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The 
 Egregious English 
 
 BY 
 
 angus mcneill 
 
 v>u<^-4. 
 
 
 New York : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 London: GRANT RICHARDS 
 
 1903 
 
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 THE LIBRARY OF 
 CONGRESS, 
 
 Two Copies Received 
 
 JAN 7 190? 
 
 iCopy nght Entry 
 
 ClfiASS ft; XXc. No. 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 Copyright, igo2, by 
 
 angus McNeill 
 
 Published, January, 1903 
 
 Ube TKntcfeerbocfeer press, mew JBorft 
 
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 CONTENTS 
 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. — Apollo 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 II. — The Sportsman 
 
 ■ 13 
 
 III. — The Man of Business . 
 
 20 
 
 IV. — The Journalist 
 
 28 
 
 V. — The Employed Person . 
 
 • 37 
 
 VI. — Chiffon .... 
 
 47 
 
 VII.— The Soldier . 
 
 ■ 59 
 
 VIII.— The Navy 
 
 ■ 7i 
 
 IX. — The Churches 
 
 • 79 
 
 X. — The Politician 
 
 . 90 
 
 XI. — Poets .... 
 
 . 103 
 
 XII. — Fiction .... 
 
 ■ 113 
 
 XIII. SUBURBANISM . 
 
 124 
 
 XIV. — The Man-about-Town . 
 
 ■ 137 
 
 XV.— Drink .... 
 
 144 
 
 XVI.— Food .... 
 
 ■ iS3 
 
 XVII. — Law and Order 
 
 . 163 
 
 XVIII. — Education 
 
 • 171 
 
 XIX. — Recreation 
 
 ■ 183 
 
 XX. — Stock Exchange 
 
 192 
 
 XXL— The Beloved . 
 
 199 
 
 111 
 
The Egregious English 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 APOLLO 
 
 It has become the Englishman's habit, one 
 might almost say the Englishman's instinct, 
 to take himself for the head and front of the 
 universe. The order of creation began, we 
 are told, in protoplasm. It has achieved at 
 length the Englishman. Herein are the cul- 
 mination and ultimate glory of evolutionary 
 processes. Nature, like the seventh-stand- 
 ard boy in a board school, "can get no 
 higher." She has made the Englishman, 
 and her work therefore is done. For the 
 continued progress of the world and all that 
 in it is, the Englishman will make due 
 
2 The Egregious English 
 
 provision. He knows exactly what is wanted, 
 and by himself it shall be supplied. There 
 is little that can be considered distinguish- 
 ingly English which does not reflect this 
 point of view. As an easy-going, entirely 
 confident, imperturbable piece of arrogance, 
 the Englishman has certainly no mammal- 
 ian compeer. Even in the blackest of his 
 troubles he perceives that he is great. "I 
 shall muddle through/' he says. He is ex- 
 pected and understood to muddle through; 
 and, muddle through or not, he invariably 
 believes he has done it. Sheer complacency 
 bolsters him up on every hand. At his going 
 forth the rest of the world is fain to abase 
 itself in the dust. He is the strong man, the 
 white man of white men. He is the rich, 
 clean sportsman, the incomparable, the fear- 
 less, the intolerable. And by " Englishman " 
 the world has learned not to mean " Briton." 
 The world has been taught to discriminate. 
 It has regarded the Britannic brotherhood; 
 and though it forgets that the Gael and the 
 Celt are Britons, it takes its Englishman for 
 
Apollo 3 
 
 a Briton, only with a difference. On the 
 other hand, it is keenly sensible of sundry 
 facts — as that it is the Englishman who rules 
 the waves and the Englishman upon whose 
 dominions the sun never sets ; that the British 
 flag is the English flag, the British army the 
 English army, and the British navy the Eng- 
 lish navy, and that Scotland and Ireland, 
 with Wales, are English appanages. It 
 would be foolish to assert that the English- 
 man has greatly concerned himself in either 
 the promulgation or the acceptance of these 
 notions. But he holds them dear, and they 
 are ineradicably planted in his subconscious- 
 ness. 
 
 One is inclined to think, however, that, 
 while the supremacy and superiority of the 
 Englishman have been received without tra- 
 verse in his own dominions, there are those 
 in outer darkness — on the Continent, in Ire- 
 land, and even in Scotland — who admit no 
 such supremacy and no such superiority. 
 Nay, there be persons breathing the breath 
 of life who, so far from looking upon the 
 
4 The Egregious English 
 
 Englishman with the eyes with which the 
 early savage must have regarded Captain 
 Cook, look upon him with the eyes with which 
 Captain Cook regarded the early savage. In 
 Ireland, particularly, hatred of the English 
 has become a deep-grounded national charac- 
 teristic. The French dislike of perfidious Al- 
 bion may be reckoned to a great extent an 
 intermittent matter. It sputters and flares 
 when a Fashoda or a Boer War comes along, 
 and it has a way of finding its deadliest ex- 
 pression in caricature. But the Irish hatred 
 is as persistent and concrete as it is ancient. 
 In Scotland the feeling about the English 
 amounts in the main to good-humoured tol- 
 erance, touched with a certain amazement. 
 The least cultivated of Scotsmen — and such 
 a man is quite a different being from the 
 least cultivated of Englishmen — will tell you 
 that "thae English" are chiefly notable by 
 reason of their profound ignorance and a 
 ridiculous passion for the dissipation of 
 money. The Scot of the middle class thinks 
 his neighbour is a feckless, foolish person 
 
Apollo 5 
 
 who would pass muster if he could be serious, 
 and who has got what he possesses by good 
 luck rather than by good management. Up 
 to a point both are right, for the English in 
 the mass are at once much more ignorant and 
 much less thrifty than the people of Scot- 
 land, and their good-nature and happy-go- 
 luckiness are things to set a Scot moralising. 
 Years ago Matthew Arnold put the right 
 names on the two more creditable and 
 powerful sections of English society. The 
 aristocracy he set down for Barbarians, the 
 middle class for Philistines. The aristo- 
 cracy were inaccessible to ideas, he said ; the 
 middle class admired and loved the aristo- 
 cracy. It is so to this day, and so to an 
 extent which is in entire consonance with the 
 circumstance that for sheer stupidity the Eng- 
 lishman of the upper class is without parallel, 
 while the Englishman of the middle class can- 
 not be paralleled for snobbishness. Arnold's 
 complaint that neither class was a reading 
 class or at all devoted to the higher matters 
 still holds. The great, broad-shouldered, 
 
6 The Egregious English 
 
 genial Englishman whom Tennyson sang 
 and at whom Arnold gibed is still with us. 
 That he is as great and as broad-shoul- 
 dered and as genial as ever nobody will deny. 
 And, broadly speaking, his outlook upon life 
 remains exactly what it was. To be ruddy 
 and healthy, to go out mornings with dogs, 
 to dine hilariously and dance evenings, 
 to be generous to the poor, and to hon- 
 our oneself and the King are the rule of his 
 life if he be a Barbarian ; and to ape these 
 things and consider them gifts of price, if he 
 be a Philistine. Since Arnold, however, the 
 Englishman, egregious though he undoubt- 
 edly was, has taken unto himself a new and 
 altogether alarming demerit. Out of his love 
 of health and ease and security and pleasure 
 and well-ordered materialism there has sprung 
 up a trouble which is like to cost him exceed- 
 ing dear— a trouble, in fact, which, if he be 
 not careful, will go far to emasculate him, if 
 not wholly to destroy him. Of the higher 
 matters, as has been said, he has taken but 
 the smallest heed. Writer fellows, painter 
 
Apollo 7 
 
 fellows, philosopher Johnnies, and so forth are 
 not of his world, except in so far as they may- 
 entertain his women-folk, or deck his halls 
 with commercial canvas, or assist him in the 
 eking out of his small talk before dessert. It 
 is not to be expected of him that he should 
 take to his heart persons whom he cannot by 
 any possibility understand. Even Arnold 
 could forgive him that failing. It was the 
 build of the man, the breed and constitu- 
 tion of him, that justified him. But since, 
 being English, he has found his way to the 
 unpardonable sin. It was well that he 
 should despise persons who, however much 
 they might think, did little and got little for 
 doing it. It was well that brains which 
 could not sit a horse, and preferred bed to 
 the moors, and had no rent-roll, should be 
 despised. It would have been well, too, if 
 that other kind of brains, which, beginning 
 with nothing, ends in millionairedom and 
 flagrant barbarianism, might also have con- 
 tinued to be despised and to be kept at arm's- 
 length. The great, broad-shouldered, genial 
 
8 The Egregious English 
 
 Englishman, however, has succumbed. Park 
 Lane has become a Ghetto ; my lord's house 
 parties reek of gentlemen with noses, and 
 names ending in "baum"; and the English 
 Houses of Parliament, the finest club in 
 Europe, the mother of parliaments, the most 
 dignified assemblage under the sun, is just a 
 branch of the Stock Exchange. As the ex- 
 ceedingly clever young man who recently 
 wrote a book about the Scot might say, this 
 shows what the English really are. 
 
 It has been remarked, and possibly not 
 without truth, that the Scot keeps the Sab- 
 bath and everything else he can lay his hands 
 upon. He is credited with being the per- 
 fect money-grubber; his desire for compe- 
 tence, we have been told by the clever young 
 man before mentioned, has blighted his soul 
 and brought him into opprobrium among 
 Turks and Chinamen. Well, the Scot does 
 look after money: he desires competence, he 
 loves independence; and, when he can get 
 them, ease and pleasure are gratifying to 
 him. If he comes off the rock and at- 
 
Apollo 9 
 
 tains affluence, he is not averse to the 
 goodnesses that affluence commands. He 
 will start a castle and a carriage and a 
 coat-of-arms with the best of them ; he will 
 lift up his family and leave his children 
 well provided for. In these connections he 
 is just as human as the next man; but he 
 never has played and he never will play the 
 English game of lavishness and wastefulness 
 and swaggering profusion, and, least of all, 
 will he play it on a basis of undesirable asso- 
 ciation. The Scotsman who has compassed 
 wealth, even though he be the son of a mole- 
 catcher or a sweetie-wife or a Glasgow beer- 
 seller, can always remember that there is 
 such a thing as spiritual integrity. And 
 though he may or may not boo and boo and 
 boo in accordance with the good old kindly 
 English legend, he certainly will not do it in 
 Jews' houses. This, I take it, is where he 
 has some little advantage over Englishmen. 
 Perhaps no finer indication of the English 
 spirit, and of the greed and corruption that 
 have overtaken it, could have been offered 
 
io The Egregious English 
 
 than has been offered by the trend of recent 
 events in South Africa. To go thoroughly 
 over the ground in such an essay as the 
 present is, of course, impossible ; to state the 
 arguments for both sides would be to repro- 
 duce writing of which everybody is heartily 
 tired. The battling newspapers have said 
 their say, and we are just beginning to feel 
 the comfort of a more or less reasonable 
 settlement. All that need be said here is 
 that the Englishman has not come out of 
 this war with anything like the honour and 
 the glory and the eclat that he has been ac- 
 customed to expect of himself in similar 
 undertakings. His bodily prowess, his hardi- 
 hood, his Spartan capacity for withstanding 
 the rigours of campaigning, his military abil- 
 ities, and his very patriotism have all had to 
 be called in question during the past two and 
 a half years. When he went out to the fray, 
 his cry was, " Ha! ha!" and the war was to 
 be over in six weeks. He had the finest 
 equipment, the finest munitions, the finest 
 men, the finest system, the world had seen. 
 
Apollo 1 1 
 
 He was as fit as a fiddle and as hard as nails, 
 and his love of music prompted him to take 
 a piano with him. Then the English and 
 they that dwell in outer darkness saw many- 
 things. They have been learning their les- 
 son ever since. They have learned that in 
 a fight the great, broad-shouldered, genial 
 Englishman, instead of being worth three 
 Frenchmen, is worth about the fiftieth part 
 of a Boer farmer. They have learned that the 
 great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman 
 is not above selling spavined horses and 
 stinking beef to the country that he loves. 
 And they have learned that when a great, 
 broad-shouldered, genial Englishman is dis- 
 covered in his incompetence or his culpable 
 negligence or his dishonour, it is the business 
 of all the other great, broad-shouldered, gen- 
 ial Englishmen to get round him and screen 
 him from the public gaze and swear that he 
 is a maligned and misunderstood man. The 
 incidents of the war alone, without any back- 
 ing or the smallest distortion or exaggera- 
 tion, have been quite sufficient to show that 
 
i2 The Egregious English 
 
 there is something rotten in the condition of 
 the English. It has been a tale of shame 
 and ignominy and disaster from beginning to 
 end. It has resulted in a peace which prac- 
 tically settles very little, and an inquiry with 
 closed doors. Verily Apollo must have a 
 care for his reputation in the Pantheon. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE SPORTSMAN 
 
 The Englishman who is not a sportsman 
 dares not mention the circumstance. In the 
 counties he must shoot and hunt, or be for 
 ever damned. In the towns he must have 
 daily dealings with a starting-price book- 
 maker and hourly news from the race-courses 
 and the cricket-pitches, otherwise English- 
 men decline to know him. " I am a sports- 
 man, sir," is the English shibboleth. "It is 
 the English love of manly sports that has 
 made the English paramount in every land 
 and on every sea." The Lord Chief Justice 
 of England rowed stroke for his college in 
 Oxford v. Cambridge in 1815, otherwise he 
 would not be Lord Chief Justice of England. 
 At eighteen the Lord Chancellor was one of 
 13 
 
1 4 The Egregious English 
 
 the best sprinters of his day, otherwise he 
 would never have dandled his little legs on 
 the Woolsack. Sir Henry Campbell-Banner- 
 man is a keen shot, and was one of a party 
 of seven who made the biggest bag on record 
 in 1865, otherwise he would never have been 
 Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Henry La- 
 bouchere is one of our most brilliant and 
 daring steeple-chase riders, otherwise he 
 would never have owned Truth. Mrs. Or- 
 miston Chant is a cricket enthusiast ; so are 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Joseph 
 Chamberlain, and Mr. Tommy Bowles. Lord 
 Roberts can take a hand at croquet with the 
 best young woman out of Girton, and Mr. 
 John Morley understands a race-horse almost 
 as well as he understands the Encyclopaedists. 
 In fact, the English eminent are either sports- 
 men or nothing, and all the other English 
 follow suit. 
 
 Now and again somebody gets up and 
 points out that betting is a great evil ; where- 
 upon the Duke of Devonshire opens one eye 
 and says that he never had a shilling on 
 
The Sportsman 15 
 
 a horse in his life. Then everybody says 
 that horse-racing is good for the breed of 
 horses, employing large amounts of capital 
 and large numbers of honest persons, and on 
 the whole a manly and profitable pastime. 
 Incidentally, too, it transpires that fox- 
 hunting is an equally noble and English 
 form of sport, and that when farmers cease 
 from puppy-walking, Britain may very well 
 drop the epithet "Great" from her name. 
 Or perhaps Mr. Kipling, fresh from the un- 
 pleasant truths of South Africa, conceives a 
 distich or two as to flannelled fools and mud- 
 died oafs. In response there is an immediate 
 and emphatic English howl. Why cannot 
 the little man stick to his Recessionals ? How 
 dare he call sportsmen like Ranji and Trott 
 and Bloggs and Biffkin flannelled fools, much 
 less the Tottenham Hotspurs and Sheffield 
 United muddied oafs ! Is it not true that the 
 battle of Waterloo was won on the playing- 
 fields of Eton ? Were not flannelled fools and 
 muddied oafs among the first to throw up 
 their home ties and fling themselves into the 
 
1 6 The Egregious English 
 
 imminent breach when the war broke out? 
 Are not cricket and football healthy and ad- 
 mirable old English sports, and pleasantly- 
 calculated to keep the youth of the country 
 out of much worse mischief on Saturday 
 afternoons? And so on right down the line. 
 The English are sportsmen. Sport is bred 
 in the bone of them. Less than a century 
 ago they were cock-fighting and man-fighting 
 in the splendid English way. They would 
 be doing it yet, if their own stupid laws did 
 not prevent them. Instead they race horses 
 and pursue the fox, watch cricket and foot- 
 ball matches, and play tennis and croquet 
 and ping-pong. It is sport that keeps Eng- 
 land sweet. If it were not for sport, the 
 English would cease to have red faces and 
 husky voices and check suits. One pre- 
 sumes, too, that if it were not for sport they 
 would entirely lose their sense of fair play, 
 their love of honest dealing, and that spirit 
 of self-sacrifice which notoriously informs all 
 their actions. It is sport that has made the 
 English the just est as well as the greatest of 
 
The Sportsman 17 
 
 the nations. It is sport which keeps her un- 
 spotted of the lower vices, such as drunken- 
 ness, indolence, and misspent Saturday after- 
 noons. It is sport which gives her a standard 
 of manliness, an all-day press, and a platform 
 upon which prince and pauper, the highest 
 and the lowest, meet as common men. Long 
 live sport! 
 
 Perhaps it is pardonable in a Scot to note 
 that the only forms of sport which can be 
 pronounced sane and devoid of offence came 
 out of Scotland. The grand instance in 
 point, of course, is the ancient and royal 
 game of golf. Without attempting to say a 
 word that would tend to exaggerate the 
 value of a pastime which is beloved by all 
 Scotsmen, and not without its appreciators 
 even in England, it seems fitting to remark 
 that in golf you have a game which, while 
 every whit as healthy, as manly, and as in- 
 vigorating as horse-racing, cricket, football, 
 and the rest of them, can never by any 
 chance become the mere kill-time of the idle, 
 unparticipating spectator or the prey of the 
 
1 8 The Egregious English 
 
 " professional," the ready-money bookmaker, 
 and the halfpenny journal. As to other 
 Scottish sports, one need not here particu- 
 larise ; but they are all healthy and honest in 
 the broadest sense, and with the single excep- 
 tion of football, which has been corrupted by 
 the English, they have not been allowed to 
 deteriorate into vices. The exploitation of 
 popular pastimes by covetous and unprin- 
 cipled persons is an unmistakable sign of 
 national decadence. In England that ex- 
 ploitation goes on without let or hindrance 
 and in almost every department. Protest 
 brings merely contempt and objurgation 
 upon the head of the protester, and the na- 
 tional virility continues to be slowly but 
 surely sapped away. That the English no- 
 tion of sport should permit of the orgies 
 of bloodshed, rowdyism, and partisanship 
 which take place in the coverts and on foot- 
 ball-fields, race-courses, and cricket-grounds 
 serves to indicate that, in spite of all that 
 has been said and sung in its praises, the 
 English notion of sport is an exceedingly sad 
 
The Sportsman 19 
 
 and sorry one. It is natural that a people 
 given over to display and the getting of 
 money for the sake of the more unnecessary 
 luxuries money can buy should in a great 
 measure lose its taste for outdoor sports of 
 the primal order. The English are losing 
 that taste at a rate which can leave no doubt 
 as to the ultimate upshot. In brief, the Eng- 
 lishman as sportsman worth the name seems 
 to be disappearing ; and in his place England 
 will have the adipose, plethoric, mechanical 
 slayer of birds who goes to his shoot in a 
 bath-chair, and the cadaverous, undersized, 
 Saturday-afternoon zealot, the chief joys of 
 whose existence are the cracking of filberts 
 and the kicking of umpires. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MAN OF BUSINESS 
 
 The English, all the world has heard, 
 are a nation of shopkeepers. They are un- 
 derstood to keep shop and to glory in it. 
 They have kept shop, with the other na- 
 tions for customers, ever since international 
 shopkeeping became a possibility. In the 
 beginning, one is afraid, their notion of 
 shopkeeping ran neither to fair trade nor 
 honest dealing ; but gradually there was built 
 up a system of commercial equity, the main 
 principle of which was the protection of one 
 shopkeeper against another and the security 
 of shopkeepers generally. 
 
 In course of time the English man of 
 business arose. He had a silk hat and ex- 
 pansive manners. He lived in a suburb 
 20 
 
The Man of Business 21 
 
 and read the Times on his way to busi- 
 ness in the morning. All day at his office 
 he would cheat no man, and his word was 
 as good as his bond. His office day was 
 a day of quite ten hours, and during those 
 ten hours he sweated like the proverbial 
 nigger. At nights he retired to his suburb, 
 and, with the wife and children whom he 
 kept there, ate to repletion from the joint, 
 washed it down with sherry and port sup- 
 plied to him by merchants of the type of the 
 late Mr. Ruskin's father; and, hey, presto! 
 by eleven of the clock he was deep among the 
 feathers. Twice on Sundays he went to 
 church and held the plate. To Sunday's 
 midday dinner he invited the vicar or a 
 curate, and there was always beef and batter- 
 pudding and improving talk, not to mention 
 cabbage and an extra special ' ' glass of wine, 
 sir." Other recreations the English man of 
 business had none, save and except perhaps 
 an occasional Saturday-afternoon drive in a 
 hired chaise with Mrs. Man-of-Business and 
 the children, and a still more occasional visit 
 
22 The Egregious English 
 
 to the theatre. In the long run, by the 
 practice of these virtues he amassed wealth. 
 He put his money into good bottoms; he 
 owed no man a penny; and as he never 
 robbed anybody and always lived miles 
 within his income, he had a conscience so 
 easy that it seemed to sleep. Everybody 
 respected him. He was in demand to take 
 the chair at the meetings of young men's 
 improvement societies, and to explain the 
 secret of his success ''free, gratis, and for 
 nothing" to the callow young men thereat 
 assembled. He would tell you unctuously 
 that he attributed his success (i) to early 
 rising, (2) to never wasting time [the split 
 infinitive was his], (3) to always saving at 
 least one third of his income, (4) to never 
 going bond for anybody, and (5) to marrying 
 Mrs. Man-of-Business — this last, of course, 
 with a chortle. So he wagged along and 
 helped to build up the commercial greatness 
 and probity and honour of his country. And 
 when he died he had a magnificent and costly 
 funeral and was attended to his last long 
 
The Man of Business 23 
 
 home by his weeping relict and sorrowing 
 sons and daughters. Next day there was an 
 account of Mr. Man-of- Business' s obsequies 
 in the local papers, and his sons proceeded to 
 carry on the concern. 
 
 That was forty years ago. To-day the 
 English man of business is a bird of an en- 
 tirely different and altogether more entranc- 
 ing feather. Indeed, it is a question whether 
 he has not ceased to be a man of business at 
 all. One might perhaps sum him up best by 
 saying that he has begun to have notions. 
 Whereas he was once the bulwark of the 
 Philistine class, he has now gone over, lock, 
 stock, and barrel — particularly barrel — to 
 the Barbarians. He lives in the manner, 
 style, and odour of Barbarism ; and the ruling 
 ambition of his existence is to pass for a 
 " county magnate," a man of birth and leis- 
 ure, rather than for a man of business. So 
 that he has entirely laid aside the character- 
 istics which distinguished his early and mid- 
 dle Victorian prototype. Breadth, girth, 
 weight, the substantial, the ponderous, are 
 
24 The Egregious English 
 
 not for him. He does not attribute his suc- 
 cess to early rising ; he does not boast that 
 his word is his bond; he does not slap his 
 sides when he laughs ; he never went to busi- 
 ness on a tram-car in his life ; and as for his 
 owing all he is to Mrs. Man-of-Business, it is 
 to his association with that charming be- 
 chiffoned, bejewelled little lady that he owes 
 all he owes. In other words, the new Eng- 
 lish man of business has made up his mind 
 that, if life is to be made tolerable at all, it 
 must be made tolerable through social ways. 
 That is to say, if one's income runs to a couple 
 of thousand a year out of a butter business, 
 one must live in precisely the manner of per- 
 sons whose incomes run to two thousand a 
 year out of lands and hereditaments. "The 
 glass of fashion and the mould of form' ' for a 
 person who would live is Mayfair. Lords 
 and dukes and the landed gentry have 
 houses in Mayfair; their wives and female 
 relatives flutter round in flashing equipages 
 and brilliant toilettes ; there is the theatre, 
 the opera, and other people's houses in the 
 
The Man of Business 25 
 
 evening, the Park on Sundays, the river in the 
 summer, Scotland in the autumn, and the 
 Riviera for the winter and early spring. 
 Lords and dukes and the landed gentry tread 
 this pretty round, and find both pleasure and 
 dignity in it. Why not the head of the old- 
 established firm of Margarine, Sons, Bros. 
 & Co.? Why not, indeed? Old Margarine, 
 founder of the house, never missed a day at 
 the office for forty years. Young Margarine 
 will tell you that, " after all, you know, it is 
 rather amusing to drop into the office some- 
 times and see the fellows sit up." All the 
 same, the business is a beastly bore, and 
 there are moments when he wishes it at the 
 deuce. 
 
