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 Ex Libris 
 ! C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 .
 
 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ?

 
 Hi ^cb^f^fw-x* 
 
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 ARE WE A STUPID 
 PEOPLE? 
 
 BY ONE OF THEM 
 
 LONDON 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. 
 
 DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W. 
 1908
 
 . 4 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I FEEL that a book so unconventional as this demands some 
 preliminary explanation if not some personal clues and hints 
 by way of credentials. 
 
 An American humorist, who by some oversight seems to 
 have escaped a doctorate of laws from Oxford University, 
 said that life usually consisted of three periods the first 
 twenty years of adult life was spent in throwing stones at 
 a mark the next twenty in looking where the stones have 
 
 hit and the next twenty in d g the whole stone-throwing 
 
 concern ! That has not been my lot. The boot has been 
 entirely on the other leg. Born with a silver spoon in my 
 mouth, the heir to an ancient .name and great estates, as well as 
 two of the most noted seats in England, favours and honours 
 were from my earliest years showered upon my reluctant head. 
 At Oxford Dean Liddell publicly thanked me for having placed 
 the name of Christchurch at the head of the modern languages 
 list a thing which it seemed had never been achieved before by 
 that aristocratic, if easy-going, college. On coming to town, in 
 my very first " season," Cabinet Ministers, home and foreign, 
 begged me to let them start me on the thorny path of politics. 
 But, like Gallio, I cared nothing for these things. Entirely 
 devoid of ambition, craving intensely to know the great world 
 outside these western isles, but inspired with the deepest love 
 and faith in the land of my birth, the social condition of England 
 as it gradually unfolded itself before my astounded eyes in the 
 streets of London and Liverpool, with its hideous inequalities, 
 its callous selfishness, its unnumbered horrors " Society " 
 
 10G77U8
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 (so called), with its heathenish sensuality, its vulgarity, its 
 false pretensions, lying impostures and insincerity whose 
 members, instead of furnishing an example to those less 
 endowed by fortune and education than themselves, seemed to 
 take pride in reproducing the vices and the follies of the working 
 classes in their idlest moods, without their excuse ; while politics, 
 which in my books I had learnt to regard as the art by which 
 patriots sought to embellish and improve the lives and lot of 
 their fellowmen were apparently used to furnish a crowd of 
 half-educated " scramblers " with an opportunity of gaining 
 advertisement, rank and subsistence at the expense of the nation 
 these things, and much more, drove me at twenty-one to shake 
 the dust of England from my feet, and register a vow to shun, 
 as far as might be, intercourse with my fellow-countrymen and 
 women for ever ! 
 
 Thus, varying the order of the American humorist at twenty- 
 one, I began life by d g the whole social and political concern, 
 
 and acquired a subjective certitude of the worthlessness and 
 corruption of English society and politics. Doubting, however, 
 the soundness of this precocious judgment, I resolved to test it 
 by careful examination and comparison with the civil and social 
 constitution of other nations. 
 
 At thirty I remained so steadfast in my opinions, that when 
 my father, in 1875, was offered a peerage by the Government 
 of Sir Stafford Northcote, and professed his readiness to accept 
 it however personally disinclined to be enrolled in the ranks 
 of the " Beerage," if it would have the effect of keeping me 
 in England and engaging me in politics, I replied that it was 
 impossible to touch pitch and not be defiled, and that until 
 England changed her skin, which did not seem likely, I 
 should still continue to hope in another land to find a state of 
 things which more nearly accorded with the reason and dignity 
 of man than I had found at home. 
 
 After my father's death, having failed to persuade him to 
 alter the succession to his estates in favour of my younger
 
 PEEFACE vii 
 
 brother, I took the earliest occasion to address my tenantry upon 
 the evils of party government and the selfish egotism of both 
 Political Parties. Their local representatives, who were present, 
 instantly claimed me as a Liberal and a Conservative respec- 
 tively, and in due course separately invited me to stand for 
 the county division. I rejoined by a letter to the principal paper, 
 stating my equal abhorrence from both parties, and my profound 
 disbelief in " party government," ending up with the statement, 
 " that when a really patriotic and national party shall arise in 
 England I should be glad to place myself at the service of my 
 country, if so desired." 
 
 Later on, finding that the General Election of '84 was likely 
 to turn exclusively upon Home Rule, a subject in which I had 
 always taken the deepest interest and had strongly urged in 
 press and platform, I consented to stand for a large manufac- 
 turing northern town, where I was able to put forward my 
 all-round plans of reform ad libitum, and acquired a clear, if 
 painful, insight into the ways and means of British politicians. 
 I found the view formed at the age of twenty-one, in the 
 main, perfectly correct, and after a brief but ineffectual struggle 
 to reconcile British politics with patriotism, and to press the 
 ways of reformation upon unwilling ears, I abandoned the design 
 entirely, not so much because I had grown weak in the faith 
 of my remedies, but because I found that no one wanted to be 
 reformed ! Why should they ? There would be no money in it. 
 
 I found that Conservatives and Liberals, with few excep- 
 tions, regarded politics as a game whose stakes took the 
 shape of rank, wealth and pensions; that the main difference 
 between the two parties, is that the Liberals of to-day, out of 
 regard possibly for their great and undoubted achievements in 
 the past, "profess" more loudly than their adversaries, but as 
 for their policy and methods, they are absolutely identical, 
 consisting briefly in (1) "sticking to power"; and (2) "gam- 
 moning" the democracy. Here is the whole art of British 
 government in a nutshell. Such patriots as exist in England
 
 viii PEEFACE 
 
 are always found outside Parliament, because everything 
 conspires to discourage them from taking a hand inside ; since, 
 if they were once let in they would soon spoil the game. Such 
 as cannot be prevented from getting in give more trouble to 
 their leader than the entire government of the country. The 
 pretended patriots, who get in merely to be bought off, are 
 easily silenced by bribes and pensions ; but when they are 
 genuine, and there are many such in the Radical ranks mostly 
 fanatics of sorts then indeed are the dovecotes fluttered. 
 Through an ingenious adaptation of the same tricks which 
 enable the average British schoolmaster to make his scholars 
 the partners of his iniquities by inculcating " strict fidelity to 
 the sc/tooZ," the parliamentary "new boy," if recalcitrant and 
 unwilling to fall into line, is "boycotted" or "ragged," and 
 denounced as being "disloyal to his chief, 1 ' as if forsooth his 
 constituents had elected him for that end ! If still unamenable 
 alike to argument or threats he refuses to "play the game," 
 the Party have no choice but to promote him. A ministerial 
 post usually soothes the savagest breast, and failing that, the 
 recalcitrant one is often put into the Cabinet, vjhere his subtle 
 colleagues privately fool him to the top of his bent, and publicly 
 praise his honesty and disinterestedness, calling him in derision, 
 " Honest John," etc., etc. 
 
 At forty-five I found myself slowly drifting into the position 
 of stock chairman of the district, and doomed to open all the 
 bazaars, patronize the so-called balls, fancy fairs, fetes and 
 bazaars, devised expressly to gratify the personal vanity of 
 the idlest busybodies in the county, and besides being expected 
 to contribute to help on causes for which I had no sympathy, 
 whose means I disapproved, and whose funds were mostly 
 absorbed by the " able and disinterested gentlemen " aforesaid. 
 
 Boused to the danger of my position by a rise to two 
 chairmanships in the week, I pondered deeply upon the whole 
 duty of man and the duties of citizenship in particular, and 
 finding myself on the brink of that slippery slope of public
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 favour, from whose slavery there is no escape but the grave, 
 I came to the deliberate conclusion that it was my instant duty 
 to decide between the rival rights of family or citizenship for 
 good and all. Further, was I not conscious, or at all events 
 suspicious of being made a stalking-horse for vain enterprises, 
 idle show and insincere follies, for which I entertained a profound 
 contempt, and which I ascribe partly to the restlessness and 
 partly to the incurable love of self-advertisement of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race ? Also had I any solid grounds for the belief 
 that I was doing more good than harm ? 
 
 My conclusion was in the negative. I had firmly satisfied 
 myself by that time (1) that party politics cannot advance 
 public good to any appreciable extent ; (2) that English 
 politicians do not desire to advance anything or anybody but 
 themselves ; (3) I came to think J. Stuart Mill was right 
 when he declared that the man who made two blades of 
 grass grow where there grew only one before, was more 
 deserving of his country's gratitude than the most notable 
 statesman of the realm. So I set myself to cultivate and 
 plant waste lands, and succeeded in the teeth of all opposition 
 and adverse prophecies beyond my highest expectations. 
 " Si quaeris Monumenta, circumspice." 
 
 It will perhaps be objected that the criticism of those who 
 do not frequent "Society" can have no value. True it is 
 that since the age of twenty-one I have kept aloof from the 
 society of my fellow-countrymen and women as far as it was 
 possible for me to do so. Nevertheless, I have taken infinite 
 pains for many years to sound the secret springs and causes of 
 its being, not wholly, I imagine, without success : nor can one, 
 without being blind, deaf or idiotic, help seeing what is going on 
 around one. Its " loudness " compels attention from the most 
 unwilling. It advertises itself from the housetops. Those who 
 are in the thick of it are those who least observe its ways. You 
 might as well ask a man in a fog what he thinks of the scenery ; 
 or ask a fish what he thinks of a watery life. That a man
 
 x PEEFACE 
 
 seeks society, defines him sufficiently for all practical purposes. 
 Conversely, to endure English society, and not to deteriorate, 
 is in itself highest praise, but how many are there that 
 deserve it? 
 
 History and experience tell us that while society is young and 
 fresh and green, virtue flourishes and the State defies decay ; 
 but they do not so much attribute national decay to " Society," 
 as we call it, that is, " social agglomeration," or a " herding of 
 both sexes together," as to the vices that flow from the excess of 
 luxury and wealth. I am inclined to think that as the most 
 striking difference between man's nearest rivals in the animal 
 creation and himself is the gregariousness of the former and the 
 solitariness of the latter, so man's chief cause of decay in those 
 qualities which knit the State together of earnestness, sin- 
 cerity and fidelity proceed from the advancement out of a 
 solitary, and hence a meditative state, to a gregarious and hence 
 a thoughtless and frivolous habit of life. Not idly or in vain did 
 St. James urge upon Christians the importance of " keeping 
 oneself unspotted from the toorld" as an essential condition of 
 " religion pure and undefiled." Does not this clearly indicate 
 the apostle's view of the corrupting character of social 
 intercourse ? 
 
 This is the explanation of my attitude, and these the warrant 
 of my sincerity. 
 
 Descended from a Cavalier stock, I am in theory as deeply 
 opposed to a foreign dynasty as I am free from the silly practice 
 of Jacobite fanatics, who see in a Bavarian princess the 
 rightful sovereign of England. Nor do I hold that countries were 
 made for kings but kings for countries wherefore if, as I cannot 
 consider doubtful, the greater bulk of my fellow-countrymen are 
 content along with Spain, and Italy, and Denmark, to be ruled 
 by German princes, I should be the last to express dissent, since 
 loyalty to any dynasty soever constitutes the surest guarantee 
 of national happiness. 
 
 Having much to lose and nothing to gain, my interest would
 
 PEEFACE xi 
 
 incline me to the Conservative side, were not their practise 
 generally at variance with their professions, and their 
 cynical selfishness repellant to my sense of truth and justice. 
 Greatly as the early history of the Liberal party captivate my 
 heart and enlist my sympathy, their wild and reckless career 
 after the '60's disentitle them to the esteem which their earlier 
 reforming exploits had evoked. Well disposed and disinterested 
 as are the average Liberal recruits the inherent evil prevails, 
 that Liberalism from its very nature draws into its ranks the 
 most generous, self-denying and enthusiastic spirits of the people 
 1 the stuff, in short, of which saints and martyrs are made, if you 
 will but like all such, ill-balanced, one-sided, self-willed and 
 impracticable. It therefore necessarily harbours all the " cranks," 
 "faddists," " fanatics," and " sentimentalists " in the realm, each 
 of whom cares nothing and knows nothing of any grief or care but 
 his own and has neither the wit nor the knowledge to compre- 
 hend that in a highly complex society, sudden or ill-planned 
 reformation often brings greater ills than those which it is 
 designed to remove. Such men, too, are the natural prey of 
 self-seeking rogues, who easily lead them on to their own and 
 their nation's destruction. Far be it from me to impute such 
 designs to their present blameless if somewhat colourless leader, 
 whose only reproach would seem to be that he has neither the 
 character nor experience required to rule a menagerie, or manage 
 a lunatic asylum. 
 
 I am as far, however, removed from sympathy with the insane 
 adherence of the Liberals to the letter instead of the spirit of 
 Free Trade, as I am disgusted with the insincerity of the Conser- 
 vatives, who now, for the first time, adopt the platform cry of 
 Fiscal Eeform to taunt the Liberals with, when for twenty years 
 they have had its importance urged upon them, and yet have 
 never stirred hand or foot to so much as attempt it. For years, 
 when in opposition, they thundered at the Whigs for abandoning 
 Pitt's admirable system of applying the returns from indirect 
 taxation to the redemption of the National Debt, and in later
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 days for their iniquitous continuance of a war tax of 8d. in the 
 pound in times of peace, yet when their power was absolute and 
 unquestioned in both Houses of the Legislature, no attempt 
 whatever was made by the Conservatives to redeem their pledges 
 or justify their contentions in any particular. They raved at the 
 confiscatory character of the uneven and inequitable Death 
 Duties, yet made no attempt whatever when returned to power 
 to rescind them. They vowed in opposition that the Liberals 
 were bent on ruining the brewing and farming interests, that they 
 were squandering the national coal-wealth for want of protection, 
 driving the milling trade out of the country, and filling the East 
 End with foreign paupers and yet with nearly twenty years 
 what have they done except disgust their supporters, deceive their 
 friends, hatch up a war and blunder through it at a cose of 300 
 millions to the nation, and almost double the yearly expenditure 
 of the Government ? 
 
 Let it not be imagined that they stayed in thus long because 
 they enjoyed the confidence of the country. It was nothing but 
 the dread of worse incompetence and evils awaiting them from the 
 opposite side which so long stayed their hands, until at last 
 even John Bull's incomparable patience gave way, and in 
 sheer desperation he flung himself into the arms of the opposite 
 camp. 
 
 That a trading, shipbuilding, manufacturing, densely populous 
 and highly-developed country, where the land is owned by fewer 
 hands than anywhere in the world, presents all the features that 
 most urgently cry for free trade, must be apparent to the least 
 reflective mind ; but it is no more true to say that we possess free 
 trade, than to say that we possess a monopoly of the moon. Had 
 we ordered our vital concerns like men, instead of Whigs and Tories, 
 (arcades ambo !) we should not now be in the ridiculous plight to 
 which our insane party strife and political auctions have reduced 
 us, nor would Providence " in our old age have left us naked 
 to our " Colonies. 
 
 THE AUTHOR.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I Page 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 INTRODUCTORY (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 INTRODUCTORY (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 BRITISH RELIGIONS 47 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 CANT, OR RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY 63 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 BIBLE OR BEER .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 70 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE DRINK QUESTION 77 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 OUR GLORIOUS CONSTITUTION . . . . 83 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 PARTY POLITICS 89 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 EDUCATION 97 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 PRIVATE SCHOOLS 108 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 ABOUT LAW 117
 
 CONTENTS 
 CHAPTER XIII Page 
 
 PRESS 
 
 144 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 151 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 OUR MORAL SLAVERY 165 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 STAGE 170 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 TASTE AND TACT 185 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 SOCIETY .. 199 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 DECLINE OF GOOD SOCIETY . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 OUR NOBILITY .. 215 
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 PROFESSIONALISM 235 
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 VULCAN OR CHRIST? PSEUDO-SANITATION 252 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 OUR POPULAR HEROES f 268 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 OUR POPULAR FAVOURITES SHOPKEEPERS 282 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 "BUSINESS" AMONG "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS" HYPOCRISY OUR 
 
 MOST CONSPICUOUS VIRTUE FAVOURITISM 295 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 WIT AND HUMOUE 309 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 KING AND SOCIETY 317
 
 CONTENTS xv 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII Page 
 
 THE LADIES SHOPKEEPING IN HIGH LIFE .. .. .. .. 326 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 FASHION BOND STREET PESTS OUR CIVILISATION VULCAN IN WAR 340 
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 THE " BouNDER-ON-A-BoiLER " 367 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 THE DECLINE OF RESPECT FOR WOMAN GALLANTRY . . . . . . 377 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 OUR COUNTRY BOYS AND GIRLS 388 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 THE DECLINE OF HOME LIFE THE IDLE RICH ON THE DOWN- 
 GRADE DRINK BELOW STAIRS DRINK ABOVE STAIRS . . . . 392 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 COOKERY 403 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 THE DECLINE OF THE SENSE OF HONOUR 411 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 OUR EGREGIOUS GOVERNMENT, COUPLED WITH A FEW REFLECTIONS 
 
 UPON OUR EMPIRE 419 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII 
 RATES AND TAXES 429 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 DECLINE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PRESS AND DRAMA .. .. .. 433 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX 
 UNEMPLOYED OUR MILITARY AND NAVAL ESTABLISHMENTS . . . . 439 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 OUR OWN TONGUE 449 
 
 CHAPTER XLI 
 PRIMOGENITURE AND OTHER LAWS PARTY GOVERNMENT v. 
 
 AGRICULTURE AND COMMERCE 454
 
 xvi CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XLII Page 
 
 OUR BOYS AND GIRLS 459 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES SPORTS OF THE IDLE RICH OOB EMPIBE 
 
 UP-TO-DATE ARMY GOLF POLICE 463 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV 
 OOB STATE CLERGY AND THEIR DOCTRINE OF "CONTINUITY" .. .. 474 
 
 CHAPTER XLV 
 
 BRITISH RELIGIOUS REFORM HOUSE OF LORDS TEMPERANCE 
 
 REMEDIES 479 
 
 CHAPTER XLVI 
 CONCLUSION 488
 
 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 " wad some power the giftie gie us 
 To see ourselves as ithers see us." 
 
 INTEODUCTORY 
 
 So sang Burns long ago : but I doubt if that Power would be 
 popular either in Scotland or in England. We all entreat our . 
 friends to give us a candid opinion of ourselves, but we are 
 seldom pleased when we get it. " Holding up the mirror to 
 nature," as Shakespeare has it, is equally distasteful, especially 
 when done on a large scale. Not that Britons dislike hearing 
 themselves " run down " by foreigners. Indeed they rather like 
 it than otherwise. It seems to tickle their vanity, and since 
 they put it down entirely to jealousy it has the effect rather to 
 exalt their feeling of superiority than offend their pride. But 
 when a fellow Briton criticises them, they cry out, " How dares 
 he ? " etc., etc. 
 
 Now I propose greatly daring to hold up " the mirror " to 
 my fellow-countrymen in some notable respects. Up till the 
 Boer War I should have hardly dared to do so. Since that 
 momentous epoch thinking Englishmen have opened their eyes 
 and stared very wide in the abortive attempt to discover how it 
 comes about that foreigners display such unanimity in hating 
 and reviling us, and to this end I shall endeavour to "hold up 
 the mirror to nature," however unpopular such a course may be. 
 
 But you will exclaim in one voice, " Who is this that offers to 
 teach us what we are like ? Who is this new Moses to guide us 
 out of the wilderness ? " Calm yourselves, gentle readers, my 
 pretensions are not so high as that. Long years of observation 
 and intimate relations with most European nations have taught 
 me this salient fact that no man, or woman either, can 
 thoroughly understand the " Zeitgeist " of a people unless
 
 2 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 married among them, or established in business among them 
 (and not always then) or otherwise closely related by ties of 
 relationship; and in all cases, and above all, be thoroughly 
 acquainted with their language. I have, however, also remarked 
 that when an Englishman with any of these qualifications 
 passes many years among, and becomes thoroughly acquainted 
 with, any single nation other than his own, he either becomes ten 
 times more bigoted a Briton than he was before, or more often 
 sinks the Briton altogether in the ultra anti-British Cosmopolite, 
 without widening his range in any degree, or possessing any 
 wider faculty for scanning the European horizon than if he 
 had remained at home. 
 
 These, then, are my qualifications, that knowing seven or eight 
 languages, and having from early childhood lived in intimacy 
 with my foreign relatives of various countries, besides having 
 been partly educated abroad and having subsequently spent 
 among foreigners the best years of my life, I regard it as a 
 patriotic duty in my later years to render what I believe to be 
 the greatest service that can be done to my fellow-countrymen 
 by a faithful and unbiassed account of how the Englishman looks 
 to various nations of the civilised globe. 
 
 I may here premiss that there are three grades or varieties of 
 linguists. 
 
 (1) The commonest variety is the young man from Oxford or 
 Cambridge who is firmly persuaded that having spent infinite 
 time and pains in amassing words of various languages which he 
 is informed by his too indulgent tutors will easily blossom out 
 when he finds himself abroad into French, Italian, or German 
 as the case may be, flounders heavily whenever he thinks fit to 
 produce them, and is generally reduced once more to English by 
 a foreign waiter or other whom he finds infinitely more eloquent 
 in his own language than himself, and who returns from his 
 travels after many vain attempts to make himself understood 
 with a very low opinion of extra-Britannic intelligence, contenting 
 himself for the rest of his life by interlarding his own language 
 with ample scraps of foreign tongues intended to convey the 
 impression of foreign research and travel. 
 
 Others there are who, having acquired a foreign language well 
 enough to converse familiarly and freely, gain much information 
 of a generally useless and encyclopaedic or guide-book description,
 
 INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 please themselves exceedingly, while greatly boring their foreign 
 friends, and come back to their own country as travelled men. 
 
 This is not the sort of man I mean. Highly estimable in his 
 way, gaining a certain reputation for his fellow-countrymen, and 
 giving himself a good time as the Yankees say, he rarely gains 
 any insight into the ways of foreigners, much less into their way 
 of looking at other nations, inclusive of his own. Of such is the 
 common globe-trotter or rather the best educated among them. 
 
 For the man, however, who reaches the third stage or has 
 learnt a foreign language in his early youth so that his accent is 
 undistinguishable from those of the natives among whom he 
 moves, a variety of unpleasantness dogs his steps. Your beloved 
 foreign friends or relatives, as the case may be, continually blurt 
 out the most unpleasant things about your nation with at most 
 an apologetic remark about forgetting that you are an English- 
 man ; or if you interpose any objection, they will say, " After all, 
 you are only an imitation Englishman, and are sure not to 
 mind " ; or if in more general society where you are not known 
 to the company at large, you are treated to a large selection of 
 most unpleasant manifestations of continental anti-English 
 bigotry. Here it is no longer a case of " How you schpek 
 veil, I should not haf known but dat you vas Scherman, 
 etc.," but something more like this, " Of course you are only 
 half an Englishman, and you know as well as we do what we 
 think about your countrymen." 
 
 I scarcely know which is the more unpleasant situation to 
 find yourself in general company taken for a native, and out of 
 good-fellowship maintaining the illusion in the face of a very 
 offensive caricature of English customs or manners without 
 being able to retaliate or protest under pain of being denounced 
 as an intentional though most unwilling impostor, or to be 
 compelled in intimate society to grin and look pleasant when 
 your national corns are being carefully trodden on with a 
 passing comment of " Of course you don't mind as you are 
 only half an Englishman." 
 
 One of the earliest shocks to my national pride was a 
 serious discussion in a French lycee upon the respective claims 
 to civilisation of the English and Russian. (I must parentheti- 
 cally remark that the French always class the English and the 
 Russian together ; surely a remarkable instance of the utter
 
 4 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 inefficiency of concrete knowledge to alter abstract national 
 sentiment ; for, historically speaking, there can be nothing more 
 widely separate than the history of the two nations.) The louder 
 talker of the two finally clenched the subject by challenging 
 disproof of the well-known fact that Englishmen sold their wives 
 at Smithfield, while as for their capacity for drinking, Shakespeare 
 himself, their most admired poet, while admitting that the Danes 
 were the biggest drunkards in Europe, said that an Englishman 
 could drink any Dane dead drunk with ease. 
 
 Many years after, when dining with a Portuguese family at Bio 
 Janeiro, upon my expressing some surprise at a remark that fell 
 from a neighbour in respect of a certain Brazilian worthy whose 
 early death had been ascribed to " speaking English," the aston- 
 ishing but unpleasant explanation was casually vouchsafed that 
 the ordinary term in Portuguese for getting drunk was " speaking 
 English." 
 
 Again, in Spanish society, a remarkably loquacious senator 
 once appealed to me for confirmation as to whether it was not an 
 undoubted fact that London is the clearly predicted " Scarlet 
 Woman" of the Apocalypse, corresponding most accurately in 
 position and attributes. When objection was offered to the 
 statement that she sat on Seven Hills he said, "But everybody 
 has heard of Seven Dials " (which he apparently confused with 
 the Seven Vials of the Apocalypse), finishing a triumphant 
 harangue with the remark that she was clearly the strumpet of 
 nations, and gathered about her all the people of the earth, for 
 whom she made, sold or carried, all the merchandise of the world. 
 
 It will be easily seen by these chance memories, first, how 
 difficult it is to combat half-truths which pass from mouth to 
 mouth, and though frequently disproved, always reappear in a 
 fresh form. 
 
 Nor are we the only sufferers. Can anything be more childish 
 than our frog- and snail-eating and such like legends? 
 
 " Is there a boy whose soul's so dead 
 
 That never to himself has said, ' Every Frenchman lives on frogs and 
 snails ! ' " 
 
 But I shall be told by the ingenuous reader, " Surely there is 
 some truth in the saying that many Frenchmen do eat frogs, 
 and others, at least in Burgundy, do eat snails." To this I
 
 INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 reply, Have you by chance, dear reader, ever sat down to a dish 
 of escargots a la Bourguignonne or a fricassee of frog's-legs a 
 la Chantilly ? If you have not, I have ; and I think that had 
 you enjoyed those delicious morsels cooked in that delicious 
 manner, you could not but admit that these are not dishes to 
 be lightly spurned, still less to be made a subject of national 
 reproach. Rather should it be a matter of reproach to our- 
 selves that we do not appreciate but despise these simple 
 gifts of Providence. And here let me take this somewhat 
 trivial subject as a text on which to preach a sermon to my 
 beloved countrymen, for this lies at the very root of our 
 national antipathies; that root syllogistically expressed, being 
 "What you do, we don't; and what we don't, you do," or, 
 " Because you do it and we don't, therefore, you must be a fool." 
 
 Given the opportunity, probably no man is more easily won 
 over or converted to foreign views than the average Briton 
 but when he looks across the sea in a critical spirit he is apt to 
 pour unmeasured sarcasm upon any practice that differs from 
 his own. Here again is an instance of how the "half-truth" 
 bloated by national prejudice swells itself out like a bull-frog 
 till it becomes an absolute bar to international sympathies, 
 and possibly may even amount to a menace of war; and yet 
 how simple to explain away, and at the same time how 
 difficult to refute. For example, if you call a Frenchman a. 
 frog-eater or a snail-devourer when it is a thousand to one if 
 he ever ate a snail or a frog in his life, he only thinks you as 
 stupid and witless as you would if he were to call you a 
 tripe-stuffer or a devourer of pineapples, neither of which 
 estimable commodities might conceivably have ever passed your 
 lips. 
 
 On the other hand, when you go, gentle reader, to a French 
 theatre or take up a French Almanach Comique (save the mark !) 
 you will possibly, if not of a philosophic temperament, be 
 extremely apt to boil over at the presentment of an Englishman 
 or Englishwoman of the usual French comic type in a deer- 
 stalker and a bright green plaid coat and large check trousers 
 his face ornamented with wide-spreading, red bushy whiskers 
 with a wife similarly attired, allowing for differences in sex, 
 adorned with long ringlets which flow gracefully down each
 
 6 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 side of her meagre face, while, to crown all, large yellow tusks 
 emerge from their mouths, completing the beauty of the picture. 
 Here again is the half truth above referred to, so difficult to 
 refute and so easy to defend. 
 
 I will explain. After the great war with Napoleon was 
 happily closed by Waterloo, the difference of prices between 
 living in France and in England was so great, that numberless 
 old maids of uncertain age and fixed income, finding that they 
 were able to live in France in a style which the high prices 
 caused by national exhaustion and heavy debt made impossible 
 in their own country, flocked to all the smaller towns of France 
 and Belgium, where they were enabled to live with great comfort 
 on their small annuities of 25 to 50 a year. In my younger 
 days in such places I still saw many of them ; they were 
 invariably eloquent upon the subject of rising prices, and were 
 usually understood to subsist upon tea and bread and butter. 
 It was many years before I satisfactorily explained the reasons 
 which produced that extraordinary uniformity of face and 
 appearance which has unfortunately resulted in building up a 
 type under which Englishmen are likely to groan for many a 
 day. Science has clearly demonstrated nor can any observant 
 visitor to China fail in baing impressed with the truth of its 
 teaching in this respect that the special and invariable effect of 
 tea saturation or, if you will, tea poisoning, resulting from the 
 continuous application of that beneficent, but in large quantities 
 disastrous beverage, is a pale and flaccid face, and above all that 
 unfleshing of the teeth which follows the abuse of astringents. 
 As for the long curls which still adorn the " Engleesh mees " of 
 the French comic stage they are still visibly impressed in the 
 eyes of my memory, in those same French country towns of 
 bygone days. 
 
 With all intention, therefore, to sympathize with the outraged 
 feelings of my fair countrywomen thus grossly libelled, I am 
 bound to say in my character of unbiassed umpire, that if any- 
 thing the fault is more on the English than on the French side ; 
 for while both caricatures are inherently absurd and misleading, 
 that of attributing to the Frenchman the universal habit of 
 eating frogs or snails has substantially less foundation, in fact, 
 than the abounding "mees" of country towns of other days.
 
 INTKODUCTOEY 7 
 
 It would have been an injustice to the average Frenchman or 
 even Englishman to insinuate that he considered such types as 
 either universal or general. Nor is it certain that any large 
 section of either people believe this type to exist at all in these 
 days ; but having no better weapon at hand wherewith to 
 wreak their ever-present hostility towards an hereditary foe, they 
 use such terms of abuse or caricatures for want of anything 
 better or more consistent with truth. The only remedy that I 
 can suggest, which will adequately appease the wounded feelings 
 of my fair countrywomen, is to ponder over this pregnant fact, 
 that if Frenchmen of the First Empire found no worse form of 
 ridicule than the ringleted "mees" for nearly a century, when 
 mutual hatreds were still seething in the breast of Briton and 
 Frank, is it not consoling to reflect that all these years have not 
 developed in the French mind a still more offensive type than 
 that to which they cling with such faithful tenacity ? 
 
 Let them rather beware lest their indifference to foreign 
 opinion, and their haughty and ungracious demeanour while 
 travelling abroad, lay the foundation of a far deeper and better 
 grounded antipathy than that which is afforded by the grotesque 
 if childish caricatures of days gone by. 
 
 Here I can almost fancy I hear my fair readers indignantly 
 exclaim, " I know exactly what he means. He refers to those 
 silly attacks in the newspapers that appear from time to time 
 about ladies wearing out their old clothes when they are abroad, 
 or coming down to table-d'hote in a morning wrapper, or going 
 out shopping in tweed caps and ulsters. Besides, how could 
 such things determine international relations ? He might as 
 well talk of straws causing an earthquake or an avalanche." 
 
 Well, gentle reader, I am not prepared to deny that straws 
 will sometimes originate a human avalanche or earthquake, if 
 not a terrestrial. There is no greater mistake than to say, as 
 many will, "These are merely straws that point which way the 
 wind blows." I am not so sure that the straws themselves are 
 not in many cases the cause of the disaster. 
 
 When we heard, at the outbreak of the most terrible war of 
 modern times, between France and Germany, that the silliest of 
 a silly people ran to and fro on the boulevards shouting out, 
 " a Berlin," did not our papers say there was not much in it?
 
 8 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 but it showed which way the wind blew, in other words the 
 trend of public feeling. They were wrong. It was the straws 
 blown hither and hither on the storm of public opinion that 
 themselves determined that momentous event. While Napoleon 
 sat shivering in his palace, uncertain how to act, listening for 
 every puff of popular feeling, dreading to lose that crown 
 which he had so cleverly snatched from a thoughtless 
 Democracy, and had kept by flattering, coaxing, and bullying 
 in turn the astute statesmen who opposed him, the now unnerved 
 leader of 1870, crippled with disease and surfeited with pleasure, 
 turned hither and thither for any sign from the people as to 
 how popular feeling ran. It was literally the straws of the 
 boulevards from which proceeded that appalling calamity that 
 drenched France with her best blood ; it was the students, the 
 riff-raff, and the schoolboys of Paris, the lightest and most 
 frivolous of a most frivolous people, not the iron hand of 
 Bismarck, that cast the die. But of all this more anon. 
 
 Turn we now to our American cousins as we fondly call 
 them, soon to be our leaders, if, as the copy-books say, " Imita- 
 tion is sincerest flattery." 
 
 Staying with some relatives in Baltimore in the early '70's, 
 boy-like I hotly contested a casual sentence which fell from the 
 lips of a distinguished young soldier of the Confederate Army, 
 who at the age of twenty-six in the bloody field of Vicksburg 
 had earned the command of his regiment by reason of the 
 slaughter of all his brother officers, but otherwise the mildest of 
 men. " Wai now, see here, I should never have taken you for 
 a Britisher by your accent. You talk just like an Amurrican. 
 And I guess you haint ben so long as a year in the States with- 
 out finding out that we claim to speak better English than you 
 do." Here again we have one of these half-truths which nakedly 
 stated seem ludicrous, but obtain universal belief throughout 
 the States, upon what may seem very slender grounds. 
 
 I will not trouble my readers with the heated argument 
 which ensued between myself and the gallant colonel on this 
 occasion, or enlarge upon the very mixed feelings with which I 
 regarded his intolerable assumptions. Suffice it to say, rightly 
 or wrongly, such is the popular belief in the United States. 
 
 A few months later I got another reminder in the same direction
 
 INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 by a remark made to me by a well-meaning young rancher 
 out West, who prefaced a highly affectionate speech begotten of 
 many cock-tails, in which he assured me of his eternal friendship 
 coupled with the instant disposal of all his goods in my favour, 
 consisting, as far as I noticed, of his lasso, his bowie, and his 
 "gun," in course of which he occasionally mentioned as my 
 most endearing feature that I " warnt like any Britisher he'd 
 ever come across." " How's that " ? said I. " Why," he replied, 
 " you don't talk about an 'orse, or a hass or any of them things, 
 any way, no sirree." I confess I was staggered by the compli- 
 ment. It however served to throw some light into an unexpected 
 corner of the trans- Atlantic mind, which however grating was not 
 without its advantages. 
 
 We English are apt to forget, in our new-found pride in the 
 establishment of universal compulsory education, that up to 
 about thirty years ago the English as a nation were worse 
 educated and had less opportunities for education than any 
 civilized people in Europe or America. 
 
 It would be laughable were it not painful to make a list of 
 the number of British authors, who, -in sheer ignorance of the 
 amazing educational shortcomings of their own land, were wont 
 to pour forth their misplaced pity for the backward and ignorant 
 condition of the non-commercial nations, such as Spain, Italy, and 
 South America, and confusing things intellectual with material, 
 in their compassion for their luckless condition, assume that 
 their educational equipment is inferior to our own. 
 
 Not until Mr. Gladstone declared on a solemn occasion in 
 the late sixties that no other national system of education in 
 Europe was so poor, so meagre, and so scandalously inadequate 
 as our own, did the nation fully realise that though there were 
 ample facilities for the well-to-do, there were none whatever 
 for those who were not able to pay handsomely for those 
 educational opportunities which abound for all classes in every 
 other civilized land. 
 
 Almost a hundred years before we made any serious attempt 
 as a nation to educate our people, the citizens of the then new 
 republic, freshly emancipated from the galling yoke of an incom- 
 petent and retrograde system of home government, in her 
 Declaration of Independence, proclaimed the national duty of
 
 10 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 educating all its members. Hence it fell out that the United 
 States, possessing, as it did unquestionably, greater facilities of 
 popular education than Great Britain, contained a far greater 
 proportion of educated inhabitants. At a time when fully half 
 of the English people were literally unable to read, there was 
 hardly a soul in the United States of adult age who did not read 
 his daily newspaper. 
 
 It may not have been strictly accurate to say that North 
 Americans spoke better English than Englishmen, while their 
 newspapers teemed with errors and vulgarisms of every kind, 
 which were certainly not according to Cocker; nevertheless it 
 could not be denied that a far greater number of Americans 
 than Britons not only spoke a tongue which closely resembled 
 our classical standard, but were undeniably better educated in 
 every essential respect. 
 
 Further than this, there can be no question that beside this 
 uncomfortable feeling of intellectual superiority which I have 
 shown to be very far from ill-founded, there undoubtedly runs 
 through the transatlantic mind the deeply-seated conviction, not 
 unalloyed with compassionate affection, that "the old country " 
 (as it is called) is " on the down grade." Many circumstances 
 have contributed to this effect. 
 
 The Declaration of Independence, though possibly of French 
 origin, and smelling strongly of the Contrat Social of J. J. 
 Eousseau and the Encyclopaedists generally, was heralded as 
 the new dawn of enfranchised manhood by all the down-trodden 
 nations of the Old World. The encomiums of Abbe Sieyes and 
 the eloquent Girondists of the National Assembly, who vied 
 with each other to foist a similar constitution upon their dis- 
 tracted country, all conspired to turn Uncle Sam's head. The 
 meanest criminal who is spared the gaol on condition that he 
 will emigrate to America and trouble his country no more, scarce 
 landed becomes infected with a notion that the humblest American 
 can teach a trick to any European of them all. This notion 
 pervades the whole country from end to end. It is well typified 
 in the current story of the little Yankee boy who was seen 
 weeping copiously, and when comforted by a good-natured 
 foreigner, who was passing by and inquired the motive of his 
 tears, said, he was beaten by his father, and he would not so
 
 INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 much mind if he were not a foreigner. The mere contact 
 
 with American soil and still further the right of being born 
 within its wide territory seems to infuse a spirit of rebellious 
 contempt for all traditions, conventions and prejudices of the 
 historic past. Like Athene who sprang fully armed from the 
 hand of Jove, Columbia passes a sponge over the European slate, 
 and announces to the world that she is the new phoenix risen 
 from the ashes of the effete nations of the earth. 
 
 We are apt to sneer at the American's predilection for bunkum 
 and look upon it as a kind of national disaster, proceeding partly 
 from exuberant youth, and partly from want of knowledge ; but 
 a closer acquaintance with our trans-Atlantic cousins is apt to, 
 convince us that we put the boot on the wrong leg. So far from 
 this, when we consider the average teaching, the state of public 
 opinion, and the body of tradition in which he is brought up, we; 
 are astounded at the comparative modesty of their pretensions 
 and assertions. To most Yankees it appears as clear as the 
 noontide sun that the European nations are "played out," or 
 to use a French expression, " in full decadence " ; and in spite of 
 the lingering affection not unmixed with pride with which they 
 regard the land that gave them birth, coupled with a sincere 
 love and respect for Englishmen, and as far as my experience 
 goes a sensitiveness as far removed as possible from jealousy 
 about the good opinion and esteem of the land from which they 
 sprang, the views formed upon European nations generally apply 
 to our own country in no less a degree. One must become as it 
 were saturated with the American atmosphere before one can 
 understand fully the force of this feeling and appreciate the 
 height, depth, and width of their national self-satisfaction, and 
 the almost tender pity with which they regard the denizens of 
 the used-up land from whose loins they sprang. Not that they 
 believe their institutions to be perfect ; not that they have no 
 lurking suspicion that " they are o'er young yet," and a trifle 
 "green and sour i' th' mouth" ; still, nothing can exceed the 
 strength of their collective conviction that, like the Muslims of 
 old under the banner of Mohammed, it is, and will always be their 
 pride and their privilege, to hold up the banner and point out 
 the path of life to the desolate nations of the Old World.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 INTRODUCTORY (continued) 
 
 IN the preceding chapter I have briefly enumerated some of the 
 most striking instances which I have myself met with of the 
 views held by foreign nations in our regard. 
 
 I now propose to examine the causes that have contributed to 
 produce the undoubted volume of dislike of which we obtained 
 such clear manifestations during the course of the Boer War, 
 and if possible to define more precisely the views held respecting 
 ourselves. Some of my readers will say, " After all, what does 
 it matter? We fortunately live in an island surrounded by a 
 sea so conveniently narrow as to enable us to reach the main- 
 land without danger or difficulty, and at the same time wide 
 enough to prevent our enemies landing upon our shores with any 
 hostile intent while our navy dominates the seas." Another 
 will exclaim, " We ought to be rather flattered than otherwise 
 by their abusive language towards us, which proceeds from the 
 merest jealousy, and is obviously caused by our overwhelming 
 commercial superiority which crushes all rivals and naturally 
 causes heart-burning and dislike." Or a third, " It is a tribute 
 to our high qualities, and if inconvenient sometimes, is, or should 
 be, rather a source of pride than regret." 
 
 A fourth will say, as I have continually heard Englishmen 
 and Englishwomen exclaim, " After all, their hatred of us is 
 made up of such a number of trifles (if we may judge by the 
 letters which are poured from time to time on the papers in 
 explanation of the phenomenon) that it is surely not worth our 
 while to take any particular pains to please them or to bother 
 our heads about what they think or do not think." 
 
 Now while I am fully agreed with those who, following the 
 lesson of the celebrated fable of the man, the boy, and the 
 donkey, deem it a hopeless task to try to please everybody, and 
 unbefitting our national dignity to make serious attempts in 
 that direction, my labour will not go unrewarded if I persuade 
 my beloved countrymen to see, and, if possible, amend certain 
 glaring defects in what I may call the international conduct of 
 our countrymen in great measure proceeding from our unfortunate
 
 INTEODUCTOEY 13 
 
 political constitution, as well as others, which partly proceed 
 from our national character, and partly from that self-same insular 
 position which, while depriving us of the close intercourse which 
 make of the rest of the Euopean nations a kind of European 
 family, prevents us from enjoying that wholesome attrition with 
 alien ideas and customs and intellects which are so necessary 
 an antidote to the evils of seclusion and isolation. Nor can I 
 admit that we should lightly dismiss such matters as unworthy 
 of the consideration of a strong and successful race. 
 
 It will be said that we are safe with our enormous navy ever 
 circling our shores, and it is next to impossible for any nation or 
 combination of nations to take us unawares. But has not the 
 Boer War proved that our wide- stretching Empire subjects us 
 continually in the most unexpected manner to so heavy a strain 
 upon our resources and such sudden and unexpected dangers, 
 that it is not at all impossible or even improbable that we should 
 again find ourselves in such a position as we were in December, 
 1900 ; at which date had one, or at any rate two, nations com- 
 bined to overthrow our commercial superiority, it is not impos- 
 sible that we should have by this time ceased to exist as a nation, 
 or else like Holland and Spain once the leaders of the world 
 we should have been first ruined by an enormous war indemnity 
 and then deprived of our Colonies, bound over to reduce our 
 navy to moderate dimensions, and, in short, compelled to return 
 to our original nothingness as a little sea-girt island inhabited 
 admittedly by a fierce race of bull-dogs impossible to subdue, but 
 in the opinion of most of our neighbours decidedly dangerous and 
 unpleasant when unkennelled and allowed to roam abroad. 
 
 For let us remember that it was not one, nor two, nor three 
 nations, nor even those to whom we were tied by terms of 
 mutual political and commercial intercourse, who turned against 
 us in our hour of need. It was an universal howl that arose 
 throughout the European Press from St. Petersburg to San 
 Francisco crying shame upon us and inveighing in the strongest 
 terms against our greed and oppression, and our thirst for more 
 goldfields and more territory which were the sole and only 
 causes, according to their account, for declaring war upon a 
 weak and harmless community ! And when the war plunged 
 us day by day deeper and deeper into the mire, as fresh difficulties 
 of every kind arose till at length the wealth and might of
 
 H ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 England trembled in the balance, a cry of deligbt and triumph 
 went up from one end of Europe to the other, that at last the 
 tyrant had met with its fitting retribution that the trodden 
 worm had turned upon the big bully and that Heaven had at 
 last thrown itself into the scales in order to redress the balance. 
 Nor was it a mere manifestation of sympathy for a weaker 
 nation oppressed by a stronger, which if it were justified by 
 actual facts could not fail to strike a spark in every human 
 breast. Worse yet remained. The same outcry that held up 
 England to universal execration as a bully and a land-grabber 
 went on to revive every abuse and contumely that the foreign 
 imagination could devise or the petty spite of every contemptible 
 quill-driver could dig up out of past or present history to blacken 
 our fame withal. In those dark days when even the United 
 States largely sympathised with our enemy, and even as a whole, 
 sided strongly against us; and Edward VII. 's nephew himself, 
 the German Kaiser, whom England through her press never 
 ceased to belaud and bespatter with slavish adulation and praise, 
 actually sent a telegram to Kruger as a culminating proof of 
 aversion and abhorrence from our cause it will be remembered 
 that many said that it was not the nations of Europe but the 
 Press the venal and perfidious Press that sought to sell their 
 newspapers by inventing these malicious stories against us. 
 Nothing could be further from the truth. While it is un- 
 doubtedly the case that through the untiring efforts of that far- 
 sighted statesman, Lord Salisbury, whose loss we recently 
 deplored, the Kaiser was induced to draw in his horns and 
 pocket his premature and unsupported advances, and thus the 
 war cloud was swept from the political horizon there can be 
 nothing more obvious in the light of after events, than that he 
 himself, if not the originator, was undoubtedly the head and 
 front of the entire anti-English movement in Germany from first 
 to last. For anyone who is well acquainted with the position 
 of the German Press and the power placed in the hands of the 
 Emperor by the law, must know that the greater part of the 
 newspapers of the kingdom are directly inspired or subsidised 
 by the Imperial Chancellor, and that it would be a matter of 
 impossibility for any universal crusade of this kind to be taken 
 up had it not the Emperor's complete and entire support. Nor
 
 INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 can any greater fallacy exist than to suppose blood connections 
 and family ties are of any avail to stem the direction of a 
 " welt-politik " or the trend of a nation's aspiration. 
 
 To those who are accustomed to believe implicitly in national 
 affinities, and to whom the vague phrase that " blood is thicker 
 than water " conveys an axiomatic truth, it must seem surprising 
 to reflect that while undoubtedly the German and Scandinavian 
 nations are closely related to us by collateral descent and other 
 ties, of habits, language, and temperament, so far from 
 evincing any special consideration for their insular cousins in 
 our hour of need, we have to proceed to the extreme verge of 
 Southern Europe, in fact, up to the very pillars of Hercules, 
 before we can detect in public press, popular literature, or social 
 intercourse, those marks of sympathy we should expect and 
 deserve. 
 
 Taking, then, the Boer War as a test, according to the well- 
 known saying that "a friend in need is a friend indeed," with 
 the solitary exception of the United States, whose stout and 
 persistent condemnation of our campaign was mingled with a 
 certain compassionate or friendly sympathy, it may be said 
 without fear of contradiction that the closer our connection 
 by ties of commerce, religion, common language and habits, the 
 more virulent the pandemonium of abuse, the more vigorous the 
 storm of denunciation poured out upon our heads. 
 
 It was reserved for poor little Spain in the land of grapes 
 and olives on the far-off fringe of Europe, and the very extreme 
 edge of its civilisation, to produce a few cheering and generous 
 articles and speeches informing the Spanish people that possibly 
 after all the right might be on our side. 
 
 Next to that came echoes of sympathy if not approval from 
 the far-off toe of Italy, where newspapers upheld the British 
 view and uttered friendly sentiments which poureid balm upon 
 the Briton's soul. 
 
 Could any law or rule be framed for denning or explaining the 
 inconsequent vagaries that govern international amities, the 
 malicious might infer from this that the more an Englishman is 
 known the less he is appreciated ; and if this test of the Trans- 
 vaal War, to which I have referred, were the final verdict of 
 the nations in our regard, it would certainly seem at least a
 
 16 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 remarkable coincidence. The same rule would apply in respect 
 to the sympathy shown in Turkey and the distant regions of 
 Hungary beyond the influence of the Viennese Press (where 
 anti-British feeling was still predominant). That in these four 
 remote parts of the central continents where Englishmen are 
 little seen and less known than elsewhere, there should have 
 been an exhibition in their favour, would certainly seem to point 
 to the confirmation of such a law. In truth, for some reason 
 which I have never been able to completely understand, the 
 Spaniard has a sneaking respect for us, to say nothing of a 
 latent affection which I should greatly like to ascribe to gratitude 
 for our assistance during the war we waged for their indepen- 
 dence, were it not for certain primary Spanish works of education 
 which make it abundantly clear that the Spanish youth is not so 
 much brought up to a spirit of gratitude for English benefits as 
 to revere and admire the heroic efforts of his own nation in 
 repelling the Gallic invader ! 
 
 As to the Hungarians and the Turks, the affection and the 
 esteem that mutually bind us seem on the part of the Turks to 
 be rather the outcome of the pleasant traditions and friendly 
 associations that arose in the Crimean War, followed up by a 
 series of official posts both naval and military held by English- 
 men since that day, while the Hungarian good-fellowship has 
 been secured by a strong similarity of habits, a mutual love of 
 horses, and a common love of sport; to say nothing of mutual 
 interchanges, consisting of game and remounts purchased from 
 them, as well as every sort of sporting outfit, including blood 
 horses, and prize farm-stock and machinery for which they are 
 largely indebted to British skill and enterprise. 
 
 The popular Italian opinion respecting Englishmen, though 
 not as favourable as the Spanish, has been of late years greatly 
 influenced by the strong general conviction that we contributed 
 largely as a nation to that unity which they hold so dear, as the 
 result of Mr. Gladstone's appeal to the nations on behalf of the 
 oppressed victims of Neapolitan misgovernment. Over and 
 above this, in common with his Swiss neighbours, your Italian 
 has a very high appreciation of the pecuniary advantages of 
 British patronage, and dreads greatly to scare the Briton from 
 his hospitable shores.
 
 INTEODUCTORY 17 
 
 It is reserved for the French (of whom it must be said that 
 much must be conceded in view of the many knocks that we 
 have exchanged in days gone by) to refer to us in their public 
 prints as " ce peuple brutal," "cette nation stupide," and to 
 habitually refer to us under what they believe to be the suitable 
 designation of " Perfide Albion." At first sight this last appel- 
 lation would seem to be as inappropriate as any that could 
 well be chosen. We are so accustomed to hear our neighbours 
 attribute the lowest possible motives to all our political actions 
 that nothing but a close survey of the actual facts of history can 
 avail to bring us to the painful conclusion that in respect of 
 treaty-breaking and breaking-faith in divers ways with our 
 Gallic foes, we have at least proved ourselves their equals if not 
 their superiors. 
 
 I have before adverted to our political institutions as being a 
 prominent factor in sowing those seeds of discord which trouble 
 the rest of our neighbours and fill them with confusion and 
 dismay. For while our neighbours either have the executive 
 power firmly placed in the hands of a king, a president, or a 
 permanent council, we alone of nations, though democratic in 
 the highest degree as to our constitution have, with a fatuity 
 which may result in our ultimate ruin, declined to place in any 
 hands that supreme control which alone enables the bark of 
 State to be safely steered, but have preferred to commit it to 
 what is called a " Cabinet, 1 '' composed of ever-shifting members 
 drawn alternatively from two opposite camps as far apart as the 
 poles, with the natural result that no man can guess by our 
 policy of to-day what shall be our policy of to-morrow. 
 
