By STEPHEN 
 
 u - W K B Ljfc--rijr ** 'T iin p i 
 
 sum 
 
 
 ,.-•,.'. , '., _;..' . .. .... 
 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
My discovery of England, 
 
 3 1924 007 438 652 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924007438652 
 
MY DISCOVERY 
 OF ENGLAND 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 LITERARY LAPSES 
 
 NONSENSE NOVELS 
 
 SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF 
 A LITTLE TOWN 
 
 BEHIND THE BEYOND 
 
 ARCADIAN ADVENTURES 
 WITH THE IDLE RICH 
 
 MOONBEAMS FROM THE 
 LARGER LUNACY 
 
 FURTHER FOOLISHNESS 
 
 FRENZIED FICTION 
 
 THE HOHENZOLLERNS IN 
 AMERICA 
 
 THE UNSOLVED RIDDLE 
 OF SOCIAL JUSTICE 
 
 WINSOME WINNIE AND 
 OTHER NEW NONSENSE 
 NOVELS 
 
 ESSAYS AND LITERARY 
 STUDIES 
 
 THE BODLEY HEAD 
 
MY DISCOVERY 
 
 OF ENGLAND 
 
 BY STEPHEN LE ACOCK 
 
 LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLETHEAD LTD 
 
 MCMXXU 
 
 E.M. 
 
Printed in Great Britain at 
 Tht Mayflower Prrss, Pfynteuth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd. 
 
I 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 NTRODUCTION of Mr. Stephen Leacock 
 given by Sir Owen Seaman on the occasion 
 of his first Lecture in London. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen : 
 
 It is usual on these occasions for the chairman to 
 begin something like this : " The lecturer, I am 
 sure, needs no introduction from me." And in- 
 deed, when I have been the lecturer and somebody 
 else has been the chairman, I have more than once 
 suspected myself of being the better man of the 
 two. Of course I hope I should always have the 
 good manners — I am sure Mr. Leacock has — to 
 disguise that suspicion. However, one has to go 
 through these' formalities, and I will therefore 
 introduce the lecturer to you. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Stephen 
 Leacock. Mr. Leacock, this is the flower of London 
 intelligence — or perhaps I should say one of the 
 flowers ; the rest are coming to your other lectures. 
 
 5 
 
Preface 
 
 In ordinary social life one stops at an introduc- 
 tion and does not proceed to personal details. But 
 behaviour on the platform, as on the stage, is seldom 
 ordinary. I will therefore tell you a thing or two 
 about Mr. Leacock. In the first place, by vocation 
 he is a Professor of Political Economy, and he 
 practises humour — frenzied fiction instead of 
 frenzied finance — by way of recreation. There he 
 differs a good deal from me, who have to study the 
 products of humour for my living, and by way of 
 recreation read Mr. Leacock on political economy. 
 
 Further, Mr. Leacock is all-British, being English 
 by birth and Canadian by residence. I mention 
 this for two reasons : firstly because England and 
 the Empire are very proud to claim him for their 
 own, and secondly because I do not wish his nation- 
 ality to be confused with that of his neighbours 
 on the other side. For English and American 
 humorists have not always seen eye to eye. When 
 we fail to appreciate their humour they say we are 
 too dull and effete to understand it : and when 
 they do not appreciate ours they say we haven't 
 got any. 
 
 Now Mr. Leacoek's humour is British by hered- 
 ity ; but he has caught something of the spirit 
 of American humour by force of association. This 
 
 6 
 
Preface 
 
 puts him in a similar position to that in which I 
 found myself once when I 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 I was accosted by the pro- 
 prietor of the hotel adjacent to the shore. " You 
 have 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 either side of the 
 water is unintelligent enough to criticize Mr. 
 Leacock's humour, he can always say it comes from 
 the other side. But the truth is that his humour 
 contains all that is best in the humour of both 
 hemispheres. 
 
 Having fulfilled my duty as chairman, in that I 
 have told you nothing that you did not know before 
 — except, perhaps, my swimming feat, which never 
 got into the press because I have a very bad publicity 
 agent — I will 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 " Frenzied 
 Fiction." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Balance of Trade in Impressions . 13 
 II. I am Interviewed by the Press . . 25 
 
 III. Impressions of London .... 33 
 
 IV. A Clear View of the Government and 
 
 Politics of England .... 49 
 
 V. Oxford as I See It .... 72 
 
 VI. The British and the American Press . 104 
 
 VII. Business in England . . . .132 
 
 VIII. Is Prohibition Coming to England ? . 143 
 
 IX. " We Have with us To-night " . . 159 
 
 X. Have the English ant Sense of Humour? 184 
 
MY DISCOVERY 
 OF ENGLAND 
 
Chapter I — The Balance of Trade in 
 Impressions 
 
 FOR some years past a rising tide of lecturers 
 and literary men from England has washed 
 upon the shores of our North American 
 continent. The purpose of each one of them is to 
 make a new discovery of America. They come 
 over to us travelling in great simplicity, and they 
 return in the ducal suite of the Aquitania. They 
 carry away with them their impressions of America, 
 and when they reach England they sell them. 
 This export of impressions has now been going on 
 so long that the balance of trade in impressions is 
 all disturbed. There is no doubt that the Americans 
 and the Canadians have been altogether too generous 
 in this matter of giving away 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 great proportions that we are com- 
 pelled to ask whether it is right to allow these 
 
 13 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 people to carry away from us impressions of the 
 very highest commercial value without giving us 
 any pecuniary compensation whatever. English 
 lecturers have been known to land in New York, 
 pass the Customs, drive uptown in a closed taxi, 
 and then forward to England from the closed, taxi 
 itself ten dollars' worth of impressions of American 
 national character. I have myself seen an English 
 literary man — the biggest, I believe : he had at 
 least the appearance of it — sit in the corridor 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 America at twenty 
 cents a word. The nice question as to whose 
 twenty cents that was never seems to have occurred 
 to him. 
 
 I am not writing in the faintest spirit of jealousy. 
 I quite admit the extraordinary ability that is in- 
 volved in this peculiar susceptibility to impressions. 
 I have estimated that some of these English visitors 
 have 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. But without 
 jealousy or complaint, I do feel that somehow these 
 impressions are inadequate and fail to depict us as 
 we really are. 
 
 14 
 
The Balance of Trade in Impressions 
 
 Let me illustrate what I mean. Here are some 
 of the impressions of New York, gathered from 
 various visitors' discoveries of America, and repro- 
 duced not perhaps 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 
 impression of cosiness, of tiny graciousness ; in 
 short, of weeness." But compare this : " New 
 York " (according to another discoverer of America) 
 " gave me an impression of size, of vastness : there 
 seemed to me a bigness about it not found in 
 smaller places." A third visitor writes : " New 
 York struck me as hard, cruel, almost inhuman." 
 This, I think, was because his taxi driver had 
 charged him three dollars. " The first thing that 
 struck me in New York," writes another, " was the 
 Statue of Liberty." But, after all, that was only 
 natural : it was the first thing that could reach him. 
 
 Nor is it only the impressions of the metropolis 
 that seem to fall short of reality. Let me quote a 
 few others taken at random here and there over the 
 continent. 
 
 " I took from Pittsburg," says an English visitor, 
 " an impression of something that I could hardly 
 define — an atmosphere rather than an idea." 
 
 All very well. But, after all, had he the right to 
 
 15 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 take it ? Granted that Pittsburg has an atmosphere 
 rather than an idea, the attempt to carry away this 
 atmosphere surely borders on rapacity. 
 
 " New Orleans," writes another visitor, " opened 
 her arms to me and bestowed upon me the soft and 
 languorous kiss of the Caribbean." This statement 
 may or may not be true : but in any case it hardly 
 seems the fair thing to mention it. 
 
 " Chicago," according to another book of dis- 
 covery, " struck me as a large city. Situated as it 
 is and where it is, it seems destined to be a place 
 of great importance." 
 
 Or here, again, is a form of " impression " that 
 recurs again and again : " At Cleveland I felt a 
 distinct note of optimism in the air." 
 
 This same note of optimism is found also at 
 Toledo, at Toronto — in short, I believe it indicates 
 nothing more than that somebody gave the visitor 
 a cigar. Indeed, it generally occurs during the 
 familiar scene in which the visitor describes his 
 cordial reception in an unsuspecting American 
 town. Thus : 
 
 " I was met at the station (called in America the 
 depot) by a member of the Municipal Council 
 driving his own motor-car. After giving me an 
 excellent cigar he proceeded to drive me about the 
 
 16 
 
The Balance of Trade in Impressions 
 
 town, to various points of interest, including the 
 municipal abattoir, where he gave me another 
 excellent cigar, the Carnegie Public Library, the 
 First National Bank (the courteous manager of 
 which gave me an excellent cigar), and the Second 
 Congregational Church, where I had the pleasure 
 of meeting the pastor. The pastor, who appeared 
 a man of breadth and culture, gave me another cigar. 
 In the evening a dinner, admirably cooked and 
 excellently served, was tendered to me at a leading 
 hotel." And of course he took it. After which his 
 statement that he carried away from the town a 
 feeling of optimism explains itself : he had four 
 cigars, the dinner, and half a page of impressions 
 at twenty cents a word. 
 
 Nor is it only by the theft of impressions that we 
 sufier at the hands of these English discoverers of 
 America. It is a part of the system also that we 
 have to submit to be lectured to by our talented 
 visitors. It is now quite understood that as soon as 
 an English literary man finishes a book he is rushed 
 across to America to tell the people of the United 
 States and Canada all about it, and how he came to 
 write it. At home, in his own country, they don't 
 care how he came to write it. He's written it, and 
 that's enough. But in America it is different. One 
 
 B 17 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 month after the distinguished author's book on 
 The Boyhood of Botticelli has appeared in London, 
 he is seen to land in New York very quietly out of 
 one of the back port-holes of the Olympic. That 
 same afternoon you will find him in an arm-chair in 
 one of the big hotels giving off impressions of 
 America to a group of reporters. After which 
 notices appear in all the papers to the effect that 
 he will lecture in Carnegie Hall on Botticelli the Boy. 
 The audience is assured beforehand. It consists of 
 all the people who feel that they have to go because 
 they know all about Botticelli, and all the people 
 who feel that they have to go because they don't 
 know anything about Botticelli. By this means the 
 lecturer is able to rake the whole country from 
 Montreal to San Francisco with Botticelli the Boy. 
 Then he turns round, labels his lecture Botticelli the 
 Man, and rakes it all back again. All the way across 
 the continent and back he emits impressions, esti- 
 mates of national character, and surveys of American 
 genius. He sails from New York in a blaze of 
 publicity, with his cordon of reporters round him, 
 and a month later publishes his book, America as I 
 Saw It. It is widely read — in America. 
 
 In the course of time a very considerable public 
 feeling was aroused in the United States and Canada 
 
The Balance of Trade in Impressions 
 
 over this state of affairs. The lack of reciprocity 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 some impressions off England. The choice 
 of such a person (my choice) fell upon myself. By 
 an arrangement with the Geographical Society of 
 America, acting in conjunction with the Royal 
 Geographic Society of England (to both 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 outfit and equipment, though I hope 
 to do so in a later and more extended account of my 
 expedition. Suffice it to say that my outfit, which 
 was modelled on the equipment of English lecturers 
 in America, included a complete suit of clothes, a 
 dress shirt for lecturing in, a fountain pen, and a 
 silk hat. The dress shirt, I may say for the benefit 
 of other travellers, proved invaluable. The silk 
 hat, however, is no longer used in England except, 
 perhaps, for scrambling eggs in. 
 
 I pass over the details of my pleasant voyage from 
 New York to Liverpool. During the last fifty years 
 so many travellers have made the voyage across the 
 Atlantic that it is now impossible to obtain any 
 impressions from the ocean of the slightest com- 
 
 19 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 mercial value. My readers will recall the fact that 
 Washington Irving, as far back as a century ago, 
 chronicled the pleasure that one felt during an 
 Atlantic voyage in idle day-dreams while lying prone 
 upon the bowsprit and watching the dolphins 
 leaping in the crystalline foam. Since his time so 
 many gifted writers have attempted to do the same 
 thing that on the large Atlantic liners the bowsprit 
 has been removed, or, at any rate, a notice put up : 
 " Authors are requested not to lie prone on the 
 bowsprit." But even without this advantage, three 
 or four generations of writers have chronicled with 
 great minuteness their sensations during the transit. 
 I need only say that my sensations were just as good 
 as theirs. I will content myself with chronicling the 
 fact that during the voyage we passed two dolphins, 
 one whale, and one iceberg (none of them moving 
 very fast at the time), and that on the fourth day 
 out the sea was so rough that the captain said that 
 in forty years he had never seen such weather. One 
 of the steerage passengers, we were told, was 
 actually washed overboard; I think it was over- 
 board that he was washed, but it may have been on 
 board the ship itself. 
 
 I pass over also the incidents of my landing at 
 Liverpool, except perhaps to comment upon the 
 
The Balance of Trade in Impressions 
 
 extraordinary behaviour of the English Customs 
 officials. Without wishing in any way to disturb 
 international relations, one cannot help noticing 
 the brutal and inquisitorial methods of the English 
 Customs men as compared with the gentle and 
 affectionate ways of the American officials at New 
 York. The two trunks which I brought with 
 me were dragged brutally into an open shed ; the 
 strap of one of them was rudely unbuckled, while 
 the lid of the other was actually lifted at least four 
 inches. The trunks were then roughly scrawled 
 with chalk, the lids slammed-to, and that was all. 
 Not one of the officials seemed to care to look at 
 my things or to have the politeness to pretend to 
 want to. I had arranged my dress suit and my 
 pyjamas so as to make as effective a display as 
 possible : a New York Customs officer would have 
 been delighted with it. Here they simply passed it 
 over. " Do open this trunk," I asked one of the 
 officials, " and see 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 immigration officials are even worse. I 
 could not help being struck by the dreadful care- 
 lessness with which people are admitted into 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 England. There are, it is true, a group of officials 
 said to be in charge of immigration, but they know 
 nothing of the discriminating care exercised on the 
 other side of the Atlantic. 
 
 " Do you want to know," I asked of 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 any and every system of 
 government ? " 
 
 The man seemed mystified. " No, sir," he said, 
 " I don't know that I would." 
 
 " 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 kind of 
 revealed religion, that I regard the State and 
 property and marriage as the mere tyranny of the 
 bourgeoisie, and that I want to see class hatred 
 carried to the point where it forces every one into 
 brotherly love. Now, do I get in ? " 
 
 The official looked puzzled for a minute. " You 
 are not Irish, are you, sir ? " he said. 
 
 " No." 
 
The Balance of Trade in Impressions 
 
 " 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 ; it contains 
 only fifty thousand square miles, whereas the United 
 States, as every one knows, contains three and a half 
 billion. I mentioned this fact to an English fellow- 
 passenger on the train, together with a provisional 
 estimate of the American corn crop for 1922 ; but 
 he only drew his rug about his knees, took a sip of 
 brandy from his travelling flask, and sank into a state 
 resembling death. I contented myself with jotting 
 down an impression of incivility and paid no 
 further attention to my fellow-traveller other than 
 to read the labels on his luggage and to peruse the 
 headings of his newspaper by peeping over his 
 shoulder. 
 
 It was my first experience of travelling with a 
 fellow-passenger in a compartment of an English 
 train, and I admit now that I was as yet ignorant 
 of the proper method of conduct. Later on I be- 
 came fully conversant with the rules of travel as 
 understood in England. I should have known, of 
 course, that I must on no account speak to the man. 
 But I should have let down the window a little bit 
 
 23 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 in such a way as to make a strong draught on his 
 ear. Had this failed to break down his reserve, 
 I should have placed a heavy valise in the rack over 
 his head so balanced that it might fall on him at 
 any moment. Failing this, again, I could have blown 
 rings of smoke at him or stepped on his feet under a 
 pretence of looking out of the window. Under the 
 English rule, as long as he bears this in silence you 
 are not supposed to know him. In fact, he is not 
 supposed to be there. You and he each presume 
 the other to be a mere piece of empty space. But 
 let him once be driven to say, " Oh, I beg your 
 pardon, I wonder if you would mind my closing the 
 window," and he is lost. After that you are entitled 
 to tell him anything about the corn crop that you 
 care to. 
 
 But in the present case I knew nothing of this, 
 and after three hours of charming silence I found 
 myself in London. 
 
 24 
 
Chapter II — / am Interviewed by the 
 Press 
 
 IMMEDIATELY upon my arrival in London 
 I was interviewed by the press. I was inter- 
 viewed in all twenty times. I am not saying 
 this in any spirit of elation or boastfulness. I am 
 simply stating it as a fact — 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 I could have wished, I think it well to 
 make some public explanation of what happened. 
 
 The truth is that we do this thing so differently 
 over in America that I was, for the time being, 
 completely thrown off my bearings. The questions 
 that I had every right to expect after many years 
 of American interviews x entirely failed to appear. 
 
 1 I am a Canadian. But for lack of any other word to indicate 
 collectively those who live between Rio Grande and the]North 
 Pole I have found it necessary again and again in this book^to use 
 the word "American." If the Canadians and the Eskimos and 
 the Flathead Indians are not Americans, what are we f 
 
 25 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 I pass over the fact that being interviewed for 
 five hours is a fatiguing process. I lay no claim to 
 exemption for that. But to that, no doubt, was due 
 the singular discrepancies as to my physical appear- 
 ance which I detected in the London papers. 
 
 The young man who interviewed me immediately 
 after breakfast described me as " a brisk, energetic 
 man, still on the right side of forty, with energy in 
 every movement." 
 
 The lady who wrote me up at 11.30 reported that 
 my hair was turning grey, 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 : " The old gentleman sank 
 wearily upon a chair in the hotel lounge. His hair 
 is almost white." 
 
 The trouble is that I had not understood that 
 London reporters are supposed to look at a man's 
 personal appearance. In America we never bother 
 with that. We simply describe him as a " dynamo." 
 For some reason or other it always pleases every- 
 body to be called a " dynamo," and the readers, 
 with us, at least, 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 
 
 26 
 
/ am Interviewed by the Press 
 
 beyond these three classes we hardly venture on 
 description. So I was misled. 
 
 I had expected that the reporter would say : 
 " As soon as Mr. Leacock came across the floor we 
 felt we were in the presence of a ' dynamo ' (or an 
 ' extinct battle-horse,' as the case may be)." Other- 
 wise I would have kept up those energetic move- 
 ments all morning. But they fatigue me, and 
 I did not think them necessary. But I let that 
 pass. 
 
 The more serious trouble was with 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 inter- 
 view that I have given out in such places as 
 Youngstown, Ohio, and Richmond, Indiana, and 
 Peterborough, Ontario. 
 
 In all these places — for example, in Youngstown, 
 Ohio — the reporter asks as his first question, " What 
 is your impression of Youngstown ? " 
 
 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 been burning 
 to know this, just as the Youngstown, Ohio, people 
 are, and were too proud to ask. 
 
 In any case, I will insert here the answer which I 
 
 27 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 had already written out in my pocket-book (one copy 
 for each paper — the way we do it in Youngstown), 
 and which read : 
 
 " London strikes me as emphatically a city with 
 a future. Standing as she does in the heart of a 
 rich agricultural district with railroad connection 
 in all directions, and resting, as she must, on a 
 bed of coal and 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 the right kind of heading : 
 
 PROPHESIES BRIGHT FUTURE FOR LONDON. 
 
 Had that been used, my name would have stood 
 higher in England than it does to-day — unless the 
 London people are very different from the people 
 in Youngstown, which I doubt. As it is, they don't 
 know whether their future is bright or is dark as 
 mud. But it's not my fault. The reporters never 
 asked me. 
 
 If that first question had been handled properly 
 it would have led up by an easy and pleasant tran- 
 sition to question two, which always runs : 
 
 " Have you seen our factories ? " 
 
 28 
 
/ am Interviewed by the Press 
 
 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 and 
 bucket works. At 11.30 I was taken out by a 
 second group in what was apparently the same car 
 to see your soap works. I understand that you are 
 the second nail-making centre east of the Alle- 
 ghanies, and I am amazed and appalled. 
 
 " This afternoon I am to be taken out to see your 
 wonderful system of disposing of sewerage, a thing 
 which has fascinated me from childhood." 
 
 Now, I am not offering any criticism of the 
 London system of interviewing, but one sees at 
 once how easy and friendly for all concerned this 
 Youngstown method is ; how much better it works 
 than the London method of asking questions about 
 literature and art and difficult things of that sort. 
 I am sure that there must be soap works and 
 perhaps a pail factory somewhere in London. But 
 during my entire time of residence there no one 
 ever offered to take me to them. As for the 
 sewerage — oh, well, I suppose we are more hospit- 
 able in America. Let it go at that. 
 
 I had my answer all written and ready, saying : 
 
 " I understand that London is the second greatest 
 
 29 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 hop-consuming, the fourth hog-killing, and the 
 first egg-boiling centre in the world." 
 
 But what I deplore still more, and I think with 
 reason, is the total omission of the familiar 
 interrogation, " What is your impression of our 
 women ? " 
 
 That's where the reporter over on our side of 
 the Atlantic hits the nail every time. That is the 
 point at which we always nudge him in the ribs 
 and buy him a cigar, and at which youth and age 
 join in a sly jest together. Here again the sub- 
 heading comes in so nicely : 
 
 THINKS YOUNGSTOWN WOMEN CHARMING. 
 
 And they are. They are, everywhere. But I hate 
 to think that I had to keep my impressions of 
 London women unused in my pocket while a young 
 man asked me whether I thought modern literature 
 owed more to observation and less to inspiration 
 than some other kind of literature. 
 
 Now, that's exactly the kind of question, the last 
 one, that the London reporters seem to harp on. 
 They seem hipped about literature ; and their 
 questions are too difficult. One asked me whether 
 the American drama was structurally inferior to the 
 French. I don't call that fair. I told him I didn't 
 
 30 
 
/ am Interviewed by the Press 
 
 know ; that I used to know the answer to it when 
 I was at college, but that I had forgotten it, and 
 that, anyway, I am too well off now to need to 
 remember it. 
 
 That question is only one of a long list that they 
 asked me about art and literature. I missed nearly 
 all of them, except one as to whether I thought 
 Al Jolson or Frank Tinney was the higher artist, and 
 even that one 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 atmosphere of these young men was 
 not healthy, and I felt that I didn't want to see 
 them any more. Had there been any young 
 reporter of the kind that we have at home in 
 Montreal, or Toledo 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 told me how many cubic feet of water 
 go down the Thames in an hour. I should have 
 been glad of his society, and he and I would 
 together have made up the kind of copy that 
 people of his class and mine can read. 
 
 But I felt that if any young man came along to 
 ask about the structure of the modern drama he 
 had better go on to the British Museum. 
 
 31 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 Meantime, as the reporters entirely f ailed'' to 
 elicit the large fund of information which I 
 acquired, I reserve my impressions of London for 
 a chapter by themselves. 
 
 32 
 
Chapter III — Impressions of London 
 
 BEFORE setting down my impressions of the 
 great English metropolis — a phrase which I 
 have thought out as a designation for London 
 — I think it proper to offer an initial apology. I find 
 that I receive impressions with great difficulty and 
 have nothing of that easy facility in picking them 
 up which is shown by British writers on America. 
 I remember Hugh Walpole telling me that he could 
 hardly walk down Broadway without getting at 
 least three dollars' worth and on Fifth Avenue five 
 dollars' worth ; and I recollect that St. John Ervine 
 came up to my house in Montreal, drank a cup of 
 tea, borrowed some tobacco, and got away with 
 sixty dollars' worth of impressions of Canadian fife 
 and character. 
 
 For this kind of thing I have only a despairing 
 admiration. I can get an impression if I am given 
 time and can think about it beforehand. But it 
 requires thought. This fact was all the more dis- 
 tressing to me, inasmuch as one of the leading 
 
 c 33 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 editors of America had made me a proposal as 
 honourable to him as it was lucrative to me that 
 immediately on my arrival in London — or just be- 
 fore it — I should send him a thousand words on the 
 genius of the English, and five hundred words on 
 the spirit of London, and two hundred words of 
 personal chat with Lord Northcliffe. This contract 
 I was unable to fulfil except the personal chat with 
 Lord Northcliffe, which proved an easy matter as 
 he happened to be away in Australia. 
 
 But I have since pieced together my impressions 
 as conscientiously as I could "and I present them 
 here. If they seem to be a little bit modelled on 
 British impressions of America, I admit at once that 
 the influence is there. We writers all act and react 
 on one another ; and when I see a good thing in 
 another man's book I react on it at once. 
 
 London, the name of which is already known to 
 millions of readers of this book, is beautifully 
 situated on the river Thames, which here sweeps 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, is a city of clean 
 streets and admirable side-walks and has an excellent 
 water supply. One is at once struck by the number 
 of excellent and well-appointed motor-cars that one 
 
 34 
 
Impressions of London 
 
 sees on every hand, the neatness of the shops, and 
 the cleanliness and cheerfulness of the faces of the 
 people. In short, as an English writer said of Peter- 
 borough, Ontario, there is a distinct note of optimism 
 in the air. I forget who it was who said this, but, 
 at any rate, I have been in Peterborough myself and 
 have seen it. 
 
 Contrary to my expectations and contrary to all 
 our Transatlantic precedent, 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 really excellent cigar, and 
 proceed to drive me about the town so as to show 
 me the leading points of interest — the municipal 
 reservoir, the gasworks, and the municipal abattoir. 
 In fact, he was not there. But I attribute his 
 absence not to any lack of hospitality, but merely 
 to a certain reserve in the English character. They 
 are as yet unused to the arrival of lecturers. When 
 they get to be more accustomed to their coming, 
 they will learn to take them straight to the municipal 
 abattoir, just as we do. 
 
 For lack of better guidance, therefore, I had to 
 form my impressions of London by myself. In the 
 mere physical sense there is much to attract the eye. 
 