 As for Mrs. Margarine, Mrs. Man-of- 
 Business, the erstwhile portly mother of 
 daughters and only begetter of her spouse's 
 success, really, if you saw her in her boudoir, 
 in her carriage, at Princes, at the opera, at 
 Brighton, or at Monte Carlo, you would not 
 recognise her. She is young and slim; her 
 hair is of flax ; she has rings on her fingers, 
 
26 The Egregious English 
 
 and probably bells on her toes; her dia- 
 monds are the envy of duchesses; "and as 
 for Margarine, my dear, I never think either 
 about it or him. My little boys are at Eton, 
 and Dickie is going into the Guards." Some- 
 times even Mr. and Mrs. Man-of-Business 
 manage to get presented. Then, as you may 
 say, their cup runneth over; hand in hand 
 they stand upon their Pisgah and stare at the 
 Pacific as it were. There are no more worlds 
 to conquer. They come down with a light 
 upon their faces, and Margarine, Sons, Bros. 
 & Co. can be hanged. In point of fact, Mar- 
 garine, Sons, Bros. & Co. sooner or later be- 
 comes Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co., Limited. 
 Margarine himself drops out, taking with him 
 all the money he can get. When he comes 
 to die, if you said " Margarine," he would do 
 his best to insult you. 
 
 That is all. Of course, I have taken an 
 extreme case, but apparently the desire of 
 the latter-day English man of business is 
 wholly in these directions. Be he in a great 
 or small way, he is fain to step westward ; he 
 
The Man of Business 27 
 
 is fain to live as the Barbarians and to be 
 undistinguishable from them. And rather 
 than be beaten he will enter into that king- 
 dom piecemeal. Surpluses that would have 
 gone to consolidation and extension in the 
 old days now go to personal and feminine 
 expenditure. Bond Street captures what the 
 wise would have dumped into Threadneedle 
 Street ; and instead of resting our hope upon 
 the business methods of Benjamin Franklin 
 and Samuel Budgett, our heart inclines to 
 the excellent precepts of our millionaire 
 friend " Yeth Indeed." Which is to say that 
 the English man of business, like the English 
 sportsman, is dying out of the land. Whether 
 his loss will be deplored by countless thou- 
 sands is another question. Anyway, he is 
 going. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE JOURNALIST 
 
 I am dealing here with the English jour- 
 nalist, because in my opinion, after the Eng- 
 lish sportsman and the English man of 
 business, there is nothing under the sun so 
 wonderfully English and so fearfully foolish. 
 The elegant and austere writer who gave us 
 The Unspeakable Scot has said much which 
 he no doubt hoped would lead people to be- 
 lieve that the British Press was entirely in 
 the hands of Scotsmen, and that this ac- 
 counted at once for its dulness and its con- 
 tinual advertisement of Scottish virtues. For 
 my own part, I have no hesitation in assert- 
 ing that Mr. Crosland's view of the situation 
 is quite a mistaken one. In any case, it is 
 
 obvious that, even if Fleet Street be, as Mr. 
 
 28 
 
The Journalist 29 
 
 Crosland suggests, eaten up with louts from 
 over the Border, the English journalist is not 
 yet wholly extinct, and somewhere in the 
 land the remnant of him stands valiantly to 
 its guns. It is well known, however, that, 
 as a fact, the remnant very largely outnum- 
 bers its hated rival, the proportion of Scots 
 to the proportion of Englishmen on the 
 staffs of most newspapers being probably 
 no higher than as one is to three. So that 
 for the stodginess and flat-footedness of the 
 English newspaper — the epithets are Mr. 
 Crosland' s own — the Englishman is at least 
 equally to blame with the Scot. Mr. Cros- 
 land' s main complaint against the newspaper 
 press of his country is that it lacks brilliance. 
 So far as I am aware, it has never before been 
 asserted that the function of a newspaper is 
 to be brilliant. News is news all over the 
 world. To write brilliantly of a dog-fight or 
 of the suicide of a defaulting clerk may be 
 Mr. Crosland 's ambition in life, but most per- 
 sons possessing such an ambition would trans- 
 fer their finical attentions from the field 
 
30 The Egregious English 
 
 of journalism to that of belles-lettres. No 
 doubt, if Mr. Crosland had his way, the morn- 
 ing papers, in which the soul of the average 
 Englishman so delighteth, would be pub- 
 lished from the Bodley Head or at the Sign of 
 the Unicorn, or haply at Mr. Grant Richards's. 
 It is not my intention, however, to enter 
 into a sort of ten nights' discussion with Mr. 
 Crosland. He has had his say and taken the 
 whipping he deserved. My business is with 
 the English journalist ; and while I shall not 
 descend to personalities in dealing with him, 
 I hope to show that his brilliance and liveli- 
 ness and smartness, though much vaunted, 
 are neither a boon nor a blessing either to 
 journalism as a force or to society at large. 
 I think that it may be fairly set down for a 
 fact that the fine flower and consummate ex- 
 pression of English journalism is the half- 
 penny newspaper. At any rate, nobody would 
 pretend to find in the halfpenny news- 
 paper the sententious dulness and flat-f ooted- 
 ness which are supposed to characterise the 
 j ournalistic work of the Scot . The smartness 
 
The Journalist 3 1 
 
 of the halfpenny press is indeed not even 
 American. There is but one epithet for it, 
 and that is English. Broadly speaking, its 
 appeal is directly and exclusively to the 
 bathotic. In England the bathotic has 
 always had the majority in its grip. The 
 majority notoriously has no mind. It is a 
 thing of one emotion, an instrument of one 
 stop. On that stop — the bathotic stop — the 
 English journalist makes a point of playing. 
 There has been a time in his history when he 
 believed in the educative possibilities and 
 duties of his profession. He long held with 
 the Scot that the Press was a power, and 
 that it was becoming that it should glory in 
 being a power for the betterment of the race. 
 After many shrewd searchings and commer- 
 cial gropings, the English journalist discov- 
 ered that the way to fame and fortune lay in 
 the mastery of the bathotic stop. He learned 
 to sing songs of Araby in one squalid key 
 every morning, and he has since been able to 
 keep a gig and out-circulate everything that 
 considers itself possessed of circulation. He 
 
3 2 The Egregious English 
 
 has played, as one might say, old Harvey with 
 the Daily Telegraph. He has put the Times to 
 the shame of being a journal that " nobody 
 reads." More than all, he has said flatly to 
 the English people, " You are a rabbit-brained 
 crowd, and here for your delectation and 
 your coppers is the worst that can be writ- 
 ten for you." 
 
 When England comes to her day of reck- 
 oning, in the hour when she shall see her 
 own mischance and is fain to remember 
 the names of her destroyers, none of them 
 will seem to her so flagrant and so to be 
 deprecated as the English journalist. "Be- 
 hold," she will say, "the monster who con- 
 vinced me that it was beautiful to split 
 infinitives; that it was elegant to begin six 
 paragraphs on one page with the blessed 
 statement, ' A dramatic scene was enacted in 
 Mr. Thingamybob's court yesterday'; that 
 good books are to be worthily pronounced 
 upon by sub-editors in the intervals of wait- 
 ing for the three o'clock winner; and 
 that, so far from being a reproach to one, 
 
The Journalist 33 
 
 the bathotic was the only honourable and 
 creditable attitude of mind." 
 
 If a man wish to perceive to what degraded 
 passes the art of writing may come and yet 
 retain the qualities of intelligibility and ap- 
 parent reasonableness, let him peruse the 
 morning papers and die the death. The 
 reek and offence of them smells to heaven. 
 They are a sure indication of the decadence 
 of the English mind and of the cupidity and 
 unscrupulousness of the English journalist. 
 There has been nothing like them, nothing to 
 compare with them, for cheapness and futility 
 and banality in the history of the world. They 
 are more to be fearful of than the pestilence, 
 inasmuch as they spell intellectual debase- 
 ment, the corruption of the public taste, and 
 the defilement of the public spirit. Their very 
 literal innocuousness condemns them. It is 
 their boast that they may be read in the fam- 
 ily without a blush. Their assumption of 
 morality and puritanical straitlacedness is 
 admirable. Beneath it there lie a licentious- 
 ness of purpose, a disregard for what is just, 
 
 3 
 
34 The Egregious English 
 
 and a contempt for what is decent and of 
 good report which are calculated to make the 
 angels weep. When one inquires into the 
 personnel of the staffs by which these papers 
 are run, one is confronted with exactly the 
 kind of man one expects to meet. First of 
 all, he is English, and as shallow and flippant 
 and irresponsible as only an Englishman can 
 be. The saving touch of seriousness does 
 not enter into his composition. He neither 
 reads nor thinks. Beer, billiards, and free 
 lunches, free entry to the less edifying places 
 of amusement, a minimum of work and a 
 maximum of pay, constitute his ideal of the 
 journalist's career, and he is always doing his 
 best to live up to it. Of responsibility to 
 anybody save his immediate chief, who, after 
 all, is only himself at a little higher salary, he 
 has not the smallest notion. His duty is 
 neither by himself nor by the public. All 
 that is expected of him is loyalty to his chief 
 and to his paper, and it is his pride and joy 
 that this loyalty is invariably forthcoming. 
 Very occasionally one hears that, in con- 
 
The Journalist 35 
 
 sequence of a change in the political policy 
 of a newspaper, the editor of that paper has 
 considered it to be his duty to resign his edi- 
 torship. Probably not more than two such 
 resignations have occurred in English jour- 
 nalism during the past twenty years. In 
 both instances the self-denying editors have 
 been held up by the English papers as sub- 
 lime examples of honour and martyrdom. 
 That there is nothing extraordinary in stick- 
 ing to one's principles, even though it means 
 loss of livelihood, does not appear to have 
 dawned upon the lively English mind. Of 
 course, it will be said that, if every member 
 of the staff of a newspaper, down even to the 
 junior reporters, were allowed to have be- 
 liefs and principles, and were not expected to 
 write anything in antagonism to them, an 
 exceedingly remarkable kind of newspaper 
 would result. Compromise, at any rate on 
 established matters, must be the rule of 
 the journalist's life. On the other hand, I 
 incline to the opinion that the English 
 journalist is far too swift to acquiesce in 
 
36 The Egregious English 
 
 doubtful procedure, and that where the mor- 
 als, good report, and high character of a paper 
 are concerned it is better to have a Scotch 
 staff than an English one. Nothing is more 
 characteristic of the English journalist of to- 
 day than the circumstance that he is literally 
 without opinions of his own. He takes his 
 opinions from his chiefs, just as his chiefs 
 take their opinions from their proprietors, or 
 from the wire-pullers with whose party the 
 paper happens to be associated. In a sense 
 it is impossible that it should be otherwise. 
 Yet you will find that in the main Scottish 
 journalists do have opinions of their own, and 
 that somehow they manage to be loyal to 
 them. For weal or woe the Scot is immov- 
 able and unchangeable as the granite of his 
 own hills. You can never get him to see that 
 half-measures are either desirable or neces- 
 sary. He will not stretch his conscience nor 
 palter with his soul for any man or any man's 
 money. The Englishman is all the other way 
 — that is why he makes such a nimble and 
 even brilliant journalist. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE EMPLOYED PERSON 
 
 The English are a nation of employed per- 
 sons. Wherever you go, from Berwick to 
 Land's End, you will find that in the main 
 the men you meet are somebody's employees. 
 The better kind of them possibly write " man- 
 ager" on their cards; some of them even are 
 managing directors; others, again, are part- 
 ners in wealthy houses or heads of such 
 houses. Yet, as I have said, they strike you 
 almost to a man as being in somebody's em- 
 ployment. Even the most prosperous of 
 them have the strained, repressed, furtive 
 look which comes of the long turning of other 
 people's little wheels; while the masses, the 
 employed English masses, give you, as re- 
 gards appearance, physique, and habit of 
 
 37 
 
38 The Egregious English 
 
 mind alike, an excellent notion of what a 
 galley-slave must have been. The fact of 
 being employed is indeed the only big and 
 abiding fact in the average Englishman's life. 
 It has its effect on the whole man from the 
 time of his youth to the time of his death ; it 
 influences his actions and the trend of his 
 thoughts to a far greater extent than any 
 other force — love and religion included. In 
 the Englishman's view, to be employed is the 
 only road to subsistence, and, if one be am- 
 bitious, the only road to honour. He must 
 work for somebody, otherwise he cannot be 
 happy. The notion of working for himself 
 appals him ; and if by any chance he be per- 
 suaded to take the plunge, the consideration 
 that he has no master weighs so heavily upon 
 him that his end is usually speedy ruin of one 
 sort or another. That is to say, he either 
 takes advantage of his freedom to the extent 
 of doing no work at all, or, in the absence of 
 the guiding hand, he loses his judgment and 
 throws to the winds the caution that kept 
 him his place. It is a pity, there can be no 
 
The Employed Person 39 
 
 doubt ; but the thing is in the English blood. 
 If you are an Englishman, you must be em- 
 ployed ; if you are unemployed, you are un- 
 happy, and worse. For a full century the 
 rich merchants, enterprising manufacturers, 
 colliery-owners, mill-owners, and what not, 
 in whom the English put their trust, have 
 been preaching and fomenting this doctrine 
 by every means in their power. To their aid 
 in spreading the glorious truth they have 
 brought the moralists and the Churches : " ' if 
 a man will not work, neither shall he eat.' 
 ' Servants, obey your masters.' Punctuality 
 is the soul of business. Be faithful over a 
 few things. Begin at the bottom rung of the 
 ladder. Mr. So-and-so, the notorious bil- 
 lionaire, was once a poor working-boy in 
 Manchester. Furthermore, if you don't work 
 and at our price — well, to say the least of it, 
 God will not love you." 
 
 And the English — poor bodies! — carry on 
 their lives accordingly. The whole scheme 
 of things is arranged to fit in with the ideas 
 of employers as to what work means, under 
 
4o The Egregious English 
 
 what conditions it should be performed, and 
 what should be its rewards. To live in the 
 manner pronounced to be respectable by the 
 moralists and the Churches, you must take 
 upon yourself exactly the labours, and no 
 others, prescribed by the employers. In 
 other words, to keep an eight-roomed house 
 with a piano in it, a wife with blouses and 
 four new hats a year, and a little family who 
 can go to church on Sunday mornings dressed 
 as well as any of them, you must keep Messrs. 
 Reachemdown's books, and pass through 
 your hands many thousands of Messrs. 
 Reachemdown's moneys, for a salary of £150 
 a year. When you get old and half blind 
 through years of poring over Reachemdown's 
 figures, they will pension you off at a pound 
 a week, and get a younger man to do the 
 work for the other £2. You, good, easy 
 Englishman, will, in your heart of hearts, 
 be exceedingly grateful to Reachemdown & 
 Reachemdown, and count it not the least of 
 your many blessings that you have never 
 wanted good work and kind employers. You 
 
The Employed Person 4 1 
 
 will say to your English son, " My boy, make 
 up your mind to serve people well, and in 
 your old age they will never forget you. 
 Always be industrious, obliging, and respect- 
 ful. Remember that a rolling stone gathers 
 no moss, and never forsake the substance for 
 the shadow. " And the chances are that your 
 fine English boy will do exactly what you, 
 his fine English father, have done. Indeed, 
 if he be old enough at the time of your "re- 
 tirement," he might very appropriately take 
 your place at Reachemdown & Reachem- 
 down's; then he will marry, he will live in a 
 house with a piano in it, his wife will have 
 four new hats a year, and his children will go 
 to church on Sundays as well dressed as any 
 of them. 
 
 On the whole, I should be sorry to say 
 that this sort of thing was not desirable. If 
 a nation is to be great, it is essential that it 
 should contain a large body of workers, and 
 the more industrious and dependable and 
 trustworthy that body of workers, the better 
 it is for the State and for the pillars and props 
 
42 The Egregious English 
 
 of the State, the employers included. But 
 the point is that the English take too much 
 credit for it and get too much ease out of it. 
 It has been complained by Mr. Crosland and 
 other masters of elegant English that the 
 Scot goes to London and the smaller indus- 
 trial markets and there enters into successful 
 competition with the English employed, and 
 it appears to annoy Mr. Crosland that the 
 Scot should not be content with good work, 
 say book-keeping from nine to six, good 
 wages, say £150 per annum, and kind em- 
 ployers, say Messrs. Reachemdown & Reach- 
 emdown, all his life. It seems to annoy him, 
 too, that the Scot never acquires that pa- 
 thetic satisfaction in being employed which 
 permeates the beautiful spirit of his English 
 competitor. You will meet hoary and bald- 
 headed Englishmen who will tell you with a 
 quaver that they have been in the employ- 
 ment of one and the same house, man and 
 boy, for over half a century, sir! Somehow 
 the Englishman tells you this with a look of 
 pride, and rather expects you to regard him 
 
The Employed Person 43 
 
 as a sort of marvel. It never occurs to him 
 that he is really bragging of his own inepti- 
 tude, — to use Mr. Crosland's favourite ab- 
 straction, — his own lack of enterprise. The 
 number of Scots who have been in the em- 
 ployment of one house for forty years, least 
 of all the number of Scots who brag about 
 it, is probably not a round dozen. As a gen- 
 eral rule, when a Scot has been in a house 
 forty years, it is his house. 
 
 Another matter in which the English em- 
 ployee appears to me to err mightily is his 
 treatment of his employer. In concerns of 
 great magnitude personal relations between 
 employer and employed are often impossi- 
 ble, because the employer seldom comes near 
 the place where his money is made for him. 
 Quite frequently, however, he is accessible; 
 yet the employee knows him not. He would 
 no more think of walking up and shaking 
 hands with him than he would think of 
 casting himself from the top of the factory 
 chimney-stack. It is the unwritten law of 
 the English that the employer is a better man 
 
44 The Egregious English 
 
 than the employed. For the employee to 
 say " How do ! " to the employer ; for the em- 
 ployee to meet the employer in the street and 
 omit to make respectful obeisances; for the 
 employee to assert anywhere outside his fa- 
 vourite pot-house that Jack's as good as his 
 master, would never do. If you are paid 
 wages, you must be grateful and respectful; 
 and though you know quite well that your 
 employer is paying you just as little as ever 
 he can, you must still respect him. Broadly 
 speaking, we manage these things better in 
 Scotland ; and, for that matter, the Scot man- 
 ages them better in England. The English 
 employee quirks and crawls before his em- 
 ployer, because he knows that his employer 
 can exercise over him powers which, if they 
 do not mean exactly life and death, do mean 
 a possibly long period of out-of-workness. 
 And out-of-workness is, as a rule, the most 
 fearful thing in life that can happen to an 
 Englishman, for the simple reason that he 
 never has anything behind him. If he has 
 been earning fifty pounds a year, he has 
 
The Employed Person 45 
 
 spent it all; if he has been earning a thou- 
 sand a year, he has spent it all and more to 
 it. With the Scot it is different. No matter 
 how small his earnings, he invariably con- 
 trives to save a portion of them. When he 
 has saved a hundred pounds, he is practically 
 an independent man, for a Scot with a hun- 
 dred pounds at his disposal can defy, and can 
 afford to defy, any employer that ever 
 breathed the breath of life. Besides, hun- 
 dred pounds or no hundred pounds, the Scot 
 will not grovel. He does his work and his 
 duty, and the rest can go hang. His days 
 are not spent in blissful contemplation of the 
 joys of being in good work; he has no anxi- 
 eties as to how long it is going to last; he 
 admits no superiorities; he is afraid of no 
 man. Some day, perhaps, the Englishman 
 will learn to take a leaf out of his book. The 
 Englishman will learn that to be employed, 
 excepting with a view to greater things than 
 subsistence, is to be in a condition which 
 borders very closely on degradation. He 
 will learn that services rendered and energies 
 
4 6 The Egregious English 
 
 expended for long periods of years without 
 adequate reward, and with only a pretence 
 at advancement, are a discredit and not an 
 honour. He will learn that a man 's a man, 
 and that it is no man's business to be so 
 faithful to another man that he cannot be 
 faithful to himself. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 CHIFFON 
 
 It pains me beyond measure to say it, but 
 I think there can be no doubt that the ac- 
 cumulated experience and wisdom of man- 
 kind goes to show that at the bottom of most 
 troubles there is a woman. Since Eve and 
 the first debacle, it has been woman all along 
 the line. I do not say that it is her fault, 
 but the fact remains. White hands cling to 
 the bridle-rein, and the horse proceeds ac- 
 cordingly. It is woman that shapes our 
 ends, rough-hew them as we will. She has a 
 delicate finger in everybody's pie. No mat- 
 ter who you are, some woman has got you by 
 a little bit of string. Occasionally you are 
 the better for being so entangled; but nine 
 times out of ten it is a misfortune for you. 
 
 47 
 
48 The Egregious English 
 
 When one comes to look closely at the de- 
 cadence of the English, and endeavours to 
 account for it in a plain way and without 
 fear or prejudice, one cannot help perceiving 
 that here again one has a pronounced case of 
 woman, woman, woman. Further, — and 
 once more I pray that I may not seem impo- 
 lite, — the woman with whom you have to 
 contend in England, though her hand be full 
 of power, is not, perhaps, a woman, after all. 
 I sometimes think that she may be best and 
 most properly expressed in the word " Chif- 
 fon." Whatever she may have been in the 
 past, however sweet, however demure, how- 
 ever capable, however beautiful, the English- 
 woman of to-day is just a foolish doll, a thing 
 of frills and fluff and patchouli, a daughter 
 of vanity, and a worshipper of dressmakers. 
 Under her little foot, under her mild, blue, 
 greedy eye, the Englishman has become a 
 capering carpet-knight, one who dallies at 
 high noon, a buck, a dandy, an unconvinced 
 flippancy, the shadow of his former self. Be 
 he father or merely husband of the fair, his 
 
Chiffon 49 
 
 case is pretty much the same. Both at home 
 (if he can find it in his heart to call his 
 conglomeration of cosey-corners home) and 
 abroad it is Chiffon that runs him. Chiffon 
 must have a house full of fal-lals: so must 
 the Englishman. Chiffon delights in Chip- 
 pendale that a sixteen-stone male person dare 
 not sit upon : so does the Englishman. Chif- 
 fon must dine late off French kickshaws with 
 champagne to them: so must the English- 
 man. Chiffon must not have more than two 
 children, whom she must visit and kiss once 
 a day : it is the same with the Englishman. 
 Chiffon does not like the way in which you 
 are running your newspaper: the English- 
 man forthwith runs his newspaper another 
 way. Chiffon does not like that cross-eyed 
 clerk of yours; she is sure there is some- 
 thing wrong about him ; she would n't trust 
 him with a hairpin, my dear ! He gets fired. 
 Chiffon is fond of motor-cars and tiaras of 
 diamonds and eight-guinea hats and three or 
 four new frocks a week, and she hates to be 
 worried about money matters. " Poor little 
 
50 The Egregious English 
 
 Chiffon!" says the good, kind Englishman; 
 "she shall be happy, even though we drift 
 sweetly toward Carey Street. We must keep 
 it up, though the heavens fall; and when I 
 come to think of it, I have read somewhere 
 of a man who had only £500 year, and is 
 now in receipt of £16,000 simply through 
 marrying an expensive wife." Lower down 
 the scale it is just the same : Chiffon will have 
 this, Chiffon will have that, and so will the 
 Englishman. It is only four-three a yard, 
 and it will make up lovely ! The Englishman 
 never doubts that it will. Chiffon discovers 
 that Chiffon next door has got an oak par- 
 lour-organ and a case of birds on the instal- 
 ment system. "She is getting them off a 
 Scotsman," says Chiffon; "and I want 
 some too." "Dry those pretty eyes," says 
 the Englishman ; " I will apply at once for an 
 extra two-bob a week, and it shall be done." 
 The children of Chiffon next door are " tak- 
 ing music lessons off a lidy in reduced circum- 
 stances." Chiffon's children are as good as 
 the children of Chiffon next door any day in 
 
Chiffon 5 1 
 
 the week — they, too, shall take music lessons. 
 The Englishman concurs. 
 