 Nor can they be blamed if they form a harsh conclusion from 
 these premisses ; for while we know as an ascertained fact that 
 the strength of a chain is that of its weakest link so the 
 strength of a democracy, unless, as in the case of the U.S.A., 
 combined with healthy monarchic principles dovetailed into its 
 president, is in vulgar speech that of the " biggest fool " contained 
 in its electorate. 
 
 To attempt to account for the infinite variation of divergence 
 existing between French and English would indeed be a Sisyphoaan 
 task which I should be loath to undertake. 
 
 It may be taken for granted that whatever appears to an 
 o
 
 18 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Englishman black most surely appears white to a Frenchman, 
 and vice versa. There is nothing stranger than the singular 
 fate which has, so to speak, joined these two nations by the 
 closest ties of commercial and geographical intercourse ; while 
 but for this enforced proximity, and the necessity of reaching 
 through France the continent of Europe, one could scarcely 
 imagine that any Englishman would desire to cross her borders. 
 Her very language is the antipod of our own ; so different is the 
 spirit of the two languages that even the simplest phrases cannot 
 be rendered so as to convey the right impression ; and while the 
 sequence of words more closely follow those of the English 
 language than those of the German, the meaning conveyed by 
 similar phrases of almost identical origin is totally dissimilar. 
 To this must be added the tradition founded on mutual hatred 
 dating from the earliest dawn of history, and a firm conviction 
 on the part of both nations of the inferiority of the other in 
 every respect ; for nothing is more certain than that the com- 
 moner sort, where hatred is present in a high degree, will 
 infallibly discover motives for contempt, or, if they cannot, will 
 invent them. Moreover, this mutual hatred and contempt, at 
 least on the French side, which at present is the theme that we 
 are most concerned about in these pages, is certainly, as in 
 Germany, not confined to the lowest classes or even the great 
 bulk of the people, but is present in the highest classes in an 
 even higher degree than in the lower. 
 
 It is not unusual to find grave professors and learned legislators 
 calmly discussing the causes of the British inability to appreciate 
 the charms of what they choose to call their " sel gaulois " (or 
 French equivalent for wit) by explaining that our diet of heavy 
 indigestible food and half-roasted joints, etc., etc., on which they 
 firmly believe we principally exist, form insuperable obstacles to 
 the higher flights of fancy; while others will dilate on the 
 obvious connection between the thickness of our murky atmo- 
 sphere and the unquestionable dulness of our speech, literature 
 and general policy. None in France any more than in Germany 
 seem to ascribe our eccentric political action and our insular ways 
 to their real origin, or make any serious attempt to inquire at 
 first hand into the remote causes which have co-operated to 
 deflect the British mind into muddy channels and obscure byways.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 INTRODUCTOEY (continued) 
 
 BEFORE I proceed to enumerate the various complaints laid to 
 our charge by our foreign friends, it would be well to consider 
 for a while the character and origin of these international 
 dislikes, and then, by dividing them into subjective and objective 
 classes, arrive at some determination as to how far they originate 
 in the misguided minds of our opponents, and how far they have 
 a real objective existence. To use an unsavoury scriptural 
 phrase, we are said to " stink in the nostrils of the nations " at 
 least the press of Europe try to persuade us that that is the 
 case and it is surely interesting to know whether the stench 
 proceeds from our neighbours or ourselves. In short, is this 
 body of anti-British tradition purely fictitious, and does it exist 
 solely and entirely in the distorted imagination of our critics, or 
 has it any objective reality ? 
 
 And first let us ask ourselves Whence arose these shadowy 
 evil reports ? Looking back in history as far as ever we can go 
 with any certainty, the earliest chroniclers took upon themselves 
 to form somewhat reckless opinions of the nations of whom they 
 wrote, hazarding at a venture and setting down this or that 
 sweeping gibe from a desire rather to please their patrons or 
 their rulers than to satisfy the strict requirements of truth. If 
 pleasant or favourable, it is tolerably certain that such reports 
 were not allowed to drop; similarly, if unpleasant, they were 
 speedily treasured up for future use in order to belittle and insult 
 a potential foe. 
 
 When our monkish chroniclers of early ages with the un- 
 doubted intention of pleasing their superiors Norman to a man 
 --referred to the Saxons as a swinish herd delighting only in 
 guzzling and gluttony, it may be taken for granted that the 
 Normans were not slow to avail themselves of these amiable 
 epithets to vilify and irritate the subject race when occasion 
 offered. 
 
 Go back a thousand years, listen to Suetonius, and Tacitus, 
 and Julius Caesar. Do not the Scots, and the Germans, and the
 
 20 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Italians and what not who have been honoured by their friendly 
 notice, glory in quoting their epithets of trivial praise up to the 
 present hour ? To cite a familiar instance of the reverse, do we 
 not still throw in the teeth of the French that they are still as 
 they were in the well-known phrase of Julius Caesar, " Cupidi 
 rerum novarum," " greedy of novelties " ? 
 
 Going farther down the ladder of ages, however, on this side 
 of the ballad-singers and minstrels, who were great inventors of 
 gibes and jeers framed, like their predecessors, with the primary 
 intention of pleasing the powers that be, and who were certainly 
 as little moved by love of abstract truth as any living beings, we 
 come to the earliest echoes of the press as the accredited voice of 
 the nations. But in the early days there was no liberty for the 
 press ; newspapers were the mere organs of certain powers, 
 generally ministers of kings, or courts, or parliaments ; yet it 
 cannot be doubted that whatever unpleasant jest or sneer could 
 te collected from rhyme or popular ballad would surely be 
 treasured up and reproduced as fancy dictated or opportunity 
 offered. Nor can we doubt that, excepting the matter which 
 can be culled from the great historians of the past, whose 
 weighty names coupled with the absence of all contemporary 
 contradiction could be used as a battering ram of enormous 
 authority, the greater amount of the pernicious flood of angry 
 abuse which breeds international hatreds must surely have 
 originated at the bottom rather than at the top of society. 
 
 For just as the scum ever rises to the surface in the seething 
 cauldron of popular fancy or popular fury, so we must look to 
 the lowest ranks of humanity for invective and ingenious causes 
 of quarrel. The nobler spirits of contending nations are ever 
 more averse to vent their anger in verbal bickering than 
 combatants of the lower sort. So, too, in our own time slang 
 comes not from the top but from the lowest strata of society, 
 gradually climbing up, by force of its appropriateness, or by 
 tickling men's ears with its novelty, mounting finally, class by 
 class, from the gutter to the drawing-room. 
 
 At the risk of offending my beloved countrymen by touching 
 their vanity in its tenderest spot, a careful review of the whole 
 situation compels me in all truth and honesty to state that by 
 far the greatest number of the causes that conspire to form the
 
 INTBODUCTOEY 21 
 
 body of anti-British tradition are not subjective, but in the 
 strictest sense objective, and founded in actual reality. 
 
 "After all, then," the indignant reader will exclaim, "you 
 are on the side of our enemy : no doubt a little Englander ; a 
 rampant Eadical ; one of those who delight in fouling their own 
 nest," etc., etc. 
 
 Nay, not so, gentle reader. Nothing but the strictest necessity, 
 coupled with the sincerest desire to benefit my fellow-country men, 
 compels me to the painful and ungrateful task of tearing the veil 
 from unwilling eyes and letting in the full glare of distasteful 
 truth. Believe me, wild horses would not drag from me " the 
 secrets of our prison house " in the presence of the ribald 
 foreigner. Nevertheless, I hold no duty more sacred or more 
 closely incumbent upon every true lover of their country, than to 
 apply the scalpel, however painful, to the diseased spots in the 
 body, politic and social, and, whatever his private feelings 
 or regard for his own popularity, to risk all and to brave 
 all to secure what he believes to be the highest and most 
 urgent interests of his beloved Motherland; and in order to 
 prove that I am inspired with no hostile intent, but seek only to 
 draw the mind of the nation to national shortcomings in order 
 that they may rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the nations, 
 I shall not merely be content to set down in succession those 
 nati@nal habits which inspire the foreigner with that profound 
 hatred and contempt which we at once recognise and deplore, 
 but I propose by grouping them into heads and tracing them to 
 their origin to bring home to my readers the contributing 
 causes, and, if possible, to point out the direction in which the 
 remedy may be sought. Nor can I think so ill of my fellow- 
 countrymen as to believe that flattery holds more sway than 
 truth in British breasts, nor doubt that however unpleasant be 
 the conclusions that are drawn, Englishmen will neither repel 
 nor refuse to admit them, providing the evidence adduced be 
 sufficiently strong and the testimony of truth sufficiently 
 conclusive. 
 
 I began the chapter by saying that the first stage in our 
 analysis of the causes of Anglophobia among the nations would 
 naturally be to divide them into objective and subjective 
 classes. I wish that I could honestly find it in my heart to
 
 22 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 group the greater number of them under the term subjective as 
 having no existence except in the jaundiced eye of the foreigner ; 
 but truth compels me to say that the greater number of these 
 charges, however exaggerated by passing through unfriendly 
 mouths, have a very real and demonstrable existence, which it 
 would be vain to deny or extenuate. 
 
 A striking example of the subjective description of anti-English 
 tradition may be found in the familiar, if ludicrous, exaggerations 
 of the popular type, as shown upon the French or Italian stage 
 (which I have already exhaustively described) together with the 
 ancient but still surviving appellation of " Godam," or the long 
 teeth and red locks of the British stage maiden. 
 
 It will here be observed with regard to the term " Godarn," 
 which Frenchmen are wont very harmlessly to apply to Britons in 
 general, for the reason that at a remote period our countrymen 
 were unable to express themselves without this or similar 
 interjections firstly, that this form of caricature closely 
 resembles our own (probably retaliatory) epithet in regard to the 
 French when we term them "froggies " which, as I have before 
 shown, is not without a groundwork of truth, and consists in its 
 essence of the application of a partial attribution to a general ; 
 secondly, that this is a habit so inherent in human nature that it 
 suffices for the average man to see a single Spaniard with a 
 beard, or German say with a flat nose, for him at once to say, 
 " All Germans have flat noses, or all Spaniards have beards " ; 
 thirdly, that such and similar caricatures lose their sting, not so 
 much from their inherent harmlessness as because they seem to 
 us in these days so remote of origin and inapplicable, as rather 
 to provoke our hilarity than excite our resentment. Thus, when 
 your Frenchman in his futile effort to prove him a barbarian 
 puts in the mouth of the stage Englishman, " Godam, I vill sell 
 my vife at Smithfield," or other similar traditional imbecilities, 
 we are tempted to laugh at what we consider the ludicrous 
 ignorance of the French writer, rather than to take offence at 
 the obvious offensiveness implied. In judging these matters, 
 therefore, one should distinguish between intention and effect, 
 and recollect that when a foreigner makes a desperate attempt 
 to plunge the blade of his satire into the British breast it 
 frequently recoils upon himself in a shower of ridicule, while
 
 INTEODUCTOEY 23 
 
 similarly when we deny the occasional or remote practices 
 among ourselves which have given rise to the original caricature, 
 we are guilty of the identical display of ignorance which we 
 complain of in our neighbours over the^water. 
 
 I think, therefore, it may be fairly 'deduced from the foregoing 
 summary that our main complaint against the foreigner and the 
 main indictment that he brings against us of which we have 
 any reason to complain, may properly be classed under the 
 objective head, nor need we trouble ourselves any more to 
 discuss the subjective classes of caricature and invective. 
 
 Even the stay-at-home Briton, whose experience of the 
 " Contenong " (as he calls it) is confined to Ostend, where he 
 pervades the promenade, eats oysters at the casino, and 
 furtively ventures at the tables a casual half-crown while not 
 averse from declaiming against the wickedness of foreign 
 gambling resorts or disports himself in a gay bathing costume at 
 " Boolong," among what he believes to be the cream of Parisian 
 society, or, say, where his foreign acquaintance is still more 
 circumscribed consisting, in fact, of a day trip there and back 
 from Eamsgate or Margate to " Gaily," including one turn 
 round the town, and two up and down on the pier seldom, 
 if ever, has any hesitation in expressing the most sweeping 
 and outspoken opinions upon " them foreigners" (as they were 
 generally styled in pre-School-Board times) which opinions tend 
 to confirm the notion in the hearer's mind that the said 
 foreigners consist of a definite breed quite distinct from English- 
 men, yet undistinguishable among themselves, or at any rate 
 possessing so few traits of difference as to be unworthy of the 
 notice of an Englishman. 
 
 But I shall at once be told, " Of course you are speaking of 
 the ignorant and untravelled classes." Undoubtedly. It should 
 be steadily kept before us, that in treatingjof a subject, which is 
 mainly the outcome of action and reaction of popular passions 
 and popular ignorance, we need scarcely count in the scale the 
 travelled few, or the wealthy tourists that swarm over the 
 Continent, fattening hotel-keepers, parading the galleries and 
 churches, scrambling through ruins, devouring historic monu- 
 ments with the help of a guide-book at high pressure, and 
 herding together in British hotels where natives scarce dare
 
 24 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 penetrate, or at other seasons invading whole towns till they 
 have driven out the native element and established a truly 
 British pandemonium of loudness and vulgarity, tempered by 
 lawn tennis, golf, and cricket, yachting, and bag-fox hunting ; 
 where Americans help to swell the rag tail and bobtail, and evict 
 the harmless foreigner from his native soil, leaving only a 
 handful of " declasses " behind, whose high-sounding titles, 
 mostly self-bestowed, lure the gilded Chicago heiress with forty 
 thousand horse-power, diversified with broken-down Parisian 
 turfites (also heavily titled for the Anglo-Saxon market) who, 
 having been warned off the Continental race-courses, have no 
 other resources than to cheat Englishmen or Americans of their 
 superfluous cash under the fictitious pretext of love of sport! 
 Such as these have no share in making or marring our name in 
 foreign parts ; and why ? simply because the press, the paid, the 
 venal, and everywhere venomous daily newspapers, are the sole 
 and continuous agency upon which is borne the vast body of 
 tradition, subjective and objective, imaginary or real, culled or 
 invented [from a thousand unknown sources, just as the ocean 
 tide that. : sweeps between continents, bearing on its bosom the 
 wealth of the world as well as the rubbish that it scours from 
 every creek, bay, and harbour that lies in its path. Nay, 
 further, the currents of the sea are traced and known, whereas 
 who shall trace the currents of the human mind and the 
 thousand rivulets of human opinion that trickle down, unnoticed 
 and uncared for into the whirlpool of public opinion ? All we can 
 do is to sift it as best we can from the newspapers of the world , 
 and by averaging their contents and their correlative expressions 
 in the mouths of average men of all classes, strike a common 
 measure of uniformity which will give us the average public view 
 of Englishmen in this or that country, or at any rate the view 
 which mainly predominates and upon this base our philosophy. 
 It mattersjnothing whether this body of tradition is scraped from 
 the sewers, or scavenged in the streets, or ferried through 
 Countesses' boudoirs, suffice it that it is there, and in the well- 
 known saying of the French writer, "It is mud, and it will 
 stick." Let us first, then, consider the nature of the mud as we 
 find it ; not that of the imagination which is subjective, but real, 
 hard, adhesive, unpleasant, stinking mud, which stings as it hits
 
 INTBODUCTOEY 25 
 
 you, in short, the rotten eggs of continental unpopularity. 
 Then let us fairly weigh truth and untruth and make up our 
 minds "to be or not to be ! " that is : Are we for ever to be as 
 foreigners see us, or not to be as foreigners see us ? " That is the 
 question ! " 
 
 If it can be shown that nearly every grain of this unpleasant 
 mud is made up of solid truths and facts that not one of us dare 
 dispute, though possibly cemented together and coloured by 
 Anglophobia, may I not hope to effect a breach in that self- 
 complacency which is a by- word among the nations, our " triple 
 brass " of self-esteem, our " seven-hided shield " of insularity ? 
 
 The first step to improvement is conviction, the next reforma- 
 tion. Could I but hope that England, as a mass, should be 
 penetrated as I am with the undoubted fact that every action, 
 every imprudent word, every foolish and thoughtless expression 
 of opinion or conduct expressed in the presence of a foreigner, 
 goes to swell the bad opinion that he already has of Englishmen 
 and Englishwomen, and remember that every living Englishman 
 and woman is responsible each in his own degree and measure 
 for that Continental Anglophobia, which, if pushed to its extreme 
 limit, must undoubtedly end in a war which may terminate in 
 our total destruction or dismemberment, I shall have done much 
 to deserve well of my country. But that is not all. 
 
 In the eloquent words of the Roman sage, " Esse quam videri," 
 should be our only rule of conduct, as it is the only aspiration 
 worthy of a great nation. 
 
 How many of us think that it matters not what our conduct 
 may be so long as we appear well in the eyes of the world. As 
 with private individuals so with nations. It is a vain error to 
 believe that the world can be so easily deceived. 
 
 It is essential not only to behave well before the foreigner, as 
 so many of us think is all that is necessary but also in all our 
 relations with him. In order to defeat the view in which we are 
 now held we must be such as we were in the days of old, if we 
 wish to restore our character and reputation to that which we 
 held in the past. 
 
 Are we going backwards ? or, at any rate, from bad to worse ? 
 " There's the rub ! " 
 
 My pains and your patience, dear reader, will surely be amply
 
 26 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 repaid if every Englishman who reads these lines will balance 
 the arguments, for and against, fairly in his mind, and then say 
 to himself, "How far have I contributed to this result by com- 
 mission or omission? How far can I accuse myself of having 
 neglected opportunities of lifting my voice against acknowledged 
 national defects and national habits in the society of Englishmen?" 
 
 " With desolation is the earth made desolate, 
 Because there is no man that thinketh in his heart." 
 
 How well this beautiful sentence expresses the feelings of every 
 true lover of his country. The psalmist does not say " thinketh 
 in his mind," for that might be but a mere passing mental spark. 
 It is not enough to say that we love our country, but we must 
 prove it. So, when we speak of it and for it, we must think in 
 our hearts, that is, we must think of it as the parent should of 
 his child, not for pleasure or gain, or for something to say, but 
 out of the fulness of his heart. As Shakespeare so admirably 
 says, " You men say more, swear more, but indeed your oaths 
 are little more than words, for still we see much in your vows 
 but little in your love." And here it seems to me that we arrive 
 at the very root of the matter. How commonly we hear people 
 say that Jones or Smith has been so long abroad that he is satis- 
 fied with nothing in England. Again, how common it is to hear 
 others exclaim that so-and-so is ever speaking ill of his own 
 countrymen, with possibly a casual reference to the well-known 
 Scotch Proverb, " It is an ill bird that fouls its own nest." Now, 
 philosophically speaking, is there not a strong antecedent improb- 
 ability, in view of the well-known tendency of all natives to repel 
 and dislike reflections upon their own country that, were they 
 not impelled by the desire of amending their fellow-countrymen, 
 they should press these subjects upon them when they know 
 that there is nothing more irritating and unpopular ? And here 
 let me remark that though Englishmen enjoy hearing their, 
 country ill spoken of by travellers of other nations, and scarcely 
 ver take it ill though they be criticised ever so harshly, they 
 bitterly resent the same criticism on the part of their fellow- 
 countrymen. The former peculiarity seems to be inherent in 
 human nature in all countries and all times, but the latter is, I 
 believe, a weakness peculiar to Englishmen. In some countries 
 the love of home is stronger than in others, such as in Scotland
 
 INTRODUCTOBY 27 
 
 for instance, Dr. Johnson remarking (as per Boswell), "There is 
 a conspiracy against truth amongst all Scotchmen to exalt their 
 native land." This feeling I believe to be weaker in our own 
 land than any other, and is one that is usually attributed by 
 foreigners to the impenetrability of our insular conceit. 
 
 Consider, too, that Englishmen who have settled and lived long 
 in any part of the globe usually become weaned, so to speak, 
 from their old habits and ways to that extent that scarcely 
 any of them wish to return, and such as do return are for the 
 most part utterly wretched, and wish themselves heartily back 
 again in the land of their adoption. No doubt the answer from 
 many would come pat, "Habit is a second nature, and after a 
 certain age a man cannot easily adopt new habits." In my early 
 days I used to think such was the case ; but further examination 
 seems to show the contrary, since at all ages of life and in 
 respect of all classes this tendency alike applies. 
 
 I have generally found, whether it be the young man without 
 education going afield to seek his bread, or an educated scholar 
 teaching his language or earning a living at the expense of his 
 brains, or, again, even the inevitable "globe-trotter," so long as 
 he dwells in any country long enough to master its language, and 
 have serious relations with its inhabitants I know no exception 
 to the same invariable rule that his valuation of English ways 
 and thoughts and habits undergoes a rapid revolution while 
 loving the foreigner no better than before or (as may be easily 
 guessed) without consciously accepting his standard. Is this to 
 count for nothing ? If the same thing were noticed in denizens 
 of other lands one would think no more of the matter, and 
 possibly ascribe it to some inscrutable habit common to all 
 humanity ; but surely it is conspicuously the reverse with other 
 nations. Your Frenchman or German, your Italian organ- 
 grinder, or your Alsatian cook, counts the days like a school-boy 
 who yearns for cessation of study in order to return to the 
 parental home. He endures separation from fatherland not for 
 present happiness but for gain and future prosperity. His dream 
 is if a working man to buy some snug cot on the side of the 
 Apennines and cultivate his little vineyard, or may be to smoke 
 his pipe under the humble roof-tree of the familiar Bier-garten 
 far from the fogs of Albion, where he has gathered a competence
 
 28 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 in discomfort and sadness. Nor can the foreigner be induced to 
 either care for, or study, or learn, or sympathise ever so little 
 with the British atmosphere in which he is forced to gain his 
 bread. He is profoundly unhappy if he does not live, as near as 
 may be, according to the ways of his own country. He adopts 
 no British habit except under absolute compulsion, and when he 
 leaves, he cares and knows no more about them than when he 
 first came among them to earn his bread. 
 
 Are we to consider, then, that Englishmen taking one class 
 with another are more receptive, more acutely alive to the 
 advantages that foreigners possess over Englishmen, or more 
 sympathetic, that is, affectionate in their disposition, than their 
 continental neighbours ? Surely not, unless, indeed, all history 
 and experience is fraudulent and mendacious ! Or again, is he 
 of such pliant and soft disposition that he allows, as a rule, men 
 of other lands to persuade him that the moon is made of green 
 cheese ? 
 
 There remains, therefore, as far as I can see, no alternative 
 except to conclude that your Englishman undergoes no trans- 
 formation that can account for his change of disposition by a 
 transference from England to foreign climes. " Coelum non 
 animum mutant qui trans mare currunt," says Horace, and 
 consequently, we are forced to the conclusion that there must be 
 at least something incomplete or deficient in our own insular 
 system. 
 
 If this be the case, would it not be well to seriously consider 
 whether the united consensus of Europe which is undeniably 
 against us together with the unbiassed and, so to speak, 
 instinctive inclination of the Briton as soon as he is cut off from 
 the atmosphere of his own country, does not form an overwhelm- 
 ing body of testimony in the same direction? It would also 
 seem to follow that so far from hostile criticism being reprehen- 
 sible where reason seems to point out that outside criticism is 
 specially desirable, no new lights that can be thrown upon the 
 causes of acknowledged facts should be neglected, and the 
 inference to be drawn from such facts ought rather to be sought 
 for eagerly, than contemptuously set down to an envious and 
 carping spirit. 
 
 The silver streak that from time immemorial has been reckoned
 
 INTBQDUCTOKY 29 
 
 alike our salvation and our pride, has probably been also the 
 cause of our inaccessibility to the opinion of civilised nations. 
 It should be remembered that while during these last fifty years 
 of our national life there is no people unless, perhaps, our 
 American cousins who devour more eagerly the news of the 
 world, and who telegraph and disperse more energetically the 
 latest foreign events to the four winds of heaven but a very 
 short while ago, when the said silver streak was a very real and 
 effective bar to foreign connection, our countrymen of sixty 
 years ago, like Gallio, cared nothing for these things, and in 
 their rough and manly fashion lived their own life and framed 
 their own habits with an absolute disregard of foreign opinion 
 and a stern dislike of innovation, which if it displeased, at any 
 rate impressed, our foreign friends in the highest degree. 
 
 Then came the triumph of Waterloo, and, thereafter, John 
 Bull lost his head entirely. From that evil hour intoxicated 
 with success, his wits overbalanced in his new-found pride of 
 leading the "European Concert," the fatal desire to strut 
 abroad and show the foreigner that in the touching words of 
 the music-hall ditty "he'd got the ships, and got the men, 
 and got the money too " was too much for him. He pervaded 
 Europe with his top boots and his leather breeches, and for the 
 first time paraded his women-kind to the eye of the astonished 
 foreigner. " Hinc illae lacrymae ! " Female fashions being then 
 at their most preposterous height, consisting of a British adapta- 
 tion of a Greek tunic closely resembling a meal sack tied in the 
 middle, a style little calculated to develop the latent beauties of 
 the slim damsels of Britain, not unnaturally evolved the lanky 
 Mees of the Continental stage. Add to this agreeable picture 
 the libellous corkscrew curls of lively auburn hue and teeth of 
 prodigious length, and we can easily realise how the patriotic 
 Frenchman sought to revenge himself on his hereditary foe. 
 
 These remarks, which may be considered somewhat wide of 
 the subject, might seem to require apology were it not that they 
 are specially intended to fix the origin of a new departure ; and 
 I shall endeavour to prove that from the time when Englishmen 
 left their natural element and sought for the first time to 
 shine among their continental neighbours in matters social and 
 civil for which, as I hold, they are wholly unfitted instead of as
 
 30 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 before, standing proudly aloof and confining themselves to- 
 matters military and naval, and commercial, out of which they 
 had built up their fame a steady, conspicuous, and continuous- 
 backsliding has set in, which, if not brought home to the English 
 people and sedulously fought against, would seem likely to bring 
 us to the pass to which so many other nations have been 
 brought, and which our volatile friends over the water style 
 " Decadence." 
 
 John Bull of the ante-Waterloovian period was a thoroughly 
 respectable and respected European figure. He had the reputation 
 of being liberal with his cash (whence the invariable " milord '" 
 and its numerous traditions), and as ready with his oaths as with 
 his fists. If you search the contemporary literature of Europe 
 you will generally see him represented as a man of infinite self- 
 possession, calm, proud, loud-voiced and overbearing to be sure, 
 but good-tempered withal ; and if rough of manners and speech, 
 yet a man whose word was as good as his bond. 
 
 Where are we now ? Ask of contemporary literature during 
 the last fifty years ! " What a change is there, my countrymen ! " 
 
 Are we to persist in believing, contrary to common sense, 
 experience and history, that for some unseen purpose and 
 inscrutable end all the nations of the world are in open con- 
 spiracy to defame us ? Yet this is the attitude of most of my 
 fellow-countrymen. 
 
 Again I repeat the first step towards reformation is to see our 
 own faults. The second is for each one of us to be determined, 
 in his measure to expose, deprecate and denounce, in public and 
 private, in season and out of season, every tendency, and elimi- 
 nate every element of our modern life which he is satisfied must 
 contribute, not indeed to our depreciation in the eyes of 
 foreigners, but to the downfall of our Empire ; for I cannot 
 sufficiently urge that " Esse quam videri" should be our only 
 motto, and that it is idle and vain to attempt to appear to 
 foreign eyes other than what we really are. 
 
 It was observable but lately, when the subject of Anglo- 
 phobia upon the continent was so hotly discussed in our 
 English Press, that the prevailing if not universal view of our 
 apologists was that in the first place our continental friends 
 dislike us for purely subjective reasons, mainly attributable to-
 
 INTRODUCTORY 31 
 
 their want of perception, logic, or good taste, and not to any 
 shortcomings of our own. Secondly, if there were any such 
 shortcomings, or even any grounds for seeming to be guilty of 
 such, the remedy was plainly to be sought in a more careful 
 display of those external forms which, according to many autho- 
 rities, formed the chief groundwork of their complaints. Finally, 
 all concurred in the view that the bulk of the accusations brought 
 against us, and the grounds suggested in explanation, were in 
 great part imaginary, and wholly founded on jealousy or com- 
 mercial hostility : while among all the various correspondents who 
 pressed eagerly their own particular explanation as being the one 
 and only cause of a manifestation to which all history can afford 
 no parallel, it is at least remarkable that there were none with 
 sufficient philosophy to suggest that such widespread sentiments 
 could not but have originated in a multiplicity of causes, any 
 more than the ocean could subsist without being fed from 
 countless brooks and rivulets. 
 
 Some glimpse of the real truth seemed to have penetrated the 
 scribblers of the Press when attempting to describe, however 
 feebly, the glories of Mafeking Day. I had the misfortune, or, 
 from a philosophical point of view, the advantage, of personally 
 viewing that extraordinary aberration of British intelligence, 
 which prompted even the most indifferent to exclaim that not 
 even the most excitable nations in Europe could have afforded a 
 more unedifying spectacle, while others judiciously remarked that 
 such a display could only be produced by some strange transfor- 
 mation in our national character. 
 
 So it seems that our all-seeing and all-knowing instructors; 
 the guardian angels who watch over our every interest ; the 
 gods by whom we swear; our Phoebus Apollo, without whose 
 leave no Briton dares to call his soul his own ; in short, the penny 
 papers, Britain's tribunal of last appeal in all questions of faith 
 and morals, have at last confessed to a lurking suspicion of a fact 
 to which the literature of every country in Europe, including our 
 own, bears abundant testimony. 
 
 The precise date when this national change took place matters 
 nothing, whether at the battle of Waterloo as I am inclined to 
 think or shortly after, when we first entered upon that political 
 competition, which may be described as putting up political
 
 32 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 power to auction, through which we have arrived in a hundred 
 years, namely, from George III. to Edward VII., from an almost 
 despotic monarchy to the most irresponsible and ill-balanced 
 republic with a king for a figure-head, that the world ever saw. 
 Nor need the contributing causes greatly concern us at present. 
 Personally I incline to the belief that one of the strongest causes 
 of this undoubted and radical change in the British character 
 must be largely sought in the change from soothing, solid, stolid, 
 beer-drinking to noxious, nefarious, nerve-destroying tea, and 
 the national adoption of the cigarette. 
 
 Among continental nations the Hungarians have the reputa- 
 tion of being the most hot-headed and impatient of offence and 
 bad government of any people living, as well they might be, 
 being the purest oriental blood in Europe, directly descended as 
 they are from the fiery Huns of the North. Yet an Hungarian 
 (who had been brought up at Eton and largely frequented 
 London society) once told me that he considered Englishmen the 
 most excitable race with which he was acquainted. 
 
 I am aware that the few French newspapers whose columns 
 were not filled with abuse and vituperation, expressed their 
 surprise at the calm stolidity with which we received the many 
 reverses which were sustained at the opening of the Boer 
 campaign, and some went so far as to contrast them favourably 
 with the attitude of the French under similar circumstances. 
 Alas ! it is to be hoped that they were not spectators of the 
 Mafeking epilogue, or I greatly fear that their admiration of our 
 stoical calm in the early stages of the war (which, as far as my 
 observation went, closely resembled a state of general paralysis 
 and blank despair) would speedily be changed into one of undis- 
 guised contempt. 
 
 As I walked the streets of London on that day the prevailing 
 sentiment in my mind was one of anxious solicitude lest any for- 
 eigner should chance to see us. Alas ! for our antique pride ; alas ! 
 for the calm dignity, the "phlegme Britannique" of other days ! 
 
 To return to our muttons. It is not our frivolity, or our light- 
 headedness, or our excitability, or even that paramount and 
 most fatal of all our vices, social and financial recklessness, the 
 spirit of gambling, if you will, that troubles the foreigner or raises 
 his ire : it is not even our conceit, though many who have
 
 INTEODUCTOEY 33 
 
 closely studied the subject give it that name, it is our un- 
 measured and illimitable self-complacency which lashes the 
 foreigner to the verge of madness. More wonderful still it is to 
 note, that, contrary to what one might expect of human nature, 
 contrary to all analogy and all that is probable and reasonable, it 
 is not the Offensive, the Aggressive, the Positive, so much as the 
 Passive, the Impersonal, the Intangible, which seems to irritate 
 the foreigner beyond the bounds of reason. 
 
 The open childlike brag of the Gascon, the " Longbow " of 
 the North American, the vulgar ostentation of the Brazilian, 
 the haughty pride of the Castilian, the overbearing roughness of 
 the Prussian, all this can be contended with, rebutted and 1 
 snubbed as occasion requires ; but that the nation who in the 
 eyes of all the other members of the European flock, whether 
 from average specimens culled abroad, or from the depressing 
 tone of the English books which they seem specially to affect and 
 translate, or by reason of our diplomatic representatives who are 
 said to shine by their conspicuous dulness in every court of 
 Europe, or a mixture of all these causes, have somehow contrived 
 to give us a character by no means flattering to our intellectual 
 and social qualities should swagger about Europe in their 
 worst clothes to show their contempt for everything outside 
 their own country, elbowing the natives out of their own rail- 
 way carriages, crowding them out of their own hotels, or 
 criticising them in their loudest tones in hotel, street or railway 
 carriage, as if no one but themselves could possibly understand 
 their own language, pervading their monuments and churches 
 with a Murray or a Baedeker in their hand, for the most part 
 selecting the hours of public service their conversation, if any, 
 usually turning upon the superior advantages enjoyed by their 
 own nation, coupled with a lofty disregard of snub, retort or 
 argument all this and much more go to make up a combina- 
 tion so incongruous and inscrutable as to fill the foreigner's 
 bosom with anger and despair. "But why incongruous?" it 
 will be said. " Surely there is nothing remarkable in the fact 
 that the all-conquering Briton strolling abroad for his pleasure 
 should criticise this and frown at that, dispensing his favour and 
 displeasure at his own sweet will in the free exercise of his 
 natural liberty?" To explain this seeming mystery, though
 
 34 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 clear as the noon-tide sun to those who know the inner mind 
 of Europe, nothing but a review of European literature for the 
 last 400 years would suffice, together with a complete com- 
 pendium of modern literature. Enough to say that, roughly 
 speaking, the Eoman race look upon their own culture and 
 civilisation as the only one worth mentioning. We are too apt 
 to forget nay, I know not how we are to learn from English 
 books or where that whatever civilisation we have received has 
 gradually filtered to us through France from the extreme east 
 of Europe. When Eome and Florence were filled with palaces, 
 we were scarce removed from savages ; when the mansions of 
 Venice were hung with gorgeous paintings, costly tapestries 
 and all the splendour of the East, our Henry VIII. and his nobles 
 revelled and caroused in pestilential hovels like St. James's 
 Palace, with mud-baked floors strewn with rushes or fresh straw, 
 hung with villainous tapestries of the coarsest kind, or boarded 
 with rough-hewn panels to hide its rough-cast walls. 
 
 Then as for our literature and arts, where were they a 
 hundred years ago, where are they now, but for the foreigner ? 
 
 "What about Shakespeare?" you will say, "or Sir Isaac 
 Newton?" Precisely; Bacon, Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, 
 in their several spheres of philosophy, literature and science, 
 according to the European verdict, are pretty nearly all we have 
 to boast of. I do not say they are right, but there is the fact. 
 Nor are they so very far wrong when they grudge us the fame 
 which rests upon the production of these great men. For 
 what would Bacon have done without Eoman and Italian 
 literature and philosophy ? Shakespeare, too (upon the supposi- 
 tion that it was not Bacon but Shakespeare who wrote those 
 magnificent plays before whose genius all nations bow down), 
 did he not go to Italy for his inspiration ? Is there scarce a 
 story or a play, excepting his English historical plays, which are 
 not based upon Italian or Spanish drama? In short, the 
 collective European mind regards true civilisation and culture as 
 wholly and entirely a Eoman appanage, confined to members of 
 the Eoman race and tongue ; just as the Greeks considered 
 their civilisation so perfect, their arts and graces so superior 
 to all around, that to them the outer circles of the world were 
 barbarians, whose language and habits seemed so contemptible,
 
 INTEODUCTOEY 35 
 
 that they deemed, just as the Chinese still do to the present 
 hour, the habits and ways of other lands scarce worthy of their 
 attention. And lest I should be thought to exaggerate, to this 
 day does not your Frenchman and your Italian invariably 
 class the English and Eussians together precisely as the Eomans 
 of the Augustan age when they spoke of the distant tin islands 
 of Britain, and of the ice-bound Scythians, or northern Eussians, 
 as if they were, as probably they really were, in the same 
 category of civilisation. "Is it not in a great measure a 
 geographical confusion of mind," I shall be told, " arising from 
 our equidistant position from what they please to consider the 
 centre of culture ? " Personally, I incline to that belief. So 
 persistent, however, are traditions, especially when adverse to 
 others and flattering to ourselves, that it is more than probable 
 that Horace, or Ovid, or Virgil's careless geography, crystallis- 
 ing itself in the literature of Italy and France, has been the 
 original cause of this undoubted, if monstrous, nay ludicrous 
 combination, the more ludicrous and irritating when we think 
 that Eussia has scarcely yet stepped across the border of civili- 
 sation and is but a mushroom of yesterday with an authentic 
 history scarce three hundred years old, while our own country 
 has played a brilliant part in Christendom since the days of 
 King Alfred. 
 
 " But how about the Germans, where do they come in ? Are 
 they outer barbarians like ourselves ? " I shall be asked. It must 
 be confessed that Frederick of Prussia did an excellent turn to 
 Germany when he invited Voltaire to remodel his schools 
 and transplant French culture wholesale into the barrack squares 
 of Germany. Far be it from me to argue that they did them- 
 selves any good in faith or morals thereby; but this they 
 certainly did attain, viz. a place in the European comity. No 
 sooner had Maria Theresa of Austria and Frederick of Prussia 
 come to the conclusion that no improvement was possible but 
 through wholesale importation of an alien civilisation than with 
 whatever loss to national character the portals of European 
 culture were thrown wide open, and Germany en bloc was 
 welcomed within the inner barriers of polite Europe, from which 
 she had up to that date been rigorously excluded. 
 
 Odious and contemptible as it is, I think history would bear
 
 36 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 out the accuracy of this observation, that only through the 
 Caudine forks of slavish Franco-Italian imitation can a European 
 nation hope to break through the deep-set tradition which gives 
 to Rome alone the monopoly of culture. So firm is the 
 determination to exclude us from participation in the European 
 comity that it is even urged in explanation of the seeming 
 impossibility of so barbarous a nation having produced a man 
 like Shakespeare, that Shakespeare must not be reckoned as an 
 Englishman. " He is one of those exceptional minds like the 
 Corsican Napoleon," they tell us, "he is of no country and no 
 race, but a citizen of the world ! " 
 
 To those who have done me the honour to follow me closely in 
 this brief sketch in explanation of the preposterous and un- 
 generous point of view taken up by not only the lawful 
 inheritors of the civilisation of Eome but even by our upstart 
 German cousins who but yesterday were on a worse footing 
 than our own, who nevertheless eagerly join in the hunt as 
 if their position were equally assured with their nobler rivals 
 let us for a moment consider what our feelings would be if our 
 Zulu friends from the Cape, puffed up with their earnings in our 
 ill-gotten Transvaal gold mines, were to take it into their heads 
 to don tall hats and varnished boots, or a straw hat and knicker- 
 bockers, and saunter about Charing Cross, criticising the Rational 
 Gallery or the British Museum, or making unfavourable remarks ' 
 about Westminster Abbey, or drawing comparisons between the 
 civilisation of London and that of Natal and you can easily guess 
 the indignation and disgust of the Continental when the bold 
 Briton stalks abroad to air his own superiority and contempt by 
 that display of " Nil admirare " which he usually considers to be 
 the acme of refinement and culture. To complete the picture, it 
 must be borne in mind that his remarks so far as their taste 
 and discrimination are concerned are usually little better 
 entitled to respect than those of the gentlemen from Zululand 
 aforementioned. 
 
 For if there is one thing that our countrymen specially 
 distinguish themselves by the absence of, it is TASTE. Now taste 
 must not be confused with a similar word with a different 
 meaning, which, through the unfortunate poverty of our language, 
 is, I verily believe, the cause of more fundamental aesthetic
 
 INTBODUCTOKY 37 
 
 error than almost any other. When treating of it (as I hope to 
 do later) I see no method of better handling the subject than by 
 successfully disproving its existence among us by the considera- 
 tion of the many admitted practices which are in direct defiance 
 of taste. For the present it suffices to declare what I think will 
 be the general opinion among Englishmen, that one important 
 department of taste consists in a correct appreciation of ourselves 
 and our own qualities to know what we are, and what we are 
 not. 
 
 When I have seen the epithet "stupid" applied to our nation 
 by the various scribblers of the European Press with an unanimity 
 which is as striking as it is unpleasant, I have invariably spent 
 much time in considering how I could deduce from the context or 
 the subject in hand a clear idea of the cause and origin of what I 
 used to consider a wholly unwarrantable and preposterous title. I 
 have even analysed closely the word " stupid" in its original Latin 
 sense in hopes of deriving some grain of comfort. Subse- 
 quently in later years, gaining a more perfect and intimate 
 acquaintance with the various equivalents among the various 
 Latin nations, without being precisely consoled by the informa- 
 tion obtained, I perceived that the signification attached to that 
 unpleasant word differs somewhat in every Latin country in 
 proportion as they approach to or depart from the original 
 tongue. Proceeding as it does from the word " stupeo," which 
 means to grow torpid or to be moonstruck (which I take to be 
 the closest equivalent), a condition of amazement or bewilder- 
 ment rather than mental density is supposed. Contrary to the 
 prevailing opinion, and if one may judge even from clever 
 translations, contrary to the common belief, it must be 
 remembered that very few words even when derived from a 
 common origin bear precisely the same meaning in the mouths 
 of different nations. If, however, I have a right conception of 
 the word " stupid " in English, which I take to be a condition of 
 complete absence of sense and reason " stupid " has not a 
 meaning quite so objectionable in the Eoman tongues as in our 
 own, and in its application to ourselves in the unpleasant term 
 " ce peuple stupide," or " cette nation stupide " does not imply 
 what we understand by the bare English counterpart, viz. "a 
 stupid people," or " a stupid nation," but that condition of mind,
 
 38 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 which, whether applicable or not to the great bulk of my fellow- 
 countrymen in their outlook abroad, constitutes the great question 
 between ourselves and our Continental neighbours. 
 
 Of all the prominent writers with which I am acquainted, 
 Thackeray who was about as " Frenchified " and as saturated 
 with French feeling in his earlier days as an Englishman could 
 possibly be seems to have had the keenest perception of some- 
 thing wrong about his fellow-countrymen, as displayed by his 
 irritating and most unconvincing satires upon English society, 
 from highest to lowest, under the aspect of " Snobbery," with 
 which he has immortally connected his name. Had he plainly 
 laid down the principles upon which his satire was founded, and 
 defined the limits of what he seemed rather to feel than discover 
 to be a national defect of our nation, his large and copious efforts 
 in that direction, coming to us as they did with the authority of 
 so popular a writer, would have obtained very important results. 
 Possessing, however, a singularly unphilosophical mind, and 
 being essentially a caricaturist rather than a censor of current 
 morals, the effect produced upon his hearers was rather that of a 
 disappointed man who for some fancied slight lost no opportunity 
 to pour out upon the society which he depicted the contempt and 
 venom with which his soul overflowed. 
 
 Perhaps " stupefaction," in the sense of imperfect apprehension 
 without any tincture of appreciation, brings before us the precise 
 shade of meaning attributed to it by our Continental friends in 
 the clearest and highest degree. It may be understood to be 
 that frame of mind in which two farmers in the inimitable pages 
 of " Brown, Jones and Robinson," appeared to the admiring eyes 
 of their fellow-countrymen in their travels down the Rhine, and 
 in my private experience is well typified by a Cook's tourist who 
 sat by my side at an hotel in Naples and confidentially remarked 
 to me that had it not been for his wife's desire to talk about the 
 "Continong" no power on earth would ever have drawn him 
 away from Pangbourne, for he said, " They drags me hout of one 
 mooseum into another, through one church and then hover one 
 of these here picture galleries, and hout of one hotel into 
 another, till I don't know whether I stand on my 'ead or my 'eels ; 
 and as for their food, I'm blowed if I've 'ad what I calls a good 
 honest meal since I left my 'ome in Pangbourne." I took great
 
 INTRODUCTORY 39 
 
 pleasure in cross-questioning ray friend, as he seamed to be a 
 singularly hard-headed, sensible, average Briton, by no means 
 deficient in the solids, while wholly devoid of what may be 
 called the ornaments of education. The prevailing impression 
 produced upon me by this as I may call him central type of an 
 Englishman, was that his attitude towards foreigners generally, 
 whom he delighted in classing in a lump (precisely as I have so 
 often been deeply irritated by hearing Hindoos and Chinese 
 similarly deliver themselves in our own regard) as "them 
 furriners," for whom as well as for their habits and language he 
 neither knew nor cared, but enjoyed a firm, unhesitating, and 
 undisguised contempt. There will be many who will say, " Here 
 you take as an example a man without an " H," or if he has one 
 puts it in the wrong place ; surely this is not a fair specimen ?" 
 To this I reply that he and such as he, " H " or no " H," 
 probably supplies nine-tenths of modern travel, and consequently, 
 for every one that departs from this type to any essential degree, 
 there will be nine possessed of most of this man's leading 
 characteristics. 
 
 Nor are the ladies by any means behindhand in their porcupine- 
 like attitude towards everything foreign. The Duke's womankind 
 down to the much despised 'Arry and 'Arriet of comic lore, differ 
 in their main features to a very slight degree. I have studied 
 them closely " in season and out of season," and it is my firm and 
 unalterable conviction that the vast majority of Britons and 
 Britonesses, to say nothing of our American cousins, who come over 
 to "do" Europe, are animated by no conceivable purpose beyond 
 that so straightforwardly expressed by our friend from Pangbourne, 
 even though expressed in different language ; while the effect 
 upon themselves and consequently upon the foreigners with 
 whom they have mingled is almost precisely similar. From the 
 moment they leave their native shores to the moment they return 
 to the stale buns and dubious tea which greet them on landing at 
 Dover, their main topic of conversation is the dissimilarity and as a 
 natural consequence the inferiority of every thing foreign to every- 
 thing English the great want of " Comfort " abroad as compared 
 with what they enjoy at home, and the deplorable political, social, 
 moral and religious condition of foreigners generally, and their 
 ignorance of British civilisation as specially evinced in the article
 
 40 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of tea, fill their mouths and hearts to the exclusion of all 
 attempts to derive benefit and instruction. 
 
 Now were this bedazement, which has earned us the un- 
 pleasant title of a collectively stupid nation, held to imply a 
 stupefaction of the intellect at the superiority of other nations 
 over ourselves, depend upon it there would be no complaint. The 
 " Causa gravaminis " is widely different ! For it mainly consists 
 in nothing less than stupefaction at the inferiority of everything 
 foreign to everything British ; so that in the overwhelming 
 majority of cases the Briton and Britoness come home more 
 British than he or she set out, and more firmly convinced than 
 ever according to the shortness and the quickness of their trip 
 (always supposing that they do not live very long in any spot or 
 master the language completely and form a large foreign 
 acquaintance, in which latter case they generally rush into the 
 opposite extreme) that (to repeat once more the immortal 
 language of " Brown, Jones, and Eobinson ") " the whole thing 
 is a do and a sell." 
 
 Lastly, to sum up, this frame of mind, coupled with a serene 
 conviction of our own superiority in every conceivable respect, 
 which is so obvious (to ourselves, at any rate) that it is not 
 worth disputing or arguing about, combined with that want of 
 taste which not only prevents our sympathising with the foreigner 
 but from making any attempt, internal or external, to hide or 
 bridge the abyss that yawns between us, represents an inability 
 to perceive the beam in our own eye while criticising the mote in 
 our neighbour's, which fills the foreigner with rage and 
 indignation. For, argues he (with what truth I leave to my 
 discriminating readers to judge), " Where are these institutions 
 of which Britions are so proud? Which of them can be said to 
 be perfect? Nay, which of them is not opposed to every 
 Continental canon and consequently eminently undesirable ?" And 
 in proof of this they add, " Is there an institution of whatever kind 
 which has not been heartily denounced high and low by the 
 most accredited British writers ? Are they really honest when 
 they criticise all our institutions while they are for ever grumbling 
 at their own ? Must we not to that diabolical pride, that 
 1 morgue ' which besets them added to that ' splin ' by which 
 they are tormented, look for that intolerable attitude which they
 
 INTRODUCTORY 41 
 
 assume upon the Continent, which is wholly unjustified by facts 
 and even by the testimony of their own writings ? from which it 
 surely follows that they are either conspiring to hide from us 
 their deplorable condition by an affected superiority, or else are 
 too stupid to properly appreciate the immensity of the beam in 
 their own eye : in any case they are a stupid people, since in the 
 former case they try stupidly to deceive us, and in the latter 
 they stupidly deceive themselves." 
 
 But is it so certain that we do really deceive ourselves ? Are 
 we as a nation prone to live in what is called a Fool's Paradise ? 
 If so, Englishmen's conversation, when the foreigner is not 
 present, is exceedingly misleading ; for nothing is more remark- 
 able than the freedom with which the average Briton denounces 
 within the walls of his own sanctuary, nay in his favourite papers, 
 the habits and shortcomings of his nation. 
 
 The enormous divergence between our private talk and our 
 public utterances is an essential and striking English peculiarity. 
 I have heard the same man, who, in private conversation, will 
 talk as if Englishmen collectively were the biggest fools on earth, 
 stand before a public audience and glorify himself and 
 themselves collectively and individually, congratulating his 
 audience upon their civic virtues and intrinsic merits 
 without so much as a blush or a suspicion that he was 
 deviating in the slightest degree from the path of rectitude and 
 truth. But is not this again a further manifestation of a stupid 
 people ? For surely none but a stupid people would care to 
 hear themselves collectively praised for being the finest people 
 under the sun, or would desire to hear nothing better in a public 
 hall than an exaggerated statement of virtues which they know 
 to be wholly fictitious and non-existent. Would they not rather 
 express their strong distaste and disgust for such fulsome 
 encomiums, and by word and action signify to those who address 
 them that they preferred plain truths to senseless adulation ? 
 
 Another strange circumstance may be adverted to before we 
 proceed further to the consideration of the points to which our 
 criticism should be mainly directed. There are two supreme 
 and preponderating qualities which the whole of Europe 
 ungrudgingly concede to us ; first, our commercial superiority 
 and mechanical ingenuity (of late largely shared by our American
 
 42 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 cousins who are treading fast on our heels in European esteem) ; 
 secondly, our system of popular government as especially 
 displayed in our colonial successes. 
 