 35 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 The city is able to boast of many handsome public 
 buildings and offices which compare favourably with 
 anything on the other side of the Atlantic. On the 
 bank of the Thames itself rises the power house of 
 the Westminster Electric Supply Corporation, a 
 handsome modern edifice in the later Japanese 
 style. Close by are the commodious premises of 
 the Imperial Tobacco Company, while at no great 
 distance the Chelsea Gas Works add a striking 
 feature of rotundity. Passing northward, one 
 observes Westminster Bridge, notable as a principal 
 station of the Underground Railway. This station 
 and the one next above it, the Charing Cross one, 
 are connected by a wide thoroughfare called White- 
 hall. One of the best American drug stores is here 
 situated. The upper end of Whitehall opens into 
 the majestic and spacious Trafalgar Square. Here 
 are grouped in imposing proximity the offices of the 
 Canadian Pacific and other railways, the Inter- 
 national Sleeping Car Company, the Montreal Star, 
 and the Anglo-Dutch Bank. Two of the best 
 American barber shops are conveniently grouped 
 near the Square, while the existence of a tall stone 
 monument in the middle of the Square itself 
 enables the American visitor to find them with- 
 out difficulty. Passing eastward towards the heart 
 
 36 
 
Impressions of London 
 
 of the City, one notes on the left hand the im- 
 posing pile of St. Paul's, an enormous church with 
 a round dome on the top, suggesting strongly the 
 first Church of Christ (Scientist) on Euclid Avenue, 
 Cleveland. But, the English churches not being 
 labelled, the visitor is often at a loss 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 National Bank 
 of Milwaukee, The Planters' National Bank of St. 
 Louis, The Montana Farmers Trust Co., and many 
 others — have either their offices or their agents. 
 The Bank of England, which acts as the London 
 Agent of The Montana Farmers Trust Company, 
 and the London County Bank, which represents the 
 People's Deposit Co., of Yonkers, N.Y., are said to 
 be in the neighbourhood. 
 
 This particular part of London is connected with 
 the existence of that strange and mysterious thing 
 called " the City." I am still unable to decide 
 whether the City is a person, or a place, or a thing. 
 But as a form of being I give it credit for being the 
 most emotional, the most volatile, the most peculiar 
 creature in the world. You read in the morning 
 paper that the City is " deeply depressed." At 
 
 37 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 noon it is reported that the City is " buoyant," 
 and by four o'clock that the City is " wildly ex- 
 cited." 
 
 I have tried in vain to find the causes of these 
 peculiar changes of feeling. The ostensible reasons, 
 as given in the newspaper, are so trivial as to be 
 hardly worthy of belief. For example, here is the 
 kind of news that comes out from the City : " The 
 news that a modus vivendi has been signed between 
 the Sultan of Kowfat and the Shriek-ul-Islam has 
 caused a sudden buoyancy in the City. Steel rails 
 which had been depressed all the morning reacted 
 immediately, while American mules rose up sharply 
 to par." ..." Monsieur Poincare, speaking at 
 Bordeaux, said that henceforth France must seek 
 to retain by all possible means the pingpong cham- 
 pionship of the world : values in the City collapsed 
 at once." ..." Despatches from Bombay say 
 that the Shah of Persia yesterday handed a golden 
 slipper to the Grand Vizier Feebli Pasha as a sign 
 that he might go and chase himself. The news was 
 at once followed by a drop in oil, and a rapid attempt 
 to liquidate everything that is fluid." 
 
 But these mysteries of the City I do not pretend 
 to explain. I have passed through the place dozens 
 of times and never noticed anything particular in 
 
 38 
 
Impressions of London 
 
 the way of depression or buoyancy, or falling oil, or 
 rising rails. But no doubt it is there. 
 
 A little beyond the City and further down the 
 river the visitor finds this district of London ter- 
 minating in the gloomy and forbidding Tower, the 
 principal penitentiary of the City. Here Queen 
 Victoria was imprisoned for many years. 
 
 Excellent gasoline can be had at the American 
 Garage immediately north of the Tower, where 
 motor repairs of all kinds are also carried on. 
 
 These, however, are but the superficial pictures 
 of London, gathered by the eye of the tourist. A 
 far deeper meaning is found in the examination of 
 the great historic monuments of the City. The 
 principal ones of these are the Tower of London 
 (just mentioned), the British Museum, and West- 
 minster Abbey. No visitor to London should fail 
 to see these. Indeed, he ought to feel that his visit 
 to England is wasted unless he has seen them. I 
 speak strongly on the point because I feel strongly 
 on it. To my mind there is something about the 
 grim fascination of the historic Tower, the cloistered 
 quiet of the Museum, and the majesty of the 
 ancient Abbey which will make it the regret of my 
 life that I didn't see any one of the three. I fully 
 meant to, but I failed ; and I can only hope that 
 
 39 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 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 of things to 
 do, and I always put the Tower of London on it. 
 No doubt the reader knows the kind of little list 
 that I mean. It runs : 
 
 I. 
 
 Go to bank. 
 
 2. 
 
 Buy a shirt. 
 
 3- 
 
 National Gallery. 
 
 4- 
 
 Razor blades. 
 
 5- 
 
 Tower of London. 
 
 6. 
 
 Soap. 
 
 The itinerary, I regret to say, was never carried 
 out in full. I was able at times both to go to the 
 bank and buy a shirt in a single morning ; at other 
 times I was able to buy razor blades and almost to 
 find the National Gallery. Meantime I was urged 
 on all sides by my London acquaintances not to 
 fail to see the Tower. " There's a grim fascina- 
 tion about the place," they said, " you mustn't 
 miss it." I am quite certain that in due course of 
 time I should have made my way to the Tower but 
 for the fact that I made a fatal discovery. I found 
 
 40 
 
Impressions of London 
 
 out that the London people who urged me to go 
 and see the Tower had never seen it themselves. 
 It appears they never go near it. One night at a 
 dinner a man next to me said, " Have you seen the 
 Tower ? You really ought to. 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 seen it." " When ? " I asked. 
 The man hesitated. " When I was just a boy," he 
 said, " my father took me there." " How long ago 
 is that ? " I inquired. " 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 seen the Tower of 
 London ? " the answer is, " No, and neither have 
 you." 
 
 Take the parallel case of the British Museum. 
 Here is a place that is a veritable treasure house. A 
 repository of some of the most priceless historical 
 relics to be found upon the earth. It contains, for 
 instance, the famous Papyrus Manuscript of 
 Totmes II of the first Egyptian dynasty — a thing 
 known to scholars all over the world as the oldest 
 extant specimen of what can be called writing ; 
 indeed, one can here see the actual evolution (I am 
 
 41 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 quoting from a work of reference, or at least from 
 my recollection of it) from the ideographic cunei- 
 form to the phonetic syllabic script. Every time I 
 have read about that manuscript and have happened 
 to be in Orillia (Ontario) or Schenectady (N.Y.), or 
 any such place, I have felt that I would be willing 
 to take a whole trip to England to have five minutes 
 at the British Museum, just five, to look at that 
 papyrus. Yet as soon as I got to London this 
 changed. The railway stations of London have been 
 so arranged that to get to any train 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. " Inside those walls," I thought to myself, 
 " is the manuscript of Totmes II." The next time 
 I actually stopped the taxi. " Is that the British 
 Museum ? " I asked the driver. " I think it is some- 
 thing of the sort, sir," he said. I hesitated. " Drive 
 me," I said, " to where I can buy safety razor 
 blades." 
 
 After that I was able to drive past the Museum 
 with the quiet assurance of a Londoner, and to 
 take part in dinner-table discussions as to whether 
 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 the Winged 
 
 42 
 
Impressions of London 
 
 Victory of Samothrace is in the Louvre, and the 
 papyrus of Totmes II (or some such document) is 
 in the Museum. 
 
 The Abbey, I admit, is indeed majestic. I did 
 not intend to miss going into it. But I felt, as so 
 many tourists have, that I wanted to enter it in the 
 proper frame of mind. I never got into the frame 
 of mind ; at least, not when near the Abbey itself. 
 I have been in exactly that frame of mind when 
 on State Street, Chicago, or on King Street, 
 Toronto, or anywhere three thousand miles away 
 from the Abbey. But by bad luck I never 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 only like the rest of the world. 
 The people who live in Buffalo never go to see the 
 Niagara Falls ; people in Cleveland don't know 
 which is Mr. Rockefeller's house ; and people live 
 and even die in New York without going up to the 
 top of the Woolworth Building. And, anyway, the 
 past is remote and the present is near. I know a cab 
 driver in the city of Quebec whose business in life 
 it is to drive people up to see the Plains of Abraham, 
 but, unless they bother him to do it, he doesn't show 
 them the spot where Wolfe fell. What he does 
 
 43 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 point out with real zest is the place where the 
 Mayor and the City Council sat on the wooden 
 platform that they put up for the municipal cele- 
 bration last summer. 
 
 No description of London would be complete 
 without a reference, however brief, to the singular 
 salubrity and charm of the London climate. This 
 is seen at its best during the autumn and winter 
 months. The climate of London, and indeed of 
 England generally, is due to the influence of the 
 Gulf Stream. The way it works is thus. The Gulf 
 Stream, as it nears the shores of the British Isles 
 and feels the propinquity of Ireland, rises into the 
 air, turns into soup, and comes down on London. 
 At times the soup is thin and is, in fact, little more 
 than a mist ; at other times it has the consistency 
 of a thick Potage St. Germain. London people are 
 a little sensitive on the point and flatter their 
 atmosphere by calling it a fog ; but it is not : it is 
 soup. The notion that no sunlight ever gets 
 through and that in the London winter people 
 never see the sun is, of course, a ridiculous error, 
 circulated, no doubt, by the jealousy of foreign 
 nations. I have myself seen the sun plainly visible 
 in London, without the aid of glasses, on a Novem- 
 ber day in broad daylight ; and again one night 
 
 44 
 
Impressions of London 
 
 about four o'clock in the afternoon I saw the sun 
 distinctly appear through the clouds. The whole 
 subject of daylight in the London winter is, how- 
 ever, one which belongs rather to the technique of 
 astronomy than to a book of description. In 
 practice daylight is but little used. Electric lights 
 are burned all the time in all houses, buildings, 
 railway stations, and clubs. This practice, which 
 is now universally observed, is called Daylight 
 Saving. 
 
 But the distinction between day and night during 
 the London winter is still quite obvious to anyone 
 of an observant mind. It is indicated by various 
 signs, such as the striking of clocks, the tolling of 
 bells, the closing of saloons, and the raising of taxi 
 rates. It is much less easy to distinguish the 
 technical approach of night in the other cities of 
 England that lie outside the confines, physical and 
 intellectual, of London and live in a continuous 
 gloom. In such places as the great manufacturing 
 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 as finished when I realized that I had 
 made a terrible omission. I neglected to say any- 
 
 45 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 thing about the Mind of London. This is a thing 
 that is always put into any book of discovery and 
 observation, and I can only apologize for not having 
 discussed it sooner. I am quite familiar with other 
 people's chapters on " The Mind of America " and 
 " The Chinese Mind," and so forth. Indeed, so 
 far as I know it has turned out that almost every- 
 body 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." Even the gentler peoples, such as the 
 Burmese, the Siamese, the Hawaiians, and the 
 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 of London ; and it is all the 
 more culpable in me to have neglected it, inasmuch 
 as my editorial friend in New York had expressly 
 mentioned it to me before I sailed. " What," said 
 he, leaning far over his desk after his massive fashion 
 and reaching out into the air, " is in the minds of 
 these people ? Are they," he added, half to him- 
 self, though I heard him, "thinking? And, if 
 they think, what do they think ? " 
 
 I did, therefore, during my stay in London make 
 
 4 6 
 
Impressions of London 
 
 an accurate study of the things that London seemed 
 to be thinking about. As a comparative basis for 
 this study I brought with me a carefully selected 
 list of the things that New York was thinking about 
 at the moment. These I selected from the current 
 newspapers in the proportion to the amount of 
 space allotted 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," 
 I was able to collect and set beside it a list of similar 
 topics taken from the London press to represent 
 the " mind of London." The two placed side by 
 side make an interesting piece of psychological 
 analysis. They read as follows : 
 
 The Mind of New York. The Mind of London. 
 
 (What is it thinking ?) (What is it thinking ?) 
 
 i. Do chorus girls make good I. Do chorus girls marry 
 wives ? well ? 
 
 2. Is red hair a sign of tem- 2. What is red hair a sign 
 
 perament ? of ? 
 
 3. Can a woman be in love 3. Can a man be in love with 
 
 with two men ? 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 without comment. I feel sure that 
 somewhere or other in them one should detect the 
 
 47 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 heart-throbs, the pulsations of two great peoples. 
 But I don't get it. In fact, the two lists look to 
 me terribly like " the mind of Costa Rica." 
 
 The same editor also advised me to mingle, at his 
 expense, in the brilliant intellectual life of England. 
 " There," he said, " is a coterie of men, probably 
 the most brilliant group east of the Mississippi " 
 (I think he said the Mississippi). " You will find 
 them," he said to me, " brilliant, witty, filled with 
 repartee." He suggested that I should send him 
 back, as far as words could express it, some of this 
 brilliance. I was very glad to be able to do this, 
 although I'fear that the results were not at all what 
 he had anticipated. Still, I held conversations with 
 these people, and I gave him in all truthfulness the 
 result. Sir James Barrie said, " This is really very 
 exceptional weather for this time of year." Cyril 
 Maud'e said, " And so a Martini cocktail is merely 
 gin and vermuth." Ian Hay said, " You'll find 
 the Underground ever so handy once you under- 
 stand it." 
 
 I have a lot more of these repartees that I could 
 insert here if it was necessary. But somehow I feel 
 that it is not. 
 
 4 8 
 
Chapter IV — A Clear View of the Govern- 
 ment and Politics of England 
 
 A LOYAL British subject like myself in 
 dealing with the government of England 
 should necessarily begin with a discussion 
 of the monarchy. I have never had the pleasure of 
 meeting the King, except once on the G.T.R. 
 platform in Orillia, Ontario, when he was the Duke 
 of York and I was one of the welcoming delegates 
 of the town council. No doubt he would recall it 
 in a minute. 
 
 But in England the King is surrounded by for- 
 mality and circumstance. On many mornings I 
 waited round the gates of Buckingham Palace, but 
 I found it quite impossible to meet the King in the 
 quiet, sociable way in which one met him in Orillia. 
 The English, it seems, love to make the kingship a 
 subject of great pomp and official etiquette. In 
 Canada it is quite different. Perhaps we understand 
 kings and princes better than the English do. At 
 any rate, we treat them in a far more human heart- 
 
 d 49 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 to-heart fashion than is the English custom, and 
 they respond to it at once. I remember when King 
 George — he was, as I say, Duke of York then — came 
 up to 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 and 
 shook hands with him and invited him to come right 
 on up to the Orillia House, where he had a room 
 reserved for him. Charlie Janes and Mel Tudhope 
 and the other boys who were on the town council 
 gathered round the Royal Prince and shook hands 
 and told him that he simply must stay over. George 
 Rapley, the bank manager, said that if he wanted a 
 cheque cashed or anything of that sort to come 
 right into the Royal Bank and he would do it for 
 him. The Prince had two aides-de-camp with him 
 and a secretary, but Bob Curran said to bring them 
 up town too, and it would be all right. We had 
 planned to have an oyster supper for the Prince 
 at Jim Smith's hotel and then take him either 
 to the Y.M.C.A. Pool Room or else over to the 
 tea social in the basement of the Presbyterian 
 Church. 
 
 Unluckily the Prince couldn't stay. It turned 
 out that he had to get right back into his train and 
 go on to Peterborough, Ontario, where they were 
 
 50 
 
Politics of England 
 
 to have a brass band to meet him, which naturally 
 he didn't want to miss. 
 
 But the point is that it was a real welcome. And 
 you could see that the Prince appreciated it. There 
 was a warmth and a meaning to it that the Prince 
 understood at once. It was a pity that he couldn't 
 have stayed over and had time to see the carriage 
 factory and the new sewerage plant. We all told 
 the Prince that he must come back, and he said that 
 if he could he most certainly would. When the 
 Prince's train pulled out of the station and we all 
 went back uptown together (it was before prohibi- 
 tion came to Ontario) you could feel that the 
 institution of royalty 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 that would never go down with us. 
 They like to have the King come and open parlia- 
 ment, dressed in royal robes, and with a clattering 
 troop of soldiers 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 
 the mere outside of his kingship that they don't 
 understand the heart of it as we do in Canada. 
 
 But let us turn to the House of Commons, for 
 
 51 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 no description of England would be complete with- 
 out at least some mention of this interesting body. 
 Indeed, for the ordinary visitor to London the 
 greatest interest of all attaches to the spacious and 
 magnificent Parliament Buildings. The House of 
 Commons is commodiously situated beside the 
 River Thames : the principal features of the House 
 are the large lunch-room on the western side and 
 the tea-room on the terrace on the eastern. A 
 series of smaller luncheon rooms extend (apparently) 
 all round about the premises ; while a commodious 
 bar offers a ready access to the members at all hours 
 of the day. While any members are in the bar a 
 light is kept burning in the tall Clock Tower at one 
 corner of the building, but when the bar is closed 
 the light is turned off, by whichever of the Scotch 
 members leaves last. There is a handsome legis- 
 lative chamber attached to the premises from which 
 — so the antiquarians tell us — the House of Com- 
 mons took its name. But it is not usual now for 
 the members to sit in the legislative chamber as the 
 legislation is now all done outside, either at the 
 home of Mr. Lloyd George or at the National 
 Liberal Club, or at one or other of the newspaper 
 offices. The House, however, is called together at 
 very frequent intervals to give it an opportunity of 
 
 52 
 
Politics of England 
 
 hearing the latest legislation and allowing the 
 members to indulge in cheers, sighs, groans, votes, 
 and other expressions of vitality. After having 
 cheered as much as is good for them, they go back 
 again to the lunch-rooms and go on eating till they 
 are needed again. 
 
 It is, however, an entire exaggeration to say that 
 the House of Commons no 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 a high degree. One of 
 the leading newspaper proprietors of London him- 
 self told me that he had always felt that if he had 
 the House of Commons on his side he had a very 
 valuable ally. Many of the labour leaders are in- 
 clined to regard the House of Commons as of 
 great utility ; while the leading women's organiza- 
 tions, now that women are admitted as members, 
 may be said to regard the House as one of them- 
 selves. 
 
 Looking around to find just where the natural 
 service of the House of Commons comes in, I am 
 inclined to think that it must be in the practice of 
 " asking questions " in the House. Whenever any- 
 thing goes wrong a member rises and asks a question. 
 He gets up, for example, with a little paper in his 
 
 53 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 hand, and asks the government if ministers are aware 
 that the Khedive of Egypt was seen yesterday wear- 
 ing a Turkish tarbosh. Ministers say very humbly 
 that they hadn't known it, and a thrill runs through 
 the whole country. The members can apparently 
 ask any questions they like. In the repeated visits 
 which I made to the gallery of the House of 
 Commons I was unable to find any particular sense 
 or meaning in the questions asked, though no doubt 
 they had an intimate bearing on English politics not 
 clear to an outsider like myself. I heard one 
 member ask the government whether they were 
 aware that herrings were being imported from 
 Hamburg to Harwich. The government said no. 
 Another member rose and asked the government 
 whether they considered Shakespeare or Moliere the 
 greater dramatic artist. The government answered 
 that ministers were taking this under their earnest 
 consideration and that a report would be submitted 
 to Parliament. Another member asked the govern- 
 ment if they knew who won the Queen's Plate this 
 season at Toronto. They did ; in fact, this member 
 got in wrong, as this is the very thing that the 
 government do know. Towards the close of the 
 evening a member rose and asked the government 
 if they knew what time it was. The Speaker, how- 
 
 54 
 
Politics of England 
 
 ever, ruled this question out of order on the ground 
 that it had been answered before. 
 
 The Parliament Buildings are so vast that it is 
 not possible to state with certainty what they do, 
 or do not, contain. But it is generally said that 
 somewhere in the building is the House of Lords. 
 When they meet they are said to come together very 
 quietly shortly before the dinner hour, take a glass 
 of dry sherry and a biscuit (they are all abstemious 
 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 restricted access 
 to the Houses of Parliament ; its approaches are 
 now strictly guarded by policemen. In order to 
 obtain admission it is necessary either to (A) com- 
 municate in writing with the Speaker of the House, 
 enclosing certificates of naturalization and proof of 
 identity, or (B) give the policeman five shillings. 
 Method B is the one usually adopted. On great 
 nights, however, when the House of Commons is 
 sitting and is about to do something important, such 
 as ratifying a Home Rule Bill or cheering, or wel- 
 coming a new lady member, it is not possible to 
 enter by merely bribing the policeman with five 
 shillings ; it takes a pound. The English people 
 
 55 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 complain bitterly of the rich Americans who have 
 in this way corrupted the London public. Before 
 they were corrupted they would do anything for 
 sixpence. 
 
 This peculiar vein of corruption by the Americans 
 runs like a thread, I may say, through all the texture 
 of English life. Among those who have been 
 principally exposed to it are the servants — especially 
 butlers and chauffeurs, hotel porters, bell-boys, 
 railway porters and guards, all taxi-drivers, pew- 
 openers, curates, bishops, and a large part of the 
 peerage. 
 
 The terrible ravages that have been made by the 
 Americans on English morality are witnessed on 
 every hand. Whole classes of society are hopelessly 
 damaged. I have it in the evidence of the English 
 themselves, and there seems to be no doubt of the 
 fact. Till the Americans came to England the 
 people were an honest, law-abiding race, respecting 
 their superiors and despising those below them. 
 They had never been corrupted by money, and their 
 employers extended to them in this regard their 
 tenderest solicitude. Then the Americans came. 
 Servants ceased to be what they were ; butlers were 
 hopelessly damaged ; hotel porters became a wreck ; 
 taxi-drivers turned out thieves ; curates could no 
 
 56 
 
Politics of England 
 
 longer be trusted to handle money ; peers sold their 
 daughters at a million dollars apiece, or three for 
 two. In fact, the whole kingdom began to deterio- 
 rate till it got where it is now. At present, after a 
 rich American has stayed in any English country- 
 house, its owners find that they can do nothing with 
 the butler : a wildness has come over the man. 
 There is a restlessness in his demeanour and a strange 
 wistful look in his eye as if seeking for something. 
 In many cases, so I understand, after an American 
 has stayed in a country-house the butler goes insane. 
 He is found in his pantry counting over the six- 
 pences given to him by a Duke, and laughing to 
 himself. He has to be taken in charge by the police. 
 With him generally goes the chauffeur, whose mind 
 has broken down from driving a rich American 
 twenty miles ; and the gardener, who is found 
 tearing up raspberry bushes by the roots to see if 
 there is any money under them ; and the local 
 curate, whose brain has collapsed or expanded, I 
 forget which, when a rich American give him fifty 
 dollars for his soup kitchen. 
 
 There are, it is true, a few classes that have 
 escaped this contagion — shepherds living in the hills, 
 drovers, sailors, fishermen, and such-like. I re- 
 member the first time I went into the English 
 
 57 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 country-side being struck with the clean, honest 
 look in the people's faces. I realized exactly where 
 they got it : they had never seen any Americans. 
 I remember speaking to an aged peasant down in 
 Somerset. " Have you ever seen any Americans ? " 
 " Nah," he said. " Uz 'eerd a mowt o' 'em, zir, 
 but uz zeen nowt o' 'em." It was clear that the 
 noble fellow was quite undamaged by American 
 contact. 
 
 Now the odd thing about this corruption is that 
 exactly the same idea is held on the other side of 
 the water. It is a known fact that if a young 
 English Lord comes to an American town he puts 
 it to the bad in one week. Socially the whole place 
 goes to pieces. Girls whose parents are in the hard- 
 ware business, and who, used to call their father 
 " pop," begin to talk of precedence and whether a 
 Duchess Dowager goes into dinner ahead of or 
 behind a countess scavenger. After the young Lord 
 has attended two dances and one tea-social in the 
 Methodist Church Sunday School building (adults 
 25 cents, children 10 cents, all welcome), there is 
 nothing for the young men of the town to do except 
 to drive him out or go farther west. 
 
 One can hardly wonder, then, that this general 
 corruption has extended even to the policemen who 
 
 58 
 
Politics of England 
 
 guard the Houses of Parliament. On the other 
 hand, this vein of corruption has not extended to 
 English politics. Unlike ours, English politics — one 
 hears it on every hand — are pure. Ours, unfortu- 
 nately, are known to be not so. The difference 
 seems to be that our politicians will do anything for 
 money, and the English politicians 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 English political questions that we 
 don't find elsewhere. At home in Canada our 
 politics turn on such things as how much money 
 the Canadian National Railways lose as compared 
 with how much they could lose if they really tried ; 
 on whether the Grain Growers of Manitoba should 
 be allowed to import ploughs without paying a duty 
 or to pay a duty without importing the ploughs. 
 Our members at Ottawa discuss such things as 
 highway subsidies, dry farming, the Bank Act, and 
 the tariff on hardware. These things leave me 
 absolutely cold. To be quite candid, there is some- 
 thing terribly plebeian about them. In short, our 
 politics are what we call in French feuple. 
 
 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 
 
 59 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 to draw upon, can always dig up some kind of 
 political topic of discussion that has a real charm 
 about it. One month you find English politics 
 turning on the Oasis cf Merv, and the next on the 
 hinterland of Albania ; or a member rises in the 
 Commons with a little bit of paper in his hand 
 and desires to ask the foreign secretary if he is 
 aware that the Ahkoond of Swat is dead. The 
 foreign secretary states that the government have 
 no information other than that the Ahkoond was 
 dead a month ago. There is a distinct sensation in 
 the House at the realization that the Ahkoond has 
 been dead a month without the House having known 
 that he was alive. The sensation is conveyed to the 
 press and the afternoon papers appear with large 
 headings : The Ahkoond of Swat is dead. The 
 public who have never heard of the Ahkoond bare 
 their heads in a moment in a pause to pray for the 
 Ahkoond's soul. Then the cables take up the re- 
 frain and word is flashed all over the world, " The 
 Ahkoond of Swat is dead." 
 