 This, of course, is all when you are mar- 
 ried to her. When you are Chiffon's fiance 
 (she would not have you say sweetheart or 
 lover for worlds), you enjoy what is com- 
 monly called in England a high old time. 
 First of all, she will flirt with you till your 
 reason rocks upon its throne. Then, when 
 you are about as confused as a little boy who 
 has fallen out of a balloon, she brings you 
 to the idiot-point, informs you that it is so 
 sudden and that she does n't quite know what 
 you mean, and asks you if you do not think 
 it would have been more manly on your part 
 to have spoken first with her papa. Being 
 an Englishman, and having nothing better 
 to do, you put up with it and go guiltily off 
 to Chiffon's delectable male parent. He in- 
 quires into your income in pretty much the 
 manner of a person who is going to lend you 
 £20 on note of hand only, grunts a bit, asks 
 to be excused while he has a word with the 
 missis ; comes back, says, " Yes, you can have 
 
52 The Egregious English 
 
 her," and next morning you find yourself on 
 the same old stool, in front of the same old 
 shiny desk, wondering what in the name of 
 heaven you have done. There is a three- 
 years' courtship, all starch and theatre-tickets 
 and bouquets and fretfulness and anxiety; 
 there is a wedding pageant, got up specially 
 for the purpose of annoying the neighbours; 
 you have a whirling twenty minutes before 
 a company of curates, who persist in calling 
 you by the wrong name; you go home in 
 shivers ; you drink soda-water to prevent you 
 from getting drunk; you make a speech in 
 the tone of a man who has just been hung; 
 you find yourself feeling rather queer aboard 
 the Dover packet, — and Chiffon is yours. 
 Such an experience at a time of life when a 
 man is callow, shy, full of nerves, and un- 
 versed in the serious matters of life is bound 
 to leave its mark upon the character. It 
 takes the heart out of most men, and some 
 of them never get it back again. It is an 
 English institution and a stupid one. Like 
 many another English institution, it has its 
 
Chiffon 53 
 
 basis in pretentiousness and display, instead 
 of in the vital issues of life. In Scotland we 
 make marriages on different and more serious 
 principles. There are no Chiffons in Scot- 
 land, whether maids or matrons. Conse- 
 quently in Scotland there are precious few 
 fools. Hard heads, sound sense, high spirits, 
 indomitable will, inexhaustible energy, are 
 not the offspring of mammas who know more 
 about cosmetics than about swaddling- 
 clothes, and who suckle their children out of 
 patent-food tins. One of the rebukers of Mr. 
 Crosland has pointed out with some pertin- 
 ence that the Scotswoman approximates 
 more closely to the Wise Man's view of what 
 a good wife should be than almost any other 
 kind of woman in the world. Here, as Mr. 
 Crosland would say, is Solomon : 
 
 Who can find a virtuous woman ? for her price is far 
 above rubies. 
 
 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, 
 so that he shall have no need of spoil. 
 
 She will do him good and not evil all the days of her 
 life. 
 
 She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly 
 with her hands. 
 
54 The Egregious English 
 
 She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her 
 food from afar. 
 
 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat 
 to her household, and a portion to her maidens. 
 
 She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit 
 of her hands she planteth a vineyard. 
 
 She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengthen- 
 ed her arms. 
 
 She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her 
 candle goeth not out by night. 
 
 She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands 
 hold the distaff. 
 
 She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she 
 reacheth forth her hands to the needy. 
 
 She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for 
 all her household are clothed with scarlet. 
 
 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth 
 among the elders of the land. 
 
 She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth 
 girdles unto the merchant. 
 
 Strength and honour are her clothing: and she shall 
 rejoice in time to come. 
 
 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her 
 tongue is the law of kindness. 
 
 She looketh well to the ways of her household, and 
 eateth not the bread of idleness. 
 
 Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her hus- 
 band also, and he praiseth her. 
 
 Yes, Mr. Crosland, it is "very, very, very 
 Scotch." What poor little Chiffon would 
 think of it, if it were put before her as a stan- 
 dard of wifely qualification and duty, nobody 
 but the Englishman knows. Perhaps she 
 
Chiffon 55 
 
 would shrug her shoulders and say, "How 
 absurd!" Perhaps she would not under- 
 stand it at all. 
 
 The Englishwoman's love of petty display 
 and cheap fripperies, her desire to outshine 
 the neighbours and to put all she has on her 
 back, and to pass everywhere for a woman 
 of means and station, no doubt had its be- 
 ginning in a laudable anxiety to make the 
 best of things. Unfortunately, however, the 
 tendency has been developed out of reason, 
 to the neglect of the qualities which make a 
 woman the inspiration and strength of a 
 man's life. To dress, and to talking and 
 thinking about it, the Englishwoman devotes 
 unconscionable hours. The bare business of 
 robing and disrobing takes up pretty well half 
 her waking day. Her transference from the 
 bath to the breakfast-table cannot be accom- 
 plished under fifty minutes. Before she will 
 appear in the open she will make yet another 
 toilet. She is a full twenty minutes tidying 
 herself before lunch. In the afternoon there 
 is an hour of getting into tea-gowns; and, 
 
5 6 The Egregious English 
 
 crowning rite of all, my lady " strips" for 
 dinner. From morn to dewy eve her little 
 mind is busy with dress. The shopping, over 
 which she makes such a fuss, is almost in- 
 variably a matter of new frocks, new hats, 
 new shoes, new feathers, matching this, ex- 
 changing that, sitting on high stools before 
 pomatumed counter-skippers, and dissipat- 
 ing, in the purchase of sheer superfluities, 
 gold that men have toiled for. Her visiting 
 is equally an unmitigatedly dressy matter; 
 she goes to see her friends' frocks, not her 
 friends, and it is the delight of her soul to 
 turn up in toilettes which render her friends 
 frankly and miserably envious. Of the real 
 purport of clothes she knows nothing; and 
 if you endeavour to explain it to her, she 
 will charge you with the wish to make an old 
 frump of her before her time. As for the ex- 
 pense of it all, she never bothers her pretty 
 head about money matters; she tells you in 
 the most childlike way that her account at 
 the bank seems to be perpetually overdrawn, 
 but that " Randall is a dear, kind boy, 
 
Chiffon 57 
 
 though he does swear a bit when some of the 
 bills come in. Besides," she says, "I am 
 sure it helps him in his profession to have a 
 well-dressed wife." 
 
 And the pity of it is, that quite frequently 
 the person upon which these adornments are 
 lavished is really not worth the embellish- 
 ment, and would indeed be far better served 
 and make a far better show in the least elab- 
 orate of garments. For, notoriously, the 
 physique of the Englishwoman of the middle 
 and upper classes is not now what it was. In 
 height, in figure, in suppleness and grace of 
 build, the Scottish woman can give her Eng- 
 lish sister many points. In the matter of 
 facial beauty, too, the Englishwoman cannot 
 be said particularly to shine. At a Drawing- 
 Room, at the opera, the beauty of England 
 spreads itself for your gaze ; and the amazing 
 lack both of beauty and the promise of it 
 appals you. If we are to believe the society 
 papers, there is not an ugly nor a plain-feat- 
 ured woman of means in all broad England. 
 Every week the English illustrated journals 
 
5 8 The Egregious English 
 
 give you pages of photographs, beneath 
 which you may read in entrancing capital 
 letters, "The beautiful Miss Snooks," or 
 ' 'Lady Beertap's two beautiful daughters." 
 Yet the merest glance at those photographs 
 convinces you that Miss Snooks is about as 
 good-looking as the average kitchen- wench, 
 while the two beautiful daughters of Lady 
 Beertap have faces like the backs of cabs. 
 The fact is, that the so-called English beauty 
 is a rare thing and a fragile thing. Fully 
 seventy-five per cent, of Englishwomen are 
 not beautiful to look upon. Of the other 
 twenty-five per cent., one here and there — 
 perhaps one in a thousand — could stand be- 
 side the Venus of Milo without blenching. 
 For the rest, they have a girlish prettiness 
 which accompanies them into their thirtieth 
 year, and sickens slowly into a sourness. At 
 forty, little Chiffon, who was so pretty at 
 twenty, has crow's-feet and flat cheeks, and 
 a distinct tendency to the nut-cracker type of 
 profile. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE SOLDIER 
 
 "With a tow-row-row-row-row-row for 
 the British Grenadiers!" Which, of course, 
 means the English Grenadiers, inasmuch as 
 there never were any Scottish Grenadiers. 
 To-day, however, the English do not sing 
 this song. Their grandfathers delighted in 
 it, and the tune still survives as a soldier- 
 man's march. But when the modern Eng- 
 lish wish to celebrate the English soldier 
 vocally, they do it in their own decadent, 
 bathotic way. They have an idiot-song 
 called Tommy Atkins. The chorus of it goes 
 somewhat in this wise : 
 
 Oh! Tommy, Tommy Atkins, 
 
 You're a good 'un, heart and hand; 
 
 You're a credit to your nation 
 And to your native land. 
 
 59 
 
60 The Egregious English 
 
 May your hand be ever ready! 
 
 May your heart be ever true! 
 God bless you, Tommy Atkins! 
 
 Here 's your country's love to you! 
 
 And since the outbreak of the late war, at 
 any rate, the English do not speak of soldiers, 
 but of Tommies; and the principal English 
 poet has gone farther, and dubbed them Ab- 
 sent-Minded Beggars. Since the outbreak 
 of the war, too, it has been necessary to 
 issue from time to time words of caution 
 to the great English public. Lord Roberts 
 — "Little Bobs," I suppose, I should call him, 
 in the choice English fashion — has on two or 
 three occasions deemed it advisable to let it 
 be known that his desire was that the great 
 English public should discontinue the prac- 
 tice of treating Cape-bound or returned 
 Tommies to alcoholic stimulants, and .sub- 
 stitute therefor mineral waters or cocoa. This 
 was very wise on Little Bobs's part, and 
 it has no doubt saved at least two Cape- 
 bound or returned Tommies from the degrada- 
 tion of an almighty drunk. I mention this 
 because it illustrates in an exceedingly quaint 
 
The Soldier 61 
 
 way the attitude of the English towards the 
 soldier. When there is war toward, the sol- 
 dier is absolutely the most popular kind of 
 man in England. In peace-time an English 
 soldier is commonly credited with being so- 
 cially vile and unpresentable. There is a 
 popular conundrum which runs, "What is 
 the difference between a soldier and a meer- 
 schaum pipe?" and the answer, I regret to 
 say, is, "One is the scum of the earth, and 
 the other the scum of the sea." Tommy's 
 place in the piping times of peace is just at 
 the bottom of the social ladder; there he 
 must stay, and drink four ale, and smoke 
 cheap shag, and sit at the back of the gallery 
 in places of amusement. Then war comes 
 along, and the English bosom expands to the 
 sound of the distant drum, and to the rumour 
 of still more distant carnage. Who is it that's 
 a-working this 'ere blooming war? Blest if 
 it ain't our old friend Tommy Atkins ! Fetch 
 him out of the four-ale bar at once. The 
 nation's heroes have no business in four-ale 
 bars. The saloon bar is the place for them, 
 
62 The Egregious English 
 
 and the barmaid shall smile upon them, and 
 they shall have free drinks and free cigars till 
 all's blue; for they are the nation's heroes, 
 and they deserve well of their country. Fur- 
 thermore, if they wish to visit those great 
 and glorious centres of enlightened entertain- 
 ment commonly called the Halls, they shall 
 no longer be stuffed obscurely away in the 
 rear portion of the gallery, but they shall 
 come out into the light of things ; they shall 
 come blushingly and amid acclaim into the 
 pit or the stalls, or, for that matter, into any 
 part of the 'ouse. 
 
 Throughout the war this has been so. It 
 was so till yesterday. But the ancient Eng- 
 lish smugness has begun to assert itself once 
 more; and Tommy — dear Tommy, God- 
 bless-you Tommy, in fact — finds staring him 
 in the face, as of yore, " Soldiers in uniform 
 not served in this compartment" ; "Soldiers 
 in uniform cannot be admitted to any part 
 of this theatre except the gallery." The 
 English Kipling hit the whole matter off in 
 his vulgar way when he wrote Tommy: 
 
The Soldier 63 
 
 I went into a theatre as sober as could be; 
 
 They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'ad n't none for 
 
 me; 
 They sent me to a gallery, or round the music-'alls; 
 But when it comes to fightin' — Lord! they'll shove me 
 
 in the stalls! 
 
 For it ' s Tommy this and Tommy that , an' ' ' Tommy , 
 wait outside"; 
 
 But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the 
 trooper 's on the tide — 
 
 The troopship's on the tide, my boys — the troop- 
 ship's on the tide: 
 
 Oh! it's "Special train for Atkins" when the 
 trooper 's on the tide. 
 
 We were told that this war, if it were 
 doing England no other good, was at least 
 bringing her to a right understanding of the 
 soldier-man. It was teaching her to take 
 him by the hand, to recognise in him a cred- 
 itable son and an essential factor in the State. 
 It has ended in the way in which pretty well 
 every English revival does end — namely, in 
 smoke. Though England has as much need 
 of the soldier and is as much dependent upon 
 him for peace and security as any other 
 nation, she has never been able — excepting, 
 as I have said, in time of war — to bring her 
 greedy mind to the pass of doing him the 
 
64 The Egregious English 
 
 smallest honour or of rendering to him that 
 measure of social credit which is obviously 
 his by right. 
 
 That the English Tommy is not altogether 
 a delectable person, however, goes, I think, 
 without saying. According to General Bul- 
 ler and other more or less competent author- 
 ities, the men in South Africa were splendid. 
 I do not doubt it in the least. On the other 
 hand, the "returns" from that country have 
 not struck one as reaching a high standard 
 of savouriness or manliness; and, however 
 splendid he may have been as a campaigner, 
 as an ex-campaigner the English Tommy has 
 scarcely shone ; so that in a sense the changed 
 attitude of the English public mind towards 
 him is not to be wondered at. 
 
 Elsewhere in this essay I have pointed out 
 that the late war has not reflected any too 
 much credit upon that chiefest of snobs — 
 the English military officer. To go into the 
 army has long been considered good form 
 among the English Barbarians, and to be an 
 officer in a swagger regiment may be reckoned 
 
The Soldier 65 
 
 one of the best passports to English society. 
 It gives a man a tone, and puts him on a 
 footing with the highest, because an officer is 
 a gentleman in a very special sense. But it is 
 well known that, during the past half -cen- 
 tury or so, the English Barbarians have been 
 too prone to put their sons into the army for 
 social considerations only, and without re- 
 gard to their qualification or call for the pro- 
 fession of arms. And in the long result it 
 has come to pass that the English army is 
 officered by men who know as little as pos- 
 sible and care a great deal less about their 
 profession, and are compelled to leave the 
 instruction, and as often as not the leader- 
 ship, of their men to non-commissioned 
 officers. Over and over again in the South 
 African campaign it was the commissioned 
 officer who blundered and brought about 
 disaster, and the non-commissioned officers 
 and the horse sense of the rank and file that 
 saved whatever of the situation there might 
 be left to save. Probably the true history 
 of the British reverses, major and minor, in 
 
66 The Egregious English 
 
 South Africa will never be made public. But 
 I believe it can be shown that in almost 
 every instance it was the incapacity or re- 
 missness of the English commissioned officer 
 which lay at the root of the trouble. The 
 fact is, that the monocled mountebank who 
 is in the army, don't you know, seldom or 
 never understands his job. He is too busy 
 messing, and dancing, and flirting, and philan- 
 dering, and racing, and gambling, and speed- 
 ing the time merrily, ever to learn it. That 
 the honour of Britain, and the lives of Eng- 
 lishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, should be 
 in his listless, damp hand for even as long as 
 five minutes is an intolerable scandal. That 
 he should haw and haw, and yaw and yaw, 
 on the barrack-square, and take a salary out 
 of the public purse for doing it, shows exactly 
 how persistently stupid the English can be. 
 Of course, the common reply to any attack 
 upon these shallow-pated incompetents is 
 that you must have gentlemen for the King's 
 commissions, and that the pay the King's 
 commissions carry is so inadequate that no 
 
The Soldier 67 
 
 gentleman unpossessed of private means can 
 afford to take one. This is a very pretty- 
 argument and exceedingly English. The 
 money will not run to capable men; there- 
 fore let us fling it away on fools. Army re- 
 form, sweeping changes at the War Office, 
 new army regulations, an army on a busi- 
 ness footing, and so on and so forth, are 
 always being clamoured for by the English 
 people, and always being promised by the 
 English Government. But until the day 
 when the granting of commissions and pro- 
 motion are as little dependent upon social 
 influence and the influence of money as ad- 
 vancement in the law or advancement in the 
 arts, the English army will remain just where 
 it is and just as rotten as it is. 
 
 For downright childishness the modern 
 English soldier, whether he be officer or file- 
 man, has perhaps no compeer. When the 
 South African War broke out, Tommy and 
 his officers were men of scarlet and pipe-clay 
 and gold lace and magnificent head-dresses. 
 Also all drill was in close order ; you were to 
 
68 The Egregious English 
 
 shove in your infantry first, supported by 
 your artillery, and deliver your last brilliant 
 stroke with your cavalry. The men should 
 go into the fray with bands playing, flags 
 flying, and dressed as for parade. You com- 
 menced operations with move No. i ; the 
 enemy would assuredly reply with move No. 
 2 ; you would then rush in with move No. 3 ; 
 there would be a famous victory, and the 
 streets of London would be illuminated at 
 great expense. In South Africa matters did 
 not quite pan out that way; the enemy de- 
 clined absolutely to play the stereotyped 
 war-game, for the very simple reason that 
 they did not know it, and that South Africa 
 is not quite of the contour of a chess-board. 
 And so the English had to change their cher- 
 ished system, and to learn to ride, and to 
 throw their pretty uniforms into the old- 
 clothes baskets, and to get out of their old 
 drill into a drill which was no drill at all, and 
 to give up resting their last hope on the 
 British square, and to get accustomed to 
 deadly conflict with an enemy whom they 
 
The Soldier 69 
 
 never saw and who never took the trouble to 
 inform them whether they had beaten him 
 or not. It was all very trying and all very 
 bewildering, and it is to the credit of the 
 English army that in the course of a year or 
 two it did actually manage to understand 
 the precise nature of the work cut out for it 
 and made some show of dealing with it in a 
 workman-like way. 
 
 Here was a lesson for us, and we learned it. 
 An Englishman, you know, can learn any- 
 thing when he makes up his mind to it. And 
 he has learned this South African lesson 
 thoroughly well ; so well, indeed, that it looks 
 like being the only lesson he will be able to 
 repeat any time in the next half-century. 
 For what has he done? Well, to judge by 
 appearances, we must reason this way: "I 
 was not prepared for this South African 
 business. It was a new thing to me. It 
 gave me a new notion of the whole art and 
 practice of war. The old authorities were 
 clean out of it. Therefore I solemnly abjure 
 the old authorities. For the future I wear 
 
70 The Egregious English 
 
 slouch-hats and khaki and puttees and a 
 jacket full of pockets, and I drill for the 
 express notion that I may some day meet a 
 Boer farmer. The entire sartorial and gen- 
 eral aspect of my army shall be remodelled 
 on lines which might induce one to think 
 that the sole enemy of mankind was Mr. 
 Kruger, and the great military centre of the 
 world was Pretoria." It does not seem to 
 occur to the poor body that his next great 
 trial is not in the least likely to overtake 
 him in South Africa. He has had to fight 
 on the Continent of Europe before to-day, 
 and I shall not be surprised if he has to do 
 it again before many years have passed over 
 his head. Yet, wherever his next large fight- 
 ing has to be done, you will find that he will 
 sail into it in his good old infantile, stupid 
 English way, armed cap-a-pie for the special 
 destruction of Boers. It is just gross want of 
 sense, and that is all that can be said for it. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE NAVY 
 
 Since Trafalgar, the English navy has 
 been the apple of the Englishman's eye. He 
 holds that the English power is a sea-power ; 
 that these leviathans afloat, the King's ships, 
 are his first line of defence ; and that so long 
 as he keeps the English navy up to the mark 
 he can defy the world. His method of keep- 
 ing it up to the mark is most singular. It 
 consists of tinkering with old ships genera- 
 tion after generation, laying down new ones 
 which seemingly never get finished, and of 
 being chronically short of men. The naval 
 critics of England may be divided sharply 
 into two camps. In the one we have a 
 number of gentlemen who are naval critics 
 simply because they happen to be connected 
 71 
 
72 The Egregious English 
 
 with newspapers. These young persons 
 are naturally anxious to do the best that 
 can be done for their papers and for them- 
 selves. They recognise that if they are to 
 be in a position to obtain immediate and 
 first-hand information — not to say exclusive 
 information — as to naval doings, they must 
 stand well with the Admiralty and the au- 
 thorities. The Admiralty and the authori- 
 ties are not in need of adverse critics. What 
 they like and what they will have are smily, 
 wily reporters, who will swear with the offi- 
 cial word, see with the official eye, and take 
 the rest for granted. In the other camp of 
 naval critics you have a bright collection of 
 book-compilers, naval architects, and patent- 
 mongers, all of whom have some sort of fad 
 to exploit or some private axe to grind. 
 Hence the amiable English taxpayer knows 
 just as much at the present moment about 
 his navy as he knew three years ago about 
 his army. In spite of the perfervid assur- 
 ances of Mr. Kipling, and of the ill- written, 
 anti-scare manifestoes of the morning papers, 
 
The Navy 73 
 
 the English taxpayer knows in his heart that 
 all is not so well as it might be with the Eng- 
 lish navy. What is wrong the English tax- 
 payer cannot tell you; but there it is, and 
 he has a sort of feeling that, when the big 
 sea-tussle comes, the English navy, being 
 tried, will be found wanting. Herein I think 
 he shows great prescience. The superstition 
 to the effect that the English rule the waves 
 has of late begun to be known for what it is. 
 There are nowadays other Richmonds in the 
 field, all bent on doing a little wave-ruling 
 on their own account. And after the first 
 start of surprise and astonishment, the sleepy, 
 slack, undiscerning Englishman has just let 
 things go on as they were, and has just dilly- 
 dallied what time the new wave-rulers were 
 building and equipping the finest battle-ships 
 that modern science can put afloat, and mak- 
 ing arrangements for the acquisition of as 
 much naval supremacy as they can lay their 
 hands on. And whether the English navy 
 be or be not as efficient as the Admiralty and 
 the admirals would have us believe, it is 
 
74 The Egregious English 
 
 quite certain that, in consequence of bud- 
 ding wave-rulers, the English navy is not, on 
 the whole, so formidable a weapon or so im- 
 pregnable a defence as it ought to be. The 
 fact is, that in the matter of naval strength, 
 offensive and defensive, the English are just 
 a quarter of a century behind. They slept 
 whilst their good friends the French, the 
 Russians, and the Germans were climbing 
 upward in the dark ; and when they woke it 
 was to perceive that another navy had sprung 
 into existence by the side of the English 
 navy, and that the task of catching up, of 
 putting the old navy into a position of ab- 
 solute supremacy over the new, was well- 
 nigh an impossible one. You cannot build 
 line-of-battle ships in an hour. Further- 
 more, the yards of England, though capable 
 of extraordinary achievements, are not ca- 
 pable of a greater output than the yards 
 of France, Russia, and Germany conjoined. 
 Half a century ago the English had a dis- 
 tinct and preponderating start. When the 
 other powers began to show increased activ- 
 
The Navy 75 
 
 ity in the matter of shipbuilding, the Eng- 
 lish said, "It is of no consequence; let 'em 
 build." They threw their start clean away. 
 The probabilities are that they will never be 
 able to regain it. 
 
 Quite apart from the large general ques- 
 tion, however, and granting that on paper 
 England's sea-power is equal to that of any 
 three powers combined, it cannot have 
 escaped the attention of the interested that 
 the foreign naval experts view our whole 
 flotilla with a singular calm, and appear to 
 be quite amused when we talk of naval 
 efficiency and advancement. It is pretty 
 certain that this calm and this amusement 
 are not based entirely in either ignorance or 
 arrogance. Ships built and fitted in Contin- 
 ental yards may lack the advantage of being 
 English built, but they are fighting -ships 
 nevertheless, and they have not much to 
 lose by comparison with the best English 
 fighting-ships, even when the comparison is 
 made by English experts. Indeed, it is very 
 much open to question whether some of the 
 
76 The Egregious English 
 
 Continental ships are not a long way ahead 
 of some of the best English ships in destruc- 
 tive power and possibilities for fight. Of 
 course the common reply to this is, that it is 
 no good having a fine machine unless you 
 have the right man to handle it. And Jack, 
 of course, — the honest English Jack, — is the 
 only man in the world that really knows how 
 to handle fighting-ships. Well, it may be so, 
 or it may not be so. The Englishman will 
 undoubtedly keep his engines going and 
 stick to his guns till chaos engulfs him. It 
 seems possible, too, that he has made him- 
 self thoroughly familiar with every detail of 
 the machine he has got to work, and that he 
 knows his business in a way which leaves 
 precious little room for more intimate know- 
 ledge. In spite of all this, however, it 
 cannot be denied that the Continental navy- 
 man is slowly but surely creeping up to the 
 English standard. That as a rule he is a 
 man of better family than the English navy- 
 man, that his conditions of service are more 
 favourable, and that his food and accommo- 
 
The Navy 77 
 
 dation are better, are all in his favour. He 
 may lack the steadiness and the grit of the 
 old original English hearts of oak. Still, he 
 is coming on and making progress ; whereas 
 the old original English hearts of oak do not 
 appear to be getting much "forrader." Be- 
 sides, it is well known that the English do 
 not possess anything like enough of them, and 
 those whom they do possess have such a love 
 for the service that they take particularly 
 good care to warn would-be recruits off it. 
 