 Now I imagine that if most Englishmen were polled upon this 
 head, the general verdict would be extremely adverse to our 
 pretensions of possessing the secret of government in its greatest 
 perfection. Take any of the provincial papers I care not in 
 what part of England and it is ten to one that the greatest 
 part of the written articles and letters therein contained will 
 consist of strong denunciations of the tricks, or speculations, or 
 shortcomings of one or other Government Party, or one or other 
 governing body in the town or city where the paper is edited. 
 Listen to a knot of interested talkers in any commercial hotel, or 
 at any place of public resort, and it will be a marvel if the subject 
 of attack or controversy be not the last financial or other scandal 
 connected with public maladministration. No doubt this 
 condition of things may result in great measure from the strong 
 party spirit infused into the national system of politics. The 
 patriot is lost in the politician. The Tory forgets that the Whig 
 is as much an Englishman as he is ; and the intensity of the 
 rivalry between opposing parties produces a condition almost 
 similar to civil war. On the other hand, the strong tendency to 
 mitigate and defend the errors and excesses of the party to 
 which one belongs produces an excessive severity towards the 
 Opposition and disables the average politician from distinguishing 
 calmly between right and wrong. It would seem that quarrelling 
 and strife are so inherent in human nature that from the time 
 that we Englishmen no longer had occasion to struggle with the 
 crown, that is roughly, since James II. F s time, and possibly also 
 because we felt that we had no right to grumble at a king of our 
 own choosing, our political activities had been deflected from 
 incessant bickerings with the Crown to incessant internecine 
 conflicts between Whig and Tory. I know that there are many 
 who look upon party politics as being the mainstay of the British 
 Constitution ; they consider that just as the sluggish river 
 becomes filled with mud and turbid if not stirred by dividing 
 rocks and alternate deeps and shallows, so the political life of a 
 nation requires the stimulus of passion and strong emotion to 
 prevent the dull stagnation into which it would otherwise fall.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 43 
 
 We can now hardly realise the condition of things that followed 
 upon the dismissal of the Stuarts, when for nearly a hundred 
 years a large body of the best of a nation were firmly, if not 
 openly, opposed to the existing Government, not so much upon 
 general or even upon moral grounds, as upon a bare and simple 
 preference for the discarded dynasty ; and yet such is the perver- 
 sity of human nature, that, looking through the contemporary 
 literature of the past, paradoxical as it may seem, one is struck 
 with the fact that the moment the politicians had less to quarrel 
 about, they seemed to quarrel the more ; that is, as soon as Tory 
 adversaries were reduced almost to zero, political ferocity and 
 hatred rose to its highest point under the placid if uneventful 
 early years of George III. : so that, although the Pretender's 
 followers had long since fallen away or died out, you will hear 
 such men as Dr. Johnson deny all possibility of honesty, order 
 or justice proceeding from a Government of Whigs. 
 
 When the foreigner in a generous mood descants upon the 
 one and only superiority which he admits in us, and desperately 
 attempts to pronounce "the British Constitution," to use a 
 vulgar phrase " he has the wrong sow by the ear." For in the 
 first place we have, strictly speaking, no constitution at all. That 
 high-sounding phrase "British Constitution" which has too 
 often proved a stumbling-block to after-dinner eloquence appears 
 to move many Britons to ecstasies of self-congratulation appar- 
 ently upon the same principle as that which moved the old 
 woman who when asked what she had understood of a somewhat 
 high-flown sermon, replied, that she " thought a lot of that 
 blessed word Mesopotamia." Perhaps the chief beauty of our 
 so-called Constitution or at any rate its special suitability to 
 Englishmen is the fact of its not being a constitution at all, but 
 rather a congeries of maxims, habits and sayings, of such 
 extreme elasticity as to suit all times and all cases, and mixed 
 with as little intelligible principles as will serve to hold it 
 together, in fact a very similar jumble to what we dignify with 
 the name of Law, the chief merit of which seems to consist in a 
 total absence of order, regularity, or principle, three things 
 apparently repugnant to the British mind. 
 
 For centuries the excitable and unruly heirs of Roman civili- 
 sation, not unnaturally envying our comparatively unbroken
 
 44 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 share of peace and prosperity perhaps partly from national 
 vanity, and partly from their deep-seated belief in the efficacy of 
 logical systems, have confused the instrument with the user and 
 sought an explanation of our success in the wrong direction. 
 
 The truth is that it is not our political but our physical and 
 mental constitution to which our comparative freedom from 
 revolutions and civil dissension must be ascribed. Koughly 
 speaking, the British race is a compound of Dane and Saxon 
 grafted upon a Celtic stock. As flowers and fruit display the 
 character and qualities of the graft rather than the stock 
 ingrafted, so the heterogeneous blood of Northern Germany and 
 Scandinavia strongly predominated except in certain portions of 
 Wales, north and west Scotland, and western Ireland, with the 
 result that although the greater portion of wealth and power 
 with nearly all the land fell to the successful Normans, the over- 
 powering "vis inertia" of what we call the Saxon element has 
 invariably prevailed over the Norman vivacity of our rulers. 
 Let our enemies call it bovine stupidity if they will, and certainly 
 it looks uncommonly like it when we consider that such prosperity 
 as we have attained was assuredly not derived from the exertions 
 of the downtrodden People, who, till yesterday, enjoyed no share 
 of power or influence until it was thrust into their unwilling 
 hands for party purposes let us, however, assume a virtue if we 
 have it not, and call it Stability at all events in the presence of 
 the foreigner. 
 
 Thus even our faults at times may prove a source of safety. A 
 witty Frenchman said that most men have the quality of their 
 defects. Here we perceive that our chief defect so closely 
 counterfeits a quality as to have succeeded in hoodwinking the 
 jealous and critical foreigner these four hundred years or more. 
 Surely this should be a matter of pride to most of us. For if 
 this characteristic of ours enabled us tenaciously to resist all 
 attempts to tamper with our laws and political constitution and 
 all that makes for the glory of our Motherland, such a disposition 
 should certainly be reckoned a quality greatly to be admired : 
 whereas, on the contrary, if our political institutions when 
 blurred and disfigured with the grossest stains and errors, 
 through mere force of habit or obstinacy, are hugged and 
 cherished as a national boon of infinite price, must we not then
 
 INTRODUCTORY 45 
 
 in all honesty denounce it as a most pernicious fault, which, when 
 carried to excess, not only amounts to a national curse, but seems 
 to bar the way to all national improvement ! 
 
 Few better examples can be given of this tendency than a letter 
 which appeared lately in the columns of a daily paper, where 
 an Englishman bitterly complains of the inferiority of the 
 refreshments afforded at Dover on landing from abroad ; he was 
 instantly answered by another indignant writer, who, while fully 
 agreeing in every respect with the substance of the complaint, 
 exclaims, " But it is thoroughly English ! and therefore 1 am too 
 patriotic to complain ! " winding up by saying that he never 
 landed at Dover without thanking Heaven he was an 
 Englishman ! 
 
 Two more examples I will give of this truly national peculiarity 
 compounded apparently of a pig-like obstinacy and a bovine 
 self-complacency. The former quotation may be held to disclose 
 the wisdom of the middle classes. Let us take two similar 
 examples from the higher and lower as well. 
 
 A Prime Minister not long ago was found to excuse the 
 intolerable neglect of his Government in taking the commonest 
 measures to avert or successfully carry on the war in the Trans- 
 vaal by saying that he supposed "Englishmen have always 
 muddled and mismanaged their wars in the past, and he thought 
 it was highly probable that they always would in the future." 
 
 Again, when an impudent and most improbable impostor, called 
 Arthur Orton, vainly endeavoured to prove himself the long-lost 
 heir of large estates, I was assured that a working man was 
 heard sententiously to remark to his mates, as if disposing of the 
 entire question, " I am for the claimant, I am. I don't care 
 whether he is the right man or not ! but I likes his pluck ! " 
 
 What is the moral to be drawn from these three stories ? I 
 take it that the last may be considered a genuine manifestation 
 of what may be called a central type of Briton making a 
 public declaration to his fellows, just as a little higher up I 
 have recounted a similar expression of opinion in a letter to the 
 newspapers among a superior class, each betraying amazing 
 depths of mingled obstinacy and stupidity, and each, too, taking 
 the form of an appeal to the verdict of their fellow-countrymen : 
 from which it may be fairly deduced that these men are not only
 
 46 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 honestly convinced of what they say, but also that they have 
 reason to believe, and probably rightly so, that they have the 
 sympathy of a very large section of their fellow-countrymen. 
 
 My quotation from the speech of an eminent statesman seems 
 to point, by a different road, to the same conclusion. We can 
 hardly do such injustice to a notoriously acute and far-seeing 
 statesman as to suppose that he fairly expressed his own opinion, 
 or his own sense of the fitness of things ; there is, therefore, no 
 other conclusion to be drawn, but that in making such a remark 
 he felt that he was appealing to the sympathy of the greater 
 number of his countrymen. Now, as the mathematicians say, 
 this aforesaid sympathy equals unfathomable stupidity, ergo, he, 
 in common with the other two samples of different classes, all 
 unite in appealing to the enormous collective stupidity of their 
 fellow-countrymen. (Q.E.D.) 
 
 Having cleared the ground, I now propose to consider whether 
 there is a prima facie ground for " philosophic doubt " as to 
 whether or not the foreigner is right ? Are we or are we not a 
 stupid people ? Of course, taken as individuals there can be no 
 doubt that Britons have achieved great things. Whether it is 
 the Norman or Celtic blood, which, with many drawbacks, 
 invariably introduces into any nation with which it is allied 
 great mental vivacity and indeed capacity for every variety of 
 intellectual development, or whether it is that in our dull Saxon 
 veins some ferment occasionally arises which lifts the individual 
 above the common herd, there can be no doubt that individual 
 Englishmen have attained the highest capacity in every 
 department of human effort. Collectively, I think it may be 
 demonstrated to the satisfaction of every unbiassed Englishman 
 that the foreigner has ample grounds for attributing enormous 
 stupidity to our public and national conduct as distinguished 
 irom the individuals of which that nation is composed. 
 
 I propose, then, to consider this question under various heads, 
 from its most important aspects down to its most trivial social 
 manifestations.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 BRITISH BELIGIONS 
 
 IN dealing with religion it is not easy to keep apart those 
 branches of moral conduct which, in the public eye, are almost 
 inextricably mingled, for example, charitable institutions, 
 hospitals, tithes, glebes, methods of dispensing of religious 
 preferment, philanthropic institutions for the improvement of 
 the human race generally, such as the S.P.G., Temperance 
 Societies, and so forth. If, therefore, I diverge from the strict 
 confines of religious thought and polity, it may be borne in mind 
 that while many have a strong feeling in favour of keeping these 
 matters strictly apart and drawing a line where religion begins 
 and philanthropy finishes, still in such a connection it will be 
 extremely difficult to keep a strict technical boundary, where 
 most Englishmen are only too apt to draw no distinction 
 whatever. 
 
 Probably it will be universally admitted that we are a deeply 
 religious people. In adverting to the special advantages with 
 which foreign nations have credited us and our institutions 
 generally, and to which I am inclined to attribute our national 
 immobility or disinclination to move forward or backward, I 
 might have added, had it not more properly come under the head 
 of religion, that whenever we have fallen away from the enjoy- 
 ment of that even and peaceful civil condition which our laws 
 ensure, the moving cause has invariably been religion. Though 
 the Celt may rave and rant, and the Norman plan and plot, the 
 Saxon deadweight, uniting as it does the greater dulness with the 
 greater numbers, usually acts in the same manner as gravitation 
 upon bodies in violent action, that is, it speedily reduces them to 
 impotence. 
 
 When, therefore, Religion appears amongst us with its 
 attendant handmaids, Passion and Jealousy, by which I mean 
 the hatred of other men's beliefs combined with a determination 
 to proscribe them, the pent-up activities of the entire race 
 burst forth, and a muddy pond is suddenly converted into a
 
 48 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 roaring flood. Not that your Anglo-Saxon ever reaches the 
 lofty heights of piety and self-sacrifice of a Bernard or a 
 Francis of Assisi, nor produces missioners with the superhuman 
 self-devotion of a Xavier or a Peter Claver. Indeed some his- 
 torians, in explaining the facts of the English Reformation, have 
 gone so far as to assert that the Roman domination and the sway 
 of the Western Church affected only the external mind of the 
 English people, and that in adopting the Reformation they only 
 followed their own natural bent. Whether there be any 
 truth in this or not, no one will deny that the earlier Saxons 
 in pre-Norman days were marvellously zealous in their attach- 
 ment to the religious orders and supported them with the 
 utmost liberality, while strangely enough it is from Norman days 
 that the attachment of the lower and middle classes to the 
 Church of Rome seems to have gradually melted away. 
 
 The first attack against the Church of Rome was but a 
 skirmish upon the outworks. Wycliffe with his " Lollard " 
 preachers stirred a very small section of the English people, and 
 were themselves chiefly recruited among the ranks of the needy 
 and intriguing Norman clergy. Through all these centuries, 
 however, growing dislike and sturdy British distrust of spiritual 
 authority was fast gaining sway, and at the first clang of the 
 Reformation abroad, the barriers of irksome restraint which the 
 clergy had set upon the liberties of the people were burst 
 asunder. Your true Englishman does not love fasting. He will 
 stand a heavy drain on his purse without murmuring, even 
 though he likes it not ; but touch him in his stomach and his 
 religion flies up the chimney. Probably his piety, from all 
 that we read, was never of a very high order, while on the 
 contrary his charity seems to have been always conspicuous. 
 The abrogation of fast days and feast days, of pilgrimages and 
 mortification of the flesh, however, suited him exactly. No 
 wonder that he welcomed the Reformation with open arms. 
 Then, again, the Saxon is eminently domestic; he loves his wife 
 and his children, and he looks askance at everybody who is not 
 similarly provided ; for being wholly devoid of imagination, he can- 
 not believe in celibacy or self-sacrifice, or indeed anything whatso- 
 ever that cannot be measured up and felt, and bought and sold. 
 Jealous of any authority except that which he himself has a
 
 BRITISH RELIGIONS 49 
 
 share in, standing up for his king to whom he always bears 
 unflinching loyalty, John Bull never liked the interference of a 
 foreigner as the Head of his Church. When there was an 
 English Pope he could stretch a point ; or even for a French 
 Pope who had perhaps held a fat abbey or canonry in his own 
 island, and perchance bore a name familiar among his own 
 magnates at home : but for Italians and Spaniards and such 
 like he had a profound aversion and distrust. 
 
 Henry VIII. (for none knew better his people's temper than 
 that wily prince) hit the nail on the head when he raised the cry 
 of " England for the English, an English Pope in an English 
 land." 
 
 Your true Anglo-Saxon knows nothing and cares less about 
 logic or dogma. Foreigners he always hated and despised. 
 Therefore it was but natural that he joyfully acclaimed the 
 substitution as the Head of his Church of a popular king like 
 Henry VIII. in the room of a foreigner whom he knew not, and 
 consequently contemned. 
 
 Now the Sectaries of various kinds, especially the Brownists, 
 and the Independents, who carefully moulded their views of worship 
 to suit their countrymen, gave him what they called the Open 
 Bible, which, to use the modern slang of the ring and the cycle- 
 track, means " Go as you please." There are two elements here 
 that please John Bull. He is not a vain man by any means, 
 but he likes to feel he is trusted and that he can do something for 
 himself. He never liked vicarious instruction. Though good- 
 natured, he is suspicious. If Luther was right, he cannot see 
 why the Rev. Jones or Brown should be more qualified than him- 
 self to understand the Word of God ; and above all he is intensely 
 jealous of his personal rights. Day after day he recites his 
 creed, yet the Church to him is an abstraction which he com- 
 pletely fails to realise. He invokes the communion of the saints, 
 and yet he does not believe in them, and probably never did ; 
 the image is too intricate for his dull comprehension to compass. 
 
 Nor did the Sectaries stop at the Open Bible. They soon 
 found out that the silly herd which, sheep-like, followed each 
 other into their fold, needed only the conviction of a heaven- 
 sent message to turn them into such fanatics as Mahomet led 
 of old. By an artful substitution of the new dispensation for 
 E
 
 50 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 the old, they were easily inflamed by the inculcations of the Old 
 Testament. Ignorant and credulous, they were easily persuaded 
 by their cunning teachers that the best part of the Word of 
 God had been sedulously kept from their knowledge by their 
 priests of old, and that they (the Sectaries) for the first time 
 revealed the Word of God in its fullest plenitude and truth. 
 
 In short, the fanatics who pulled down the Monarchy, as they 
 had before baffled the cunning Cecil and the unscrupulous 
 Walsingham, were soon turned into fanatical Jews with the 
 ferocity of the true British bulldog breed thrown in. 
 
 It must be remembered that nothing stirs the British blood 
 like religion. Slow and dull as he is in all other things, not even 
 the vilest brandy or the rawest whisky will fly to his head like 
 religion. Between forty and fifty per cent, at the present hour 
 of our lunatics, male and female, have lost such wits as they 
 ever possessed by getting " saved," or not "saved" as the case 
 may be. 
 
 Therefore, when for the first time their cherished teachers 
 read out of the holy book, once forbidden to the vulgar, the words 
 in which the prophets of old addressed God's people, telling them 
 they were the chosen of the Lord, destined above all other men 
 to wear the white robes of righteousness and " hew down the 
 eons of Belial," or " gird their loins with the sword of Agag," 
 which meant in plain English that they were to lay about them 
 in any direction pointed out by the aforesaid reverend teachers, 
 can their excesses be wondered at, even if indulgence be denied ? 
 
 From this source sprang the indomitable Cromwellian legions 
 as well as the deplorable bigotry and the sectarian hatreds 
 and intolerance which poison our land to the present hour. 
 
 The simple idea of God speaking to His people through His 
 gospels without a mediator was plain and intelligible enough. 
 This view your typical Englishman has passionately seized and 
 held with astonishing tenacity, during the 17th and part 
 of the 18th century, with whatever fatal results in the gradual 
 depletion of the new state fold ; for since no authority was 
 irrevocable and final, each man who invented a new method of 
 religious polity or worship found new supporters ; and English- 
 men, unlike any other nation as far as we know upon the earth 
 or under the earth, found no incongruity in churches springing
 
 BRITISH RELIGIONS 51 
 
 up like mushrooms at the bidding of crazy cobblers or illiterate 
 tailors. Nor is it easy to see why there should be any limit to 
 the formation of voluntary assemblies banded together under 
 certain limitations for purposes of prayer or other pious exer- 
 cises, unless we hold fast to the belief that Christ came on earth 
 to establish His Kingdom or Church, and that Church necessarily 
 must be One not Many. 
 
 Everyone has heard of the witty Frenchman who remarked 
 that the English had a hundred religions and only one sauce. 
 The serious and thinking foreigner is utterly unable to compre- 
 hend by what process of thought Englishmen can reconcile 
 themselves to the legal enrolment of two or three hundred 
 churches, more especially when nearly all coincide in reverencing 
 and most in accepting the Athanasian Creed, in which one only 
 definite "Catholic Church" is duly recited. 
 
 " They are surely not churches," they will exclaim, " but 
 clubs. The English have no sense of humour when they talk 
 about or demand the serious acceptation of two or three 
 hundred churches of God. There can only be one Church of 
 God, that is, supposing that God has any Church at all. There 
 is certainly room for doubt as to whether God has appointed any 
 special body to whom He has delegated the task of preaching and 
 teaching and carrying out His designs upon earth, or again it may 
 be urged that there is no such Church and never was. But logic 
 and reason stand aghast at the stupidity of a nation which sets 
 in its Almanac between two and three hundred churches all 
 alike claiming to be the Church of God, and the one and only 
 fold of salvation." 
 
 The fact is that the more logical mind of the average educated 
 foreigner refuses to entertain the notion of any but the one true 
 fold. 
 
 " If it is not the Church of God," he says, " how can it be a 
 Church at all, and therefore why follow it ? We can understand 
 that you make superhuman efforts to find the real Church of 
 God, if you think it cannot be the Church of your forefathers : 
 but what is the sense of setting up hundreds of new Churches of 
 God of which only one can conceivably be the right one ? We 
 can readily understand how the Reformers impatient of 
 ecclesiastical control, and of the theory of the Catholic Church
 
 52 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 which confides the whole care of its flock and the expounding of 
 its Gospels to a privileged class relying upon the alleged word of 
 Christ that He would always be with us even until the end of 
 the world should exclaim ' Let us have no more mediators, 
 there is nothing in the Gospel to warrant a go-between 'twixt 
 Christ and sinner,' and forthwith abolish priesthood and the 
 hierarchy and all other forms of spiritual despotism whatsoever, 
 or that other sectaries cry out, ' The Gospel is plain enough 
 for every man to read for himself.' ' Has not our Lord said 
 that where two or three are gathered together in His name, He 
 will be in the midst of them ? ' ' Why these churches, these 
 cathedrals, this human pomp, this splendid worship ? There is 
 nothing of all this in the Bible.' ' There is not a word about a 
 Church or a Church of God in the Bible.' True it is that 
 he spoke of one fold and one shepherd (on which the 
 Catholics so greatly rely), but as for any definite statement that 
 He appointed Saint Peter the Head of that Church and that his 
 successors for ever after should determine all questions of faith 
 and morals you can ransack the whole Bible without finding a 
 word of it 1 " 
 
 So said the earliest seceders from the newly re-formed State 
 Church. Time soon showed, however, that the No-Church 
 theory did not pay. Of what avail to invent a new religion, 
 without priests or officials to collect the " offerings," or a 
 hierarchy without fat places to strive for ? Thus a new religion, 
 whatever its original basis might be, always grew to be a 
 " Church " with duly appointed officers for collecting purposes, 
 whether they were called priests or ministers or Saints or 
 Apostles. 
 
 Here some will exclaim, " Surely if the Church of Borne has 
 erred we must set up another in her place ! " Yet is not this a 
 virtual impeachment of God Himself ? If He has made a Church 
 and intended it to last for ever, and to be the bearer of Truth 
 and good life and true worship to men, to say that that divinely- 
 appointed Church has erred is simply to say that God has erred. 
 If He has not, by what right does man set up a new Church of 
 His own and call it God's ? Consequently it follows that all a 
 reasonable being can say is this : "I will not belong to the 
 ancient Church even though it descends from Peter in direct line
 
 
 BRITISH RELIGIONS 53 
 
 through its Apostles, because I have no evidence that God ever 
 made a Church at all, or in other words, ever appointed an 
 invariable method of knowing Him, serving Him, and attaining 
 eternal felicity. All I have therefore to do is to endeavour to 
 live after His precepts, and if I choose to pray, my prayers will 
 surely be as acceptable in the garden, or the desert, therefore, 
 why a Church," as His own were to His Divine Father. 
 
 No wonder we hear from the bewildered foreigner, " What is 
 the meaning of your Church of England, Church of Independents, 
 of Congregationalists, Methodists, etc. ? If they did not call 
 themselves a ' Church ' (as they do apparently from vanity 
 without rhyme or reason) we could understand them : but what 
 is this Church of England whose formularies are a mixture, 
 one-half Catholic and the other half Lutheran, and whose 
 Liturgy and discipline and external forms are entirely Catholic ? 
 Is it not contrary to common sense to give the name of Church 
 to a purely State-invented Compromise with the sole object of 
 reconciling the entire nation to one religion, and is it not sheer 
 blasphemy to call it God's?" 
 
 " There can be no pretence in this case of Divine interference to 
 set aright the errors of the Ancient Church, nor were even its 
 authors respectable enough to make this probable, were such a 
 thing possible. It was simply a substitution for political 
 purposes and no other of a so-called Church of purely man's 
 invention in the place of the Ancient Catholic Church of ages, 
 which, whatever its faults or alleged errors, has unquestionably 
 been ruled in direct succession since the time of Peter, and 
 which, if it be truly the Church of God, would surely be able to 
 correct its own errors and remedy its own abuses without 
 waiting for a bad king like Henry VIII., or a queen of dubious 
 virtue like Elizabeth to set matters straight." 
 
 Nor does the absurdity end here. " What is the meaning of 
 this New Party " (they will ask you) " within that State-Church 
 of yours? We hear that they are more Catholic than the 
 Catholics, that they exaggerate even Catholic practices, and that 
 while pretending to belong to the State Church, they are moving 
 heaven and earth to undermine and restore it to the unity of the 
 Papal Church. This is what we cannot comprehend. If they 
 don't like their ' Church ' now that they are no longer forced to
 
 54: AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 stop in it, why don't they leave it ? They tell us that they consider 
 it wrong to leave the Church of their baptism, and that they do 
 not wish to have a Pope or a foreign head to their Church. 
 That may be, but what of the logic and reasonableness of it? 
 What must be the condition of the minds of people who deliber- 
 ately say to themselves, ' We belong to the State Church and are 
 appointed by State-paid ministers, and yet as soon as we find 
 ourselves on the Continent we invariably follow the practices of 
 the Continental Churches, and loudly exclaim that we are not 
 Protestants.' Is this madness, or is it sheer unadulterated 
 stupidity ? " 
 
 In desperately attempting to fend off the logic and contempt 
 of the thinking foreigner, I have at last hit upon what I conceive 
 to be the only patriotic method, however sophistical, by which 
 we can turn aside their wrath and diminish their disgust. I 
 answer: "You see we are independent people, unused to slavish 
 methods and tight discipline. In England every man thinks for 
 himself and dislikes all intellectual compulsion. Now as there 
 are a thousand shades of human opinion upon every point, it is 
 not wonderful that in religion so few agree, and when any 
 number of us are found to agree, we band ourselves together 
 and call ourselves a Church. Your Briton is an eminently 
 clubable person, but like all dull folk he loves big talk and high- 
 sounding phrases, and, as is well known, his Anglo-Saxon 
 brothers across the Atlantic are even still more inclined that 
 way. In tiny villages you will hear the village inn dubbed 
 1 Hotel ' ; and ' out West ' there are few theatres that are not 
 styled ' Opera Houses.' Their Town Hall is called ' Capitol,' 
 their smallest Gardens 'Parks.' It will not, therefore, be 
 wondered at that these clubs (as they may be called) of men 
 similarly inclined in religious opinion, should band themselves 
 together for worship with the same common views, and style 
 themselves Churches in order to give themselves greater 
 importance." 
 
 Whether this view will hold water or not I cannot pretend to 
 say, suffice it that it is the only one that I have ever been able 
 to discover, which, if not wholly satisfactory, proves an exceed- 
 ingly valuable mode of scoring a temporary success, or staving 
 ofl logical annihilation.
 
 BRITISH RELIGIONS 55 
 
 Now what is the reasonable deduction from this multiplication 
 of so-called Churches ? Why, that cunning men find in England 
 and America a greater number of fools than elsewhere to act 
 upon, whereby they can either acquire fame, or, as we know in 
 the greater number of instances, large wealth, by the promulga- 
 tion of their own patent variety of doctrine. 
 
 That men should believe that God has appointed for ever a 
 perssn or succession of persons who should govern and direct 
 His Church, and that that Church should be thereby guided for 
 ever, is intelligible enough and satisfied the conscience of 
 Europe till the fifteenth century. Then arose the doubt as to 
 whether so worldly and powerful and magnificent a prince as he 
 that ruled the See of Peter could really be the true representative 
 of the humble fisherman upon earth. This it was, first and 
 foremost added to a dislike of foreign control that shook 
 Luther's faith, and spurred him on to unsettle men's minds : 
 and they, instead of reducing the Pope to poverty and evangelic 
 simplicity of life by judicious reform, merely gave an excuse to 
 temporal princes to take the Pope's power into their own hands 
 exclaiming as did the Jews of old, " Away with him! Away with 
 this foreign pontiff. Let us have no mediator between ourselves 
 and Christ ! " And the princes, marvelling no doubt at the 
 people's folly, did greatly rejoice thereat, and each became his 
 own Pope from that time forth. 
 
 All men can understand that Christ might have appointed a 
 perpetual teacher for all time to govern His Church upon earth, 
 and also that, if He had so done, His doctrine as represented by 
 His Apostles in the Gospel should be the sole guide of faith to 
 men on earth. The question stands : (1) Did He create any 
 Church at all ? and (2) Did He really appoint any ruler on earth ? 
 The chief difference of opinion consisted in whether or not it is 
 possible for each man by himself to understand the teaching of 
 Christ as set down by the Apostles and the doctors who suc- 
 ceeded them, or whether that task should be reserved for the 
 teaching body of the Church alone. In other words, the 
 Reformation hinged mainly on "Authority or no Authority!" 
 Those who took the former view stood fast by the Old Church, 
 those who took the latter view protested, or declared themselves 
 against, this wholesale monopoly. But surely^there is no room
 
 56 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 between the two. Clubs there may be, meeting-houses there 
 may well be ; for has not Christ Himself said, " That when two 
 or three are gathered together in His name, He will be in their 
 midst " ? but fatuous as is the notion of a Josiah Muggleton or 
 Joanna Southcote inducing people to follow their particular 
 method of prayer and exercises, and thereafter continue for 
 evermore to propagate such methods and build chapels for the 
 same form of worship, crowning the whole work by giving them 
 the name of their leader that these should be called a Church, 
 and openly declared and registered as such, rather than a refuge 
 for idiots or a lunatic asylum, is one of the marvels of Anglo- 
 Saxon civilisation, that petrifies the observant foreigner when he 
 visits our island shores. 
 
 But this is nothing to what follows, either in its absurdity, 
 iniquity and contempt of justice, or in the enormous consequences 
 involved. There is probably nothing more sacred in legality, 
 reason, or tradition, than the prescriptive right of the Ancient 
 Church of England to possess the lands, churches, glebes and 
 tithes which were solemnly presented to her by pious benefactors 
 during the ages that elapsed between the coming of Saint Augustus 
 and the Eeformation. They had the express sanction of the law ; 
 they were not only included in the Great Charter of our liberties, 
 but expressly recited over and over again when every succeeding 
 sovereign upon his accession was civilly compelled to re-certify 
 and take oath to the fulfilment of its covenants : and yet the 
 State, in the 16th century, deliberately rejected the faith and 
 communion of Christendom, and altered the fundamental worship 
 of the old religion by the public abolition of the " Mass " or 
 Central Sacrifice, and the equally public deposition of the Pope 
 in favour of their own sovereign. 
 
 If we English shine conspicuously by our blunders and 
 stupidity in the pure domains of reason and logic, or what may 
 be termed the luxuries or non-essentials of civil life, what 
 language must we apply to the iniquity and injustice of our 
 religious polity, by virtue of which the Elizabethan Church of 
 England has consistently robbed, and does still rob, under the 
 fullest state sanction, both Dissenters and Catholics of their 
 share of the National Church wealth bequeathed by their pious 
 forefathers for the maintenance of Religion. Nothing can be
 
 BRITISH RELIGIONS 57 
 
 more certain in the entire domain of truth and justice than that 
 church rates, tithes and all other ecclesiastical obligations are 
 distinctly reciprocal in their nature, that is, that in considera- 
 tion of a tenth of the produce of their crops and flocks being set 
 apart for the support of their pastors, the tithe-payers had a 
 distinct right to the fullest benefits of the ministry of the payees 
 or priests. 
 
 I need not remind my hearers that formerly the Lords of 
 Manors (once coterminous with Parishes) either themselves 
 built churches and endowed them with a portion of land called a 
 glebe, which, with the tenth of all produce arising from crops 
 and breeding flocks of all kinds, sufficed for the support of the 
 priest of the parish the lord and his descendants having, by 
 virtue of such donation, the Patronage, i.e. the right of presenting 
 thereto any incumbent who is not under ecclesiastical censure. 
 
 As soon as Elizabeth had been safely seated on the throne of 
 her ancestors, her first act was to reinstate the reformed religion 
 by proscribing or deposing the bishops and priests of the old 
 religion, and introducing others in their room, compelling the 
 entire people to adopt the Prayer Book and formularies imposed 
 by Edward VI. and Protector Somerset, and thus transferring 
 bodily the churches, ministers, cathedrals, glebes and tithes to 
 the ministers of her new State-made Church. It has been esti- 
 mated by trustworthy testimony that up to the end of her reign 
 nine out of ten Englishmen adhered to the Old Church in 
 sympathy, and, as far as was possible, in secret practice. At any 
 rate nothing is more certain than that this violent upheaval was 
 by no means carried out with the unanimous consent of the 
 nation. 
 
 Now, whatever views may be held as to the legality or other- 
 wise of Queen Elizabeth compelling all Englishmen to worship 
 God in the manner she dictated, it must be admitted that a very 
 considerable number of Englishmen were, as a matter of fact, 
 driven, from policy or other reasons, into accepting the reformed 
 faith, and that many more, who had secretly clung to the old 
 religion through the stormy and dangerous days of the Virgin 
 Queen abandoning all hopes of protection in the following 
 century at the hands of the wily son of Queen Mary of Scotland 
 'Conformed in large numbers during this and the following
 
 58 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 reign, with the natural result that the National churches, if they 
 had been allowed to remain in the hands of those for whose 
 worship and religion they had been intended, would have stood 
 empty and tenantless. 
 
 Was it then unreasonable, abstract justice and donors' inten- 
 tions apart, that the English Government should have taken 
 away the cathedrals and parish churches their lawful posses- 
 sions from the dwindling minority and transferred them to the 
 more numerous adherents of the State faith who had exchanged 
 the Mass for the Prayer Book? I am fully aware, of course, 
 that the spoliation was unjust and sacrilegious in law and fact, 
 and that the bishops and priests of the Old Church in communion 
 with Rome had not only enjoyed from time immemorial the 
 ownership and use of such buildings, but were secured in their 
 possessions by Magna Charta and the highest sanctions of the 
 law of England. Nevertheless, to adhere too closely to the 
 strict equity of the case, might clearly, in the event of the entire 
 nation being forced to adopt the new doctrines leave the bulk 
 of Church wealth and buildings empty and desolate which would 
 be ridiculous ! Besides, regarding the same as National Church 
 wealth, and as such, belonging to the entire nation, it seems but 
 common sense and " rough and ready " justice (legal sanction 
 and Canon law apart), that such Church wealth should be 
 divided pro rata among the people, as is the practice of our 
 Teutonic congeners abroad. But to confirm the entire Church 
 lands and possessions of the nation to a body which was, as 
 best, only an unwilling half, and which, not until George III. 
 had come upon the throne, had grown to be two-thirds or more 
 of the nation, dwindling down later through the spread of 
 dissent to probably less than one-half, is an act of legal robbery, 
 for which no excuse or parallel can be found, and one which only 
 a stupid people would tolerate. 
 
 In order to appreciate the full force of this injustice one 
 must go to the Northern or South- Western counties, where the 
 parishes, when first formed, being thinly peopled, were naturally 
 carved out of a larger area. In many cases, as for example, in 
 South West Lancashire where large tracts of land in the days 
 preceding the discovery of coal and the invention of cotton mills 
 were thinly inhabited, there are parishes which now possess,
 
 BEITISH KELIGJONS 59 
 
 from the large increase of population, an income almost equalling 
 that of a modern bishopric. 
 
 In one conspicuous case where the income of the rectorate of 
 Winwick amounted to five thousand a year, at the request of 
 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the then Eector of the parish 
 generously ceded a portion and allowed it to be divided into two 
 or more parishes. 
 
 The parishes of Halsall and Sefton (which run Winwick very 
 close in this respect) afford a striking instance of the injustice 
 that is done to Dissenters and Catholics by the absorption of the 
 tithes into the maw of a dwindling State Church, which at 
 present does not probably contain one-half of the population of 
 the realm. Here we have an instance of two rectories, who, in 
 the first place from the great increase of population and value in 
 land (at the time of the Tithe Commutation in 1835), swelled 
 up out of all proportion to the reasonable stipend of a parish 
 priest ; in the second place from the fact that a large portion 
 of the tithe-payers and the surrounding tenantry have never 
 seceded to the Anglican Church, the resulting injustice and 
 anomaly has increased two-fold ; for their labour and ministerial 
 work being naturally confined to their own flock and their 
 remuneration in land and tithe being in proportion to the 
 whole area of the parish, their duties are not only limited to a 
 small congregation, while the expenses of curates to serve out- 
 lying chapels are saved, but they receive an exaggerated income, 
 without any corresponding obligations, from a large body of tithe- 
 payers, who, while they are legally compelled to pay tithe for an 
 alien religion whose ministrations they reject, have to tax them- 
 selves besides to support their own ministers and schools. 
 
 Now let us consider for a moment how it works as against 
 the owner of large estates, of whom there are so many in 
 England whose descendants have never changed their faith and 
 have in all probability either built in part or wholly the 
 parish churches upon their land. Here you have the terms of 
 highest injustice pushed to their further logical conclusion ; 
 since the descendant of the original Lord of the Manor and 
 builder of the parish church is debarred by the State change 
 of religion in Elizabeth's reign through no default of his own 
 from the use of the parish church which his ancestors had built
 
 60 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 for the worship of the ancient faith and no other. Secondly, he 
 is deprived of the ministration of the parish priest, while he is 
 legally compelled to contribute to the parson's superfluity, and 
 to forego a portion of his rental without any corresponding 
 return. Thirdly, he is morally bound to provide a chaplain for 
 his household and his tenantry who are practically evicted from 
 their own parish church by the unjust operations of the law ! 
 
 It must be remembered that church rates were up to the 
 middle of last century similarly extorted even in Catholic Ireland, 
 where in most parishes the only people who attended the minis- 
 trations of the intruding Protestant incumbent were the 
 members of his own household. There the Catholic tenantry 
 were not only compelled by law to pay tithes to the parson, but 
 were compelled by law to pay church rates for the repairs 
 and upkeep of his church and parsonage. This Compulsory 
 Church rate, however, caused so much rioting and so frequently 
 called for military assistance that it was finally abolished about 
 the middle of the last century not so much from any views of 
 inherent justice, as on account of the enormous expense attend- 
 ing its exaction ! 
 
 When intelligent foreigners upon visiting Ireland have sought 
 an explanation for these astounding public acts of injustice and 
 have reported these circumstances to their incredulous friends at 
 home, even though they have imbibed from their infancy the 
 most atrocious stories of English rule in Ireland, they seem 
 utterly incapable of believing that a principle so entirely con- 
 flicting with the fundamental principles of justice should be 
 tolerated in a land which publicly boasts of its wide Toleration 
 and Liberty 1 
 
 It is not so much however, here, my aim to dwell upon the 
 cruel wrongs of the Reformation for injustice and cruelty serve 
 often to purify a nation through the fire of suffering but rather 
 to point out the indirect results of this frightful plunge into the 
 unknown at the bidding of a reckless and petulant tyrant. 
 
 It has little by little made Englishmen what they are to-day 
 frivolous, thoughtless and insincere and set us on a different 
 plane from any other Christian nation. Small wonder if they fail 
 to understand us 1 
 
 Worse than that, it has deeply scarred our national Conscience
 
 BRITISH RELIGIONS 61 
 
 and poisoned the wells of national truth, so that from a nation 
 of warrior freemen we have sunk since the days of Agincourt 
 to be a nation of shopkeepers aye and far worse than that a 
 nation of hypocrites or unbelievers ! 
 
 How should it be otherwise ? The first lesson learnt by nearly 
 every English child in his Catechism is " that in baptism he has 
 become a child of God, and an heir to the kingdom of heaven " ; 
 while in all probability he will hear the vicar in the parish church 
 deny baptismal regeneration, and lament the decay of sound 
 Protestantism, and of the principles of the glorious Reformation. 
 At Sunday-school he will perhaps be enjoined by his teacher to 
 never forget that he is a little Catholic, and that his Apostles' 
 Creed requires him to believe in the Catholic Church, and on the 
 following Monday he gathers from his history lesson that up to 
 the Reformation England was peopled with bad men called 
 Catholics, who were gradually replaced by virtuous Protestants 
 through the forcible measures of Good Queen Bess. 
 
 At Oxford he finds pandemonium complete. The Government 
 preacher, Father Ananias Brown, vows that there was no change 
 at all at the Reformation enjoins auricular confession and 
 mimicks the mass in white petticoat and crimson vestment 
 whilst the Rev. Ebenezer Snooks thunders from the parish pulpit 
 against transubstantiation and prayers for the dead and likens 
 Ritualists to ravening wolves. 
 
 Is it then surprising that our youth start life without Faith or 
 Sincerity or Honesty ? If destined for the Church and unwilling 
 to denounce and expose, or abandon the Church of their parents 
 they remain conscious hypocrites to the end, content to drown 
 the voice of conscience in the enjoyment of social wealth and 
 station, or in the soberer resources of philanthropy or charity, 
 sinking daily deeper into the slough of imposture, till at last, lost 
 to all shame, they begin to take a pride in tarring others with the 
 same brush, and end by dragging down the new generation to 
 their own level. In this way our gigantic national bubble, how- 
 ever often pricked and burst, is as often reinflated. Like a vast 
 toadstool or a giant banyan it excludes the light in this England 
 of ours, while it absorbs all its wealth, charity and energy. Our 
 State-made religion on the other hand by setting logic, order 
 and reason at defiance, confuses the intellect, and saps the
 
 62 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 morality of English men and women at the most susceptible age. 
 Perpetuated solely by the criminal conspiracy of those who enjoy 
 its emoluments, and who must needs pile lie upon lie to defend 
 their unjust privileges, employing every sordid plea to fend off 
 retribution that the most debased mind can invent or conceive, 
 what must be the effect of so degrading an example upon a 
 religious people, if not to convert them from a Christian nation 
 into a nation of hypocrites or scoffers ?
 
 CHAPTEK V 
 
 CANT OB RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY 
 
 No true picture can be drawn of the religious, moral and social 
 aspects of British life without a consideration of Cant, its origin, 
 its rise, and its triumphant progress up to the present hour. 
 
 Possibly in the majority of cases in which the word Keligion is 
 used, Cant would be the truer and more correct expression. It 
 pervades every department of public and private life. It corrodes 
 our civil and religious policy ; and, wherever the banner of 
 Religion is raised in Great Britain or indeed in the United 
 States by its self-chosen champions, in nine cases out of ten it is 
 Cant not Eeligion which should be inscribed in its stead. 
 
 Now what is Cant ? and what its origin ? 
 
 It is derived from the French word " Chant," whence, too, 
 " chantage " (or blackmail) or as applied to the lies of horse-dealers 
 in inducing purchasers to buy, hence our chanters ; and secondly, 
 to the whining patter of beggars, closely akin to the former in 
 form and matter. It was not applied until two centuries later 
 in its metaphorical sense to the saints of the seventeenth century. 
 The wits of the Cavalier Party first seem to have applied the 
 term to the whining affected speech of the psalm-singing 
 Puritans, whose reckless application of Biblical texts to sanctify 
 their own unworthy actions have afflicted us with that deadly 
 inheritance of Hypocrisy which is usually denominated Cant. 
 
 A protracted study of the causes and early phases of the 
 Eeformation, revealing as they do an element in the national 
 character of which I can find no traces before that eventful 
 period, has led me to ascribe the origin of Cant or that 
 condition of national mind which is and has been since the 
 seventeenth century so designated, to the necessities of the 
 occasion. 
 
 For the first time the Bible, which had been in a great 
 measure a sacred depository of which the priesthood of the 
 Catholic Church were not only the guardians but the authori- 
 tative expounders, became the source in which every adversary
 
 64 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of the Ancient Church sought weapons to destroy her. No 
 longer were the Holy Scriptures searched in a reverent spirit, for 
 mutual improvement, edification, and enlightenment, but as an 
 armoury of incalculable value, from which were selected the 
 poisoned arguments that were destined, like the daughters of 
 Chronos, to devour the author of their existence. 
 
 Cant, a vulgar word in truth raked from the gutter and 
 worthy of the subject to which it was destined to be applied, 
 taints our national mind and reacts upon every fibre of our body 
 politic. Its results upon the national character are incalculable. 
 When we compare together the central types of pre- and post- 
 Reformation Englishmen, it is terrible to think what a distance 
 has been traversed from Bede to Cranmer, from Sir Thomas 
 More to Lord Halsbury, from Edward III. to Charles II., from 
 Becket to Benson. 
 
 When King Harry sent his victims to the gallows because they 
 displeased him and interfered with his views, he was at any rate 
 a Man who lived and died like a man. A brutal tyrant it is 
 true, but still a grand type of the overbearing, roystering, sport- 
 loving, straightforward, masterful Englishman, who asked neither 
 favour from friend or foe, and scorned to assume a virtue if he 
 had it not. But then came to tempt him the serpent Cranmer, 
 chief architect of the English Reformation and Apostle of Cant, 
 who whispered in his ear and taught him to dissemble. " Say 
 you covet not a young wife for an old forsooth nor the broad 
 lands of the monks. You only desire their better reformation ! '" 
 
 The Reformation has come and gone. Twice beaten back, by 
 the end of the sixteenth century it was firmly settled at last on 
 Englishmen's backs. That they were the better for it in many 
 ways cannot be doubted, but at what a price ! 
 
 From this to the triumph of Cant over Truth upon the 
 national stage was but a step. There was a sneaking feeling in 
 most men's minds that they had taken a wrong turn, that they 
 had made a false move. With others there was a conviction 
 that absolute truth was no more with the death and downfall of 
 the old Church. Whatever the rank and file felt and knew, 
 every single actor in the great drama of national robbery felt 
 and knew that he was a rogue and hypocrite when he defended 
 the eviction of the abbots and monks on the grounds that they
 
 CANT OR RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY 65 
 
 were immoral or lazy. They well knew, whatever the preamble 
 might say in palliation of the act, that the real motive was 
 Rapacity, and Rapacity only. So when monks and nuns were 
 turned adrift to starve, how could it be expected that they 
 should bring themselves to tell the plain truth and say, " We 
 want their monasteries and their broad lands " ? Thus was 
 universal Cant nationally established. Again, when the ruthless 
 ministers of Elizabeth, fearing the still active partisanship of 
 Mary Queen of Scots or Philip of Spain, sent Catholics to the 
 block or Jesuits to be quartered, could they be expected to face 
 the truth and tell the people that they did so because they had 
 adhered to the Ancient Faith? Certainly not. They declared 
 them to be spies and favourers of Philip, or later of Mary Queen 
 of Scots, and when that would no longer hold water, they were 
 bluntly declared to be "executed as traitors to the realm," 
 instead of as adherents to the ancient religion of the realm, 
 which all Englishmen well knew to be their only crime. 
 
 This it was that tainted the national honour. This it was that 
 "sicklied o'er" the national escutcheon with the pale cast of 
 insincerity. 
 
 As sin stains the human soul, so a crime consented in by the 
 whole nation leaves an undying mark upon the national 
 character. " From that time," to paraphrase the words 
 Shakespeare so beautifully uses in Macbeth, " Truth is no 
 more." Henry, Cranmer, Somerset, Elizabeth, Cecil, and 
 Walsingham have murdered Truth ; and Cant henceforth reigns 
 in its stead. 
 
 Nor is it only in the sphere of politics that Cant holds sway. 
 In philanthropy, in social schemes, in every branch of morals 
 the trail of the serpent " Cant " is over them all. This it is 
 that has gained for us the name of " Perfide Albion " with our 
 neighbours across the Channel. And right well, at least in 
 foreign politics, have we earned the appellation. 
 
 For example, if we consider Gibraltar a useful coaling station 
 we must forsooth declare that we should only be too glad to be 
 able to return it to the lawful owners from whom it was 
 unexpectedly filched, if it were not, for the Spaniards' own 
 sakes, far better to retain this focus of British civilisation in 
 their midst.
 
 6 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 If we find valuable gold mines owned by niggers, we take the 
 first futile excuse to seize them and say that we do so for the 
 sole advantage of the people evicted, who, though they lose their 
 gold mine, will infallibly reap in exchange the more durable 
 benefits of British commerce and evangelisation. 
 
 If we steal an island from a weak nation like Spain or 
 Portugal, it will be observed that our excuse is never because 
 they are unable to defend themselves, which would be the true 
 one, but that by so doing we save the inhabitants from 
 " priestcraft or idolatry," etc., etc. 
 
 So saturated is the British mind with Cant, so sodden is the 
 Press of the country with what may be called our National 
 Substitute for Truth, that it may be fairly said that the 
 language of everyday life has gradually drifted away from that of 
 public and political life ; and that orators and leader-writers 
 unconsciously assume a totally different tone as soon as they 
 mount the pulpit or the platform. In short, British public 
 opinion, corrupted by long severance from Truth, requires that a 
 veil of falsehood shall be thrown over the language of her 
 politicians, lest the delicate susceptibilities of the nation be 
 aroused. 
 
 For John Bull is always used by the Press and the Politicians 
 to conceal, and be the accomplice of its rogueries, under the guise 
 of a timid maiden. She must never be told the truth, whatever 
 iniquity be done in her name, and above all no breath of public 
 scandal must reach her ears, lest her modesty should be 
 offended. 
 
 In seeking the origin of this remarkable phenomenon let us for 
 a moment consider whether this does not clash with the character 
 of truthfulness, with which we invariably credit ourselves, and 
 for which we are pleased to think we have gathered national 
 renown. Surely to speak the truth is our national virtue ! Can 
 it be said that lying is our national vice ? Let us consider what 
 warrant there is for this stout belief in our national love of 
 Truth. Does it not descend to us from the days of chivalry, 
 and have we not carried it forward, so to speak, as one of out- 
 most valuable assets ? 
 
 It must be admitted that foreigners have a high opinion of 
 English veracity, from which it is clear that at some time or
 
 CANT OK EELIGIODS HYPOCKISY 67 
 
 other Englishmen were celebrated at least for honest commercial 
 dealing, and that when they said their goods were of a particu- 
 lar class, and free from particular defects, it is probable that 
 foreigners generally trusted and believed them, and that hence 
 arose the old phrase that "An Englishman's word was as good 
 as his bond." 
 
 In remote parts of the world this flattering axiom is stiU 
 quoted, but in civilised lands rarely ; from which it may be fairly 
 concluded that our reputation in this direction is waning fast. 
 Be this as it may, the conspicuous dishonesty of our Birmingham 
 and Manchester manufacturers has gone far to disable our 
 commerce on the Pacific coast of America, as well as in the 
 China seas, and has too often given a text to commercial 
 reformers, and reporting consuls, to require more than a passing 
 mention. 
 
 It is certain that no nation impresses the importance of 
 Truth upon their sons more earnestly than Englishmen. No 
 virtue amongst us is ranked higher than Truth ; and no insult 
 is more hotly resented than the imputation of mendacity. This 
 much must be admitted, but does it follow from this that 
 we are more truthful than our continental neighbours ? or are 
 we only truthful in our dealings with them, and not among 
 ourselves ? 
 
 My experience is, that among Western nations truthful- 
 ness differs not according to nation so much as temperament, 
 with this exception, that as regards the play of the imagina- 
 tion or what may be called the non-essentials of truth, it may 
 be fairly admitted that the perfervid Celt and the excitable 
 Gascon (whose eloquence often outruns their discretion) and 
 from among our own blood, Australians and New Zealanders, 
 being greatly addicted to self-gratulation and "brag," run even 
 our American cousins themselves a very close race in their 
 respective powers of imaginative invention. 
 
 Since the days of Cicero it has been noticed that human 
 nature is especially liable to credit itself with those virtues 
 which it does not possess. This will be fouud to be a weakness 
 of almost universal application. What woman is there on earth 
 whose conduct is obviously frivolous and constantly requires 
 explanation, who does not expressly pride herself on being " so
 
 68 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 very particular," seizing every occasion to denounce frivolity 
 and to visit with righteous indignation the faults of her erring 
 sisters ? 
 
 The swindling solicitor who spends his life in decoying foolish 
 spiders into his den in order to lighten them of their cash 
 invariably delivers himself of the noblest and highest sentiments, 
 and, if possible, drags in a Biblical text in confirmation of the 
 same. 
 
 Again, what is more notorious than the church-going propen- 
 sities of all the celebrated swindlers who have made a name for 
 themselves in the annals of Newgate and Westminster Hall? 
 Are they not invariably godly men and remarkable for their 
 forwardness in Church matters? Indeed, in Anglo-Saxondom 
 no safer rule can be given to the unwary to prevent being trapped 
 by the guiles of unscrupulous rogues than to shun all dealings 
 with the man who draws special attention to his honesty. " I, 
 sir, am a man that you can rely on, whose word is his bond, and 
 would not cheat a fellow- Christian of the value of sixpence to 
 win an Empire." That is the man to beware of. 
 
 One of the most noted Churchmen of the age in a burst of 
 colloquial confidence once said in my presence, " For my part I am 
 not so sure that Englishmen do love truth, at any rate collec- 
 tively. I greatly doubt if they would have listened to the 
 Sermon on the Mount with anything approaching to respect. 
 The well-dressed would have undoubtedly turned away and said, 
 ' This seems just such another mob meeting as we have in Hyde 
 Park ! ' " The tables brought down from Mount Sinai, I imagine, 
 would not have fared any better unless Moses had places to give 
 away, and an influential backing. 
 