 There was a Canadian journalist and poet once 
 who was so impressed with the news that the 
 Ahkoond was dead, so bowed down with regret that 
 he had never known the Ahkoond while alive, that 
 he forthwith wrote a poem in memory of The 
 
 60 
 
Politics of England 
 
 Ahkoond of Swat. I have always thought that the 
 reason of the wide admiration that Lanigan's verses 
 received was not merely because of the brilliant wit 
 that is in them, but because in a wider sense they 
 typify so beautifully the scope of English politics. 
 The death of the Ahkoond of Swat, and whether 
 Great Britian should support as his successor 
 Mustapha El Djin or Kamu Flaj — there is some- 
 thing worth talking of over an afternoon tea-table. 
 But suppose that the whole of 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 with interest. What more delightful 
 than to open an atlas, find out where the new king- 
 dom of Hedjaz is, and then violently support the 
 British claim to a protectorate over it ? Over in 
 America we don't understand this sort of thing. 
 There is naturally little chance to do so, and we 
 don't know how to use it when it comes. I re- 
 member that when a chance did come in connection 
 with the great Venezuela dispute over the owner- 
 ship of the jungles and mud-flats of British Guiana 
 the American papers at once inserted headings : 
 Where is the Essiquibo River? That spoilt the 
 whole thing. If you admit that you don't know 
 
 61 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 where a place is, then the bottom 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 great amusement at the Versailles Conference 
 by admitting that he hadn't known where Teschen 
 was. So, at least, it was reported in the papers ; 
 and for all I know it might even have been true. 
 But the fun that he raised was not really half what 
 could have been raised. I have it on good authority 
 that two of the American delegates hadn't known 
 where Austria proper was, and thought that Un- 
 redeemed Italy was on the East side of New York ; 
 while the Chinese delegate thought that the 
 Cameroons were part of Scotland. But it is these 
 little geographic niceties that lend a charm to 
 European politics that ours lack for ever. 
 
 I don't mean to say the English politics always 
 turn on romantic places or on small questions. 
 They don't. They often include questions of the 
 largest order. But when the English introduce a 
 really large question as the basjs of their politics 
 they like to select one that is insoluble. This 
 guarantees that it will last. Take, for example, the 
 rights of the Crown as against the people. That 
 lasted for one hundred years, all the seventeenth 
 century. In Oklahoma or in Alberta they would 
 
 62 
 
Politics of England 
 
 have called a convention on the question, settled it 
 in two weeks, and spoiled it for further use. In the 
 same way the Protestant Reformation was used for 
 a hundred years and the Reform Bill for a genera- 
 tion. 
 
 At the present time the genius of the English for 
 politics has selected as 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 Germany is to pay the Allies 
 3,912,486,782,421 marks. I think that is the 
 correct figure, though, of course, I am speaking 
 only from memory. At any rate, 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 
 the figure 4,281,390,687,471. But Mr. Lloyd George 
 would not pick it up. Nor do 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 properly pay a limited amount, 
 such as 3,912,486,782,421 marks ; but it was 
 
 63 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 not feasible to put on them a burden of 
 4,281,390,687,471 marks. 
 
 By the way, if anyone at this point doubts the 
 accuracy of the figures just given, all he has to do 
 is to take the amount of the indemnity as stated in 
 gold marks and then multiply it by the present value 
 of the mark, and he will find to his chagrin that the 
 figures are correct. If he is still not satisfied, I refer 
 him to a book of Logarithms. If he is not satisfied 
 with that, I refer him to any work on conic sections ; 
 and, if not convinced 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 of collecting it. In the first 
 place, there is no intention of allowing the Germans 
 to pay in actual cash. If they do this they will 
 merely inflate the English beyond what is bearable. 
 England has been inflated now for eight years and 
 has had enough of it. 
 
 In the second place, it is understood that it 
 will not do to allow the Germans to offer 
 4,281,390,687,471 marks' worth of coal. It is more 
 than the country needs. 
 
 What is more, if the English want coal they 
 propose to buy it in an ordinary decent way from 
 a Christian coal dealer in their own country. They 
 
 64 
 
Politics of England 
 
 do not propose to ruin their own coal industry for 
 the sake" of building 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 any of these 
 will be sternly refused. Even now it is all the 
 British farmers can do to live, and for some it is 
 more. Many of them are having to sell off 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 and further is able 
 to work fourteen hours a day. This argument may 
 not be quite correct, but I take it as I find it 
 in the London press. Whether I state it correctly 
 or not, it is quite plain that the problem is 
 insoluble. That is all that is needed in first-class 
 politics. 
 
 A really good question like the German repara- 
 tion question will go for a century. Undoubtedly 
 in the year a.d. 2000 a British Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer will still be explaining that the govern- 
 ment is fully resolved that Germany shall pay to 
 the last farthing {cheers) ; but that ministers have 
 no intention of allowing the German payment to 
 take a form that will undermine British industry 
 E 65 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 {wild applause) ; that the German indemnity shall 
 be so paid that, without weakening the power of 
 the Germans to buy from us, it shall increase our 
 power of selling to them. 
 
 Such questions last for ever. 
 
 On the other hand, sometimes by sheer careless- 
 ness a question gets settled and passes out of politics. 
 This, so we are given to understand, has happened 
 to the Irish question. It is settled. A group of 
 Irish delegates and British ministers got together 
 round a table and settled it. The settlement has 
 since been celebrated at a demonstration of brother- 
 hood by the Irish-Americans of New York with 
 only six casualties. Henceforth the Irish question 
 passes into history. There may be some odd fight- 
 ing along the Ulster border, or a little civil war, 
 with perhaps a little revolution every now and then, 
 but as a question the thing is finished. 
 
 I must say that I for one am very sorry to think 
 that the Irish question is gone. We shall miss it 
 greatly. Debating societies which have flourished 
 on it ever since 1886 will be wrecked for want of it. 
 Dinner parties will now lose half the sparkle of their 
 conversation. It will be no longer possible to make 
 use of such good old remarks as " After all, the 
 Irish are a gifted people," or " You must remember 
 
 66 
 
Politics of England 
 
 that fifty per cent of the great English generals 
 were Irish." 
 
 The settlement turned out to be a very simple 
 affair. Ireland was merely given dominion status. 
 What that is, no one knows, but it means that the 
 Irish have now got it and that they sink from the 
 high place that they had in the white light of 
 publicity to the level of the Canadians or the New 
 Zealanders. 
 
 Whether it is quite a proper thing to settle trouble 
 by conferring dominion status on it is open to 
 question. It is a practice that is bound to spread. 
 It is rumoured that it is now contemplated to 
 confer dominion status upon the Borough of Poplar 
 and on the Cambridge undergraduates. It is even 
 understood that at the recent disarmament con- 
 ference England offered to confer dominion status 
 on the United States. President Harding would 
 assuredly have accepted it at once but for the 
 protest of M. Briand, who claimed that any 
 such offer must be accompanied by a permission 
 to increase the French fire-brigade by fifty per 
 cent. 
 
 It is lamentable, too, that at the very same 
 moment when the Irish question was extinguished 
 the Naval question, which had lasted for nearly 
 
 6 7 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 fifty years, was absolutely obliterated by disarma- 
 ment. Henceforth the alarm of invasion is a thing 
 of the past and the navy practically needless. Be- 
 yond keeping a fleet in the North Sea and one on 
 the Mediterranean, and maintaining a patrol all 
 round the rim of the Pacific Ocean, Britain will 
 cease to be a naval power. A mere annual expendi- 
 ture of fifty million pounds sterling will suffice for 
 such thin pretence of naval preparedness as a dis- 
 armed nation will have to maintain. 
 
 This thing, too, came as a surprise, or at least a 
 surprise to the general public who are unaware of 
 the workings of diplomacy. Those who know about 
 such things were fully aware of what would happen 
 if a whole collection of British sailors and diplo- 
 matists and journalists were exposed to the hospi- 
 talities of Washington. The British and Americans 
 are both alike. You can't drive them or lead them 
 or coerce them, but if you give them a cigar they'll 
 do anything. 
 
 The inner history of the conference is only just 
 beginning to be known. But it is whispered that 
 immediately on his arrival Mr. Balfour was given a 
 cigar by President Harding. Mr. Balfour at once 
 offered to scrap five ships, and invited the entire 
 American cabinet into the British Embassy, where 
 
 68 
 
Politics of England 
 
 Sir A. Geddes was rash enough to offer them 
 champagne. 
 
 The American delegates immediately offered to 
 scrap ten ships. Mr. Balfour, who simply cannot 
 be outdone in international courtesy, saw the ten 
 and raised it to twenty. President Harding saw the 
 twenty, raised it to thirty, and sent out for more 
 poker chips. 
 
 At the close of the play Lord Beatty, who is 
 urbanity itself, offered to scrap Portsmouth Dock- 
 yard, and asked if anybody present would like 
 Canada. President Harding replied with his 
 customary tact that if England wanted the Philip- 
 pines, he would think it what he would term a 
 desiduum of normalcy to give them away. There 
 is no telling what might have happened had not 
 M. Briand interposed to say that any transfer on 
 the Philippines must be regarded as a signal for a 
 twenty per cent increase in the Boy Scouts of 
 France. 
 
 As things are, disarmament coming along with the 
 Irish settlement leaves English politics in a bad way. 
 The general outlook is too peaceful altogether. One 
 looks round almost in vain for any of those "strained 
 relations " which^used to be the very basis of English 
 foreign policy. In only one direction do I see light 
 
 69 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 for English politics, and that is over towards Czecho- 
 slovakia. It appears that Czecho-Slovakia owes the 
 British Exchequer fifty million sterling. I cannot 
 quote the exact figure, but it is either fifty million 
 or fifty billion. In either case Czecho-Slovakia is 
 unable to pay. The announcement has just been 
 made by M. Sgitzch, the new treasurer, that the 
 country is bankrupt, or at 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 " strained relations " between Great 
 "Britain and Czecho-Slovakia. Now, what I advise 
 is, that if the relations are strained, keep them so. 
 England has lost nearly all the strained relations she 
 ever had ; let her cherish the few that she still has. 
 I know that there are other opinions. The sugges- 
 tion has been at once made for a " round table 
 conference," at which the whole thing can be freely 
 discussed without formal protocols and something 
 like a " gentleman's agreement " reached. I say 
 don't do it. England is being ruined by these 
 round table conferences. They are sitting round 
 in Cairo and Calcutta and Capetown, filling all the 
 best hotels and eating out the substance of the tax- 
 payer. 
 
 I am told that Lloyd George has offered to go to 
 70 
 
Politics of England 
 
 Czecho-Slovakia. He should be stopped. It is said 
 that Professor Keynes has proved that the best way 
 to deal with the debt of Czecho-Slovakia is to send 
 them whatever cash we have left, thereby turning 
 the exchange upside down on them, and forcing 
 them to buy all their Christmas presents in Man- 
 chester. 
 
 It is wiser not to do anything of the sort. England 
 should send them a good old-fashioned ultimatum, 
 mobilize all the naval officers at the Embankment 
 hotels, raise the income-tax another sixpence, and 
 defy them. 
 
 If that were done it might prove a successful first 
 step in bringing English politics back to the high 
 plane of conversation interest from which they 
 are threatening to fall. 
 
 71 
 
Chapter V — Oxford as I See It 
 
 ~fk ^Y private station being that of a university 
 1% /■ professor, I was naturally deeply inter- 
 1 y ^_ ested in the system of education in 
 England. I was therefore led to make a special 
 visit to Oxford and to submit the place to a search- 
 ing scrutiny. Arriving one afternoon at four 
 o'clock, I stayed at the Mitre Hotel and did not 
 leave until eleven o'clock next morning. The whole 
 of this time, except for one hour spent in addressing 
 the undergraduates, was devoted to a close and eager 
 study of the great university. When I add to this 
 that I had already visited Oxford in 1907 and spent 
 a Sunday at All Souls with Colonel L. S. Amery, it 
 will be seen at once that my views on Oxford are 
 based upon observations extending over fourteen 
 years. 
 
 At any rate, I can at least claim that my acquaint- 
 ance with the British university is just as good a 
 basis for reflection and judgment as that of the' 
 numerous English critics who come to our side of 
 
 72 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 the water. I have known a famous English author 
 arrive at Harvard University in the morning, have 
 lunch with President Lowell, and then write a 
 whole chapter on the excellence of higher education 
 in America. I have known another one come to 
 Harvard, have lunch with President Lowell, and do 
 an entire book on the decline of serious study in 
 America. Or take the case of my own university. 
 I remember Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to 
 McGill and saying in his address to the under- 
 graduates at 2.30 p.m., " You have here a great 
 institution." But how could he have gathered this 
 information ? As far as I knew, he spent the entire 
 morning with Sir Andrew Macphail in his house 
 beside the campus, smoking cigarettes. When I add 
 that he distinctly refused to visit the Palaeontologic 
 Museum, that he saw nothing of our new hydraulic 
 apparatus, or of our classes in Domestic Science, his 
 judgment that we had here a great institution seems 
 a little bit superficial. I can only put beside it, to 
 redeem it in some measure, the hasty and ill-formed 
 judgment expressed by Lord Milner, " McGill is a 
 noble university " ; and the rash and indiscreet 
 expression of the Prince of Wales, when we gave 
 him an LL.D. degree, " McGill has a glorious 
 future." 
 
 73 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 To my mind these unthinking judgments about 
 our great college do harm, and I determined, there- 
 fore, that anything that I said about Oxford should 
 be the result of the actual observation and real study 
 based upon a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel. 
 
 On the strength of this basis of experience I am 
 prepared to make the following positive and 
 emphatic statements. Oxford is a noble University. 
 It has a great past. It is at present the greatest 
 university in the world ; and it is quite possible that 
 it has a great future. Oxford trains scholars of the 
 real type better than any other place in the world. 
 Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. 
 Its lectures are rotten. It has professors who never 
 teach and students who never learn. It has no 
 order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculum 
 is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no 
 state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet — 
 it gets there. Whether we like it or not, Oxford 
 gives something to its students, a life and a mode 
 of thought 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 wainscoted 
 bedroom, period of Charles I) and study the place 
 for himself. 
 
 74 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 These singular results achieved at Oxford are all 
 the more surprising when one considers the dis- 
 tressing conditions under which the students work. 
 The lack of an adequate building fund compels 
 them to go on working in the same old buildings 
 which they have had for centuries. The build- 
 ings at Brasenose had not been renewed since 
 the year 1525. In New College and Magdalen the 
 students are still housed in the old buildings erected 
 in the sixteenth century. At Christ Church I 
 was shown a kitchen which had been built at the 
 expense of Cardinal Wolsey in 1527. Incredible 
 though it may seem, they have no other place to 
 cook in than this and are compelled to use it to-day. 
 On the day when I saw this kitchen, four cooks were 
 busy roasting an ox whole for the students' lunch : 
 this, at least, is what I presumed they were doing 
 from the size of the fire-place used ; but it may not 
 have been an ox, perhaps it was a cow. On a huge 
 table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs of wood 
 five inches thick, two other cooks were rolling out 
 a game pie. I estimated it as measuring three feet 
 across. In this rude way, unchanged since the time 
 of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford student s are 
 fed. I could not help contrasting it with the cosy 
 little boarding houses on Cottage Grove Avenue 
 
 75 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 where I used to eat when I was a student at Chicago, 
 or the charming little basement dining-rooms of the 
 students' boarding houses in Toronto. But then, of 
 course, Henry VIII never lived in Toronto. 
 
 The same lack of a building fund necessitates the 
 Oxford students living in the identical old boarding 
 houses they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries. Technically they are called " quad- 
 rangles," " closes," and " rooms " ; but I am so 
 broken in to the usage of my student days that I 
 can't help calling them boarding houses. In many 
 of these the old stairway has been worn down by 
 the feet of ten generations of students ; the win- 
 dows have little latticed panes ; there are old names 
 carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick 
 growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding 
 house at St. John's dates from 1509, the one at 
 Christ Church from the same period. A few 
 hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace 
 these old buildings with neat steel and brick struc- 
 tures like the normal school at Schenectady, N.Y., 
 or the Peel Street High School at Montreal. But 
 nothing is done. A movement was, indeed, at- 
 tempted last autumn towards removing the ivy 
 from the walls, but the result was unsatisfactory 
 and they are putting it back. Anyone could have 
 
 76 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 told them beforehand that the mere removal of the 
 ivy would not brighten Oxford up, unless at the 
 same time one cleared the stones of the old inscrip- 
 tions, put in steel fire-escapes, and, in fact, brought 
 the boarding houses up to date. 
 
 But Henry VIII being dead, nothing was done. 
 Yet, in spite of its dilapidated buildings and its lack 
 of fire-escapes, ventilation, sanitation, and up-to- 
 date kitchen facilities, I persist in my assertion that 
 I believe that Oxford, in its way, is the greatest 
 university in the world. I am aware that this is an 
 extreme statement and needs explanation. Oxford 
 is much smaller in numbers, for example, than the 
 State university of Minnesota, and is much poorer. 
 It has, or had till yesterday, fewer students than the 
 University of Toronto. To mention Oxford beside 
 the 26,000 students of Columbia University sounds 
 ridiculous. In point of money, the $39,000,000 
 endowment of the University of Chicago, the 
 $35,000,000 of Columbia, and the $43,000,000 of 
 Harvard seem to leave Oxford nowhere. Yet the 
 peculiar thing is that it is not nowhere. By some 
 queer process of its own it seems to get there every 
 time. It was therefore of the very greatest interest 
 to me, as a profound scholar, to try to investigate 
 just how this peculiar excellence of Oxford arises. 
 
 77 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 It has hardly been due to anything in the curri- 
 culum or programme of studies. Indeed, to anyone 
 accustomed to the best models of a university 
 curriculum as it flourishes in the United States and 
 Canada, the programme of studies is frankly quite 
 laughable. There is less Applied Science in the 
 place than would be found with us in a theological 
 college. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would 
 recognize a dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. 
 The Oxford student learns nothing of chemistry, 
 physics, heat, plumbing, electric wiring, gasfitting, 
 of the use of a blow-torch. Any American college 
 student can run a motor-car, take a gasoline engine 
 to pieces, fix a washer on a kitchen tap, mend a 
 broken electric bell, and give an expert opinion on 
 what has gone wrong with the furnace. It is these 
 things, indeed, which stamp him as a college man, 
 and occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds 
 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 the mechanical side of education. True ; 
 but one searches in vain in the Oxford curriculum 
 for any adequate recognition of the higher and more 
 cultured studies. Strange though it seems to us on 
 this side of the Atlantic, there are no courses at 
 
 7 s 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 Oxford in Housekeeping, or in Salesmanship, or in 
 Advertising, or on Comparative Religion, or on the 
 influence of the press. There are no lectures what- 
 ever on Human Behaviour, on Altruism, on Egotism, 
 or on the Play of Wild Animals. Apparently, the 
 Oxford student does not learn these things. This 
 cuts him off from a great deal of the larger culture 
 of our side of the Atlantic. " What are you study- 
 ing this year ? " I once asked a fourth-year student 
 at one of our great colleges. " I am electing Sales- 
 manship and Religion," he answered. Here was a 
 young man whose training was destined inevitably 
 to turn him into a moral business man : either that 
 or nothing. At Oxford, Salesmanship is not taught, 
 and Religion takes the feeble form of the New 
 Testament. The more one looks at these things 
 the more amazing it becomes that Oxford can pro- 
 duce any results at all. 
 
 The effect of the comparison is heightened by the 
 peculiar position occupied at Oxford by the pro- 
 fessor's lectures. In the colleges of Canada and the 
 United States the lectures are supposed to be a really 
 necessary and useful part of the student's training. 
 Again and again I have heard the graduates of my 
 own college assert that they had got as much, or 
 nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out 
 
 79 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 of athletics 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. At 
 Oxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are 
 given and may even be taken. But they are quite 
 worthless and are not supposed to have anything 
 much to do with the development of the student's 
 mind. " The lectures here," said a Canadian 
 student to me, " are punk." I appealed to another 
 student to know if this was so. " I don't know 
 whether I'd call them exactly punk," he answered, 
 " but they're certainly rotten." Other judgments 
 were that the lectures were of no importance ; that 
 nobody took them ; that they don't matter ; that 
 you can take them if you like ; that they do you 
 no harm. 
 
 It appears, further, that the professors themselves 
 are not keen on their lectures. If the lectures ^are 
 called for they give them ; if not, the professor's 
 feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and rests 
 his brain until in some later year the students call 
 for his lectures. There are men at Oxford who have 
 rested their brains this way for over thirty years : 
 the accumulated brain power thus dammed up is 
 said to be colossal. 
 
 I understand that the key to this mystery is found 
 
 80 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 in the operations of the person called the tutor. It 
 is from him, or rather with him, that the 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 his rooms," 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 goes over our exercises with us." 
 From this and other evidence I gather that what an 
 Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students 
 together and smoke at them. Men who have been 
 systematically smoked at for four years turn into 
 ripe scholars. If anybody doubts this, let him go 
 to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in 
 operation. A well-smoked man speaks and writes 
 English with a grace that can be acquired in no 
 other way. 
 
 In what was said above, I seem to have been 
 directing criticism against the Oxford professors as 
 such ; but I have no intention of doing so. For the 
 Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I 
 have nothing but a profound respect. There is, 
 indeed, the greatest difference between the modern 
 up-to-date American idea of a professor and the 
 English type. But even with us in older days, in 
 the bygone time when such people as Henry 
 
 F 81 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 Wadsworth Longfellow were professors, one found 
 the English idea : a professor was supposed to be 
 a venerable kind of person, with snow-white 
 whiskers reaching to his stomach. He was expected 
 to moon around the campus oblivious of the world 
 around him. If you nodded to him he failed to see 
 you. Of money he knew nothing ; of business, far 
 less. He was, as his trustees were proud to say of 
 him, " a child." 
 
 On the other hand, he contained within him a 
 reservoir of learning of such depth as to be practi- 
 cally bottomless. None of this learning was supposed 
 to be of any material or commercial benefit to any- 
 body. Its use was in saving the soul and enlarging 
 the mind. 
 
 At the head of such a group of professors was one 
 whose beard was even whiter and longer, whose 
 absence of mind was even still greater, and whose 
 knowledge of money, business, and practical affairs 
 was below zero. Him they made the president. 
 
 All this is changed in America. A university pro- 
 fessor is now a busy, hustling person, approximating 
 as closely to a business man as he can do it. It is 
 on the business man that he models himself He 
 has a little place that he calls his " office," with a 
 typewriter machine and a stenographer. Here he 
 
 82 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 sits and dictates letters, beginning after the best 
 business models, " In re yours of the eighth ult., 
 would say, etc. etc." He writes these letters to 
 students, to his fellow-professors, to the president — 
 indeed, to any people who will let him write to 
 them. The number of letters that he writes each 
 month is duly counted and set to 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 asked to step out of the college 
 and take a post as an " executive " in a soap com- 
 pany 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, he will pre- 
 sently be dismissed, or, to use the business term, be 
 " let go," by a board of trustees who are themselves 
 hustlers and live-wires. As to the professor's soul, 
 he no longer needs to think of it, as it has been 
 handed 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 a prescribed 
 pace like a flock of sheep. They all go humping 
 together over the hurdles with the professor chasing 
 them with a set of " tests " and " recitations," 
 
 83 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 " marks " and " attendances," the whole apparatus 
 obviously copied from the time-clock of the business 
 man's factory. This process is what is called 
 " showing results." The pace set is necessarily that 
 of the slowest, and thus results in what I have heard 
 Mr. Edward Beatty describe 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 a premium on 
 dullness and a penalty on genius. It circumscribes 
 that attitude of mind which is the real spirit of 
 learning. If we persist in it we shall presently find 
 that true learning will fly away from our universities 
 and will take rest wherever some individual and 
 inquiring mind can mark out its path for itself. 
 
 Now, the principal reason why I am led to admire 
 Oxford is that the place is little touched as yet by 
 the measuring of " results " and by this passion 
 for visible and provable " efficiency." The whole 
 system at Oxford is such as to put a premium on 
 genius and to let mediocrity and dullness go their 
 way. On the dull student Oxford, after a proper 
 lapse of time, confers a degree which means nothing 
 more than that he lived and breathed at Oxford and 
 kept out of jail. This for many students is as much 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 as society can expect. But for the gifted student 
 Oxford offers great opportunities. There is no 
 question of his hanging back till the last sheep has 
 jumped over the fence. He need wait for no one. 
 He may move forward as fast as he likes, following 
 the bent of his genius. If he has in him any ability 
 beyond that of the common herd, his tutor, inter- 
 ested in his studies, will smoke at him until he 
 kindles him into a 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. 
 The American professor has no time to be interested 
 in a clever student. He has time to be interested 
 in his " department," his letter-writing, his execu- 
 tive work, and his organizing ability and his hope 
 of promotion to a soap factory. But with that his 
 mind is exhausted. The student of genius merely 
 means to him a student who gives no trouble, who 
 passes all his " tests," and is present at all his 
 " recitations." Such a student also, if he can be 
 trained to be a hustler and an advertiser, will un- 
 doubtedly " make good." But beyond that the 
 professor does not think of him. The everlasting 
 principle of equality has inserted itself in a place 
 where it has no right to be, and where inequality 
 is the breath of life. 
 