 From time immemorial the English have 
 made a point of treating the saviours of their 
 country meanly and shabbily. In the Crimea 
 the English troops were half-starved and 
 went about in rags, while a lot of broad- 
 shouldered, genial Englishmen made fortunes 
 out of army contracts. It was the same in 
 the Transvaal, and it will be the same when- 
 ever England is at war. In peace-time she 
 does manage to keep her soldiers and sailors 
 decently dressed, but it is notorious that she 
 nips them in the paunch, and that the roast 
 beef and plum-pudding and flagons of Octo- 
 
78 The Egregious English 
 
 ber which are supposed to be the meat and 
 drink of John Bull are not considered good 
 for his brave defenders. A beef -fed army 
 and a beef -fed navy are what Englishmen 
 believe they get for their money. The rank 
 and file of the army and navy are better in- 
 formed. With a navy that is undersized, 
 undermanned, underfed, and underpaid, the 
 English chances of triumph, when her real 
 strength is put to the test, are problemati- 
 cal. Meanwhile, we may comfort ourselves 
 with Mr. Kipling and the Daily Telegraph. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE CHURCHES 
 
 The English have one sauce. But the 
 number of their religions is as the sands of 
 the sea. Roughly speaking, they divide 
 themselves religiously into two classes — An- 
 glicans and Nonconformists. The Anglicans, 
 one may say, are reformed Catholics; the 
 Nonconformists, reformed Anglicans. Appar- 
 ently all English religions — with the excep- 
 tion, of course, of the Catholic religion, which 
 is not counted — date from or since the Re- 
 formation. We know what the Reformation 
 means in Scotland, though the English no- 
 tion of it seems to be a trifle vague. We also 
 know in Scotland what religion means. I 
 doubt if the English have any such know- 
 ledge. One has only to visit an average 
 
 79 
 
80 The Egregious English 
 
 Anglican or Nonconformist church on the 
 Sabbath to perceive that in England religion 
 is under a cloud and has almost ceased to be 
 a spiritual matter. In the first place, you 
 will notice that the congregation is for the 
 most part composed of women and children. 
 Englishmen are too busy or too bored to go 
 to church on the Sabbath. What little faith, 
 what little religious fervour or feeling, they 
 ever possessed has been knocked out of them, 
 and they no longer go to church. And this 
 change has been accomplished, not by the 
 failure of dogmas, not by the spread of free- 
 thought, not by secularists, anti-clericalists, 
 or philosophers, but simply by an indolent 
 clergy on the one hand and cheap railway 
 fares on the other. The mediocre preacher 
 and the new-fangled English week-end have 
 emptied the churches of England's manhood. 
 The women and children are left, a puling, 
 bemused crowd, and to these the English 
 shepherds and pastors blate • heir cheap ritual 
 and read their ill-considered sermons. 
 
 It is curious to note how easily an English 
 
The Churches 81 
 
 parson or Nonconformist minister can make 
 a reputation for greatness as a preacher. Let 
 him be just a little more competent than the 
 average, and people flock to hear him. I 
 doubt if there is a really great preacher alive 
 in England to-day. Yet there are three or 
 four who pass for great, and who are sup- 
 posed to be in line with St. Paul, John Knox, 
 and Wesley. To give instances would be in- 
 vidious, but I have no hesitation in asserting 
 that the preachments offered in London at 
 the three or four great churches which are 
 supposed to enshrine orators are, as a rule, 
 exceedingly feeble efforts, tricked out with 
 gauds and mannerisms, packed with trite 
 sentiment, and utterly devoid of doctrine, 
 inspiration, and value. There are not three 
 bishops on the English bench that can fur- 
 nish forth a sermon worth going fifty yards 
 to hear. There is not a Nonconformist min- 
 ister who has a soul above stodginess, con- 
 vention, and a convenient if threadbare 
 Scriptural tag. The Salvation Army, per- 
 haps, have the fervour and the courage, but 
 
 6 
 
82 The Egregious English 
 
 they lack wisdom, and they have no art. 
 The Congregationalists have some of the 
 wisdom and a touch of the art, but they have 
 no fervour. Indeed, wherever you turn you 
 find that the recognised English religionists 
 have given themselves up to a decadent, 
 Hebraic emotion, and let the solid things of 
 the spirit — the Hebraic culture, the Hebraic 
 vision, the Hebraic passion — pass by them. 
 Gradually the churches of this remarkable 
 country are ceasing to have anything to do 
 with religion at all. " Religion be hanged!" 
 say those that run them. " Religion no 
 longer appeals to the wayward, stony- 
 hearted, over-driven, half -educated English 
 populace. What is wanted is social bright- 
 ness and warmth, the religion of brotherhood 
 and the full belly ; so that we will give magic- 
 lantern entertainments in our churches on 
 the Lord's Day, we will go in 'bald-headed' 
 for pleasant Sunday afternoons, hot coffee 
 and veal-and-ham pies, and screws of tobacco 
 given away at the doors, wrapped up in a 
 tract, which you are at liberty either to read 
 
The Churches 83 
 
 or to light your pipe with." As for the 
 English priests that had the authority of 
 God, they are no longer sure whether they 
 have that authority or not. Of course, they 
 believe they have it in a sacerdotal, canonical, 
 and private way ; but not one of them dare 
 stand up and swear by his powers publicly. 
 The bishops are all for peace and quietness. 
 " If you please, we are your friends, and not 
 your masters," say they to their clergy; and 
 their clergy, to use an English vulgarism, 
 "wink the other eye." And the clergy, too, 
 in turn are the friends and not the masters 
 of common men; they are so much your 
 friends, indeed, that, providing you mount a 
 silk hat on Sunday and put a penny on the 
 plate, you can depend upon a friendly shake 
 of the hand and a kindly grin of recognition 
 six days in the week, even though you hap- 
 pen to be a bookmaker or the keeper of a 
 bucket-shop. For the Nonconformist clergy, 
 if clergy they may be called, they speak 
 humorously at tea-parties, they enter into 
 hat -trimming competitions at bazaars, and 
 
84 The Egregious English 
 
 they play principal guest at the tables of 
 over-fed tradesmen. There is not a man 
 amongst them who can say bo to a goose. 
 There is not a man amongst them who as a 
 social unit is worth the £150 a year and a 
 manse, with £10 per annum for each child, 
 that a glozing, unintellectual English con- 
 gregation hands over to him. Out of the 
 ease and security and respectability and dolce 
 far niente which the Church of England pro- 
 vides for a considerable proportion of her 
 priests, she has managed to evolve a few 
 scholars, a few men of letters, perhaps an odd 
 saint or two, and an odd man of tempera- 
 ment and mark. But what have the Eng- 
 lish Nonconformists produced? Dr. Horton 
 and Dr. Parker, and that G. R. Sims of re- 
 ligionists, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes. To 
 this distinguished triumvirate — though the 
 English Nonconformists will hold up pious 
 hands of horror at the notion — one may add 
 that valiant thumper of the pulpit drum, 
 General Booth, w T ho is doing a work in re- 
 ligious decadence and bathoticism which it 
 
The Churches 85 
 
 will take centuries to undo. Want of heart 
 and want of mind, coupled with the blessed 
 spirit of tolerance, have indeed played havoc 
 with the English Churches. 
 
 The loosening of the grip of the Church 
 on English society has, of course, not been 
 without its results on English morals and on 
 English society at large. There is a general 
 feeling abroad that religion is played out, 
 that the system of Hebrew ethics which has 
 been drilled into the English blood by genera- 
 tions of the faithful was all very well for the 
 faithful, but is altogether impracticable and 
 out of harmony with the present intelligent 
 times. You will find Englishmen now- 
 adays complaining that the taint of spiritu- 
 alism, ascetism, and ethical faith which they 
 have inherited from their people is a source 
 of hindrance to them in the matter of their 
 commercial or social progress, and their lives 
 are spent in an endeavour to eradicate or to 
 triumph over that taint. The Archbishop of 
 Canterbury could not run a tea-shop by the 
 rules laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, 
 
86 The Egregious English 
 
 they will tell you; and, what is worse, the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with them. 
 11 Take all thou hast, and give it to the poor" 
 is out of the question even for Dr. Horton. 
 Since those blessed words were said, we are 
 told, the Poor Law has sprung up ; we give 
 all that is necessary for pauperism in the 
 poor-rate; and, thanks to the excellence of 
 our social system, it is now impossible for 
 man, woman, or child to die of starvation, 
 provided only that they will work. I have 
 heard it stated by an English Nonconformist 
 minister that his chief complaint against the 
 Roman Catholic community in his district 
 was their habit of being over-liberal to the 
 poor. "No man is refused," observed my 
 Nonconformist friend, "no matter how dis- 
 solute or idle or irreligious he may be." 
 
 Then in the large question of the employ- 
 ment of human flesh and blood to make 
 money for you, the modern Englishman finds 
 that he must either tear the effects of his 
 religious bringing-up out of his heart, or 
 forego the possibility of becoming really rich, 
 
The Churches Sy 
 
 don't you know. It is all a matter of supply 
 and demand; and if the mass of humanity 
 live starved lives and die daily in order that 
 I may be fat and warm and cultured and 
 possessed of surpluses at banks, it is not my 
 fault. You must really blame supply and 
 demand. With this fine phrase on his lips, 
 the English capitalist confutes all the philo- 
 sophies and sets his foot on the majority of 
 the decencies of life. Of course, I shall be told 
 that the prince and chief of all hide-bound 
 industrial capitalists is Mr. Andrew Carnegie, 
 who happens to be a Scot. And I cheerfully 
 admit that Mr. Carnegie is a very serious 
 case in point. But for our one Mr. Carnegie, 
 the English have fifty Mr. Carnegies. They 
 may not be so rich or so famous; but there 
 they are, and the blood and spirit of the Eng- 
 lish people suffer accordingly. The religion 
 of the wealthy does not prevent them from 
 grinding the face of the poor ; and the relig- 
 ion of the middle classes is of pretty much 
 the same order. It is at the hands of the 
 English middle classes that the English poor 
 
SS The Egregious English 
 
 suffer a further and a bitterer depredation. 
 For when you have earned money hardly, 
 you want good goods for it ; and the English 
 middle classes, who are nearly all shop- 
 keepers, either directly or indirectly, make a 
 point of palming off on you the very worst 
 goods the law will allow them to sell. 
 
 And, in spite of all, the churches continue 
 to open their doors, new churches continue 
 to be built, million-pound funds are raised, 
 the missionary speeds over the blue wave 
 to the succour of the 'eathen, and English 
 women and children have their pleasant Sun- 
 day afternoons, and bishops keep high-step- 
 ping horses ; Church and State are grappled 
 together with hooks of steel, and England is 
 a Christian country. Till the churches get 
 out of their slippers and their sloth and their 
 tea-bibbing and their tolerance, matters will 
 go on in the same old futile, scandalous way. 
 If they are to have charge and direction of 
 the soul of man, they must remember that 
 the soul of man is a greater thing than ease, 
 and a greater thing than the Church; they 
 
The Churches 89 
 
 must not play with the immortal part of 
 humanity, and they must not trifle with the 
 things which they believe to be of God. In 
 no other country save England would such 
 churches and such priests as the English 
 now possess be tolerated or supported; it 
 is the English decadence which has rendered 
 Englishmen blind to the stupidity and ban- 
 ality of their pastors and spiritual guides, 
 and it is the English easy-heartedness which 
 permits the game of cant and cadge and 
 sham to go on unchecked. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE POLITICIAN 
 
 The flower and exemplar of well-nigh 
 everything that is choicely and brutally Eng- 
 lish may be summed up in the English poli- 
 tician. Such a tub-thumper, such a master 
 of claptrap and the arts and feints and 
 fetches of oratory, has never been known 
 before since the world began. He is Eng- 
 lish, and therefore he knows his business. 
 He has made a study of it as a business, and 
 without regard to its more serious issues. 
 His position is, that, if he would do himself 
 well, he must tie himself hand and foot to 
 some party, and serve that party through 
 thick and thin. Then in the end, and with 
 good luck, will come reward. You may be 
 born in a chandler's shop. By birth, there- 
 90 
 
The Politician 91 
 
 fore, you belong to the very lower English 
 middle class. Through the practice of a 
 number of commercial virtues, and with the 
 help of considerable speculation outside your 
 own business, you become wealthy. Now, 
 wealth without honour is nothing to an Eng- 
 lishman. He cannot brook that his wealth, 
 his shining, glorious superfluity, should be 
 hidden under a bushel. Therefore he seeks 
 municipal honours; he becomes a town 
 councillor, an alderman, a mayor even. 
 
 But these, after all, are not the summits; 
 they lead at best only to a common knight- 
 hood, and any fool can get knighted if he 
 wants to. So you determine to seek Parlia- 
 mentary honours. You subscribe liberally 
 to the funds of your party, and by-and- 
 by a constituency is found for you to 
 contest. You lose the fight and subscribe 
 again; another constituency is found for 
 you, and you win by the skin of your teeth 
 or with a plumping majority, as the case 
 may be. You are now a full-blown member 
 of Parliament; it is worth the money and 
 
9 2 The Egregious English 
 
 much better than being a mayor. Up to 
 this time you have been an orator of sorts. 
 You have held forth from schoolroom plat- 
 forms and the, tops of waggons what time 
 the assembled populace shouted and threw 
 up its sweaty nightcaps. You have been 
 carried shoulder high behind brass bands ren- 
 dering See, the Conquering Hero Comes. Now 
 however, you are really in Parliament; and 
 for the nonce — for several years, in fact — you 
 must give up talking. There is plenty for 
 you to do; you may put questions on the 
 paper, you may get a look in at committee 
 work, you may show electors round the 
 Houses, and you may go on subscribing lib- 
 erally to the party funds. When you have 
 subscribed enough, it is just within the 
 bounds of possibility that the heads of the 
 party — the Front Bench people, as it were — 
 will begin to discover that there is virtue in 
 you. You will be encouraged to make a 
 speech or two at the slackest part of debates, 
 and some fine day you may be entrusted 
 with the fortunes of a little Bill which your 
 
The Politician 93 
 
 party wishes to rush through. All the while 
 you are subscribing liberally to the party 
 funds. After many years, when you are 
 least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall 
 out of the universe — that is to say, there is 
 a General Election. You have to fight your 
 seat; you win; you come nobly back; be- 
 hold, your party is in power. Then comes 
 the grand moment of your life. You are 
 shovelled into the Cabinet on account of 
 services rendered. From this point, if you 
 possess any ability at all, you can have 
 things pretty much your own way; and if 
 your ambition has been to hear yourself 
 called "My lord" before you die, and to see 
 your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great oc- 
 casions, and your sons swanking about town 
 with "Hon." before their names, you can 
 manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves 
 many years of hard work and lavish expend- 
 iture ; but it is politically possible in Eng- 
 land for a man to be born on the flags and to 
 die properly set forth in Burke and Debrett. 
 I do not say for a moment that the end 
 
94 The Egregious English 
 
 and aim of every English politician is the 
 peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his 
 labours are directed towards some end of 
 honour or emolument, and seldom or never 
 to the good of the State. It is ambition, and 
 not patriotism, that fires his bosom; it is 
 self -aggrandisement, and not a desire for the 
 welfare of the English people, that keeps him 
 going; and it is party, and not principle, 
 that guides and rules his legislative actions. 
 Of course, the great art of being a politician 
 is to hide these facts from the public. If 
 you went down to your constituency like an 
 honest man and said, " Gentlemen, I wish 
 you to return me to Parliament in order that 
 I may make a high position for myself, in 
 order that I may become a man of rank and 
 the founder of a family," your constituency 
 would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you 
 go down with an altogether different tale: 
 " I am going to the House of Commons, gen- 
 tlemen, in your interests and not in mine. 
 It will cost me large sums of money ; besides 
 which, as your member, I shall be expected 
 
The Politician 95 
 
 to subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. 
 But I have the best interests of Muckington 
 at heart; and, if you honour me by mak- 
 ing me your representative, money is no 
 object." 
 
 It is a wonderful business, and a great and 
 a glorious. One stands in astonishment be- 
 fore the bright English intelligence which 
 takes so much on promise and gets so little 
 performed. An English party never goes 
 into power with the intention of doing more 
 than half of what it has promised to do. At 
 election times its great business is to capture 
 votes : these must be had at any price short 
 of rank bribery. And, once landed with the 
 blest, the party immediately settles down, 
 not to the work of carrying out its promises, 
 but to the far more serious business of keep- 
 ing itself in power. From the point of view 
 of the careless lay-observer, the House of 
 Commons is an assemblage for the discussion 
 of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being 
 managed in the best possible way. To the 
 politician it is just an arena in which two 
 
96 The Egregious English 
 
 sets of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, 
 ridicule, and bring about the downfall of 
 each other. 
 
 The amount of interest the Englishman is 
 supposed to take in this amazing assemblage 
 and its doings makes it plain that the Eng- 
 lishman himself is well-nigh as foolish and 
 well-nigh as oblique as the person whom he 
 elects to represent him. Next to royalty 
 itself there is nobody in England who can 
 command so much attention and such a 
 prominent place in the picture as the poli- 
 tician. If he be a Cabinet Minister of any 
 standing, it is impossible for him to walk 
 through the streets either of London or of 
 any of the English provincial towns without 
 being immediately recognised and "respect- 
 fully saluted"; whereas, if he happens to 
 have come to any metropolitan district or 
 provincial town on political business bent, 
 he may depend upon being received at the 
 proper point by the local authorities, sup- 
 ported by a guard of honour of the local 
 Volunteers, and he may also depend upon 
 
The Politician 97 
 
 more or less of an ovation on his way to and 
 from the place of meeting. 
 
 Year in and year out, too, the illustrated 
 papers of every degree blossom with his latest 
 photograph. Mr. So-and-so in his new motor- 
 car ; Mr. So-and-so playing golf ; Mr. So-and-so 
 and the King ; Mr. So-and-so addressing the 
 mob from the railway train, — these are pic- 
 tures in which every Englishman has delighted 
 from his youth up, and in which he will always 
 find great artistic and moral satisfaction. As 
 for the journals which live out of the personal 
 paragraph, they must give — or imagine they 
 must give — pride of place to the politician, or 
 perish. Little anecdotes of the sayings and 
 doings of the politically great are always mar- 
 ketable. It is not necessary that they should 
 have the slightest foundation in truth; but 
 they must be neat, reasonably amusing, and 
 nattering to the personage involved. 
 
 It is when one turns to the English daily 
 papers, however, that one begins to under- 
 stand what an extraordinary hold the polit- 
 ical interest has upon the English public 
 
98 The Egregious English 
 
 mind. It is well known that, in the main, 
 the debates in the House of Commons are 
 quite dull, colourless, and somnolent func- 
 tions. Half of them take place in the pre- 
 sence only of the Speaker and a quorum. 
 That is to say, nine nights out of ten, mem- 
 bers spend the greater portion of their time 
 in the smoke-rooms, dining-rooms, and lob- 
 bies, and not in the House itself, the simple 
 reason being that, as a rule, the debates are 
 not interesting. When some reputable cham- 
 pion of either party gets on his legs, or when 
 some wag is up, members manage to attend 
 in force; but it is only at these moments 
 that they do so. Yet, if you pick up an 
 English morning newspaper, you will find 
 six columns of that sheet devoted to a report 
 of the proceedings in Parliament; another 
 three columns of descriptive matter bearing 
 on the same proceedings; and, out of four 
 or five leaders, three at least deal with the 
 political question of the moment. Even 
 when Parliament is not sitting, the first 
 leader is never by any chance other than 
 
The Politician 99 
 
 political. From the point of view of the 
 dull English mind, nothing more important 
 than a political happening can happen in 
 this world. Mr. Somebody has called Mr. 
 Somebody else a liar across the floor of the 
 House of Commons. It is essential for 
 the well-being of the country at large that the 
 episode should be reported with a separate 
 subhead and great circumstance in the Par- 
 liamentary report ; that the scene should be 
 described by the lively and picturesque pen 
 of the writer of the Parliamentary sketch; 
 that the appearance of the gentleman who 
 called the other gentleman a liar should be 
 dwelt upon in the notes; that instances of 
 other gentlemen having called gentlemen 
 liars across the floor of the House should also 
 be given in the notes; and, finally, that a 
 rotund and windy leader should be written, 
 wherein is discussed gravely the general ad- 
 visability of gentlemen calling other gentle- 
 men liars across the floor of the House; 
 wherein one is assured that, in spite of occa- 
 sional regrettable instances of the kind, the 
 
 LofC. 
 
ioo The Egregious English 
 
 English Parliament is the most decorous and 
 dignified assemblage under the sun; and 
 wherein we cannot refrain from paying our 
 tribute of respectful admiration to the Right 
 Honourable the Speaker, whose tact, good 
 sense, and gentleman-like spirit, coupled with 
 the firmness, resolution, and knowledge of 
 the procedure of the House becoming to his 
 high position, invariably enable him to still 
 the storm and to repress the angry passions 
 of our heated legislators before any great 
 harm has been done. So that a gentleman 
 who calls another gentleman a liar across the 
 floor of the House of Commons really ren- 
 ders a great service to Englishmen, inasmuch 
 as he provides them with a gratuitous enter- 
 tainment, about which they may read, talk, 
 and argue for at least twenty-four hours. 
 
 Recognising their own love of politics and 
 political strife, and knowing in their hearts 
 that the talk in the House of Commons — not 
 to mention the House of Lords — is, gener- 
 ally speaking, of the flattest and flabbiest, 
 one would imagine that the wise English 
 
The Politician 101 
 
 would be at some pains to take measures 
 calculated to brighten up the Parliamentary 
 debates and render them of real interest. 
 But no such precautions are taken. When 
 a would-be member of Parliament is heckled, 
 he is never by any chance asked if he is pre- 
 pared, at the psychological moment, to pull 
 the nose of one of the right honourable gentle- 
 men opposite. Any member of Parliament 
 who, in the middle of a dull debate, would 
 walk across the floor and box the ears of, 
 say, Mr. Balfour, or Lord Hugh Cecil, would 
 thereby earn for himself the distinction of 
 being the best-discussed and best-described 
 man in England for quite half a week. Con- 
 sidering the small amount of exertion re- 
 quired for such a proceeding, and the very 
 large amount of notoriety which would accrue 
 to the person who ventured on it, one won- 
 ders that it has never been done. 
 
 In spite of the abnormal share of pub- 
 licity and applause which is extended to the 
 English politician, however, the solemn fact 
 remains that he is seldom a person of any 
 
102 The Egregious English 
 
 real force, capacity, understanding, or char- 
 acter. Commonplace, mediocre, insincere, 
 inept, are the epithets which best describe 
 him. He passes through the legislative 
 chamber or chambers, says his say in undis- 
 tinguished speeches, casts his vote, earns his 
 place, his pension, or his peerage, and passes 
 beyond our echo and our hail. The daily 
 papers manufacture for him an obituary 
 notice varying in length from five lines to a 
 couple of columns, and nobody wants to hear 
 anything more about him. As a matter of 
 fact, he has left the world neither wiser nor 
 wittier nor happier than he found it. If he 
 has made one phrase or uttered one senti- 
 ment that sticks in men's minds, he is for- 
 tunate. Neither history nor posterity will 
 have anything to say about him, though in 
 his day he kicked up some fuss and took up 
 a lot of room. In short, politics as a career 
 in England is not a career for solid, serious 
 men. It merely serves the turn of the spe- 
 cious, the shallow, the incompetent, and the 
 vainglorious. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 POETS 
 
 It may be set down as an axiom that a 
 nation which is in the proper enjoyment of 
 all its faculties, which is healthy, wealthy, 
 wise, and properly conditioned, must be pro- 
 ducing a certain amount of poetry. From 
 the beginning this has been so ; it will be so 
 to the end. When England was at her high- 
 est, when the best in her was having full 
 play, she produced poets. Right down into 
 the Victorian Era she went on producing 
 them. Then she took to the Stock Exchange 
 and an ostentatious way of life, and the sup- 
 ply of poets fell off. If we except Mr. Swin- 
 burne, who does not belong rightfully to this 
 present time, there is not a poet of any parts 
 exercising his function in England to-day. 
 103 
 
104 The Egregious English 
 
 Furthermore, any bookseller will tell you 
 that the demand for poetry-books by new 
 writers has practically ceased to exist. 
 
 These statements will be called sweeping 
 by a certain school of critics, and I shall be 
 asked to cast my eye round the English nest 
 of singing-birds, and to answer and say 
 whether Mr. So-and-so be not a poet, and 
 Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. 
 So-and-so. I shall also be asked to say if I 
 am prepared to deny that of Mr. So-and-so's 
 last volume of verse three hundred copies 
 were actually sold to the booksellers. For 
 the propounders of such questions I have one 
 answer — namely, it may be so. 
 
 In the meantime let us do our best to find 
 an English poet who is worth the name, and 
 who is prescriptively entitled to be men- 
 tioned in the category which begins with 
 Chaucer and ends with Mr. Swinburne. Shall 
 we try Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Tested by 
 sales and the amount of dust he has man- 
 aged to kick up, Mr. Kipling should be a 
 poet of parts. He is still young, and, hap- 
 
Poets 105 
 
 pily, among the living; but it cannot be 
 denied that as a poet he has already out- 
 lived his reputation. Two years ago he 
 could set the English-speaking nations hum- 
 ming or reciting whatever he chose to put 
 into metre. Some of his little things looked 
 like lasting. Already the majority of them 
 are forgotten. To the next generation, if he 
 be known at all, he will be known as the 
 author of three pieces — Recessional, the 
 U Envoi appended to Life's Handicap, and 
 Mandalay. What is to become of such 
 verses as the following? 
 
 'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor, 
 With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead? 
 
 She 'as ships on the foam — she 'as millions at 'ome, 
 An' she pays us poor beggars in red. 
 ('Ow poor beggars in red!) 
 
 There's 'er nick on the cavalry 'orses, 
 There's 'er mark on the medical stores — 
 
 An' 'er troopers you'll find with a fair wind be'ind 
 That takes us to various wars. 
 
 (Poor beggars ! barbarious wars !) 
 
 Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor, 
 An' 'ere's to the stores and the guns, 
 
 The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forces 
 O' Missis Victorier's sons. 
 
 (Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!) 
 
106 The Egregious English 
 
 At the time of their appearance these lines 
 and the like of them were vastly admired; 
 everybody read them, most people praised 
 them. They were supposed to stir the Eng- 
 lish blood like a blast of martial trumpets. 
 Here at length was the poet England had 
 been waiting for. There could be no mis- 
 take about him ; he had the authentic voice, 
 the incommunicable fire, the master-touch. 
 He had come to stay. At the present mo- 
 ment the bulk of his metrical work is just 
 about as dead and forgotten as the coster- 
 songs of yesteryear. He has not even made 
 a cult ; nobody quotes him, nobody believes 
 in him as a poetical master, nobody wants 
 to hear any more of him. His imitators have 
 all gone back to the imitation of better men. 
 If a copy of verses have a flavour of Kipling 
 about it nowadays, editors drop it as they 
 would drop a hot coal. So much for the 
 poet of empire, the poet of the people, the 
 metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq. 
 
 Another poet of empire — Mr. W. E. Hen- 
 ley — has fared very little better. "What 
 
Poets 107 
 
 can I do for England?" is, I believe, still in 
 request among the makers of a certain class 
 of anthology; but English poetry in the 
 bulk is just the same as if Mr. Henley had 
 never been. Even the balderdash about 
 "my indomitable soul" has fallen out of the 
 usus loquendi of young men's Christian as- 
 sociations and young men's debating so- 
 cieties. The Song of the Sword is sung no 
 longer; For England's Sake has gone the 
 way of all truculent war-poetry; and out of 
 Hawthorn and Lavender perhaps a couple of 
 lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns 
 when Burns had been a century dead. Who 
 will consider it worth while to attack Mr. 
 Henley in, say, the year 2002? 
 
 Possibly the real, true English poet who 
 will in due course put on the laurel of Mr. 
 Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. 
 Stephen Phillips is a purveyor of metrical 
 notions for the stage, and in his last great 
 work — Ulysses — I find him writing as follows : 
 
 Athene. Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard, 
 Whose act is lightning after thunder-word, 
 
108 The Egregious English 
 
 A boon ! a boon ! that I compassion find 
 For one, the most unhappy of mankind. 
 
 Zeus. How is he named? 
 
 Athene. Ulysses. He who planned 
 
 To take the towered city of Troy-land — 
 A mighty spearsman, and a seaman wise, 
 A hunter, and at need a lord of lies. 
 With woven wiles he stole the Trojan town 
 Which ten years' battle could not batter down: 
 Oft hath he made sweet sacrifice to thee. 
 
 Zeus (nodding benevolently) . I mind me of the sav- 
 oury smell. 
 
 Athene. Yet he, 
 
 When all the other captains had won home, 
 Was whirled about the wilderness of foam: 
 For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore, 
 Mocked by the green of some receding shore. 
 Yet over wind and wave he had his will, 
 Blistered and buffeted, unbaffied still. 
 Ever the snare was set, ever in vain — 
 The Lotus Island and the Siren strain; 
 Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run, 
 Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun. 
 Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed, 
 So much encountered, and so little quailed? 
 
 Which is exactly the kind of poetry one 
 requires for the cavern scene of a New Year's 
 pantomime. 
 
 Possibly, again, the real, true English 
 poet is Mr. William Watson, with his tire- 
 some mimicry of Wordsworth and his high- 
 
Poets 109 
 
 and-dry style of lyrical architecture. Mr. 
 Watson is believed to have done great things, 
 but his role now appears to be one of aus- 
 tere silence ; he is what the old writers would 
 have termed a costive poet. And if his 
 Collected Poems are to be the end of him, his 
 end will not be long deferred. Or, possibly, 
 the one and only poet our England of to-day 
 would wish to boast is Mr. Arthur Symons. 
 Mr. Symons writes just the kind of poetry 
 one might expect of a versifier who, in early 
 youth, had loved a cigarette-smoking ballet- 
 girl, and could never bring himself to re- 
 press his passion. Here is a sample of Mr. 
 Arthur Symons at his choicest : 
 
 The feverish room and that white bed, 
 The tumbled skirts upon a chair, 
 The novel flung half open where 
 
 Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread. 
 
 And you, half dressed and half awake, 
 Your slant eyes strangely watching me; 
 And I, who watch you drowsily, 
 
 With eyes that, having slept not, ache: 
 
no The Egregious English 
 
 This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?) 
 
 Will rise, a ghost of memory, if 
 
 Ever again my handkerchief 
 Is scented with White Heliotrope. 
 
 No doubt, if the English continue to descend 
 the moral Avernus at their present rate of 
 speed, Mr. Symons will become, by sheer 
 process of time, the representative poet of 
 the nation. It is part of a poet's duty to 
 look into the future, and Mr. Symons ap- 
 pears to have taken the next two or three 
 generations of Englishmen by the forelock. 
 May he have the reward which is his due ! 
 
 For the rest, they all mean well, and they 
 all aim high; but one is afraid that nothing 
 will come of them. There are Francis 
 Thompson, and Laurence Housman, and 
 Henry Newbolt, and Laurence Binyon, and 
 F. B. Money-Coutts, and Arthur Christopher 
 Benson, and Victor Plarr — amiable perform- 
 ers all, but each a standing example of poeti- 
 cal shortcoming. Perhaps one ought not to 
 mention Mr. John Davidson and Mr. W. B. 
 Yeats, because Mr. Davidson is a Scot, and 
 Mr. Yeats, putatively, at any rate, an Irish- 
 
Poets 1 1 1 
 
 man. In some respects these twain may be 
 considered the pick of the basket. I am 
 constrained to admit, however, that neither 
 of them has as yet fulfilled his earlier promise. 
 So that, on the whole, England is practi- 
 ally without poets of marked or extraordin- 
 ary attainments. The reason is not far to 
 seek. She is losing the breed of noble 
 bloods; her greed, her luxuriousness, her 
 excesses, her contempt for all but the ma- 
 terial, are beginning to find her out. Her 
 youths, who should be fired by the brightest 
 emotions, are bidden not to be fools, and 
 taught that the whole duty of man is to be 
 washed and combed and financially success- 
 ful. Consequently that section of English 
 adolescence which, in the nature of things, 
 begins with poetry and gladness very speed- 
 ily throws up the sponge. Consecration to 
 the muse is no longer thought of among Eng- 
 lishmen. They cannot be content to be 
 published and take their chance. The dis- 
 mal shibboleth, " Poetry does not pay," 
 wears them all down. What is the good of 
 
ii2 The Egregious English 
 
 writing verses which bring you neither repu- 
 tation nor emolument? One must live, and 
 to live like a gentleman by honest toil, and 
 devote one's leisure instead of one's life to 
 poetry, is the better part. Meanwhile, Eng- 
 land jogs along quite comfortably. She can 
 get Keats for a shilling, and Shakespeare for 
 sixpence. Why should she worry herself for 
 a moment with the new men? 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 FICTION 
 
 After much patient thinking, the Eng- 
 lish have come to the conclusion that there 
 is but one branch of literary art, and that 
 its name is Fiction. And by fiction the 
 English really mean the six-shilling novel. 
 I do not think it is too much to say, that 
 since the six-shilling novel was first thrust 
 upon our delighted attention it has never 
 brought within its covers six shillings' worth 
 of reading. The high priest and the high 
 priestess who serve to the right and left of 
 the altar of six-shillingism are, as every one 
 knows, Mr. Hall Caine and Miss Marie Cor- 
 elli. Each of them wears a golden ephod, 
 with a breastplate of jewels arranged to 
 spell out the magic figures, One Hundred 
 
 8 
 
 "3 
 
ii4 The Egregious English 
 
 Thousand. All the other priests of the 
 Tabernacle look with awe and envy upon 
 these two, because the other priests' breast- 
 plates have hard work to spell out fifty 
 thousand, and some of them do not even 
 achieve one thousand five hundred. Burnt- 
 offerings of Caine and Corelli therefore fill 
 the place with savour. A pair of sorrier 
 writers never was on sea or land. Every- 
 body knows it, nobody denies it, and nobody 
 seems sad about it. The six-shilling novel 
 is an established English institution. Caine 
 and Corelli are its prop and stay, and the 
 rest do their best to keep in the running and 
 pick up the minor money-bags. 
 
 The perusal of six-shilling fiction is prac- 
 tically a sort of mania. It has seized in its 
 grip the fairest England has to show, par- 
 ticularly matrons, the younger women, and 
 stockbrokers. For the Englishwoman the 
 daily round would lose its saltness did she 
 not have handy the newest six-shilling novel 
 by Mr. Caine, Miss Corelli, or the next literary 
 bawler in the market-place. There are shops 
 
Fiction 115 
 
 called "libraries," to which the English- 
 woman repairs for her supplies of literary 
 pabulum. Here the six-shilling novel has a 
 great time. Strapped together in sixes, or 
 packed in boxes of dozens, it is handed forth 
 to the carriages of its fair devourers, and 
 taken right away to its repose in the cult- 
 ured homes of Bayswater and Kensington. 
 From morning till night many Englishwomen 
 do little but read this precious stuff. What 
 they get out of it amounts in the long run to 
 hysteria and anasmia. It brings about a 
 general deadening of the mind and a 
 general jaggedness of the emotions, coupled 
 with an utter incapacity to take any save an 
 exaggerated view of the facts of life. Dis- 
 content, disillusionment, ennui, boredom, 
 ill-temper, a sharp tongue, and a cynical 
 spirit are other symptoms which the six- 
 shilling novel is prone to evoke. The habit 
 is worse than opium or haschisch or tea 
 cigarettes. It is just the devil, and that is 
 all you need say about it. The persons em- 
 ployed in the opium traffic are supposed to 
 
n6 The Egregious English 
 
 be very wicked. To my mind, the persons 
 employed in the fiction traffic are as wicked 
 as wicked can be. When the foul disease 
 began first to make its ravages obvious, there 
 were not wanting persons who would have 
 checked it and provided remedies for it. 
 These persons squeaked somewhat, and 
 nothing more has been heard of them. So 
 the thing goes on unrestrained, and even ap- 
 plauded by press and pulpit alike; and the 
 Englishwoman has become a confirmed, in- 
 veterate, and incurable fiction-reader. If a 
 man have an enemy to whom he would do 
 an abiding injury, let him persuade that 
 enemy to obtain the six more popular six- 
 shilling novels of the moment, and read 
 them through. If the man's enemy sticks 
 to his bargain — at which, however, he will 
 probably shy in the middle of the second 
 volume — the chances are that he gets up 
 from that reading a broken and spiritless 
 man. His brain will be as saggy as a sponge 
 full of treacle, and his vision as unreliable 
 as that of the alcoholist who always saw two 
 
Fiction 117 
 
 cabs, and invariably got into the one that 
 was not there. 
 
 Seriously, however, what is there about 
 this English fiction — or, for that matter, 
 about Scottish fiction — that men and women 
 should buy it and devour it to the exclusion 
 of all other literary fare? It is ill- writ ten, it 
 is not original, it is not like life, it is not beau- 
 tiful, it is not inspiring, it does not touch the 
 profound emotions, it means nothing, and it 
 ends nowhere. The reason of its popularity 
 is, that it appeals to an indolent habit of 
 mind, and, as a general rule, is calculated to 
 excite the passions, and particularly to open 
 up questions which experience has shown to 
 be best left alone. In nine cases out of ten, 
 where a popular work of fiction is concerned, 
 it is always possible to put one's finger on 
 the chapter or passages on which its popul- 
 arity is based ; and in nine cases out of ten 
 that chapter or those passages have to do 
 with sexual matters. The questions which 
 arise out of the relation of man and woman 
 are no doubt vitally important and most 
 
n8 The Egregious English 
 
 interesting ; but that they should be discussed 
 in an unscientific, irresponsible, and catch- 
 penny way by everybody who can trail a 
 pen is something of a scandal. If an author 
 can succeed in inventing a sexual situation 
 which could not by any possible chance 
 exist for a moment in real life, or if he can 
 put a glow and a gloss on the tritenesses of 
 love and lust, his success as a fictionist is to 
 all intents and purposes assured. What is 
 sometimes spoken of as wholesome fiction 
 scarcely exists — anyway, nobody reads it. 
 It is the carefully constructed book about 
 sex that sells and is read. Such a book need 
 not be flagrant, as was once thought to be 
 the case ; it can be " a work of art " — a thing 
 of veiled suggestion, delicate, unobjection- 
 able, and seemingly meet to be read. 
 
 One has hesitation in asserting that such 
 books ought not to be written or ought not 
 to be circulated. It is difficult to justify 
 any attitude of intolerance in such a mat- 
 ter ; yet the fact remains that the maids and 
 matrons of England, together with the men 
 
Fiction 119 
 
 who have the leisure and sufficient lack of 
 brains to read fiction, are being stuffed 
 season by season and year by year with 
 about the most undesirable kind of sexual 
 philosophy that could well be placed before 
 them. Of any Englishwoman of the leisured 
 class above the age of sixteen years it may 
 be said, as was said of the late Professor 
 Jowett in a different sense, "What I don't 
 know is n't knowledge." And the instructor 
 in all cases is a fictionist. If a man took his 
 notion of business, or politics, or art, out of 
 six-shilling novels, he would be set down for 
 a fool. Yet most Englishwomen get their 
 view of love and the married relation from 
 these extraordinary works, and it is taken 
 for granted that nobody is a penny the worse. 
 For my own part, I should incline to the 
 opinion that the only persons who are a 
 penny, not to say six shillings, the worse, are 
 the English middle and upper classes as a 
 body. 
 
 Much has been said in derision of what the 
 English call the Kailyard school of fiction — 
 
120 The Egregious English 
 
 Kailyard fiction being, I need scarcely say, 
 a brand of fiction written by Scotsmen usu- 
 ally in Scotland, and sold in the English and 
 the American markets. Everybody of taste 
 and judgment cheerfully admits that Kail- 
 yarders are not persons of genius. For the 
 delectation of the Southerner they have 
 made a Scotland of their own, the which, 
 however, is not Scotland. They have made 
 a Scottish sentiment, a Scottish point of 
 view, a Scottish humour, a Scottish pathos, 
 and even a Scottish dialect, which may be 
 reckoned quite doubtful. At the same time, 
 one looks in vain to the Kailyarders for any- 
 thing that is worse than slobber — anything 
 really noxious and dreadful, that is to say. 
 One might read Kailyard for ever and a day 
 without coming to great moral grief. In- 
 deed, I would point out that, on the whole, 
 the Kailyard system of ethics partakes some- 
 what of the character of the system of ethics 
 which used to be unfolded in the melodrama 
 of our grandfathers' days. Virtue rewarded, 
 vice punished, is the moral upshot of it. 
 
Fiction 1 2 1 
 
 And in any case, and let it be as bad and as 
 meretricious and as greatly to be deprecated 
 as one will, we must always remember that 
 the Kailyard book is a work invented and 
 manufactured, not for Scotsmen, but for the 
 Anglo-Saxon — the Englishman and his off- 
 shoots. 
 
 Some months back a considerable hubbub 
 arose in English literary circles because M. 
 Jules Verne had been saying to an inter- 
 viewer, at Amiens of all places in the world! 
 that the novel as a form of literary expres- 
 sion was doomed, and would gradually die 
 out of popular favour. It is safe to say that, 
 in the eyes of sundry critics of pretty well 
 every nationality, the novel has been doomed 
 any time this last fifty years. Yet the novel 
 comes up smiling every time. Since it was 
 reduced in price to six shillings in England 
 it has undoubtedly deteriorated, not only as 
 a piece of writing, but also in the matter of 
 ethical intention. So long as it remains the 
 prey of some of its latter-day exploiters, so 
 long will it continue to deteriorate. So long 
 
122 The Egregious English 
 
 as the English mind continues to be feeble 
 and unwholesome, and to yearn for artificial 
 thrills and undesirable emotions, so long will 
 English fiction continue to be of its present 
 decadent quality. As the capitalist says, it 
 is all a question of supply and demand. The 
 great aim of writers of fiction, or at any rate 
 of ninety-nine per cent, of them, is to pro- 
 duce an article that will sell. You must turn 
 out what the public want, and they will 
 assuredly buy it. The knack of hitting the 
 public taste looks easy to acquire, and the 
 fictionist strives after it with all his might. 
 Many are called to make fortunes out of 
 novel-writing : few are chosen. But nobody 
 can examine the work of those few without 
 perceiving that for weal or woe — principally 
 for woe — they know their business. 
 
 Of course, it goes without saying that a 
 very considerable amount of fiction is pub- 
 lished in England which is just as mild and 
 just as innocuous as tinned milk. To this 
 puling variety of fiction, however, the Eng- 
 lish do not appear to be very greatly drawn. 
 
Fiction 123 
 
 It crops up with great regularity every pub- 
 lishing season, it is solemnly reviewed in the 
 critical journals, and it even stands shoulder 
 by shoulder with stronger meat in the book- 
 shops. But the fact remains that it does not 
 sell; to see ''Second Edition" on it is the 
 rarest occurrence. In fine, the English will 
 have their fiction spiced, and highly spiced, 
 or not at all. Mealy mouthed writers, over- 
 reticent, over-blushful, over-austere writers, 
 they do not want; neither have they any 
 admiration for a writer who is plagued with 
 a feeling for style, and who may be reckoned 
 an artist in the collocation of words. Their 
 much-vaunted Meredith has never had the 
 sale of a Crockett or a Barrie or a Hocking, 
 or, for that matter, of a J. K. Jerome. The 
 English have little or no literary taste, little 
 or no literary acumen, and they expect their 
 fictionists to give them anything and every- 
 thing save what is edifying. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SUBURBANISM 
 
 Of old — that is to say, twenty years ago — 
 the great majority of the English people suf- 
 fered from a mental and general disability 
 which was termed "provincialism." If you 
 hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool, or 
 Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the 
 kind gentlemen in London who size people 
 up and put them in their places assured you 
 that you were a provincial, and that you 
 would have to rub shoulders a great deal with 
 the world — by which they meant London — 
 before you could rightly consider yourself 
 qualified to exist. Against the epithet "pro- 
 vincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, 
 when it was applied flatly to themselves. 
 Most men of feeling felt hurt when you called 
 124 
 
Suburbanism 125 
 
 them provincial. In the world of letters and 
 journalism to call a man provincial was the 
 last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually 
 settled him, just as to say that he has no 
 sense of humour settles him to-day. Then 
 up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchan- 
 an and a few lesser lights, who said, "You 
 call us provincials: provincials we undoubt- 
 edly are, and we glory in the character." 
 This rather baffled, not to say amazed, the 
 lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually 
 the term "provincial," as a term of oppro- 
 brium, passed out of use. 
 
 It is admitted now on all hands that the 
 provincial is a very useful kind of fellow ; and 
 when the metropolis feels itself running 
 short of talent and energy, the provincial is 
 invariably invited to look in. Latterly, how- 
 ever, the Londoner and the dweller in Eng- 
 lish provincial cities have begun to exhibit a 
 distinctly modern disorder, which may be 
 called, for want of a better term, " suburban- 
 ism." In London, which may be taken as 
 the type of all English cities, suburbanism is 
 
126 The Egregious English 
 
 pretty well rampant. It has its origin in 
 what the Americans would call "location." 
 A man's daily work lies, say, in the City or 
 in the central quarters of London. For vari- 
 ous reasons — such, for example, as consid- 
 erations of health, expenditure, and custom 
 — it is practically impossible for him to 
 live near his work. He must live some- 
 where; so he goes to Balham, or Tooting, 
 or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or 
 Willesden, or Finchley, or Crouch End, or 
 Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat. 
 London is ringed round with these residential 
 quarters, these little towns outside the walls. 
 A visitor to any one of them is at once 
 struck with its striking and painful similar- 
 ity to all the others. There is a railway sta- 
 tion belonging to one of the metropolitan 
 lines; there is a High Street, fronted with 
 lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is a 
 reasonable sprinkling of churches and chap- 
 els; there is a brand-new red-brick theatre; 
 and the rest is row on row and row on row 
 of villa residences, each with its dreary pali- 
 
Suburbanism 127 
 
 sading and attenuated grass-plot in front, 
 and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, 
 behind. Miles and miles of these villas exist 
 in every metropolitan suburb worth the 
 name; and though the rents and sizes of 
 them may vary, they are all built to one 
 architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, 
 ostentatious, and unlovely. No person of 
 judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the 
 philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them with- 
 out concluding at once that the English do 
 not know how to live. Take a street of these 
 villas, big or little, and what do you find? 
 You note, first, that nearly every house, be 
 it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or pro- 
 fessional man, has got a highfalutin name 
 of its own. The County Council or local 
 authority has already bestowed upon it a 
 number. But this is not enough for your 
 suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for 
 his house a name which will look swagger on 
 his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham 
 Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham 
 Road, Tooting, at all; but The Laurels, if 
 
128 The Egregious English 
 
 you please. No. 4 — not to be outdone — is 
 Holmwood; No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The 
 Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and so 
 forth. Then, again, if you walk down a 
 street and keep your eye on the front win- 
 dows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you 
 will note that every one of those windows 
 has cheap lace curtains to it, and that im- 
 mediately behind the centre of the window 
 there is a little table, upon which loving 
 hands have placed a green high-art vase, 
 containing a plant of sorts. And right back 
 in the dimness of the parlour there is a side- 
 board with a high mirrored back. 
 
 If you made acquaintance with half a 
 dozen of the occupiers of these houses, 
 and were invited into the half dozen front 
 rooms, you would find in each, in addition 
 to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano 
 of questionable manufacture, a brass music- 
 stool with a red velvet cushion, an over- 
 mantel with mirrored panels, a " saddle-bag 
 suite," consisting of lady's and gent's and 
 six ordinary chairs and a couch; a centre- 
 
Suburbanism 129 
 
 table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bam- 
 boo bookcase containing a Corelli and a Hall 
 Caine or so, together with some sixpenny 
 Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain- 
 sales, Nuttall's Dictionary, Mrs. Beeton's 
 House Book, a Bible, a Prayer Book, some 
 hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks wait- 
 ing to be darned, and a little pile of music, 
 chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs 
 comes home to The Laurels, he has an apo- 
 logy for late dinner, gets into his slippers, 
 and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his 
 elder daughter, into that parlour. There he 
 reads a halfpenny newspaper till there is 
 nothing left in it to read; then he talks to 
 Mrs. Spriggs about that beast So-and-so, his 
 employer ; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him not to 
 grumble so much, and asks the elder daugh- 
 ter why she does n't play a chune to 'liven us 
 up a bit. " Yes," says Spriggs, " what is the 
 good of having a piano, and me buying you 
 music every Saturday, if you never play?" 
 Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through 
 Dolly Gray, The Honeysuckle and the Bee, and 
 
i3° The Egregious English 
 
 Everybody 's Loved by Some One; and Spriggs 
 beats time with his foot till he grows weary, 
 and thinks we had better have supper and 
 get off to bed. 
 
 This kind of thing is going on right down 
 both sides of Sandringham Road — at Holm- 
 wood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at 
 Sutherland House, as well as at The Laurels 
 — every week-day evening between the hours 
 of eight and midnight. In point of fact, it 
 is going on all over Tooting. It is the sub- 
 urban notion of an 'appy evening at home; 
 and, hallowed as it is by wont and custom, 
 everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best 
 that life can offer after business hours. Per- 
 haps it is. Just before supper, or haply a 
 little afterwards, however, Spriggs says that 
 he believes he will take a little stroll " round 
 the houses." He puts on a straw hat in 
 summer and a tweed cap in winter, and pro- 
 ceeds gravely down the Sandringham Road 
 until he reaches a break in the long array of 
 villas, and is aware of a rather flaring public- 
 house. Into the saloon bar of this hostelry 
 
Suburbanism 13 1 
 
 he walks staidly, nods to the company, and 
 asks the barmaid for a drop of the usual. 
 " Let me see," says that sweet lady ; "Johnny 
 Walker, is n't it?" " Well, you know it is," 
 says Spriggs, as he hands over threepence. 
 With the glass of whisky in his hand he re- 
 tires to the nearest red plush settee, and 
 looks listlessly at the illustrated papers on 
 the little table in front of him, drinks some- 
 what slowly, smokes a pipe, exchanges a 
 word about the weather with the landlord of 
 the establishment, says there's time for an- 
 other before closing time, has another, and 
 at twelve-thirty trots off home. 
 