 It is at least doubtful if the Briton of to-day does really care 
 for Truth. He certainly likes what he calls a good working 
 theory, which, by the way, he does not take seriously, but 
 which he can talk and fight over. But he likes a good lie best 
 of all; something new and startling. Mind you, it must 
 have a respectable following; no rag and tag, but men of 
 substance. Or let a man but be notorious for anything, and 
 John Bull will swallow whatever he says, truth or untruth, 
 with equal avidity. 
 
 If the angel Gabriel were to come here before us in the dress
 
 CANT OE EELIGIOUS HYPOCEISY 69 
 
 of a tramp and tell us he had a message to deliver, though his 
 word were of the purest truth and reason, which of us would 
 care to listen ? 
 
 Nor can it be denied that we English, like most stupid 
 people, are greatly addicted to mistaking the spirit for the letter. 
 This is carried to such an extent in our common law, that it 
 may be said as a rule that our common law judges have no 
 choice but to deliver their judgment upon the Letter rather than 
 the Spirit of the contract or other civil transaction in dispute. 
 The result is that the unsuccessful suitor to whom justice has 
 been conspicuously denied, has no other resource but to appeal 
 to Chancery to get the question reversed upon the grounds of 
 common sense and reason, by which process expenses are 
 doubled, a totally different set of lawyers are employed, two 
 judges get a living instead of one, and everybody is pleased, 
 except the unhappy suitor who has probably spent on his victory 
 more than the value of the suit. How can this fail to react 
 sensibly upon the conscience of the nation ? 
 
 No nation in the world, individually or collectively, places 
 so high a value as ourselves upon verbal accuracy, which is the 
 letter of truth. Are we equally blameless in respect of that 
 sincerity which is the spirit of Truth ? For this is the cardinal 
 point on which all morality hinges. If we are no longer a 
 sincere people ; if, as we shall see further on, there is strong 
 ground for believing that our love of truth is but an empty show ; 
 and if our insincerity of thought, word and action is painfully 
 noticeable at home and abroad shall it not be attributed to that 
 fatal inheritance of Cant which has gone farther to taint English 
 blood, corrupt English character, and ruin us in the eyes of the 
 foreigner, than any catastrophe since the Flood ?
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 BIBLE OR BEER 
 
 AT first sight my heading would seem not far short of incon- 
 gruous ; those, however, who are acquainted with the inner and 
 more active life of the church will have observed that there is 
 some subtle connection between these two ideas besides the fact 
 of each beginning with a B. The religious Briton, more 
 especially if he is a " seasoned Vessel of Election," turns to 
 Bible or Beer as the magnet to the Pole ; and strange to relate, 
 in common with preachers and doctors, the more he doses others 
 the more firmly he abstains himself from the applications which 
 he earnestly enjoins upon the rest of the world. Being entirely 
 free from blame himself, and having "got Jesus," or "found 
 salvation," or otherwise " made his soul," nothing can exceed his 
 contempt for other people's religious condition unless it is his 
 satisfaction and self-gratulation at having saved his own. 
 
 These are the gentlemen who, so to speak, fling the Bible 
 at others whether they will or not, and by cramming it down 
 other men's throats bring the Word of God into disrepute. 
 Equally certain is it that if they do not devote their energies to 
 pelting inoffensive foreigners with Bibles, they needs must devote 
 their superfluous energy to depriving poor men of their Beer. 
 Hence the connection between Bible and Beer, which may be 
 termed the two strings to the bow of the Elect. 
 
 Now, strange as it may appear, the gyrations of the religious 
 Briton in the face of Bible or Beer afford more laughter and 
 scorn to the benighted foreigner than perhaps any other mani- 
 festation of what (doubtless through ignorance) he persistently 
 regards as British hypocrisy. He scarcely knows which is 
 funnier, that we English should pervade the entire globe with 
 drummers in the religious line who peddle their wares from door 
 to door precisely as commercial travellers do, getting a commission 
 on the Bibles they sell from the house which despatches them, 
 running down rival firms, and vowing that no Bible is genuine 
 unless it bears their trade-mark all forms of religion being of
 
 BIBLE OB BEEE 71 
 
 course spurious except the one they " travel in " or that we 
 should invoke the Law to prevent men from buying the beer and 
 spirits out of which half our revenue is earned, and without 
 which our Government could not for a moment subsist ! 
 
 Besides Hypocrisy, there must be an infinite lack of Humour 
 in the religious Briton to fully account for his singular 
 manoeuvres in the matter of Bible or Beer. It is noticeable that 
 when he is deeply affected in that direction, he does not fly to a 
 distant land, nor even sell his goods and give them to the poor, 
 nor demean himself in any biblical or godly fashion. He is- 
 generally a singularly comfortable, self-contained citizen who has- 
 made his money, and enjoys the respect and esteem of his trade, 
 his church and his native town. Many there are, indeed, who 
 consider the mission fund of the district as a kind of free adver- 
 tisement by which they herald to the public at large, and their 
 competitors in trade in particular, the tale of their successful 
 profits or stave off rumours of bankruptcy by their exceptional 
 liberality. Others, animated no doubt by the best intentions, 
 being childless, and without near relatives, centre their entire 
 interests in feeding and clothing the heathen, and above all 
 providing him with biblical nourishment, or alternatively, in- 
 depriving their fellow-citizens of bibulous refreshment, by every 
 art that their purse or ingenuity can devise. A publican harassed 
 and dislodged is to such men a brand plucked from the burning. 
 Yet, strange to say, these apostles of hypocrisy here in England 
 are neither confined as lunatics, nor is their sanity so much as 
 disputed. 
 
 Possibly the explanation is to be found in the statement 
 of the Danish Prince that such trifles are not noticed in 
 England, "as they are all mad there." Anyhow, instead of 
 being set down as people possessed by an engrossing if objec- 
 tionable " craze," they pose as would-be saviours of society, 
 and, stranger still, not unfrequently draw in their wake others 
 more foolish than themselves, who, like Johanna Southcote 
 and other half-witted fanatics of immortal memory, frequently 
 obtain, instead of pity or aversion, a large meed of general 
 approbation. Is there a country town in all England where 
 a certain number of old women of both sexes do not acquire 
 a certain notoriety, and, what is more, a reputation for
 
 72 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 philanthropy, by dunning all their friends for contributions 
 and deluding the small fry of their acquaintance into sur- 
 rendering their hard-won sixpences in order to swell the 
 mission box of some society or other of which they know or 
 care next to nothing, in order to convert heathens of whom they 
 know less while at their doors more exemplary forms of 
 perfect heathendom are to be discovered than in any other 
 part of the universe ? 
 
 I never see an engaging old lady wheedling the price of a 
 bar of chocolate or a sponge cake from a schoolboy " to save 
 the heathen," without wishing that they could see Sky-Pilot 
 Parade (as the irreverent term a palatial group of missionary 
 residences at Shanghai) in order that they might have some 
 idea of the probable result of their sacrifice and be enabled to 
 inform their co-religionists of the manner in which the lavish 
 contributions of the faithful are applied. 
 
 But do we not read in Scriptures, " Go ye and teach all 
 nations," etc., etc.? Quite so; but surely that is not the 
 same as asking people to subscribe to a company of exceed- 
 ingly comfortable citizens who make a living by the contribu- 
 tions of the unsuspecting members of their faith, an extremely 
 small portion whereof is ultimately devoted to Bible distributions 
 after the requirements of the aforesaid gentlemen, an enormous 
 staff, scores of secretaries, and magnificent mansions at home 
 and abroad, have been abundantly satisfied. Moreover, to 
 whom was the command addressed ? Surely to an apostle ! 
 Now if we can judge rightly of Saint Paul's expenses as 
 described by himself in numerous epistles as well as from 
 contemporary reports, they were not likely to constitute a very 
 heavy drain upon his co-religionists ! 
 
 In the words of the immortal Mrs. Glass of hare-cooking 
 fame it seems reasonable to advise " First catch your apostle." 
 Having then made sure of his qualities, there surely can be 
 no objection to provide him with sufficent funds for the purpose, 
 or at any rate such outfit as will enable him to do his work 
 properly. " This is all very fine," will exclaim the staff of the 
 " Aboriginal Improvement Society " or the " Society for the 
 Dispersion of Useless Knowledge," but where do we come in ? 
 how are we going to be supported ? Charity begins at home !
 
 BIBLE OR BEEE 73 
 
 Do we not, like Saint John the Baptist, make straight the ways 
 for them that dwell in darkness, and further, do we not find 
 apostles for the public, and what is more, frequently rear them 
 up in our missionary schools and other kindred institutions ? 
 
 Far be it from me to deny that there is in England much 
 good intention, much pure philanthropy, and a sincere desire to 
 benefit the lot of the heathen by teaching him the rule of Christ 
 and placing the Bible within his reach : but I do most positively 
 aver, in common with nearly all travellers who have become 
 acquainted with the missionary system in its actual operation 
 throughout the globe, that in England and the United States at 
 any rate, the Missionary business is, and has been, conducted from 
 the beginning precisely as any other commercial enterprise ; and 
 to use the expressive language of America, the good intentions 
 and superabundant cash of excellent but misguided people are 
 " run for all they are worth " by designing and interested 
 companies, who, under the never-failing banner of Cant or 
 Keligious Hypocrisy, not only empty the pockets of their co- 
 religionists to the uttermost farthing, but cast themselves and 
 their enormous families upon the unwilling though too often 
 unresisting heathen for further support, by a judicious applica- 
 tion of diplomacy and gunboat. 
 
 Nor as far as common sense and reason can dictate could 
 it possibly be urged that a Divine sentence such as we quoted 
 above, applied to a devoted Apostle of known merit and tried 
 self-sacrifice, can ever be one of universal application, still less 
 be used as the foundation of joint-stock companies paying a 
 handsome dividend. 
 
 Perhaps the foremost and most important or central doctrine 
 of Christ is " To love thy neighbour as thyself." Has it ever 
 occurred to the " unco guid " to preface their missionary efforts 
 by a formal inquiry as to how their victims enjoy the process 
 of involuntary conversion ? Or can any honest or reasonable 
 person in this land deny that if this proposition were placed 
 plainly and squarely before any set of savages upon the habit- 
 able globe as thus : " We, the undersigned inhabitants of the 
 great champion land-grabbing nation of the world, propose 
 shortly to invade your shores and present you on behalf of 
 the 'Foreign Missions,' the 'Gospel Brethren,' the 'Free
 
 74 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Kirk,' the 'Presbyterian Missions,' the 'United Wesleyans,' 
 the ' Eechabites,' the ' Moravians,' and some thirty or forty 
 others, with an abundance of cheap tracts and cheap Bibles, 
 every one of which societies offer you the only true way of life,, 
 and the only correct form of worship for securing salvation 
 enjoining you to divide yourself into equal sections, so that we 
 can share your nation easily between us ; in return for which, 
 we ask for nothing more than what you can easily give without 
 depriving yourselves of the absolute necessities of life : we feel, 
 however, called upon to warn you that any difference in opinion 
 that arises between us will be settled in our favour at your own 
 expense by our gunboats " would not their answer be an 
 indignant negative ? 
 
 It follows, therefore, that in its last analysis, such and similar 
 conspicuous examples of British Cant-in-action amount to this, 
 that Great Britain acts towards these defenceless heathens 
 precisely as she, in common with all the other so-called civilised 
 nations, behave in pushing their trade. In a word, because they 
 are weak, she compels them, whether they like it or no, to take 
 her wares, civil, religious, or commercial. This, as I have 
 myself seen in half-a-dozen groups of islands in the Pacific 
 Ocean, is the nefarious custom common to all the European 
 Concert as it is facetiously termed. For, given only the oppor- 
 tunity, the Sky-Pilot, arbitrary by nature and training, shines 
 wherever he can discover a suitable opening, by a tyranny which 
 is scarcely equalled or indeed distinguishable from any vulgar 
 secular despotism. 
 
 I have a distinct recollection, when I visited the Friendly 
 Islands, of the manifold acts of tyranny exercised by a minister 
 called Shirley when he succeeded in establishing a highly 
 profitable theocracy, by virtue of which he not only obtained 
 an absolute ascendency over the King of Tonga whom he had 
 converted to Wesley anism, but managed to monopolise " Copra," 
 the only trade of the island, besides drawing up a code of law 
 which he enforced with truly Spartan severity. It would take 
 long to recite the wrongs thereby inflicted upon the unhappy 
 islanders, or the list of legally enacted infringements on their 
 natural liberty which produced an abundant and profitable crop 
 of fines, or their equivalent value in work ; let it suffice as an 

 
 BIBLE OR BEER 75 
 
 example, that no islander was allowed to walk on the public 
 highway (under penalty of a dollar fine) without boots an 
 article about as natural to an amphibious and fishing popula- 
 tion in the Tropics as a pair of spectacles to an elephant. 
 Secondly, the entire population were compelled to dress in 
 European shirt and trousers, the women in smock and petticoat, 
 which articles, sold by the said Shirley at a high price he 
 having the sole monopoly of them in the island contributed not 
 a little to swell the Wesleyan exchequer. Thirdly, as a crown- 
 ing absurdity, they were to be forcibly civilised by being 
 compelled to follow European habits at meals, and in all villages 
 a bell was to be rung three times a day, at 8, 12 and 6, at which 
 times the inhabitants were expected to sit down to their respec- 
 tive meals whether they liked it or not. Moreover sanitation 
 (so-called) was thrust upon them by a law which compelled 
 every householder under a penalty of fine and imprisonment to 
 erect elaborate privies after a definite plan, to be built out 
 of Wesleyan imported planks. It is needless to add that their 
 simple rustic habits debarred them from either divining or 
 availing themselves of their proper use. These privies I 
 personally, in numerous cases, ascertained to be exclusively 
 devoted to the secreting of the Bible and Hymn Books (also 
 similarly imported but compulsorily paid for in " Copra") which, 
 as in many other parts of the world, though seldom, if ever, 
 perused, are regarded with the deepest veneration as an amulet 
 or charm of the highest value, to be applied externally or 
 internally, in suitable doses as occasion requires. 
 
 In short, to sum up the entire missionary situation in con- 
 nection with the biblical command upon which we Christians 
 rely, it seems that there is no warranty whatever for any 
 interference, especially as between the stronger and weaker of 
 nations, with a religion or civilisation which no doubt Provi- 
 dence dispenses in a degree and amount suited to their capacity 
 and temperament. When, however, the call is internal instead 
 of external, and a man like Francis Xavier, or Peter of Alcantara, 
 or Peter Claver, of his own accord, impelled by the spirit of 
 self-abnegation and intense love of humanity, goes forth to preach 
 the word, without money or friends, or help of any kind, trust- 
 ing solely for his sustenance to the love or esteem that he
 
 76 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 inspires amongst his hearers, surely such a one may reasonably 
 be a subject for admiration and respect. 
 
 Now, however monstrous in itself, the spectacle of a great 
 and powerful nation in the van of civilisation deliberately 
 fostering at enormous expense the importation of thirty or 
 forty different organisations for introducing compulsory varieties 
 of religion all hostile to each other, and wherever possible 
 forcing the same down the throats of an unwilling but defence- 
 less people as a preliminary to the next step which invariably 
 consists in compulsory exchange and introduction of Manchester 
 calicoes and Birmingham hardware similarly pushed at the 
 point of the bayonet, what should be the reflections of the 
 critical foreigner, or even the impartial Englishman, when he 
 remembers that there is more misery, more hopeless squalor, 
 vice and organised savagery within the sound of Bow Bells 
 than can probably be found in the entire circumference of the 
 Pacific Ocean ? More especially when none but the blindest, the 
 most bigoted, and the most prejudiced can hesitate in ascribing 
 to these same nations (who, according to our scribblers, are 
 " bereaved of the blessings of civilisation, and stumbling in the 
 ways of darkness ") any conceivable inferiority to ourselves in 
 point of happiness, morality, or any other essential of human 
 felicity ! Yet so ingrained from our infancy is our instinct to 
 depreciate in others an existence which seems to be incom- 
 patible with our own aims and perhaps our own less favoured 
 condition, that you will hear not merely casual globe-trotters, or 
 thoughtless travellers, but men of intelligence and learning, 
 parrot-like deploring the lamentable condition of the Mexicans, 
 or Africans, or South Americans, who in total oblivion of the 
 natural and supreme object of life (as viewed by the Anglo- 
 Saxon race) of wearing out their lives in the desperate pursuit 
 of dollars spend their existence in avoiding all exertion be- 
 yond what is necessary for a bare living, in the belief that a 
 natural life spent in innocent diversions, tempered with sufficient 
 labour to give it zest, without wants or luxuries but what a bene- 
 ficent nature bestows freely upon all her sons, confers a degree of 
 happiness, which neither varnished boots nor swallow- tailed 
 coats, nor even chimney-pot hats, suffice entirely to secure.
 
 CHAPTEE 
 
 THE DBINK QUESTION 
 
 OUR attitude towards what is recognised to be an abiding blot 
 on our pretended civilisation and the reputed source of half of 
 our national crime is, if anything, more surprising than our 
 views upon international equity, and exhibits that strange 
 divergence between action and speech, or, in plain words,. 
 between what we do and what we say, which is the essential 
 feature of that hypocrisy which earns the disfavour of our 
 Continental critics. While fully sympathising with our desire 
 to diminish a curse which the best authorities assert to be 
 the chief cause of crime among us, nevertheless our method of 
 coping with its evils fills all foreigners and neutral spectators 
 among ourselves with amazement and disgust. For what can 
 be more illogical, or comprise a more complete denial of our 
 boasted principles of liberty than for the possessors of well- 
 stocked cellars and comfortable homesteads to band themselves 
 together for the express purpose of bringing legal compulsion 
 upon their less favoured neighbours, in order to deprive them of 
 those facilities for drink which they themselves possess in the 
 highest degree ? 
 
 Now let us suppose for a moment that collective humanity is 
 capable of such perfection as to be induced by external pressure 
 to abandon its favourite weakness or, perhaps, to substitute one 
 for another. If we may judge of the future by the experience of 
 the past, substitution is the best we can hope for, since no 
 human record from the earliest time has ever afforded an 
 instance of any human being or group of human beings being 
 flogged into repentance, still less into reformation. 
 
 No doubt temporary abatement of this or any other human 
 passion can be occasionally brought about by a wave of religious 
 enthusiasm, such as when Father Matthew preached his gospel 
 of temperance to the Irish, or Savonarola induced the ladies 
 of Florence to pile up their jewels in the market place and 
 exchange their luxurious dresses and ornaments for the simple.
 
 78 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 attire of the early Christians. Let us not forget the wise old 
 Roman saying, "Expel Nature with a fork, still she persists in 
 returning ! " 
 
 However, as my present purpose is not to discuss the question 
 of whether or not coercive temperance will finally prevail, as it 
 has already in many States of America without any correspond- 
 ing moral or material advantage, but rather to point out the 
 divergence between our profession and our practice, it may be 
 sufficient to remark that, sentiment apart, no better reason 
 can be urged for depriving one's neighbour, either by force of 
 arms or police regulations, of his undoubted right to buy and 
 drink as much beer or wine as he thinks fit, than for legally 
 regulating the amount of bread that shall be sold in a given 
 district, how many bakers shall be allotted to a certain area, 
 -or how many muffins each household shall consume. For, be 
 it observed, excess in muffins is quite as deleterious, and, to many 
 people, quite as seductive to the palate as beer or wine, especially 
 with members of the fair sex, whose efforts to shorten their lives 
 by the consumption of that and similar tea-adjuncts, though, 
 possibly, not so unpleasant in its results, show a perseverance 
 which is not equalled by the most inveterate drunkard. 
 
 While it must be admitted that absolute liberty in a civil state 
 is unattainable, it is surely one of the strangest paradoxes of 
 history that the two nations whose glory it is to place liberty in 
 the forefront of their civil institutions, should in America, 
 through the action of several State legislatures, and in England, 
 through the rapidly increasing body of teetotalo-maniacs, afford 
 the astonishing spectacle to the world, of nations whose most 
 fervent and popular efforts are directed to a crusade against 
 personal freedom. 
 
 Before dismissing the subject let us bear in mind that the 
 striking feature of this strange offspring of Stupidity and Cant 
 may be summed up in the determination (in the words of 
 
 Hudibras) to 
 
 " Compound for sins we are inclined to, 
 By damning those we have no mind to." 
 
 Brave old Butler, how well he knew the nonconformist spirit ! 
 What could better illustrate the essential spirit of the religio- 
 political squabbles of the 17th century, culminating in that
 
 THE DEINK QUESTION 79 
 
 magnificent display of dog-in-the-manger intolerance, which 
 induced the Dissenters to reject James II. 's offer of equal rights 
 with the English Church, if similar rights were extended to the 
 Papists! And yet these same Puritans, like the Eedcaps of the 
 French Kevolution, were never tired of prating of Eeligious and 
 Civil Toleration and Liberty ! 
 
 Nor let us forget that however permissible, nay, even laudable, 
 it may be for weak-willed individuals to bind themselves of their 
 own accord not to transgress the bounds of moderation by 
 signing or taking the pledge, etc., it is difficult to conceive a 
 more degrading exhibition than to publish the avowal, " urbi et 
 orbi," that Englishmen are unable to control their ignoble 
 passions without the forcible intervention of the law. 
 
 It is not easy to persuade our foreign critics of even so much 
 as the honesty of our intentions in that direction. " Is this not," 
 he exclaims, " part of your gigantic scheme of universal 
 hypocrisy to profess to be anxious about the reform of drunkards, 
 when you know full well that the proceeds of. drink form the chief 
 support of your administration, and that a diminution in the 
 drink bill would be the ruin of your nation ? The next thing we 
 shall hear is that the imposition of a heavy salt tax upon the 
 starving peasantry of India, and the forcible introduction of 
 opium at the bayonet's point upon the Chinese, have no bearing 
 whatever on your financial interests, but are solely and entirely 
 devised for the sanitary and moral improvement of the nations 
 aforesaid ! " 
 
 Hamlet said of Polonius, "If he will play the fool, let him 
 play the fool in his own house." A pity that we do not take 
 the lesson to our hearts. If we have the taint of hypocrisy, let 
 us, at least, avoid parading it to a scoffing world. Let us 
 frankly avow it, and, like a distemper in our body politic, let us 
 never rest until we starve it out by want of nourishment and 
 stamp it out of our hearts and those of our children. 
 
 Bible and Beer have, up till lately, been considered the watch- 
 words of English Conservatism. It is surely a strange instance 
 of the irony of events that, owing to the peculiar disposition and 
 working of our system of Party Politics, the Conservative party 
 should have first succeeded in passing a drastic measure upon 
 lines similar to, if not still stricter than, those proposed by the
 
 80 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Radicals when in power on various former occasions. Well 
 might the Brewers exclaim in the celebrated words of Sir 
 Harry Vane, " The Lord preserve me from my friends ! " 
 
 Here we seem to have reached, in the year of our Lord 1904, 
 the highest development of popular folly, injustice and want of 
 logic, to which the human mind can attain. With the exception 
 of the well-known legislative feat of compelling China to accept 
 a compulsory opium treaty, which was, be it remembered, first 
 solemnly devised by the Houses of Parliament, and then 
 deliberately forced upon the Chinese at the cannon's mouth, 
 no greater outrage has ever been perpetrated against the 
 sanctity of justice and humanity at large, than the conversion 
 by a stroke of the pen of the entire difference between the value 
 of hotels, public-houses and beer-houses, when fully-licensed, 
 compared with what they would be worth without such licenses 
 (or, in other words, the aggregate of their trade " goodwills ") 
 into a national asset from the date of the passage of the Licensing 
 Bill of 1904. Nor must it be supposed that this measure, 
 sweeping as it was, was violent enough to suit the extreme 
 temperance party in the land, or even any large section of the 
 Radical party. For the second time at least in modern 
 Conservative history the astute leaders of that body have 
 considered it hopeless to defend to the full the interests of their 
 supporters, and have, consequently preferred to take the matter 
 in hand themselves, and by satisfying their opponents, stave off 
 their tyranny for a while, by passing a more moderate Bill than 
 they could possibly have hoped their opponents, if in power, to 
 pass. In order fully to appreciate the intrinsic injustice of such 
 a measure we must recollect that the licensing or beer and spirit 
 selling trade has been held, both by State and Law, to be a 
 perfectly legitimate branch of commerce. Not only has that 
 Trade acquired the same rights before the law as any other, 
 according to innumerable decisions, but through the action of the 
 Excise the State, besides enriching itself, also carries on the 
 expenses of its Government very largely through the taxes paid 
 upon the manufacture of such articles. Indeed it is no exaggera- 
 tion to say that if all Englishmen became suddenly teetotalers, 
 ic would be almost impossible for our Government to 
 maintain itself.
 
 THE DEINK QUESTION 81 
 
 It comes to this, therefore, that by following the practice of the 
 wolf and the lamb of the ancient fable, the State, finding her means 
 of raising income is becoming beautifully less, presents to the world 
 a magnificent exhibition of the purest British Cant by suddenly 
 admitting that she has been enriching herself these 300 years 
 past upon the proceeds of " this vile and infamous traffic," and that, 
 therafore, the only means left to her of purifying the connection 
 and sanctifying her partnership, is to plunder the Liquor Trade 
 still more ruthlessly than before, by laying down the doctrine 
 that the entire increment, or, in other words, the trade goodwill 
 of the entire licensing community, must be instantly confiscated 
 and diverted into the State coffers. 
 
 It may be further observed that, precisely as in all other ex- 
 travagant crusades in which lying and exaggeration take the place 
 of principle and truth, it is a favourite device to act upon the well- 
 known principle of giving a dog a bad name in order to hang him. 
 
 Thus the rabid teetotalers and Kadical Press generally, on 
 platform or in newspaper, delight in denouncing the liquor trade 
 as a vile Monopoly, and those who take part in it as vampire& 
 who suck the blood of the nation. 
 
 Now, in the first place, a monopoly is a right accorded by the 
 State to an individual or a company to sell a given article of 
 general use to the exclusion of all others, while the liquor trade 
 being essentially one of the widest competition corresponds as 
 little with a monopoly as anything that can be. If, by a con- 
 fusion of ideas, the term " monopoly " is applied to the entire 
 licensing trade because individual retailers are compelled to 
 purchase from the State the right of sale, it would be just as 
 rational to call hawkers or cab proprietors or bakehouse 
 keepers "monopolists," since they in common with publicans 
 pay a duty or tax for the right of selling their wares. More- 
 over, because of late years a group of fanatics, in Parliament and 
 out, have infected the local authorities in many parts of the 
 country so deeply with their own preposterous views that a 
 license has come to be considered a boon rather than a mere 
 commercial transaction, some muddle-headed individuals have 
 come to think that since that boon has been conferred 
 by the State, the State has, after due notice, a right to take 
 away that which it has given. To that the answer is perfectly 
 clear. The State has no right to determine a compact
 
 82 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 between itself and an individual where no term is assigned, 
 except where the misconduct of the contracting party constitutes 
 a danger to the nation. Now this risk is averted and fully 
 provided for by the system of endorsing licenses, coupled with 
 the clear conditions upon which licenses have always been 
 granted, and without which it would be most unreasonable to 
 grant them ; namely, the good conduct of the license-holder. As 
 in all other contracts between man and man, it is the essence of 
 public polity that good faith must be kept between the contract- 
 ing parties, without which civilisation would be a fraud and a 
 sham. If, then, ordinary contracts between man and man are 
 and always have been invested with the highest sanction, how 
 much higher must be the sanction of those that are entered into 
 with the full consent of the representatives of a free people in the 
 person of their Government. Yet here we see, as in many 
 other instances, the futility of expecting a stable, consequent, 
 and firm Polity where there exists no Constitution which 
 determines the fundamental and irremovable principles upon 
 which it rests, and above all the fatal evil of our system of party 
 politics, which recks little of national shame when a party 
 victory may be obtained, and by reason of which a bare vote 
 taken, perhaps, in a thin House, or snatched by a cunning com- 
 bination of party fanatics, endangers or sweeps away the props 
 upon which our entire polity rests. 
 
 An Archbishop of Canterbury has summarised the whole 
 question in an admirable apothegm which cannot too often be 
 repeated : "7 would rather see England free than sober." 
 
 That these brave and true words have been misconstrued a 
 thousand times, and twisted to vile purposes is only to say that 
 the teetalomaniac is a poor thing of small wit and less judgment, 
 which " all who run may see " for themselves. 
 
 Such sayings were ever " caviare " to the million. 
 
 It is Freewill that we must strengthen in Englishmen and 
 women, not the Arm of the Law. 
 
 Let us strive to breed men and women, not sponges or 
 limpets, nor even sheep who follow each other in a beaten track 
 without knowing why or whither. Let us bestir ourselves to make 
 self-reliant Christians of our race, not educated beasts free men 
 and women who can be trusted to choose good from evil the 
 masters, not the slaves, of their inclinations and passions. 

 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 OUR GLORIOUS CONSTITUTION 
 
 PASSING into the political sphere, here again the mote and the 
 beam play a most important part. Just as in the wider area of 
 religious thought, so in the political there is nothing that an 
 Englishman brags of more openly and arrogantly than his 
 ability to shape his own destiny and steer his own course 
 without let or hindrance from any country in the world. He 
 will often boast of his very language as if it were heaven- 
 born and insular as his own views. Even to the present hour 
 when he sees his cherished markets invaded with cheap German 
 substitutes he fills out his chest and with a sneer remarks, 
 " Humph, made in Germany." Here once more we are con- 
 fronted with the difficulty of deciding if stupidity or blindness 
 or want of thought is most conspicuous. For what is the 
 obvious suggestion that should spring into every cultivated 
 rnind at so thoughtless an exhibition of folly or self-deception ? 
 When I hear such words as these I tremble to think what 
 the German may say. Might he not answer, " You Britons 
 brag of your race and your doings as if you had dropped from 
 the brain of Jove, like Minerva, all armed. Surely you must 
 know that you are at least as near akin to us as what you 
 call your trans-Atlantic cousins, even if the cousinship be a 
 few generations further back? Your very language is but a 
 dialect of German. Your people are for the most part Germans, 
 and though you cry that you " Never, never, never will be 
 slaves," you were first enslaved by Normans, who did their best 
 to eradicate your German language and de-Teutonize your 
 customs compelling you to use their language for well nigh 
 three centuries, until at last the Teutonic speech got the upper 
 hand of Norman ! (And, indeed, are not your laws and customs 
 relics of German habits like ours ? ) A century later, you go 
 to Germany for your reformed religion, and your new worship, 
 and claim our Luther for your new prophet ; while scarcely has 
 your new German religion been crammed down the people's
 
 84 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 throats at the sword's point, when your new-taught divines 
 flock to Dordt, as to a new-found Rome, for comfort and con- 
 solation, and come back " publicly thanking God that now there 
 is no difference between your religion and ours ! " Three 
 generations later, you tire of your home-bred kings because 
 they have thrown off the German brand of religion, and take to 
 your arms the dullest and meanest of our German princelets 
 in his room, with a thin trickle of Stuart blood in his veins ! 
 There is probably not an Englishman so true-bred, however 
 English he may think himself, that has not through some of his 
 ancestors as much foreign blood as there is of English blood in 
 the House of Brunswick, and yet your Court is crammed with 
 our refuse or destitute German princelets for all they are 
 " made in Germany," who filch away your best places, military 
 and naval, and regard your land as a happy hunting ground 
 expressly " made for Germany " ! 
 
 Once more, let me entreat my fellow-countrymen, in the words 
 of Hamlet, " if they will play the fool, to play the fool in their 
 own houses." 
 
 To those whom I respect and esteem, that section of the 
 British public which desires " Esse quam videri " (" to be, rather 
 than to seem "), I would appeal to leave no stone unturned to 
 pluck the beam from their fellow-countrymen's eyes and guide 
 them to more modest ways while to the great bulk of my 
 fellow-countrymen who, unless their very speech and acts greatly 
 belie them, reverse that noble axiom and care little or nothing 
 so long as they seem to be what they are not, I entreat them, if 
 they will not or cannot amend their manners, at least to wash 
 their dirty linen at home and not to offer themselves as a 
 spectacle to gods and men. 
 
 Nothing would be more entertaining if it were not painful 
 than the amazing illusions respecting the British Constitution 
 and its mysterious accessories. Here, again, I am never quite 
 sure whether it is not part of that enormous conspiracy originating 
 in the determination of the well-informed to hoodwink the less 
 favoured majority of the nation. Yet I for one will never cease 
 to inveigh against the wickedness of teaching our children, and 
 still more the children of the nation as the helpless victims of 
 our School Board system of education may well be called, the
 
 OUR GLORIOUS CONSTITUTION 85 
 
 outrageous fictions that we dignify with the name of history. 
 What .British child is there who does not learn that Magna 
 Charta is the great bulwark of our liberties ? yet what is it but 
 an elaborate and most selfish list of the encroachments of a 
 selfish and rapacious tyrant upon the privileges of an equally 
 rapacious and selfish nobility ? In short, a rectification of the 
 barons' wrongs, and an assertion of the paramount rights of 
 the Lords and Superior Clergy without ever a thought for the 
 nation at large ! And what else ? Why, strange to relate, its 
 most important and prominent clause was carefully constructed 
 by the clergy to make their own rights indefeasible against a 
 grasping and irreligious monarch. In the favourite language of 
 the late Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, the average schoolboy 
 will be no doubt surprised to hear that Magna Charta is prac- 
 tically swept away, since its first and most important clause 
 defending the interests of the English Church, that is the 
 Church in communion with Rome, was necessarily swept away 
 and cancelled at the Reformation. As to the later provisions, 
 referring as they do mainly to the preservation of the Feudal 
 rights of the fighting aristocracy, scarce a shadow of them 
 remains, nor would they be of any service to the nation if they 
 did. 
 
 We are often told in most magniloquent language, which the 
 British schoolboy is expected to re-echo with enthusiasm, that 
 the next great political event which should fill the Briton's 
 breast with pride is our Glorious REVOLUTION. Now this in 
 plain words amounts to a transference by sale of the entire 
 realm of England, and presumably of the unresisting sheep 
 therein contained who " Never, never, never will be slaves," 
 from the rule of the last Catholic Stuart to one of the meanest, 
 coldest and most self-seeking Dutchmen that ever schemed for 
 power or Dutch influence in European Councils, at our expense ! 
 
 The Protestant Settlement which was its legal outcome is 
 usually referred to in Exeter Hall, and Orange Institutions 
 generally, as the glorious Charter of our Protestant Liberties, 
 by which, translated out of British cant into plain English, is 
 meant at any rate for the sister kingdom the right for one- 
 tenth of Irishmen and Dissenters not only to enjoy their own 
 religion in an alien land, that is in Protestant Ulster, which
 
 86 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 was undoubtedly wrenched from their Irish possessors by fraud 
 and treachery, but also to enjoy the peculiar delight of a free 
 hand to impose their religion upon the remaining nine-tenths 
 and reduce them for 200 years to that position of civil slavery 
 which has caused England to become the scorn and byword of 
 nations. That Orangemen should glory in the Eevolution which 
 put them on the back of the Papist majority and use it as a 
 continual blister wherewith to scarify their fellow-subjects can 
 well be imagined, for as Cicero so truly says of men in a phrase 
 that rings through the ages, " Men are never more resentful and 
 vindictive than towards those whom they have wronged," 
 surely an incredible proposition, but one to which all times and 
 all students of humanity have borne abundant witness. England, 
 however, has less excuse than Orange Ireland, whose position as 
 a desperate garrison in an alien land upon stolen territory, earned 
 them the hatred of a spirited people, while England's chief 
 acquisition in the matter was a Dutch king, a large debt incurred 
 in quarrels not our own, and one of the most insulting and 
 abusive Declarations that was ever presented to the sovereign of 
 a free nation to sign, in order to keep out the rightful line and 
 ensure a Protestant succession. This Declaration, which every 
 English monarch is compelled to read on mounting the throne, 
 in itself one of the finest monuments to Cant that ever emanated 
 from a British pen, is not only clung to and fondly maintained 
 by extreme Protestants, through sheer stupidity and blind 
 adhesion to a Shibboleth of days gone by, but is remarkable for 
 this, that while it substantially adds nothing to the security of 
 our realm from falling into the hands of a Catholic ruler, it is 
 conspicuous for its precise and categorical expression of insolence 
 and distrust towards the sovereign who reads it. If foreigners 
 could furnish no other proof of our national stupidity, surely such 
 a monument as this would alone suffice to gain their cause. 
 
 I have before adverted to the fact that there are few subjects 
 of British self-gratulation that are more closely concurred in 
 by our foreign friends than our so-called British Constitution, 
 and I have before pointed out that, in the first place, as a 
 determinate charter it does not, properly speaking, exist ; secondly, 
 that it is a kind of mythical bubble of which the less 
 cultivated make use after dinner to glorify their hearers and
 
 OUE GLORIOUS CONSTITUTION 87 
 
 themselves and the institutions in which they have a share ; 
 thirdly, it is mainly a collection of old world maxims, many of 
 which have been repealed, till, like the Florentine horse of 
 " Brown, Jones and Eobinson " " the head and legs and most of 
 the body have been restored, but the rest belongs to the original 
 animal," and finally, that its wide-reputed qualities are almost 
 exclusively due to our Saxon stolidity, which acts precisely like 
 the central weight in the political see-saw, and which, being ex- 
 ceedingly hard to move in one direction or the other, allows both 
 parties alternately to kick the beam, and each in turn to press 
 their views upon the country. For whenever a so-called 
 Constitutional measure is threatened through the passions of 
 extremists on either side, John Bull comes to the rescue with the 
 weight of his bovine, if stupid, indifference to improvement and 
 reluctance to change, and acts like oil upon the troubled waters 
 in calming the political sea by preventing a reform or revolution 
 which he neither wants nor understands. So little is our Con- 
 stitution a fixed quantity, or in any way definable, or similar to 
 any other upon the earth or under the earth, that there are not a 
 few among our most distinguished men who, while not hesitating 
 to extol the legendary beauties of the British Constitution to 
 their delighted electors, do not scruple to dilate among their 
 cultivated equals upon the elasticity which characterizes our 
 Constitution and which makes all things possible to all men ; 
 while others openly and loudly glorify our proud position of 
 having no Constitution at all, and do not hesitate to declare 
 their conviction that whatever meed of political prosperity has 
 fallen to our lot is mainly attributable to our dearth of a 
 Constitution. 
 
 Here again the foreigner who learns the true state of things is 
 filled with amazement at our recklessness when he discovers that 
 this grand Constitution of which we boast so much, and to which 
 in his childhood he fondly attributed the stability of our civil 
 institutions, so far from possessing a firm basis, affords no 
 such check or warranty soever against popular passion or 
 popular change as are considered essential to the constitu- 
 tions of every people in civilized Europe. Our centre of power 
 for two centuries has wandered to and fro, formerly in the 
 feudality and King, next in the military, now in the civil, next in
 
 S8 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 the landlords, and next in King and Parliament, and last of all, 
 at the present hour, is the subject of continual dispute between 
 Parliament as a body, and the particular members which call 
 themselves a Cabinet chosen out of its ranks, while any irre- 
 sponsible private member who thinks he can find a backing may, 
 without let or hindrance, propose the abolition, nay, and carry 
 it too, of the most cherished and sacred of our national 
 institutions. 
 
 Are we not, then, a stupid people ? since practically we trust to 
 luck or to the aforementioned invaluable deadweight of British 
 stolidity as our only guarantee against anarchy and disruption ? 
 or rather, is not this recklessness and rashness becoming fast a 
 permanent national trait ? Is it not the same spirit that prompts 
 us yearly to rush into wars with Abyssinia, and the Transvaal, 
 and Thibet, and Ashantee, and any other second-class nation 
 which we think we can easily beat, with an open purse and a 
 light heart, trusting to luck alone, and when rebuffed we console 
 ourselves by telling each other in the immortal words of Mr. 
 Balfour, " We always have blundered in the past, and for all he 
 could see we always should in the future."
 
 CHAPTEE IX 
 
 PARTY POLITICS 
 
 IF, then, our much-lauded Magna Charta and our fabulous 
 British Constitution turn out upon examination to be nothing 
 more than exploded bubbles to which silly people have, through 
 the cunning of their teachers, learnt to ascribe a fetish-like 
 importance ; if moreover, on closer scrutiny, we find that our 
 glorious Constitution (so-called) is of so frail a texture and so 
 ill-designed that we possess no kind of effectual check such as all 
 civilised nations have deemed it necessary to protect their most 
 valued rights from being suddenly swept away by the passing 
 gusts of popular passion what have we to say to the system 
 which we term Party Government? which resolved into its 
 simpler elements may be described as an artificial division of the 
 British race into two religions, whose God is Power, whose 
 hierarchy is the Ministry, and, in a general way, whose ultimate 
 aspirations are centred in " Large profits and quick returns." 
 
 Now as our race is eminently Conservative, this arbitrary and 
 senseless disposition of things, having accidentally originated 
 with the deep fissure that split the nation into Whigs and Tories 
 upon the question of a Stuart or a Dutchman for a king, has 
 been retained, like most English institutions, till it has come 
 (just as Free Trade became in a later century) to be regarded as 
 a branch of the national religion to be followed without question, 
 however senseless and inapplicable to present needs. 
 
 Probably there is no more deeply-rooted weakness in the 
 human mind than respect for antiquity. The silliest fables that 
 ever emanated from the brain of man need but to be softened by 
 the mists of antiquity in order to be swallowed wholesale. Even 
 the Semitic races, perhaps the least credulous and the keenest 
 witted of all the children of men, as well as the Hindoos, and 
 ancient Greeks and Eomans, found no difficulty in gaining 
 acceptance for the senseless fables that we find woven into the 
 fabric of their religions. 
 
 Is it, t-heu, to be wondered at that a dull-witted race like ours
 
 90 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 should equally be prone to sanctify each and every practice 
 which claims antiquity for its sponsor, and hypocritically take 
 pride in it a mere rut into which we have stumbled because we 
 are too stupid to get out of it ? 
 
 I am fully aware that some of our greatest men have warmly 
 advocated the system of Party, not only on the ground of its 
 suitability to our national character, but also by attempting to 
 prove its universal efficacy. As to the former argument, we have 
 only to observe the habits of the domestic ass to convince 
 ourselves of the tenacity of our humbler brethren to the path in 
 which they are accustomed to tread in order to refrain from 
 branding with the name of laziness or stupidity what may 
 easily, by the aid of oratory, be raised to the rank of a virtue. 
 
 When, however, efficacy becomes the plea for marching in a 
 traditional groove, this is but a resort to the well-known dema- 
 gogic practices that have come down to us from the days of 
 Demosthenes, and is usually dignified, in these days, by the 
 term of " playing to the gallery." 
 
 It is not improbable that if the four-footed companion of 
 Balaam were called upon to explain the cause of his deep- 
 rooted antipathy to depart from his usual route, his answer 
 would be cast in a similar mould ; and here we arrive by 
 easy stages at a condition of mind which is so deeply con- 
 nected with the most obvious manifestations of British genius, 
 that we are almost tempted to regard it as the " Open 
 Sesame " to its most hidden secrets. 
 
 " What is, is good." " What I and my father and my 
 grandfather and his fathers before him have done, must be 
 good. Therefore it follows that everything that has been 
 done for a long time must also be good, or else, where should 
 we be now? If it was bad, we should have perished long 
 ago, therefore it must be good, and I shall keep on doing it 
 as long as I live. What is good enough for my fathers is 
 good enough for me." Some such logic as this, which has 
 often been ascribed to Hodge by his detractors, even if 
 couched in higher and more flowery language, constitutes the 
 staple judgment of the average Briton upon average subjects. 
 
 Depend upon it, it is not our Constitution, nor our Magna 
 Charta, nor our Declaration of Bights, that has saved us in
 
 PAETY POLITICS 91 
 
 the past, and will save us in the future. It is the cautious, 
 unenterprising disposition of the British elector, which, like 
 lead on the keel, often steadies the ship of State however 
 buffeted by wind or wave. 
 
 For let us consider what this artificial division of British 
 humanity into Whig and Tory really means. It means' that 
 each reasonable man attaining the age at which the law 
 enables him to bear a share in the nation's destiny, is either 
 fettered in advance by the prejudices or exaggerated state- 
 ments of those by whom he has been nurtured, or the family 
 practices in which he has been bred. Instead of applying the 
 knowledge which he has gained (if any), and the reason with 
 which he is endowed, to defeat the abuses, remove the 
 corruptions, and help to guide the bark of State, or lift those 
 about him from the grooves in which dull habits have retained 
 them he is practically thrown into the conflict, bound hand 
 and foot by the senseless convictions, prejudices, passions 
 and follies of what he is taught to call his " Side." From 
 early infancy it has been assumed that he is a Whig or Tory, 
 Liberal or Conservative, according to family tradition and 
 connection, without & chance of hearing an impartial or 
 unbiassed statement of the political facts which he is called 
 upon to face. Is it wonderful, then, that having heard no good 
 of one side and every known virtue ascribed to the other, he 
 should select, before his mind is formed, or opinions and 
 judgment strengthened by experience, so close an attachment 
 to one or other parties of the State as to be prematurely 
 bound like Ixion to the wheel, and thus fatally incapacitated 
 from the obvious work to which every patriotic citizen should 
 devote himself, namely, the improvement of the lot of his 
 fellow-countrymen, and the elevation of his own nation by the 
 elevation of every man within it ? For is it not manifest that 
 no man can think the same thoughts, trim his mind to the 
 same view, or hold the same opinion upon the multifarious 
 points which go to make the politics of a Party ? Surely only 
 the stupidest of a stupid nation could hope to evolve permanent 
 conditions of national life out of circumstances so entirely 
 opposed to humsKi reason and experience. And what are the 
 results directly traceable to this unhappy system ? Simply
 
 92 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 this, that without any fixed intention on their part, unless as 
 regards some few ultra-demagogues of the Republican type 
 whose sympathies are more foreign than British, the entire 
 people of England put in practice the familiar methods of 
 commerce to which their instinct naturally leads them, and 
 from the very nature of things the vital interests of the 
 nation are systematically bought and sold in the market-place 
 or tossed to and fro in the senseless hurly-burly of party 
 politics. 
 
 Setting aside the magnificent philanthropic conquests of Lord 
 Shaftesbury in the sphere of child labour, of Wilberforce on 
 behalf of our colonial slaves, and at an earlier date still of John 
 Howard and Mrs. Fry, who so nobly spent their lives in 
 alleviating the lot of the miserable denizens of our gaols and 
 workhouses, the history of the nineteenth century is the 
 helpless fall of a helpless people from an ultra- aristocracy to 
 the most helpless, aimless, soulless democracy that the world 
 ever saw. The key-note of the downward slide is the alter- 
 native Political Auction of Whigs and Tories, resulting in 
 placing the national destiny in the hands of the working 
 classes, and handing over its most important interest, agriculture, 
 to the wolves. Had it been the definite purpose of the 
 majority of English electors to put up power to auction until 
 there was nothing left to bid for, and no prize left to be 
 bandied to and fro, it might at any rate be urged that the 
 stronger had prevailed, and that according to the modern 
 theory elaborated under Mr. Gladstone's many governments, 
 and brought to a head by the successful Liberals of the 
 nineteenth century, their Pope Majority had spoken " Causa 
 finita est." Not so ! It was simply nobody's concern ! 
 
 Can any system be other than bad that is not conscious of 
 its own aims, that does not possess a fixed plan, and that acts 
 according to the current exigencies of party requirements ? Is 
 it conceivable that any business or any estate or any worldly 
 possession of any kind can be thus administered? Is it not 
 a constant complaint among the ministers of the Continental 
 countries with whom we have political or commercial dealings 
 that it is in vain to listen to our proposals, since from day to 
 day they know not what the next British Ministry will do,
 
 PARTY POLITICS 93 
 
 or whether it will completely reverse the policy of its 
 predecessors ? 
 
 No doubt the Liberals of the early part of the nineteenth 
 century had much to redress. All honour to the noble efforts 
 of Lord Grey, and those who worked with him, to sweep away 
 the corruptions of the old Electorate, and place the represen- 
 tation of England upon a more equitable basis. But what 
 more damning indictment can be brought against a nation 
 than to allow its politicians to barter away its privileges and 
 put up its electoral franchise to auction for each political 
 party to bid for in turn, each offering a larger slice than his 
 predecessor, till we find ourselves at the end of the nineteenth 
 century without any conscious volition or expressed determina- 
 tion of a part or a whole of the Electorate, in possession of 
 an unwieldy, ever-increasing Empire, with ever-widening 
 responsibility entrusted to the tender mercies of a simple 
 democracy, whose law, social and civil status, and forms of 
 representation remain those of a pure aristocracy, with an 
 ornamental king for a figure-head nominally at the head of 
 the nation but in reality holding no share of power in the 
 national commonwealth. When foreigners ask us why we 
 keep a king, when we have robbed him of his place, his use 
 and his meaning, and do not trust him even with the powers 
 of a republican president, we reply, with that logic which 
 distinguishes the Briton, that as we do not pay our members, 
 our king does not cost so much as the Congress of the United 
 States or a Chamber of Deputies of France or Italy, and that 
 as We are a highly loyal people whatever that may mean 
 and are attached to the royal family, and prefer to play at 
 Monarchy instead of Republic, we see no reason for discharg- 
 ing him. 
 
 It is in this invertebrate condition of our national organism 
 that is to be sought the explanation of the Boer War and the 
 other expensive wars and undertakings of which we have been 
 guilty during the last fifty years, which, in the main, consist 
 of taking advantage of any quarrel that arises between lesser 
 potentates, and stepping in to interfere, imitating the lawyers 
 by eating the oyster and returning the shell to the suitors. 
 Here, too, we have the explanation of one of the greatest
 
 94 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 sources of the universal hatred and jealousy with which the 
 nations regard us. 
 
 " Here is this nation of shopkeepers," they exclaim, " who 
 never tire of telling us of their righteous motives and the lofty 
 sentiments that inspire their expeditions among the half-savage 
 nations with whom they trade, after they have grabbed nearly 
 all the vacant spaces upon earth in order to sell their un- 
 consumed stock of Manchester cottons and Birmingham 
 hardware, and West of England cloths, they boast in their 
 conventicles and assemblies of being the chosen race for whom 
 the world is reserved and the fruits thereof, who are destined to 
 spread the Gospel to the uttermost ends of the earth, and even 
 now they are scheming to lay taxes upon us in order that 
 their Colonies' and their own produce shall suffice for support 
 and render them independent of the rest of the world." 
 
 An admirable dream, forsooth, if it can but be realised ! 
 Alas ! had we not allowed ourselves to be seduced by the 
 honeyed speech of Cobden, which so wound itself about the 
 British heart that Free Trade became a religion which it was 
 heresy to modify or dispute ; had we framed our municipal 
 laws in such a way as to give our own people the full benefit of 
 Free Trade; and if, before making these vast acquisitions to which 
 the Mother Country is but as one in a hundred, we had federated 
 our possessions upon a rational basis we should now instead 
 of a paper Empire and a king with a paper imperial- 
 crown emanating from the brain of an enthusiastic Jew, 
 possess a real Empire and a real Constitutional monarch 
 with corresponding powers ! For of what avail is a loosely- 
 knit agglomeration of heterogeneous nations at our tail, linked 
 together by no tie save that of common expectation of 
 profit, and casually administered by a body of well-meaning 
 amateurs whose qualifications usually consist in a nice turn for 
 oratory combined with an absolute ignorance of business ! As 
 for the connection of those boasted Colonies with their 
 Motherland, by far the greater bulk of the human beings of 
 which they are composed, if called upon, could scarcely tell 
 whether England was an island or a continent ; and though 
 there can be no doubt that wherever we take up the sword we 
 shall never lack defenders in those that have sprung from our
 
 PAETY POLITICS 95 
 
 loins in Great Britain over the seas, we must not be misled 
 by that love for fighting which is inherent in the British 
 blood, or cherish the delusion so commonly held at the present 
 hour that our Colonial cousins would dream of sacrificing their 
 most valued possessions of political autonomy and independence, 
 to say nothing of sharing the cost of our military and naval 
 expenditure, in order to convert that paper Empire into a real 
 one, which, while it tickles the British ear, causes the profane 
 foreigner to gibe and jeer at us, and secretly intrigue for our 
 ultimate disruption. 
 