 85 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 American or Canadian college trustees would be 
 horrified at the notion of professors who apparently 
 do no work, give few or no lectures, and draw their 
 pay merely for existing. Yet these are really the 
 only kind of professors worth having — I mean, men 
 who can be trusted with a vague general mission in 
 life, with a salary guaranteed at least till their death, 
 and a sphere of duties entrusted solely to their own 
 conscience and the promptings of their own desires. 
 Such men are rare, but a single one of them, when 
 found, is worth ten " executives " and a dozen 
 " organizers." 
 
 The excellence of Oxford, then, as I see it, lies 
 in the peculiar vagueness of the organization of its 
 work. It starts from the assumption that the pro- 
 fessor is a really learned man whose sole interest lies 
 in his own sphere ; and that a student, or at least 
 the only student with whom the university cares to 
 reckon seriously, is a young man who desires to know. 
 This is an ancient mediaeval attitude long since 
 buried in more up-to-date places under successive 
 strata of compulsory education, state teaching, the 
 democratization of knowledge and the substitution 
 of the shadow for the substance, and the casket for 
 the gem. No doubt, in newer places, the thing has 
 got to be so. Higher education in America flourishes 
 
 86 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 chiefly as a qualification for entrance into a money- 
 making profession, and not as a thing in itself. 
 But in Oxford one can still see the surviving 
 outline of a nobler type of structure and a higher 
 inspiration. 
 
 I do not mean to say, however, that my judgment 
 of Oxford is one undiluted stream of praise. In one 
 respect at least I think that Oxford has fallen away 
 from the high ideals of the Middle Ages. I refer 
 to the fact that it admits women students to its 
 studies. In the Middle Ages women were regarded 
 with a peculiar chivalry long since lost. It was taken 
 for granted that their brains were too delicately 
 poised to allow them to learn anything. It was 
 presumed that their minds were so exquisitely hung 
 that intellectual effort might disturb them. The 
 present age has gone to the other extreme ; and 
 this is seen nowhere more than 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 attrac- 
 tive, flittering up and down the streets of Oxford 
 in their caps and gowns is very distressing. 
 
 Who is to blame for this and how they first got 
 
 87 
 
t } 
 
 My Discovery of England 
 
 in I do not know. But I understand that they first 
 of all built a private college of their own close to 
 Oxford, and then edged themselves in foot by foot. 
 If this is so, they only followed up the precedent 
 of the recognized method in use in America. When 
 an American college is established, the women go 
 and build a college of their own overlooking the 
 grounds. Then they put on becoming caps and 
 gowns and stand and look over the fence at the 
 college athletics. The male undergraduates, who 
 were originally and by nature a hardy lot, were not 
 easily disturbed. But inevitably some of the senior 
 trustees fell in love with the first year girls and 
 became convinced that co-education was a noble 
 cause. American statistics show that between 1880 
 and 1900 the number of trustees and senior pro- 
 fessors who married girl undergraduates, or who 
 wanted to do so, reached a percentage of — I forget 
 the exact percentage ; it was either a hundred or 
 a little over. 
 
 I don't know just what happened at Oxford, but 
 presumably something of the sort took place. In 
 any case, the women are now all over the place. 
 They attend the college lectures, they row in a boat, 
 and they perambulate the High Street. They are 
 even offering a serious competition against the men. 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 Last year they carried off the ping-pong champion- 
 ship and took the chancellor's prize for needlework, 
 while in music, cooking, and millinery the men are 
 said to be nowhere. 
 
 There is no doubt that, unless Oxford puts the 
 women out while there is yet time, they will overrun 
 the whole university. What this means to the pro- 
 gress of learning few can tell, and those who know 
 are afraid to say. 
 
 Cambridge University, I am glad to see, still sets 
 its face sternly against this innovation. I am re- 
 luctant to count any superiority in the University 
 of Cambridge. Having twice visited Oxford, having 
 made the place a subject of profound study for 
 many hours at a time, having twice addressed its 
 undergraduates, and having stayed at the Mitre 
 Hotel, I consider myself an Oxford man. But I 
 must admit that Cambridge has chosen the wiser 
 part. 
 
 Last autumn, while I was in London on my 
 voyage of discovery, a vote was taken at Cambridge 
 to see if the women who have already a private 
 college close by should be admitted to the univer- 
 sity. They were triumphantly shut out ; and, as 
 a fit and proper sign of enthusiasm, the under- 
 graduates went over in a body and knocked down the 
 
 89 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 gates of the women's college. I know that it is a 
 terrible thing to say that anyone approved of this. 
 All the London papers came out with headings that 
 read, Are our undergraduates turning into 
 baboons ? and so on. The Manchester Guardian 
 bordered its pages in black, and even the Morning 
 Post was afraid to take bold ground in the matter. 
 But I do know, also, that there was a great 
 deal of secret chuckling and jubilation in the 
 London clubs. Nothing was expressed openly. The 
 men of England have been too terrorized by the 
 women for that. But in safe corners of the club, 
 out of ear-shot of the waiters and away from casual 
 strangers, little groups of elderly men chuckled 
 quietly together. " Knocked down their gates, 
 eh ? " said the wicked old men to one another, and 
 then whispered guiltily behind an uplifted hand, 
 " Serve 'em right." Nobody dared to say any- 
 thing outside. If they had, some one would have 
 got up and asked a question in the House of 
 Commons. When this is done all England falls flat 
 upon its face. 
 
 But, for my part, when I heard of the Cambridge 
 vote' L felt as Lord Chatham did when he said in 
 parliament, " Sir, I rejoice that America has re- 
 sisted." For I have long harboured views of my 
 
 90 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 own upon the higher education of women. In these 
 days, however, it requires no little hardihood to 
 utter a single word of criticism against it. It is like 
 throwing half a brick through the glass roof of a 
 conservatory. It is bound to make trouble. Let 
 me hasten, therefore, to say that I believe most 
 heartily in the higher education of women ; in fact, 
 the higher the better. The only question to my 
 mind is : What is " high education," and how do 
 you get it ? With which goes the secondary inquiry : 
 What is a woman, and is she just the same as a man ? 
 I know that it sounds a terrible thing to say in these 
 days, but I don't believe she is. 
 
 Let me say, also, that when I speak of co- 
 education I speak of what I know. I was co-educated 
 myself some thirty-five years ago, at the very be- 
 ginning of the thing. I learned my Greek alongside 
 of a bevy of beauty on the opposite benches that 
 mashed up the irregular verbs for us very badly. 
 Incidentally, those girls are all married long since, 
 and all the Greek they know now you could put 
 under a thimble. But of that presently. 
 
 I have had further experience as well. I spent 
 three years in the graduate school of Chicago, where 
 co-educational girls were as thick as autumn leaves — 
 and some thicker. And as a college professor at 
 
 91 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 McGUl University, in Montreal, I have taught 
 mingled classes of men and women for twenty 
 years. 
 
 On the basis of which experience I say with 
 assurance that the thing is a mistake and has nothing 
 to recommend it but its relative cheapness. Let me 
 emphasize this last point and have done with it. 
 Co-education is, of course, a great economy. To 
 teach ten men and ten women in a single class 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 the discussion turns not 
 on what is cheapest, but on what is best, then the 
 case is entirely different. 
 
 The fundamental trouble is that men and women 
 are different creatures, with different minds and 
 different aptitudes and different paths in life. There 
 is no need to raise here the question of which is 
 superior and which is inferior (though I think, 
 the Lord help me, I know the answer to that 
 too). The point lies in the fact that they are 
 different. 
 
 But the mad passion for equality has masked this 
 obvious fact. When women began to demand, quite 
 rightly, a share in higher education, they took for 
 granted that they wanted the same curriculum as 
 
 92 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 the men. They never stopped to ask whether their 
 aptitudes were not in various directions higher and 
 better than those of the men, and whether it might 
 not be better for their sex to cultivate the things 
 which were best suited to their minds. Let me be 
 more explicit. In all that goes with physical and 
 mathematical science, women, on the average, are 
 far below the standard of men. There are, of 
 course, exceptions. But they prove nothing. It is 
 no use to quote to me the case of some brilliant girl 
 who stood first in physics at Cornell. That's 
 nothing. There is an elephant in the zoo that can 
 count up to ten ; yet I refuse to reckon myself his 
 inferior. 
 
 Tabulated results spread over years, and the 
 actual experience of those who teach, show that in 
 the whole domain of mathematics and physics 
 women are outclassed. At McGiD the girls of our 
 first year have wept over their failures in elementary 
 physics these twenty-five years. It is time that 
 some one dried their tears and took away the 
 subject. 
 
 But, in any case, examination tests are never the 
 whole story. To those who know, a written exami- 
 nation is far from being a true criterion of capacity. 
 It demands too much of mere memory, imitative- 
 
 93 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 ness, and the insidious willingness to absorb other 
 people's ideas. Parrots and crows would do 
 admirably in examinations. Indeed, the colleges 
 are full of them. 
 
 But take, on the other hand, all that goes with 
 the aesthetic side of education, with imaginative 
 literature and the cult of beauty. Here women are, 
 or at least ought to be, the superiors of men. 
 Women were in primitive times the first story- 
 tellers. They are still so at the cradle side. The 
 original college woman was the Witch, with her 
 incantations and her prophecies and the glow 
 of her bright imagination, and if brutal men of 
 duller brains had not burned it out of her 
 she would be incanting still. To my thinking, 
 we need more witches in the colleges and less 
 physics. 
 
 I have seen such young witches myself — if I may 
 keep the word : I like it — in colleges such as 
 Wellesley in Massachusetts, and Bryn Mawr in 
 Pennsylvania, where there isn't a man allowed 
 within the three-mile limit. To my mind, they do 
 infinitely better thus by themselves. They are 
 freer, less restrained. They discuss things openly 
 in their classes ; they lift up their voices, and they 
 speak ; whereas a girl in such a place as McGill, 
 
 94 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 with men all about her, sits for four years as silent 
 as a frog full of shot. 
 
 But there is a deeper trouble still. The careers 
 of the men and women who go to college together 
 are necessarily different, and the preparation is all 
 aimed at the man's career. The men are going to 
 be lawyers, doctors, engineers, business men, and 
 politicians. And the women 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 their eye on it side- 
 ways all the time. The plain fact is that, after a 
 girl has spent four years of her time and a great 
 deal of her parents' money in equipping herself for 
 a career that she is never going to have, the wretched 
 creature goes and gets married, and in a few years 
 has forgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right- 
 angled triangle, and she doesn'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 I hasten to 
 answer : most assuredly. I freely admit that a girl 
 
 95 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 who knows algebra, or once knew it, is a far more 
 charming companion and a nobler wife and mother 
 than a girl who doesn't know x from y. But the 
 point is this : Does the higher education that fits 
 a man to be a lawyer also fit a person to be a wife 
 and mother ? Or, in other words, is a lawyer a wife 
 and mother ? I say he is not. Granted that a girl 
 is to spend four years in time and four thousand 
 dollars in money in going to college, why train her 
 for a career that she is never going to adopt ? Why 
 not give her an education that will have a meaning 
 and a harmony with the real life that she is to 
 follow ? 
 
 For example, suppose that during her four years 
 every girl lucky enough to get a higher education 
 spent at least six months of it in the training and 
 discipline of a hospital as a nurse. There is more 
 education and character making in that than in a 
 whole bucketful of algebra. 
 
 But no, the woman insists on snatching her share 
 of an education designed by Erasmus or William of 
 Wykeham or William of Occam for the creation of 
 scholars and lawyers ; and when later on in her home 
 there is a sudden sickness or accident, and the life 
 or death of those nearest to her hangs upon skill and 
 knowledge and a trained fortitude in emergency, she 
 
 96 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 must needs send in all haste for a hired woman to 
 fill the place that she herself has never learned to 
 occupy. 
 
 But I am not here trying to elaborate a whole 
 curriculum. I am only trying to indicate that 
 higher education for the man is one thing, for the 
 woman another. Nor do I deny the fact the 
 women have got to earn their living. Their higher 
 education must enable them to do that. They 
 cannot all marry on their graduation day. But that 
 is no great matter. No scheme of education 
 that anyone is likely to devise will fail in this 
 respect. 
 
 The positions that they hold as teachers or civil 
 servants they would fill all the better if their educa- 
 tion were fitted to their wants. 
 
 Some few, a small minority, really and truly 
 " have a career " — husbandless and childless — in 
 which the sacrifice is great and the honour to them, 
 perhaps, all the higher. And others, no doubt, dream 
 of a career in which a husband and a group of 
 blossoming children are carried as an appendage to 
 a busy life at the bar or on the platform. But all 
 such are the mere minority, so small as to make no 
 difference to the general argument. 
 
 But there — I have written quite enough to make 
 g 97 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 plenty of trouble except, perhaps, at Cambridge 
 University. So I return with relief to my general 
 study of Oxford. 
 
 Viewing the situation as a whole I am led, then, 
 to the conclusion that there must be something in 
 the life of Oxford itself that makes for higher learn- 
 ing. Smoked at by his tutor, fed in Henry VIII's 
 kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the student 
 evidently gets something not easily obtained in 
 America. And the more I reflect on the matter 
 the more I am convinced that it is the sleeping in 
 the ivy that 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 I lived, from start to finish, 
 in seventeen different boarding houses. As far as 
 I am aware these houses have not, or not yet, been 
 marked with tablets. But they are still to be found 
 in the vicinity of McCaul and Darcy and St. Patrick 
 Streets. Anyone who doubts the truth of what I 
 have to say may go and look at them. 
 
 I was not alone in the nomadic life that I led. 
 There were hundreds of us drifting about in this 
 fashion from one melancholy habitation to another. 
 We lived, as a rule, two or three in a house, some- 
 times alone. We dined in the basement. We always 
 
 98 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 had beef, done up in some way after it was dead, 
 and there were always soda biscuits on the table. 
 They used to have a brand of soda biscuits in those 
 days in the Toronto boarding houses that I have not 
 seen since. They were better than dog biscuits, but 
 with not so much snap. My contemporaries will all 
 remember them. A great many of the leading 
 barristers and professional men of Toronto were fed 
 qn them. 
 
 In the life we led we had practically no oppor- 
 tunities for association on a large scale, no common 
 rooms, no reading rooms, nothing. We never saw 
 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 Caer Howell 
 Hotel on University Avenue and interchanging 
 them there. 
 
 I mention these melancholy details not for their 
 own sake, but merely to emphasize the point that 
 when I speak of students' dormitories, and the 
 larger life which they offer, I speak of what I 
 know. 
 
 If we had had at Toronto,fyhen I was a student, 
 the kind of the living-in system and common rooms 
 that they have at Oxford, I don't think I would ever 
 have graduated. I'd have been there still. The 
 
 99 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 trouble is that the universities on our continent are 
 only just waking up to the idea of what a university 
 should mean. They were, very largely, instituted 
 and organized with the idea that a university was 
 a place where young men were sent to absorb the 
 contents of books and to listen to lectures in the 
 class-rooms. The student was pictured as a pallid 
 creature, burning what was called the " midnight 
 oil," his wan face bent over his desk. If you wanted 
 to do something for him, you gave him a book ; if 
 you wanted to do something really large on his 
 behalf, you gave him a whole basketful of them. If 
 you wanted to go still further and be a benefactor 
 to the college at large, you endowed a competitive 
 scholarship and set two or more pallid students 
 working themselves to death to get it. 
 
 The real thing for the student is the life and 
 environment that surrounds him. All that he really 
 learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation 
 of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient 
 of lectures. And for this active operation what he 
 really needs most is the continued and intimate 
 contact with his -fellows. Students must live to- 
 gether and eat together, talk and smoke together. 
 Experience shows that that is how their minds really 
 grow. And they must live together in a rational 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 and comfortable way. They must eat in ' a big 
 dining-room or ball, with oak beams across the 
 ceiling, and the stained glass in the 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 left a name worthy of the memory 
 of the college. If a student is to get from his 
 college what it ought to give him, rooms in college, 
 with the life in common that they bring, are his 
 absolute right. A university that fails to give it to 
 him is cheating him. 
 
 If I were founding a university — and I say it with 
 all the seriousness of which I am capable — I would 
 found first a smoking-room ; then when I had a 
 little more money in hand I would build rooms ; 
 then after that, 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 
 hire a professor and get some textbooks. 
 
 This chapter has sounded in the most part like 
 a continuous eulogy of Oxford with but little in 
 favour of our American colleges. I turn therefore 
 with pleasure to the more congenial task of showing 
 what is wrong with Oxford and with the English 
 university system generally, and the aspect in which 
 our American universities far excel the British. 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 The point is that Henry VIII is dead. The 
 English are so proud of what Henry VIII and the 
 benefactors of earlier centuries did for their univer- 
 sities that they forget the present. There is little 
 or nothing in England to compare with the mag- 
 nificent generosity of individuals, provinces, and 
 states which is building up the colleges of the 
 United States and Canada. There used to be. But 
 by some strange confuson of thought the English 
 people admire the noble gifts of Cardinal Wolsey 
 and Henry VIII and Queen Margaret, and do not 
 realize that the Carnegies and Rockefellers and the 
 William Macdonalds are the Cardinal Wolseys of 
 to-day. The University of Chicago was founded 
 upon oil. McGill University rests largely on a basis 
 of tobacco. In America the world of commerce 
 and business levies on itself a noble tribute in favour 
 of the higher learning. In England, with a few 
 conspicuous exceptions, such as that at Bristol, there 
 is little of the sort. The feudal families are content 
 with what their remote ancestors have done : they 
 do not try to emulate it in any great degree. 
 
 In the long run this must count. Of all the 
 various reforms that are talked of at Oxford, and 
 of all the imitations of American methods that are 
 suggested, the only one worth while, to my think- 
 
Oxford as I See It 
 
 ing, is to capture a few millionaires, give them 
 honorary degrees at a million pounds sterling apiece, 
 and tell them to imagine that they are Henry VIII. 
 I give Oxford warning that if this is not done the 
 place will not last another two centuries. 
 
 103 
 
Chapter VI — The British and the 
 American Press 
 
 THE only paper from which a man can really 
 get the news of the world in a 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 the Montreal 
 Star at my dinner, I don't really know what is 
 happening. In the same way I have seen a man from 
 the south of Scotland settle down to read the 
 Dumfries Chronicle with a deep sigh of satis- 
 faction ; and a man from Burlington, Vermont, 
 pick up the Burlington Eagle and study the 
 foreign news in it as the only way of getting 
 at what was really happening in France and 
 Germany. 
 
 The reason is, I suppose, that there are different 
 ways of serving up the news and we each get used 
 to our own. Some people like the news fed to them 
 gently ; others like it thrown at them in a bomb- 
 shell ; some prefer it to be made as little of as 
 
 104 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 possible ; they want it minimized ; others want the 
 maximum. 
 
 This is where the greatest difference lies between 
 the British newspapers and those of the United 
 States and Canada. With us in America the great 
 thing is to get the news and shout it at the reader ; 
 in England they get the news and then break it to 
 him as gently as possible. Hence the big headings, 
 the bold type, and the double columns of the 
 American paper, and the small headings and the 
 general air of quiet 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 designed to be 
 read quietly, propped up against the sugar bowl of 
 a man eating a slow breakfast in a quiet corner of a 
 club, or by a retired banker seated in a leather chair 
 nearly asleep, or by a country vicar sitting in a 
 wicker chair under a pergola. The American 
 paper is for reading by a man hanging on the 
 straps of a clattering subway express, by a man 
 eating at a lunch counter, by a man standing 
 on one leg, by a man getting a two-minute shave, 
 or by a man about to have his teeth drawn by 
 
 a dentist. 
 
 105 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 In other words, there is a difference of atmo- 
 sphere. It is not merely in the type and the 
 lettering : it is a difference in the way the news is 
 treated and the kind of words that are used. In 
 America we love such words as " gun-men " and 
 " joy-ride " and " death-cell " ; in England they 
 prefer " person of doubtful character " and " motor 
 travelling at excessive speed " and " corridor No. 6." 
 If a milk waggon collides in the street 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 
 assistant in Houndsditch." That designation would 
 knock any decent murder story to pieces. 
 
 Hence comes the great difference between the 
 American " lead," or opening sentence of the 
 article, and the English method of commencement. 
 In the American paper the idea is that the reader 
 is so busy that he must first be offered the news in 
 one gulp. After that if he likes it he can go on 
 and eat some more of it. So the opening sentence 
 must give the whole thing. Thus, suppose that a 
 leading member of the United States Congress has 
 committed suicide. This is the way in which the 
 American reporter deals with it : 
 
 1 06 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 " Seated in his room at the Grand Hotel with his 
 carpet slippers on his feet and his body wrapped in 
 a blue dressing-gown with pink insertions, after 
 writing a letter of farewell to his wife and emptying 
 a bottle of Scotch whisky in which he exonerated 
 her from all culpability in his death, Congressman 
 Ahasuerus P. Tigg was found by night-watchman 
 Henry T. Smith, while making his rounds as usual, 
 with four bullets in his stomach." 
 
 Now, let us suppose that a leading member of 
 the House of Commons in England had done the 
 same thing. Here is the way it would be written 
 up in a first-class London newspaper. The heading 
 would be Home and General Intelligence. 
 That is inserted so as to keep the reader soothed 
 and quiet, and is no doubt thought better than 
 the American heading, Bughouse Congressman 
 Blows Out Brains in Hotel. After the heading 
 " Home and General Intelligence " the English 
 paper runs the subheading, Incident at the 
 Grand Hotel. The reader still doesn't know 
 what happened : he isn't meant to. Then the 
 article begins like this : 
 
 "The Grand Hotel, which is situated at the 
 corner of Millbank and Victoria Streets, was the 
 scene last night of a distressing incident." 
 
 107 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 " What is it ? " thinks the reader. 
 
 " The hotel itself, which is an old Georgian 
 structure dating probably from about 1750, is a 
 quiet establishment, its clientele mainly drawn from 
 business men in the cattle-droving and distillery 
 business from South Wales." 
 
 " What happened ? " thinks the reader. 
 
 " Its cuisine has long been famous for the excel- 
 lence of its boiled shrimps." 
 
 " What happened ? " 
 
 " While the hotel itself is also known as the 
 meeting-place of the Surbiton Harmonic Society 
 and other associations." 
 
 " What happened ? " 
 
 " Among the more permanent of the guests of 
 the hotel has been numbered during the present 
 Parliamentary session Mr. Llewyllyn Ap Jones, 
 M.P. for South Llanfydd. Mr. Jones apparently 
 came to his room last night at about ten p.m., 
 and put on his carpet slippers and his blue 
 dressing-gown. He then seems to have gone 
 to the cupboard and taken from it a whisky 
 bottle which, however, proved to be empty. The 
 unhappy gentleman then apparently went to 
 bed. ..." 
 
 At that point the American reader probably stops 
 
 108 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 reading, thinking that he has heard it all. The un- 
 happy man found that the bottle was empty and 
 went to bed — very natural ; and the affair very 
 properly called a " distressing incident " : quite 
 right. But the trained English reader would know 
 that there was more to come and that the air of 
 quiet was only assumed, and he would read on and 
 on until at last the tragic interest heightened, the 
 four shots were fired, with a good long pause after 
 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 the better. They are just two 
 different ways, that's all. But the result is that 
 anybody from the United States or Canada reading 
 the English papers gets the impression that nothing 
 is happening ; and an English reader of our news- 
 papers gets the idea that the whole place is in a 
 tumult. 
 
 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. There was, for 
 example, a heading called Indian Intelligence 
 that showed, on close examination, that two thou- 
 sand Parsees had died of the blue plague, that a 
 powder boat had blown up at Bombay, that some 
 
 109 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 one had thrown a couple of bombs at one of the 
 provincial governors, and that four thousand 
 agitators had been sentenced to twenty years' hard 
 labour each. 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 hundred thousand Chinese had been 
 drowned in a flood. And there was another 
 little item labelled " Foreign Gossip," under 
 which was mentioned that the Pope was dead, 
 and that the President of Paraguay had been 
 assassinated. 
 
 In short, I got the impression that I was living 
 in an easy, drowsy world, as no doubt the editor 
 meant me to. It was only when the Montreal Star 
 arrived by post that I felt that the world was still 
 revolving pretty rapidly on its axis and that there 
 was still something doing. 
 
 As with the world news so it is with the minor 
 events of ordinary life — birth, death, marriage, 
 accidents, crime. Let me give an illustration. 
 Suppose that in a suburb of London a housemaid 
 has endeavoured to poison her employer's family by 
 putting a drug in the coffee. Now, on our side of 
 the water we should write that little incident up in 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 a way to give it life, and put headings over it that 
 would capture the reader's attention in a minute. 
 We should begin it thus : 
 
 PRETTT PARLORMAID 
 DEALS DEATH-DRINK 
 
 TO CLUBMAN'S FAMILY. 
 
 The English reader would ask at once, how do we 
 know that the parlourmaid is pretty ? We don't. 
 But our artistic sense tells us that she ought to be. 
 Pretty parlourmaids are the only ones we take any 
 interest in : if an ugly parlourmaid poisoned her 
 employer's family we should hang her. Then again, 
 the English reader would say, how do we know that 
 the man is a clubman ? Have we ascertained this 
 fact definitely and, if so, of what club or clubs is 
 he a member ? Well, we don't know, except in so 
 far as the thing is self-evident. Any man who has 
 romance enough in his life to be poisoned by a 
 pretty parlourmaid ought to be in a club. That's 
 the place for him. In fact, with us the word club- 
 man doesn't necessarily mean a man who belongs to 
 a club : it is defined as a man who is arrested in a 
 gambling den, or fined for speeding a motor, or 
 who shoots another person in an hotel corridor. 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 Therefore this man must be a clubman. Having 
 settled the heading, we go on with the text. 
 