 The seven or eight other men in the saloon 
 bar being respectively the occupiers of Holm- 
 wood, Hazledene, The Pines, Sutherland 
 House, etc., have done almost exactly as 
 Spriggs has done in the way of drinks and 
 nods and illustrated papers and having a 
 final at twenty minutes past twelve. But 
 during the whole evening they have not ex- 
 changed a rational word with one another. 
 They have nothing to talk about; therefore 
 
i3 2 The Egregious English 
 
 they have not talked. They are neighbours, 
 and they know it; but they all hold them- 
 selves to be so much superior to one another 
 that they have scorned to speak to each 
 other, except in the most cursory and casual 
 way. Next morning, at a few minutes to 
 nine o'clock, they will all be scooting anx- 
 iously along the Sandringham Road with 
 set faces, damp brows, and a fear at their 
 hearts that they are going to miss their 
 train. They will travel in packed carriages, 
 half of them standing up, while the other 
 half growls, to Ludgate Hill or Moorgate 
 Street, as the case may be, and then rush off 
 again to their respective offices, in fear and 
 trembling this time lest they should be three 
 minutes late and the " governor' ' might 
 notice it. 
 
 This is the life of the males in the Sand- 
 ringham Road year in and year out. Through 
 living in the same houses, in the midst of the 
 same furniture, listening to the same pianos, 
 drinking at the same public-houses, going to 
 business in the same trains, they become as 
 
Suburbanism 133 
 
 like one another as peas. They are all anx- 
 ious, all dull, all short of sleep, all short of 
 money. In brief, they have become suburb- 
 anized. The monotony and snobbery and 
 listlessness of their home life are reflected in 
 their conduct of the working-day's affairs. 
 There is not a man amongst them who has a 
 soul above his job. Each of them sticks at 
 business, not because he loves it or likes it, 
 but simply because he knows that, if he were 
 discovered in a remissness, he would get 
 what he calls "the sack." Each of them 
 "lunches" — oh, this English lunch! — at the 
 bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer 
 and a penny Welsh rare-bit. Each of them 
 feels a bit chippy and not a little sleepy of 
 an afternoon, and each of them races for his 
 train in the evening, chock-full of worry and 
 bad-temper. You must live in the suburbs 
 if you are to live in London at all, and there 
 is no escape from it. 
 
 The lines of the female suburbians are cast 
 in more or less pleasant places. They do 
 not need to go to town every day. There 
 
134 The Egregious English 
 
 are shops galore, filled with just the goods 
 they want, round the corner; and there is 
 always the next female on both sides to gos- 
 sip with. For, unlike the male suburbian, 
 the female suburbian will talk to her neigh- 
 bours. Her conversation is of babes, and 
 butchers' meat, and the piece at the theatre, 
 and the bargains at the stores in the High 
 Road, and "him." He, or "him," means 
 the good lady's husband. She never by any 
 chance refers to him either by his Christian 
 name, or his surname, or as "my husband." 
 It is always, "He said to me this morning," 
 or, "As I was saying to him before he went 
 to business," — which, I take it, is a peculiarly 
 English habit. The female suburbian goes 
 out to tea sometimes, usually at the house 
 of some suburban relative. Her dress is a 
 curious blend of ostentation and economy. 
 She will be in the fashion; and, being an 
 Englishwoman, "expense is no object," pro- 
 viding she can get the money. She has no 
 notion of thrift ; she is perennially in arrears 
 with the milk and the insurance man ; and 
 
Suburbanism 135 
 
 when money gets very tight indeed, she lec- 
 tures her husband on his wicked inability to 
 make more than he is getting. The whole 
 life, whether for male or female, is dreary, 
 harried, unrelieved, and destructive of every- 
 thing that tends to make life affable and 
 tolerable. 
 
 In view of the obvious evils suburbanism 
 has brought about in the English metropolis, 
 it might have been expected that the Eng- 
 lish provincial cities would have done their 
 best to avoid similar troubles in their own 
 areas. So far from this being the case, how- 
 ever, the craze for suburbanism is making 
 itself apparent wherever one turns. City 
 and borough councils lead the way by erect- 
 ing, at the public expense, artisans' and 
 clerks' dwellings well out of the town. They 
 hold that fresh air, the open country, and 
 cheap railway fares are all that is wanted to 
 make the English citizen's life a perennial 
 joy to him. Yet the dwellings they erect 
 are of the shoddiest and least homelike kind, 
 the fresh-air which is to do the worker and 
 
13 6 The Egregious English 
 
 the children so much good is a doubtful 
 quantity, and the cheap railway fares are 
 bragged about without regard to the time 
 taken up in travelling and the hurry and 
 anxiety to catch trains. Suburbanism as a 
 stereotyped and soul-deadening institution is 
 of purely English origin. In no other coun- 
 try in the world do convention and what 
 other people will say so rule the lives of men 
 as they do in England. Suburbanism is in 
 many ways the most obvious of the many 
 products of English convention. It is at 
 once an indication of brainlessness, want of 
 intelligence, and incipient decay. Appar- 
 ently there is to be no limit to it. Outside 
 London new suburbs spring up almost weekly. 
 But their newness brings no changes in its 
 train. Each new suburb is mapped out and 
 built exactly on the lines of the old ones; 
 each is destined for the reception of exactly 
 the same kind of stupid people ; each will be 
 the living-ground of generations of people 
 still more stupid. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE MAN-ABOUT-TOWN 
 
 The English man-about-town — and I am 
 not acquainted with any other sort — is, to 
 put it mildly, a devil of a fellow. Who he 
 may be, how he gets a living, whether he gets a 
 living, how and why he became a man-about- 
 town, and whether, after all, he is really a 
 man-about-town, are matters which are wrapt 
 in mystery. Everybody knows him, yet no- 
 body knows much about him. You meet 
 him everywhere, yet nobody can tell you 
 how he gets there. His acquaintance is as- 
 tonishing, ranging from dustmen to dukes, as 
 it were; he cuts nobody, though he is inti- 
 mate with nobody; he is familiar with his 
 world and all that it expects of him ; and he 
 plays the game skilfully, correctly, and as a 
 137 
 
138 The Egregious English 
 
 gentleman should. There are droves of him 
 in London; probably no other city in the 
 world could, with comfort, accommodate so 
 many of him. He lives in the sun ; he is the 
 joy and pride of the restaurateurs' and the 
 cafe-keepers' hearts ; no billiard-room is com- 
 plete without him; he shines at bars of 
 onyx; music-halls and theatres could not 
 get on without him ; and, on the whole, it is 
 his useful and pleasing function to keep the 
 West End of London and its offshoots going. 
 What the West End of London means to the 
 man about -town is a large question. It 
 means clubs in the morning, with a tailor, a 
 hatter, a bookmaker or two, thrown in; it 
 means expensive lunches, lazy, somnolent 
 afternoons, big dinners, hard drinking, cards, 
 night clubs, and a day that ends at three 
 o'clock in the morning. Nobody but an 
 Englishman could stand the racket ; nobody 
 but an Englishman could find satisfaction in 
 so doing. 
 
 The man-about-town is the last expression 
 of an unhealthy plutocracy; he is the child 
 
The Man-About-Town 139 
 
 of means, the son of his father, the pam- 
 pered darling of his mother; and he has 
 never understood that life was anything 
 more than a frivolous holiday. Whether he 
 has money or happens to have spent it all, 
 he sets the standard of expenditure for 
 everybody who would be considered in the 
 movement. He also sets the fashion in hats, 
 coats, trousers, fancy waistcoats, shoes, walk- 
 ing-sticks, and scarf-pins for Englishmen at 
 large. It never occurs to him that he does 
 this, but he does it. He it is, too, who is 
 the prime supporter and patron of the manly 
 English sports, horse-racing, glove-fighting, 
 coaching, moting, polo, shooting, fishing, 
 yachting, and so forth. In these exercises 
 he finds great delight. When he is not busy 
 dining and wining and painting the town 
 red, sport is the mainstay of his existence. 
 
 He is usually young till he reaches the 
 age of thirty, when he begins to decline rap- 
 idly. But the older he gets the younger he 
 gets. Although he may lose his hair, and be 
 compelled to have resort to false teeth and 
 
140 The Egregious English 
 
 elastic stockings, his spirits are invariably of 
 the cheerfullest, his laugh is boisterous, his 
 interest in life acute, and he continues to be 
 passionately fond of food and drink. It is 
 not till his locks become hoar, his purse well- 
 nigh empty, and the number of his years 
 well over threescore- and-t en that he begins 
 to droop. Englishmen will point him out 
 to you in cafes, and say with hushed voices, 
 "You see that man, — the one with the 
 frowsy beard and his hat atilt — well, he 
 spent a hundred and fifty thousand twice! 
 A hundred and fifty thousand, my boy! 
 What did he do with it? Oh, well, what do 
 people do with money? There's a man, sir, 
 that's seen life: used to have a house in 
 Berkeley Square; has owned three Derby 
 winners ; built the Thingamybob Theatre for 
 Miss Jumpabouty; knows everybody; has 
 hobnobbed with the King when he was 
 Prince of Wales; used to be hand-in-glove 
 
 with the Duke of and that crowd ; and 
 
 now, damme! he has n't a pennypiece." 
 All this with the air of a person who is 
 
The Man-About-Town 141 
 
 showing you something worth seeing. It is 
 the English fatuity, first of all, to admire the 
 man who is possessed of wealth; secondly, 
 to admire a man who is throwing his money 
 away; and, thirdly, to look with respectful 
 awe upon the man who has thrown it away. 
 It warms the English heart and fires the 
 English imagination to see the son of a re- 
 cently deceased provision-dealer playing the 
 prince at the best hotels, plunging at Ascot 
 and Monte Carlo, buying up the stalls at the 
 Frivolity at the behest of Lottie Flutterfast, 
 and generally flinging to the winds the hard- 
 earned and, to a great extent, ill-gotten 
 estate of his late lamented parent. By all 
 the best people — by all the best English 
 people, that is to say — such a youth is re- 
 ceived and made welcome, if not exactly 
 taken to the bosom. Englishmen ask him to 
 dinner simply because he has money. They 
 are aware that his courses will not bear ex- 
 amination, that his tastes are gross, that his 
 intellect is none of the brightest. He has 
 nothing to say for himself; he is neither 
 
i4 2 The Egregious English 
 
 entertaining, nor amusing, nor instructive. 
 The Englishman has no ulterior designs upon 
 him ; he does not hope to get him into this 
 or that financial swim, neither does he desire 
 to marry his daughter to him ; he simply feels 
 that it is well to be friendly with money and 
 the man-about-town. 
 
 Even a bankrupt or " broke" man-about- 
 town is better to the Englishman than none 
 at all. With such a person he will foregather 
 and be pleasant in the sight of all men. 
 "Old So-and-so," he says, "is a dear old 
 sort. He is broke, of course, and sometimes 
 he rather worries one for sovereigns. But I 
 have never deserted a pal in adversity in my 
 life, and I am not going to begin with Old 
 So-and-so." Thus your good snob English- 
 man would lead you to believe that he was 
 on terms of intimacy and affection with Old 
 So-and-so in Old So-and-so's palmy money- 
 squandering days. Whereas, in point of fact, 
 he never clapped eyes on the man till he had 
 spent his last farthing. 
 
 It is all very English, and to a mere Scot 
 
The Man-About-Town 143 
 
 a trifle astonishing. The Scot, if I know 
 him at all, takes no joys of spendthrifts, how- 
 ever prettily dressed, and, least of all, can 
 he be brought to court the society of a man 
 who has reduced himself to beggary by ex- 
 travagance and riot. The bare gift of pro- 
 digality and the bare reputation of having 
 been wealthy are nothing to the Scot. If he 
 wants men to admire, he can find men of sol- 
 ider quality. The Englishman, on the other 
 hand, has no great love for either solidity or 
 worth; the first makes him envious; the 
 second bores him. Though he may himself 
 be a person of judgment and sober life, he 
 likes to have about him men who are going 
 or who have gone the whole hog, and who 
 pursue their pleasures without restraint, re- 
 morse, or fear. Hence the man-about-town 
 will always figure interestingly in English 
 society. There is romance about him. He 
 has been foolish, and perhaps even wicked; 
 but he belongs to the select coterie of people 
 who, when all is said, make the gay world 
 go round. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 DRINK 
 
 Mr. Crosland has very kindly suggested 
 that "under the inspiring tutelage of the na- 
 tional bard Scotland has become one of the 
 drunkenest nations in the world." I shall 
 not retaliate as one might do, but shall con- 
 tent myself by referring the reader to the 
 easily accessible tables of statistics, which 
 render it quite plain that Scotland's drunken- 
 ness is very considerably exceeded by the 
 drunkenness of England. 
 
 In London, at any rate, strong drink flows 
 like a river. There are 5300 licensed houses 
 in the metropolitan area alone. In Kilburn, 
 a suburb of more or less irreproachable re- 
 spectability, there are twenty-five churches 
 and chapels and thirty-five public-houses. 
 144 
 
Drink 145 
 
 During late years public -house property has 
 begun to be looked upon in the light of a 
 gilt-edged investment. Turn where one will, 
 one finds the older inns are being swept 
 away, while on their sites are erected flaring 
 gin-palaces, with plate-glass fronts, elab- 
 orate mahogany fitments, gorgeous saloon 
 and private bars, painted ceilings, inlaid 
 floors, and electric light throughout. Be- 
 hind the bar, instead of mine host of a 
 former day and his wife and daughter, there 
 are half a dozen perked-up barmaids with 
 rouged cheeks and Rossetti hair, and a per- 
 son called the manager, who for £2 a week 
 runs the place for its proprietors — a Limited 
 Company, which owns, perhaps, twenty or 
 thirty other houses. In the conduct of these 
 mammoth drinking-places three great points 
 are kept in view: namely, that a quick- 
 drinking, stand-up trade pays better than 
 any amount of slow regular custom ; that the 
 English drinker of the lower class cannot tell 
 the difference between good drink and bad, 
 often preferring, indeed, the bad to the good ; 
 
H 6 The Egregious English 
 
 and that, as bad liquor is cheaper than good, 
 the sound commercial thing to do is to sup- 
 ply bad liquor. 
 
 With these admirable axioms continually 
 before it, the English trade has prospered 
 amazingly. More drink and worse drink is 
 sold in England to-day than has ever been 
 sold in England before. Through legislation 
 intended to ensure sound liquor and the 
 proper conduct of licensed houses the pro- 
 prietors have consistently made a point of 
 driving the usual brewer's dray. "In order 
 to meet the Food and Drugs Adulteration 
 Act, all spirits sold at this establishment, 
 while of the same excellent quality as hereto- 
 fore, are diluted according to strength." 
 "The same excellent quality as heretofore" 
 is choice, and so is "diluted according to 
 strength." As for the beer, we dilute also 
 the beer according to strength. When we 
 are caught at it, it is a mistake on the part of 
 the cellarman, who has been discharged ; and 
 the fine is so small in proportion to the profit 
 on selling water, that we smile at the back of 
 
Drink 147 
 
 our necks and keep on diluting according to 
 strength. Our whole system, in fact, is de- 
 signed to make people drink, and to make 
 them drink the worst that we dare put be- 
 fore them. 
 
 Now, the Scot, drunkard or no drunkard, 
 does have something of a taste in liquor. 
 The best clarets have gone to Scotland (in 
 spite of Mr. Crosland) since claret became a 
 dinner wine. You cannot put off a Scot with 
 either bad whisky or bad beer. He knows 
 what whisky should be and what beer should 
 be, and in Scotland, at any rate, he never 
 has any difficulty in getting them. But the 
 English, taking them in the mass, are quite 
 the other way. Any sort of wine, provided 
 it be properly fortified and sophisticated, 
 passes with them for the real thing. Their 
 Scotch whisky is about the most wholesome 
 thing they drink; but large quantities of 
 this are bought by English merchants in a 
 crude state, and rammed down the public 
 throat without a thought to maturing, 
 blending, and otherwise rendering the spirit 
 
1 48 The Egregious English 
 
 potable. English beer, we have been told in 
 song and story, is the finest beer in the 
 world. Yet nobody can visit an English 
 brewery without discovering that English 
 beer is not English beer at all. Glucose in 
 the place of malt, quassia and gentian in the 
 place of hops, finings in the place of storage, 
 are the universal order; and so depraved 
 and perverted has the fine old English taste 
 in beer become that brewers who have set up 
 to provide an honest article and sent it out 
 to their customers have had it returned with 
 the curt comment that "nobody would drink 
 such hog-wash, and what the customers 
 wanted was beer, and not brewer's apron." 
 Every now and again scares crop up in con- 
 sequence of the use of improper ingredients ; 
 there is an inquiry, a Royal Commission, and 
 the Englishman still goes on stolidly drink- 
 ing. Arsenic will not drive him away from 
 his favourite tipple, neither will cocculus in- 
 dicus or any of the round dozen abomina- 
 tions upon which the brewer's chemist takes 
 his stand. 
 
Drink 149 
 
 If there is one thing more than another 
 that is considered the chief necessity of life 
 in the English household of the poorer class, 
 it is beer, and its sister beverage, porter. 
 From morning till night the can is continu- 
 ally going between the house of the artisan 
 and the neighbouring ''public." The first 
 thing in the morning the artisan himself 
 must have a couple of goes of rum and milk ; 
 by eleven o'clock he is ready for a pint of 
 four-half; at noon, when he knocks off for 
 dinner, he will imbibe a quart or more of the 
 same beverage ; and at night, after work, he 
 sits in the taproom till closing-time, and 
 drinks as much as ever he can pay for or 
 chalk up. Meanwhile, his wife must have 
 her drop of porter in the morning, her 
 drop of bitter to dinner, and her drop of 
 something hot before going to bed. Also on 
 Saturday afternoons, when the twain go mar- 
 keting together, they must have a few drinks, 
 just to show there is no ill-feeling ; while on 
 Saturday night the artisan not infrequently 
 improves the shining hours by "getting 
 
150 The Egregious English 
 
 blind," to use his own elegant phrase. Thus 
 it quite commonly happens that a third and 
 even a half of the total income of a house- 
 hold of the artisan class is spent in alcohol. 
 Thrift, provision for a rainy day and for old 
 age, become an impossibility. Underfeed- 
 ing usually walks hand in hand with over- 
 drinking ; the man loses his nerve, the woman 
 her comeliness and her capacity ; and the end 
 is pauperism and a pauper's grave, if nothing 
 worse. 
 
 Among the English middle and upper 
 classes there is distinctly a greater tendency 
 to moderation than among the lower classes. 
 For all that, the middle classes especially can 
 point to a great many brilliant examples of 
 the fine art of soaking. Publicans, betting- 
 men, commercial travellers, proprietors of 
 businesses, solicitors' clerks, journalists, and 
 the like get through an amount of drinking 
 in the course of a day which would probably 
 appal even themselves if they kept an ac- 
 count of it. " Let's 'ave a drink," is invari- 
 ably one of the first phrases dropped when 
 
Drink 151 
 
 two Englishmen meet. "We'll 'ave an- 
 other" is sure to follow; and so is, " 'Ang 
 it, man! we must have a final." Among the 
 middle classes, too, as also among the upper 
 classes, there is a very great deal of secret 
 drinking, particularly among women and 
 persons whose professional or official posi- 
 tions necessitate the maintenance of an 
 appearance of extreme respectability. The 
 grocer's license and his fine stock of carefully 
 selected wines and spirits offer a ready means 
 of supply to the female dipsomaniac, who 
 would not be seen in a public-house for 
 worlds ; besides, gin can be charged as tea in 
 a grocery account, and many a bottle of 
 brandy has figured in such accounts under 
 the innocent pseudonym of "rolled ox- 
 tongue." 
 
 Though the English upper classes, as I 
 have said, drink with a certain moderation, 
 their moderation really embraces a quantity 
 of liquor which would send the artisan quite 
 off his head. Whiskies-and-sodas at noon, 
 Burgundy at lunch, with cognac to one's 
 
15 2 The Egregious English 
 
 coffee, three kinds of wine at dinner, fol- 
 lowed by liqueurs and whisky, make no 
 appreciable mark on a man who is living at 
 his ease and can sleep as long as he likes; 
 but the sum total of alcohol is quite consid- 
 erable, and probably greater than that con- 
 sumed by the " drunken sot" for whom my 
 lord has such contempt. 
 
 Of English drinking, generally, one may 
 remark that it is done in a very deliberate 
 and unsociable way. The English cannot be 
 said to drink for company's sake. They do 
 not foregather and carry on their drinking 
 merrily. In their cups they are neither 
 witty nor happy, but just dull and dour and 
 inclined to be quarrelsome. They drink for 
 drinking'ssake, — for the sake of intoxication, 
 and to drown trouble. I wish them good 
 luck and less of their vile concoctions ! 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 FOOD 
 
 The subject of diet— he prefers to call it 
 diet — is apparently one of unlimited interest 
 to the Englishman. Meet him where you 
 will, he is ever ready to discuss, first, the 
 weather, and then the things — that is to say, 
 the kinds of food — that agree with him. In- 
 deed, you could almost stake your life on ex- 
 tracting from any strange Englishman you 
 happen to come across some such statement 
 as, "I can't abide eggs," or, "Veal always 
 makes me bilious," within ten minutes of 
 opening up a conversation with him. The 
 Englishman's house, we are told, is his castle ; 
 and the Englishman's hobby, surely, is his 
 digestion. In point of fact, ninety-nine per 
 cent, of adolescent and adult English people 
 153 
 
154 The Egregious English 
 
 suffer from chronic indigestion in a more 
 or less severe form. Flatulence, heartburn, 
 colic, and "liver" are the Englishman's mor- 
 tal heritage. He is invariably troubled with 
 some of them, and quite commonly with all. 
 If you relieved him of them he would scarcely 
 thank you, because he has nursed them from 
 his youth up, and what he really wants is 
 amelioration, and not cure. Probably this 
 is the reason why in the midst of his wails 
 and his unholy talk about diet he continues 
 to feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and 
 least rational manner that generations of bad 
 feeders have been able to develop. 
 
 Of mornings, if you sojourn with an Eng- 
 lish family, you will be invited to breakfast 
 at half -past eight. Promptly at that hour 
 they serve a sort of sickly oatmeal soup, com- 
 pounded apparently of milk and sugar, which 
 they call porridge. Then follow thick and 
 piping-hot coffee with 'am and eggs, fish, or 
 a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade 
 as a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles 
 this menu goes to business belching like a 
 
Food 155 
 
 torn balloon. By eleven o'clock, however, he 
 is ready for a little snack — oysters and cha- 
 blis, prawns on toast, a mouthful of bread 
 and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something 
 of that kind. Then at half -past one there is 
 lunch, practically a dinner of several courses, 
 or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what 
 the English euphoniously term "two veg." 
 At tea-time your Englishman must needs 
 lave himself in a dish of Orange- Pekoe or 
 Bohea, to the accompaniment of lumps of 
 cake. And at long and last comes dinner, 
 the crowning guzzle of the Englishman's day, 
 and a function usually spread over a couple 
 of hours. It will be perceived that this gus- 
 tatory programme or routine has been copied 
 from the French. The French put away two 
 good meals per diem, one at noon and the 
 other in the evening, and there is no reason 
 why the English should not do the same. 
 When you come to think of it, dinner in the 
 middle of the day is a low, under-bred, un- 
 distinguished arrangement ; also not to dine 
 at night is to run the risk of not losing one's 
 
156 The Egregious English 
 
 figure, and of having the neighbours say that 
 one cannot afford it. 
 
 The French programme would be all very 
 well if it were carried out on French lines 
 all through. But it is not. When you say 
 " soup" in a French restaurant, it means that 
 you will be served with half a dozen table- 
 spoonfuls of consomme, or petite marmite, or 
 bisque, as the case may be. When the Eng- 
 lishman says " soup," he means enough thick 
 stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he 
 gets it and swallows it. And it is so all down 
 the menu — too much of everything, and don't 
 you think you can put me off with your 
 blooming homoeopathic portions. A liberal 
 table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is 
 one of the bulwarks of English respectability. 
 That bad digestion and talks about diet fol- 
 low is nobody's fault. 
 
 This profusion — this overfood, as it were — 
 has been brought to its noblest expression by 
 the English aristocracy, whose tables liter- 
 ally groan with costly viands, whose spits 
 are always turning, and whose scullions and 
 
Food 157 
 
 kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related 
 that when a certain duke found it necessary 
 to retrench, and was advised by his family 
 solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and 
 seventh cooks, his grace remarked, "But 
 , So-and-so, a man must have a bis- 
 cuit!" And the English middle class of 
 course faithfully imitates to the best of its 
 powers the English upper class, and so on 
 through the grades. Among all classes there 
 is a rooted prejudice against food that hap- 
 pens to be cheap. To this day people who 
 eat escallops are rather looked down upon, 
 for no other reason than that oysters run you 
 into half a crown a dozen, while you can get 
 excellent escallops at ninepence. So the her- 
 ring, the whiting, and other kinds of cheap 
 fish are considered little better than offal by 
 persons who can afford to pay for sole and 
 salmon. Turtle soup is infinitely to be pre- 
 ferred to any other soup in the world because 
 it is dearer, and champagne is drunk, not be- 
 cause people like it, but because it looks 
 swagger and testifies to the possession of 
 
158 The Egregious English 
 
 means. These gustatory idiosyncrasies are 
 purely English, and obviously they are the 
 offspring of the English love of display and 
 superfluity. 
 