 All history proves that none but a strong central Govern- 
 ment or a highly centralised Administration, usually under a 
 despotic monarch, has ever been able long to keep its 
 Colonies together. What is won by the sword must be held 
 by the sword, and the hand that grows rich by the sword is 
 usually palsied by the enervating effects of the luxury and 
 commercial wealth which follow in its wake. What reason 
 have we, then, to hope that we shall escape the common 
 destiny ? The Boer War, in few words, is the story of a strong 
 people who deliberately watch a weaker neighbour arming 
 herself for aggression and who calmly bides her time, relying 
 upon her strength to crush her. When the time, however, for 
 crushing came, so ill-laid were her plans and so completely at 
 fault her machinery, that it may be truly said that England 
 reeled, and still reels, under the blow inflicted by a handful of 
 farmers struggling to be free. 
 
 That little war and the measures immediately resulting from 
 it, including the pacification of the territory so acquired, and 
 the introduction of a new administration to work its vast 
 territories profitably, will increase England's financial responsi- 
 bilities to something like 300 millions of money. She has 
 groaned under the terrible burthen of a disaffected Ireland for 
 well nigh six centuries. Heaven only knows how long this 
 new burden will, like the old man of the sea, cling to her 
 unhappy back and prove to be another Ireland worse than the 
 first. 
 
 Nor is this the full measure of her stupidity and thought- 
 lessness. By the gradual decline of power originally seated in 
 the highest places we have tossed the critical destinies of
 
 96 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 building up an Empire to a majority of the ignorant, the 
 thoughtless, and, in short, those who have the least stake 
 in their country, not certainly, as I have shown, designedly 
 of a set purpose, but fortuitously and casually sliding down- 
 wards to a political future of which we can foresee neither 
 the limits nor the boundary, with a waning Exchequer, 
 a swelling Budget, commercial profits declining, important 
 industries threatened, universal luxury and profusion on the 
 increase, while the only consolation that our politicians can 
 offer us is, that we hold an Empire on which the sun never 
 sets. 
 
 There is yet another evil which follows in the train of party 
 politics and constantly dogs its footsteps. 
 
 No more deeply corrupting agency exists than the ties of 
 common politics or one that more readily overrides the claims 
 of Honesty and Justice. 
 
 In Ireland, Scotland, as well as in England, numberless proofs 
 are constantly afforded of the commonly recognised tendency 
 among the unpaid Magistracy to favour those who belong to 
 
 their "side" in politics ! What, then, must be its effects 
 
 upon the less educated and less high-placed. In Ireland ihe 
 sentences (in prosecutions) are generally supposed to depend 
 entirely upon the political colour of the " bench," and 
 " Masonry " notoriously besides being quite unworthy of a free 
 and civilised nation on the grounds of secresy if for no other 
 reason obstructs the course of justice to a degree which is alike 
 subversive of Morality, and ruinous to public order and 
 security.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 TIME was when Oxford, through the number of her schools and' 
 the fame of her professors, eclipsed the universities of Paris and 
 Padua. Her zenith was reached early in the fourteenth century, 
 since which time she declined in the number of her students and 
 the fame of her professors with remarkable evenness, until the 
 depth of her degradation was reached in the middle of the 
 nineteenth century, when Mr. Gladstone, the faithfullest of her 
 sons, was compelled, however unwillingly, to take up the painful 
 duty of reforming that Alma Mater which he loved so well after 
 vainly endeavouring by friendly advice and public entreaty to 
 shame her authorities into setting their houses in order. 
 
 It is a singular, if authentic, commentary upon our " Glorious 
 Protestant Eeformation " that, however magniloquently its 
 authors and apologists declaim upon the slavery of the intellect, 
 and the enforced ignorance of the people and the opposition of 
 the ancient clergy to the education of the poor, while in 
 pre-Eeformation days, by continued and frequent injunctions of 
 the Holy See, each bishop was bound to maintain and provide 
 teachers for his cathedral school and see that in every parish a 
 similar school was provided for the poorer sort, the entire fabric 
 should speedily fall to pieces under Queen Bess's new regimen, 
 indifferently supplemented as it had been in her father's reign 
 by the establishment of a handful of ill-endowed Grammar 
 Schools. Indeed, the condition of public facilities for learning, 
 in short, Education for the people, declined to such a point 
 under the vivifying rays of the new religion that the later divines 
 looked rather to Germany and Switzerland, and later to 
 Scotland, for their intellectual support and nourishment. 
 
 I have before adverted to the astonishing faculty which the 
 English possess above all other nations for hiding the proverbial 
 "skeleton in the cupboard" with a skill which other nations 
 may well envy. To her alone is given the wit to dress up the 
 aforesaid skeleton on public occasions and trick him out so gaily
 
 98 ABE WE A STDPID PEOPLE? 
 
 as not only to delude their hearers, but ultimately the speakers 
 themselves. 
 
 At the very time when Mr. Gladstone first undertook, and 
 with a loving hand finally carried out, the Augean task of 
 cleaning the foul stables of Oxford and Cambridge by compelling 
 the heads of colleges to something approaching decency in the 
 management of their vast revenues, it is amusing to note in the 
 speeches of the Eight Keverend Lords in Parliament no jot or 
 tittle of shame or self-reproach at this state of things, while 
 obstinately striving with all the energy and skill of their united 
 talents to defeat a measure of public right which involved the 
 plainest and simplest applications of the moral, law. In accord- 
 ance with what we have observed when speaking of the absorption 
 of the monasteries and chantries in a former page, the greater 
 number of the vast revenues of our universities and abbey 
 churches and hospitals, in common with the valuable chantries 
 which the eighth Harry had swept into his pocket, were chiefly 
 composed of charitable bequests of pious Englishmen and 
 women, who confined, as a rule, their benefits to either religious 
 people, or church students, or the indigent poor, moreover, 
 appending and making it a " sine qua non " to the enjoyment of 
 such benefits that certain prayers and frequently masses (or other 
 usages swept away at the Reformation) should be maintained and 
 annually performed. 
 
 In accordance with what I have before observed as to the 
 wholesale seizure of the goods of the Ancient Church by its State- 
 appointed successors affording the only plausible pretext for 
 conferring wholesale the benefactions of bygone Englishmen to 
 uses which they obviously would never have sanctioned by the 
 very terms of their grant from the Reformation onwards, it 
 became a matter of common practice to ignore the founder's 
 bequests and pocket the revenue, construing the founder's 
 views with such truly British liberality towards themselves, that 
 to give one instance among many the Mastership of Holy Cross 
 enjoys an income of 500 a year as present value of a bequest to 
 supply all comers with beer and bread, while Charter House, in 
 London, and Christ Church, in Oxford, and numberless others 
 translate the founders' " poor scholarships and indigent clerk- 
 ships " into a useful provision for the cheap education of the sons
 
 EDUCATION. 99. 
 
 and relatives of their managers and directors. In short, the 
 revelations of the Commission appointed to inquire into the 
 management of the University Funds indisputably earned for 
 Oxford and Cambridge, in the place of the stump-orator's usual 
 appellation of " seats of learning," the titles of " seats of corruption 
 and peculation." However, in spite of the determined stand 
 made by the English Bishops, duly buttressed by hypocritical if 
 learned disquisitions in the usual vein upon the vested interests, 
 disadvantages of innovation, respect for old usages, levelling 
 tendencies of the times, etc., which would seem incredible if it 
 were not a well-known fact that the Eight Eeverend Fathers in 
 God have invariably opposed every measure that has ever been 
 proposed for the amelioration or reform of .themselves, their 
 chapters, their cathedrals and their colleges, or the education of 
 the people disclosed to the public at large the painful fact that it 
 was not to the bishops of the State Church that they should look 
 for reform and progress in religion or education. The ball thus 
 set rolling by Mr. Gladstone was taken up by the noble band of 
 self-devoted men who shed an undying lustre upon the Liberal 
 name by their up-hill efforts, in spite of the determined resistance 
 and hostility of the Established Church, to first persuade the 
 English people of their national deficiencies, and, in the second 
 place, convert the Electorate to a scheme of compulsory and 
 universal public education. 
 
 " It must be remembered," said Mr. Gladstone in effect, while 
 presenting the resolution to the House of Commons in 1869, 
 " that our system of education, if system it can be called, is the 
 worst, the most discreditable and the most indefensible in the 
 entire civilized world." 
 
 Alas ! for the apostles of Cant ! These terrible Liberals with 
 unpleasant perseverance persisted in successively producing each 
 cherished cat from the bag in which the State and its Church 
 had so carefully hidden them for well nigh two centuries ! 
 
 In case it should be urged that I hold reactionary views, and 
 would have England hang back in its career and her sons 
 crippled in the race of life, I will at once admit that, hasty and 
 thoughtless as was the 1870 settlement, it formed a suitable 
 counterpart to the ill-fated compromise effected by Elizabeth, 
 which was expected to sweep Puritans and Papists all into one
 
 100 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 net, and by fusion, in the end, developed a mixture of the two, 
 which, satisfying neither, produced that ludicrous mixture which, 
 while devouring the entire religious endowments of the State in 
 its own greedy maw, shedding from time to time new sects, in 
 the course of ages has left us a divided nation, distracted in 
 politics, religion, society, and learning, endowed us with the 
 eternal plague-spot of Irish rebellion in our midst, and a pauper 
 population handing down disease, dirt and vice to generations 
 unborn. Surely a dear price to pay for a State Church whose 
 chief superiority over the old Church consists in a home Pope 
 instead of a foreign, the Cup for the laity, an English Prayer 
 Book, and wives for the Clergy. 
 
 None who had been used to see the condition of the London and 
 Liverpool streets can but rejoice at the material results of that 
 educational measure, even though constructed with the sole 
 object of placing the toiling millions of the country upon the same 
 level as their more fortunate Continental rivals. For though it failed, 
 as is now admitted on all hands, to attain the purpose intended, its 
 success was conspicuous in one direction, that of clearing the 
 streets of London and still more noticeably those of the other 
 great cities, whose condition, which before that date rivalled 
 the worst parts of New York, or the Ghetto of Hamburg, 
 or Frankfort, was by the indirect influence of the School 
 Board Authorities, in the course of twenty years, completely 
 transformed. 
 
 How truly British, however, is the upshot of all these labours. 
 So practical and business-like a people are we, that having at 
 last composed the religious differences which raged around the 
 eager ministers who strove in vain like wind-bound mariners to 
 steer their frail bark through the surf of sectarian hate and 
 party politics after all this toil and trouble it is now found in 
 the Year of Grace, 1904, that the Act of 1870 ended in pleasing 
 nobody, and was just such another compromise as Elizabeth 
 endowed us with, along with its compensating disadvantages of 
 three centuries of religious strife, with the result that we are 
 now all at one in the conviction that the last thirty years and a 
 trifle of 120 or 130 millions sterling have been wasted in popular 
 education ; while it would appear that with a little more tact 
 and time and a more delicate hand in composing religious
 
 EDUCATION 101 
 
 differences the whole of this money would have been saved to 
 the nation by the voluntary subscription instead of compulsory 
 inclusion of the militant sects affected. 
 
 We have heard of the Genii of the Arabian Nights whom 
 magicians used with the waving of a wand to develop from the 
 smoke of a wood fire, which rising aloft solidified and formed a 
 huge, hideous, frowning figure. But why go to Bagdad when we 
 British have such a remarkable talent for raising these genii or 
 spirits of evil that tower up and frown over humanity, and once 
 raised not even legions of men can destroy ? First we have the 
 glorious Eeformation, next we have the great political fissure, 
 Stuart versus Orange, and lastly, we try to reconcile our scheme 
 of education by a system which will pacify the jarring sects. 
 And with what success ? Why, simply that we have raised 
 another monster which not even a hecatomb of British children 
 shall appease. 
 
 Must I quote Dr. Clifford, or the Bishop of St. Asaph, or 
 Cardinal Vaughan ? Do we not know by heart their complaints 
 on behalf of their several communities? Is there a section of 
 Englishmen or even an individual that is completely satisfied ? 
 
 Nevertheless we had distinctly before us not only the Scotch 
 system to copy with its undoubtedly successful results, but we 
 had also the alternative of choosing the system adopted in 
 Canada or Germany. But no, we must needs satisfy the 
 warring sects, the privileged hierarchy of the Established Church, 
 and, above all, Mrs. Grundy, and though we have practically 
 disestablished Christ in England by the admission of the Jews in 
 our National Legislature, yet, forsooth, "we must assume a 
 virtue if we have it not " ; and therefore the simple plan of 
 making each sect maintain its own children with a Government 
 grant for efficiency in non-religious subjects can never be accepted 
 because the various apostles of Cant of whom each Parliament 
 contains a never-failing supply, however practical be the method 
 suggested, refuse to be a party to endowing with public money 
 the education of any sect but their own ! Finally, all agree upon 
 this, that though all are equally contemptuous of the particular 
 variety of Christian religion confessed by their neighbours, not to 
 speak of a large minority who deny Christ altogether, such is 
 the overwhelming power of hypocrisy in our national Parliament
 
 102 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 that wild horses will not drag them to the socially damaging 
 conclusion that where the nation is split up into a thousand 
 varieties of political and religious opinion there is no remedy but 
 to secularize education entirely and leave the religious instruction 
 of children to their ministers by supplying an hour or two of 
 religious instruction in the week deducted from the secular 
 schedule. Then let us for a moment consider the admitted 
 conditions which are inseparable from such a compromise, and 
 how far the demands of common sense and true education have 
 been served during the last thirty years. The ineffectual 
 character of our legislative machinery to obtain a given end is too 
 well known to deserve anything but regret. We find that Party 
 Politics, superadded to our Religious distractions, have produced 
 a system which at the end of thirty years is found by the entire 
 nation to have satisfied nobody, while it has plunged nearly 
 every borough in the country into debt, filled every town with 
 factious parties who fly at each other's throats and fail to agree 
 on any point except in laying their plans so that when they come 
 into office in their turn and oust their enemies, they may brag 
 about Educational Reform, Retrenchment, or Progress, while one 
 and all concur in clapping more burdens upon the unhappy 
 ratepayer. Here, again, let us incidentally note the absence of 
 public sense of justice, which I take to be the result of Party 
 Politics and its exigencies, gradually blinding public men to 
 general principles, and accustoming them to regard all public 
 acts as subject to compromise, till they end by losing all 
 distinction between good and evil. For what can be more 
 grossly unjust than for the State to determine the condition and 
 the manner of instructing the youth of its nation, enforcing its 
 exercises under severest penalties, and invoking the power of the 
 law to compel attendance, depriving parents of their natural 
 right to be supported by their children, even though they are 
 unwilling to receive the religious teaching of the State-erected 
 School Board, and are consequently obliged, however poor, to 
 maintain schools of their own, yet forced to contribute to the 
 State brand of Education without any control whatever over 'its 
 expenditure, or any power of determining what that Education 
 shall be. Is this not a galaxy of injustice ? Is it possible that 
 any nation should inflict such a complicated series of unjust acts
 
 EDUCATION 103 
 
 and yet escape popular indignation ? What is the result upon 
 the national conscience? Must it not be dulled by such 
 characteristic exhibitions of callous indifference to personal 
 rights and personal grievances, trampling upon consciences and 
 family prejudices, and expecting payment for a fancied public 
 advantage like some vast Jaggernat bruising and mangling body 
 and soul alike. 
 
 Again, with regard to the quality of its Education, would not 
 the intelligent ministry of an intelligent nation, before attempting 
 to enforce universal education upon an unwilling people, begin by 
 considering how to adapt its method of instruction to the needs 
 of the various sections of population under its control ? Would 
 it not begin by considering where the needs of the country folk 
 differ from those of the town folk ? or if in doubt, as it might well be, 
 would it not, if honestly desirous of conferring a real permanent 
 national benefit, assemble a congress, firstly for the full discussion 
 of the principles, and secondly of the method for carrying these 
 principles into practice, and lastly endeavouring by every means 
 in their power to ascertain what the views and experience of the 
 parents in varying localities would suggest ? The answer to this 
 seems to be, Yes ! but for the curses of the Reformation and 
 Party Politics. 
 
 It is often said that nothing is easier than to criticise more 
 especially after the event. No doubt we are always very wise 
 after the event, but what must we think of the collective wisdom 
 of the country as expressed by leading authorities, or what must 
 we think of the machinery of representation which we boast of 
 so loudly as the most perfect in the world, when we neglect so 
 obvious a preliminary of a universal system of education as to 
 consult the persons affected, and decide by patient inquiry and 
 study, if the instruction imparted is likely to suit the varying 
 requirements of the pupils ? Here, again, we mark the universal 
 prevalence of tall talk over common sense : nor can it be 
 otherwise in a Democracy. 
 
 All experience has shown us, all history demonstrates beyond 
 cavil, that whenever a nation through weakness or folly, as in the 
 case of our own notable system of Party Government, by the 
 same simple process of counting noses and putting up public 
 interests to auction by calculation of votes thereby obtained,
 
 104 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 has the incredible folly to hand over its vital concerns to the most 
 ignorant of its body, two things necessarily follow first, 
 that the said ignorant people will infallibly choose, not the most 
 practical, nor the most wise, nor the men most possessed of 
 common sense, nor indeed the men who are possessed of any 
 quality which is likely to forward the interests of the community, 
 or the members of which it is composed but the men who 
 attract most by their eloquence, or fascinate by their showy 
 external qualities. 
 
 When the Japanese embarked on their enterprise of national 
 reconstruction with that thoroughness which seems to charac- 
 terize them, having decided that their religion was incoherent, 
 and in many ways preposterous, they deliberately started a 
 Commission of Enquiry which they directed to examine all the 
 religions of Europe. Excellent as were their intentions, it was 
 found to be impossible to uproot the national superstitions, 
 though it is believed that the Ministers in their wisdom con- 
 structed out of the multifarious fables of the Old World a religion 
 the like of which the world had never seen. It certainly fell 
 flat and was consigned still-born to the pigeon-holes of the Yeddo 
 Archives. 
 
 When travelling in Japan, I was greatly struck with the 
 practical common sense of that remarkable nation in dealing with 
 a universal brand-new compulsory system of education. Eoughly 
 speaking, they considered that three classes of instruction should 
 be imparted, while in practice these, as far as may be, were sub- 
 divided into many others. For the country they provided public 
 elementary classes, consisting of a large square, enclosing a 
 garden, plotted out so as to contain specimens of the various 
 methods of culture of fruits, flowers, and vegetables, and on a 
 small scale instructed the children in all the necessary elements 
 of successful flora and agriculture. 
 
 This enables the child who is taken out of the fields at once to 
 respect and esteem highly that work which in England he learns 
 only to despise and undervalue, while it teaches him the very 
 best method known of carrying out his work in accordance with 
 the latest improvements of Science and Industry. Nor is this 
 the only advantage. The mind of the city child is obviously 
 more receptive of new facts and new ideas than his country
 
 EDUCATION 105 
 
 congener. The country-bred boy, as all the world knows, is 
 better informed upon country matters, and his interest being 
 naturally centred upon such, nothing is more difficult than to 
 secure his interest in any objects which are external to his 
 observation. 
 
 There is nothing recondite in these remarks, nothing that is 
 not within the reach of everyone's knowledge and everyone's 
 observation, and yet our system is avowedly in direct and distinct 
 contradiction of these two well-known and elementary facts. 
 
 The general lines upon which instruction is fashioned in 
 England is, " All children are alike." There is no fool in the 
 entire country that is not perfectly aware that every child differs 
 from its neighbour far more than a tree of one species differs from 
 its fellows in the forest. And yet we persist in treating every 
 child alike, and dosing him with exactly the same amount, as if 
 we were dealing with a row of pint pots each destined to contain 
 one pint of Imperial knowledge with the Government stamp, 
 and finally in our wisdom enact that that fixed amount is to be 
 administered to every child alike, whether sickly or strong, 
 wise or otherwise, gifted by nature with physical rather than 
 intellectual endowments, underfed or fuU of animal life and 
 spirits. 
 
 Whether there be or be not any marked difference of opinion 
 upon these matters, nearly all parents seem to agree that the 
 results are exceedingly unsatisfactory, and I think it is not too much 
 to add that if the foregoing words are, as I believe them to be, 
 unanswerable and plain as the noontide sun to all who have eyes 
 to see and ears to hear, it flows from this as surely as the river 
 to the sea, that our aim and the whole aim of a really popular 
 system of education should be entirely directed to convey such 
 instruction as is common to all in the simplest, plainest manner, 
 and, with the least possible waste of time, by which I mean 
 the three B's (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic), and beyond 
 that the Syllabus should be accommodated entirely to the known 
 capacity of the scholar, and, as far as may be, the bent, and 
 secondly the probable future position in life which he expects 
 to occupy, the higher and more intellectual branches of learning 
 being entirely reserved for that insignificant minority which in 
 the course of its earlier instruction should chance to display
 
 106 
 
 such exceptional qualifications as to justify exceptional treatment. 
 In short, the whole aim of rational instruction should be to 
 improve the child's material prospects, while considering the 
 qualities that Nature has endowed him with in such a way 
 as to give them the highest effect, and the highest aim of a 
 paternal government should be to devote all its educational 
 facilities, and bend all its powers, to push on and advance the 
 exceptional scholar to the highest grades of a scholastic or 
 technical career. 
 
 One more colossal blunder to the credit of that "Monstrum 
 horrendum infandum ingens cui lumen ademptum." Surely Virgil 
 must have foreshadowed the British Democracy when he 
 penned these fateful words. 
 
 These hundred years and more every scientific, nay every 
 rational, being in the British Empire has hoped against hope, 
 that the all-wise decrees of the British Parliament would deign 
 to smile upon them to the extent of shortening by one-half the 
 labour of the youth of Great Britain to say nothing of the assis- 
 tance thus afforded to calculators and men of science of every 
 rank and station more especially in their relations with their 
 fellow-workers outside these islands by substituting the decimal 
 and metrical systems of money, weight, and measurement 
 universally adopted by all civilised nations, as well as the 
 Centigrade instead of the Fahrenheit thermometer, and last not 
 least by a thorough reform of English spelling. Could a more 
 favourable moment be imagined for such a sweeping change as 
 the commencement of our public educational era to place our- 
 selves in a line with other nations, while at the same time we 
 lighten the labours of our children by one-half ? 
 
 Is there a teacher of youth or a scientific man, or a corre- 
 spondent with foreign societies, or a lecturer, or anyone nearly 
 or remotely connected with the instruction of youth, who doea 
 not bewail the enormous waste of time and money, to say 
 nothing of human brains, which are required to master the 
 elements of our applied arithmetic or to learn the spelling -of 
 our language, which only an exceptional memory can ultimately 
 grasp, and which to most children presents so insuperable a 
 stumbling-block as to prolong their term of education by at 
 least two years ? It is but yesterday that Professor Max Miiller
 
 EDUCATION 107 
 
 (whose name cannot but cause a thrill of painful emotion in 
 every truly patriotic breast, for who can remember without 
 shame that Englishmen were compelled to import a German 
 professor to teach the English language to our National 
 University?) and his followers succeeded in persuading us, 
 greatly to our amazement and regret, that the greater part of 
 the commonest Saxon words in use, whose erratic spelling 
 causes perennial grief to generations unborn, and fills the foreigner, 
 who attempts to learn our language, with anguish and dismay, 
 are mostly if not wholly devoid of that sacred authenticity which 
 has been attributed to them by the pedagogic wiseacres of the 
 past. Moreover, our spelling having been for two centuries or 
 more, like nearly everything else in Great Britain, left entirely 
 to chance, there seems to be no excuse for prolonging an 
 universal martyrdom ; so that with the exception of those words 
 which we have introduced out of the more civilized early 
 vocabularies of Greece and Rome, no reason can be adduced for 
 not reforming the spelling of Anglo-Saxon words, " Ab ovo 
 usque ad mala " without compunction or hesitation.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PRIVATE SCHOOLS 
 
 HAVING grappled heavily and laboriously, if unsuccessfully, with 
 the momentous problem of public elementary education spoilt 
 alas ! in great measure as nearly all our national measures must 
 be by the very essence of things, through our religious dissensions 
 as well as by reason of our party politics we Britons are inclined 
 in disgust to drop the subject altogether, and by virtue of our 
 democratic vis inertias return once more to our central gravity of 
 indifference and apathy. For deep down in the British mind and 
 probably inherent in the Anglo-Saxon character are graven the 
 axioms, " Let well alone," and " What is good enough for our 
 forefathers is good enough for us." At least such are the argu- 
 ments used by the overwhelming majority in this country when 
 anything new is proposed of a revolutionary character. The 
 second, firm, all-pervading opinion overlapping the former to a 
 certain extent and more prevalent among the well-informed, but 
 still working in the same direction, is an opinion based on strong 
 conviction that private enterprise unaided and unstimulated (as 
 elsewhere from above) will accomplish in England under the 
 pressure of competition everything that is accomplished elsewhere 
 at the suggestion or by the help of the Government. 
 
 It would be idle to deny that there has arisen a strong body of 
 opinion in favour of State Socialism to replace the early Liberal 
 Faith in the unaided virtue of Individualism. Now the Liberal 
 measures, intended as they were primarily for the benefit of the 
 entire community, were, nevertheless, from the very nature of 
 things and by reason of the injustice wrought upon the greater 
 number by the preponderating political power of the aristocracy, 
 since they were intended to right that balance, necessarily more 
 for the benefit of the lower classes than the upper. 
 
 Mr. Howard's and Elizabeth Fry's work for the prisons and 
 gaols, and Lord Shaftesbury's admirable efforts, ultimately 
 crowned with success, in spite of the usual strong opposition of 
 the House of Lords and Bishops, on behalf of the helpless victims
 
 PEIVATE SCHOOLS 109 
 
 of the mine-owners and manufacturers, together with Wilber- 
 force's ever memorable efforts on behalf of the slaves of our West 
 Indian Colonies, were all alike proofs of the waning power of 
 Individualism and a rising belief in the necessity of a stimulus to 
 improvement being given from above in order to right national 
 wrongs and effect national improvement. 
 
 Were it not for this ever-present leaning towards the 
 "status quo ante," from which our fellow-countrymen were 
 with much difficulty by a due sense of national shame 
 conducted through the powerful and persuasive oratory 
 of Mr. Gladstone and his friends, one would naturally 
 suppose that the first and most important duty of the Govern- 
 ment, after attempting to set in order the educational facilities of 
 the masses, would be that of closely inspecting and sternly 
 regulating the equally chaotic educational institutions devoted to 
 superior education. Yet here again the only excuse that I ever 
 heard advanced for this outrageous indifference and apathy 
 which is now bearing full fruit in the technical and educational 
 inferiority which is reported from all our Consular stations, and 
 which is all too generally admitted to be the principal cause of our 
 commercial failure is the same old story of indifference and 
 improvidence which seems to have become chronic amongst us. 
 Some say, " We have done well enough in the past, so I don't see 
 why we should change." Others again say, " Competition will 
 soon produce a better style of young olerk, and when the pressure 
 of trade begins to tell, the Commercial Schools will soon feel the 
 effects. The result will be that they will have to give a better 
 all-round education, at which foreign languages will be taught 
 more efficiently and they will be forced to remodel themselves 
 upon up-to-date principles." Thus we go on year after year, 
 thoroughly aware, each one of us, of our national deficiency, while 
 we watch British trade drop out of our hands, and continue to 
 read day by day in the paper of the gross abuses prevalent at 
 private schools. One day we read of boys at Eton, which we 
 look upon as the mirror of all other schools, with difficulty 
 escaping from the horrors of a fire against which no precaution 
 of any kind had been taken, and find that boys were burnt to 
 death because bars had been placed across their window to secure 
 that discipline which it seems it is impossible to obtain without
 
 110 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 such primitive methods ; or we are startled with the almost 
 unanimous accounts of cunning schoolmasters who deliberately 
 starve their pupils to enrich themselves, and actually compel the 
 inmates of their school to eke out the imperfect and indifferent 
 fare provided, by smuggling delicacies or blush not to openly 
 procure for their starving scholars the means of purchasing 
 refreshment at their own expense, in relief of their school- 
 master's pocket. 
 
 Nor is this all. With Machiavellian astuteness, schoolmasters, 
 since the dawn of English school history, have been careful to instil 
 into the tender minds of their charges a principle which, however 
 useful to cloak up the master's shortcomings, is fatal alike to the 
 moral sense and sincerity of the scholar. One of the first lessons of 
 childhood on entering a public school, and one which I hold to be 
 most destructive and far-reaching in its effects, is the well-known 
 axiom, "not to tell tales out of school." By reason of this 
 immoral wall which is erected between the parent and the child 
 it is not difficult for a cunning schoolmaster to impress upon the 
 plastic mind of youth that it is unworthy of the public schoolboy 
 to divulge school tricks and iniquities of any kind, and that it is 
 unmanly to complain of the food, management, punishments, and 
 other details of school life. Thus the schoolmaster shelters 
 himself successfully behind a barrier of insincerity which can only 
 be dispelled by the system which is adopted and considered 
 necessary in every country but our own, namely, of placing all 
 secondary schools under public supervision, with the safeguard of 
 high-class independent visitors, to whom any formal complaint can 
 be made under the seal of strict secrecy in the same manner as is 
 common to all public institutions. Let in the light of day, and 
 the " sneaking" schoolmaster will then be exposed to the rightful 
 obloquy which he now succeeds in meting out to the schoolboy 
 who "sneaks." 
 
 Here, again, is it national stupidity or downright apathy that 
 causes our indifference to the obvious remedy applied before our 
 very eyes by all nations except ourselves to this most pressing 
 need to this most glaring anomaly which has so long and still 
 stares us in the face at every turn? And yet it is almost a 
 hundred years since Charles Dickens pathetically described the 
 sufferings and wrongs of Dotheboys Hall and harrowed the public
 
 PEIVATE SCHOOLS 111 
 
 feelings (for a few months) with his eloquent and burning words. 
 Do not the papers daily reveal Dotheboys Hall in every part of 
 the country, and does not every reasonable being amongst us 
 know full well that what has occurred may, and probably will, 
 under the same conditions, occur again ? 
 
 The only possible explanation is that where wealth and a so- 
 called Christian education, and exalted rank, aid, abet, and are 
 ranged on one side the inherent snobbery or exaggerated 
 respect for position which differentiates the Anglo-Saxon from 
 every other race and which appears to be compounded in equal 
 parts of a weak sense of justice, an excessively slavish worship 
 of wealth and power, and a great deficiency of personal dignity 
 all concur in barring effectually the way to reform. Nay, the 
 very law exhibits the same bias, for do we not see every day 
 clergymen brought up at the Police-courts for this or that offence 
 or indicted before a judge for serious crime, or when magistrates 
 or peers are brought up on grave charges, the whole attitude of 
 Judges and of the Courts generally is almost invariably exchanged 
 for one of tenderness, consideration, and a strong leaning to 
 mercy ? In the case of a lawyer or a parson as far as my 
 experience and reading go it is safe to say that whatever his 
 offence, it is fifty to one that he is whitewashed and got off by 
 hook or by crook unless public interest or attention is aroused, or 
 if the newspapers, as more often happens, have not been bribed 
 to draw the public off the scent. 
 
 In all the cases with which I am acquainted where a school 
 or educational institution of any kind has been attacked by 
 parents for the grossest carelessness or neglect of the 
 commonest duties and it must be remembered that in 
 England no one ever attempts such an action without the 
 gravest cause and the fullest assurance of success I have never 
 known any attention whatever paid to the grievances of the 
 parent, while according to the invariable practice of English 
 Courts the greatest deference and credulity is exhibited towards 
 the assertions of brother pedagogues, schoolmasters interested in 
 similar situations, and the avouchers, clerical and otherwise, of 
 their respectability and good conduct. And parenthetically I 
 may here remark that I have never been able to see the sense of 
 a Eule of Law which almost invariably obtains in our English
 
 112 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Courts. It matters little what is the act or crime committed, a 
 light sentence is almost infallibly secured to the fortunate 
 possessor of friends who are willing to come forward and to 
 declare that they have always known the delinquent to have been 
 a virtuous youth from infancy upwards, that he is of most 
 respectable parentage, and up to the present hour held to be a 
 model of all perfection! The Archdeacon of the Deanery in 
 which the offender, if in good society, lives and moves, is sure to 
 be brought up to forward the whitewashing process, as well as 
 the family doctor (who is always referred to as " an eminent 
 practitioner ") to show that he has been vaccinated or treated for 
 scarlatina, etc. his long words telling enormously upon judge 
 and jury while at length the crowning benediction is passed by 
 the Chairman of Quarter Sessions, who completes the farce by 
 assuring the magistrate or judge with tears in his eyes that he 
 has known him from boyhood upwards to be a most exemplary 
 member of Society ! 
 
 Now the common sense, and above all the logical view 
 though I should be far from insinuating that this has any weight 
 with most Englishmen would be simply this : that if a young 
 man falls into bad ways in spite of having had an excellent 
 example placed before him and all the advantages that education, 
 position, or (may be) rank is able to confer, his offence ought to 
 be deemed quadrupled in enormity, and a correspondingly 
 adequate punishment should be inflicted; while, on the other 
 hand, the less the education, and the more dismal, sordid, and 
 wretched the surroundings and previous life of the offender, the 
 more inclined should a magistrate be to deal leniently and use all 
 the facilities that the Law can give for reformation and separation 
 from the bad companions who have led him into evil. Moreover, 
 it seems to follow necessarily from the practice of shortening 
 sentences for good character, that where the character is bad an 
 undue or excessive sentence should be inflicted upon an offender, 
 which surely proves that the notion is one entirely repugnant to 
 justice, and falsified by facts. No careful observer of human 
 nature will venture to assert that the best way of weaning boy or 
 man from a course of vice would be to notify him that he may go 
 ahead with perfect safety, since no punishment will be inflicted 
 upon him for the first offence. If I am met with the idiotic and
 
 PRIVATE SCHOOLS 113 
 
 senseless theory of British Law as to a dog's first bite being freely 
 licensed, I can only reply that the same class of Anglo-Saxon 
 wits was clearly responsible for the twain. 
 
 Let us not, however, forget the enormous strides we have 
 made during the last seventy or eighty years since Dickens wrote 
 with such passion and feeling upon the wrongs of children and 
 the neglect of schoolmasters. In those days it was still considered 
 natural to flog learning into boys with the cudgel, as strangely 
 enough it seems to have been in the old days of the Greeks and 
 Romans, who, in spite of their refinement and close sympathy 
 with the requirements and potentialities of youth, manifested by 
 their harsh treatment of boys a firm belief in the advantages of 
 severity, disciplinary and educational, which was not exceeded by 
 Mr. Bumble of immortal memory, or Wackford Squeers himself. 
 
 There probably does not exist a human being in England that 
 has reached middle age who is not well acquainted with number- 
 less instances of Preliminary, Grammar, Middle-class, Upper- 
 class, Higher-class and what-not schools, or at least one among 
 such, where the grossest greed and brutality on the part of the 
 Principal is not a matter of universal comment and common 
 reprobation. In short there is no reason why such a state of 
 things should not be universal. For upon one hand, menaced by 
 the Libel Law, which is the protecting aegis or palladium of the 
 Rogue in this country, Englishmen and women will think twice 
 before they so much as whisper one word of detriment or reproach 
 outside the domestic circle ; while on the other hand, even if they 
 have the strongest proofs of grievous shortcomings and grossest 
 breaches of contract on the part of the schoolmaster, there exists 
 such a wholesome dread of an English Court of Law and so little 
 confidence in its operations that parents would rather " grin and 
 bear " the worst extortions and suffer the greatest wrongs to purse 
 or person than prosecute their author or endeavour to stir up a 
 more healthy public opinion in such matters. 
 
 Now granted this state of things to be correct, and my view 
 of the average parent to be also correct, is it wonderful that our 
 so-called Higher-class Schools are frequently as nearly conducted 
 upon the Squeers' system as the proprietor of the school thinks it 
 safe to venture, especially as regards overcrowding and under- 
 feeding, which are the two most prevalent faults, being, as they
 
 114 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 undoubtedly are, the two methods by which most money can be 
 made ? The ordinary laws of Sanitary Inspection which protect 
 the pauper in the workhouse, and even the pauper lunatic in the 
 county asylum, are carefully suspended in view of that exaggerated 
 British theory of respect of vested rights and personal liberty 
 which positively enables the keeper of a school to contract 
 himself out of the ordinary regulations to which every inferior 
 school under Government is subject, under the ridiculous and 
 utterly false pretence that he is simply entertaining a more or 
 less numerous selection of guests, of more or less tender years, in 
 his house, and that as such he is not liable to public supervision ! 
 
 Needless to say that everywhere abroad the supervision of 
 education of whatsoever kind is considered to be the first duty of 
 the Government of the country. Secondly, licenses must be 
 taken out, setting forth that after due inspection they have com- 
 plied with the proper rules as to air, light, healthiness, 
 breathing room, sanitation, etc., etc., without which no school of 
 any kind may be opened without being exposed to the heaviest 
 penalty of the law. 
 
 Preparatory Schools in England are usually started by a 
 comfortable, middle-aged woman, who having nothing better to 
 do, and having no children of her own and a large acquaintance, 
 sees no reason why she should not turn an honest penny by 
 getting the cheapest lodging house that she can find, bribing a 
 doctor or two in the hopes of future practice to say that the 
 aforesaid Establishment is situate in the healthiest part of the 
 town, next advertise for any ragtag and bobtail who will come 
 without a salary " for the run of his or her teeth" ; if male, the 
 same being described vaguely as an M.A. of Cambridge, or if 
 female, as being possessed of several foreign diplomas and duly 
 entered as such in the prospectuses of the school ! As many 
 pupils as can possibly be got are then crowded into any rooms 
 which are not required by the mistress and her servants, and 
 finally a charge is made for each child which no English parent 
 ever dreams of disputing, and which varies according to the 
 fashionableness or otherwise of the locality between five to ten 
 times as much as any but Englishmen or women would dare to 
 charge for similar accommodation. 
 
 I clearly recollect two preparatory schools which I have
 
 PKIVATE SCHOOLS 115 
 
 visited and know well, both situated in two most fashionable 
 seaport residential towns, where one nicely built in a most 
 salubrious place receives little boys for 100 a year where the 
 boys are crowded together in a manner that, to my certain 
 knowledge, would not be permitted in any gaol, workhouse, or 
 asylum in the kingdom, and whose Principal having contracted 
 in a definite manner through a printed programme to supply the 
 pupils with mutton chops or eggs and bacon for breakfast, was 
 proved by the evidence of several boys to have only provided 
 mutton chops once in a term, eggs three or four times, and a 
 substance which was believed to be thin slices of something 
 belonging to a pig of the brawn variety alternately with cold 
 bacon during the rest of the term. 
 
 The other school in question was simply a fifth-class lodging 
 house into which an extraordinary number of children of all sizes 
 and ages were crammed higgledy-piggledy, the larger ones 
 obviously belying the statement on the prospectus that only 
 children from six to ten were taken. One room alone served for 
 eating and study, and the stench that pervaded the entire estab- 
 lishment from top to bottom would not have disgraced a gaol or 
 workhouse of the eighteenth century. This, be it remarked, was 
 not a charitable refuge for paupers, but a highly patronised and 
 warmly recommended seaside school where children of the highest 
 birth were freely despatched by infatuated or despairing mothers 
 in the delusive search of a healthy and comfortable seaside home 
 for their delicate fledglings. 
 
 Is it a matter of wonder, then, that our foreign friends, con- 
 temptuous as they ever are of our educational facilities, treat 
 with incredulity the statement that our Government and parents 
 are not indifferent as to whether their children should be at the 
 mercy of the first tinker or tailor who having failed in business 
 sees no reason why he should not open a school? And well 
 knowing as we do that all but Board Schools are, as a matter of 
 fact, conducted precisely on the same principles as a lodging 
 house, corner grocery, or East End slop-shop, whose chief object 
 is to make t^ie largest profits, combined with the heaviest charges 
 consistent with safety, in return for the lowest possible expendi- 
 ture, is it not surprising that we are only just beginning to 
 realise that the youth of Great Britain, in spite of the enormous
 
 116 ABB WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 advantages enjoyed by our race from its priority in the field, is 
 destined, unless strong measures of reform are adopted, to fall 
 behind other nations in that trade supremacy which is to us, 
 above all nations, of paramount importance, and which any 
 failure to retain would assuredly destroy our most cherished 
 national aspirations. Lastly, what can be more stupid and more 
 opposed to common sense, even in a Democracy where the scum 
 usually comes to the top, than to spend vast sums for the due 
 instruction of the masses, while the rich are bereft of the protec- 
 tion of the law the State considering in its wisdom that the 
 education of those whose wealth secures them the possession of 
 independence is a subject unworthy of their assistance or 
 consideration.
 
 CHAPTEE XII 
 
 ABOUT LAW 
 
 APPROPRIATELY appendant to our political chaos a still darker 
 abyss frowns before us ; for what is more fearfully and wonder- 
 fully wrought than what we please to call our Law ? 
 
 In extreme youth we are apt to regard our Courts of Justice 
 as a sacred tribunal where god-like persons in wigs and scarlet 
 gowns, which our unformed minds picture to us in the guise of 
 Bible-illustrations of the Prophets of old, are sent down as a 
 delegation from Heaven to redress earthly wrongs ! 
 
 Must I recall to my readers' minds the traditional after-dinner 
 speech, the inevitable Bench complimenting the Bar, and the Bar 
 complimenting the Bench, or the references in the Press to those 
 august personages ? Alas ! what a change when we pass behind 
 the scenes and hear the cheerful solicitor before going into Court, 
 when asked by the trembling client whether he thinks he has any 
 chance of success. " No doubt, sir, you have a splendid case. 
 You have all the right on your side ; but whether you will get it 
 or no depends so very much on what kind of judge you get. If 
 you have old Jones, then he will go right against you. I should 
 not wonder if old Brown or Thompson would suit you very well, 
 but Heaven preserve us from Snooks! However, you must be 
 prepared for the worst, for you know that our Law is proverbially 
 uncertain. Ha! ha! " "But," says the excited client, "if you 
 say I have the right entirely on my side and that the Law is 
 perfectly clear, what risk do I run?" "Well, you see, the jury 
 have complete power in the matter, and there is no knowing what 
 view they will take of it. It is left entirely to them." Or else, 
 perhaps, if the case is not tried before a jury, he will say, " There 
 is no knowing what humour the judge will be in, or what view he 
 may take of it. It depends very much on what he has had for 
 breakfast." Or, possibly, client No. 2 says, " But surely there 
 can be no doubt about my wrong, and the Law's first axiom is 
 ' that for every wrong there is a right.' " " No doubt, sir, the
 
 118 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Law says so, but you must remember what Mr. Bumble said, 
 ' My opinion is, that the Law's a hass.' ' 
 
 In truth, the great misfortune in this and in many other 
 British institutions may be summed up in a word. We lack a 
 Revolution ! The so-called Rebellion cannot be regarded as such, 
 since it was in no sense, like the French Revolution, a universal 
 or a popular one, in this that Charles I.'s execution, unlike that 
 of Louis XVI., was practically the work of a few dozen con- 
 spirators, and thanks to our cold Anglo-Saxon blood, the wrongs 
 of the people so painfully and cruelly redressed in France in 
 1792, and in other Continental lands in 1848, failed to stir our less 
 emotional feelings ; while their English reputed counterparts, the 
 Chartists, though led by an excitable Irishman, mad enough and 
 bloodthirsty enough to dare or do anything, were but very faint 
 echoes of the French " Sansculottes." John Bull looked upon 
 Fergus O'Connor as a strange if dangerous mountebank rather 
 than a serious leader of a serious Revolution ; and as for foreign 
 anarchical notions he will have none of them. 
 
 What is, then, our condition? We are the slaves of Anglo- 
 Saxon crude, brutal, ignorant legal customs, evolved out of an 
 originally barbarous adaptation of the Mosaic Code, in which 
 human life was cheaply reckoned and property was all in all. To 
 this ever enlarged and ever growing mass of common law must 
 be added numberless statutes, with other statutes on top cor- 
 recting and amending the preceding, the former being mostly out 
 of date and bearing no relation whatever to modern facts and 
 diction. Add to this a totally different system of Jurisprudence 
 imported from Rome, filtering through Canon Law originally 
 applied by the Norman Clergy to all such cases as could possibly 
 be construed as affecting, near or far, the interests of Mother 
 Church, but now welded into the former system under the term 
 Chancery or Equity Law. Next we have the " Reports " in 
 countless volumes setting out the rulings of past judges upon 
 given cases, and their interpretations of various statutes, with their" 
 confirmation or otherwise recorded in trials and appeals chiefly 
 occasioned by the obscurity of the said statutes (which are 
 mostly drawn up by members of a Parliament who neither under- 
 stand the value of legal phrases nor the purport of the language 
 which they employ) and it may be safely said " there needs no
 
 ABOUT LAW 119 
 
 ghost from the dead" to tell us that out of such perplexing 
 machinery only perplexing justice can be expected to issue. Nor 
 are expectations unjustified. It is not my purpose here to write a, 
 legal treatise or to attempt to compass a subject, which would 
 require a volume, within the space of a page. Here, as elsewhere, I 
 propose to face and deal with only those facts and circumstances 
 that all alike acknowledge and all alike accept as true. Whatever 
 is debatable or even doubtful I am willing to hand over to the 
 other side to be set off against my indictment of my fellow- 
 countrymen. Even then I suspect enough will remain to justify 
 the impeachment. 
 
 1. The exorbitant costs of " Justice." 
 
 2. Our law is of such a complex character and so overladen 
 
 and overgrown with the senseless iteration and mysterious 
 jargon which for centuries cunning clerks and lawyers 
 have piled up to mystify, and so compel professional 
 assistance, that it is almost impossible for any but a 
 trained lawyer to carry out the simplest business 
 transaction. 
 
 3. The utter disorder of ways and means for obtaining so- 
 
 called justice, so that procedure, as it is called (save the 
 mark), is a byword for confusion and chaos. 
 
 4. The utter want of definition, so that the legal language in 
 
 one man's mouth means quite another thing from the 
 same language in another man's mouth. 
 
 5. Absence of codification : so that the average Englishman 
 
 is totally unable to ascertain Law upon any given point ; 
 and while nearly all other civilised nations have their 
 Law criminal and civil so distinctly stated, as for 
 example in France in a book that you can carry in your 
 waistcoat pocket, and by reference to which you can 
 clearly comprehend what your civil rights, duties and 
 risks are and may be the only resource of an English- 
 man in difficulty is to pay 6s. Sd. to his lawyer who will 
 give him no better an opinion than he can form for him- 
 self ; while if, as generally happens, the solicitor desires to 
 shirk the responsibility of an opinion he refers the matter 
 to a barrister (called counsel) where at the cost of a, 
 two- to ten-guinea fee he can obtain an equally valueless
 
 120 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 " opinion " or rather guess at the existing Law, and in 
 all probability will have to recur in the end to an 
 expensive suit which may cost him a thousand pounds, 
 in order to ascertain what the Law upon a given point 
 may be I From which it seems to follow that such is 
 our apathy, laziness, or indifference to what has always 
 been considered to be the test and "ultima ratio" of 
 civil prosperity that we care nothing for a clear, 
 settled, and unchangeable Code of Law ; unless, indeed, 
 we are driven to the alternative of believing that the 
 combined wisdom of our nation is utterly unable to 
 compass its accomplishment. At all events the Law's 
 quality of Uncertainty has impressed itself so long 
 upon us as to have become not only a household word 
 and a universally accepted fact, but by process of 
 time has come to be, so to speak, enrolled as a special 
 British Institution, and is not infrequently alluded to in 
 fond and loving terms as the " glorious uncertainty " of 
 our British Law ! 
 
 Taking these points as briefly as we can, the explanation 
 usually offered for the enormous scale of charges, which, though 
 somewhat reduced at a very recent date, when it must be con- 
 fessed a very full and generous attempt was made to place the 
 law at the service of poor creditors with almost painfully 
 successful results, still remain far above those of our Continental 
 rivals, is this, that in the first place, our judges are not as other 
 judges, German, French, etc. ; and secondly, they must be paid 
 enormous salaries in order to be freed from all suspicion of 
 interest, partiality or bribery. I will pass over the genuine 
 Pharisaical ring of this truly British sentiment which comes 
 easily and glibly from the professional or official mouth and 
 finds so frequent an echo in the British Press, and merely 
 observe, in passing, that up to a comparatively recent date our, 
 judges were rather remarkable for their partiality to bribes 
 than the reverse, and only so lately as Elizabeth we hear of 
 bitter complaints made by Ladies-in-Waiting of Elizabeth, that 
 they had " missed their turn " in obtaining the coveted privilege 
 of a suit. In the next place, let us not forget that by placing 
 our judges in a position of such opulence and of such indepen-
 
 ABOUT LAW 121 
 
 dence that he is irremovable for any fault short of felony, 
 he is placed upon such a lofty pedestal of pride and irrespon- 
 sibility that he becomes at once subject to the universal law 
 affecting those who are elevated above their fellow-men, and one 
 from which only the noblest of God's creatures are free, with 
 the result that he usually develops his besetting weakness of, 
 say, extreme pride, or insolence, or anger, or tyranny, or the 
 utmost indifference, or keenest sensitiveness to every wave of 
 public opinion. It would be unbecoming to quote notorious 
 instances of these several allegations. Suffice it to say that 
 while human nature is such as it is, the safest restraint that 
 can be placed upon a man in a high official post is not to 
 make him irresponsible and fill his pockets with gold, but to 
 place him in a position where he knows that the slightest aber- 
 ration will produce his instant dismissal. In the fourth place, 
 in order apparently to make it next to impossible for an angel 
 to slip unawares into the seat of judgment, in which case 
 my preceding remarks would not only be highly indecorous 
 but entirely out of place, let us not forget how and why our 
 judges are appointed according to the all- wise decrees of Parlia- 
 ment. In the words of the late Lord Chief Justice Coleridge 
 during the Tichborne trial, " perhaps it will surprise " the 
 more ingenuous of my readers if they were to hear that nearly 
 all our judges are and have been usually selected, not for their 
 judicial qualities, nor for any domestic or public virtues which 
 they are supposed to possess, but solely by virtue of an extremely 
 vulgar if business-like bargain between the Ministry of the day 
 and any loud-voiced, self-assertive pushing barrister who has 
 kindly consented to curtail his fees by brow-beating the Oppo- 
 sition as a change from cross-examining witnesses. To comment 
 upon this source of recruitment seems superfluous. By what 
 process of reasoning it can be expected that a man who by 
 brow-beating timid witnesses, bullying judges or juries, or 
 lying with greater plausibility and shamelessness than his fellows 
 has acquired notoriety at the Bar or in the columns of the 
 sensation-seeking penny papers, should for these reasons be 
 considered suitable material for a Judge to grow out of, or how 
 a man who has ground his wits perennially to prove that black 
 is white or vice versa, should develop a strong instinct for
 
 122 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 abstract Honesty and Justice, is surely a problem that would 
 absorb the united wit of a British Parliament to solve. 
 