 " Brooding over love troubles which she has 
 hitherto refused to divulge under the most grilling 
 fusillade of rapid fire questions shot at her by the 
 best brains of the New York police force, Miss 
 Mary de Forrest, a handsome brunette, thirty-six 
 inches round the hips, employed as a parlourmaid 
 in the residence of Mr. Spudd Bung, a well-known 
 clubman, forty-two inches round the chest, was 
 arrested yesterday by the flying squad of the 
 emergency police after having, so it is alleged, put 
 four ounces of alleged pirate of potash into the 
 alleged coffee of her alleged employer's family's 
 alleged breakfast at their residence on Hudson 
 Heights in the most fashionable quarter of the 
 metropolis. Dr. Slink, the leading fashionable 
 practitioner of the neighbourhood, who was imme- 
 diately summoned, said that but for his own extra- 
 ordinary dexterity and promptness the death of the 
 whole family, if not of the entire entourage, was a 
 certainty. The magistrate in committing Miss de 
 Forrest for trial took occasion to enlarge upon her 
 youth and attractive appearance : he castigated the 
 moving pictures severely and said that he held them, 
 together with the public school system and the 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 present method of doing the hair, directly respon- 
 sible for the crimes of the kind alleged." 
 
 Now, when you read this over you begin to feel 
 that something big has happened. Here is a man 
 like Dr. Slink, all quivering with promptness and 
 dexterity. Here is an inserted picture, a photo- 
 graph, a brick house in a row marked with a cross X 
 and labelled " The Bung Residence as it appeared 
 immediately after the alleged outrage." It isn't 
 really. It is just a photograph that we use for this 
 sort of thing and have grown to like. It is called 
 sometimes : " Residence of Senator Borah " or 
 " Scene of the Recent Spiritualistic Manifestations," 
 or anything of the sort. As long as it is marked 
 with a cross X the reader will look at it with 
 interest. 
 
 In other words, we make something out of an 
 occurrence like this. It doesn't matter if it all fades 
 out afterwards when it appears that Mary de 
 Forrest merely put ground allspice into the coffee 
 in mistake for powdered sugar and that the family 
 didn't drink it anyway. The reader has already 
 turned to other mysteries. 
 
 But contrast the pitifully tame way in which 
 the same event is written up in England. Here 
 it is : 
 
 H 113 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 " Suburban Item. 
 
 " Yesterday at the police court of Surbiton-on- 
 Thames, Mary Forrester, a servant in the employ 
 of Mr. S. Bung, was taken into custody on a charge 
 of having put a noxious preparation, possibly poison, 
 into the coffee of her 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 f Of what club was he a member ? 
 None, apparently. Then who cares if he is poisoned? 
 And " the young woman " ! What a way to speak 
 of a decent girl who never did any other harm than 
 to poison a clubman. And the English magistrate ? 
 What a tame part he must have played : his name, 
 indeed, doesn't occur at all ; apparently he didn't 
 " enlarge on the girl's good looks," or " comment 
 on her attractive appearance," or anything. I don't 
 suppose 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 re- 
 manded for a week the incident is closed. The 
 English reporter doesn't apparently know enough to 
 follow Miss de Forrest to her home (called " the 
 
 114 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 De Forrest Residence " and marked with a cross X). 
 The American reporter would make certain to 
 supplement what went above with further informa- 
 tion of this fashion : " Miss de Forrest when seen 
 later at her home by a representative of the Eagle 
 said that she regretted very much having been put 
 to the necessity of poisoning 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, expressed herself as warmly 
 in favour of the League of Nations and as a devotee 
 of the short ballot and proportional representation." 
 
 Any American reader who studies the English 
 press comes upon these wasted opportunities every 
 day. There are, indeed, certain journals of a newer 
 type which are doing their best to imitate us. But 
 they don't really get it yet. They use type up to 
 about one inch, and after that they get afraid. 
 
 I hope that in describing the spirit of the English 
 press I do not seem to be writing with any personal 
 bitterness. I admit that there might be a certain 
 reason for such a bias. During my stay in England 
 I was most anxious to appear as a contributor to 
 some of the leading papers. This is, with the 
 English, a thing that always adds prestige. To be 
 
 "5 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 able to call oneself a " contributor " to the Times 
 or to Punch, or the Morning Post or the Spectator, 
 is a high honour. I have met these " contributors " 
 all over the British Empire. Some, I admit, look 
 strange. An ancient wreck in the back bar of an 
 Ontario tavern (ancien regime) has told me that 
 he was a " contributor " to the Times ; the janitor 
 of the building where I lived admits that he is a 
 " contributor " to Punch ; a man arrested in Bristol 
 for vagrancy while I was in England pleaded that 
 he was a " contributor " to the Spectator. In fact, 
 it is an honour that everybody seems to be able to 
 get but me. 
 
 I had often tried before I went to England to 
 contribute to the great English newspapers. I 
 had never succeeded. But I hoped that while in 
 England itself the very propinquity of the atmo- 
 sphere, I mean the very contiguity of the sur- 
 roundings, would render the attempt easier. I tried 
 and I failed. My failure was all the more igno- 
 minious in that I had had very direct personal 
 encouragement. " By all means," said the editor 
 of the Times, " do something for us while you 
 are here. Best of all, do something in a political 
 way ; that's rather our special line." I had already 
 received almost an identical encouragement from 
 
 116 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 the Morning 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 peculiar kind that always makes a stir 
 in English politics and write it up for these English 
 papers. To simplify matters, I thought it better 
 to use one and the same incident and write it up 
 in three different ways and get paid for it three 
 times. All of those who write for the press will 
 understand the motive at once. I waited, therefore, 
 and watched the papers to see if anything interest- 
 ing might happen to the Ahkoond of Swat, or the 
 Sandjak of Novi Bazar, or any other native poten- 
 tate. Within a couple of days I got what I wanted 
 in the following item, which I need hardly say is 
 taken word for word from the press despatches : 
 
 "Perim, via Bombay. News comes by messenger 
 that the Shriek of Kowfat, who has been living 
 under the convention of 1898, has violated the 
 modus operandi. He is said to have torn off his 
 braces, dipped himself in oil, and proclaimed a 
 jehad. The situation is critical." 
 
 Everybody who knows England knows that this 
 is just the kind of news that the English love. On 
 our side of the Atlantic we should be bothered by 
 
 117 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 the fact that we did not know where Kowf at is, nor 
 what was the convention of 1898. They are not. 
 They just take it for granted that Kowf at is one 
 of the many thousand places that they " own," 
 somewhere in the outer darkness. They have so 
 many Kowfats that they cannot keep track of them. 
 
 I knew, therefore, that everybody would be in- 
 terested in any discussion of what was at once called 
 " the Kowfat Crisis," and I wrote it up. I resisted 
 the temptation to begin after the American fashion, 
 " Shriek sheds suspenders," suiting the writing, as 
 I thought, to the market I was writing for. I wrote 
 up the incident for the Morning Post after the 
 following fashion : 
 
 " The news from Kowfat affords one more in- 
 stance of a painful back-down on the part of the 
 Government. Our policy of spineless supineness is 
 now reaping its inevitable reward. To us there is 
 only one thing to be done. If the Shriek has torn 
 off his braces he must be 'made to put them on 
 again. We have always held that where the imperial 
 prestige of this country is concerned there is no 
 room for hesitation. In the present instance our 
 prestige is at stake : the matter involves our reputa- 
 tion in the eyes of the surrounding natives — the 
 Bantu Hottentots, the Negritos, the Dwarf Men of 
 
 118 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 East Abyssinia, and the Dog Men of Darfur. What 
 will they think of us ? If we fail in this crisis, their 
 notion of us will fall fifty per cent. In our opinion 
 this country cannot stand a fifty per cent drop in 
 the estimation of the Dog Men. The time is one 
 that demands action. An ultimatum should be 
 sent at once to the Shriek of Kowfat. If he has 
 one already, we should send him another. He 
 should be made at once to put on his braces. 
 The oil must be scraped off him, and he must be 
 told plainly that if a pup like him tries to* start a 
 jehad he will have to deal with the British Navy. 
 We call the Shriek a pup in no sense of belittling 
 him as our imperial ally, but because we consider 
 that the present is no time for half words, and we 
 do not regard pup as half a word. Events such as 
 the present, rocking the Empire to its base, make one 
 long for the spacious days of a Salisbury or a Queen 
 Elizabeth, or an Alfred the Great or a Julius Caesar. 
 We doubt whether the present Cabinet is in this 
 class." 
 
 Not to lose any time in the coming and going of 
 the mail — always a serious thought for the con- 
 tributor to the press waiting for a cheque — I sent 
 another editorial on the same topic to the Man- 
 chester Guardian. It ran as follows : 
 
 119 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 " The action of the Shriek of Kowfat in pro- 
 claiming a jehad against us is one that amply 
 justifies all that we have said editorially since 
 Jeremy Bentham died. We have always held that 
 the only way to deal with a Mohammedan potentate 
 like the Shriek is to treat him like a Christian. The 
 Khalifate of Kowfat at present buys its whole 
 supply of cotton piece goods in our market and 
 pays cash. The Shriek, who is a man of enlighten- 
 ment, has consistently upheld the principles of 
 Free Trade. Not only are our exports of cotton 
 piece goods, Bibles, rum, and beads constantly in- 
 creasing, but they are more than offset by our 
 importation from Kowfat of ivory, rubber, gold, 
 and oil. In short, we have never seen the principles 
 of Free Trade better illustrated. The Shriek, it is 
 now reported, refuses to wear the braces presented 
 to him by our envoy at the time of his coronation 
 five years ago. He is said to have thrown them into 
 the mud. But we have no reason to suppose that 
 this is meant as a blow at our prestige. It may be 
 that after five years of use the little pulleys of the 
 braces no longer work properly. We have ourselves 
 in our personal life known instances of this, and can 
 speak of the sense of irritation occasioned. Even 
 we have thrown on the floor ours. And in any case, 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 as we have often reminded our readers, what is 
 prestige ? If anyone wants to hit us, let him hit us 
 right there. We regard a blow at our 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 our fort and 
 garrison on the Kowfat river. Our proper policy 
 is to knock down the fort, and either remove the 
 garrison or give it to the Shriek. We are convinced 
 that as soon as the Shriek realizes that we are pre- 
 pared to treat him in the proper Christian spirit 
 he will at once respond with true Mohammedan 
 generosity. 
 
 " We have further to remember that in what we 
 do we are being observed by the neighbouring 
 tribes — the Negritos, the Dwarf Men, and the Dog 
 Men of Darfur. These are not only shrewd 
 observers, but substantial customers. The Dwarf 
 Men at present buy all their cotton on the Man- 
 chester market, and the Dog Men depend on us for 
 their soap. 
 
 " The present crisis is one in which the nation 
 needs statesmanship and a broad outlook upon the 
 world. In the existing situation we need not the 
 duplicity of a Machiavelli, but the commanding 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 prescience of a Gladstone or an Alfred the Great 
 or a Julius Caesar. Luckily we have exactly this 
 type of man at the head of affairs." 
 
 After completing the above I set to work with- 
 out delay on a similar exercise for the Times. 
 The special excellence of the Times, as everybody 
 knows, is its fullness of information. For genera- 
 tions past the Times has commanded a peculiar 
 minuteness of knowledge about all parts of the 
 Empire. It is the proud boast of this great journal 
 that to whatever far-away outlandish part of the 
 Empire you may go, you will always find a corre- 
 spondent 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 for 
 thinking are made separately. 
 
 Incidentally I may say that I had personal oppor- 
 tunities while I was in England of realizing that the 
 reputation of the Times staff for the possession of 
 information is well founded. Dining one night 
 with some members of the staff, I happened to 
 mention Saskatchewan. One of the editors at the 
 other end of the table looked up at the mention of 
 the name. " Saskatchewan," he said, " ah yes ; 
 that's not far from Alberta, is it ? " and then turned 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 quietly to his food again. When I remind the 
 reader that Saskatchewan is only half an inch from 
 Alberta he may judge of the nicety of the know- 
 ledge involved. 
 
 Having all this in mind, I recast the editorial and 
 sent it to the Times as follows : 
 
 " The news that the Sultan of Kowfat. has thrown 
 away his braces renders it of interest to indicate 
 the exact spot where he has thrown them. (See 
 map.) Kowfat, lying, as the reader knows, on the 
 Kowfat river, occupies the hinterland between the 
 back end of South-West Somaliland and the east, 
 that is to say the west, bank of Lake P'schu. It 
 thus forms an enclave between the Dog Men 
 of Darfur and the Negritos of T'chk. The in- 
 habitants of Kowfat are a coloured race three- 
 quarters negroid and more than three-quarters 
 tabloid. 
 
 " As a solution of the present difficulty, the first 
 thing required, in our opinion, is to send out a 
 boundary commission to delineate more exactly 
 still just where Kowfat is. After that an ethno- 
 graphical survey might be completed." 
 
 It was a matter not only of concern but of 
 surprise to me that not one of the three contribu- 
 
 123 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 tions recited above was accepted by the English 
 press. The Morning Post complained that my 
 editorial was not firm enough in tone, the Guardian 
 that it was not humane enough, the Times that I 
 had left out the latitude and longitude always 
 expected by their readers. 
 
 I thought it not worth while to bother to revise 
 the articles, as I had meantime conceived the idea 
 that the same material might be used in the most 
 delightfully amusing way as the basis of a poem for 
 Punch. Everybody knows the kind of verses that 
 are contributed to Punch by Sir Owen Seaman and 
 Mr. Charles Graves and men of that sort. And 
 everybody has been struck, as I have, by the extra- 
 ordinary easiness of the performance. All that one 
 needs is to get some odd little incident such as the 
 revolt of the Sultan of Kowf at, make up an amusing 
 title, and then string the verses together in such a 
 way as to make rhymes with all the odd words that 
 come into the narrative. In fact, the thing is ease 
 itself. 
 
 I therefore saw a glorious chance with the Sultan 
 of Kowfat. Indeed, I fairly chuckled to myself 
 when I thought what amusing rhymes could be 
 made .with " negritos," " modus operandi" and 
 " Dog Men of Darfur." I can scarcely imagine 
 
 124 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 anything more excruciatingly funny than the 
 rhymes which can be made with them. And as for 
 the title, bringing in the word Kowfat or some 
 play upon it, the thing is perfectly obvious. The 
 idea amused 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't have done so, 
 given time ; I am quite certain that if I had had 
 about two years I could have done it. The main 
 structure of the poem, however, is here, and I give 
 it for what it is worth. Even as it is, it strikes me 
 as extraordinarily good. Here it is : 
 
 Title. 
 Kowfat. 
 
 Verse One. 
 
 modus operandi ; 
 
 negritos : 
 
 P'shu. 
 
 Verse Two. 
 
 Khalifate 
 
 Dog Men of Darfur 
 
 T'chk. 
 
 125 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 Excellent little thing, isn't it ? All it needs is the 
 rhymes. As far as it goes it has just exactly the 
 ease and the sweep required. And if some one will 
 tell me how Owen Seaman and those people get the 
 rest of the ease and the sweep I'll be glad to put 
 it in. 
 
 One further experiment of the same sort I made 
 with the English press in another direction and met 
 again with failure. If there is one paper in the 
 world for which I have respect and — if I may 
 say it — an affection, it is the Spectator. I sup- 
 pose that I am only one of thousands and 
 thousands of people who feel this way. Why under 
 the circumstances the Spectator failed to publish my 
 letter I cannot say. I wanted no money for it : 
 I only wanted the honour of seeing it inserted 
 beside the letter written from the Rectory, Hops, 
 Hants, or the Shrubbery, Potts, Shrops — I mean 
 from one of those places where the readers of the 
 Spectator live. I thought, too, that my letter had 
 just the right touch. However, they wouldn't take 
 it : something wrong with it somewhere, I suppose. 
 This is it : 
 
 126 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 " To the Editor, The Spectator, 
 Dear Sir, London, England. 
 
 Your correspondence of last week contained 
 such interesting information in regard to the appear- 
 ance of the first cowslip on Kensington Common 
 that I trust I may, without fatiguing your readers 
 to the point of saturation, narrate a somewhat 
 similar and I think, Sir, an equally interesting ex- 
 perience 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 singu- 
 larly 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 recognizing 
 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)." 
 127 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 Distressed by these repeated failures, I sank back 
 to a lower level of English literary work — the puzzle 
 department. For some reason or other the English 
 delight in puzzles. It is, I think, a part of the 
 peculiar schoolboy pedantry which is the reverse 
 side of their literary genius. I speak with a certain 
 bitterness because in puzzle work I met with no 
 success whatever. My solutions were never acknow- 
 ledged, never paid for — in fact, they were ignored. 
 But I append two or three of them here, with 
 apologies to the editors of the Strand and other 
 papers who should have had the honour of pub- 
 lishing them first : 
 
 Puzzle I. 
 
 Can you fold a square piece of paper in 
 such a way that with a single fold 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, each seeking the 
 
 shortest line. A, walking from corner to 
 
 corner, may be said to diangulate the 
 
 128 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 hypotenuse of the meadow. B, allowing 
 for a slight rise 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 monkey at the 
 other. There is the same length of rope 
 on either side and equilibrium is main- 
 tained. The rope weighs four ounces per 
 foot. The age of the monkey and the age 
 of the monkey's mother together total four 
 years. The weight of the monkey is as 
 many pounds as the monkey's mother is 
 years old. The monkey's mother was 
 twice as old as the monkey was when the 
 monkey's mother was half as old as the 
 monkey will be when the monkey is three 
 times as old as the monkey's mother was 
 when the monkey's mother was three 
 times as old as the monkey. The weight of 
 the rope and the weight at the end was 
 half as much again as the difference in 
 i 129 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 weight between the weight of the weight 
 and the weight of the monkey. Now, what 
 was the length of the rope ? 
 
 My answer : I should think it would 
 have to be a rope of a fairly good length. 
 
 In only one department of English journalism 
 have I met with a decided measure of success — I 
 refer to the juvenile competition department. This 
 is a line of thing to which the English are especially 
 addicted. As a really educated nation for whom 
 good literature begins in the home they encourage 
 in every way literary competitions among the young 
 readers of their journals. At least half a dozen of 
 the well-known London periodicals carry on this 
 work. The prizes run all the way from one shilling 
 to half a guinea, and the competitions are generally 
 open to all children from three to six years of age. 
 It was here that I saw my open opportunity and 
 seized it. I swept in prize after prize. As " Little 
 Agatha " I got four shillings for the best description 
 of autumn in two lines, and one shilling for guessing 
 correctly the missing letters in BR — STOL, 
 SH— FFIFLD, and H— LL. A lot of the com- 
 petitors fell down on H — LL. I got six shillings 
 for giving the dates of the Norman Conquest — 
 
 130 
 
The British and the American Press 
 
 a.d. 1492 — and the Crimean War of 1870. In short, 
 the thing was easy. I might say that to enter these 
 competitions one has to have a certificate of age 
 from a member of the clergy. But I know a lot 
 of them. 
 
 131 
 
Chapter VII — Business in England. 
 Wanted — more Profiteers 
 
 IT is hardly necessary to say that so shrewd an 
 observer as I am could not fail to be struck 
 by the situation of business in England. Pass- 
 ing through the factory towns and noticing that no 
 smoke came from the tall chimneys and that the 
 doors of the factories were shut, I was led to the 
 conclusion that they were closed. 
 
 Observing that the streets of the industrial centres 
 were everywhere filled with idle men, I gathered 
 that they were unemployed ; and when I learned 
 that the moving picture houses were full to the 
 doors every day, and that the concert halls, beer 
 gardens, grand opera, and religious concerts were 
 crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country 
 was suffering from an unparalleled depression. This 
 diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It 
 has been freely estimated that at the time I refer 
 to almost two million men were out of work. 
 
 But it does not require government statistics to 
 
 132 
 
Business in England 
 
 prove that in England at the present day everybody 
 seems poor, just as in the United States everybody, 
 to the eye of the visitor, seems to be rich. In 
 England nobody seems to be able to afford any- 
 thing ; in the United States everybody seems to be 
 able to afford everything. In England nobody 
 smokes cigars ; in America everybody does. On the 
 English railways the first-class carriages are empty ; 
 in the United States the " reserved drawing-rooms " 
 are full. Poverty, no doubt, is only a relative 
 matter ; but a man whose income used to be 
 .£10,000 a year and is now £5000 is living in " re- 
 duced circumstances " : he feels himself just as 
 poor as the man whose income has been cut from 
 five thousand pounds to three, or from five hundred 
 pounds to two. They are all in the same boat. 
 What with the lowering of dividends and the 
 raising of the income-tax, the closing of factories, 
 feeding the unemployed and trying to employ the 
 unfed, things are in a bad way. 
 
 The underlying cause is plain enough. The 
 economic distress that the world suffers from now 
 is the inevitable consequence of the war. Every- 
 body knows that. But where the people differ is in 
 regard to what is going to happen next and what 
 we must do about it. Here opinion takes a variety 
 
 133 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 of forms. Some people blame it on the German 
 mark. By permitting their mark to fall, the 
 Germans, it is claimed, are taking away all the 
 business from England ; the fall of the mark, by 
 allowing the Germans to work harder and eat less 
 than the English, is threatening to drive the English 
 out of house and home. If the mark goes on 
 falling still further the Germans will thereby outdo 
 us also in music, literature, and in religion. What 
 has got to be done, therefore, is to force the Germans 
 to lift the mark up again, and make them pay up 
 their indemnity. 
 
 Another more popular school of thought holds to 
 an entirely contrary opinion. The whole trouble, 
 they say, comes from the sad collapse of Germany. 
 These unhappy people, having been too busy for 
 four years in destroying valuable property in France 
 and Belgium to pay attention to their home affairs, 
 now find themselves collapsed : it is our first duty 
 to pick them up again. The English should there- 
 fore take all the money they can find and give it to 
 the Germans. By this means German trade and 
 industry will revive to such an extent that the port 
 of Hamburg will be its old bright self again and 
 German waiters will reappear in the London hotels. 
 After that everything will be all right. 
 
 134 
 
Business in England 
 
 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 of industrial 
 collapse in England does not spring from what is 
 happening in Germany, but from what is happen- 
 ing in England itself. England, like most of the 
 other countries in the world, is suffering from the 
 over-exertion of government and the decline of 
 individual self-help. For six generations industry 
 in England and America has flourished on individual 
 effort called out by the prospect of individual gain. 
 Every man acquired from his boyhood the idea that 
 he must look after himself. Morally, physically, and 
 financially, that was the recognized way of getting 
 on. The desire to make a fortune was regarded as 
 a laudable ambition, a proper stimulus to effort. 
 The ugly word " profiteer " had not yet been 
 coined. There was no income-tax to turn a man's 
 pockets inside out and take away his savings. The 
 world was to the strong. 
 
 Under the stimulus of this the wheels of industry 
 hummed. Factories covered the land. National 
 productions grew to a colossal size, and the whole 
 outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the 
 great industry. As a system it was far from perfect. 
 It contained in itself all kinds of gross injustices, 
 
 135 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 demands that were too great, wages that were too 
 small ; in spite of the splendour of the foreground, 
 poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. 
 But, such as it was, the system worked ; and it was 
 the only one that we knew. 
 
 Or turn to another aspect of this same principle 
 of self-help. The way to acquire knowledge in the 
 earlier days was to buy a tallow candle and read a 
 book after one's day's work, as Benjamin Franklin 
 read, or Lincoln ; and when the soul was stimulated 
 to it, then the aspiring youth must 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 
 student has a " Union " like the profiteer's club 
 and a swimming-bath and a Drama League and a 
 co-educational society at his elbow for which he 
 buys Beauty Roses at five dollars a bunch. 
 
 Or turn, if one will, to the moral side. The older 
 way of being good was by much prayer and much 
 effort of one's own soul. Now it is done by a 
 Board of Censors. There is no need to fight sin 
 by the power of the Spirit : let the Board of 
 Censors do it. They, together with three or four 
 
 136 
 
Business in England 
 
 kinds of Commissioners, are supposed to keep sin 
 at arm's length and to supply a first-class legislative 
 guarantee of righteousness. As a short cut to 
 morality and as a way of saving individual effort, 
 our legislatures are turning out morality legislation 
 by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our 
 drink, it begins already to guard us against the 
 deadly cigarette, it regulates, here and there, the 
 length of our skirts, it safeguards our amusements, 
 and in two states of the American Union it even 
 proposes to save us from the teaching of the 
 Darwinian theory of evolution. The ancient 
 prayer " Lead us not into temptation " is passing 
 out of date. The way to temptation is declared 
 closed by Act of Parliament and by amendment to 
 the constitution of the United States. Yet, oddly 
 enough, the moral tone of the world fails to respond. 
 The world is apparently more full of thugs, hold- 
 up men, yegmen, bandits, motor-thieves, porch- 
 climbers, spotters, spies, and crooked policemen 
 than it ever was, till it almost seems that the slow, 
 old-fashioned method of an effort of the individual 
 soul may be needed still before the world is made 
 good. 
 
 This vast new system, the system of leaning on 
 the government, is spreading like a blight over 
 
 137 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 England and America, and everywhere we suffer 
 from it. Government that in theory represents a 
 union of effort and a saving of force sprawls like an 
 octopus over the land. It has become like a dead 
 weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry it 
 cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy 
 deficit ; it builds ships and 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 of industry. 
 
 Now, the only way to restore prosperity is to give 
 back again to the individual the opportunity to 
 make money, to make lots of it, and when he has 
 got it to keep it. In spite of all the devastation of 
 the war, the raw assets of our globe are hardly 
 touched. Here and there, as in parts of China, 
 with 182 people to the square mile, in England 
 with 89, and in Belgium with 652, the world is 
 fairly well filled up. There is standing room only. 
 But there are vast empty spaces still. Mesopotamia 
 alone has millions of acres of potential wheat land 
 with a few Arabs squatting on it. Canada could 
 absorb easily half a million settlers a year for a 
 generation to come. The most fertile part of the 
 world, the valley of the Amazon, is still untouched : 
 
 138 
 
Business in England 
 
 so fertile is it that for tens of thousands of square 
 miles it is choked with trees, a mere tangle of life, 
 defying all entry. The idea of our humanity sadly 
 waiting the streets of Glasgow or sitting mourn- 
 fully fishing on the piers of the Hudson, out of work, 
 would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of it. 
 