 Among the lower classes the general feed- 
 ing, though cheaper, is just as wasteful and 
 just as gross. Excluding bread, it consists 
 chiefly of inferior cuts of butcher's meat with 
 char cuter ie and dried fish thrown in. It has 
 been complained against the Scot that he is 
 none too clean a feeder, delighting hugely in 
 inferior meats. Haggis is held forth as a 
 great exemplar in point. But it cannot be 
 denied that throughout England the one kind 
 of emporium for the sale of comestibles which 
 flourishes and is unfailingly popular is the 
 pork or ham-and-beef shop. And here what 
 do you obtain? Why, exactly the meats 
 which gentlemen of the type of Mr. Henley 
 describe as offal. They include, in addition 
 to pork in and out of season, pig's feet, pig's 
 heads, pig's liver and kidneys, pig's blood 
 sausages, the ''savoury duck" or mess of 
 seasoned remnants, tripe boiled and raw, and 
 
Food 159 
 
 chitterlings. So that the haggis of Scotland 
 is fairly well balanced. I am not suggesting 
 for a moment that the English display other 
 than a proper judgment in devouring these 
 dainties. But if they will favour the pork 
 shop and its contents, they can scarcely ex- 
 pect to be set down for an angel-bread and 
 manna-eating people. 
 
 Perhaps the chief scandal about English 
 feeding lies in the condition of the English 
 hotels. On the Continent an hotel is an 
 establishment for the accommodation of trav- 
 ellers requiring food and rest. In England 
 an hotel is an establishment for the accom- 
 modation of landlords and waiters. "High 
 class cuisine," says the tariff card, also 
 " wines and spirits of the best selected qual- 
 ity." Yet one's experience tells one that, 
 though the bill will be heavy, neither the 
 cuisine nor the wines will be more than pass- 
 able, much less high class. A menu which is 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, 
 bad cooking, careless service, and a general 
 lack of finish, are the things one may expect 
 
160 The Egregious English 
 
 at an English hotel with the tolerable cer- 
 tainty of not being disappointed. To com- 
 plain is to draw forth the ill-disguised 
 contempt of bibulous head-waiters and the 
 stiff apologies of haughty proprietors. But 
 beyond that mortal man will never get, be- 
 cause the English hotel is an immemorial and 
 conservative institution, and as wise in its 
 own conceit as the ancient sphinx. Of late 
 and in London attempts have been made to 
 organise hotels adapted to the best kind of 
 requirement. So far as I am aware, only two 
 of them have really succeeded, and the 
 charges at both places are quite pro- 
 hibitive. 
 
 Closely identified, one might almost say 
 affiliated, to the English hotel is the English 
 railway-buffet, of which so much has been 
 said in song and story. The sheer horrible- 
 ness of the " refreshments " here provided has 
 passed into a proverb. The English them- 
 selves admit that if you wish to know the 
 worst about refreshments, you should drink 
 the railway-buffet tea and partake of the 
 
Food 161 
 
 railway -buffet sandwich. They also ad- 
 mit that for abominations in the way of 
 aerated waters, milk, beer, and whisky, pas- 
 try, cakes, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats, 
 boiled chicken and ham, and chops and 
 steaks from the grill, the railway-buffet takes 
 the palm; and they admit further that the 
 Hebes who dispense these comestibles to the 
 hungry and howling mob have the manners 
 of duchesses. Yet the English without their 
 railway-buffets would be an utterly woe- 
 begone and miserable people. Put an Eng- 
 lishman down at a strange railway-station 
 with a half-hour wait before him. He has 
 but one resort: he inquires right off for the 
 buffet, and there he gorges and swizzles till 
 the warning bell advises him of the departure 
 of his train. If there is no buffet, he becomes 
 a dejected, pallid man, and threatens to write 
 to the newspapers. So long as the railway- 
 buffets continue to exist, the English diges- 
 tion can never aspire to perfection, even 
 though English feeding and cooking outside 
 railway-stations became ideal ; for a single 
 
1 62 The Egregious English 
 
 "meal" of railway-buffet viands would per- 
 manently disorganise the digestive capabili- 
 ties of the most ostrichy ostrich that ever 
 walked on two legs. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 LAW AND ORDER 
 
 The English love to be ruled, just as eels 
 are said to take delight in being skinned. 
 They hold that a nation which is properly 
 ruled cannot fail of happiness. Their notion 
 of rule may be summed up in the phrase, 
 1 ' Law and order. ' ' The Englishman believes 
 that law and order are heaven-sent blessings 
 especially invented for his behoof. " Where 
 else in the world," he will ask you grand- 
 iloquently, "do you get such law and such 
 order as you get in England — the land of the 
 free?" If anybody picks his pocket, or en- 
 croaches upon his land, or infringes his patent 
 rights, or diverts his water-courses, the Eng- 
 lishman knows exactly what to do. There is 
 the law. They keep it on tap in great build- 
 163 
 
1 64 The Egregious English 
 
 ings called courts, and persons in wigs serve 
 out to you precisely what you may deserve 
 with great gusto and solemnity. The man 
 picked your pocket, did he? Three months' 
 imprisonment for the man. Somebody is 
 making colourable imitations of your patent 
 dolls' eyes. Well, you can apply for an in- 
 junction. And so on. 
 
 This is law. All Englishmen believe in it, 
 particularly those who have never had any. 
 When it comes to the worst, and the Eng- 
 lishman finds that he really must take on a 
 little of his own beautiful specific, he usually 
 begins by falling into something of a flutter. 
 Those bewigged and sedate persons seated in 
 great chairs, with bouquets in front of them 
 and policemen to bawl "Silence!" for them, 
 begin to have a new meaning for the English- 
 man. Hitherto he has regarded them com- 
 placently as the bodily representatives of the 
 law in a free country. He has smacked his 
 lips over them, rejoiced in their learning, wit, 
 and acumen, warmed at the notion of their 
 dignity, and thanked God that he belonged 
 
Law and Order 165 
 
 to a free people — free England. Now, when 
 it comes to a trifling personal encounter be- 
 fore this mountain of dignity — this mountain 
 of dignity perched on a mountain of prece- 
 dent, as it were — the Englishman shivers and 
 looks pale. But his solicitor and his counsel 
 and his counsel's clerk — particularly his 
 counsel's clerk — soon put him at his ease, and 
 instead of withdrawing at the feel of the 
 bath, he is fain to plump right in. Whether 
 he comes out on top or gets beaten is another 
 matter; in any case, the trouble about the 
 thing is that, win or lose, it is infinitely and 
 appallingly costly. Law, the Englishman's 
 birthright, is not to be given away. If you 
 want any, you must pay for it, and pay for 
 it handsomely, too. Otherwise you can go 
 without. The English adage to the effect 
 that there is one law for the rich and an- 
 other for the poor is one of those adages 
 which are very subtly true. There is a law 
 for the rich, certainly. There is also a law 
 for the poor — namely, no law at all. On the 
 whole the Englishman who has not had his 
 
1 66 The Egregious English 
 
 pristine dream of English law shattered by- 
 contact with the realities is to envied. All 
 other Englishmen, whether their experience 
 has lain in County Courts, High Courts, or 
 Courts of Appeal, talk lovingly of English 
 law with their tongues in their cheeks. 
 
 With respect to order, the much bepraised 
 handmaiden of law, I do not think that the 
 English get half so much of her as they think 
 they do. She costs them a pretty penny. 
 The up-keep of her police and magistrates 
 and general myrmidons runs the Englishman 
 into some noble taxation ; yet where shall you 
 find an English community that is orderly if 
 even an infinitesimal section of it has made 
 up its mind to be otherwise? In London at 
 the present moment there are whole districts 
 which it is not safe for a decently dressed 
 person to traverse even in broad daylight; 
 and these districts are not by any means 
 slum districts, but parts of the metropolis in 
 which lie important arteries of traffic. There 
 is not a square mile of the metropolitan area 
 which does not boast its organised gang of 
 
Law and Order 167 
 
 daylight robbers, purse-snatchers, watch- 
 snatchers, and bullies who would beat a man 
 insensible for fourpence, and whose great 
 weapon is the belt. 
 
 For convenience' sake these people have 
 been grouped together under the term 
 " Hooligan.' ' The police — the far-famed 
 London police — can do nothing with them. 
 They admit that they are ineradicable and 
 irrepressible. The magistrates and the news- 
 papers keep on asseverating that ' ' something 
 must be done." That something apparently 
 consists in the capture of a stray specimen of 
 the tribe, who is forthwith given three 
 months, with perhaps a little whipping 
 thrown in. But hooliganism is a business 
 that continues to flourish like the green bay- 
 tree, and London is no safer to-day than it 
 was in the time of the garotters. As the belt 
 is the weapon of the London robber, and as 
 Hooligan is his name, so we find in all the 
 larger provincial towns gangs of scoundrels 
 with special instruments and slang names of 
 their own. In Lancashire and the Black 
 
1 68 The Egregious English 
 
 Country kicking appears to be the favourite 
 method of dealing with the order-loving citi- 
 zen. In some of the northern towns the 
 knuckle-duster, the sand-bag, and the loaded 
 stick are requisitioned; and in all cases we 
 are told the police are powerless. The fact 
 is, that, on the whole, England cannot be 
 reckoned an orderly country. The " hooli- 
 gans" and their provincial imitators are just 
 straws that show the way of the wind. When 
 these persons say : " We will do such and such 
 things in contravention of the law," there is 
 practically nothing to stop them. In the 
 same way, when a community determines to 
 run amuck on an occasion of "national re- 
 joicing" (such as the late Maf eking night), or 
 because a strike is in progress, or a charity 
 dinner has been badly served, or the vaccina- 
 tion laws are being enforced, it does so at its 
 own sweet will, and order can be hanged. 
 Once a week, too, — namely, on Saturday 
 nights, — English order, like the free list at 
 the theatres, is entirely suspended. Satur- 
 day night is the recognised and inviolable 
 
Law and Order 169 
 
 hour of the mob. Throughout the country 
 your flaring English gin-palaces are at their 
 flaringest ; the beer-pumps sing together with 
 a myriad voices, and the clink of glasses takes 
 the evening air with beauty. Until, perhaps, 
 eight o'clock all goes well ; then the quarrel- 
 someness which the English masses extract 
 from their cups begins to assert itself, and the 
 chuckers-out (in what other country in the 
 world are there chuckers-out ?) and the police 
 begin to be busy. Till long after midnight 
 their hands are full, and it is not until the 
 Sabbath is a couple of hours old that the 
 English masses seek their rest. In the mean- 
 time what squalid indiscretions, what sins 
 against humanity, what outrages, have not 
 been committed? The bare consumption of 
 drink alone has been appalling ; the bicker- 
 ings, angry shoutings, indulgences in pugilism 
 and hair-pulling, have been infinite ; and 
 on Monday morning the police-courts will 
 have their usual plethora of drunks and 
 disorderlies, wife-beatings and assaults on 
 the police, with, perhaps, a case or two of 
 
170 The Egregious English 
 
 manslaughter and a murder to put the crown 
 on things. 
 
 In the main, therefore, law and order 
 may be counted among John Bull's many 
 illusions. They are, as one might say, sweet 
 to meditate upon; they look all right on 
 paper, and they sound all right in the mouths 
 of orators. For the rest the Englishman who 
 is wise smiles and keeps a folded tale. One 
 may note, before leaving this entertaining 
 subject, that in England lawyers and laymen 
 alike take a special pride in admitting a cer- 
 tain ignorance. At the bare mention of Scots 
 law they lift up pious hands and impious 
 eyes and say, " Thank Heaven, we know 
 nothing about it!" 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 Lord Rosebery, whom the worthy Mr. 
 Crosland dislikes on purely racial grounds, is 
 usually credited as the originator of what has 
 latterly become the Englishman's watchword, 
 "Educate, educate, educate!" Whether it 
 was the Scotch half of Lord Rosebery or 
 the English half that prompted him to 
 this simple human cry, I shall not pretend 
 to say. On the other hand, it is certain 
 that when his Lordship offered the English 
 such a profound piece of advice, he gave 
 them exactly the counsel that they most 
 needed; for, though the English boast of 
 their knowledge, though they are the ar- 
 rogant possessors of seats of learning out 
 of which can come nothing but perfection, 
 171 
 
17 2 The Egregious English 
 
 though they possess ancient universities and 
 ancient public schools, though they have 
 a school-board system and free education, 
 and though their country is overrun with 
 middle-sized men who play billiards and drink 
 bitter beer and call themselves schoolmasters, 
 they are indubitably and unmistakably an 
 uneducated people. 
 
 Until the passing of the Elementary Edu- 
 cation Act of 1870, learning in England 
 amounted practically to a luxury. Only the 
 rich might be permitted to know things. It 
 was a case of schools, colleges, and univer- 
 sities for the sons of noblemen and gentle- 
 men. The rascally lower classes might look 
 after themselves. It is open to question 
 whether the rascally lower classes were not, 
 on the whole, educationally better off in that 
 day than they are at present. That, how- 
 ever, is by the way. But in the later sixties 
 the reformer got his eagle eye on the rascally 
 lower classes. He perceived that the rascally 
 lower classes were in bad case. They got 
 drunk, they used foul language, they smoked 
 
Education 1 73 
 
 short pipes, and, Heaven help them! they 
 could not read. Anticipating the English or 
 Scotch half of Lord Rosebery, as the case 
 may be, the reformer said, " Educate, edu- 
 cate, educate!" And it was so. The Eng- 
 lish have been educating ever since. They 
 educated to such purpose that thirty years 
 later Lord Rosebery felt it incumbent upon 
 himself to bid them educate, educate, edu- 
 cate! In those thirty years the rascally 
 lower classes learned somewhat. They were 
 supposed to discover, inter alia, that know- 
 ledge was power. They were told that a 
 hodman who could write his name was a bet- 
 ter hodman than the hodman whose sign- 
 manual was a cross. They were led shrewdly 
 to infer that their pastors and masters and 
 general betters owed their supremacy to 
 knowledge; and that if they, the rascally 
 lower classes, would only instruct their child- 
 ren, these same children might wax great in 
 the land and carry burdens no more. The 
 rascally lower classes sent their children to 
 school, some of them cheerfully, some of them 
 
174 The Egregious English 
 
 with groans; and the stars began to shine 
 over England's darkness. 
 
 What has come to pass all men know. 
 Every Englishman gets the smatterings of a 
 literary education, and believes in his heart 
 that he was cut out by the Almighty to be a 
 clerk. The honest trades and handicrafts are 
 no longer desirable in the minds of English 
 youth. To take one's coat off with a view to 
 livelihood is a business for dolts and fools. 
 Advertise in England for an office-boy and 
 you shall receive five hundred applications; 
 advertise for a boy to learn plumbing, and 
 you will be offered, perhaps, two daft-looking 
 lads, who after much thrashing have managed 
 to attain the age of fourteen years. 
 
 The fact is, that the English do not know 
 what education means. At the public 
 schools, and at the universities of Oxford and 
 Cambridge, education has become, to a great 
 extent, a social matter. You go to these 
 places to learn, certainly; but you also go 
 with a view to the formation of a desirable 
 and influential acquaintance, and to get upon 
 
Education 1 75 
 
 your forehead the mark which is supposed 
 to make glorious the public-school and uni- 
 versity-bred Englishman. As a general rule, 
 that mark is altogether imperceptible to the 
 eyes of the unelect, who, if the truth must be 
 told, discover the university man not so much 
 by his manners or conversation as by his 
 ineptitudes. When one comes to consider 
 the principles upon which the public-school 
 and university system are worked, one is 
 quite prepared to admit that, were it not for 
 the element of snobbery patent in the system, 
 English public schools and universities alike 
 would in the long run have to be disestab- 
 lished. As it is, they are the conventional 
 resort of aristocratic adolescence, and per- 
 mitted to exist only on condition that, if a 
 low middle-class person can find the money 
 and keep up the style, he, too, may join the 
 angelic host. To the man of temperament, 
 to the scholar, to the man who loves learning 
 for learning's sake, the English universities 
 have precious little to offer. 
 
 After Oxford and Cambridge, one turns to 
 
176 The Egregious English 
 
 London and the non-resident foundations, 
 all of them, I believe, modern. Here, as it 
 seems to me, the English err again. Broadly- 
 speaking, these institutions, wittingly or un- 
 wittingly, devote their energies to the prepar- 
 ation of young men for the Civil Service. If 
 you are an English board-school teacher at 
 £80 a year and you discover that a second- 
 class clerk in the Circumlocution Department 
 commences at £300 a year, and that, roughly, 
 the examination to be passed is the same as 
 for matriculation at London, you naturally 
 go in bald-headed for matriculation at Lon- 
 don. For the learning you get by these 
 efforts you have not the smallest respect. If, 
 on presenting yourself for examination by the 
 Civil Service Commissioners, you come out 
 sufficiently high on the list to secure an ap- 
 pointment, well and good. If not, your 
 labour has been wasted. It is this spirit 
 which is at the bottom of the English ignor- 
 ance. With them, learning, education, is a 
 means to an end, and not in the least its own 
 exceeding great reward. Hence a properly 
 
Education 177 
 
 educated Englishman is almost as rare as a 
 blue rose. For the masses — the rascally 
 lower orders, that is to say — there are the 
 board schools. Here for thirty years past 
 has been enacted about the sweetest travesty 
 of education that the mind of man could con- 
 ceive. For the teaching of the children of 
 the rascally lower orders, the wise English 
 Government, with the assistance of the wise 
 English school boards, has invented what is 
 to all intents and purposes a new type of man. 
 And his name shall be called Schoolmaster. 
 He began Heaven knows how. But if you 
 inquire into him, you will find that he has 
 spent three years at a Government training 
 college, and that prior to this experience he 
 was for some years a pupil teacher ; also that 
 he is a son of the people, and that his father 
 drove an engine or kept a shop. In these 
 latter circumstances he was, perhaps, fortun- 
 ate. The marvellous fact about him is that, 
 in spite of his years of pupil-teachership and 
 of his three years at a Government training 
 college, he is not a man of either learning or 
 
178 The Egregious English 
 
 culture. I am told that an English pupil 
 teacher is not expected to fash himself by the 
 study of either Latin or Greek. Two books 
 of Euclid will see him through the stiff est of 
 his examinations. He does not need to have 
 even a nodding acquaintance with modern 
 languages; and as for science, if he really 
 wants some, he must pick it up at evening 
 classes. Even when he passes into the Gov- 
 ernment training college, — where, by the way, 
 he is instructed and boarded and lodged 
 gratis, — his studies do not become in any 
 way profound. The history of England, 
 the geography of the world, arithmetic 
 according to Barnard Smith, algebra ac- 
 cording to Dr. Todhunter, Latin and 
 Greek according to Dr. William Smith 
 (Part I.), with a little French, — a very 
 little French, — bring him to the end of his 
 tether. 
 
 Really, the whole business is childish. Any 
 youth of average capacity should get through 
 the entire three years' course in six weeks. 
 Of course, there is the so-called technical 
 
Education 1 79 
 
 training to reckon with ; that is to say, a man 
 at one of these colleges is supposed to spend 
 a great deal of his time, and no doubt does, 
 in perfecting himself as a teacher; but one 
 would have thought that actual practice in 
 an ordinary school would be the best instruc- 
 tor in this respect. In any case, nobody can 
 consider closely the English schoolmaster as 
 manufactured at Government training col- 
 leges without perceiving that the Govern- 
 ment turns out a very remarkable article 
 indeed. I have no desire to belittle a hard- 
 worked, and probably underpaid, body of 
 public servants. Their profession is a thank- 
 less one. I do not think for a moment a 
 single man of them went into it with his eyes 
 open, and I know for a certainty that the 
 school boards and the Government between 
 them have so hedged it round with petty 
 annoyances that a man possessed of feeling 
 must loathe it. It is probably this feeling of 
 loathing of his work that keeps the English 
 schoolmaster down. He knows that it is 
 vain for him to go a hair's-breadth out of the 
 
i8o The Egregious English 
 
 beaten tracks. The school boards must have 
 grants; the Government inspectors must be 
 satisfied. There is only one method of en- 
 suring these desirable consummations: that 
 one way amounts to sheer mechanism and 
 slog. The English schoolmaster must have 
 no temperament. If he possess such a thing, 
 he is bound to come to great grief. Hence 
 the whole weight of the English system is, 
 from first to last, employed in the work of 
 knocking temperament out of him and keep- 
 ing it out. His three years' free training 
 particularly tend to make a slack, unthink- 
 ing sap-head of him. He gets a parchment 
 which entitles him to call himself a certifi- 
 cated teacher, and he is taught to imagine 
 that for downright learning there is nothing 
 like himself under the sun. In this latter 
 surmise he is quite right. The schoolmaster 
 in England, though he will probably be an- 
 other quarter of a century waking up to the 
 fact, counts for next to nothing. Men of 
 parts avoid him; men of no parts laugh at 
 him. For himself, I imagine, he will long 
 
Education 181 
 
 continue to believe in his heart that he is a 
 great man, a little lower, perhaps, than a 
 parson, but certainly a little higher than 
 a policeman. 
 
 The real value of English education, like 
 the real value of most other things, becomes 
 apparent when it is put to the test of practi- 
 cal affairs. Any employer of labour will tell 
 you that, whether an English boy come to 
 him from a board school or a school of a 
 higher grade, whether he be the son of a 
 ploughman or of what the English call a pro- 
 fessional man, he is always and inevitably a 
 good deal of a fool. You have to teach him 
 how to lick stamps. You have to teach him 
 that, excepting in so far as he can write and 
 read, what he has learned at school is not 
 wanted; you have to teach him how many 
 beans make five ; you have to teach him that 
 punctuality and accuracy are worth more in 
 business than all the botany he ever learned ; 
 and all the time you have to watch him like 
 a cat watching a mouse. "Fire out the 
 fools!" once exclaimed Dr. Robertson Nicoll. 
 
1 82 The Egregious English 
 
 I do not think it is too much to say that, if 
 the average English employer took the hint, 
 he would have nobody left to do his business 
 for him. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 RECREATION 
 
 To amuse oneself is the great art of life. 
 From the English point of view, the finest 
 kind of amusement is to be obtained by kill- 
 ing something. Fox-hunting, deer-stalking, 
 grouse-shooting, pheasant-shooting, pigeon- 
 shooting, and even rabbit-shooting still stand 
 for a great deal among the best class of Eng- 
 lishmen. Of old, the masses had their bull- 
 baitings, dog-fights, and cock-fights. These, 
 however, are no longer regarded as legitimate 
 forms of amusement, and the masses, being 
 for various reasons unable to hunt foxes and 
 shoot pheasants, have to fall back on recrea- 
 tions in which killing takes place only by 
 accident. There is the race-course and the 
 football-field. The masses are expected to 
 183 
 
1 84 The Egregious English 
 
 consider themselves happy. Outside racing 
 and football, however, the come-day, go-day 
 Englishman has a good many facilities for rec- 
 reation. Although in most communities the 
 grandfatherly authorities have abolished the 
 old feasts and fairs, which provided periodic 
 saturnalia of merry-go-rounds and wild-beast 
 shows, it is a poor townlet which cannot 
 nowadays boast its permanent settlement 
 of cocoanut-shiesand shooting-galleries, where 
 on Saturday evenings the true-born English- 
 man may find substantial joys. Then, for the 
 Londoner, in addition to this kind of thing, 
 there are from time to time provided vast 
 orgies at Hampstead Heath, the Welsh Harp, 
 Barnet Fair, and other choice resorts. Here, 
 again, it is a case of cocoanuts, shooting-gal- 
 leries, swing-boats, steam-roundabouts, and 
 aerial flights, backed up with donkey-rides, a 
 free use of the tickler and the ladies' teaser, 
 unlimited confetti throwing, and unlimited 
 beer. These amusements, of course, are on 
 the face of them quite innocent, and equally 
 English and unintellectual. 
 
Recreation 185 
 
 Failing merry-go-rounds and cocoanut- 
 shies, the delights of which are apt to pall, 
 the English masses have still left to them 
 their main redoubt of rational enjoyment, 
 which, for reasons no man may skill, is called 
 the music-hall. The English music-hall is 
 practically an expansion or efflorescence of 
 the old-fashioned "sing-song." Sixty years 
 ago the man who went out to take a stoup of 
 ale at his inn was accustomed to be regaled 
 with a little music free of charge. Mine host 
 had possessed himself of a second-hand piano, 
 and secured the services of some broken- 
 down musician to play it for him. There 
 was a great singing of old songs, and the time 
 sped merrily, as it did in the golden age. 
 These feasts of harmony brought custom, and 
 in course of time the evening " sing-songs " at 
 certain hostelries became organised institu- 
 tions and were run on lines of great enter- 
 prise, the piano being supplemented by an 
 orchestra, and the pianist by a number of 
 professional singers and entertainers. Within 
 the last fifty years the " sing-song" has been 
 
1 86 The Egregious English 
 
 separated from its parent the alehouse, and 
 has developed into the music-hall. To-day 
 the English music-halls are almost as thick 
 on the ground as churches and chapels. In 
 the metropolis you would have a difficulty to 
 count them. In the provinces every town 
 of size supports two or three halls, and in- 
 sists on London talent and London style. 
 The class of entertainment provided may be 
 costly and amusing, but it is certainly not 
 edifying. The performers almost to a man, 
 and one might say to a woman, are persons 
 who can be considered " artists" only in the 
 broadest sense, and whose ignorance and vul- 
 garity are as colossal as their salaries. 
 