 And here it is incumbent upon us to consider the causes of 
 an undoubted British peculiarity without which the numerous 
 expenses attending, I will not say the attainment, but the 
 hopeless pursuit of justice cannot be fully understood ; for even 
 at the risk of forestalling what must fall under another chapter, 
 I ask, " How is it that we Englishmen allow ourselves not only 
 to be trampled down but overridden by those who please to term 
 themselves the learned Professions, and the Press, their fervent 
 protector and never-failing mouthpiece?" The true British 
 Pharisee will at once exclaim in the familiar language of the 
 Press, the Stump, and the Senate, " Our Judges are more 
 honest, our Barristers .are more capable, our Directors are 
 cleverer, our Engineers more able, and as for our Press, well let 
 it speak for itself." Thus the voice of Cant ; but what says the 
 " still small voice " of the British conscience which emerges 
 somewhere in the region of his breeches pocket, and whispers hi 
 accents low and mild, " But, do we get something better for our 
 money in England than elsewhere ? " Or is it the Anglo-Saxon 
 race alone that has the monopoly of skill and honesty ? 
 
 What proportion these two opinions bear to each other it is 
 difficult to say, but nothing is more certain than that the Anglo- 
 Saxon is more sensitive than any other to what he ludicrously 
 terms " Public Opinion," which he fondly believes to be the sum 
 of Private Opinion, while in reality it is nothing more than the 
 maunderings of illiterate and irresponsible scribblers, whose pens 
 are at the service of the men who pay them best. Thus the 
 apparent opinion of .the British Public, as we have before 
 noticed when treating of education, is the very opposite of the 
 real opinion of the British Public ; for the simple reason that the 
 former represents the echoes of the Press, which again are the 
 paid echoes of the voices of the parties interested, while the 
 real Public Opinion, that is, the sum of the real opinions of the 
 greater number of English men and women, if they do not serve 
 the aforesaid interests, lack expression in the Public Press and 
 consequently reach the public ear by reflected paths, which 
 reduce the murmurs of the many to an insignificant whisper. 
 Nor is this all. The necessary result of this reaction is so
 
 ABOUT LAW 123 
 
 obvious to all those " who have eyes to see and ears to hear,'-' 
 that, since the Press has loomed so heavily upon Anglo-Saxon 
 peoples as to give reason to believe that in the end it will 
 press them to death it has obtained such an ascendency over 
 the minds and hearts and brains of these nations, that while 
 we can truly boast that " We never will be slaves " (vide " Eule 
 Britannia " passim), Americans and English are, in point of fact, 
 truth, and experience, more subject to Public Opinion (as it is 
 termed, but which, in the light of the above explanation, may 
 more truly be styled the Slavery of the Press) than any people 
 on the face of the globe. 
 
 At the risk of making what may seem an irrelevant digres- 
 sion, I was greatly struck, many years ago, by hearing the 
 well-known Composer Cav. Fabio Campana, when inveighing 
 against that absence of taste with which unfortunately we are 
 universally credited by the hungry foreign parasites who 
 "batten" on our guineas, say " Zee English zay know nozing 
 about art and zay have no taste. All they know ees vat their 
 papers say. They look in their papers, ' Herr Eumstek finest 
 pianist in the world, let us go clap him. Have you heard 
 Signorina Frisihairi ? No ? Then you must go. All the papers 
 rave about her,' " etc. Naturally I defended my fellow-country- 
 men vigorously according to my wont from this grave imputation, 
 nor had I in those days the slightest suspicion that such a 
 failing could truthfully be imputed to them. Several other 
 excited foreigners immediately took up the theme and succes- 
 sively quoted such striking instances in proof of their assertions 
 that I was, in the words of the famous Jeames of Punch 
 " completely non-plushed." As years rolled on and my acquain- 
 tance with the world of Art and the great world outside 
 became more extensive, I was forced to the painful conclusion 
 that whatever our merits may be, and however determined we 
 Britons are " never, never, never 'to be slaves," it is not impos- 
 sible that the paradox can be explained by the well-known 
 words of Hamlet, " Methinks he doth profess too loudly." 
 In sooth your Englishman, though bold as a lion in the physical 
 order, is usually in the moral and social " as mild a mannered 
 man as ever cut a throat." Set him to scale a mountain's height 
 or " seek the reputation at the cannon's mouth," or to keep the
 
 124 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 enemy at bay in a forlorn hope, and he will acquit himself like 
 a man ; but put him in a ball-room in the centre of quizzing 
 maidens and inquisitive dowagers and he will wince before their 
 silly gossip and prying eyes and wish that the earth would 
 swallow him up. Or again, set him among his fellows in his 
 club, or public-house, or in the market-place, I care not where, 
 and compare him with his Continental brethren. His courage 
 deserts him, his knees tremble under him. Though he boils 
 over with ever so noble a sentiment, or his breast thrills with 
 ever so cruel a wrong, he must, above all, be cold and correct. 
 He must keep himself well in hand ; he must assume an indiffer- 
 ence which he does not feel ; he must bottle up his emotion. He 
 does not DAEE display love, poetry, sentiment, enthusiasm, 
 sorrow, or indignation. He must preserve a neutral gravity, and 
 tone himself down to the grey tint of dull British uniformity. 
 
 Endless explanations have been volunteered of this our 
 national weakness. Some suggest modesty, others self-conscious- 
 ness, etc., etc. Does it not seem more probable and more con- 
 sistent that the explanation is as above ? Whether from defects 
 of education, or personality, or race, it is difficult to say ; suffice 
 it that it does exist, and that from this vice our trans- Atlantic 
 cousins are almost entirely free, nay, I might say that they sin 
 in the opposite direction. But let that pass. The very name of 
 cowardice, like untruthfulness, causes the true Briton's blood to 
 boil within his veins and each particular hair to stand on end 
 like quills upon a fretful porcupine. Yet cowardice it is, call it 
 what you may. 
 
 But it will possibly be urged, the connection is not so apparent 
 between the subject of our theme and this admitted self- 
 consciousness or social cowardice, or whatever it may be which 
 the foreigners ever gibe at and resent, deeming it pride, morgue, 
 spleen, and what-not, which they say sets up an insular barrier 
 between the Briton and his Continental congeners ; nevertheless, 
 I submit that it is only a varying manifestation of the same 
 weakness. Englishmen do not dare to speak the truth as they 
 see it. They would rather follow any lie, any impostor, any- 
 false teacher if he has a good following or is " taken up " by 
 the newspapers, than run ever so slight a risk of being in the 
 painful position of an unpopular minority or drawing the public
 
 ABOUT LAW 125 
 
 eye upon them or being the object of social disapproval ; for this, 
 alas ! is the British touchstone of truth, honour, virtue and 
 wisdom, and beyond it lies Gehennah ! 
 
 There is no need of a non-lawyer to set himself to prove that 
 our procedure is the most cumbrous, the most disconnected, the 
 most illogical of any civil state in Europe, since so many judges 
 have expressed themselves very fully thereon, and displayed 
 their disgust in the plainest, if least judicial language. The 
 effect of all this is that however simple the "action" and how- 
 ever common and hackneyed the suit, for one unskilled in law 
 it is almost impossible without recurring to the assistance of one 
 accustomed to practise in the Courts, to know in what court the 
 case shall be tried, to whom application must be made to try the 
 suit, and what are the forms required to bring the matter before 
 the Courts. Even our trans-Atlantic cousins, whose adherence to 
 our worn-out forms is a touching tribute either to their loyalty 
 or imbecility, have long ago swept away the ridiculous practice 
 of compelling their client to put his case before one man in the 
 vain hope that that man so confided in will be able to explain 
 his case to another person yclept a Counsel or Barrister, in 
 the insane expectation of the third intervener having a remote 
 chance of explaining the whole business and carrying conviction 
 to the ear of a fourth person called a Judge, or twelve other 
 persons called a Jury, or both. 
 
 There are few of my readers that have not lost or won money 
 on a horse-race. Have they ever reflected on the extraordinary 
 parity between British law and the British turf ? Few there 
 are, moreover, unless the very young, who, gaining a better 
 insight into the methods of the turf, do not abandon, in disgust, 
 an institution which promises so little advantage to the honest 
 and offers such enormous prospects to the rogue. The truth is 
 that the investor in the game of law is on all-fours with the 
 foolish investor in a horse-race. The similarity is almost 
 complete between the two conditions of things. How shall we 
 expect, with any reasonable chance of success, the horse we 
 back to win through its merits, when, however capable the horse 
 may be, there are the various and, possibly, divergent interests 
 of owner and trainer and jockey to contend with, all or any of 
 which may upset the bettor's calculation ? I will not venture to
 
 126 ARE WB A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 carry my parallel as far as the Judge, lest it should be said that 
 I cast an imputation on the honesty of a being in whose wisdom 
 and purity every right-thinking Briton has implicit confidence. 
 Suffice it to say that even admitting that our judges on the race- 
 course or the bench are equally impeccable, is it not self- 
 evident that human testimony being such as it is, and granting 
 what everybody must admit and all can bear witness to, namely, 
 that the simplest event passing through several mouths is apt to 
 assume a totally different form from the original it follows with 
 regard to a story, plaint or contention which passes through the 
 hands of suitor, solicitor and barrister before it reaches the judge 
 or jury, each of whom may form a different opinion and each 
 swayed by conflicting interests, passions and prejudices, that 
 the chance of the ultimate triumph of justice is more than 
 problematic. 
 
 Setting aside technical details, without attempting to discuss 
 the more debatable points at issue, it may be briefly said that 
 the main difference between foreign and English methods of 
 law is a more logical division of subjects, a more exact definition 
 of rights and wrongs, and causes of action, a simplicity and 
 correctness of language which enables every educated foreigner, 
 nay, requires him, as an obligation of his position, to digest and 
 comprehend not only the exact limit of his rights as a citizen, 
 but the exact point at which his actions cease to be legal, as 
 well as the precise steps to be taken to redress his wrongs or 
 procure an enforcement of his rights. As to the conduct of 
 judicial business, the foreigner is marked by greater soberness 
 and self-restraint, the witnesses are treated with that marked 
 courtesy to which they are entitled as independent witnesses of 
 the truth, instead of being reckoned in the brutal British fashion 
 as men or women who have bound themselves for money to back a 
 particular view, a disability which at once strikes at the very 
 foundation of all conceptions of justice and propriety; and, above 
 all, barristers or pleading suitors are restrained by the judge 
 from exceeding the bounds of honesty and sobriety. The black- 
 guardliness of the British barrister and his coarse insinuations 
 would, abroad, be instantly repressed wherever exhibited. The 
 arguments used by both parties are handed in in writing, and 
 subject to the revision of each party ; the evidence given by
 
 ABOUT LAW 127 
 
 witnesses is also subject to deliberate revision by the witness 
 himself before being accepted as final, by which means the ever- 
 present danger of justice being frustrated by the cunning or 
 impudence, or intentional deception of the cross-examining 
 barrister, is avoided, and, finally, no witness but the one giving 
 evidence is permitted in the court at the same time, which is, 
 obviously, an excellent safeguard against the common and ever- 
 recurring danger of collusion among venal witnesses for the 
 purpose of compassing a common end. 
 
 Two things seem, above all, to strike the average non- 
 professional suitor with experience of the Law Courts. First, 
 that owing to the excessive and extraordinary care exhibited by 
 our Legislators in their legal methods and procedure in order to 
 prevent the possibility of a man who is innocent being con- 
 demned, the leaning of justice towards the criminal, or alleged 
 criminal to speak more correctly, is of such a patent, palpable, 
 self-advertised quality, that not only in England, but with even 
 greater certainty abroad, the wide impression prevails that a rogue 
 who knows a little law can snap his fingers at all risks what- 
 soever. The second is a corollary of the first. In order to 
 protect honest men from having their motives or character 
 impugned or their reputation damaged by interested or scheming 
 scoundrels, the Libel law is constructed in such a manner as to 
 make it more dangerous to expose a rogue or denounce a 
 scoundrel than it is to commit the original act of which he is 
 accused ; the result being, that partly from the operation of the 
 Libel law which may be broadly looked upon as the Palladium of 
 rogues or the Magna Charta of rascality, and partly from the 
 tenderness of the criminal law, which, contrary to the practice 
 of all other countries, lays down the rule that all men until 
 actually convicted, however strong the prima facie evidence may 
 be against them, must be treated with the same consideration as 
 if they were honest, the situation of a rogue is raised to such 
 an enviable pedestal as not only to affect the moral status of the 
 whole community, but serves to depress and discourage the well- 
 intentioned, while attracting evil-doers, pickpockets, revolutionary 
 cut- throats and seditious schemers to our unhappy country from 
 every part of the civilised world. 
 
 I know not if the greater number of Englishmen following
 
 128 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 Marx, Lassalle and Mazzini, find a noble consolation in the fact 
 that the dirty rags which are published in this land of the brave 
 and the free, upholding every bloodthirsty and filthy doctrine that 
 emanates from the mind of the basest of men, invariably do us 
 the honour to belaud us to the skies, and say that, indeed, in 
 England they find a home and a refuge which is denied (N.B. to 
 rogues) by the sanguinary despots of their own less hospitable 
 lands ; but nothing is more certain than that this free, if reckless 
 hospitality, which we pride ourselves upon extending to all the 
 miscreants of the earth, forms a serious bar to our effective 
 detection of crime. 
 
 In illustration of one of the views which I advance I cannot do 
 better than cite an example, since an acknowledged fact is often 
 worth a pocketful of theory. When residing at Spa in Belgium, 
 during the summer months I happened to be driving with an 
 English family who were staying in the same hotel, and in the 
 course of our drive we suffered a collision through a couple of 
 actresses whose acquaintance with the art of driving was of an 
 exceedingly elementary description, and who, being suddenly 
 faced with our larger equipage at a sharp turn in the road, 
 pulled the wrong rein, with the result that our carriage, which 
 was adhering tenaciously to our side of the road, came in contact 
 with their pony-carriage, and hurled them with remarkable 
 force and precision into the bushes that bordered the road. 
 Though no great damage was done to the fair damsels in ques- 
 tion, their anger and eloquent protestations rapidly assembled a 
 crowd, and having duly ascertained the names of their alleged 
 assailants they forthwith issued a warrant, and summoned us to 
 appear before the local Juge de Paix. Now, in England, there 
 would have been invariably a delay of a week or more before the 
 case could be heard, with corresponding annoyance, and possibly 
 expense to both parties. As to the vexation, insults, and 
 possible results of the cross-examination in a case of this sort 
 there is literally no limit in our " free and intelligent " English 
 Judicial system. Anticipating this, the two ladies who formed 
 our party (one of whom, being seated by the coachman, was well 
 qualified to repudiate the evidence of the complainants) regarding 
 their appearance in a Court of Justice as witnesses with a 
 manifest abhorrence and distrust bred of the experience of an
 
 ABOUT LAW 129 
 
 English Police Court, at first flatly refused to defend our cause 
 by presenting themselves as witnesses, preferring to pay all the 
 expenses of the damaged pony-carriage and the ladies' attire for 
 which a very considerable sum of money was claimed, declaring 
 their determination if pressed thereto to leave the gentlemen to 
 pay and fly to a distant clime. With much persuasion, however, 
 and explanation of how these things are managed on the Con- 
 tinent, I induced the fair members of our party to enter the lists 
 against the still unappeased actresses, who filled the town with 
 their clamour and objurgations. 
 
 Now for the information of the more innocent of the fair sex, 
 I may at once say, that as a matter of everyday practice, 
 when a young lady is brought forward as a witness in any 
 indifferent matter in an English Court of Justice, and especially 
 in a Police Court, nothing is more usual than for the cross- 
 examining barrister that is the individual who attempts to 
 shake the evidence of witnesses by playing upon their absence 
 of mind, nervousness, or carelessness of statement to invent 
 imaginary charges against her virtue or her respectability for the 
 sole purpose of disconcerting her and throwing doubt upon her 
 evidence. Here, however, by the calm, orderly, and refined 
 manner in which the suit was conducted, the groundless fears of 
 the ladies of our party were quickly allayed, and a quick and 
 triumphant conclusion to the case crowned our satisfaction by 
 a favourable verdict in spite of the strong popular feelings which 
 had been aroused by the loquacious followers of Thespis. 
 
 Again, the theory of English Law, which lays down the rule 
 that the Judge must not interfere in any plea, language, argu- 
 ment, or device which the suitor or his barrister may raise in 
 behalf of his cause has resulted in a license, a ribaldry, and a 
 wrangling, with not unfrequent exhibitions of blackguardism of 
 which no foreign Court can show a parallel, which must not only 
 react against British respect for the Law, but undoubtedly acts 
 as a strong deterrent in preventing respectable persons from 
 entering its precincts. 
 
 To such an extent is this carried that I have myself seen the 
 leading counsel of a Chancery Court, after being distinctly and 
 categorically rebutted in his attempt to prove an illegal act on 
 the part of his opponent, not only deliberately repeat in his
 
 130 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 concluding speech the facts which had been shown to be entirely 
 false, but on the principles of the French satirist, who advised 
 critics to " throw plenty of mud, as some is sure to stick," 
 avenged himself by founding on the disproved facts a most 
 damaging charge against the defendant, to which, by the rules of 
 procedure, his adversary was unable to reply. 
 
 It is surely needless to point out that a barrister's repeated 
 allegation of fact after the same had been shown to be utterly 
 false, was in the first place to insult the Judge (which apparently 
 in an English Court goes for nothing) by insinuating that he was 
 capable of being deceived by such simple and patent manoeuvres ; 
 secondly, to ignore the limits which even legal morality assigns 
 to the English advocate, of confining himself to his own opinion 
 or the strongest colouring that can be given to the same without 
 an absolute distortion of fact ; thirdly, to lie, and when foiled in 
 the attempt, to again resort to the same lie when there was no 
 excuse for ignorance, was to exhibit himself as an inveterate and 
 intentional liar for the direct purpose of frustrating Justice ; and 
 finally, worse than all, to openly display (whether at the instiga- 
 tion of his client or his own it matters not) a determination to 
 avenge his inability to gain his cause by a calumnious falsehood 
 against the character of his vanquisher making up a galaxy of 
 blackguardliness of which the British Bar, as the French say, 
 alone possesses the secret. 
 
 It is difficult to see why the morality of the Assembly-room, 
 the Senate, or the Drawing-room should give way to the neces- 
 sities or supposed necessities of the Judicial Tribunal : for while, 
 undoubtedly, a speaker or advocate may with impunity allege in 
 a public assembly what is false without incurring the imputation 
 of a liar, so soon as it is proved upon scrutiny that he is mis- 
 informed or in error as to his facts, any persistence or repetition 
 of the same is equivalent to a public declaration that he is not 
 only a liar, but an intentional and inveterate liar ; if he proceeds 
 still further to found an argument upon the aforesaid lie to the 
 detriment of a third person, he stands convicted of blackguardism 
 of the worst type ; while, where his opponent is either absent or 
 by procedure unable to reply in his own defence, what before 
 was an act of blackguardism pure and simple, attains the 
 proportion of an act of cowardly blackguardism, which no 
 circumstances can excuse or palliate.
 
 ABOUT LAW 131 
 
 Nor is it easy to see how the purposes of Justice can be served 
 by such exhibitions as these, which are of such common occur- 
 rence among our British lawyers as to cause the law to stink 
 in the nostrils of the people ; nor can it be advantageous that 
 the more orderly, quiet, and respectable members of the com- 
 munity not only account it a disgrace to give evidence, or to be 
 in any way distantly connected with any proceeding in a Court of 
 Justice, but openly avow their opinion to this effect, to the great 
 increase of blackmail on the part of rogues, who take advantage 
 of such indifference and dislike to threaten legal proceedings for 
 the purpose of illegitimate gain. 
 
 Finally, as to the looseness of phraseology, which has long 
 been our curse and our disgrace, since no codification or revolution 
 has been attempted from a time in our history when a totally 
 different language was in use, such are ths circumlocutions, 
 useless repetitions, and to such a point is it thought necessary to 
 join to modern laws and settled language the more exact (but 
 wholly technical, and at the present hour almost unintelligible) 
 Norman-French of the past, that the simplest contracts, deeds, 
 instruments and conveyances have to be placed in professional 
 hands for execution, while the same instruments, even among 
 our American kinsmen, who have adhered as closely as possible 
 to our English law but refuse to tolerate our archaic verbiage, 
 have been greatly modified and abbreviated. 
 
 Thus we suffer from the twofold evils of being compelled to 
 call in professional assistance upon the most trivial, occasions, 
 and of devoting sheepskins galore, with corresponding engross- 
 ing charges, to matters that in the more fortunate Eepublic 
 would be comprised in a half-sheet of note paper. 
 
 Again, what can be more totally opposed to the successful 
 prosecution of felony, and the successful redressment of wrongs 
 than the system of leaving the prosecution of all crime to 
 private effort and enterprise, when all civilised nations, except 
 our own, have long since agreed that the first and most 
 elementary duty of a Government is to find out, pursue, and 
 punish crime at the expense of the State, and reduce the 
 expenses of private suits to the lowest cost compatible with 
 efficiency ? Nor is this the only point at which the excessive 
 liberty sought and obtained by Anglo-Saxons here, as well as
 
 132 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 in the United States, proves a stumbling-block to the enjoy- 
 ment of our rights and privileges. Probably no more fatal 
 blunder and one more far-reaching in its effects, can be 
 imagined than that of neglecting to enumerate, register, and 
 classify the subjects of this realm. In all other countries 
 professing order and civilisation the State reserves to itself 
 the right of regulating these matters with a view to possessing 
 a clear and definite notion respecting the name, age, appear- 
 ance, parentage, occupation and domicile of every member of the 
 realm, and requires that each subject should register any 
 important occurrence or change in their method of living. So 
 that while, abroad, the police have every facility for detecting 
 crime, or tracing the domicile, or passage of criminals, through 
 the Domiciliary Registers which are kept in every Police 
 Office; and while, moreover, every hotel or lodging-house 
 keeper is compelled to notify or draw up on forms provided 
 by the Police the name and full particulars of every inmate, 
 and every householder to report to the Police the name and 
 quality, and, if necessary, give information respecting the 
 habits of any or all of its lodgers, our own Police are 
 reduced in the detection of crime to the resources of 
 cunning or accident, supplemented by a reckless and most 
 expensive use of the public telegraphs and telephones, 
 which usually begin as they end, in vain expense to the persons 
 interested in punishing the criminal. As for the facilities 
 afforded to crime in every department of business transactions, 
 it is not an exaggeration to say that liberty is here carried to 
 such an excess that any crime committed in the course of 
 business is usually regarded as a private matter of difference 
 in accounts, of which the Law, if sufficiently highly paid, is 
 willing to take cognizance ; though among men of business it 
 is well known that no recourse to Law is ever made with any 
 prospect of success, and is consequently rarely, if ever, 
 resorted to. 
 
 We have only to examine the daily reports of cases in 
 regard to Company defalcations, and the bogus companies erected 
 by designing rogues for the sole purpose of abstracting money 
 upon false pretences, to discover that so wide is the latitude 
 permitted by the Law, and so complete the freedom as to
 
 ABOOT LAW 133 
 
 monetary transactions between individuals, that there is 
 scarcely any roguery or any method of plundering that cannot 
 be safely and profitably conducted, provided certain legal 
 forms are complied with, and certain well-known limits are 
 not overstepped. Of such actions not the least striking result 
 is, that oftentimes it is not the aggrieved creditor, but the 
 successful robber, who, if well versed in Company Law, not 
 only sets his unhappy victims at complete defiance, but is 
 enabled by a judicious payment to the reporters, coupled with 
 other well-known legal tricks and devices, to emerge from the 
 dock with flying colours and the encomiums of the daily 
 Press. 
 
 One of the most fruitful sources of evil, and one which 
 affords the easiest opening for wholesale robbery, by companies 
 as well as bogus firms, shops, and undertakings of all kinds, 
 is the facility for personation or anonymous trading under 
 fictitious names. As a natural corollary of this practice, it is 
 common for rascally promoters and brokers of swindling com- 
 panies to create fictitious shareholders by the simple process 
 of passing large cheques through their hands. These clerks 
 or unconscious instruments of roguery are duly entered for 
 thousands or tens of thousands of fictitious capital, thereby 
 inducing unsuspecting investors to believe in the stability of 
 the enterprise. Such and similar methods of roguery, having 
 never been specially legislated against, are among the com- 
 monest means adopted for decoying capital into the hands of 
 unscrupulous scoundrels, whom the Law, however large the 
 scale of plunder, is entirely unable to reach. 
 
 Few practices of English Law would seem more immoral in 
 their tendency than the lenity that is exhibited towards Negli- 
 gence of every sort. Manifestly in a savage state of life 
 carefulness is not to be expected. On the other hand a complex 
 and intricate civilisation demands, like a delicate piece of 
 machinery, the highest care in order to prevent grave accidents, 
 loss of life, and serious injury to property. I might cite here 
 an incident which is fresh in everyone's memory, by which Long 
 Acre was almost wholly destroyed, and hundreds of thousands 
 of pounds wasted, for the sole reason that a careless servant of a 
 motor company in that street, though repeatedly warned of the
 
 134 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 danger, thought fit to paddle about with a hand-lamp in a small lake 
 of petroleum. It is unnecessary as a matter of equity to demon- 
 strate the enormous injustice which results from such reckless 
 carelessness, and it might be safely predicted at the same time 
 that little or no punishment would follow the crime. Equally 
 obvious is it that such crimes will increase in number in direct 
 proportion to their supposed immunity from punishment, and 
 that the higher and more intricate our social organisation, the 
 greater the necessity of protecting its members against negligence, 
 not only because its recurrence will necessarily be more frequent, 
 but also because more fatal in its results. 
 
 The Napoleonic Code, adopted by most civilised countries of 
 Europe, provides a punishment of from two to five years' 
 imprisonment, besides a fine proportionate to the wealth of the 
 offender, for such cases of accidental homicide as would in 
 England go entirely unpunished. Two cases that have occurred 
 within the last few years, which received no punishment whatever, 
 cannot but fail to impress most unfavourably the public sense of 
 fitness and justice. 
 
 In one case, a young gentleman of one of our oldest northern 
 families, who was reading during vacation, being taunted and 
 jeered at by a farm servant, a girl of eighteen, for coming in 
 empty-handed from shooting, was shot dead by the young 
 sportsman ; no evidence being given which could elucidate the 
 matter beyond that they were known to be on friendly terms, the 
 youth was acquitted and discharged without the slightest punish- 
 ment of any kind. His friends, however, took a different view 
 of the matter, and it was an open secret that the young man in 
 question was of such a violent temper and reckless disposition 
 that there seemed very little doubt that the taunt of the servant 
 girl had angered him to the extent of taking her life. 
 
 A similar case which occurred recently was that of a footman 
 who was discovered, by the rest of the household who ran to the 
 spot on hearing a shot, with a discharged gun in his hand, and a 
 fellow-servant, a girl of nineteen or twenty with whom he was 
 known to be on friendly if not intimate terms, mortally wounded 
 beside him. The same pretext was advanced in both cases, viz. 
 not knowing that the gun was loaded and wishing to frighten 
 the girl. There was clearly more excuse for the footman, who
 
 ABOUT LAW 135 
 
 presumably might be less experienced in the use of arms. In both 
 cases the same plea was admitted and no punishment followed. 
 
 Now in France, and indeed wherever the Napoleonic Code is 
 in force, the Judge would have the power of inflicting the heaviest 
 fine consistent with the position of the offender, besides imprison- 
 ment from two to five years, which there is every reason to 
 suppose would have been inflicted in these cases. These are 
 not rare cases but rather of every-day occurrence. Probably 
 ten such take place in England for one in France, partly from the 
 universal cheapness and abundance of firearms and the absence 
 of legislation confining firearms to adults, a useful piece of 
 legislation often attempted in England, but never carried through 
 Parliament. In all cases where there is no evidence of motive for 
 killing, the Judge will rarely, if ever, inflict any penalty whatever. 
 Obviously this condition of things is one which places the public 
 safety upon an extremely insecure basis. The wild, reckless 
 youth, the drunkard whose escapades in motors, hotel bars, and 
 public houses, and every place of public resort are so well known 
 through the Press to all newspaper readers are practically 
 absolved from all obligations and the most elemental application 
 of public law. They have only to persuade the Judge and the 
 Public that they had no special desire to take any particular life 
 in order to obtain immunity from the most reckless actions with 
 the fatal result, so far as public safety is concerned, that self- 
 control becomes for such persons not only unnecessary, but 
 is necessarily never acquired, being in England wholly 
 superfluous ! 
 
 There is another practice of Law which is universal abroad 
 and which might well be imitated at home. I have often 
 remarked that it is not the unpleasant feature of the case or 
 action which leaves a stain of prejudice against those who resort 
 to our Tribunals so much as the consequential or indirect 
 comments, often as fanciful as they are hypocryphal, of an ill- 
 guided, sensation-mongering Press. For a small fee a suitor can 
 obtain a completely false view of his case in Court put before 
 the public, and nothing is more common than to hear a report of 
 the " case for the plaintiff" to the total exclusion of any mention 
 of" the defendant. The heaviest penalties, I submit, should be 
 incurrible by every newspaper who publishes the statements of
 
 136 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 one side without that of the other. Secondly, no name should be 
 published in a newspaper, however grave the charge, until he is 
 committed for trial. This is so flagrant a practice and one so 
 repugnant to the first element of justice that only the thickest- 
 headed of nations, or perhaps it would be better to say only a 
 nation which voluntarily submits to the slavery of the Press, 
 would consent to a practice which, while it affords in the course 
 of the year more sensational paragraphs and is the cause of more 
 special editions, and rouses public attention to the great profit of 
 the newspapers beyond anything else, must surely be admitted 
 to run counter to every principle of humanity and justice. You 
 can scarcely walk down Piccadilly without seeing on a poster 
 *' Another peer charged before the magistrates for criminal 
 assault," or, " Frightful outrage by a Baronet," or, " Minister's 
 son charged with fraud." Now what is the rationale of this? 
 Simply that a British or American newspaper is licensed as a 
 matter of course by a stupid and unreflecting public to make 
 what money it can out of disasters, crimes, accidents, and every 
 phase of human suffering, which it dishes up and serves to its 
 customers in the manner it thinks most likely to please their 
 palates. Profoundly immoral as this is in itself, it is surely still 
 more inexcusable when, as in many cases, the offence is merely 
 a technical one, as of a friend of mine whom I saw on the posters 
 not long ago in the guise of " A Wiltshire Baronet charged with 
 homicide." Here I confess, in common with many of his friends, 
 to have supposed that he had been guilty of a very serious crime, 
 and was much amused to see at a later date that the so-called 
 homicide was purely technical, arising out of the fact that a 
 carter using one of his (the Baronet's) farm roads after dark, 
 had driven into a hole and broken his neck, whereupon an 
 enterprising pettifogger of the neighbourhood had given a-dvice 
 that an action for technical homicide would lie against the 
 Baronet for culpable neglect the same being subsequently 
 rebutted and cleared up by the discovery that the hole had been 
 made by the parish itself for the purpose of getting materials 
 for mending the roads ! 
 
 Abroad, in such a case as this, ample remedy would be 
 afforded. For if any proof of misstatement was afforded 
 against the newspaper concerned, the editor would have to publish
 
 ABOUT LAW 137 
 
 at least three times in his newspaper any explanation which 
 the injured person saw fit, however lengthy, to insert. And if it 
 can be shown that for the purpose of selling a " second edition," 
 the name of some well-known person is dragged into a disgraceful 
 connection without the amplest proof or necessity an event of 
 every-day occurrence in London heavy damages, in proportion 
 to his position, could be recovered as well as a full apology thrice 
 repeated in a prominent part of the offending newspaper. Every 
 day we see the grossest attacks made upon well-known persons 
 with a prominent heading, and a few days afterwards we shall 
 possibly see a denial in an obscure part of the newspaper from 
 the solicitor of the complainant which is not read by perhaps 
 one-tenth of those who had read the original charge. Especially 
 useful would this rule be in the cases of juvenile delinquents of 
 good family, whose life and prospects are often blighted by a 
 childish escapade which is prominently blazoned forth in all the 
 newspapers of the land, until the matter comes to be sifted in 
 a Court of Justice, when the bubble is pricked, and the so-called 
 crime or charge imputed to them turns out to be nothing but a 
 boyish freak or an ebullition of youth. In all such cases abroad it 
 would be considered an indictable offence to divulge even so 
 much as the initial, and even those few French papers who, I 
 regret to say, have been lately led into bad ways by the example 
 of the English and American Press so far as to cut jokes and 
 make fun of the police cases, dare not run counter to the 
 rule, and consequently are deprived of the personal flavour 
 and that special element of spice which is so much appreciated in 
 Anglo-Saxon countries, and which, it may be safely said, is 
 nothing less than a gold mine to newspaper proprietors. 
 
 It has been said that every nation has the law which it 
 deserves. If this be true of monarchical states, or states where 
 the power resides in the ruler alone, what excuse can be made 
 for a purely democratic country like England, of whom it may 
 truly be said that " We are the State," " We are the sovereign 
 people ! " 
 
 The French boast continually of their Liberty, Fraternity and 
 Equality, and never tire of calling themselves the sovereign 
 people. But those who have been able to look behind the 
 scenes and examine the real foundation of power in that land
 
 138 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 and the sources and machinery of their administration, will 
 easily perceive that the Great Napoleon in this, as in a thou- 
 sand other ways, while giving to the people the shadow, was 
 far too wise to yield the substance of authority. While reserv- 
 ing for himself the place of Mainspring in the machinery of the 
 State to which every inferior post within the Empire was sub- 
 ordinate, each so cunningly subject to the officer above him, 
 "maire de commune " under "sous preset," and "sous prefet " 
 under " preset," the "commune" under the " arrondissement," 
 and that under the " Conseil d'etat " the real power was 
 centred in the one man at the wheel, the lowest post of all 
 alone being elective. In order to tickle the public fancy the 
 pretence was invariably set forth on every occasion that the 
 "sovereign people" was the arbiter of its own destiny and the 
 framer of its own laws, while, in fact, it was nothing but a care- 
 fully-dressed puppet which, while directed by the strenuous hand 
 of a despot, was permitted " to lay the flattering unction to its 
 soul " that it was indeed the master of its own destiny. 
 
 In the domain of Law, however, this centralisation or hierar- 
 chical administration seems to be the most effective method for 
 enforcing that absolute equality of treatment and uniformity 
 which is necessary to secure the happiness of a people, providing 
 always its mainspring be not tampered with by the Executive 
 Power. 
 
 Mr. Bodley, whose work upon contemporary France has met 
 with much success, astonished, if not disgusted his fellow- 
 countrymen by the lavish praise which he dispenses upon the 
 Napoleonic system of administration and law, which de does not 
 hesitate to say secures the most effective guarantee of life and 
 property. The moment chosen for this paean of praise seemed 
 to the British Public the more inopportune, since falling as it 
 did when British Cant, outvying itself in an exhibition of 
 national self-glorification, carefully fomented by the omnipotent 
 Jewish Press, was roaring itself hoarse in rage and indignation at 
 what was found to be a scandalous failure of justice in the Dreyfus 
 case. 
 
 In fairness it must be added that Mr. Bodley proceeds to 
 remark that in this as in other ways the cloven foot is shown, 
 by the excessive facilities afforded to the police of pursuing the
 
 ABOUT LAW 139 
 
 ends of justice, which may, unfortunately, too often be used in 
 the interests of political tyranny, by domiciliary visits, the open- 
 ing of private letters, and the examination of private papers, 
 which, while giving a great arm for the detection of fraud and 
 crime, undoubtedly form part of that astute policy which, under 
 the simplest democratic forms, allows despotic methods to peep 
 through. 
 
 It should be remarked, however, that in its main features the 
 Napoleonic Code and its system of civil and criminal jurisdic- 
 tion, which together form a perfect whole, has been ardently 
 embraced bj r every civilised nation in Europe, since it has been 
 found to be the only combination of effective police and criminal 
 oversight consistent with public security, combined with a 
 reasonable prospect of detection of crime. 
 
 In England, however, which by reason of the vicious circle 
 above alluded to, be it action or reaction, or cause and effect, the 
 Business and Jurisprudence of the country has sunk into a 
 morass of verbiage, Norman-English phraseology, disused 
 methods, and a hotch-potch of common and civil law, to say 
 nothing of local customs, no escape seems possible to us from the 
 slavery under which we groan, not only by reason of the neces- 
 sary intervention of the lawyer in every transaction of business, 
 barter, sale, and land conveyance, as by the hopelessness of any 
 real reform short of a national revolution. Nor is it only the 
 enormous number of legal partisans interested in upholding our 
 present chaotic condition which tends to maintain the status 
 quo. There is also to be considered the inability of the non-legal 
 portion of the people to bring an effective reform to so highly 
 technical and complex a subject. 
 
 No nation can call itself truly civilised whose code of laws 
 is not reduced to the utmost simplicity of expression, so that it is 
 not only capable of being understood by the meanest of its 
 subjects, but stated in language of such precision that there 
 shall be no reason why its meaning and provisions should not 
 be within the reach of every individual however ignorant or 
 mean. The morality of every-day life should be directly 
 inculcated and taught by the study of the law : and conversely 
 the knowledge of the laws of the country should be co-extensive 
 with the moral and social relations between man and man.
 
 140 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 The other " sine qua non " is Absolute Equality, and Certainty 
 of Execution. So long as our laws are framed in such a way 
 as that no man can be subject to any interference or challenge 
 until a jury of his fellow-men have convicted or acquitted him, 
 and in no case is the suspected required to clear himself of the 
 charges brought against him, while the accuser is compelled, at 
 an obvious disadvantage, to prove, not only every step and item 
 of the wrong he suffers, but to do so at his own expense without 
 any assistance from outside, so long shall the law of England 
 lean rather to the guilty than the innocent, and so long shall the 
 people of England regard the law rather as the friend of the 
 wrong-doer than the protector of the innocent. 
 
 Thus, to return to our earlier proposition, we may safely say 
 that if it is true that a nation in the long run obtains the laws 
 which it deserves, Englishmen are reduced to this dilemma, that 
 they are either the most indifferent and dull-witted people that 
 the world ever saw, since as a body they profess to be satisfied 
 with the existing state of things or, at any rate, to despair of a 
 better ; while the second alternative would seem to be that we 
 are willing to endure this anomalous and uncertain condition of 
 the law and detection of crime because each one of us is more 
 willing to secure safety for himself in the hour of need than 
 truly desirous of purging the community of its objectionable 
 contents. 
 
 Nor does the evil stop here. For as the proverb tells us that 
 a nation in effect is the master of its own destinies, from an 
 observation of the evils of uncertain law and the fatal divorce 
 between society and law I believe that there is no more ruinous 
 tendency and one more sure to bring about the downfall of 
 public spirit and public morality, as its immediate and necessary 
 consequences. For let it never be forgotten that every nation 
 being composed of individuals, no nation can hope to be better 
 nor can its aspirations rise higher than those of the majority of 
 its contents. It is thus only by each in his measure striving 
 to obtain the highest measure of justice and security, 
 in so far as it is compatible with the happiness of the 
 greatest number, that a free nation can work out its destiny and 
 follow the path in its allotted orbit to progress and civilisation. 
 Let us bear in mind that among all nations, however high their
 
 ABOUT LAW 141 
 
 resolve and lofty their spirit when thirsting to be free, no sooner 
 has the stimulus of slavery or other depressing cause passed 
 away than luxury creeps in, and the love of liberty and high 
 sentiments and noble aims give way to that love of comfort 
 and well-being which, alas ! we in England hold above all most 
 dear. And as the nations of old have passed away after having 
 attained the highest rank in material wealth and power, so- 
 surely, if history can be trusted, unless we mend our ways and 
 seek the noblest national aims by the noblest paths, we shall 
 pass away like Babylon and Jerusalem, Nineveh and Memphis,, 
 leaving no trace behind. 
 
 We are told (by the lawyers, of course) that more judges are 
 wanted ; that the courts are blocked and that the public suffer 
 grievously therefrom. Quite true. There is no end to John 
 Bull's suffering at the hands of the lawyers but not from the 
 need of more, but of less Law and lawyers. Laws and lawyers 
 and judges have to be multiplied because there is no certainty, 
 uniformity, or principle in our laws. Therefore suitors constantly 
 resort to law in England, to try their luck, or to find out " what 
 the law is " on this or that matter. Hence scores of useless 
 lawsuits, and of still more futile appeals. To give examples 
 there is no law better founded i.e. if any English law can 
 properly be said to be founded at all than that the life tenant 
 of a settled estate may not fell the timber which serves to shelter 
 or adorn the park, grounds, or mansion without the consent of 
 his heir yet, lately, when I had occasion to restrain a female 
 relative who had been ignorantly advised by a designing petti- 
 fogger to infringe this well-known rule I discovered that 
 Chancery could only interfere in my favour for such a period as 
 would enable us to fight the matter out in the courts as it 
 subsequently was, to the great content and gain of the lawyers 
 and the loss of many thousands to ourselves during the following 
 two or three years, until I was able to extort a reluctant decision 
 in my favour to what was regarded by all parties as a foregone 
 conclusion. 
 
 Probably no law is better known, or oftener acted upon, than 
 the duty of the public authority to warn the owners of trees 
 overhanging highways to lop those which may endanger wayfarers,, 
 and in cases of neglect to cause them to be lopped at the expense-
 
 142 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of the owner. Yet only a few months ago a Brompton magis- 
 trate distinguished himself by holding the owner of a garden 
 overlooking an out-of-the way lane in Kensington to be answer- 
 able for a serious mishap to the conductor of a public omnibus 
 passing that way during a temporary blockade of the ordinary 
 route, who had been unfortunately pushed down the stairs back- 
 wards by a small projecting branch and seriously injured. It was 
 admitted that no omnibus ever plied along that lane, that the 
 owner had received no notice or warning to lop his trees to an 
 exceptional height, that the offending branch was no thicker than 
 a man's finger and situate 14 feet above tbe roadway thus 
 allowing ample room for all but tall men walking about upon 
 omnibuses. Nevertheless, as nothing but a costly series of 
 appeals would have availed to apportion the blame and put the 
 resulting cost upon the right shoulders and the sufferer being 
 advised, as usual, to rest content with his first loss the decision 
 went the round of the papers as a nine days' wonder of British 
 jurisprudence and " ut mos est inter Britannos " the lawyers 
 were enabled thenceforth to begin all over again, as if no such 
 rule had ever existed. 
 
 It is perhaps "flogging a dead horse" to cite further cases, 
 but if further proofs were needed to show that it is not more 
 judges but better laws that are required, I would point to a 
 recent case, where a local Solomon having mulcted heavily the 
 owner of an inconsiderate hen who, after the manner of her sex 
 and kind, had crossed the road with so little judgment that she 
 had feloniously damaged and overthrown one of the king's 
 subjects, riding peaceably by upon his bicycle. Common sense 
 and common justice would have set down such an accident to 
 the inevitable results of the modern craze for rapid travelling 
 according to the good old maxim of taking the thin with the fat. 
 But it is a notable feature of our up-to-date Solomon who like 
 unto the Scriptural ass, being overfed (and overpaid) waxing 
 fat doth kick that they are nothing if not original. If they are 
 not funny or, at any rate, try to be and merely mind their 
 business no man regardeth them not even the Daily Mail. 
 And so frivolous a folk are we, that not to merit the honour 
 of a " par " in a silly newspaper for saying a silly thing, is almost 
 Jike being worth nothing at all. Moveover, he who is not con-
 
 ABOUT LAW 143 
 
 stantly kept before the public, by cash down or otherwise, gets 
 no promotion in an age where government follows, rather than 
 guides, the greater number of fools who form public opinion ; 
 therefore, no puffs, no places, Q.E.D. 
 
 I have dwelt at some length upon the moral shortcomings of 
 British barristers and if I have overlooked their financial 
 " peculiarities," it certainly need not be from want of proofs or 
 examples, but rather because their sense of honesty, having 
 been usually nipped in the bud at an early stage of their 
 existence, by the time they have reached "silk," they have long 
 since shuffled off any qualms about fleecing their employers, 
 which they may have originally possessed. Their method I 
 had almost said their principle ! is common to all footpads 
 licensed or unlicensed in all parts of the world they ask for 
 all they think they can get, and never under any circumstances 
 refund. 
 
 As their chief study is to avoid doing any work for their pay 
 they naturally insist on being paid in advance, trusting to 
 their luck or ingenuity to devise means to escape fulfilling their 
 obligations ; and the better to render the latter achievement 
 impossible they never stick at taking fees for work which they 
 cannot perform and when popular undertaking ten times more 
 " cases " than they can possibly find time to master or conduct. 
 If the luckless suitor, at the last, is disappointed by his leading 
 counsel being engaged in another " case " it cannot but be 
 gratifying to him as an amiable Christian to reflect that the loss, 
 if any, will assuredly not fall upon his defaulting Counsel ! 
 
 For whatever else he may do and his tricks upon his clients 
 are more varied than those of any of our Simian progenitor no 
 British barrister has ever been known to show himself unworthy 
 of the " best and highest traditions of the English bar " by 
 refunding money which he has failed to earn !
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 PRESS 
 
 FBOM Law to Press, its most obliging handmaid, is but a step. 
 Unmindful of the obvious fact that newspapers are conducted 
 precisely on the same lines as groceries or eating-houses, whose 
 managers purvey the stuff that suits their customers best and 
 can be produced at the lowest cost, do we not one and all ascribe 
 some, if not superhuman, at any rate extrahuman, attributes, to 
 that magnificent abstraction which we call the Press? Or is it 
 the echo of our childish days when our earliest wandering 
 thoughts were set upon the dismal pages of our Prayer Book or 
 Bible, and we were told that each surprising tale in turn that har- 
 rowed or amazed our simple minds were one and all, not fabled 
 tale or nursery lore, but truths that must be learned and made 
 to sink into our brain, and which, however little understood, 
 made up the basis of our childish faith? Is there no subtle 
 connection between our infant tasks and the enforced belief 
 which we were compelled to attach to these early lessons ? Do 
 they not serve to erect printed matter upon a pedestal which 
 never fades while memory holds sway ? Which of us does not 
 in his heart of hearts, in spite of a thousand warnings and 
 disappointments, still cling to the words of the Press as those of 
 the Law and the Prophets, and trembles to profanely scoff at 
 what he reads in daily paper or shilling novel? Nor is there 
 anything strange in this when one reflects that the enormous 
 power exerted by religion over men proceeds chiefly from the 
 habits and associations of childhood. 
 
 It would take us too far beyond the limits assigned to this 
 inquiry were we to consider how, if at all, humanity has been 
 benefited by the art of printing. That it has placed reading 
 within the reach of more than heretofore cannot be doubted ; 
 but is this not surely a most debatable advantage ? Like the 
 " Glorious Reformation," whose chief outward sign in our dis- 
 tracted realm was to cover the country with paupers and sow
 
 PRESS 145 
 
 the land with novel sects, the art of printing and the cor- 
 responding diffusion of knowledge, while it has certainly 
 multiplied good books, has clearly in corresponding ratio 
 quintipled, nay, centupled, what may be called the Antidotes of 
 Knowledge. It has certainly increased the total production of 
 books, but since it has not increased the qualities of human 
 beings or diminished the percentage of fools, the obvious result 
 is that for every learned, wise or useful book ten thousand 
 bad and foolish ones are thrust upon the unhappy community. 
 
 When philanthropists or stump orators descant upon the 
 blessings of progress and civilisation, they invariably follow in 
 the sheep-like track of praising the Press which places the 
 newspaper in the hands of every working man, and prate about 
 the advantage of obtaining for a penny or a halfpenny what 
 their remote ancestors could not by any possibility have 
 obtained for a guinea. 
 
 This thoughtless cant is so familiar to our ears that we receive 
 it as a matter of course, and scarce take the trouble of reflecting 
 if it is a gospel truth or a blatant denial of facts. But let us 
 never forget, each one of us according to his means and power, 
 to raise our voice against what we know to be false. Nor let us 
 forget that nations are marred or made by the individuals which 
 they contain. Bad laws and a villainous Press go far to mar the 
 noblest nation, but woe to him who lifts not his voice against 
 their ravages. For, strange to say, it is precisely those things 
 that are oftener said and most often repeated by foolish people 
 on foolish occasions, perhaps because they are so often seen in 
 print when taken down by the omnipresent reporter, that come 
 to have a kind of sanctity, and disarm criticism more effectually 
 than even the Bible itself. 
 
 No saying is so frequently repeated than this, that cheap news- 
 papers are the highest blessing and privilege of humanity. Let 
 us for a moment consider what this means. Starting from 
 the point that every human being if rational and virtuous must 
 desire to contribute to the happiness and well-being of all his 
 fellow-men, how can it possibly contribute to the happiness of 
 the greater number of our fellow-citizens to spend a certain 
 number of hours or minutes of the day in reading a newspaper 
 in which error and ignorance, facts and fiction, folly and sense,
 
 146 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 are carelessly mixed in the proportion which some hurried and 
 irresponsible quill-drivers believe will best tickle the public palate ? 
 Besides, learning by itself is not a panacea. It does not neces- 
 sarily contribute to the health or happiness of the individual who 
 gains it; while even truth and useful knowledge if diluted by 
 as little as ten per cent, of falsehood, is surely worse than no 
 knowledge at all. Again, is it not self-evident that all youths 
 are not fitted alike for study, or to compete by dint of learning 
 in the spheres of invention, science and philosophy ; and even if 
 they could, would it be desirable either for themselves or humanity 
 at large? The very constitution of man, his health, every 
 function of his body calls out aloud that he is made for work, 
 manual, physical work, without which his heart, mind and brain 
 both suffer and become diseased, and happiness and contentment 
 that still more sure index of real happiness quickly depart 
 with waning health and a failing body. What is the result, then, 
 of this so-called blessing of universal education? It usually 
 serves but to destroy the natural balance, and upset the 
 nice mechanism set out for man through the operation 
 of natural gravitation and of physiological laws forcibly 
 dragging men and women away from their natural sphere to 
 where their inapt or stunted mental powers are wasted through 
 years of anxious toil and irksome confinement in order to 
 gain an end, which in 50 cases to one is never reached at all ; 
 whereas nature and inclination alike would have procured more 
 satisfactory results to body and mind by spending those hours 
 of childhood in healthy employment and patient observation, 
 acquiring little by little that intimate acquaintance with the 
 treasures of Nature and the secrets that are bound up in her 
 womb, which are vouchsafed alone to those who live a rustic 
 life of peaceful toil. Hence what is the stiffest modern problem 
 that we have to deal with? What is it that denudes the 
 country of our best blood, and fills the slums with useless hands ? 
 It is the Education which helps and stimulates our youth to 
 devour the exciting pages of the pernicious trash which floods 
 the modern bookstall, and whose effect consists in unsettling 
 them and unfitting them for the work that falls to their hand, 
 and divorces them fatally from the land upon which their fathers 
 earned their bread. Alas I shall we ever attempt to retrieve our
 
 PEESS 147 
 
 error, or shall we ever look facts in the face ? When we become 
 a sickly nation of shabby clerks and frivolous typewriters with 
 none left to till the land we shall be on the brink of what now 
 can but be seen on the horizon, but which is plain enough, at 
 any rate in the Transvaal at the present hour : a splendid 
 climate, a fruitful land, a strong and active native population ; 
 yet so refined have we become that instead of earning the fruits 
 of the earth, we can only pay with gold the Chinamen or Kaffirs 
 to feed us withal, until sunk in luxury and loathing toil and 
 labour we shall become unwilling or unable to defend ourselves 
 like the over-refined nations of antiquity, until the tide of 
 Chinese, Kaffirs or Japanese will sweep over us, and our story 
 will be that of the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks and 
 Eomans of the fateful past. 
 