 The world is out of work for the simple reason 
 that the world has killed the goose that laid the 
 golden eggs of industry. By taxation, by legislation, 
 by popular sentiment all over the world, there has 
 been a disparagement of the capitalist. And all 
 over the world capital is frightened. It goes and 
 hides itself in the form of an investment in a Victory 
 Bond, a thing that is only a particular name for a 
 debt, with no productive effort behind it and indi- 
 cating only a dead weight of taxes. There capital 
 sits like a bull-frog hidden behind water-lilies, re- 
 fusing to budge. 
 
 Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to 
 multiply government departments and government 
 expenditures, nor to appoint commissions and to 
 pile up debts, but to start going again the machinery 
 of bold productive effort. Take off all the excess 
 profits taxes and the super-taxes on income and as 
 much of the income-tax itself as can be done by a 
 wholesale dismissal of government employes, and 
 
 139 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 then give industry a mark to shoot at. What is 
 needed now is not the multiplication of government 
 reports, but corporate industry, the formation of 
 land companies, development companies, irrigation 
 companies, any kind of corporation that will call 
 out private capital from its hiding-places, offer 
 employment to millions, and start the wheels moving 
 again. If the promoters of such corporations pre- 
 sently earn huge fortunes for themselves society is 
 none the worse ; and, in any case, humanity being 
 what it is, they will hand back a vast part of it in 
 return for LL.B. degrees, or bits of blue ribbon, or 
 Companionships of the Bath, or whatever kind of 
 glass bead fits the fancy of the retired millionaire. 
 
 The next thing to be done, then, is to " fire " 
 the government officials and to bring back the 
 profiteer. As to which officials are to be fired first 
 it doesn't matter much. In England people have 
 been greatly perturbed as to the use to be made of 
 such instruments as the " Geddes Axe." The edge 
 of the axe of dismissal seems so terribly sharp. But 
 there is no need to worry. If the edge of the axe 
 is too sharp, hit with the back of it. 
 
 As to the profiteer, bring him back. He is really 
 just the same person who a few years ago was called 
 a Captain of Industry and an Empire Builder and 
 
 140 
 
Business in ^England 
 
 a Nation Maker. It is the times that have changed, 
 not the man. He is there still, just as greedy and 
 rapacious as ever, but no greedier ; and we have 
 just the same social need of his greed as a motive 
 power 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, or if not him personally, we 
 need the eager, selfish, but reliant spirit of the man 
 who looks after himself and doesn't want to have a 
 spoon-fed education and a government job alter- 
 nating with a government dole, and a set of morals 
 framed for him by a Board of Censors. Bring back 
 the profiteer ; fetch him from the Riviera, from 
 his country place on the Hudson, or from whatever 
 spot to which he has withdrawn with his tin box 
 full of Victory Bonds. If need be, go and pick him 
 out of the penitentiary, 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 likely spots. 
 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 the Mackenzie Basin or for 
 irrigation in Mesopotamia. The ink will hardly be 
 dry on it before the capital will begin to flow in : 
 it will come from all kinds of places where the 
 
 141 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 government could never coax it and where the tax- 
 gatherer could never find it. Only promise that 
 it is not going to be taxed out of existence, and the 
 stream of capital which is being dried up in the 
 sands of government mismanagement will flow into 
 the hands of private industry like a river of gold. 
 
 And incidentally, when the profiteer has finished 
 his work, we can always put him back into the 
 penitentiary if we like. But we need him just now. 
 
 142 
 
Chapter VIII — Is Prohibition Coming 
 to England? 
 
 IN the United States and Canada the principal 
 topic of polite conversation is now prohibi- 
 tion. At every dinner party the serving of 
 the cocktails immediately introduces the subject : 
 the rest of the dinner is enlivened throughout with 
 the discussion of rum runners, bootleggers, storage 
 of liquor, and the State constitution of New Jersey. 
 Under this influence all social and conversational 
 values are shifted and rearranged. A " scholarly " 
 man no longer means a man who can talk well on 
 literary subjects, but a man who understands the 
 eighteenth amendment and can explain the legal 
 difference between implemental statutes such as the 
 Volstead Act and the underlying State legislation. 
 A " scientist " (invaluable in these conversations) is 
 a man who can make clear the distinction between 
 alcoholic percentage by bulk and by weight. And 
 a " brilliant engineer " means a man who explains 
 how to make home-brewed beer with a kick in it. 
 
 143 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 Similarly, a " raconteur " means a man who has a 
 fund of amusing stories about " bootleggers," and 
 an " interesting traveller " means a man who has 
 been to Havana and can explain how wet it is. 
 Indeed, the whole conception of travel and of 
 interest in foreign countries is now altered ; as soon 
 as anybody mentions that he has been in 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 British Columbia ? " 
 no longer refers to the climate or natural resources : 
 it means, " Is the place dry ? " When such a 
 question is asked and the answer is, " It's wet," 
 there is a deep groan all around the table. 
 
 I understand that when the recent disarmament 
 conference met at Washington, just as the members 
 were going to sit down at the table Monsieur Briand 
 said to President Harding, " How dry is the United 
 States anyway ? " And the whole assembly talked 
 about it for half an hour. That was why the first 
 newspaper bulletins merely said, " Conference ex- 
 changes credentials." 
 
 As a discoverer of England I therefore made it 
 one of my chief cares to try to obtain accurate 
 information of this topic. I was well aware that 
 immediately on my return to Canada the first 
 
 144 
 
Is Prohibition Coming to England? 
 
 question I should be asked would be, " Is England 
 going dry ? " I realized that in any report I might 
 make to the National Geographical Society or to 
 the Political Science Association the members of 
 these bodies, being scholars, would want accurate 
 information about the price of whisky, the per- 
 centage of alcohol, and the hours of opening and 
 closing the saloons. 
 
 My first impression on the subject was, I must 
 say, one of severe moral shock. Landing in England 
 after having spent the summer in Ontario, it seemed 
 a terrible thing to see people openly drinking on an 
 English train. On an Ontario train, as everybody 
 knows, there is no way of taking a drink except by 
 climbing up on the roof, lying flat on one's stomach, 
 and taking a suck out of a flask. But in England in 
 any dining car 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 of criminality or moral shame. Appalling 
 though it sounds, bottled ale is openly sold on the 
 trains at 25 cents a bottle, and dry sherry at 18 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) or secret service 
 k 145 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 men on the train. I anticipated that the train con- 
 ductor would appear and throw the waiter off the 
 car. But then I realized that I was in England and 
 that in the British Isles they still tolerate the con- 
 sumption of alcohol. Indeed, I doubt if they are 
 even aware that they are " consuming alcohol." 
 Their impression is that they are drinking beer. 
 
 At the beginning of my discussion I will therefore 
 preface a few exact facts and statistics for the use 
 of geographical societies, learned bodies, and govern- 
 ment commissions. The quantity of beer consumed 
 in England in a given period is about 200,000,000 
 gallons. The life of a bottle of Scotch whisky is 
 seven seconds. The number of public-houses, or 
 " pubs," in the English country-side is one to every 
 half mile. The percentage of the working classes 
 drinking beer is 125 ; the percentage of the class 
 without work drinking beer is 200. 
 
 Statistics like these do not, however, give a final 
 answer to the question, " Is prohibition coming to 
 England ? " They merely show that it is not there 
 now. The question itself will be answered in as 
 many different ways as there are different kinds of 
 people. Any prohibitionist will tell you that the 
 coming of prohibition to England is as certain as 
 the coming eclipse of the sun. But this is always 
 
 146 
 
Is Prohibition Coming to JSngland ? 
 
 so. It is in human nature that people are impressed 
 by the cause they work in. I knew once a minister 
 of the Scotch Church who took a voyage round the 
 world. He said that the thing that impressed him 
 most was the growth of Presbyterianism in Japan. 
 No doubt it did. When the Orillia lacrosse team 
 took their trip to Australia, they said on their return 
 that lacrosse was spreading all over the world. In 
 the same way there is said to be a spread, all over the 
 world, of Christian Science, proportional representa- 
 tion, militarism, peace sentiment, barbarism, al- 
 truism, psycho-analysis, and death from wood 
 alcohol. They are what are called world move- 
 ments. 
 
 My own judgment in regard to prohibition in the 
 British Isles is this. In Scotland, prohibition is not 
 coming ; if anything, it is going. In Ireland, pro- 
 hibition will only be introduced when they have run 
 out of other forms of trouble. But in England I 
 think that prohibition could easily come unless the 
 English people realize where they are drifting and 
 turn back. They are in the early stages of the 
 movement already. 
 
 Turning first to Scotland, there is no fear, I say, 
 that prohibition will be adopted there ; and this 
 from the simple reason that the Scotch do not drink. 
 
 147 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 I have elsewhere alluded to the extraordinary mis- 
 apprehension that exists in regard to the Scotch 
 people and their sense of humour. I find a similar 
 popular error in regard to the use of whisky by the 
 Scotch. Because they manufacture the best whisky 
 in the world the Scotch, in popular fancy, are often 
 thought to be addicted to the drinking of it. This 
 is purely a delusion. During the whole of two or 
 three pleasant weeks spent in lecturing in Scotland 
 I never on any single occasion saw whisky made use 
 of as a beverage. I have seen people take it, of 
 course, as a medicine, or as a precaution, or as a wise 
 offset against a rather treacherous climate ; but, as 
 a beverage, never. 
 
 The manner and circumstance of their offering to 
 a stranger whisky amply illustrates their point of 
 view toward it. Thus at my first lecture in Glasgow, 
 where I was to appear before a large and fashion- 
 able audience, the chairman said to me in the 
 committee room that he was afraid that there might, 
 be a draught on the platform. Here was a serious 
 matter. For a lecturer who has to earn his living 
 by his occupation a draught on the platform is not 
 a thing to be disregarded. It might kill him. Nor 
 is it altogether safe for a chairman himself, a man 
 already in middle life, to be exposed to a current 
 
 148 
 
Is Prohibition Coming to England? 
 
 of cold air. In this case, therefore, the chairman 
 suggested that he thought it might be " prudent " 
 — that was his word, " prudent " — if I should take 
 a small drop of whisky before encountering the 
 draught. In return I told him that I could not think 
 of his accompanying me to the platform unless he 
 would let me insist on his taking also a very reason- 
 able precaution. Whisky taken on 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 to take something to drink on 
 purely meteorological grounds. The weather simply 
 cannot be trusted. A man might find that on 
 " going out into the weather " he is overwhelmed 
 by a heavy fog, or an avalanche of snow, or a driving 
 storm of rain. In such a case a mere drop of whisky 
 might save his life. It would be folly not to take 
 it. Again, " coming in out of the weather " is a 
 thing not to be trifled with. A person coming in 
 unprepared and unprotected might be seized with 
 angina pectoris or appendicitis and die upon the 
 spot. No reasonable person would refuse the simple 
 precaution of taking a small drop immediately after 
 his entry. 
 
 I find that, classified altogether, there are seven- 
 teen reasons advanced in Scotland for taking whisky. 
 
 149 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 They run as follows : Reason one, because it is 
 raining ; two, because it is not raining ; three, be- 
 cause you are just going out into the weather ; four, 
 because you have just come in from the weather ; 
 five — or no, I forget the ones that came after that. 
 But I remember that reason number seventeen is 
 " because it canna do ye any harm." On the whole, 
 reason seventeen is the best. 
 
 Put in other words, this means that the Scotch 
 make use of whisky with dignity and without shame ; 
 and they never call it " alcohol." 
 
 In England the case is different. Already the 
 English are showing the first signs that indicate the 
 possible approach of prohibition. Already all over 
 England there are weird regulations about the closing 
 hours of the public-houses. They open and close 
 according to the varying regulations of the munici- 
 pality. In some places they open at six in the 
 morning, 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 the morning 
 and closed in the evening ; in other places they 
 open in the evening and close in the morning. 
 The ancient idea was that a wayside public-house 
 was a place of sustenance and comfort, a human 
 need that might be wanted at any hour. It was in 
 
 150 
 
Is Prohibition Coming to England ? 
 
 the same class as a lifeboat or an emergency ambu- 
 lance. Under the old common law the innkeeper 
 must supply" meat and drink at any hour. If he was 
 asleep the traveller might wake him. And in those 
 days meat and drink were regarded in the same 
 light. Note how great the change is. In modern 
 life in England there is nothing that you dare wake 
 up a man for except gasoline. The mere fact that 
 you need a drink is no longer held to entitle you to 
 break his rest. 
 
 In London especially one feels the full force of 
 the " closing " regulations. The bars open and shut 
 at intervals like daisies blinking at the sun. And, 
 like the flowers at evening, they close their petals 
 with the darkness. In London they have already 
 adopted the deadly phrases of the prohibitionist, 
 such as " alcohol " and " liquor traffic," and so on ; 
 and already the " sale of spirits " stops absolutely 
 at about eleven o'clock at night. 
 
 This means that after theatre hours London is a 
 city " of dreadful night." The people from the 
 theatre scuttle to their homes. The lights are ex- 
 tinguished in the windows. The streets darken. 
 Only a belated taxi still moves. At midnight the 
 place is deserted. At I a.m. the lingering footfalls 
 echo in the empty street. Here and there a restau- 
 
 151 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 rant in a fashionable street makes a poor pretence 
 of keeping open for after-theatre suppers. Odd 
 people, the shivering wrecks of theatre parties, are 
 huddled here and there. A gloomy waiter lays a 
 sardine on the table. The guests charge their 
 glasses with Perrier Water, Lithia Water, Citrate 
 of Magnesia, or Bromo Seltzer. They eat the 
 sardine and vanish into the night. Not even 
 Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or Middlebury, Vermont, is 
 quieter than is the night life of London. It may, 
 no doubt, be a wise thing to go to bed early. It is 
 a terrible thing to go to bed early by Act of Parlia- 
 ment. 
 
 All of which means that the people of England 
 are not facing the prohibition question fairly and 
 squarely. If they see no harm in " consuming 
 alcohol " they ought to say so and let their code 
 of regulations reflect the fact. But the " closing " 
 and " regulating " and " squeezing " of the " liquor 
 traffic," without any outspoken protest, means let- 
 ting the whole case go by default. Under these 
 circumstances a fanatical and active minority can 
 always win and impose its will upon the crowd. 
 
 When I was in England I amused myself one day 
 by writing an imaginary picture of what England 
 will be like when the last stage is reached and 
 
 152 
 
Is Prohibition Coming to England ? 
 
 London goes the way of New York and Chicago. 
 I cast it in the form of a letter from an American 
 prohibitionist in which he describes the final 
 triumph of prohibition in England. With the 
 permission of the reader I reproduce it here : 
 
 The Advent of Prohibition in London. 
 
 As written in the correspondence of an American visitor. 
 
 How glad I am that I have lived to see this won- 
 derful 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 bear- 
 ing 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, 
 
 153 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 and for more than a month now England has been 
 dry. I wish you could have witnessed the scenes, 
 just like what we saw 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, whisky and liqueurs, when the members 
 of the Beefsteak Club were emptying out their 
 cellars on to 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 
 
 154 
 
Is Prohibition Coming to England ? 
 
 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, 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. 
 
 155 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 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 our 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 
 
 156 
 
Is Prohibition Coming to England? 
 
 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 the figures in the House. The Chan- 
 cellor 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 morn- 
 ing, 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 
 
 157 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 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 five thousand cases of Scotch whisky, 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. 
 
 158 
 
Chapter IX — " We Have with us To-night " 
 — (How it feels to be a Lecturer) 
 
 NOT only during my tour in England, but 
 for many years past it has been my lot to 
 speak and to lecture in all sorts of places, 
 under all sorts of circumstances, and before all sorts 
 of audiences. I say this, not in boastfulness, but in 
 sorrow. Indeed, I only mention it to establish the 
 fact that when I talk of lecturers and speakers I talk 
 of what I know. 
 
 Few people realize how arduous and how dis- 
 agreeable public lecturing is. The public sees the 
 lecturer step out on to the platform in his little 
 white waistcoat and his long-tailed coat and with a 
 false air of a conjurer about him, and they think 
 him happy. After about ten minutes of his talk 
 they are tired of him. Most people tire of a lecture 
 in ten minutes ; clever people can do it in five. 
 Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the 
 people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of 
 it presently hold it as a sort of a grudge against the 
 
 159 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are 
 worse than theirs. 
 
 For my own part, I always try to appear as happy 
 as possible while I am lecturing. I take this to be 
 part of the trade of anybody labelled a humorist 
 and paid as such. I have no sympathy whatever 
 with the idea that a humorist ought to be a lugu- 
 brious person with a face stamped with melancholy. 
 This is a cheap and elementary effect belonging to 
 the level of a circus clown. The image of " laughter 
 shaking both his sides " is the truer picture of 
 comedy. Therefore I say that I always try to appear 
 cheerful at my lectures and even to laugh at my 
 own jokes. But even this arouses a kind, of resent- 
 ment in some of the audience. " Well, I will say," 
 said a stern-looking woman who spoke to me after 
 one of my lectures, " you certainly do seem to enjoy 
 your own fun." " Madam," I answered, " if I 
 didn't, who would ? " But in reality the whole 
 business of being 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 
 lecturer has to bear. 
 
 The first of the troubles which anyone who begins 
 giving public lectures meets at the very outset is the 
 fact that the audience won't come to hear him. 
 
 1 60 
 
" We Have with us To-night" 
 
 This happens invariably and constantly, and not 
 through 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 money that 
 I received by the average number of people present 
 to hear me I have calculated that they paid thirteen 
 cents each. And my lectures are evidently worth 
 thirteen cents. But at home in Canada I have very 
 often tried the fatal experiment of lecturing for 
 nothing, and in that case the audience simply won't 
 come. A man will turn out at night when he knows 
 he is going to hear a first-class thirteen-cent lecture ; 
 but when the thing is given for nothing, why go 
 to it? 
 
 The city in which I live is overrun with little 
 societies, clubs, and associations always wanting to 
 be addressed. So at least it is in appearance. In 
 reality the societies are composed of presidents, 
 secretaries, and officials who want the conspicuous- 
 ness of office, and a large list of other members who 
 won't come to the meetings. For such an associa- 
 tion the invited speaker who is to lecture for nothing 
 prepares his lecture on " Indo-Germanic Factors in 
 the Current of History." If he is a professor, he 
 takes all the winter at it. You may drop in at his 
 
 L 161 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 house at any time, and his wife will tell you that 
 he is " upstairs working on his lecture." If he comes 
 down at all, it is in carpet slippers and dressing- 
 gown. His mental vision of his meeting is that of 
 a huge gathering of keen people with Indo-Germanic 
 faces, hanging upon every word. 
 
 Then comes the fated night. There are seventeen 
 people present. The lecturer refuses to count them. 
 He refers to them afterwards as " about a hundred." 
 To this group he reads his paper on the Indo- 
 Germanic Factor. It takes him two hours. When 
 it is over the chairman invites discussion. There is 
 no discussion. The audience is willing to let the 
 Indo-Germanic factors go unchallenged. Then the 
 chairman makes this speech. He says : 
 
 " I am very sorry indeed that we should have had 
 such a very poor ' turn out ' to-night. I am sure 
 that the members who were not here have missed 
 a real treat in the delightful paper that we have 
 listened to. I want to assure the lecturer that if 
 he comes to the Owls' Club again we can guarantee 
 him next time a capacity audience. And will any 
 members, please, who haven't paid their dollar this 
 winter pay it either to me or to Mr. Sibley as they 
 pass out ? " 
 
 I have heard this speech (in the years when I have 
 
 162 
 
" We Have with us To-night" 
 
 had to listen to it) so many times that I know it by 
 heart. I have made the acquaintance of the Owls' 
 Club under so many names that I recognize it at 
 once. I am aware that its members refuse to turn 
 out in cold weather ; that they do not turn out in 
 wet weather ; that when the weather is really fine 
 it is impossible to get them together ; that the 
 slightest counter-attraction — a hockey match, a 
 sacred concert — goes to their heads at once. 
 
 There was a time when I was the newly appointed 
 occupant of a college chair and had to address the 
 Owls' Club. It is a penalty that all new professors 
 pay, and the Owls batten upon them like bats. It 
 is one of the compensations of age that I am free 
 of the Owls' Club for ever. But in the days when 
 I still had to address them I used to take it out of 
 the Owls in a speech delivered, in imagination only 
 and not out loud, to the assembled meeting of the 
 seventeen Owls, after the chairman had made his 
 concluding remarks. It ran as follows : 
 
 " Gentlemen — if you are such, which I doubt. 
 I realize that the paper which I have read on ' Was 
 Hegel a deist ? ' has been an error. I spent all the 
 winter on it, and now I realize that not one of you 
 pups know who Hegel was or what a deist is. Never 
 mind. It is over now, and I am glad. But just let 
 
 163 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 me say this, only this, which won't keep you a 
 minute. Your chairman has been good enough to 
 say that if I come again you will get together a 
 capacity audience to hear me. Let me tell you that 
 if your society waits for its next meeting till I come 
 to address you again, you will wait indeed. In fact, 
 gentlemen 1 — I say it very frankly — it will be in 
 another world." 
 
 But I pass over the audience. Suppose there is a 
 real audience, and suppose them all duly gathered 
 together. Then it becomes the business of that 
 gloomy gentleman — facetiously referred to in the 
 newspaper reports as the genial chairman — to put 
 the lecturer to the bad. In nine cases out of ten 
 he can do so. Some chairmen, indeed, develop a 
 great gift for it. Here are one or two examples 
 from my own experience : 
 
 " Gentlemen," said the chairman of a society in 
 a little village town in Western Ontario to which I 
 had come as a paid (a very humbly paid) lecturer, 
 " we have with us to-night a gentleman " (here he 
 made an attempt to read my name on a card, failed 
 to read it, and put the card back in his pocket) 
 " a gentleman who is to lecture to us on " (here 
 he looked at his card again), " on Ancient — Ancient 
 — I don't very well see what it is — Ancient — Britain? 
 
 164 
 
" We Have with us To-night" 
 
 Thank you, on Ancient Britain. Now, this is the 
 first of our series of lectures for this winter. The 
 last series, as you all know, was not a success. In 
 fact, we came out at the end of the year with a 
 deficit. So this year we are starting a new line and 
 trying the experiment of cheaper talent." 
 
 Here the chairman gracefully waved his hand 
 toward me, and there was a certain 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-night and to ask any 
 of the members who haven't paid their dollar to 
 pay it either to me or to Mr. Sibley as they pass 
 out." 
 
 Let anybody who knows the discomfiture of 
 coming out before an audience on any terms judge 
 how it feels to crawl out in front of them labelled 
 " cheaper talent." 
 
 Another charming way in which the chairman 
 endeavours to put both the speaker 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 been invited to come 
 under very special auspices. It was my fate, not 
 long ago, to " appear " (this is the correct word to 
 
 165 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 use in this connection) in this capacity when I was 
 going about Canada trying to raise some money for 
 the relief of the Belgians. I travelled in great glory 
 with a pass on the Canadian Pacific Railway (not 
 since extended : officials of the road, kindly note 
 this) and was most kindly entertained wherever I 
 went. 
 
 It was, therefore, the business of the chairman at 
 such meetings as these to try and put a special dis- 
 tinction or cachet on the gathering. This is how 
 it was done : 
 
 " Ladies and gentlemen," said the chairman, 
 rising from his seat on the platform with a little 
 bundle of papers in his hand, " before I introduce 
 the speaker of the evening I have one or two items 
 that I want to read to you." Here he rustled his 
 papers, and there was a deep hush in the hall while 
 he selected one. " We had hoped to have with us 
 to-night Sir Robert Borden, the Prime Minister of 
 this Dominion. I have just received a telegram 
 from Sir Robert in which he says that he will not 
 be able to be here." {Great applause.) The chair- 
 man put up his hand for silence, picked up another 
 telegram, and continued : " Our committee, ladies 
 and gentlemen, telegraphed an invitation to Sir 
 Wilfrid Laurier very cordially inviting him to be 
 
 1 66 
 
" We Rave with us To-night " 
 
 here to-night. I have here Sir Wilfrid's answer in 
 which he says that he will not be able to be with 
 us." (Renewed applause.) The chairman again put 
 up his hand for silence and went on, picking up one 
 paper after another : " The Minister of Finance 
 regrets that he will be unable to come." (Applause.) 
 " Mr. Rodolphe Lemieux " (applause) " will not be 
 here." (Great applause.) " The Mayor of Toronto " 
 (applause) " is detained on business." (Wild ap- 
 plause.) " The Anglican Bishop of the Diocese " 
 (applause) " the Principal of the University Col- 
 lege, Toronto " (great applause) " the Minister of 
 Education " (applause) — " none of these are 
 coming." There was a great clapping of hands 
 and enthusiasm, after which the meeting was called 
 to order with a very distinct and palpable feeling 
 that it is one of the most distinguished audiences 
 ever gathered in the hall. 
 
 Here is another experience of the same period 
 while I was pursuing the same 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 was supposed to give readings from 
 my works, and my books are supposed to be of a 
 humorous character. A church hardly seemed the 
 right place to get funny in. I explained my diffi- 
 
 167 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 culty to the pastor of the church, a very solemn- 
 looking man. He nodded his head, slowly and 
 gravely, as he grasped my difficulty. " I see," he 
 said, " I see, but I think that I can introduce 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 the church, just beside and 
 below the pulpit itself, with a reading desk and a 
 big Bible and a shaded light beside it. It was a big 
 church, and the audience, sitting in half darkness, 
 as is customary during a sermon, reached away back 
 into the gloom. The place was packed full and 
 absolutely quiet. Then the chairman spoke. 
 
 " Dear friends," he said, " I want you to under- 
 stand that it will be all right to laugh to-night. 
 Let me hear you laugh heartily, laugh right out, 
 just as much as ever you want to, because " (and 
 here his voice assumed the deep, sepulchral tones of 
 the preacher) " when we think of the noble object 
 for which the professor appears to-night we may be 
 assured that the Lord will forgive anyone who will 
 laugh at the professor." 
 