 Roughly, the entertainment may be di- 
 vided into two sections, the one concerned 
 with feats of strength, juggling, and the like, 
 and the other with laughter-making and 
 vocalism. As regards the first of these sec- 
 tions, a man who can balance a horse and 
 trap on the end of his chin appears to give 
 great satisfaction to an English audience. 
 Why this should be so, nobody knows. The 
 
Recreation 187 
 
 good purpose that may be served by balanc- 
 ing a horse and trap on the end of one's chin 
 is not obvious; but the English masses are 
 ravished by the spectacle. They also have 
 a great fondness for the stout lady who 
 catches cannon-balls on the back of her neck, 
 for the other stout lady who risks her life 
 nightly on the flying trapeze, for the gentle- 
 man who walks about the stage with a piano 
 under one arm and a live mule under the 
 other, and for the gentleman who rides the 
 bicycle standing on his head. To the mind 
 of the English masses these are marvels and 
 well worth the money. They give a zest to 
 life, they provide material for conversation, 
 and their attraction seems perennial. 
 
 The great stand-by of the halls, however, 
 is the laughter-making and vocal depart- 
 ment. Here shine the great stars whose 
 names are familiar on English lips as house- 
 hold words. Here is purveyed the culture, 
 the song, and the humour of the English 
 masses. It is from the music-hall stage that 
 the vast majority of Englishmen take their 
 
1 88 The Egregious English 
 
 tone and their sentiment. That renowned 
 comedian, Fred Fetchem, strolls on to the 
 boards of the Frivolity some night, and, 
 assuming a fiendish grin, exclaims idiotically ; 
 "There 's 'air!" Next morning and for 
 many weeks thereafter all England says; 
 "There's 'air!" on any and every occasion. 
 " What ho she bumps!" " Now, we sha'n't be 
 long," "Not half," "Did he?" and similar 
 catchwords, all popular and all meaningless, 
 capture the English imagination in their turn, 
 and for a season, at any rate, Englishmen can 
 say nothing else. It is the same with the 
 music-hall song. Always there are current in 
 England three or four "songs of the hour," 
 which every Englishman worth the name 
 sings, whistles, or hums; and always these 
 songs, from whatever point of view regarded, 
 are of the most blithering and bathotic nat- 
 ure. At the present moment the prime and 
 universal favourite is that pathetic ditty, 
 Everybody 's Loved by Some One. For the 
 benefit of the English, I quote the first 
 stanza and the chorus of this work : 
 
Recreation 189 
 
 A lady stood within a busy city, 
 
 Her darling little daughter by her side; 
 
 She'd stopped to buy a bunch of pretty violets 
 
 From a ragged little orphan she espied. 
 
 The words she spoke were kinder than the boy had 
 
 heard for years; 
 And in reply to what she asked, he murmur' d through 
 
 his tears, 
 
 Everybody's loved by some one, everybody 
 
 knows that's true, 
 Some have father and mother dear ; sister and 
 
 brother, too. 
 All the time that I remember, since I was a mite 
 
 so small, 
 I seem to be the only one that nobody loves at 
 
 all. 
 
 With this enchanting song the English 
 welkin resounds by day and night. The 
 great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, 
 full of four-ale and bad whisky, howls it in 
 chorus at his favourite " public," work-girls 
 sing it in factories, mothers rock their chil- 
 dren to sleep with it, and every English 
 urchin whistles or shouts it at you with un- 
 flagging zest. Of course, there are others; 
 for example, there is I'm a Policeman, which 
 goes like this : 
 
190 The Egregious English 
 
 In the inky hour of midnight, when the clock is striking 
 three, 
 
 As I stroll along my beet-root, many curious things I 
 see: 
 
 Ragged urchins stagger past me to their mansions in 
 the west; 
 
 Millionaires, through cold and hunger, on our doorsteps 
 sink to rest; 
 
 Dirty dustmen in their broughams, off to supper at the 
 "Cri."; 
 
 Then "Bill Sykes," the burglar, passes, with an eye- 
 glass in his eye. 
 
 Such are the sights I witness when I am on my 
 
 beat, 
 Filling my heart with sawdust, filling my boots 
 
 with feet; 
 Covering half the pavement up with my "plates 
 
 of meat," 
 Though mother sent to say that I 'm a p'liceman — 
 
 which — need one remark? — is intended for 
 what the Scots are supposed to call "wut." 
 Also, there is He Stopped: 
 
 Pendlebury Plum had a wart on his gum, 
 
 And he rubbed it with sand-paper hard; 
 The wart on his gum made Plum fairly hum, 
 
 When it stuck out about half a yard. 
 The wart grew so quick, when he rubbed it with a 
 brick, 
 
 Till it looked like a short billiard-cue; 
 Said Plum to himself, "I shall die on the shelf, 
 
 For I'm darned if I know what to do." 
 
Recreation 191 
 
 So he went and got a pick- axe and shov'd it 
 
 underneath, 
 Then he lifted up his jaw, and he swallowed all 
 
 his teeth; 
 Then he stopped! 
 
 The verses I have quoted are a good, true, 
 and fair sample of the kind of thing that 
 finds favour among the English masses. I 
 do not think that anything better is being 
 proffered, and it is pretty certain that any- 
 thing less inane would be doomed to failure. 
 The fact is that the English mind in the lump 
 is flat, coarse, and maggoty, and the English 
 understanding is as the understanding of 
 a feeble and ill-bred child. A couple of 
 generations ago the songs popular among 
 Englishmen had some claim to coherence, 
 decency, and common sense ; nowadays, 
 however, the Englishman admits that "he 
 cannot sing the old songs." He has gone far- 
 ther and fared worse, and among the many 
 symptoms of his decadence, none is more 
 pronounced than his easy toleration of the 
 balderdash that is being served up to him 
 by the '"alls." 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 STOCK EXCHANGE 
 
 There is nothing in England more as- 
 tounding or more tigerish than the city 
 man. Englishmen have a fixed idea that 
 they are the soul of generosity, indifferent to 
 money, and not in the least sordid. When 
 they are put to it for a type of sheer greedi- 
 ness it pleases them to point a finger at the 
 Scot. Yet there can be no doubt that of 
 late years the desire for riches has become 
 the absorbing English passion. The osten- 
 tation and vulgar displays of the aristocracy 
 and the newly rich have stirred the middle- 
 class English heart to envy. How comes it 
 that such and such a man sleeps on lilies and 
 eats roses? He has " means," my friend. 
 
 And what are ''means"? Just money. If 
 192 
 
Stock Exchange 193 
 
 you are going to be happy in this life, if you 
 insist upon a full paunch of the choicest — 
 upon the ease and softness which are so grate- 
 ful to decadent persons, if you would be in a 
 position to possess all that the soul of the 
 decadent person covets, you really must have 
 money. And as you are a middle class Eng- 
 lishman whose people have omitted to leave 
 you a million or so, it is very awkward for 
 you. Life is short ; the cup goes round but 
 once. 
 
 You have £500. How is it to be made 
 into £50,000, and that while the flush of 
 youth still incarnadines your ambitious 
 cheek? There is only one way: you must 
 speculate — judiciously, if you can; but you 
 must speculate. You are an Englishman 
 and a sportsman, and sometimes you get 
 your £50,000. Then all the world marvels 
 and would fain do likewise, so that the ball 
 is kept rolling. It is a ball full of money, 
 and it rolls cityward. The generous, open- 
 handed Englishmen who are the City take as 
 much as they want and toss you the balance. 
 
194 The Egregious English 
 
 The game is as fashionable as ping-pong: 
 everybody plays it, and, win or lose, every- 
 body calls it the Stock Exchange. I am told 
 that the Stock Exchange proper is a reput- 
 able institution and essential to the well- 
 being of the country. I do not doubt this 
 for a moment ; but round it there has grown 
 up a specious and parasitical finance which is 
 rapidly transforming the English into a 
 nation of punters. " Fortunes made while 
 you wait," is the lure to which the latter-day 
 Englishman has been found infallibly to re- 
 spond. The remnant of the common sense 
 possessed by his excellent grandparents 
 arouses in him a sneaking suspicion that the 
 golden promises of the outside broker and 
 the bucket-shop keeper are not to be de- 
 pended upon. Yet he reads in his morning 
 paper that no end of stocks and shares have 
 risen a point or dropped a point, as the case 
 may be, and he knows that if he had been in 
 on the right side he would have made more 
 money in a few hours than his excellent 
 grandparents could have made in the course 
 
Stock Exchange 195 
 
 of a whole grubby lifetime. Hence, sooner 
 or later, his patrimony, or few hundred of 
 surplus capital, is planked into the ball that 
 rolls citywards, on the off-chance that it may 
 come back arm in arm, as it were, with thou- 
 sands. 
 
 Even the more cautious sort of English- 
 man, who looks upon speculation with a 
 deprecating eye and pins his faith on legiti- 
 mate investment, is rapidly descending into 
 the gambling habit. Schemes which promise 
 fat dividends inflame his imagination and 
 drag him out of the even tenor of his way. 
 He is perfectly well aware that fifteen, 
 twenty, and twenty-five per cent, in return 
 for one's money is quite wrong somehow. 
 But, on the other hand, the prospect rav- 
 ishes, and there are concerns in the world 
 which pay such dividends year by year with- 
 out turning a hair. Only sometimes there is 
 a colossal smash, and half the shopkeepers 
 of England put on sackcloth and ashes and 
 get up funds for one another's relief. To 
 the looker-on the whole system is highly 
 
19 6 The Egregious English 
 
 diverting; to the players in the game the 
 fun will never be obvious. 
 
 The real truth about the matter is simply 
 this — the standard of living in England is an 
 inflated and artificial standard. Practically 
 every Englishman lives, or longs to live, be- 
 yond his means. The workman and the 
 workman's wife must put on the style of 
 the foreman and the foreman's wife, and the 
 foreman and the foreman's wife must ap- 
 pear to be nearly as comfortably off as the 
 manager, the manager as his employer, all 
 employers, shopkeepers, factory owners, iron- 
 masters, engineers, printers, and even pub- 
 lishers as prosperous as each other, and so 
 on till you come to dukes, than whom, of 
 course, nobody can be more prosperous. It 
 would be possible to bring together six Eng- 
 lishmen whose incomes ranged from £i ios. 
 a week to £50,000 a year, and whose dress 
 and tastes would be pretty well identical. 
 Fifty years ago the sons of the middle classes 
 had really no inclination toward the super- 
 fluities. The dandy was rather laughed at 
 
Stock Exchange 197 
 
 among them, the gourmet was a monster 
 they never by any chance encountered, and 
 the libertine was a sad warning and a person 
 to be eschewed. Nowadays it is all the other 
 way: the gilt and tinsel and glamour and 
 rapidity of the gay world have captured the 
 English understanding and brought it ex- 
 ceeding low. There is little moral backbone 
 left in the country. Money, money, money, 
 to be ill gotten and ill spent, is the English 
 ideal. The man who can go without is con- 
 sidered a crank or a fool or worse, or he is set 
 down for an indolent fellow who should be 
 given a month or two on the treadmill for 
 luck. The whole duty of man — of English- 
 men, that is to say — is to have money in 
 ponderable quantities ; the man without it is 
 of no account at all. Nobody believes in him, 
 nobody wants him, nobody tolerates him. 
 He may be wise and witty and chaste and 
 blessed with all the virtues, and still be re- 
 ceived with great coldness by bank man- 
 agers ; and it is well known that the attitude 
 of a bank manager towards a man is the 
 
19S The Egregious English 
 
 attitude of society at large. If the bank man- 
 ager beams and rubs his hands, "God's in 
 His heaven: all's right with the world." If 
 the bank manager frowns and sends you im- 
 pertinent letters, you may last a week or a 
 fortnight or a few months, but you are on 
 thin ice, and you must please take care not 
 to forget it. I should not be at all surprised 
 if the omnipotent official whose business it is 
 to discover what persons are or are not quali- 
 fied to approach our British fountain of hon- 
 our were one day found to be a bank manager 
 in disguise. 
 
 So that, on the whole, the Englishman has 
 every inducement to get rich and to be very 
 quick about it. His dealings with the 
 " Stock Exchange" — that is to say, with the 
 City — are but the natural expression of his 
 anxiety to oblige all parties concerned. It 
 is a pity that getting and spending should 
 become the main concerns of his life ; but, as 
 he pathetically puts it, "One must do as 
 Rome does, and some women are never con- 
 tent. ' ' The Stock Exchange is the only way. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE BELOVED 
 
 What is more beautiful or meet to be 
 taken to the bosom than the Englishman? 
 Everybody loves him ; his goings to and fro 
 upon the earth are as the progresses of one 
 who has done all men good. He drops fat- 
 ness and blessings as he walks. He smiles 
 benignity and graciousness and "I-am-glad- 
 to-see-you-all-looking-so-well. ,, And before 
 him runs one in plush, crying, "Who is the 
 most popular man of this footstool?" And 
 all the people shall rejoice and say, "The 
 Englishman — God bless him!" 
 
 Hence it comes to pass that in whatever 
 
 part of the world the Englishman may find 
 
 himself, he has a feeling that he is thoroughly 
 
 at home. " I am as welcome as flowers in 
 
 199 
 
200 The Egregious English 
 
 May," he says. "These pore foreigners, 
 these pore 'eathen are glad to see me. They 
 never have any money, pore devils ! and were 
 it not for our whirring spindles at home, I 
 verily believe they would have nothing to 
 wear." In brief, the Englishman abroad is 
 always in a sort of Father Christmassey, 
 Santa Claus frame of mind. He eats well, 
 he drinks well, and he sleeps well. He calls 
 for the best, and he pays for it. It is a won- 
 derful thing to do, and it goes straight to the 
 hearts of the " pore foreigner " and the " pore 
 'eathen." This, at any rate, is the English- 
 man's own view. It is a pleasing, consoling, 
 and stimulating view, and it would ill be- 
 come an unregenerate outsider rudely to dis- 
 turb it. Indeed, I question whether the 
 Englishman in his blindness and adipose con- 
 ceit would allow you to disturb it. 
 
 When persons in France say, "A has 
 V Anglais" your fat Englishman smiles, and 
 says, " Little boys ! " When people put rude 
 pictures of him on German postcards, he 
 smiles again, and says that the flowing tide 
 
The Beloved 201 
 
 of public opinion in Germany is entirely with 
 him. When Dutch farmers propose to throw 
 him into the sea, he becomes very red in the 
 neck, splutters somewhat, and says, "I'm 
 sure they will make excellent subjects in 
 time." And when the savage Americans de- 
 sire to chaw him up and swallow him, he 
 says, ' ' You astonish me. I have always been 
 under the impression that blood was thicker 
 than water." His desire is to live at peace 
 with all men; but his notion of peace is to 
 have his hand in both your pockets and no 
 questions asked. He owns two-thirds of the 
 habitable globe (vide the geography books), 
 and every pint of sea is his (pace the popular 
 song) ; he owns also everything that is worth 
 owning. He is the Pierpont Morgan of the 
 universe. Who could help loving him? 
 
 On the other hand, the excellent J. B. has 
 not escaped calumny. If I were disposed to 
 reproduce some of the slanders upon him, it 
 goes without saying that they would make 
 a rather large chapter. All manner of for- 
 eign writers have time and time again had a 
 
202 The Egregious English 
 
 fling at the Englishman. They love him, but 
 their love is not blind. They perceive that 
 he has faults of a grievous nature, and they 
 write accordingly. Curiously enough, too, 
 quite severe criticisms of John Bull have been 
 written in his own household. Mr. Wilfrid 
 Scawen Blunt, for example, who is an Eng- 
 lishman, and apparently innocent of Celtic 
 taint, actually goes so far as to call the Eng- 
 lishman an Anglo-Norman dog: 
 
 Down to the latest born, the hungriest of the pack, 
 The master- wolf of all men, called the Sassenach, 
 The Anglo-Norman dog, who goeth by land and sea, 
 As his forefathers went in chartered piracy, 
 Death, fire in his right hand. 
 
 And the English poet goes on to elaborate 
 his indictment against the Englishman, thus : 
 
 He hath outlived the day 
 Of the old single graspings, where each went his way 
 Alone to plunder all. He hath learned to curb his lusts 
 Somewhat, to smooth his brawls, to guide his passion- 
 ate gusts, 
 His cry of "Mine, mine, mine!" in inarticulate wrath. 
 He dareth not make raid on goods his next friend hath 
 With open violence, nor loose his hand to steal, 
 Save in community and for the common weal 
 
The Beloved 203 
 
 'Twixt Saxon man and man. He is more congruous 
 
 grown ; 
 Holding a subtler plan to make the world his own 
 By organized self-seeking in the paths of power 
 He is new-drilled to wait. He knoweth his appointed 
 
 hour 
 And his appointed prey. Of all he maketh tool, 
 Even of his own sad virtues, to cajole and rule. 
 
 We are told, further, that the Beloved has 
 tarred Time's features, pock-marked Nat- 
 ure's face, and "brought all to the same 
 jakes," whatever that may mean. Also: 
 
 There is no sentient thing 
 Polluteth and defileth as this Saxon king, 
 This intellectual lord and sage of the new quest. 
 The only wanton he that fouleth his own nest, 
 And still his boast goeth forth. 
 
 This is an English opinion, and, conse- 
 quently, worth the money. Mr. Blunt as- 
 sures us that in putting it forth he has the 
 approval of no less a philosopher than Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer, and no less an idealist than 
 Mr. George Frederick Watts. " I have not," 
 says Mr. Blunt, "shrunk from insisting on 
 the truth that the hypocrisy and all-acquir- 
 ing greed of modern England is an atrocious 
 
204 The Egregious English 
 
 spectacle — one which, if there be any justice 
 in Heaven, must bring a curse from God, as 
 it has surely already made the angels weep. 
 The destruction of beauty in the name of 
 science, the destruction of happiness in the 
 name of progress, the destruction of rever- 
 ence in the name of religion, these are the 
 Pharisaic crimes of all the white races; but 
 there is something in the Anglo-Saxon impiety 
 crueller still : that it also destroys, as no other 
 race does, for its mere vainglorious pleasure. 
 The Anglo-Saxon alone has in our day exter- 
 minated, root and branch, whole tribes of 
 mankind. He alone has depopulated con- 
 tinents, species after species, of their wonder- 
 ful animal life, and is still yearly destroying ; 
 and this not merely to occupy the land, for it 
 lies in large part empty, but for his insati- 
 able lust of violent adventure, to make record 
 bags and kill." 
 
 When the Beloved comes across reading of 
 this sort he no doubt sheds bitter tears, and 
 remembers how sharper than a serpent's 
 tooth it is to have a thankless child. And 
 
The Beloved 205 
 
 he goes on his way rejoicing, unimpressed and 
 unreformed. 
 
 The fact of the matter is, that from the 
 beginning, John Bull, though possessed of a 
 great reputation for honesty and munifi- 
 cence, has never really been any better than 
 he should be. When he interfered between 
 tyrant and slave, when he went forth to con- 
 quer savage persons and to annex savage 
 lands which somehow invariably flowed with 
 milk and honey, he made a point of doing 
 it with the air of a philanthropist, and for 
 centuries the world took him at his own esti- 
 mate. Even in the late war the great cry 
 was that he did not want gold-mines. As a 
 general rule he never wants anything; but 
 he always gets it. It is only of late that the 
 world has begun to find him out and that he 
 himself has begun to have qualms. He feels 
 in his bones that something has gone wrong 
 with him. It may be a slight matter and 
 not beyond repair, but there it is. He can- 
 not put his hand on his heart and say ; " I am 
 the fine, substantial, sturdy, truth-speaking, 
 
206 The Egregious English 
 
 incorruptible, magnanimous, genial English- 
 man of half a century ago!" The fly has 
 crept into the ointment of his virtue, 
 and the fragrance of it no longer remains. 
 His attitude at the present moment is 
 the attitude of the anxious man who per- 
 ceives that life is a little too much for him, 
 and keeps on saying, "We shall have to 
 buck up!" 
 
 He is in two minds about most things over 
 which he was once cock-sure. He could not 
 quite tell you, for example, whether he con- 
 tinues to stand at- the head of the world's 
 commerce or not. Once there was no doubt 
 about it ; now — well, it is a question of sta- 
 tistics, and you can prove anything by statis- 
 tics. Out of America men have come to buy 
 English things which were deemed unpur- 
 chasable. The American has come and seen 
 and purchased and done it quite quickly. 
 The Englishman is a little puzzled ; his slow 
 wits cannot altogether grasp the situation. 
 "We must buck up!" he says, "and take 
 measures while there is yet time." He does 
 
The Beloved 207 
 
 not see that the newer order is upon him, and 
 that inevitably and for his good he must be 
 considerably shaken up. His own day has 
 been a lengthy, a roseful, and a gaudy one; 
 it has been a day of ease and triumph and 
 comfortable going, and the Beloved has be- 
 come very wealthy and a trifle stout in conse- 
 quence. Whether to-morrow is going to be 
 his day, too, and whether it is going to 
 be one of those nice loafing, sunshiny kind 
 of days that the Beloved likes, are open 
 questions. It is to be hoped devoutly 
 that fate will be kind to him: he needs the 
 sympathy of all who are about him; he 
 wants encouragement and support and a 
 restful time. 
 
 It is said that his Majesty of Portugal, 
 who has just left these shores, on being asked 
 what had impressed him most during his 
 visit, replied, ''The roast beef." "Nothing 
 else, sir?" inquired his interlocutor. "Yes," 
 said the monarch ; "the boiled beef." And 
 there is a great deal in it. Through much 
 devouring of beef the English have undoubt- 
 
208 The Egregious English 
 
 edly waxed a trifle beefy. It is their beefi- 
 ness and suetiness — that fatty degeneration, 
 in fact — which impress you. 
 
 Recognising his need of props and stays 
 and abdominal belts, as it were, the Beloved 
 has latterly taken to remembering the Col- 
 onies. He is now of opinion that he and his 
 sturdy children over-seas should be "knit 
 together in bonds of closer unity," "to pre- 
 sent an unbroken front to the world," 
 "should share the burdens and glories of 
 Empire," and so on and so forth. The Col- 
 onies — good bodies ! — saw it all at once. They 
 had been accustomed to be snubbed and 
 neglected and left out of count, and they had 
 forgotten to whom they belonged. In his 
 hour of need the Beloved cried, "'Elp! I 
 said I didn't want you, but I do — I do!" 
 and the Colonies sent to his aid, at a dollar 
 a day per head, the prettiest lot of free- 
 booters and undesirable characters they 
 found themselves able to muster. Later, 
 they sent several landau loads of premiers 
 and politicians, who were fed and flattered 
 
The Beloved 209 
 
 to their hearts' content, and went home, no 
 doubt, greatly impressed with the English 
 roast and boiled beef. These gentlemen 
 made speeches in return for their dinners; 
 they were allowed to visit the Colonial Office 
 and kiss the hand of Mr. Chamberlain ; they 
 saw Peter Robinson's and the tuppenny tube : 
 and the bonds of Empire have been knit 
 closer ever since. 
 
 Not to put too fine a point upon it, the 
 Englishman's attempt to buttress himself up 
 out of the Colonies has proved a ghastly fail- 
 ure. The scheme fell flat. The English may 
 want the Colonies, but the Colonies do not 
 want the English — at any rate, on bonds of 
 unity lines. The banner of Imperialism 
 which has waved so gloriously during the 
 past lustrum will have to be furled and put 
 away. The great Imperial idea declines to 
 work; it has been brought on the political 
 stage half a century too late. At best it was 
 a fetch, and it has failed. The All-Beloved 
 will have to find some other way out. 
 Whether he is quite equal to the task may 
 
210 The Egregious English 
 
 be reckoned another question. One sup- 
 poses that he will try ; for there is life in the 
 old dog yet, at any rate, according to the old 
 dog. 
 
 THE END 
 
The UNSPEAKABLE 
 SCOT 
 
 By T. W. H. CROSLAND 
 
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The Romance of 
 Leonardo da Vinci 
 
 By 
 
 The 
 Forerunner 
 
 ( The Resurrection 
 of the Gods) 
 
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 ing higher above the level of contemporary fiction than it 
 would be easy to say." — Spectator. 
 
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 a vivid personality at the back of it all." — Academy. 
 
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