 But are we not to seek after refinement ? To that I answer, 
 No, ten thousand times no ! Let us not forget that we are a. 
 conquering race like the Romans of old, who, rising out of nothing 
 by sheer strength of will, and arm, and fibre, have subjected 
 weaker and more refined races, and built up an Empire which 
 must be held, as it has been won, by the sword. 
 
 Refinement is for the Greeks and Italians and other such 
 nations, and as Greece fell through its refinement and became 
 the slave and mistress of Rome and the minister of her pleasure, 
 so, too, the French, the modern exponents of Attic Refinement, 
 Wit, and Taste, whose teachers, jaded with subtlety and satiety, 
 have cast aside and used up in turn all the resources of religion, 
 philosophy, faith, and hope, restlessly turning hither and thither 
 for new pleasures, new sensations, and new gods, are destined 
 themselves to be ground in God's good time under the heel of 
 a revolting democracy. 
 
 At first sight it would seem almost inexplicable that rough-and- 
 ready nations, like England and America, to whom culture and 
 refinement are but meaningless exotics and empty words, should 
 turn out more books and newspapers per head than any people in 
 the world. But funnier still it is to hear the thoughtless amongst 
 us deduce from that our superiority to other nations who are 
 satisfied with smaller newspapers and less print for the money. 
 How many times have I heard with undisguised pride the Western 
 American, in the congeries of shingle-built monstrosities,
 
 148 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 which, if you only go far enough West, is invariably called 
 a City, say, " Why, sir, in this h'yar city I cal'ate there ain't 
 a single shanty that don't get his daily paper every morning. 
 There are more papers in the state of New York than are pub- 
 lished in the whole darned Eepublic of France. And just see 
 what you get for your money. Why, there's more printing in 
 one of our 5 cent papers than there is in a 10 cent French, 
 German, or Italian newspaper, to say nothing of an extra sheet 
 for advertisements. 1 ' 
 
 The explanation, however, is perfectly simple. Whether it is 
 education, or religion, or philanthropy, if it is worked by an 
 Anglo-Saxon, it is infallibly worked on business lines ; that is, in 
 plain English, whatever the profession or flag under which it is 
 " run," the aim is always the same. In the words of a Yankee 
 editor, "If it don't pay, it won't go down; and if it don't go 
 down, it won't pay." The universal test is the almighty dollar ; 
 and though oddly enough we twit our American cousins with a 
 weakness which is so apparent as even to grate upon our own 
 accustomed ears and eyes, our only superiority in the matter lies 
 in our greater antiquity, which enables us to gain greater practice 
 in the art of concealing what we all know exists, and loudly 
 denying in public what we universally admit in private ; or to 
 put it in other words, by long experience we have learned so 
 cunningly to wrap up our hypocrisy, that not only it does not 
 grate upon our conscience, but we have come to flatter ourselves 
 that it defies the closest scrutiny of our neighbours. 
 
 When properly considered, the secret of the many newspapers 
 that infest our land, and of their superiority in point of size and 
 weight when compared with our continental neighbours, is merely 
 the sign of our commercial spirit. Here, as everywhere, 
 hypocrisy is the breath of our life as it is to the life of everything 
 that goes to make it up. The overwhelming majority of our 
 newspapers are neither run for the instruction of youth, nor the 
 consolation of old age, nor yet for imparting useful information, 
 nor disseminating useful knowledge. Their main prop is advertise- 
 ment. Advertisement for cash down, advertisement, like 
 gratitude for favours to come, advertisement of opinions, 
 philosophies, mining adventures, or anything under the sun, 
 however false and unacceptable, that promises a cash profit ;
 
 PEESS 149 
 
 advertisement of the newspaper proprietor, or his friends and 
 relations, or the sect to which he belongs (if the sect pays enough 
 for it, or if it promises a fair return) ; in short, the modern 
 newspaper consists of, as anybody can see for himself by invest- 
 ing a penny in the Daily Tellalie, a farthing's-worth of news and 
 three farthings'-worth of advertisement. In order to realize what 
 this is, what should we think of our host if he were to ask us 
 to his party and placard our backs with " Try Horniman's 
 pure tea," or "Pears' soap is matchless for the complexion," 
 etc. ? Must we not be a stupid nation to endure such barefaced 
 impudence on this outrageous scale ? 
 
 I am informed that a shilling a day is paid to the shadiest 
 of outcasts for carrying a light placard setting forth the merits of 
 the latest drama, or the last invented soap ; yet while there is 
 not a free and independent Briton in the realm who would not 
 account it a disgrace to pace Piccadilly with a sandwich board, 
 it needs but the honoured and respected tongue of the Press to 
 convince him that his lot is one that should be envied above 
 all nations of the earth, since for the sum of a penny, aye, and 
 even half a penny, he is admitted to the exalted privilege of 
 playing the part of a sandwich man by carrying about three or 
 four sheets of finely printed advertisements along with his daily 
 paper. 
 
 I never return from abroad without an inward sense of revolt 
 at the involuntary post of a walking advertisement thus un- 
 willingly assumed, when in exchange for the smallest coin of the 
 realm a large bundle of advertisements is thrust into my unwilling 
 hand ; nor can I reconcile this humble assumption of an un- 
 grateful office with what I conceive to be the just limits of 
 British philanthropy, and am therefore reduced to the painful 
 conclusion that my fellow-countrymen as a body are lured by the 
 syren's tongue to play the vulgar, if necessary, part of walking 
 advertisement-mongers, from sheer credulity not unmingled with 
 stupidity. But if it seems in the light of these remarks not 
 doubtful, but almost certain, that the aim and end of the penny 
 paper in England and America is not, as we are apt to say on 
 grand occasions, to instruct or amuse, or even to beguile a passing 
 hour, but rather to "push" antibilious pills, or set forth the 
 transcendent merits of a lung tonic, what shall we say of the
 
 150 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 ephemeral publications which, pressing eagerly one upon the other, 
 "like shadows come and so depart"? When we cast our eyes 
 upon the modern book-stall and wearily scan the pages of each 
 illustrated paper or magazine in turn with their inevitable Inaugu- 
 rations, Royal Visits, Accidents, and still more senseless " Snap- 
 shots of Celebrities," whose inane portraits are prepaid by the 
 aforesaid celebrities, usually in cash one trembles for the future 
 of our race. 

 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 
 
 To every true lover of this country the recent Yankee invasion 
 of Society, Press, Literature, Language and Politics, and the 
 rise and progress of the Jews into the realms of Press, 
 Literature, Art, and Society are phenomena of painful interest. 
 
 Somebody has said "That absence makes the heart grow 
 fonder." However this may be, there can be no doubt that the 
 Englishman who has been long away from his country not only 
 yearns for the flesh-pots of Egypt (which may be freely translated 
 into the greasy chop and stale bun which greet him with un- 
 varying fidelity in whatever port he lands), but the changes, 
 which to stay-at-home folk are imperceptible, at once become 
 to him a subject of notice and surprise. 
 
 In the physical order it is well understood that organisms 
 which are fitted for survival are provided with an impermeability 
 of texture which protects them from external invasion ; so, too, in 
 the inorganic world, objects which are easily penetrable by water 
 or air, being laid open to the destructive influence of that fluid are 
 speedily broken up and decay. As a familiar instance, every one 
 has noticed that bread, for example, or paper thrown into water 
 will quickly lose its nature, becoming absorbed in the 
 element in which it is placed. The hardest oak which will 
 resist weather and water for hundreds of years, if decay has once 
 set in by the absence of healthy coherence through disease, 
 becomes a mere pulp without strength or powers of resistance. 
 
 Can it be that England, like a rotten pear, is ready to fall from 
 the branch, or like a good-natured old grandmother bordering on 
 dotage, filled with a weakly and irrational tenderness towards 
 the grandchildren who cluster about her knee, sinks her self- 
 respect in the love of her offspring, overflowing with senile 
 admiration at their infantine prattle? Nor does the mischief 
 end here. For while Britannia dotes over her Colonial babes, 
 what more surely follows than that the objects of her admiration, 
 taking advantage of her weakness, should merge their filial
 
 152 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 respect into pity not unrniugled with disdain ? Alas 1 for poor old 
 England 1 To listen to her stay-at-home mouthpieces one would 
 suppose that our Colonies and trans- Atlantic cousins were ever 
 burning with a perennial glow of gratitude and affection towards 
 the land that gave them birth. Poor silly old grandmother 1 
 Could she but see herself as others see her ! Could she but don 
 Fortunatus* cap and visit the hearths and homes of Greater 
 Britain! How like the fond and doting grandmother was the 
 drivel of the Press over her beloved Colonials whose martial sons 
 rallied gallantly about her like true "chips of the old block," 
 ready to go through fire and water for 5/- a day ! Poor old 
 Britannia 1 " Quantum mutata ab illo hectore," etc. How 
 changed from the day when she sternly denied bare justice to the 
 Colonies of Boston and New York. What an age in a nation's 
 life from the firm tones of middle age to the quavering notes of 
 second childhood ! It is no longer " Go, and he goeth. Do, and 
 he doeth," but it is " Sweet Colonies, come to your old grand- 
 mother's knee. Bless your little hearts, how you did fight for 
 us 1 What we should have done without you Heaven knows ! 
 You are the consolation of my declining years. Chamberlain 
 shall come to you and give you everything you ask for, that he 
 shall, and we'll fight away all the naughty nations that tease you, 
 your old Granny shall take care of you and you shall not have a 
 penny to pay, there ! " etc., etc. 
 
 Whether this flabby condition be traceable to the spongy state 
 into which we have fallen, or to a growing imbecility denoting 
 extreme old age and premature decay, may be safely left to the 
 fancy of my readers. None will deny the extraordinary efforts 
 that we make of late to tickle and flatter our Colonies, to " butter 
 up" our American cousins, or exalt their already arrogant 
 pretensions to a level which would seem ironical were it not 
 supported by that Universal Imitation which we are told is itself 
 sincerest flattery. 
 
 We cannot always depend upon words expressing the 
 sentiments of an individual or newspaper. Diplomatists go so far 
 as to say that language is given to man to conceal his thoughts. 
 But when we see each rising politician diving into the United 
 States as if to derive fresh inspiration for his immature efforts of 
 statesmanship, each youthful aristocrat pervading the States in
 
 AMEEICAN JOUENALISM 153 
 
 order to provide himself with a specimen of Columbia's daughters, 
 each politician vying with his neighbour to produce some new 
 political slang, or worse still, the last political trick from Congress 
 or Tammany Hall, our newspapers written in Americanese wrung 
 from the gutter slang of Broadway, our schoolboys and school- 
 girls lisping the last Yankee phrase and the last joke from the 
 Yankee papers, one rubs one's eyes and wonders if Uncle Sam or 
 Britannia rules the roost. Again, is it helpless absorption, or is 
 it conscious, deliberate imitation, and if so why ? Can any man 
 with a spark of patriotism seriously set himself to copy a nation, 
 more especially in its external manifestations (and little else can 
 reach our shores), of a people without faith except in dollars, 
 without religion, though alas! with all too many religious 
 varieties, who seem to think they have just been created by a 
 special effort of the Almighty with all the latest improvements 
 " run right up to date," whose women know neither respect, nor 
 reserve, nor reticence, nor refinement, and whose children bid 
 fair to be worse than their parents. Far be it from me to ignore 
 the sterling qualities of their Western pioneers, the domesticity 
 of their rustic homes and families, the rough outspoken if 
 untutored manliness of their farming class, the open-handed 
 generosity and hospitality of all alike ; but unfortunately it is not 
 the virtues of a nation that attract or excite imitation in all times 
 and all countries, and least of all with the Briton of to-day, but 
 the novel, the striking, the erratic, and the grotesque. For this 
 it is which seems to delight the British-born man or woman in 
 the United States, this is what he imports and gulps down with 
 ever-renewing appetite. It is rather the blots on the Yankee 
 body politic, the excrescences on the surface of a mongrel society 
 raked from the gutters of every nation, which seems to exercise 
 a singular fascination upon the British mind. 
 
 If nothing else, our pride should surely save us. But where is 
 this pride that a hundred years ago (if the literature of the time 
 be trusted) was the mark of the Briton and the theme of a 
 thousand satires ? Is it the commerce of the United States that 
 excites our envy, that we must needs imitate the latest Yankee 
 trick for turning wooden nutmegs, selling clocks without works, 
 or inventing new systems for defrauding wholesale as well as 
 retail through engines most inaptly termed Trusts ? Or is it their
 
 154 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 municipal conduct of affairs and their wholesale combinations for 
 robbery, or their politics, which win our favour, and invite us to 
 imitate their log-rolling and their Caucuses, their dummy 
 candidates, their political "bosses," and their corrupt "Rings!" 
 Or is it their Wall Street with its mushroom speculators, the 
 idols of the street to-day, grovelling in the gutter to-morrow, 
 their bogus telegrams, their false news, and their perennial 
 "smartness"? Do we seriously desire to see old England 
 reduced to the political condition of the United States, where 
 every honest man shrinks from participation in the work of 
 Justice or Legislation, standing aloof from the Commonwealth 
 and the grovelling herd that fight like jackals for the national 
 revenues, while they stand by in silence, or if, perchance, they 
 have " made their pile," go spend their wealth in foreign lands 
 and mate their daughters to foreign counts or English peers, or 
 again, casting their country contemptuously aside, build palaces 
 in foreign lands, where, if liberty be less, the decency of Law, 
 Politics, and Society, offer charms unknown to them at home. 
 
 Now let us turn from the aesthetic to the concrete. Whence 
 this amazing mania for corrupting our language with Yankee 
 slang and Yankee turns of phrase ? If Jewish gold bids fair to 
 command the British Press, alternately with insidious skill 
 advertising or stealthily pleading the cause of Israel and the 
 advancement of the Jews, the almost universal invasion of the 
 Yankee, male and female, in the lower ranks of literature and 
 journalism coupled with a debasing greed for novelty in phrase 
 and diction, has produced a revolution in our written language 
 that fills every true lover of his country with humiliation, and 
 presents one of our most serious symptoms of national decay. 
 
 For pride of race is the very salt of the nation. Let but a 
 nation lose its faith in its future and its pride and belief in its 
 mission and power, and make a God of luxury and material 
 prosperity, turning to scorn its Laws and Prophets, the day of 
 doom is not far off. Nor is it only our Press which is honey- 
 combed like poor old England itself with cheap labour from every 
 part of the world and overrun with wanderers without home or 
 country, who endure exile in our land only so long as they can 
 make a living by the pen and corrupt our language at their 
 own sweet will ! There is throughout the realms of literature a
 
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 155 
 
 deplorable absence of conscious organism, of any system, or 
 point of contact between the Press and the Universities, and still 
 less of subjection to any National or Intellectual Tribunal. 
 
 In almost all other civilized lands the leading University 
 Boards from time to time undertake the revision of current 
 orthography, and place under their ban such new phrases, words, 
 or colloquies as too often merely represent the laziness or the 
 ignorance of the writer. 
 
 It is hard to say how far the current scribbling of the Press 
 contributes to corrupt our language, put together, as it is, as 
 hastily and as cheaply as the slop clothing that issues from the 
 Jewish sweater's workroom, but if we may judge by the average 
 output of the British masculine and feminine novel or the 
 columns of the Daily Press it would indeed seem that bad 
 English, false sentiment, slipshod language and literary vulgarity 
 have reached the lowest imaginable level. 
 
 Of all the many silly boasts of which the Briton is guilty in 
 pulpit, senate, or newspaper leader, there is none so fatuous as 
 the ludicrous pretension of the women of our time to greater 
 culture than their predecessors of a hundred years ago. Any one 
 who will take the trouble to go back as far as a hundred years ago 
 and read the current sheets, magazines, and gazettes, or, again, 
 the letters and memoirs of the ladies of the end of the eighteenth 
 and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, must surely be 
 struck with the lamentable disparity and the grievous declension 
 of these days in eloquence and purity of style and literary skill, 
 to say nothing of grammatical errors, vulgar Americanisms and 
 ever-recurring slang-words, which serve to bridge the gaps of 
 ignorance and haste. Without descending so low as the half- 
 penny papers but mounting as high as the best magazines and 
 such standard works as the British Encyclopaedia, no one who 
 will take the pains to compare the work of the end of the last 
 century and the beginning of this with the work of the end of 
 the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, can 
 fail to be struck with the fatal results of half a century of 
 conversational decay, slipshod thought, hurried talk and work, 
 and the indiscriminate importation of Yankee slang and 
 Continental speech-refuse. 
 
 It will be, no doubt, urged in defence of slang importation and
 
 156 AEE WE A STDPID PEOPLE? 
 
 " Amurrican " that in some cases a real want is supplied and a 
 new idea is clothed with its appropriate garb. Undoubtedly if 
 that were the case much might be said in its defence. But the 
 simplest consideration will soon show that, technicalities apart, 
 to which surely none will object, there is nothing new in the 
 realm of ideas that our language is unable to cope with, and 
 adequately represent. Moreover, whenever a word is invented 
 or modified in meaning, and by a careless writer twisted from its 
 real sense, the word it replaces will as surely be maimed and 
 destroyed. Still more where foolish imitators, whose names 
 alas ! are legion, led by a famous name or sheep-like following 
 in the footsteps of their predecessors, aggravate the evil, this 
 atrocious practice common to all illiterate scribblers but carried 
 to its highest point by our trans- Atlantic neighbours, has left a 
 searing mark on English current literature, which only sternly 
 applied reform can extirpate. Too lazy to use words for their 
 right purpose, or too ignorant to distinguish between pure 
 English and the slang of the Eing and the Market, they scarcely 
 ever make a distinction between " lie " and lay, the active and 
 passive, the transitive and intransitive, but speak of loaning 
 instead of lending, eventuate for occur, locate for fix, to breach 
 for to break, while with respect to prepositions, Americans having 
 long ago grown used to their haphazard mixture in the mouths 
 of Germans, Irish, and other foreigners around them, invariably 
 use the term "letting on" for "letting out" (a secret), 
 " backing down " for " backing out," and in a general way 
 every substantive is turned into a verb, as fancy, haste, or 
 laziness suggests. 
 
 Here we meet another peculiarity, common to ignorance in all 
 ages and climes, so well represented by the Roman author two 
 thousand years ago, who tells us that in the eyes of the ignorant 
 everything unknown is magnificent. (" Omne ignotum pro 
 magnifico.") The simplest phrase or word picked out of a foreign 
 vocabulary is hugged and cherished, and by many writers 
 dragged in to supplant an English phrase, serving the double 
 purpose of saving thought or search for an equivalent, as well as 
 of astonishing the public with the writer's masterly acquaintance 
 with foreign tongues. 
 
 The average reader instead of resenting this childish vanity of
 
 157 
 
 the author, possibly learns and echoes it as a literary novelty of 
 Jones or Simkins, and lo ! the word is introduced for good and 
 all, while to the like extent the good old English equivalent is 
 ousted and supplanted by the foreigner. Thus it becomes 
 " fashionable " it is bandied from mouth to mouth, and stranger 
 still, even when abandoned by the language of its birth, as for 
 example the phrase " upon the tapis," it remains firmly fixed in 
 the English vocabulary, though unknown in the land of its birth ! 
 
 An exaggerated, if ludicrous, example of this truly British 
 failing is the word "hinterland." One can hardly imagine a 
 more humiliating position than to adopt from unlettered Boer 
 farmers of the Cape a word for "backlands" which some 
 ignorant penny-a-liner, first discovered in a German or Dutch 
 map set out as " hinterland,'' and apparently attributing to it 
 some magic spell or some unseen superiority to its British 
 equivalent of " backland," flourished it in the eyes of his readers 
 as a highly technical and brilliant discovery. The united 
 wisdom of the British Press, failing, apparently, to discover 
 that "hinter" was Dutch for "hinder," acclaimed it with 
 enthusiasm ; and to complete the comedy, the wiseacres of 
 the Colonial Office and the Crown Surveyors entered the 
 same upon their maps, adopted it as their official term 
 for " backland " for ever and a day ! 
 
 How widely different are the manly and patriotic views of 
 Germans stimulated by the good sense and national pride of 
 Kaiser Wilhelm ! who, finding that Fashion before his day 
 required every well-bred German to render his " Bill-of-Fare " 
 into the nearest approach to French of which the language is 
 capable at the risk of being considered vulgar and unfashion- 
 able, headed in his own Court a complete revolution of this 
 slavish and degrading mimicry. 
 
 It is strange that the pride of nationality which used to 
 burn so strong in the British breast should of late years have 
 grown so weak within us that an Englishman who moves 
 into the Colonies or comes in contact with an inferior race like 
 the Boers and Kaffirs of South Africa, and the Maoris and 
 Blackfellows of Australia, should glory in displacing his own 
 more expressive tongue for a miserable jargon compounded of 
 the language of these countries grafted upon his own.
 
 158 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Let it be thoroughly understood that my reproach does not 
 extend to words for which we have no equivalent : though there, 
 too, the Western American, be it said to his credit, even where 
 a new word has to be sought, declines to take from an inferior 
 and subject race words that his own vocabulary can easily 
 supply. As an example, Captain " Mayue Reid's stories which 
 are crammed with bits of Spanish slang and Spanish oaths and 
 such like tomfoolery, apparently dished up to suit English taste, 
 invariably speak of ' lassoing ' instead of ' noosing ' (which is 
 the exact and accurate English equivalent and one always used 
 by the genuine cowboy or westerner), with the result that the 
 word 'lasso' is introduced and fixed in the English language 
 without any conceivable excuse or reason unless indeed to 
 satisfy the British appetite for exotic words to which John Bull 
 persistently ascribes a peculiar beauty and merit which he refuses 
 to his own." " Omne ignotum pro rnagnifico " verily and indeed ! 
 
 In the matter of linguistic independence we see the special 
 peculiarities of our trans-Atlantic neighbours well displayed. 
 Whether it is, as has been suggested by some, that the Colonial 
 hatred of the British yoke has produced the extraordinary 
 divergence which exists between our names for familiar things 
 and those of our erstwhile Colonists, or not, the immediate cause 
 is not far to seek. Wherever the divergence occurs it is nearly 
 always due to the current English of the day, or else the 
 dialect of the Province or County from which the Colonists 
 sprang, or sometimes an obsolete word which was current English 
 when the State was first colonized. As for example, " fishpole " 
 for "fishing-rod," or " snaking along" for " sliding," "creeks" 
 for "streams," "gunning" for "shooting," etc., etc. 
 
 In other lands either pride or good sense goes far to counteract 
 this childish tendency through the influence of an intelligent and 
 cultivated Press : but unfortunately for our ill-used language 
 modern Pressmen vie with each other in grubbing out of the mud 
 some new current slang phrase or senseless foreign word with 
 which to interlard and enliven their columns. And just as the 
 silly fresh-landed " new chum " of Australia glories in speaking 
 of a " mob " of cattle, and calls a festive gathering a " corobery," 
 the globe-trotter who has run up to Kobe and back speaks of 
 Japanese girls as " mus'mes," an hotel as his " yadoya," and
 
 AMERICAN JOUBNALISM 159 
 
 his handcart as " a jennyrickshaw," or, scarce six months landed 
 at the Cape, displays his superior wisdom to the astonishment of 
 the new-comer by calling a stone a "clip," a pond a " vley," a 
 ravine a "kloof," a track a "spoor," and scorns to speak of a 
 forest in any other terms but a " bush ! " 
 
 Apart from the ignominy of introducing equivalents drawn 
 from inferior tongues for objects of the commonest kind, which 
 cannot but degrade and impoverish our own language, must it 
 not lower us in the foreigner's eyes to find the countrymen of 
 what he supposes to be a civilized land accepting and substi- 
 tuting in their own ordinary conversation his own words for 
 common objects ! 
 
 If corruption of our language is a matter of unconcern to the 
 gentlemen of the Press, what are we to say to the corruption of 
 the innocent and the virtuous, to which they are equally indifferent 
 if we may judge by the villainous literature which is produced by 
 the cartload in the United States and England and which is, 
 through the misfortune of a free and cheap Press, brought at the 
 lowest conceivable price to the very door of the cottage and the 
 reach of every child in the realm. When we consider the far- 
 reaching power of evil possessed by the Press, and the illimitable 
 harm wrought through its agency one is inclined to doubt if its 
 boasted advantages outweigh its evil effects. It would be vain 
 to enumerate the temptation that is given to the half-taught, 
 underfed children of the lower classes, especially those who 
 spring from families where no high or noble thought or any idea 
 beyond the sordid exigencies of a miserable life compel attention 
 to the aesthetic or spiritual side of existence, who, half-starved for 
 the most part and induced by an overpowering instinct to search 
 the streets for garbage in lieu of food, from which it is but a short 
 step to begin by plundering children smaller and weaker than 
 themselves, are led on step by step, till the animal instinct being 
 fully aroused, they are ripe for a criminal life. Given to such as 
 these, the abominations that disgrace our cheaper book-shops 
 and the libraries of our slums, and perhaps in a more dangerous 
 degree the sensational tales of crime and adventure graphically 
 represented upon the inferior theatres of the entire kingdom, the 
 more attractive because more graphically displayed and sur- 
 rounded by the thrilling accompaniments of dress, scenery and
 
 160 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 action, what agent can truly be said to contribute more directly 
 to the ruin of the nation than the cheap Press ? Nor need we 
 go as low as this to trace the fatal effects of the alluring tales of 
 criminals and exciting if impossible hair-breadth escapes of 
 imaginary heroes who revel in bloodshed and slaughter. It 
 should not be forgotten that just as the embryo of the highest 
 types frequently display the characteristics of the lowest type of 
 the same family, so, too, the human child in the centres of civiliza- 
 tion exhibits from birth the tendencies of its savage forefathers, 
 the cave-dwellers, who fought for bare existence with tooth and 
 nail, or, armed with rude sticks and later with weapons of flint, 
 painfully struggled to support life against the hyenas and cave- 
 bears of the prehistoric period. Even in the highest classes, 
 among the most cultivated races, the male child in his earliest 
 manifestations of activity tears flies and birds to pieces, while his 
 earliest actions display a passion for bloodshed and destruction, 
 passing on from torture of inferior animals to the destruction of 
 game, which, if not corrected by education or diverted into the 
 channels of sport and athletic exercises, too surely degenerates 
 into blood-thirsty brutality, and proclaims the victory of the 
 beast over the man. 
 
 Nor are these idle fancies, or theories of philosophic con- 
 jecture. The stern hard facts of the police court and jail too 
 clearly show that no more fruitful and direct allurement to the 
 paths of crime and vice can be found than the penny novelette 
 of the " criminal " and " detective " class, which flood the 
 kingdom from one end to the other. It is no exaggeration to 
 say that there is scarcely a boy criminal who is not found with 
 these hideous publications in his pocket, or to whom habitual 
 indulgence in such literature is not regularly imputed. 
 
 But if our penny novelettes, and, speaking generally, the 
 intellectual food that is offered to the parched brains and 
 knowledge-seeking minds of the half-awakened youth of the 
 Democracy are entirely bad, and tend usually to inflammation 
 of the passions, excitement of the brain, and general deteriora- 
 tion of the entire human structure, what must we say to the 
 foulness that parades itself in picture, print, newspaper and 
 gazette throughout the continent of America, where police 
 restrictions are less exacting than in our own land ?
 
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 161 
 
 It will hardly be believed that I have myself bought in the 
 United States, under the wrappers and titles of harmless 
 classical stories, such books as no decent or civilized person could 
 peruse without horror, nor the police of any civilized country 
 admit. It is difficult to conceive the motives of such diabolical 
 strategies for the corruption of youth, unless it is that by 
 diffusing the subtle poison of a passion for such intellectual 
 garbage, their circulation is increased and the area of demand 
 is enlarged for a kind of literature which can be produced in 
 enormous quantities by the meanest and coarsest intellects. 
 
 All honour to the English Legislature that, in this particular, 
 they stand alone and above every Christian land. Would that 
 the same good intentions could, by any possibility, be ascribed 
 to the purveyors of the newspapers, magazines, popular plays 
 and novels, which are poured out over the land like some vast 
 river of pollution, to which the deluge of Holy Writ can alone 
 aptly be compared, since only those who take refuge in the ark 
 of Morality and Religion can emerge from the raging flood 
 unscathed. 
 
 No doubt it will be urged that the Press do a great work in 
 checking men's evil courses by exposing to the full glare of 
 publicity their secret as well as public actions and holding them 
 up to public execration. Such is the public theory in their 
 defence. Now let us look at it in fact and practice. Keeping 
 well in mind the fact, the undoubted principle, that books, plays 
 and newspapers and all that comes from the Press are produced 
 and governed precisely by the same laws as any other commodity, 
 the police laws restraining the public sale of the more infamous, 
 and the public want of taste restraining the production of the 
 better class of literature, it is manifest that those who push their 
 sale and stimulate their production are governed by the ordinary 
 rules of demand and supply precisely like any other trade, with 
 this remarkable difference, that they alone possess of all trades 
 the enormous moral responsibility of leading the youth of the 
 country into better or worse ways, thought and morality, accord- 
 ing as the output of the Press is more or less vicious and 
 corrupt. 
 
 Now, since it is clear that a higher intellect is required for the 
 production of superior than inferior work, it follows, as an abso- 
 M
 
 162 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 lute certainty, that the tendency, where enormous production is 
 the rule, i8 infallibly on the down grade ; that is, that the bulk of 
 literary output will most certainly be inferior in tone, quality 
 and morality. Again, the law of Libel which I have before 
 characterised as the Palladium of the rogue, under whose 
 protection the rogue who knows the law can pick his way as 
 safely, indeed more safely than any honest man, through the 
 shoals and breakers of the legal archipelago, and, as a crowning 
 climax, can meet his victim's accusations with a smiling face, 
 invoking the law itself to justify his villanies the law of Libel 
 stands always right in the way of the critic and reformer. How, 
 then, shall we expect improvement until the law itself is 
 reformed and brought into line with the foreign jurisprudence 
 where technical libels are distinguished from real, and the spirit is 
 set before the letter : in short, until real libels, punishable in other 
 lands with imprisonment, present terrors for the guilty alone. 
 In the greater number of cases the Press is debarred from any 
 effective exposure of the myriads of conspiracies against purse 
 and person which they know to exist, which are revealed in their 
 daily issues, and out of which they, themselves, make a conscious 
 and deliberate harvest through innumerable advertisements, for 
 even if they were inclined to cut their own throats by drying up 
 the roots of their own prosperity for the furtherance of public 
 morality, they would have to run the gauntlet of countless 
 prosecutions. If any doubt exists upon this point, we have only 
 to call to mind the legal persecution suffered by that admirable 
 newspaper, Truth, which set itself deliberately the task of 
 detection and exposure of roguery, fraud and organised swindling, 
 together with the more monstrous inequalities of what we please 
 to call Justice in this country ; or to recall the universal howl of 
 execration and the condemnation to the severest penalty of 
 Joseph Stead, who, by his publication of the " Victims of 
 Babylon," literally offered himself up as a holocaust to the 
 law, and by suffering grave legal persecution for justice's sake, 
 procured the amendment of the law affecting women by his 
 effective exposure of crime in high places. Let us not forget 
 that the efforts of the Press in this direction have been so few 
 and far between that they can safely be ascribed to that excep- 
 tion which is said to prove the rule, while on the other hand
 
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 163 
 
 there does not seem a tittle or jot of truth in the widespread 
 assertion which is made in defence of the inferior quality of 
 their productions, that the public in drama, literature and art,, 
 prefer the low and abject and grovelling to the lofty, the sublime, 
 the moral and the spiritual. One more remaining claim has 
 been put forward by the Press on their behalf, which is, that all 
 human action being prone to evil, and all human administration, 
 police and law, being in the hands of human instruments and 
 carried out by fallible human agency, an impartial and almost 
 irresponsible universal agent is desirable, who, like the " little 
 cherub who sits up aloft," or the chorus of a Greek play, is 
 supposed to watch over human interests from its Olympian 
 height, and, guided by pure virtue and unalloyed altruism, records 
 in unimpassioned tones the tale of human vanities. Beautiful, 
 if true ! Touching indeed, but wholly chimerical ! Alas ! the 
 British Press, like the rag-picker, is all too prone to probe 
 its dirty fingers into every nook and cranny into which the 
 basest curiosity would peer, or out of which money can possibly 
 be made ! War, bloodshed and crime it dilates upon, yet not in 
 the interests of human wrongs or for the redress of human 
 rights, but, I fear greatly, in order to stimulate the basest human 
 passions, to satisfy the meanest cravings of human inquisitive- 
 ness, and pierce the most degrading secrets of the human soul. 
 
 And those whose touching confidence in the civilizing influence 
 of the Press has not been destroyed by the contact of actual 
 experience, we must remind, that while it is an undoubted 
 fact that its far-reaching power would, if exerted in the right 
 direction, be of enormous service to encourage the more even 
 distribution of justice, to curb the fantastic tricks of judges, 
 expose the asinine freaks of juries, and restrain the party- 
 begotten acts of ministerial folly, instead of all this, we find, in 
 fact, that the Press is ever selling its services to the highest 
 bidder, and while it poses as the defender, is too often the 
 abettor, and the paid advocate of the crimes which it professes 
 to abhor. 
 
 To those who have accompanied me thus far it may seem as if 
 a strong anti-American bias animated my remarks. It does 
 not, however, follow that my strictures against the perti- 
 nacious adoption of American and Colonial idioms are meant to
 
 164 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 confer any slur upon those estimable communities. My 
 complaint rather lies with our own want of pride, which 
 would stoop so low as to gather up the rough-and-ready 
 phrases and untutored talk which, while natural and even 
 commendable in young and struggling communities, as in the 
 amusing, if imperfect, speech of childhood, is most pitiable 
 and undesirable when adopted into the more matured speech 
 of the Mother-country. 
 
 Granted that pride of race, love of country, earnestness of 
 purpose, and an abiding sense of duty owing to one's father- 
 land, are the four marks of a vigorous and masterful nation, 
 it is painful to watch as years roll by the steady decline of 
 these four qualities in our fellow-countrymen. The Japanese 
 have lately displayed to the world these characteristics of an 
 imperious race in so startling a degree as to fill the minds of 
 European nations with amazement, and admiration not 
 unmingled with fear, lest powers so exceptional should be 
 ultimately turned against the nations who taught them the 
 material arts for which in these late years they have 
 exhibited such surprising proficiency.
 
 CHAPTEE XV 
 
 OUR MOBAL SLAVERY 
 
 IF we believe the teachings of the past, the marked change 
 which has come over Englishmen in the last forty years, 
 during which our ideals as well as our practices have de- 
 parted widely from those of earlier days, coinciding as they 
 do ominously with the signs which have accompanied the 
 decline of nations that have risen and fallen into decay, must 
 fill us with apprehension for our own. It is true that some 
 nations enjoy the privilege of a re-birth. France has been 
 generally credited with having risen from the lowest depths 
 of national degradation through the fiery furnace of disaster 
 and carnage, lite a Phoenix from its ashes, where other nations 
 have sunk to rise no more. But, at least, the great Bour- 
 geoisie was as yet untainted ; and , by climbing to power over 
 the bodies of an effete aristocracy, they painfully attempted the 
 moral regeneration of their country. 
 
 Let us glanee at the causes assigned by history to the fall 
 of nations : In ancient Babylon, overwhelming success in 
 commerce ; in Persia, overwhelming success in arms, enervat- 
 ing luxury and debasing despotism ; in Macedon and the 
 Greek Colonies, pride of conquest ; in Old Eome, as in 
 Modern Spain, the accumulation of colossal fortunes, Surfeit 
 of conquest, and Slavery, Wasteful prodigality, and Enervating 
 luxury. Slavery by name we certainly abolished in 1840 : 
 but is it so certain we should be in the mood to repeat that 
 heroic sacrifice now were the occasion to recur again ? It 
 may fairly be doubted. For since that epoch, we have passed 
 from generous youth to cynical old age, when we eagerly hug 
 our Creature Comforts and think all else a delusion and a 
 sham. Yes Slavery by name and title indeed is gone from 
 us ! But what, then, is the aim of the industrial and financial 
 Millionaires of England and the United States, but to make 
 slaves of their fellow-countrymen and reduce them to the posi- 
 tion of their humble tributaries, as surely as ever the Assyrians
 
 166 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of old made captives to their bow and spear ! I will go 
 further : such is our degradation if the Press does not greatly 
 mistake our ideals that we are bidden in the newspapers 
 to fall down and worship them day by day. To be sure, 
 slavery of the body we have no more among us. It is slavery 
 of the senses, of the will, of the mind, which now holds sway. 
 Nor is it only that we glory in the Practice of Slavery, but, 
 what is far worse, we worship the Ideal. Let us look around 
 us and calmly survey the trend of common habit and common 
 talk, the turgid declamations of the council chamber or the 
 tribunals, the deliverances of judges, or the gossip of the 
 market-place and the Exchange, the presentment of public 
 opinion in the myriad rags which flaunt their vicious senti- 
 ments in the public eye, the theatres and music-halls that 
 nightly compass degradation by thought, word, and deed ; 
 shall it be said that all such run counter to public feeling, 
 public sentiment, and public taste? or does it not proclaim a 
 universal worship of moral and intellectual slavery worse than 
 any that has debased Old Babylon or Pagan Eome? 
 
 But I shall be told, " Where is the justice of the compari- 
 son between these heathen cities and those of our days ? Are 
 we not Christians, and as far removed from heathendom as 
 heaven from hell? Then why attempt to form a parallel? 
 Aye, Christians in name we are indeed : but as far removed 
 from the practice or theory of Christian life as ever was 
 Roman centurion or Mongol khan. As we have our churches 
 to Christ, so had the centurion in old Eome along with the 
 countless gods of every land, with each their servitors and 
 temples to choose from. But herein lies the difference. He 
 did not choose to give up the world, the flesh, and the devil, 
 and cleave to the banner of Christ : while we, far worse than 
 he who knew not the truth as we do choosing not to 
 imitate Christ's life and precepts, use His standard but to 
 cloak our iniquities. 
 
 Nor is it only in straightforwardness that we lag behind the 
 heathens of old Eome, whom we afiect to despise for their 
 cruelty and idolatrous practices, while we confessedly learn 
 from them true nobility of character, loftiness of views, 
 steadfastness of purpose, and purity of patriotism. Is it not
 
 OUK MORAL SLAVERY 167 
 
 a terrible and a shameful reflection to think that after r near 
 2,000 years of openly avowed Christianity, our religion and 
 our morality is but little better than those of the Ancients, 
 while in all that goes to constitute perfect manhood we are 
 immeasurably their inferiors ? Nay, do we not even now recall 
 their noble lives to stimulate our youth, their illustrious 
 examples to spur us to higher planes of effort, their lofty acts 
 of self-sacrifice to quicken our own jaded patriotism? If we 
 describe an heroic act, must we not fly to comparisons drawn 
 from classic story ? If a lofty sentiment demands expression, 
 do we not insensibly adopt the language of ancient Greece or 
 Rome ? In what, then, are we their equals, much less their 
 superiors, except it be in the profession, but not the practice, 
 of a Christianity which they have never known ? Do we 
 achieve a great building, erect a great monument, or span an 
 estuary with a noble bridge, we measure its success by its 
 close resemblance to the great models of the past. Or if one 
 of us has far outstripped his fellows in poem, tragedy, or 
 prose, do we not dub it a classic, which means that we range 
 it among the great intellectual triumphs of ancient Greece or 
 Rome? And yet we never cease to boast, and talk forsooth 
 of our MODERN CIVILISATION as if the triumphs of Vulcan in 
 forge and factory, our mechanical novelties, our power-looms, 
 our factories, and the other adjuncts of our dingy life, 
 ministering alone to luxury, comfort, and the indulgence of the 
 senses, were the be-all and end-all of human effort ! 
 
 Sad as is the tale, nothing is more certain than that our 
 ingrained habit (above all in this England of ours) of repeating 
 hackneyed phrases till we come to think they are as true and 
 unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians, has so 
 corrupted our public opinion, that few indeed there are who 
 realise that what we please to call our civilisation is but a gross 
 service of sensuality which for the most part links us by a 
 degrading chain to a slavery more debasing than any we have 
 abolished by law. 
 
 For what is plainer to every thinking mind than that every 
 step which multiplies our creature comforts and enlarges our list 
 of wants till the luxury of to-day becomes the necessity of to- 
 morrow only serves to forge another link to fetter our indepen-
 
 168 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 dence, and by attaching us yet more to trivial and unnecessary 
 comforts, by so much docks our manhood and abridges our 
 liberty. Further it follows by inexorable logic that the man who 
 possesses most luxuries, most sensual aids, and is surrounded by 
 most help, is necessarily the most helpless when deprived of 
 these adjuncts; and though he be ten times over a millionaire 
 and consequently exalted to the highest pinnacle of popular 
 estimation by the brazen tongue of a lying Press he is never- 
 theless the most helpless slave of a slavish civilisation. 
 
 But my critics will reply, " Have we no heroes still among us? 
 Are there never instances of acts of devotion, acts of self-abnegation, 
 and acts of supreme self-sacrifice for king or country which may 
 be placed in the ranks of the doings of the Ancients and as 
 worthy of immortality as they ? Most assuredly there are. " As 
 hope springs eternal in the human breast," so Nature plants in 
 all young hearts the generous spirit of self-sacrifice, which is the 
 germ from which all great deeds spring. But if such there be 
 they will not be because of, but in spite of, our modern civili- 
 sation. It is not the acts themselves but the manner with 
 which they are regarded that is deplorable. For instance, take 
 the gallant miner who descends into the pit mouth in spite of 
 his fellows' remonstrance to snatch a brother miner from a 
 terrible death at the risk of his own life. A few lines in a 
 provincial paper may record the act just to fill up an empty 
 space, and possibly, if news be scarce, the gallant deed may be 
 recorded in a London paper. Some may read it, for want of 
 thought or want of better pastime : but let a cricketer of note 
 achieve a hundred runs or a footballer of distinction give victory 
 to his team by a successful goal, or a foreign Prince land upon 
 our shores, though his sole distinction may be the possession of a 
 German name of seven syllables and his title to Fame being born 
 an Archduke ! Observe the difference ! To which will the 
 highest fame be accorded, and on which of the two will the public 
 interest centre ? Or again which event is it which excites most 
 attention and causes most talk ? If they appeared in the flesh 
 in theatre, or hall, or public park, which of them would claim 
 the admiration of the public the cricketer, the eminent foot- 
 baller, the last imported giant, or the heroic miner ? 
 
 Most true it is that great deeds are done. Many still " do good
 
 OUE MORAL SLAVERY 169 
 
 by stealth and blush to find it fame." There will ever be in 
 the present, as in the past, great natures which rise above the 
 common order and break through all rules. But must it not be 
 fatal to great lives, great deeds, great enterprises, and heroic 
 virtues, to feel and know that heroism and high purposes must 
 be hidden away rather than avowed boldly to the world the act 
 of impulse, rather than the steady purpose of well-ordered virtue 
 or valour until the recollection of a great deed has come to cause 
 Englishmen rather to blush that they are "found out" in acts 
 -of gallantry or self-sacrifice, and to treat high and lofty 
 sentiments as " stuff" fit only for a play or novel.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 STAGE 
 
 IP, then, the condition of our Press, and a consideration of 
 its output fairly weighed in the balance, must seem to many 
 " more honoured in the breach than in the observance," what, 
 are we to say to the Stage, her twin sister, which bears the 
 relation to the former, of Luxury to Necessity? 
 
 If a portion of the Press must on all hands be admitted to 
 furnish some honest food to the thoughtful mind, even though 
 this be adulterated by ten thousand times its bulk and weight of 
 pure poison, it is difficult to seriously urge a defence for an 
 institution which, at its best, is but the sugar that coats the pill 
 of Precept and Example, and for the most part serves but to 
 beguile an idle hour. 
 
 More strange than all is the undeniable social phenomenon 
 of the hour, which has chosen the moment when the Stage has 
 declined to the lowest point, to lift the status of actors from 
 being outcasts of society to an honourable position in the rank 
 of artistic professions. While even so lately as one hundred 
 and fifty years ago, the Church refused burial to those who 
 died within its ranks, now bishops patronise its votaries and 
 think not ill of presiding at its functions, and countless divines 
 from their pulpits proclaim its moral and intellectual capabili- 
 ties and resources. Such is the force of fashion in this free 
 and independent country of ours, that, like a snowball once 
 set in motion, there is no limit to the size and momentum 
 which it attains. Nor is it only the pale beams of the clergy 
 but the noontide sun of royal favour which shines down upon 
 our modern Pandemonium. For everything in England which is. 
 patronised and petted by Eoyalty, as surely as the stars revolve 
 round the sun, gains force, and strength, and votaries, from top 
 to bottom of the social scale each class vying with the one 
 above, and striving to prove its title to distinction by exaggerat- 
 ing the follies and aping the manners of the class above them.
 
 STAGE 171 
 
 Add to this parasitic and sybaritic scum of the Social pot tha 
 entire power of the Press tied to the Stage by the closest 
 bonds of mutual interest, sympathies, and above all, pecuniary 
 profit and it is easy to see that the Stage, with Fashion filling 
 her sails and with Advertisement, which in these days stands for 
 the guinea stamp, at her back, possesses the greatest motive- 
 powers of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Theatres springing up in every part of the city, and speculators 
 eagerly spying out each hole and cranny where Thespis has not 
 yet found a niche, would seem to furnish proof that the Stage 
 is in a nourishing condition, in spite of music-halls and other 
 irregular places of entertainment which in each succeeding year, 
 in some measure owing to the growing inferiority of Stage 
 productions, or perhaps a declining taste for the tedious pro- 
 priety and irksome deprivation of beer and tobacco which is 
 enforced in the better-class theatres, go far to dispute the 
 empire of the legitimate drama. Nevertheless it is an open 
 secret that extravagance and luxury in scenery, decoration and 
 stage accessories generally, to say nothing of the ladies' dresses 
 which have, in many theatres, almost taken the place of good 
 acting in the public favour, together with the ever-increasing 
 salaries of leading "Stars," conspire to diminish the margin of 
 profit to the speculator in most cases to a vanishing point. 
 
 We hear much of the injustice to the theatres by the encroach- 
 ments of the music-halls where the facilities of smoking and 
 drinking during the performance attract those who are neither 
 able nor willing to conform to the standard of dress and propriety 
 which of late years has been strictly enforced in the best seats 
 of the London theatres. Be this as it may, it cannot be denied 
 that the nation as a whole presents the singular spectacle of a 
 civilised people, whose higher classes, wholly indifferent to the 
 merits or demerits of the entertainment dished up to them, 
 provided the seats are comfortable, the theatre is clean and fresh 
 painted, the scenery and dresses luxurious, and above all served 
 up at such an hour as not to interfere with the late dinners in 
 vogue, frequent the theatres in ever-increasing numbers, while 
 the quality of the fare provided declines day by day. 
 
 The fashion of theatre-going is even making way among the 
 middle classes in the teeth of the strong Puritan leaven which
 
 172 ABB WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 almost entirely tabooed such frivolous entertainments to their 
 earlier generations, and is slowly gaining ground, according as 
 sound and meritorious pieces are brought out (which, it must be 
 confessed, generally reduce the managers to debt and despair), to 
 tempt their more cultivated tastes : while a theatre-going 
 working class, whose dramatic views, in direct opposition to the 
 two preceding divisions, the first of which deride morality in 
 drama as bitterly as the middle-classes decry drama without 
 morality place Sentiment in the first rank, caring nothing for 
 the fantastic novelties and fine-dressing plays of miscalled 
 modern drama insist upon the old-fashioned " Poetic Justice" 
 of a bygone date, and demand, above all, a moral lesson where 
 each Jack wins his Jill and the villain of the piece obtains his 
 adequate reward. 
 
 It is commonly believed in well-informed circles that what- 
 ever remnant of support can be relied upon for the legitimate 
 drama as opposed to the flimsy trash which for many years 
 past has usurped and indeed almost effaced the memory of 
 British drama, must be looked for in the unregarded ranks of 
 the middle classes. 
 
 The rising generation of theatre-goers may be divided into 
 two classes. On one hand, there seems little doubt, to judge 
 by the success obtained in town and province by the more 
 serious plays, as opposed to the rubbish that has been foisted 
 upon the public in the more showy and fashionable places of 
 resort, that authors who complain that the public care nothing 
 for solid food, but desire light hashes of " musical- turns, "strung 
 together with French Opera-Bouffe music and an abundance of 
 scenic variety, are merely inventing excuses for their own incom- 
 petence : while, on the other, the richer and better-represented 
 in the Society-Press have come to regard the theatre as a resort 
 which, in the first place, gives a pretext for a dinner at a res- 
 taurant or a fashionable hotel, in the second place affords a 
 comfortable change from a crowded restaurant to the comparative 
 ease and comfort of an armchair in the stalls, and in the third 
 place either affords (as at the music-halls) an opportunity of 
 smoking cigarettes and passing a couple of noisy hours, or (if 
 in a theatre) to have ears tickled and eyes gratified by the sight
 
 STAGE 173 
 
 of shapely limbs and white shoulders, and the latest creations qf 
 Parisian millinery. 
 
 In view of the numberless complaints from every shade of 
 opinion and every grade of critical authority in the kingdom, 
 there is no need for wasting powder over the atrocities which 
 pass for plays in the more fashionable of our London theatres. 
 Suffice it to say that it is well understood that Shakespeare spells 
 disaster, to judge by the ever-shrinking minority who still cling 
 to such bygone methods, while the solid drama as represented by 
 Coleman and Goldsmith succeeded by the graceful burlesques, 
 and later, the so-called drawing-room "ineptitudes" of twenty 
 years ago has lately settled down into a class of entertainment 
 which is neither fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red-herring, and 
 remarkable for nothing but the absence of dialogue, literary 
 value, wit, or wisdom. If Shakespeare speaks truly when he 
 says, the " Stage holds up a mirror to nature," and if it can be 
 maintained that any substantial portion of the intelligence of the 
 country still resort to the theatres to while an idle hour away, 
 then, indeed, the fall from the days of Shakespeare to the present 
 is more marked than any similar declension in any branch of 
 human activity. One can but suppose that among the cultivated 
 classes only those whose energies are enfeebled by over-indul- 
 gence and enervated by luxury can thus prostitute the feeble 
 remains of intelligence they still possess at the shrine of a 
 degrading fashion. 
 
 Perhaps among the most intolerable of later plays produced in 
 our fashionable theatres, French translations of current Parisian 
 successes have played a leading part. Here the natural disparity 
 between the two languages, which, in many cases, defies all 
 attempts at successful translation, usually serves but to coarsen 
 an originally indelicate plot, while the wit that gleams in the 
 original is, frequently in the English translation, rendered 
 conspicuous by its absence. 
 
 As to the ephemeral rubbish which is dumped by the ton upon 
 the English Stage, mainly through collusive tricks of the Press 
 and Dramatic Authors (" arcades ambo "), judging by the lengthy 
 runs which have been recorded during the last few years, it 
 would seem that handsome women, fine dresses, magnificent 
 mounting, and a total absence of plot, combined with an assort-
 
 174 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 ment of light airs, such as used to be associated with French 
 Opera-Bouffe, have netted the largest returns, and as a natural 
 consequence engendered a larger crop of imitators than any 
 other description of entertainment. 
 