 I am sorry to say, however, that none of the 
 audience, even with the plenary absolution in 
 advance, were inclined to take a chance on it. 
 
" We Have with us To-night " 
 
 I recall in this same connection the chairman of 
 a meeting at a certain town in Vermont. He repre- 
 sents the type of chairman who turns up so late at 
 the meeting that the committee have no time to> 
 explain to him properly what the meeting is about 
 or who the speaker is. I noticed on this occasion 
 that he introduced me very guardedly by name- 
 (from a little card) and said nothing about the 
 Belgians, and nothing about my being (supposed to- 
 be) a humorist. This last was a great error. The 
 audience, for want of guidance, remained very 
 silent and decorous and well-behaved during my 
 talk. Then, somehow, at the end, while some one: 
 was moving a vote of thanks, the chairman dis- 
 covered his error. So he tried to make it good- 
 Just as the audience were getting up to put on 
 their wraps he rose, knocked on his desk, and 
 said : 
 
 " Just a minute, please, ladies and gentlemen,, 
 just a minute. I have just found out — I should 
 have known it sooner, but I was late in coming to» 
 this meeting — that the speaker who has just 
 addressed you has done so in behalf of the Belgian- 
 Relief Fund. I understand that he is a well-known. 
 Canadian humorist (ha ha !), and I am sure that 
 we have all been immensely amused (ha ha !).. 
 
 169 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 He is giving his delightful talks (ha ha !), though 
 I didn't know this till just this minute — for the 
 Belgian Relief Fund, and he is giving his services 
 for nothing. I am sure, when we realize this, we 
 shall all feel that it has "been well worth while to 
 come. 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 shall guarantee him a 
 capacity audience. And I may say that if there are 
 any members 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 was naturally interested during 
 my lectures in England in the chairmen who were 
 to introduce me. I cannot help but feel that I have 
 acquired a fine taste in chairmen. I know them 
 just as other experts know old furniture and 
 Pekingese dogs. The Witty Chairman, the Prosy 
 Chairman, the Solemn Chairman — I know them all. 
 As soon as I shake hands with the chairman in the 
 committee room I can tell exactly how he will act. 
 
 There are certain types of chairmen who have so 
 often been described and are so familiar that it is 
 not worth while to linger on them. Everybody 
 knows the chairman who says, " Now, ladies and 
 
 170 
 
" We Have with us To-night " 
 
 gentlemen, you have not come here to listen to me. 
 So I will be very brief — in fact, I will confine my 
 remarks to just one or two very short observations." 
 He then proceeds to make observations for twenty- 
 five minutes. At the end of it he remarks, with 
 charming simplicity, " Now I know that you are all 
 impatient to hear the lecturer " 
 
 And everybody knows also the chairman who 
 comes to the meeting with a very imperfect know- 
 ledge as to who or what the lecturer is, and is driven 
 to introduce him by saying : 
 
 " Our lecturer of the evening is widely recognized 
 as one of the greatest authorities on — on — on his 
 subject in the world to-day. He comes to us from — 
 from a great distance, and I can assure him that it 
 is a great pleasure to this audience to welcome a 
 man who has done so much to — to — to advance the 
 interests of — of — everything as he has." 
 
 But this man, bad as he is, is not so bad as the 
 
 chairman whose preparation for introducing the 
 
 lecturer has obviously been made at the eleventh 
 
 hour. Just such a chairman it was my fate to strike 
 
 in the form of a local alderman, built like an ox, in 
 
 one of those small manufacturing places in the north 
 
 of England where they grow men of this type and 
 
 elect them to office. 
 
 171 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 " I never saw the lecturer before," he said, " but, 
 I've read his book " (I have written nineteen books). 
 ■" The committee was good enough to send me over 
 his book last night. I didn't read it all, but I took 
 a look at the preface, and I can assure him he is 
 very welcome. I understand he comes from a 
 
 college " Then he turned directly towards me 
 
 and said in a loud voice, " What was the name of 
 that college over there you said you came from ? " 
 
 " McGill," I answered equally loudly. 
 
 " He comes from McGill," the chairman boomed 
 out. " I never heard of McGill myself, but I can 
 assure him he's welcome. He's going to lecture to 
 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'll venture to say it will be a rare 
 treat. I'm only sorry I can't stay for it myself, 
 as I have to get back to the Town Hall for a 
 meeting. So without more ado I'll get off the 
 platform and let the lecturer go on with his 
 humour." 
 
 A still more terrible type of chairman is the one 
 whose mind is evidently preoccupied and disturbed 
 -with some local happening and who comes on to 
 the platform with a face imprinted with distress. 
 
 172 
 
" We Have with us To-night " 
 
 Before introducing the lecturer he refers in moving 
 tones to the local sorrow, whatever it is. As a pre- 
 lude to a humorous lecture this is not gay. 
 
 Such a chairman fell to my lot one night before a 
 gloomy audience in a London suburb. 
 
 " As I look about this hall to-night," he began in 
 a doleful whine, " I see many empty seats." Here 
 he stifled a sob. " Nor am I surprised that a great 
 many of our people should prefer to-night to stay 
 quietly at home." 
 
 I had no clue to what he meant. I merely 
 gathered that some peculiar sorrow must have over- 
 whelmed the town that day. 
 
 " To many it may seem hardly fitting that after 
 the loss our town has sustained we should come out 
 here to listen to a humorous lecture." 
 
 " What's the trouble ? " I whispered to a citizen 
 sitting beside me on the platform. 
 
 " 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 
 
 173 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 of another character our position would have been 
 less difficult " 
 
 By this time I began to feel like a criminal. 
 
 " The case would have been different had the 
 lecture been one that contained information, or that 
 was inspired by some serious purpose, or that could 
 have been of any benefit. But this is not so. We 
 understand that this lecture which Mr. Leacock has 
 already given, I believe, twenty or thirty times in 
 England " 
 
 Here he turned to me with a look of mild re- 
 proval while the silent audience, deeply moved, all 
 looked at me as at a man who went round the 
 country insulting the memory of the dead by giving 
 a lecture thirty times. 
 
 " We understand, though this we shall have an 
 opportunity of testing for ourselves presently, that 
 Mr. Leacock's lecture is not of a character which — 
 has not, so to speak, the kind of value — in short, is 
 not a lecture of that class." 
 
 Here he paused and choked back a sob. 
 
 " Had our poor friend been spared to us for 
 another six years he would have rounded out the 
 century. But it was not to be. For two or three 
 years past he has noted that somehow his strength 
 was failing, that, for some reason or other, he was 
 
 174 
 
" We Have with us To-night" 
 
 no longer what he had been. Last month he began 
 to droop. Last week he began to sink. Speech left 
 him last Tuesday. This morning he passed away, 
 and he has gone now, we trust, in safety to where 
 there are no lectures." 
 
 The audience were now nearly in tears. 
 
 The chairman made a visible effort towards firm- 
 ness and control. 
 
 " But yet," he continued, " our committee felt 
 that, in another sense, it was our duty to go on with 
 our arrangements. I think, ladies and gentlemen, 
 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 reluctance we do it, and, 
 whatever be the difficulties and the dangers, we 
 must carry on to the end ; for, after all, there is 
 an end, and by resolution and patience we can 
 reach it. 
 
 " I wili, therefore, invite Mr. Leacock to deliver 
 to us his humorous lecture, the title of which I have 
 forgotten, but I understand it to be the same 
 lecture which he has already given thirty or forty 
 times in England." 
 
 But contrast with this melancholy man the 
 pleasing and genial person who introduced me, all 
 upside-down, to a metropolitan audience. 
 
 175 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 He was so brisk, so neat, so sure of himself that 
 It didn't seem possible that he could make any kind 
 of mistake. I thought it unnecessary to coach him. 
 He seemed absolutely all right. 
 
 " It is a great pleasure," he said, with a charming 
 easy appearance of being entirely at home on the 
 platform, " to welcome here to-night our distin- 
 guished Canadian fellow-citizen, Mr. Learoyd." He 
 turned half-way towards me as he spoke with a sort 
 •of gesture of welcome, admirably executed. If only 
 my name had been Learoyd instead of Leacock it 
 "would have been excellent. 
 
 " There are many of us," he continued, " who 
 have awaited Mr. Learoyd's coming with the most 
 pleasant anticipations. We seemed from his books 
 to know him already as an old friend. In fact, I 
 think I do not exaggerate when I tell Mr. Learoyd 
 that his name in our city has long been a household 
 word. I have very, very great pleasure, ladies and 
 gentlemen, in introducing to you Mr. Learoyd." 
 
 As far as I know, the chairman never knew his 
 error. At the close of my lecture he said that he 
 was sure that the audience were " deeply indebted 
 to Mr. Learoyd," and then, with a few words of 
 rapid, genial apology, buzzed off, like a humming 
 fcird, to other avocations. But I have amply for- 
 
 176 
 
" We Have with us To-night" 
 
 given him. Anything for kindness and geniality ; 
 it makes the whole of lif e smooth. If that chairman 
 ever comes to my home town he is hereby invited 
 to lunch or dine with me, as Mr. Learoyd or under 
 any name that he selects. 
 
 Such a man is, after all, in strong contrast to the 
 kind of chairman who has 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 way to introduce a lecturer is to say a few 
 words about the finances of the society to which he 
 is to lecture (for money) and about the difficulty in 
 getting members to turn out to hear lectures. 
 
 Everybody has heard such a speech a dozen times. 
 But it is the paid lecturer sitting on the platform 
 who best appreciates it. It runs like this : 
 
 " Now, ladies and gentlemen, before I invite the 
 lecturer of the evening to address us there are a few 
 words I would like to say. There are a good many 
 of the members who are in arrears with their fees. 
 I am aware that these are hard times and it is 
 difficult to collect money, but at the same time the 
 members ought to remember that the expenses of 
 the society are very heavy. The fees that are asked 
 by the lecturers, as I suppose you know, have 
 advanced very greatly in the last few years. In fact, 
 m 177 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 I may say that they are becoming almost pro- 
 hibitive." 
 
 This discourse is pleasant hearing for the lecturer. 
 He can see the members 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 to bring Mr. Leacock to our 
 society. But fortunately through the personal 
 generosity of two of our members, who subscribed 
 ten pounds each out of their own pockets, we were 
 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 is that when we have 
 members in the society who are willing to make this 
 sacrifice — because it is a sacrifice, ladies and gentle- 
 men — we ought to support them in every way. The 
 members ought to think it their duty to 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— ^to turn out from the comfort 
 of one's own fireside and come and listen to a 
 lecture. But I think that the members should look 
 
 178 
 
" We Have with us To-night " 
 
 at it not as a matter of personal comfort, but as a 
 matter of duty towards this society. We have 
 managed to keep this society alive for fifteen years, 
 and, though I don't say it in any spirit of boasting, 
 it has not been an easy thing to do. It has required 
 a good deal of pretty hard spade work by the com- 
 mittee. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I suppose you 
 didn't come here to listen to me, and perhaps I have 
 said enough about our difficulties and troubles. So 
 without more ado " (this is always a favourite 
 phrase with chairmen) " I'll invite Mr. Leacock to 
 address the society — oh ! just one word before I 
 sit down : will all those who are leaving before 
 the end of the lecture kindly go out through the 
 side door and step as quietly as possible ? Mr. 
 Leacock." 
 
 Anybody who is in the lecture business knows that 
 that introduction is far worse than being called Mr. 
 Learoyd. 
 
 When any lecturer goes across to England from 
 this side of the water there is naturally a tendency 
 upon the part of the chairman to play upon this 
 fact. This is especially true in the case of a Canadian 
 like myself. The chairman feels that the moment 
 is fitting for one of those great imperial thoughts 
 that bind the British Empire together. But some- 
 
 179 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 times the expression of the thought falls short of 
 the full glory of the conception. 
 
 Witness this (word for word) introduction that 
 was used against me by a clerical chairman in a quiet 
 spot in the south of England. 
 
 " Not so long ago, ladies and gentlemen," said 
 the vicar, " we used to send out to Canada various 
 classes of our community to help build up that 
 country. We sent out our labourers, we sent our 
 scholars and professors. Indeed, we even sent out 
 our criminals. And now," with a wave of 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 a reformed 
 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 in favour of the chairman and in 
 gratitude for his existence. Even at his worst he is 
 far better than having no chairman at all. Over in 
 England a great many societies and public bodies 
 have adopted the plan of " cutting out the chair- 
 man." Wearying of his faults, they have forgotten 
 the reasons for his existence and undertake to do 
 
 without him. 
 
 1 80 
 
" We Have with us To-night " 
 
 The result is ghastly. The lecturer steps on to 
 the platform alone and unaccompanied. There is 
 a feeble ripple of applause ; he makes his miserable 
 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't in it with it. 
 I found also the further difficulty that in the 
 absence of the chairman very often the audience, 
 or a large part of it, doesn't know who the lecturer 
 is. On many occasions I received on appearing a 
 wild burst of applause under the impression that I 
 was somebody else. I have been mistaken in this 
 way for M. Briand, then Prime Minister of France, 
 for Charlie Chaplin, for Mrs. Asquith — but stop, 
 I may get into a libel suit. All I mean is that with- 
 out a chairman " we celebrities " get terribly mixed 
 up together. 
 
 To one experience of my tour as a lecturer I shall 
 always be able to look back with satisfaction. I 
 nearly had the pleasure of killing a man with 
 laughing. American lecturers have often dreamed 
 of doing this. I nearly did it. The man in question 
 was a comfortable, apoplectic-looking man with the 
 kind of merry, rubicund face that is seen in coun- 
 tries where they don't have prohibition. He was 
 seated near the back of the hall and was laughing 
 
 181 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 uproariously. All of a sudden I realized that some- 
 thing was happening. The man had collapsed side- 
 ways on to the floor. A little group of men gathered 
 about him ; they lifted him up, and I could see 
 them carrying him out a silent and inert mass. As 
 in duty bound, I went right on with my lecture. 
 But my heart beat high with satisfaction. I was 
 sure that I had killed him. The reader may judge 
 how high these hopes rose when, a moment or two 
 later, a note was handed to the chairman, who then 
 asked me to pause for a moment in my lecture and 
 stood up and asked, " Is there a doctor in the 
 audience ? " A doctor rose and silently went out. 
 The lecture continued, but there was no more 
 laughter : my aim had now become to kill another 
 of them and they knew it. They were aware that 
 if they started laughing they might die. In a few 
 minutes a second note was handed to the chairman. 
 He announced very gravely, " A second doctor is 
 wanted." The lecture went on in deeper silence 
 than ever. All the audience were waiting for a third 
 announcement. It came. A new message was 
 handed to the chairman. He rose and said, " If 
 Mr. Murchison, the undertaker, is in the audience, 
 will he kindly step outside ? " 
 
 That man, I regret to say, got well. Disappoint- 
 
 182 
 
" We Have with us To-night" 
 
 ing though it is to read it, he recovered. I sent back 
 next morning from London a telegram of inquiry 
 (I did it, in reality, so as to have a proper proof of 
 his death), and received the answer, " Patient doing 
 well ; is sitting up in bed and reading Lord Hal- 
 dane's Relativity : no danger of relapse." 
 
 183 
 
Chapter X — Have the English any 
 Sense of Humour ? 
 
 IT was understood that the main object of my 
 trip to England was to find out whether the 
 British people have any sense of humour. No- 
 doubt the Geographical Society had this investiga- 
 tion in mind in not paying my expenses. Certainly 
 on my return I was at once assailed with the question, 
 on all sides, " Have they got a sense of humour r" 
 Even if it is only a rudimentary sense, have they got 
 it or have they not ? " I propose, therefore, to* 
 address myself to the answer to this question. 
 
 A peculiar interest always attaches to humour. 
 There is no quality of the human mind about which, 
 its possessor is more sensitive than the sense 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 yet to see the man 
 who announces that he has no sense of humour. In 
 point of fact, every man is apt to think himself 
 possessed of an exceptional gift in this direction,. 
 
 184 
 
Heme the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 and that even if his humour does not express itself 
 in the power either to make a joke or to laugh at 
 one it none the less consists in a peculiar insight or 
 inner light superior to that of other people. 
 
 The same thing is true of nations. Each thinks 
 its own humour of an entirely superior kind, and 
 either refuses to admit or admits reluctantly the 
 humorous quality of other peoples. The English- 
 man may credit the Frenchman with a certain light 
 effervescence of mind which he neither emulates nor 
 envies ; the Frenchman may acknowledge that 
 English literature shows here and there a sort of 
 heavy playfulness ; but neither of them would con- 
 sider that the humour of the other nation could 
 stand a moment's comparison with his own. 
 
 Yet, oddly enough, American humour stands as 
 a conspicuous exception to this general rule. A 
 certain vogue clings to it. Ever since the spacious 
 days of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain it has en- 
 joyed an extraordinary reputation, and this not only 
 on our own continent, but in England. It was, in 
 a sense, the English who " discovered " Mark 
 Twain ; I mean it was they who first clearly- 
 recognized him as a man of letters of the foremost 
 rank, at a time when academic Boston still tried to. 
 
 explain him away as a mere comic man of the West* 
 
 185 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 In the same way Artemus Ward is still held in 
 affectionate remembrance in London, and, of the 
 later generation, Mr. Dooley at least is a household 
 word. 
 
 This is so much the case that a sort of legend has 
 grown around American humour. It is presumed 
 to be a superior article and to enjoy the same kind 
 of pre-eminence as French cooking, the Russian 
 ballet, and Italian organ-grinding. With this goes 
 the converse supposition that the British people are 
 inferior in humour, that a joke reaches them only 
 with great difficulty, and that a British audience 
 listens to humour in gloomy and unintelligent 
 silence. People still love to repeat the famous story 
 of how John Bright listened attentively to Artemus 
 Ward's lecture in London and then said gravely 
 that he doubted many of the young man's 
 statements ; and readers still remember Mark 
 Twain's famous parody of the discussion of his 
 book by a wooden-headed reviewer of an English 
 review. 
 
 But the legend in reality is only a legend. If the 
 English are inferior to Americans in humour, I, for 
 one, am at a loss to see where it comes in. If there 
 is anything on our continent superior in humour to 
 Punch, I should like to see it. If we have any more 
 
 186 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 humorous writers in our midst than E. V. Lucas and 
 Charles Graves and Owen Seaman, I should like to 
 read what they write ; and if there is any audience 
 capable of more laughter and more generous appre- 
 ciation than an audience in London, or Bristol, or 
 Aberdeen, I should like to lecture to it. 
 
 During my voyage of discovery in Great Britain 
 I had very exceptional opportunities for testing the 
 truth of these comparisons. It was my good fortune 
 to appear as an avowed humorist in all the great 
 British cities. I lectured as far north as Aberdeen 
 and as far south as Brighton and Bournemouth ; I 
 travelled eastward to Ipswich and westward into 
 Wales. I spoke, on serious subjects, but with a joke 
 or two in loco, at the universities, at business gather- 
 ings, and at London dinners ; I watched, lost in 
 admiration, the inspired merriment of the Savages 
 of Adelphi Terrace, and in my moments of leisure 
 I observed, with a scientific eye, the gaieties of the 
 London revues. As a result of which I say with 
 conviction that, speaking by and large, the two 
 communities are on the same level. A Harvard 
 audience, as I have reason gratefully to acknow- 
 ledge, is wonderful. But an Oxford audience is just 
 as good. A gathering of business men in a textile 
 town in the Midlands is just as heavy as a gathering 
 
 187 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 of business men in Decatur, Indiana, but no 
 heavier ; and an audience of English schoolboys as 
 at Rugby or at Clifton is capable of a wild and sus- 
 tained merriment not to be outdone from Halifax 
 to Los Angeles. 
 
 There is, however, one vital difference between 
 American and English audiences which would be apt 
 to discourage at the outset any American lecturer 
 who might go to England. The English audiences, 
 from the nature of the way in which they have 
 been brought together, exfect more. In England 
 they still associate lectures with information. We 
 don't. Our American lecture audiences are, in nine 
 cases out of ten, organized by a woman's club of 
 some kind and drawn not from the working class, 
 but from — 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, well educated without 
 being " highbrow," and tolerant and kindly to a 
 degree. In fact, what the people mainly want is 
 to see the lecturer. They have heard 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 have a look at them, 
 just as the English people, who are all crazy about 
 animals, flock to the zoo to look at a new giraffe. 
 
 188 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 They don't expect the giraffe to do anything in par- 
 ticular. They want to see it, that's all. So with 
 the American woman's club audience. After they 
 have seen Mr. Chesterton they ask one another as 
 they come out — just as an incidental 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 go and say that they have seen 
 Mr. Chesterton ; that's worth two dollars in itself. 
 The nearest thing to this attitude of mind that I 
 heard of in England was at the City Temple in 
 London, where they have every week a huge gather- 
 ing of about two thousand people, to listen to a 
 (so-called) popular lecture. When I was there I was 
 told that the person who had preceded me was Lord 
 Haldane, who had lectured on Einstein's Theory of 
 Relativity. I said to the chairman, " Surely this 
 kind of audience couldn't understand a lecture like 
 that ! " He shook his head. " No," he said, " they 
 didn't understand it, but they all enjoyed it." 
 
 I don't mean to imply by what I said above that 
 American lecture audiences do not appreciate good 
 things or that the English lecturers who come to 
 this continent are all giraffes. On the contrary, 
 when the audience finds that Chesterton and Wal- 
 pole and Drinkwater, in addition to being visible, 
 
 189 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 are also singularly interesting lecturers, they are 
 all the better pleased. But this doesn't alter the 
 fact that they have come primarily to see the 
 lecturer. 
 
 Not so in England. Here a lecture (outside 
 London) is organized on a much sterner footing. 
 The people are there for information. The lecture 
 is organized not by idle, amiable, charming women, 
 but by a body called, with variations, the Philo- 
 sophical Society. From experience I should define 
 an English Philosophical Society as all the people in 
 town who don't know anything about philosophy. 
 The academic and university classes are never there. 
 The audience is only of plainer folk. In the United 
 States and Canada at any evening lecture a large 
 sprinkling of the audience are in evening dress. At 
 an English lecture (outside of London) 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, and the same 
 atmosphere of gaiety as at a society lecture in 
 America. On the contrary, the setting is a gloomy 
 one. In England, in winter, night begins at four 
 in the afternoon. In the manufacturing towns of 
 the Midlands and the north (which is where the 
 philosophical societies flourish) there is always a 
 
 190 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 drizzling rain and wet slop underfoot, a bedraggled 
 poverty in the streets, and a dimness of lights that 
 contrasts with the glare of light in an American 
 town. There is no visible sign in the town that a 
 lecture is to happen, no placards, no advertisements, 
 nothing. The lecturer is conducted by a chairman 
 through a side door in a dingy building (The 
 Institute, established 1840), and then all of a sudden 
 in a huge, dim hall — there sits the Philosophical 
 Society. There are a thousand of them, but they 
 sit as quiet as a prayer meeting. They are waiting 
 to be fed — on information. 
 
 Now, I don't mean to say that the Philosophical 
 Society are not a good audience. In their own way 
 they're all right. Once the Philosophical Society 
 has decided that a lecture is humorous they do not 
 stint their laughter. I have had many times the 
 satisfaction of seeing a Philosophical Society swept 
 away from its moorings and tossing in a sea of 
 laughter, as generous and as whole-hearted as any- 
 thing we ever see in America. 
 
 But they are not so willing to begin. With us the 
 chairman has only to say 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's lecture," and at once there is a 
 
 191 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 ripple of applause, and a responsive expression 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 us to-night," he 
 says, " a man whose name is well known to the 
 Philosophical Society " (here he looks at his caret), 
 " Mr. Stephen Leacock." {Complete silence) " He 
 
 is a professor of political economy at " Here 
 
 he turns to me and says, " Which college did you 
 6ay ? " I answer quite audibly in the silence, " At 
 McGill." " He is at McGill," says the chairman. 
 (More silence.) " I don't suppose, however, ladies 
 and gentlemen, that he's come here to talk about 
 political economy." This is meant as a jest, but 
 the audience takes it as a threat. " However, ladies 
 and gentlemen, you haven't come here to listen to 
 me " (this evokes applause, the first of the evening), 
 " so without more ado " (the man always has the 
 impression that there's been a lot of " ado" hut I 
 never see any of it) " I'll now introduce Mr. Lea- 
 cock." (Complete silence.) 
 
 Nothing of which means the least harm. It only 
 implies that the Philosophical Society are true 
 philosophers in accepting nothing unproved. They 
 are like the man from Missouri. They want to be 
 
 192 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 shown. And undoubtedly it takes a little time, 
 therefore, to rouse them. I remember listening with 
 great interest to Sir Michael Sadler, who is possessed 
 of a very neat wit, introducing me at Leeds. He 
 threw three jokes, one after the other, into the 
 heart of a huge, silent audience without effect. He 
 might as well have thrown soap bubbles. But the 
 fourth joke broke fair and square like a bomb in the 
 middle of the Philosophical Society and exploded 
 them into convulsions. The process is very like 
 what artillerymen 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 using the word English and not 
 British, for it does not in the least apply to the 
 Scotch. There is, for a humorous lecturer, no 
 better audience in the world than a Scotch audience. 
 The old standing joke about the Scotch sense of 
 humour is mere nonsense. Yet one finds it every- 
 where. 
 
 " So you're going to try to take humour to 
 Scotland," the most eminent author in England 
 said to me. " Well, the Lord help you. You'd 
 better take an axe with you to open their skulls ; 
 there is no other way." How this legend started I 
 don't know, but I think it is because the English 
 N 193 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 are jealous of the Scotch. They got into the Union 
 with them in 1707 and they can't get out. The 
 Scotch don't want Home Rule, or Swa Raj, or 
 Dominion status, or anything ; they just want the 
 English. When they want money they go to 
 London and make it ; if they want literary fame 
 they sell their books to the English ; and to prevent 
 any kind of political trouble 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 they retaliate by saying that the Scotch have no 
 6ense of humour. But there's nothing in it. One 
 has only to ask any of the theatrical people and they 
 will tell you that the audiences in Glasgow and 
 Edinburgh are the best in the British Isles — possess 
 the best taste and the best ability to recognize what 
 is really good. 
 
 The reason for this lies, I think, in the well-known 
 fact that the Scotch are a truly educated people, 
 not educated in the mere sense of having been made 
 to go to school, but in the higher sense of having 
 acquired an interest in books and a respect for 
 learning. In England the higher classes alone 
 possess this, the working class, as a whole, know 
 nothing of it. But in Scotland the attitude is 
 universal. And the more I reflect upon the subject, 
 
 194 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 the more I believe that what counts most in the 
 appreciation of humour is not nationality, but the 
 degree of education enjoyed by the individual con- 
 cerned. I do not think that there is any doubt 
 that educated people possess a far wider range of 
 humour than the uneducated class. Some people, 
 of course, get over-educated and become hopelessly 
 academic. The word " highbrow " has been in- 
 vented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour 
 in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary 
 the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the 
 accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil 
 of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. But 
 even in the highbrow the educated appreciation of 
 humour is there — away down. Generally, if one 
 attempts to amuse a highbrow he will resent it as 
 if the process were beneath him ; or perhaps the 
 intellectual jealousy and touchiness with which he 
 is always overcharged will lead him to retaliate with 
 a pointless story from Plato. But if the highbrow 
 is right off his guard and has no jealousy in his mind 
 you may find him roaring with laughter and wiping 
 his spectacles, with his sides shaking, and see him 
 converted as by magic into the merry, clever little 
 schoolboy that he was thirty years ago, before his 
 education ossified him. 
 
 195 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 But with the illiterate and the rustic no such 
 process is possible. His sense of humour may be 
 there as a sense, but the mechanism for setting it in 
 operation is limited and rudimentary. Only the 
 broadest and most elementary forms of joke can 
 reach him. The magnificent mechanism of the art 
 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 so excellent in 
 execution that it appeals to all alike, to the illiterate 
 and to the highbrow, to the peasant and the pro- 
 fessor. Such, for example, 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 a rule, the cheap fun that excites the rustic 
 to laughter is execrable to the man of education. 
 
 In the light of what I have said above it follows 
 that the individuals that are findable in every 
 English or American audience are much the same. 
 All those who lecture or act are well aware that 
 there are certain types of people that are always to 
 be seen somewhere in the hall. Some of these 
 belong to the general class of discouraging people. 
 They listen in stolid silence. No light of intelli- 
 gence ever gleams on their faces ; no response comes 
 from their eyes. 
 
 196 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 I find, for example, that wherever I go there is 
 always seated in the audience, about three seats 
 from the front, a silent man with a big motionless 
 face like a melon. He is always there. I have seen 
 that man in every town or city from Richmond, 
 Indiana, to Bournemouth in Hampshire. He haunts 
 me. I get to expect him. I feel like nodding to 
 him from the platform. And I find that all other 
 lecturers have the same experience. Wherever they 
 go the man with the big face is always there. He 
 never laughs ; no matter if the people all round him 
 are convulsed with laughter, he sits there like a rock 
 — or, no, like a toad — immovable. What he thinks 
 I don't know. Why he comes to lectures I cannot 
 guess. Once, and once only, I spoke to him, or, 
 rather, he spoke to me. I was coming out from the 
 lecture and found myself close to him in the 
 corridor. It had been a rather gloomy evening ; 
 the audience had hardly laughed at all ; and I know 
 nothing sadder than a humorous lecture without 
 laughter. The man with the big face, finding him- 
 self 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 since thought that this 
 
 197 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 man with the big face may have his own internal 
 form of appreciation. This much, however, I know. 
 To look at him from the platform is fatal. One 
 sustained look into his big, motionless face and 
 the lecturer would be lost ; inspiration would 
 die upon one's lips — the basilisk isn't in it with 
 him. 
 
 Personally, I no sooner see the man with the big 
 face than instinctively I turn my eyes away. I look 
 round the hall for another man that I know is 
 always there, the opposite type, the little man with 
 the spectacles. There he sits, good soul, about 
 twelve rows back, his large spectacles beaming with 
 appreciation and his quick face anticipating every 
 point. I imagine him to be by trade a minor 
 journalist or himself a writer of sorts, but with not 
 enough of success to have spoiled him. 
 
 There are other people always there too. There 
 is the old lady who thinks the lecture improper ; it 
 doesn't matter how moral it is, she's out for impro- 
 priety and she can find it anywhere. Then there is 
 another very terrible man against whom all American 
 lecturers in England should be warned — the man 
 who is leaving by the 9 p.m. train. English railways 
 running into suburbs and neighbouring towns have a 
 schedule which is expressly arranged to have the 
 
 198 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 principal train leave before the lecture ends. Hence 
 the 9 p.m. train man. He sits right near the front, 
 and at ten minutes to nine he gathers up his hat, 
 coat, and umbrella very deliberately, rises with great 
 calm, and walks firmly away. His air is that of a 
 man who has stood all that he can and can bear no 
 more. Till one knows about this man, and the 
 others who rise after him, it is very disconcerting ; 
 at first I thought I must have said something to 
 reflect upon the royal family. But presently the 
 lecturer gets to understand that it is only the nine 
 o'clock train and that all the audience know about 
 it. Then it's all right. It's just like the people 
 rising and stretching themselves after the seventh 
 innings in baseball. 
 
 In all that goes above I have been emphasizing 
 the fact that the British and the American sense of 
 humour are essentially the same thing. But there 
 are, of course, peculiar differences of form and 
 peculiar preferences of material that often make 
 them seem to diverge widely. 
 
 By this I mean that each community has, within 
 limits, its own particular ways of being funny and 
 its own particular conception of a joke. Thus, a 
 Scotchman likes best a joke which he has all to 
 
 himself or which he shares reluctantly with a few ; 
 
 199 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 the thing is too rich to distribute. The American 
 loves particularly as his line of joke an anecdote with 
 the point all concentrated at the end and exploding 
 in a phrase. The Englishman loves best as his joke 
 the narration of something that actually did happen 
 and that depends, of course, for its point on its 
 reality. 
 
 There are plenty of minor differences, too, in 
 point of mere form, and very naturally each com- 
 munity finds the particular form used by the others 
 less pleasing than its own. In fact, for this very 
 reason each people is apt to think its own humour 
 the best. 
 
 Thus, on our side of the Atlantic, to cite our own 
 faults first, we still cling to the supposed humour 
 of bad spelling. We have, indeed, told ourselves a 
 thousand times over that bad spelling is not funny, 
 but is very tiresome. Yet it is no sooner laid aside 
 and buried than it gets resurrected. I suppose the 
 real reason is that it is funny, at least to our eyes. 
 When Bill Nye spells wife with " yph," we can't 
 help being amused. Now, Bill Nye's bad spelling 
 had absolutely no point to it except its oddity. At 
 times it was extremely funny, but as a mode it led 
 easily to widespread and pointless imitation. It 
 was the kind of thing; — like poetry — that anybody 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 can do badly. It was most deservedly abandoned 
 with execration. No American editor would print 
 it to-day. But witness the new and excellent effect 
 produced with bad spelling by Mr. Ring W. 
 Lardner. Here, however, the case is altered ; it is 
 not the falseness of Mr. Lardner's spelling that is 
 the amusing feature of it, but the truth of it. 
 When he writes " dear friend, Al, I would of rote 
 sooner," etc., he is truer to actual sound and in- 
 tonation than the lexicon. The mode is excellent. 
 But the imitations will soon debase it into such bad 
 coin that it will fail to pass current. In England, 
 however, the humour of bad spelling does not and 
 has never, I believe, flourished. Bad spelling is only 
 used in England as an attempt to reintroduce 
 phonetically a dialect ; it is not intended that the 
 spelling itself should be thought funny, but the 
 dialect that it represents. But the effect, on the 
 whole, is tiresome. A little dose of the humour of 
 Lancashire or Somerset or Yorkshire pronunciation 
 may be all right, but a whole page of it looks like 
 the gibbering of chimpanzees set down on paper. 
 
 In America also we run perpetually to the 
 (supposed) humour of slang, a form not used in 
 England. If we were to analyse what we mean by 
 slang, I think it would be found to consist of the 
 
 201 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 introduction of new metaphors or new forms of 
 language of a metaphorical character, strained 
 almost to the breaking point. Sometimes we do it 
 with a single word. When some genius discovers 
 that a " hat " is really only a " lid " placed on top 
 of a human being, straightway the word " lid " 
 goes rippling over the continent. 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 whole process carried through ; " cinch " 
 once sounded funny ; it is now standard American- 
 English. But other slang is made up of descriptive 
 phrases. At the best, these slang phrases are — at 
 least, we think they are — extremely funny. But 
 they are funniest when newly coined, and it takes 
 a master hand to coin them well. For a supreme 
 example of wild vagaries of language used for 
 humour, one might take O. Henry's Gentle Grafter. 
 But here the imitation is as easy as it is tiresome. 
 The invention of pointless slang phrases without 
 real suggestion or merit is one of our most familiar 
 forms of factory-made humour. Now, the English 
 people are apt to turn away from the whole field of 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 slang. In the first place, it puzzles them — they 
 don't know whether each particular sort of phrase 
 is 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 result is that 
 with the English public the great mass of American 
 slang writing (genius apart) doesn't go. I have even 
 found English people of undoubted literary taste 
 repelled from such a master as O. Henry (now read 
 by millions in England) because at a first sight 
 they get the impression that it is " all American 
 slang." 
 
 Another point in which American humour — or, 
 at least, the form which it takes — 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 dinner party in London to find that my host 
 did not open the dinner by telling a " funny 
 story " ; that the guests did not then sit silent 
 trying to " think of another " ; that some one did 
 not presently break silence by saying, " I heard a 
 good one the other day " — and so forth. And I 
 realized that in this respect English society is 
 luckier than ours. 
 
 It is my candid opinion that no man ought to be 
 allowed to tell a funny story or anecdote without a 
 
 203 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 licence. We insist, rightly enough, that every taxi- 
 driver must have a licence, and the same principle 
 should apply to anybody who proposes to act as a 
 raconteur. Telling a story is a difficult thing — quite 
 as difficult as driving a taxi. And the risks of failure 
 and accident and the unfortunate consequences of 
 such to the public, if not exactly identical, are, at 
 any rate, analogous. 
 
 This is a point of view not generally appreciated. 
 A man is apt to think that just because he has heard 
 a good story he is able and entitled to repeat it. 
 He might as well undertake to do a snake dance 
 merely because he has seen Madame Pavlova do one. 
 The point of a story is apt to lie in the telling, or, 
 at least, to depend upon it in a high degree. Certain 
 stories, it is true, depend so much on the final point, 
 or " nub," as the Americans call it, that they are 
 almost fool-proof. But even these can be made so 
 prolix and tiresome, can be so messed up with 
 irrelevant detail, that the general effect is utter 
 weariness relieved by a kind of shock 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 to originality — for example, 
 the famous anecdote of the man who wanted to be 
 " put off at Buffalo." Here it is : 
 
 204 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 A man entered a sleeping-car and said to the 
 porter, " At what time do we get to Buffalo ? " 
 The porter answered, " At half-past three in the 
 morning, sir." " All right," the man said. " Now, 
 I want to get off at Buffalo, and I want you to see 
 that I get off. I sleep heavily and I'm hard 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 of, do you see ? " " All right, sir," said 
 the porter. The man got into his berth and fell 
 fast asleep. He never woke or moved till it was 
 broad daylight and the train was a hundred miles 
 beyond Buffalo. He called angrily to the porter, 
 " See here, you, didn't I tell you to put me off at 
 Buffalo ? " The porter looked at him, aghast. 
 " Well, I declare to goodness, boss ! " he exclaimed ; 
 " if it wasn't you, who was that man that I threw 
 off this train at half-past three at Buffalo ? " 
 
 Now, this story is as nearly fool-proof as can be. 
 And yet it is amazing how badly it can be messed 
 up by a person with a special gift for mangling a 
 story. He does it something after this fashion : 
 
 " There was a fellow got on the train one night 
 and he had a berth reserved for Buffalo ; at least, 
 the way I heard it, it was Buffalo, though I guess, 
 as ajxtatter of fact, you might tell it on any other 
 
 205 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 town just as well — or no, I guess he didn't have his 
 berth reserved, he got on 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 or any other place, and. the porter came 
 through and said, ' Do you want an early call f ' — 
 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 the end. 
 
 Of course the higher type of funny story is the 
 one that depends for its amusing quality not on the 
 final point, or not solely on it, but on the wording 
 and the narration all through. This is the way. in 
 which a story is 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 
 funny from beginning to end. When some lesser 
 person tries to repeat it afterwards, there is nothing 
 left but the final point. The rest is weariness. 
 
 As a consequence most story-tellers are driven to 
 telling stories that depend on the point or " nub," 
 and not on the narration. The story-teller gathers 
 these up till he is equipped with a sort of little 
 repertory of fun by which he hopes to surround 
 himself with social charm. In America especially 
 
 206 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 we suffer from the story-telling habit. As far as 
 I am able to judge, English society is not pervaded 
 and damaged by the story-telling habit as much as 
 is society in the United States and Canada. On our 
 side of the Atlantic story-telling at dinners and on 
 every other social occasion has become a curse. In 
 every phase of social and intellectual life one is 
 haunted by the funny anecdote. Anyone who has 
 ever attended a Canadian or American banquet will 
 recall the solemn way in which the chairman rises 
 and says, " Gentlemen, it is to me a very great 
 pleasure and a very great honour to preside at this 
 
 annual dinner. There was an old darky once " 
 
 and so forth. When he concludes he says, " I will 
 now call upon the Rev. Dr. Stooge, Head of the 
 Provincial University, to propose the toast ' Our 
 Dominion.' " Dr. Stooge rises amid great applause, 
 and with great solemnity begins, " There were once 
 
 two Irishmen " and so on to the end. But 
 
 in London it is apparently not so. Not long 
 ago I . had the pleasure of meeting at dinner a 
 member of the. government. I fully anticipated 
 that as a- member of the government he would be 
 expected to tell a funny story about an old darky, 
 just as he would on our side of the water. In fact, 
 I should have supposed that he could hardly get 
 
 207 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 into the government unless he did tell a funny story 
 of some sort. But all through dinner the Cabinet 
 Minister never said a word about either a Methodist 
 minister, or a commercial traveller, or an old darky, 
 or two Irishmen, or any of the stock characters of 
 the American repertory. On another occasion I 
 dined with a bishop. I expected that when the 
 soup came he would say, "There was an old 
 
 darky " After which I should have had to 
 
 listen with rapt attention and, when he had finished, 
 without any pause, rejoin, " There were a couple 
 
 of Irishmen once " and so on. But the bishop 
 
 never said a word of the sort. 
 
 I can further, for the sake of my fellow-men in 
 Canada and the United States 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 am very 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 they manage it. I can certify also that 
 if you meet the proprietor of a great newspaper he 
 will not begin by saying, " There was a Scotchman 
 once." In fact, in England you can mingle freely 
 in general society without being called upon either 
 to produce a funny story or to suffer from one. 
 
 208 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 I don't mean to deny that the American funny 
 story, in capable hands, is amazingly funny and that 
 it does brighten up human intercourse. But the 
 real trouble lies, not in the fun of the story, but in 
 the painful waiting for the point to come and in 
 the strained and anxious silence that succeeds it. 
 Each person around the dinner table is trying to 
 " think of another." There is a dreadful pause. 
 The hostess puts up a prayer that some one may 
 " think of another." Then at last, to the relief of 
 everybody, some one says, " I heard a story the 
 other day — I don't know whether you've heard 
 
 it " And the grateful cries of " No ! no ! go 
 
 ahead," show how great the tension has been. 
 
 Nine times out of ten the people have heard the 
 story before ; and ten times out of nine the narrator 
 damages it in the telling. But his hearers are grate- 
 ful to him for having saved them from the appalling 
 mantle of silence and introspection which had fallen 
 upon the table. For the trouble is that when once 
 two or three stories have been told it seems to be 
 a point of honour not to subside into mere con- 
 versation. It seems rude, when a story-teller has 
 at last reached the triumphant ending and climax 
 of the mule from Arkansas, it seems impolite, to 
 follow it up by saying, " I see that the ex-Emperor 
 
 o 209 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 Karl has escaped again." It can't be done. Either 
 the mule or Karl — one can't have both. 
 
 The English, I say, have not developed the 
 American custom of the funny story as a form of 
 social intercourse. But I do not mean to say that 
 they are sinless in this respect. As I see it, they 
 hand round in general conversation something 
 nearly as bad in the form of what one may call the 
 literal anecdote or personal experience. By this I 
 refer to the habit of narrating some silly little event 
 that has actually happened to them or in their sight, 
 which they designate as " screamingly funny," and 
 which was perhaps very funny when it happened, 
 but which is not the least funny in the telling. The 
 American funny story is imaginary. It never hap- 
 pened. Somebody presumably once made it up. It 
 is fiction. Thus there must once have been some 
 great palpitating brain, some glowing imagination, 
 which invented the story of the man who was put 
 off at Buffalo. But the English " screamingly 
 funny " story is not imaginary. It really did happen. 
 It is an actual personal experience. In short, it is 
 not fiction, but history. 
 
 I think — if one may say it with all respect — that 
 in English society girls and women are especially 
 prone to narrate these personal experiences as con- 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 tributions to general merriment rather than the 
 men. The English girl has a sort of traditional idea 
 of being amusing ; the Englishman cares less about 
 it. He prefers facts to fancy every time, and, as a 
 rule, is free from that desire to pose as a humorist 
 which 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 English would be something like this : 
 " We were so amused the other night in the sleeping- 
 car going to Buffalo. There was the most amusing 
 old negro making the beds, a perfect scream, you 
 know, and he kept insisting that if 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 the way he wanted to put us to bed. 
 We all roared ! " 
 
 Please note that roar at the end of the English 
 personal anecdote. It is the sign that indicates that 
 the story is over. When you are assured by the 
 narrator that all the persons present " roared " or 
 " simply roared," then you can be quite sure that 
 the humorous incident is closed and that laughter 
 is in place. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, the scene with the 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 darky porter may have been, when it really hap- 
 pened, most amusing. But not a trace of it gets 
 over in the story. There is nothing but the bare 
 assertion that it was " screamingly funny " or 
 " simply killing." But the English are such an 
 honest people that when they say this sort of thing 
 they believe one another and they laugh. 
 
 But, after all, why should people insist on telling 
 funny stories at all ? Why not be content to buy 
 the works of some really first-class humorist and 
 read them aloud in proper humility of mind with- 
 out trying to emulate them ? Either that or talk 
 theology. 
 
 On my own side of the Atlantic I often marvel 
 at our extraordinary tolerance 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 or even stopped and warned ; we listen with 
 the most wonderful patience to the worst of narra- 
 tion. The story is always without any interest 
 except in the unknown point that will be brought 
 in later. But this, until it does come, is no more 
 interesting than to-morrow's breakfast. Yet for 
 some reason or other we permit this story-telling 
 habit to invade and damage our whole social life. 
 The English always criticize this and think they are 
 
 212 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 absolutely right. To my mind, in their social life 
 they give the " funny story " its proper place and 
 room and no more. That is to say, if ten people 
 draw their chairs in to the dinner table and some- 
 body really has just heard a story and wants to tell 
 it, there is no reason against 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 about John Smith." It is quite admissible as 
 conversation. But he doesn't sit down to try to 
 think, along with nine other rival thinkers, of all the 
 stories that he has 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, dealing in a jocose 
 way with death and funerals. The story begins 
 (will the reader kindly turn it into Scotch pro- 
 nunciation for himself?), "There was a Sandy 
 MacDonald had died and the wife had the body 
 all laid out for burial and dressed up very fine in 
 his best suit," etc. Now, for me that beginning is 
 enough. To me that is not a story, but a tragedy. 
 I am so sorry for Mrs. MacDonald that I can't 
 think of anything else. But I think the explanation 
 is that the Scotch are essentially such a devout 
 
 213 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 people and live so closely within the shadow of 
 death itself that they may without irreverence or 
 pain jest where our lips would falter. Or else, 
 perhaps they don't care a cuss whether Sandy Mac- 
 Donald died or not. Take it either way. 
 
 But I am tired of talking of our faults. Let me 
 turn to the more pleasing task of discussing those 
 of the English. In the first place, and as a minor 
 matter of form, I think that English humour suffers 
 from the tolerance afforded to the pun. For some 
 reason English people find puns funny. We don't. 
 Here and there, no doubt, a pun may be made that 
 for some exceptional reason becomes a matter of 
 genuine wit. But the great mass of the English 
 puns that disfigure the press every week are mere 
 pointless verbalisms that to the American mind 
 cause nothing but weariness. 
 
 But even worse than the use of puns is the 
 peculiar pedantry, not to say priggishness, that 
 haunts the English expression of humour. To make 
 a mistake in a Latin quotation or to stick on a 
 wrong ending to a Latin word is not really an 
 amusing thing. To an ancient Roman, perhaps, it 
 might be. But then we are not ancient Romans ; 
 indeed, I imagine that if an ancient Roman could 
 be resurrected, all the Latin that any of our classical 
 
 214 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 scholars can command would be about equivalent 
 to the French of a cockney waiter on a Channel 
 steamer. Yet one finds even the immortal Punch 
 citing recently as a very funny thing a newspaper 
 misquotation of " urbis et orbis " instead of " urbi 
 et orbos" or the other way round. I forget which. 
 Perhaps there was some further point in it that I 
 didn't see ; but, anyway, it wasn't funny. Neither 
 is it funny if a person, instead of saying Archimedes, 
 says Archimeeds ; why shouldn't it have been 
 Archimeeds ? The English scale of values in these 
 things is all wrong. Very few Englishmen can pro- 
 nounce Chicago properly, and they think nothing 
 of that. But if a person mispronounces the name 
 of a Greek village of what O. Henry called " The 
 Year B.C." it is supposed to be excruciatingly 
 funny. 
 
 I think in reality that this is only a part of the 
 overdone scholarship that haunts so much of English 
 writing — not the best of it, but a lot of it. It is 
 too full of allusions and indirect references to all 
 sorts of extraneous facts. The English writer finds 
 it hard to say a plain thing in a plain way. He is 
 too anxious to show in every sentence what a fine 
 scholar he is. He carries in his mind an accumu- 
 lated treasure of quotations, allusions, and scraps 
 
 215 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 and tags of history, and into this, like Jack Horner, 
 he must needs " stick in his thumb and pull out a 
 plum." 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 is a 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, after all, is of far less moment than 
 might be supposed. It lies only on the surface. 
 Fundamentally, as I said in starting, the humour 
 of the two peoples is of the same kind and on an 
 equal level. 
 
 There is, however, one form of humour which 
 the English have more or less to themselves, nor do 
 I envy it to them. I mean the merriment that they 
 appear able to draw out of the criminal courts. To 
 me a criminal court is 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 ask no nearer acquaintance. But, according to 
 the newspapers, the courts, especially when a murder 
 case is on, are enlivened by flashes of judicial and 
 legal humour that seem to meet with general 
 
 316 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 approval. The current reports in the press run like 
 this : 
 
 " The prisoner, who is being tried on a charge of 
 having burned his wife to death in a furnace, was 
 placed in the dock and gave his name as Evans. 
 1 Did he say, " Evans " or " Ovens " ? ' asked Mr. 
 Justice Joy. The court broke into a roar in which 
 all joined but the prisoner." . . ,. Or take this : 
 " How many years did you say you served the last 
 time ? " asked the Judge. " Three," said the 
 prisoner. " Well, twice three is six," said the Judge, 
 laughing till his sides shook, " so I'll give you six 
 years." 
 
 I don't say that these are literal examples of the 
 humour of the criminal court ; but they are close 
 to it. For a judge to joke is as easy as it is for a 
 schoolmaster to joke in his class. His unhappy 
 audience has no choice but laughter. No doubt in 
 point of intellect the English judges and the Bar 
 represent the most highly trained product of the 
 British Empire. But when it comes to fun they 
 ought not to pit themselves against the unhappy 
 prisoner. Why not " take a man of their own 
 size " ? For true amusement Mr. Charles Chaplin 
 or Mr. Leslie Henson could give them sixty points 
 in a hundred. I even think I could myself. 
 
 217 
 
My Discovery of England 
 
 One final judgment, however, might with due 
 caution be hazarded. I do not think that, on the 
 whole, the English are quite as fond of humour as 
 we are. I mean they are not so willing to welcome 
 at all times the humorous point of view as we are 
 in America. The English are a serious people 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 have less need for jokes than we have. They 
 have higher things to talk about, whereas on our 
 side of the water, except when the World Series 
 is being played, we have few, if any, truly national 
 topics. 
 
 And yet I know that many people in England 
 would exactly reverse this last judgment and say 
 that the Americans are a desperately serious people. 
 That, in a sense, is true. Any American who takes 
 up with an idea such as New Thought, Psycho- 
 analysis, or Eating Sawdust, or any " uplift " of 
 the kind, becomes desperately lopsided in his 
 seriousness. And as a very large number of us 
 either cultivate New Thought or practise breathing 
 exercises, or eat sawdust, no doubt the English 
 
 visitors think us a desperate lot. 
 
 218 
 
Have the English any Sense of Humour ? 
 
 Anyway, it's an ill business to criticize another 
 people's shortcomings. What I said at the start was 
 that the British are just as humorous as are the 
 Americans or the Canadians or any of us across the 
 Atlantic. And for greater certainty I repeat it at 
 the end. 
 
 THE END 
 
 219 
 
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