 There is yet another novel element of the highest importance, 
 without which well-filled stalls are well-nigh impossible to hope 
 for. The average playgoer of the higher classes who is content 
 to pay ten shillings for a stall at an entertainment for which his 
 more enlightened grandfather would have scorned to pay a 
 shilling, has not only become habituated to the senseless 
 introduction of music-hall " turns," dances and songs, which it 
 is needless to say have not only no connection with, but frequently 
 upset whatever trace of consecutive action the play may contain, 
 but he looks for it, expects it, and is not happy till he gets it. 
 " Hinc illae lachrymae." Managers have not only to provide actors 
 but also dancers and tumblers as well. 
 
 Another class of (usually imported) histrionic imbecility is greatly 
 to the fore. Just as our comic papers import American wit ad 
 libitum from New York or " Frisco," so, too, the most successful 
 plays that tickle the ear of Fashionable London of late years have 
 come from the pen of American writers, many of which it must 
 be admitted are by no means devoid of wit and " go," but totally 
 deficient in that element of probability without which the most 
 facetious plays lose all merit in the discerning eye of judgment, 
 while, per contra, they certainly possess that plentiful sprinkling 
 of foreign slang which seems to exercise an astonishing fascination 
 upon the British mind. As a sample, I recollect a play which 
 obtained a certain vogue in the clubs and drawing-rooms through 
 the constant repetition of the current American affirmative, " Why 
 certainly ! ! 
 
 As for home-grown productions, such as " Charley's Aunt " and 
 similar exhibitions of senseless buffoonery of the most crude 
 .and primitive type with utterly improbable situations and a 
 plentiful lack of wit, were it not an accepted axiom that 
 Englishmen appraise the value of an actor or a play according as 
 the Press tells them that he or it is worthy or unworthy of 
 praise, it might be argued from " length of run," that such plays 
 represent the high-water mark of English popularity. It would 
 be painful, indeed, to the patriotic Englishman if an intelligent
 
 STAGE 175 
 
 foreigner were to adopt such a standard to gauge the quality of 
 our theatrical work and the characteristics which insure success ; 
 while if he has traced the gradual introduction into the domestic 
 drama of the familiar elements of conjugal infidelity, spiced 
 with the innuendoes for which the Gallic drama has been so 
 justly deprecated and in no country more vigorously than our 
 own moral England, it comes to him as a startling revelation 
 that the frequent recurrence to foreign plays is mainly attribu- 
 table to a growing demand for that license of speech and manners 
 which, at least in the eyes of the upper classes, lends a special 
 charm and an indispensable spice to the "up-to-date drama" 
 of the twentieth century. 
 
 Still more significant to the eyes of every well-wisher of his 
 country is the growing practice of admitting young ladies to the 
 free use and exercise of privileges which in bygone days only men 
 and married women were permitted to enjoy. For it must be 
 remembered that while in France only men and married women 
 swell the ranks of those who patronise the dubious creations of 
 the Parisian stage, or read the novels which must fill with 
 surprise and disgust those who are not entirely hardened to vice, 
 in England and America the entire field of Drama and Literature 
 is thrown widely open to boys and girls for them to imbibe 
 whatever nourishment or poison they may chance to find there. 
 
 If any doubt exists as to the quality of so-called drama 
 provided for the provinces, it may be interesting to my readers to 
 know that I devoted myself during two successive winters at 
 Bournemouth and Eamsgate to a critical observation of the 
 theatrical fare provided at these popular places of winter resort by 
 a weekly visit to the theatre. There, as in most provincial towns, 
 it is usual for a travelling company to perform for the space of 
 one week. In rare instances two plays would be performed, but 
 far more frequently it is the practice of provincial travelling 
 companies to perform some " favourite " of last season, at 
 Bournemouth, or similar places, for the delectation of the Bank 
 -and Fashion, while at Eamsgate or smaller towns of business 
 and commerce, the invariably weekly- changed stock-play performed 
 throughout the winter was of the type which used to be associated 
 with the Surrey melodrama. Much as in the crowded working 
 towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, whose dirty theatres are
 
 176 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 usually crammed, at any rate as to the cheaper places, with mill- 
 hands and factory lads, to judge by the gorgeous posters, 
 displaying, in brilliantly-coloured illustration, sundry acts of 
 murder, suicide, or torture, it would appear that the stamp of 
 performance supplied to Ramsgate represents the average 
 provincial output of the British drama, and appeals to similar 
 classes. 
 
 The result of my theatrical experiences during the two winters 
 spent in Bournemouth and Ramsgate may be briefly summed up 
 as follows : In Eamsgate, which may fairly be said to typify an 
 average working population chiefly employed in fishing, of from 
 ten to twenty thousand inhabitants where the stalls were usually 
 empty, while the cheaper galleries, pit, and circles, were well- 
 filled as a rule, chiefly with men, and more sparsely with women 
 of the lowest classes it would seem, roughly speaking, that 
 the purveyors of theatrical filth dealt almost exclusively in 
 loosely-strung series of murders, robberies, suicides, abductions r 
 seductions, and other sensational situations of the highest 
 improbability, painfully constructed for the main end of introducing 
 some recondite method of torture, or scene of horror, or any 
 frightful catastrophe fitted for harrowing the feelings or terrifying 
 the imagination of its hearers. Another popular and abundant 
 variety consisted in detective stories, slightly altered for theatrical 
 purposes, made up of the usual string of impossible situations, 
 and still more impossible sequences of the daring acts and hair- 
 breadth escapes so dear to juvenile imagination, which stories 
 may be safely said to have spawned of late years a prolific brood 
 of the cheapest and vilest literature that the eye can see or the 
 mind conceive, at a price which places them within the reach of 
 the poorest school-child. I need not repeat that such methods of 
 ensnaring immature children of all ages into familiarity with 
 the dregs of the population, must necessarily not only be 
 productive of bad results, but, if we may judge by the well-known 
 tendency of similar literature, cannot fail to implant the first 
 lessons of crime and guide their steps in the direction of the 
 jail and the gallows. 
 
 It is regrettable that some effective censorship of the Press 
 should not be adopted, or that the Police Regulations should 
 not require the Stipendiary Magistrates of our great towns to
 
 
 STAGE 177 
 
 attack what every right-thinking man must consider to be a 
 serious source of popular demoralisation. 
 
 It is unnecessary to quote well-known facts that can be 
 ascertained by a cursory examination of the daily papers in 
 which we have the absolute proofs of the effects of such literature 
 upon the youth of our towns. How many boys springing from 
 the working and even the lower middle classes have been led 
 away by the bad example of such literature ? who, by their own 
 confession, and also through the testimony of their parents and 
 relatives, have disclosed the painful truth that the seeds of 
 criminality are too often sown even in the most respectable 
 circles by the introduction and perusal of the atrocious cheap 
 literature and blood-and-thunder drama of the day. Nor can 
 such moral filth be excused upon the ground of authors being 
 unable to sell their wares unless they descend to the supposed 
 depths of the populace for whom they cater. It is continually 
 urged on behalf of our so-called playwrights that they are 
 compelled much against their will to lower their style to the 
 supposed level of their audiences. A close examination of two or 
 three large seaside towns and an experience of the plays provided 
 for their delectation have convinced me that the degradation 
 proceeds from, and is almost wholly attributable to, the incapacity 
 and imbecility of the providers, rather than to the taste or want 
 of taste of their audiences. If the old style of moral and miracle 
 plays and Biblical illustrations were resorted to, I firmly believe 
 that with the exception of the hobbledehoys and ragtag and 
 bobtail of the great cities, our provincial theatres would be as 
 well or better filled than at present, and that the higher-priced 
 seats would be resorted to by the middle and shop-keeping 
 classes who are now conspicuous by their absence. Thus the 
 profit to the theatrical managers would be nowise lessened, while 
 the improved tone and feeling could not but sensibly react upon 
 the population of our towns, with no small advantage to public 
 health and morals. 
 
 I have before hinted that the middle or professional-cum- 
 trading classes who are, as a rule, more serious and more religious 
 and more appreciative of moral and literary excellence than the 
 wealthier supporters of our higher-class London theatres, are in a 
 great measure debarred from the use of the theatre by the ancient 
 
 N
 
 178 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 traditions of Puritanism which still linger among them, and 
 which are very properly kept up and fostered by the undoubted 
 immorality and debasing influence of the modern so-called 
 Drama. If, however, the revival of something after the style of 
 the old miracle plays or the later German moral dramas 
 constructed out of Biblical incidents, which are still in vogue in 
 the less sophisticated portions of Teutonic Europe, were to be 
 reintroduced to our provincial towns, though they might involve 
 a loss in gallery and stalls, the middle classes, which are now 
 repelled and divorced from theatrical patronage, would be 
 attracted to swell the circle of stage-votaries. It is most notice- 
 able that such serious moral pieces as the " Sign of the Cross " 
 (or similar semi-religious plays), however ill-staged and ill- written 
 and bald in dialogue and devoid of literary merit, when produced 
 in the provinces, where the usual blood-and-thunder " sensations " 
 have utterly failed to fill the best seats, golden harvests and 
 crowded houses have brought joy to the managerial heart, with 
 no small advantage to the community at large. 
 
 If no strictures can be sufficiently severe and no condemnation 
 sufficiently strong for the conduct of those who do not hesitate 
 to debase our youth by dramatic representation of the foulest 
 trash that the human mind can invent or conceive, on the other 
 hand one cannot but marvel to see the attitude of the British 
 public in the presence of the insults offered to its good nature 
 and judgment by the sickening transformation of the graceful 
 if well-worn nursery tales of Christmas pantomimes into the 
 senseless jumble of music-hall " turns," vulgar dances, and 
 leg-and-arm exhibitions, with which latter-day managers have 
 made us familiar. 
 
 Bad as is the case in London, I was thunderstruck to observe at 
 a fashionable southern seaside resort before an audience embracing 
 the children and youthful relatives of the most cultivated families 
 of the higher classes, a so-called pantomime which one would 
 imagine, even in the most hardened " theatre-goer " of the 
 smart set, could scarcely, from its vulgarity and indecency, 
 fail to excite a mingled sense of shame and disgust. 
 
 My first impulse was to write to the Standard, in discharge 
 of what I considered a public duty in order to draw attention 
 to the danger incurred in an unsuspected quarter by parents or
 
 STAGE 179 
 
 teachers who imprudently send their children to the pantomime 
 in fulfilment of a customary Christmas obligation. Previous 
 experience in similar ventures, however, warned me, upon further 
 reflection, that an attempt to open the public eyes to the gross 
 abuses that exist in England under the full protection of the Law 
 would invariably be met and answered by the offenders them- 
 selves under a pseudonym with the full connivance and knowledge 
 of the newspaper in which they were writing, couched in language 
 of virtuous indignation mingled with surprise that the complainant 
 should betray such narrow-mindedness and ignorance of the 
 legitimate aspirations of Art, rounded off with the usual jeremiad 
 about Philistines and Mrs. Grundy, etc., etc. 
 
 Nor is this the only trap that awaits the unwary and 
 inexperienced Briton who fondly imagines that his fellow- 
 countrymen only yearn to know of wrongs in order to remove 
 them, and of abuses in order to reform, regardless of the pitfalls of 
 the Law which in this luckless land ever watches over the evil- 
 doer and lets the well-doer shift for himself ; for right in his path 
 like a dragon stands the Libel Law, that patron saint of rogues 
 and swindlers, who, like the angel on guard at the gates of 
 Paradise, stands with a flaming sword challenging him to do his 
 worst. 
 
 It will hardly be believed that upon consulting my solicitor as 
 to the risks of warning the Public against sending their children 
 to a Christmas entertainment where the vulgarity of the dialogue 
 was only equalled by the indecency of the dresses, coupled with 
 an appeal for an alteration of the Law in this respect so that 
 children who are invited to a children's entertainment might by 
 some means be safeguarded from contamination I was assured, 
 that I should incur a grave risk of a civil action for libel with 
 possibly heavy damages which might vary from a thousand 
 pounds to a farthing according to the temper of the jury or 
 judge who tried the case with the further explanation, that as 
 
 the town of B h only possessed one high-class theatre, a judge 
 
 and jury would hold that in the first place my remarks could 
 only apply to that and no other ; that in the second place, since 
 public spirit was a thing not to be thought of, and if it existed, 
 could not possibly apply to this case, such strictures must alone 
 proceed from the malice, envy or jealousy of the complainant,
 
 180 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 presumably the owner or champion of a rival establishment, 
 animated with a desire to ruin the manager of the aforesaid 
 theatre ; and in the third place (he urged) that, while I might be 
 unable to procure a single respectable witness who was present 
 at the performance and willing to give testimony in my favour, 
 in view of them being mostly ladies and children who would 
 undoubtedly object to appear in Court, my opponent would 
 produce without any difficulty a crowd of " independent 
 witnesses " from among his own dependents and supporters. I 
 regretted more that I was unable to bring forward this flagrant 
 example of what may be called the forcible induction of fashion- 
 able immorality into the hearts and homes of an unoffending 
 public, because, warned by previous failures, I had devised for 
 the occasion what I believe to be a very successful method of 
 eliciting an expression of public opinion upon a question of direct 
 fact. I have always observed in similar controversies upon 
 artistic or social subjects where passion is more deeply stirred 
 than elsewhere, that those who reply (almost always under 
 assumed names) to genuine and well-founded attacks, nearly 
 always deprive the controversy of any real interest by their too 
 transparent advocacy, while, on the other hand, they generally 
 avoid the precise charge brought against them and labour to- 
 distract attention from the real issue by wandering into the 
 by-paths of irrelevance or vituperation. I therefore proposed 
 simply to challenge those who disputed or attempted to qualify 
 my strictures to set down on paper, if they dared, a correct and 
 accurate description of the female costumes employed, both as 
 to their shape and colour, and leave the verdict to a dispassionate 
 public. 
 
 We are continually told by indignant correspondents that 
 managers must really mend their ways and produce better 
 plays ! But why ? we may be pardoned for asking. So long as 
 the British matron shames not to resort thither with her un- 
 blushing charges, and the fatuous Briton is resigned to pay half 
 a guinea for a poor pennyworth of balderdash plus a comfortable 
 armchair, and even jostle each other for the infliction who can 
 expect theatrical managers, being merely human, to raise the 
 quality of their wares ? 
 
 Before we can effectually grapple with the causes and
 
 STAGE 181 
 
 phenomena observable in most departments of English Art, we 
 must endeavour to exhibit in the plainest light those facets of 
 social life which reflect light upon peculiarities which, though 
 universally attributed to us by our foreign friends, are not only a 
 subject of debate but also of indignant repudiation by our 
 fellow-countrymen. 
 
 I may here observe the singular fact that while our self-styled 
 artists pictorial, sculptorial, or tonsorial rely generally upon 
 hard cash rather than genius to push their pretensions to fame, 
 and even doctors, dentists, architects and lawyers have to resort 
 to advertisement in order to ensure public support, history and 
 experience tell, us that our greatest artists were originally paid 
 for their master-pieces sums which bear no proportion whatever 
 to present market values. 
 
 Another thing to be observed is the extremely small proportion of 
 individuals who embrace art as a profession as compared with our 
 continental neighbours. Nevertheless, contrary to what might be 
 expected, though we can in no sense pretend to vie with the latter 
 in the scope and variety of their pictorial and sculptorial output, the 
 prices demanded and obtained by our popular artists in these days 
 greatly exceed the fees obtainable by artists of any other nation. 
 It might be urged in explanation of this ascertained fact that the 
 unusual costliness of successful art and the prices currently 
 charged for the services of the liberal and artistic professions in 
 this country should be attributed to the greater liberality or the 
 greater wealth of our fellow-countrymen, as compared with our 
 continental neighbours. For the fact that it has raised con- 
 tinental prices and that the echoes of the astonishing figures 
 extorted from John Bull by native and foreign artists while 
 contributing largely to swell his importance have greatly added 
 to his expenses abroad, we have only to look at the "milor " of 
 the last century and his fabulous reputation of the past. 
 
 No doubt from 50 to 100 years ago, when Englishmen first 
 began to travel, it is improbable that any but men of large 
 fortune, unless engaged in commerce, were tempted to brave the 
 discomforts of foreign travel or found any inducement beyond 
 what the love of adventure or desire of forming a collection of 
 pictures or statues could supply. Since, however, travelling 
 facilities became greater, and railways and steam-boats abridged
 
 182 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 distances, and hotels were multiplied where objects of natural 
 beauty or interest attracted travellers from various lands, the 
 "milor" class was quickly superseded by the commercial or 
 commercially inclined, who, supplemented by the flood of 
 Americanjand later of German travellers which seems to have set 
 in between the 70's and 80's of the last century, while giving an 
 impetus to competition in foreign articles of virtu, introduced an 
 element of cautiousness and calculation which has greatly tended 
 to reduce foreign prices. 
 
 On the other hand the more rapid development of wealth in 
 the Anglo-Saxon races joined to a stationary if not lessening flow 
 of recruits into the army of Anglo-Saxon art, added to the 
 enormous ignorance and want of taste of the overwhelming 
 majority of their Patrons, seems to account for this singular 
 variation in the laws of demand and supply. 
 
 From this we may fairly argue that in the first place England 
 is essentially a commercial nation, that their tendencies are in 
 the direction of money-making, and that they are not in a 
 general way addicted to the cultivation of either the polite Sciences 
 or the Arts, or indeed to any subject which does not promise 
 immediate remuneration ; with the result that our artistic and 
 professional " Services " generally, by reason of that singular 
 mixture of ignorance and prejudice added to an inherent dislike 
 to be thought mean or shabby (which I take to be a marked 
 characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race) has contributed greatly 
 not only to raise the current requirements of life but still more the 
 cost of artistic and other luxuries at home and abroad, and hence 
 to corrupt the secret sources and invade the most sacred strong- 
 hold of those arts which purify and elevate the soul of a nation. 
 For the soul of a nation is purified and elevated in proportion as 
 a larger or less number are lifted beyond buying or selling, to the 
 contemplation of, and intimacy with, the secrets of nature through 
 the refining channels of true philosophy and religion, sound and 
 healthy literature, knowledge, and art 1 
 
 The first consideration when an Englishman thinks of buying 
 a picture is, What do the papers say about the man ? In the 
 second place, What does he make by painting? The result is 
 that we in England and the United States, alone apparently among 
 nations, are guided in matters of Art by Press criticisms which
 
 STAGE 183 
 
 in nine cases out of ten are merely puffs paid for in hard cash by 
 the object of their praise, scores of newspapers having their 
 being entirely in the manufacture of " puffs " more or less veiled 
 for throwing dust in the eyes of the British public. As for the 
 Ladies' papers they are scarcely veiled at all, and it is easy for 
 the rankest outsider to read between the lines the paid advertise- 
 ment in the idiotic drivel about the " gauzy and ethereal charms 
 of Miss Amarilda Jones," or Lady Sally Twoshoes' magnificent 
 crepe de chine or "how lovely Miss Plantagenet de Brown looked 
 in pale straw with just a touch of black or red," etc., etc. 
 
 One hardly knows whether the gullibility or the folly of the 
 fashionable world is to be pitied most, when we find them 
 willing to pay for " Society Papers " devoted to inane gossip 
 and the record of senseless doings already paid for in hard 
 cash by the performers themselves, with the full knowledge 
 that the said papers, being entirely supported by advertisement 
 and the insane desire of fashionable ladies to invest money in 
 their own self-aggrandisement, the proprietors would be satisfied 
 if their fair supporters were to distribute the paper among their 
 friends without a farthing of remuneration. 
 
 As with Dress so with Art. In England it is not so necessary 
 to shine, as to advertise cleverly one's supposed proficiency. No- 
 doubt it is expensive to obtain telling and cleverly written 
 references to the marvellous talent of that rising young novelist 
 Jones, or to obtain innocent looking paragraphs setting forth how 
 the town is turned topsy-turvy by that remarkable artist Mr. 
 Brown who has just returned from sketching in the East ! Nor is 
 it a bad plan to invest money in buying up your own picture 
 through a third person for a substantial sum : for so surely as a. 
 hundred guineas are reported as having been paid for the latest 
 daub of an unknown artist in the daily papers, numberless offers 
 are made from all quarters from eager investors in "rising 
 talent " ready to buy whatever he has to sell. In all such 
 matters it is only the first step that costs. After that Success, 
 goes by itself at least in England. 
 
 It is said of a late well-known actor, usually referred to as 
 being at the head of his profession, that after labouring in vain 
 for some 30 years in out-of-the-way places in the leading parts, 
 of a second-class company, and having come into a small windfall
 
 184 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 from a distant relative, he thought the best investment to make 
 was to lay out the money in Press notices. It will hardly be 
 believed that in a moment the aforesaid second-class actor at 
 once leaped into fame. By the investment of a couple of thousand 
 pounds and an appearance "for ten days only" in a first-class 
 London theatre, he woke up and found himself famous. 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with the learned professions. Such is the 
 widely-admitted necessity for outward Show and Hollow 
 Pretence in this Land of Sham and Humbug, that capable 
 doctors openly avow the necessity of maintaining equipages and 
 establishments out of all proportion to their means in order 
 to procure the reasonable fees to which their talents entitle them, 
 while distinguished lawyers have left it on record that in order 
 to secure fat briefs and heavy fees it is almost as necessary to 
 " go the pace " and shine, at least in Society papers, among the 
 votaries of fashion and frivolity, as to burn the midnight oil in 
 the painful acquisition of Hale and Coke.
 
 CHAPTEE XVII 
 
 TASTE AND TACT 
 
 PERHAPS there are few things that contribute more powerfully 
 to form, or rather deform, the social and artistic condition of 
 England than the absence of taste. 
 
 Strangely enough we are not only as a nation almost wholly 
 bereft of that sixth sense (as it has been aptly called) in which the 
 old Greeks excelled above all other nations, but we do not seem 
 to have invented a word as yet which corresponds to the 
 " Aisthesis " of that nation, to say nothing of the conception of 
 that which it dubs in common with all the Latin races, " taste." 
 
 And be it remembered always that the Eomans, like ourselves, 
 were the butt of the more artistic Greek, precisely as we are to 
 the more refined Parisian or Greek of these modern days. Hence 
 it seems that their inability to imagine or define its composition 
 had to be supplemented by a grotesque attribution of the word 
 "taste," or "gustum," which being derived from the sensation 
 which proceeds from an agreeable feeling in the mouth, or a 
 tickling of the palate, has produced not only a complete confusion 
 of ideas, but tends to attribute to the grosser external sensations, 
 what is in truth a mixed quality of the mind and soul. 
 
 The Frenchman and the Spaniard, aesthetic to the core as 
 any Athenian of the Attic Eepublic, distinguish that ineffable 
 perception which is innate refinement as to external objects by 
 the name of " bon gout," or " buen gusto," in order to differentiate 
 it from the enjoyment by the palate of " taste," pure and simple. 
 It is fair to say that there exists a perception of some deficiency 
 in the term " taste," as used in England, since the term " tact " 
 is often applied in its stead. 
 
 Now it seems not improbable that had we at an early date 
 adopted the term " good taste," in order to distinguish it from 
 the more vulgar sense of taste by mouth, there might have grown 
 up among us, in the first place, a comprehension of the meaning 
 of the term, and in the second place a desire for its fulfilment,
 
 186 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 which would have amounted to a step in the direction of 
 national aesthetic progress. 
 
 Nothing strikes the Englishman who lives abroad and is 
 intimately acquainted with the ways and manners of foreigners 
 more than this indifference to taste which sets us, along with our 
 trans-Atlantic cousins, on a totally different plane of civilisation 
 from* the Latin peoples. It will be urged possibly that the 
 Teutonic races are very much in the same boat as ourselves. It 
 may be so ; but I strongly opine that the apprehension of true art 
 on the part of the more cultivated sections of the German people 
 in its widest sense, is in some ways more healthy and desirable 
 than that of the modern representatives of ancient Borne. As to 
 their practice, it is well to always remember that the Germans 
 and their northern congeners are in point of refinement and the 
 higher arts of civilisation but mushrooms of yesterday compared 
 with the heirs of ancient Borne, to whom the tradition of pre- 
 Christian civilisation has descended in direct line. 
 
 It is said that the poet Byron cared little or nothing for his 
 poetic reputation, but was extremely sensitive as to his athletic 
 prowess. Strange as it may seem, most men are proudest and 
 most sensitive as to the qualities which are least generally 
 attributed to them. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no quality that is, if we may judge by 
 common speech by which English men and women differentiate 
 each other more critically, or to which they assign a greater value, 
 than tact. That individuals of our race possess it in the highest 
 degree, especially cultivated women at any rate in so far as 
 concerns external matters and external show can hardly be 
 doubted. Indeed, I have frequently heard the most competent 
 judges declare that no more refined type can be found than the 
 cultivated Englishwoman ; but in my experience this can also be 
 said of the Bussians and the Americans of the United States. In 
 both cases the remark of Napoleon the Great, " Scratch the 
 Bussian and you find the Cossack," is equally applicable. 
 
 But in its widest national sense as applied to cultivation and 
 refinement, the perception of and search after what is fitting, 
 beautiful and good, in opposition to what is vulgar, repulsive, and 
 unsuitable, is conspicuous by its absence here in England and 
 North America in a degree which has no parallel, as far as I am
 
 TASTE AND TACT 187 
 
 aware, in any land. Perhaps the main cause of this would seem 
 to be an excessive devotion to sport in the territorial aristocracy, 
 which from the nature of Britons, influencing very considerably 
 the plutocracy and through that channel permeating every rank 
 of society, has always conspired to develop amongst us that 
 roughness, almost amounting to brutality, which marks the 
 conquering nation whose instinctive distrust and dislike to 
 politeness as a sign of subjection or inferiority is joined to a 
 hearty contempt of external show of any kind. To judge, 
 however, by the literature of the sixteenth century and the most 
 faithful description of current English habits, it would seem as if 
 the more cultivated classes had risen to a very high level of, at 
 all events, superficial polish during the Elizabethan age, and 
 many traces of high culture are to be found even so late as the 
 Civil War. Then came the Interregnum, when Puritanism over- 
 whelmed the arts and graces, and preachers sneered at all 
 refinement as snares and temptations of the Evil One. When 
 the Eestoration came, French fashions and reckless luxury took 
 the place of refinement ; extravagance was the rule, and dissolute- 
 ness of manners came to be considered the mark of the true 
 gentleman. With the ruder Dutch fashions which came in with 
 Dutch William, the heavy British nature swung back the 
 pendulum of manners. The eighteenth century was a period of 
 debasement, degradation, drink, riot, and debauchery, from which 
 not even the National Church was exempt. And it needs but to 
 read the graphic story of the " Court of England " in the earlier 
 years of the nineteenth century, by Miss Fanny Burney, to believe- 
 that the reaction in a wholesomer and healthier direction made 
 little or no strides among the richer classes until far into the 
 reign of Victoria. 
 
 It may be said, therefore, that the brief upward strides of the 
 British nation in the direction of aesthetic cultivation after a, set- 
 back of two hundred years in spite of Wordsworths, Coleridges, 
 Euskins and Brownings, rapidly declined under the waning, 
 influence of an aged Queen, who sank her interest in her kingdom 
 and her moral influence over Society in the grief of her beloved 
 husband, until led astray, it would seem, by the backslidings of 
 our volatile neighbours during the Second Empire, we once more; 
 plunged into a vortex of vulgar extravagance and dissolute luxury.
 
 188 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 which has again set back the clock and revived the memories of 
 the degrading years which followed the Restoration. 
 
 Nor is the outlook at the present hour more promising, but, 
 indeed, quite the reverse. For our aristocracy, almost ruined by 
 the reverses of bad years, failing tenants and bad prices, unless 
 possessed of mines or town property, are scarcely able to hold 
 their heads above water, with the natural result that the standard 
 of luxury being once fixed at the highest limit to which human 
 ostentation and lavish wealth can extend, the few who are able 
 " to keep the ball rolling " are compelled to invite the yearly crop 
 of enriched financiers, mine owners and speculators to fill up the 
 breach. Add to this that the omnivorous Jews, to whom the fall of 
 the English aristocracy comes as a boon and a blessing, with the 
 astuteness of their race press closely on their successful Christian 
 rivals, and avail themselves of the gaps in the ranks of Society to 
 crowd the envied portals from which they had been so long 
 rigorously excluded. 
 
 Then came the flood of rich Americans. And the cry is, Still 
 they come ! until at length, from being once the most exclusive 
 of nations, we have come to harbour here, in London, the most 
 heterogeneous medley miscalled by the Press, Society that the 
 world ever saw ; whose characteristics are luxury without refine- 
 ment, extravagance without taste, restlessness without decorum, 
 whose path to distinction lies in lavish display, and whose 
 highest aim is vulgar notoriety. 
 
 Some will object, " But since you call the French the Greeks 
 of modern days, are we to believe that it is only lack of imitation 
 of our neighbours across the channel in which we are deficient? " 
 To this 1 reply, that a superficial examination of society, art, 
 literature, and a review of all that is great and good in France, 
 as exhibited through the colours and eyes of the Press, is apt to 
 present Frenchmen in an entirely false light. The gaudy 
 vulgarity of the regime of the Second Empire, where money 
 reigned supreme, quite overshadowed and stifled the real life of 
 France which pursued its quiet course beneath. The true Society 
 with culture and refinement loathing the usurper who had robbed 
 them of their liberties, was entirely divorced from the noisy herd 
 that clamoured in the daily Press for recognition and advertise- 
 ment, and whose doings filled Paris, and through their pages the
 
 TASTE AND TACT 189 
 
 world's eye, with the luxury and dissoluteness of its cosmopolitan 
 and exotic barbarism. 
 
 Humiliating as it is to relate, is it not absolutely certain that 
 this figment of the penny papers, miscalled Society, this Baal 
 before whom men and women bow down by the hundred thousand 
 here in England, and even more so in the United States, as is 
 apparent from the numberless allusions in the Press and daily 
 records of their senseless doings, has so bewitched large sections 
 of otherwise sane men and women, that they are not only willing, 
 but all too eager to learn even so much as the most trifling 
 details concerning the darling objects of their envy and 
 admiration ? 
 
 Thus we have a vicious circle in which the attractive Lady 
 Snooks-Gibbins and the exquisite Mr. Montgomery Jones who, 
 by a large expenditure of cash in newspaper advertisements, 
 procure a daily record of their doings and compel public attention 
 to their senseless extravagance or fantastic imbecilities incredible 
 as it may seem, raise up a crop of admirers, who subsidise the 
 society rags which subsist upon the vanity of such upstarts, and 
 are glad to pay for the honour of becoming more intimately 
 acquainted with the sordid details of their life, daily habits, and 
 the precise sums which they spend in perfumery or jewellery, by 
 buying the newspapers in which their daily doings are recorded ! 
 
 Let us for a moment trace the progress of vulgarity in its 
 most striking external aspect, and observe how the sanctity of 
 home and the respect of what is gentlest and noblest in the realm 
 has given way under trans-Atlantic methods and the omniscient 
 and omnipresent power of the Press, to the prurient curiosity 
 and blatant vulgarity which is the distinguishing mark of our era. 
 
 When I was first in New York thirty years ago I was much 
 astonished to read in the daily papers a record of the comings 
 and goings of the smartest and most opulent ladies of that city 
 of pleasure and luxury, together with an account of their 
 personal decoration and the presumed value of their jewellery, 
 and an accurate description of their personal appearance, equipage 
 and fortune. Mentioning these circumstances to a lady of 
 fashion in New York as an extraordinary and unexpected 
 incident, being, as it seemed, wholly contrary to the spirit and 
 practice of the Kepublican theory, she answered indignantly,
 
 190 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 " I see no reason why our doings should not be recorded just as 
 yours are in your own Court Journal." "But," said I, "that 
 only refers to Dukes and Duchesses." She instantly replied 
 with admirable presence of mind and ready wit, " But, my dear 
 sir, you must remember that we are all Dukes and Duchesses 
 here ! " 
 
 It will hardly be believed that in 1868 or 1869 lists were 
 frequently published in the leading New York papers with an 
 accurate description of the faces, manners, dress and prospects 
 of the marriageable young ladies and gentlemen whose families 
 engrossed public interest, not for personal merit or political 
 weight but for such strange motives as a lavish display of 
 expensive horses or jewellery or some such futile reasons. It 
 would seem that from that time forward trans -Atlantic Vulgarity 
 and Ostentation has steadily advanced by leaps and bounds up 
 to the present hour. 
 
 The interviewing system (of entirely American origin) hand-in- 
 hand with that system of personal advertisement which is the 
 outcome of Press commercialism was, soon after that date, warmly 
 welcomed on pur side of the water, and in less than ten years 
 has become the rule rather than the exception. Within twenty 
 years, probably, no less than a hundred papers, all more or less 
 evanescent and ephemeral, were run upon the lines of personal 
 advertisement, while public inquisitiveness seems to judge by 
 the gutter press daily to grow by what it feeds on. 
 
 In the present year of grace, 1904, to use the expressive 
 language of the West, we seem to have " touched bottom." For 
 not content with thrusting their blatant vulgarities upon our 
 national customs and reducing us to their own level, there are 
 London newspapers to be found which are capable of placing in 
 the front rank of their daily news a telegraphic account as to 
 how Caleb F. Washington Brown expended a quarter of a 
 million dollars in paving his " avenue " with terrines of pat6 de 
 perigord, or a minute description of how Mrs. Lafayette Snooks 
 electrified New York by driving down Broadway in a papier- 
 mach6 chariot drawn by gilt ostriches. 
 
 Here we are again brought back in a forcible manner to the 
 position that we have discussed in a previous chapter, and which 
 points to a degeneration of manners and public intelligence of
 
 TASTE AND TACT 191 
 
 which the records of the 15th and 16th centuries seem to 
 afford no parallel. On the other hand it might be fairly said 
 that our retrograde social movement, social at any rate in its 
 -more fashionable developments, being greatly influenced by 
 greed, patronage, and the breath of royal favour, seems to have 
 dated from the advent of the Dutch, and to have been carried on 
 throughout the German dynasty, till, accelerated by Judaic and 
 trans -Atlantic ostentation and love of display, it bids fair to reach 
 a point at which the nation's good sense will at length rebel and 
 return to more normal and healthy channels. It is not impossible 
 that a serious reaction may take place in the near future, since, as 
 far as can be seen, we have already attained the utmost limit of 
 self-advertisement, interview-mongering and society-trumpeting, 
 of which the united efforts of the Press is capable. Now, since 
 such eccentricities invariably attain their apogee before descend- 
 ing in their erratic flight, this desirable revolution may not be 
 so very remote. Still it is not easy to believe that a system 
 that floods the commercial Press of our country with the gold of 
 Pactolus should ever voluntarily be abandoned. Until a sense 
 of shame for what is nothing less than a national disgrace 
 overspreads the entire nation until England, as a whole, is 
 convinced of the degradation of reading about the senseless follies 
 of self-advertising idiots with more money than brains, in the 
 place of wholesome instruction, serious literature and rational 
 entertainment, it does not seem likely that any solid reformation 
 in the Press of this country is to be looked for. 
 
 In the domain of artistic taste, no clearer proofs of our 
 deficiency can be adduced than the notorious fact that our great 
 English painters of the 18th century who were paid a bare 
 pittance for their unrivalled works were so little appreciated in 
 their own country that it has taken fully a hundred years for 
 their merits to be discovered, and then only through the critical 
 literature of France and Belgium, and the enhanced prices which 
 the knowledge of their merits obtained at the hands of Americans 
 and Frenchmen. 
 
 It is well known that the admirable portraits of Sir Joshua 
 Eeynolds for which he obtained from 40 to 100 guineas, and those 
 of Gainsborough whose usual fee was scarcely more, or to descend 
 to a later date to the Shayers and Constables, or the painters of
 
 192 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 the Norwich school, were so little valued by their countrymen 
 that it is no exaggeration to say that their works fetch as many 
 guineas now as they brought in shillings to their authors. 
 
 In the domain of music the contrast is even more remarkable. 
 To say nothing of the fact that with the solitary exception of 
 George Braham, who, being educated in Italy and having made 
 his reputation by singing in that country, was an exception to the 
 rule in the sense that he arrived in England as an accepted 
 exponent of Italian art, no Englishman or woman could hope to 
 find favour among their countrymen unless their origin was 
 disguised under a foreign name. 
 
 As early as the beginning of the 18th century we hear Addison 
 in the Spectator lamenting the incurable inability of English men 
 and women to tolerate a singer, musician, or artist, who had not 
 the sallow face or the well-oiled jetty ringlets of the traditional 
 foreign musician, adding that it was useless to expect approbation 
 in this benighted land unless possessed of such attributes as these, 
 and a name ending in " ini," "etti," or " elli." These words, 
 written in Queen Anne's time, mark clearly the first stage of our 
 relapse into barbarism. And if no other proof were obtainable, 
 it would be easy to trace the artistic and social declension of the 
 nation by the furniture and structure of our houses, which speak 
 eloquently to us of the boozing habits of the days of good Queen 
 Anne. The little settees round the fire, the chimney corners, the 
 cosy nooks which (discreditable as it be, are universally 
 imitated in these days in the most fashionable quarters of London) 
 constructed for the most part for greater facilities of enjoying, 
 the prevailing luxuries of pipes, beer and punch, qualified later 
 on by tea-drinking on the part of the ladies attest the influence 
 by which the parlours, galleries, and saloons of the past became 
 dwarfed and cramped into mere low-ceiled snuggeries or thinly 
 disguised tap-rooms. 
 
 Nor do the current stories regarding the newly-invented Opera 
 which was introduced about this time from Italy tend to raise 
 our opinion of our countrymen's musical taste in those sordid 
 days. We read that the gay world of London when Opera was 
 first introduced in Queen Anne's reign was convulsed from end to 
 end with the respective merits of their favourite singers. Then, 
 as now, it seems more than probable that they cared little or
 
 TASTE AND TACT 193 
 
 nothing for the Opera, but rabidly backed their favourite singer 
 with the same vigour that their brothers and husbands backed 
 their equine favourites upon the racecourse. It is said that fair 
 disputants carried their animosity to such a ferocious extent that 
 a lady of high rank was seen to reach over and pull the feathers 
 out of the headdress of her neighbour in an adjoining box in a 
 fit of indignation and anger at the applause which she had 
 lavished on a pet of the opposite camp. 
 
 As it was then so it is now. In every English drawing-room 
 there are vigorous disputes as to whether Jones or Brown is the 
 better actor, or Miss Clarinette Tomkins' charms surpass those of 
 Dolly Montmorency, but rarely are the comparative merits of 
 current plays a subject of serious discussion, since such an effort 
 would demand a greater strain of intellectual exertion than is 
 compatible with that languid indifference which modern fashions 
 require. 
 
 Once more I exclaim, Where is the pride of olden days the 
 self-respect which every Briton bore on his countenance and 
 which impressed the foreigner more deeply than even his well- 
 known valour and rugged insularity ? Gone are all these, sunk 
 in luxury, false refinement and greed of gold. 
 
 Where is the old contentment of which so much is said and 
 which we hear the poets speak of in our earlier literature? 
 Where is the humble and lowly cot ? Nay, who would have a 
 cot nowadays at any price, or if he had one, would he not care- 
 fully avoid all allusion to it, unless it were under the vague 
 modern euphemism of my " place in the country "? 
 
 Thus we, alas! drift farther and farther from the grand old 
 Roman principle, " Esse quam videri " ; for that and nothing else 
 is the true touchstone of taste. How shall we make the first 
 step towards the comprehension of what goes to make Taste in 
 its highest and noblest sense, when we have in our declension 
 drifted so far from our ancient moorings that we care not any 
 longer what becomes of man after death, and are content to trace 
 our common origin with primeval apes, as if to justify our modern 
 decay? We affect to despise the savages upon whom we prey, 
 while not ashamed to beg from them our bread ; we point to them 
 with finger of scorn, thanking God we are not as they are, while 
 indeed, had we eyes to see and ears to hear, we would understand 
 o
 
 194 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 that those who dare to be what they are, rather than to seem 
 what they are not, are more truly and nobly fulfilling the will of 
 the Creator and the destiny of man than ourselves. 
 
 He is the true man who looks in the face of facts, who lifts 
 his head to the Creator and challenges his fellow-men fairly and 
 squarely to deny his manhood and deface God's effigy. Think of 
 the fall from Socrates to Herbert Spencer, from Marcus Aurelius 
 to Edward VII., from Plutarch to Eudyard Kipling, from 
 Cato to Joe Chamberlain. Yet the Press assure us these are 
 our prophets of to-day. It is only by contemplating the abyss 
 which yawns between such as these that we realise that had a 
 Darwin not arisen, we should have been bound to invent his 
 theories to justify our own monkey fication. 
 
 When looking upon the Masquerade, the monkey-like Masque- 
 rade of " Society," one may almost be allowed to doubt whether, 
 indeed, man owes his origin to God or to an improved ascidian 
 in common with our simian kinsmen ! 
 
 Solomon said, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Surely he 
 must have had our present condition in view, since vanity in 
 this life and the next, too, is the end-all and the be-all of our 
 modern existence. 
 
 For who among us is content with his lot ? nay, who is there 
 remaining now who believes in contentment? or who that dis- 
 believes that wealth is all in all? Manhood, virtue, dignity, 
 where are they now ? They may serve to gild a moral or adorn 
 a tale ; but what place have they in real life nowadays ? The 
 object of existence is now to acquire gold. I had almost said 
 fame or gold, but it would be mere tautology. For one symbol 
 will surely in these degenerate days serve for both, since it is not 
 fame but vulgar notoriety which may be readily turned into gold, 
 for which the soul of the modern really craves. In ancient 
 Greece fame was rewarded with a laurel crown or a garland of 
 myrtle. It was a sufficient reward for the highest excellence to 
 which man could attain, to earn the branch of olive at the 
 Panathenaic games. Think of the distance we have travelled 
 from then to now ! How great is the measure of our inferiority ! 
 Is there such a thing as fame nowadays in its pure, its noble, its 
 loftier sense, of reward for a great deed in the love and respect 
 of a free people ? No, call it as you will, it is not fame but
 
 TASTE AND TACT 195 
 
 notoriety that men covet nowadays. Buy it by advertising with 
 your gold if you have gold, and gather in the gold where you can if 
 you have it not. In modern England wealth and fame are inter- 
 changeable, one and the same thing, like Bank-notes and gold ; 
 for who so closely watched and followed by interviewer, reporter, 
 or the ragtag and bobtail of Society, as the latest millionaire 
 from Klondyke or Chicago ! 
 
 What chance would the heroes of Trafalgar or Waterloo 
 stand against Eockefeller or Pierpont Morgan ? Which of them 
 would loom biggest in the public Press ? which is kept more con- 
 stantly before the public eye, or is more frequently cast up in the 
 face of newspaper readers ? 
 
 Yet such is fame in England ! Manhood, Truth, and Faith 
 are gone. Insincerity, Hypocrisy, and Imposture reign supreme. 
 
 Perhaps few things cause at first greater surprise to foreigners 
 than the indifference, not to say ignorance, of the overwhelming 
 majority of the upper classes to the artistic treasures of their 
 own country. It is probable that not one in ten thousand men or 
 women of what are commonly but ignorantly styled the cultivated 
 classes, know, or care for, the existence of the treasures which 
 are scattered like pearls before swine in rich profusion throughout 
 the public museums and private collections of their own land. 
 
 Incredible as it may seem, the public indifference to the 
 treasures contained in this country is such that no Englishman 
 even in these days of literary speculation has ever ventured to 
 catalogue or present them to an English audience. Nor is it the 
 least likely, if so wild an attempt were made, that he would find 
 either readers or subscribers. It has been left to Frenchmen 
 and Germans to present to their more intellectual and apprecia- 
 tive countrymen the complete story of our varied national 
 possessions in art ancient and modern, which, as we ought to 
 blush to avow, are far better known abroad than at home. 
 
 I have before remarked the peculiarly British phase of 
 imbecility, of belittling everything English while belauding all 
 that is foreign ; but let us not flatter ourselves that such a 
 sentiment proceeds from undue modesty, for such a delusion 
 would lead us far from the truth. 
 
 We have seen that Fashion, that truly British juggernaut, 
 under whose weight we live, move, and have our being, and
 
 196 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 beyond whose borders we might as well be dead and buried, has 
 not only prescribed since the seventeenth century that every 
 self-respecting fiddler shall have long black hair and be provided 
 with a foreign name as witness Signer Foli, the late-lamented 
 "Basso" (mind! Basso, not "Bass," for "Bass" suggests an 
 Englishman, and would only fetch a shilling an hour in a country 
 choir) who firmly believed that he would not have earned a 
 twentieth part of his salary with his Irish name of Foley and 
 minus his long black ringlets but, as a natural consequence, 
 we persist in disbelieving that anything good in Art can come 
 from an English hand ; with the result, that while we allow 
 our best works to be carried off by foreigners, because we are 
 too stupid to know whether they are masterpieces or not, until 
 foreigners assure us of the fact, on the other hand we are totally 
 unable to induce Parliament to preserve to the nation the best 
 specimens of our own native art, although unlimited funds are 
 readily obtainable when exorbitant sums are required to purchase 
 the masterpieces of foreigners. Fashion has also prescribed that 
 under pain of severe contempt and ostracism every male or 
 female member of Society must be superficially acquainted with 
 a few of the leading gems of the great foreign collections, such as 
 the Venus of Milo, or the Madonna della Seggiola or the Apollo 
 Belvedere, but as for the British Museum, National, Tate, 
 Bethnal Green and Guildhall Galleries, and the endless gems that 
 sparkle unseen in our public and private collections, faugh ! it 
 makes the aristocratic "gorge rise" to think of rubbing shoulders 
 with frowsy workmen's wives, in any less fashionable purlieus 
 than those of the Eoyal Academy or Grosvenor Gallery. And 
 here the observant foreigner opens his eyes more than ever and 
 exclaims, "But when you see our Saloon and our Expositions 
 you always say, when you see what you call ' zee nude,' ' How 
 shocking ! How very French ! ' but when I come to the 
 Eoyal Academy I peer among many pictures which I think to be 
 1 omelettes aux fines herbes,' but which are said to be the finest 
 creations of the decorative school, also I see others which I 
 think to be dirty palettes, and I am told that these are the finest 
 samples of the impressionist school and yet you complain of our 
 nudities, as you call them, which make the British maiden to 
 blush, and the young miss to cast down her eyes, in the foreign
 
 TASTE AND TACT 197 
 
 saloons ! but I see here you have in the most prominent places 
 of your Eoyal Academy not only these things, but also painters' 
 models entirely undraped without even the excuse of Art to 
 explain them. How is this ? " 
 
 These and many other conundrums have frequently been put 
 before me by my foreign friends and seriously " gravel me " as 
 Shakespeare says. Assuredly I have done my best for my 
 fellow-countrymen to bolster up their cause by railing at the 
 incapacity and folly of the so-called Hanging Committee who 
 if I were a despot would certainly change their style from 
 "hanging" into "hanged" not only for the reasons above 
 mentioned, but because they appear so grossly and unfeignedly to 
 favour their own associates and friends, that the so-called hang- 
 ing is invariably conducted more by favour than merit. Indeed, 
 so desirous are these gentlemen to please the big wigs of their 
 Association, that they have been known to fill up the empty 
 places kept for E.A.'s with studies of their " models " and similar 
 trash (not always conspicuous for their artistic value or intrinsic 
 decency) when the above honourable gentlemen have not found 
 time to complete the number of pictures with which they had 
 originally intended to grace the Academic walls. 
 
 Here once more we find an admirable field for British 
 hypocrisy to work its wicked will. Whenever letters appear 
 from astonished British matrons who declare themselves to be 
 painfully compelled to protest against the deplorable prevalence 
 of nudities, where nudity and nothing more is the pretext for 
 their presentation it is amusing to listen to the indignant 
 replies (almost invariably under false names) which are elicited 
 from the pseudo-artistic fraternity. Nothing can be more 
 natural than their virtuous indignation, their unfeigned horror at 
 "the want of artistic feeling," "the Philistinism," the "fear of 
 Mrs. Grundy," and above all, the " deplorable want of Taste " 
 which afflicts British Society in general and the middle classes 
 who have inherited the taint of Puritanism in particular ! It 
 is needless to say that such contributions are inevitably written 
 by the subjects of the attack, usually with the full knowledge of 
 the editor. Nevertheless, such shams, involving a deliberate 
 denial of the first elements of truth and justice and the boasted 
 securities of a Free Press, are nearly always " more Britannico,"
 
 198 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 readily acquiesced in by the reading public as the fitting reward 
 of indignant virtue at the hands of a canting generation. 
 
 Only the most patient, not to say the stupidest of newspaper 
 readers, can be hoodwinked by or tolerate for any length of time 
 such deliberate and organized falsification of truth and the legiti- 
 mate uses of the Press without publicly protesting against the 
 hypocrisy which defends ignoble actions by an appeal to a false 
 ideal ; or endure an exhibition of Cant, which seeks to defend 
 miserable daubs or inartistic naked studies, whose only excuse 
 for being produced at all is that nakedness in itself to many 
 minds offers such attraction as to stimulate commercial activity, 
 the whole being dignified and silvered over with the pretence of a 
 taste and artistic merit which all concerned know full well to be 
 non-existent. For if we are doomed to submit to a free and 
 unfettered Press unhampered by official criticism, fair play and 
 fair treatment for all, a free and open access to its columns 
 by all those who have a right to enforce or a wrong to be 
 redressed, should be jealously guarded as the highest security of 
 morality ; while if interest, or the predominance of political, 
 commercial, or class influence, practically debar the public from 
 the enjoyment of its undoubted rights, it is absolutely necessary 
 that the newspaper should be above all suspicion of bribery, or 
 what is much the same, of being controlled in the interest of 
 certain opinions, political views or (as happens in the meaner 
 sort) some particular branch of industry. 
 
 Finally, I submit that none but a stupid people with an 
 immense majority of stupid readers would tolerate in the midst of 
 what they constantly call a free people, such an anomaly as that 
 correspondents should be permitted to write to the papers upon 
 personal or contentious subjects, or still more, answers to the same, 
 over anonymous signatures ; since the essence of the honour- 
 able conduct of a newspaper and of the censorship of the public 
 in its highest and truest sense can only be maintained by the good 
 faith of the editor as well as that of his contributors being entirely 
 above suspicion ; nor is it worthy of a nation who prides itself upon 
 fair play to allow secretly bribed literary assassins to stab in the 
 back, or attack under false colours, those who resort to the Press as 
 to an open tribunal to seek the verdict of their fellow-countrymen.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 FROM journalistic hypocrisy and blackmail the transition is 
 easy and simple to the ways of Society. First, what is 
 Society ? It is an invention of the fertile brain of Journalism 
 " that manufactory of false information," as Bismarck used to 
 call it and few inventions there are that have brought more grist 
 to its mill. 
 
 No other civilised people but the free and independent 
 citizens of the democracies of England and the United States 
 have deliberately placed themselves at the mercy of a devouring 
 monster, whom they are proud to feed upon their own flesh 
 and blood, content to divide between the journalists and the 
 lawyers that allegiance which they so stoutly deny, and at 
 whose shrine they pay such persistent homage. 
 
 In all other lands " Society " has no more recondite meaning 
 than "Company," that is, an aggregation of persons united for 
 any common purpose. When a foreigner of any kind says that he 
 has been in Society, or that he is very fond of Society, he simply 
 means that he is a sociable individual, or that he has been enter- 
 taining or been entertained by certain of his friends. Or if it 
 were remarked in his presence that English Society was setting 
 its face against late dinners or abandoning " Bridge," it would be 
 at once a natural question to inquire in what circles such a 
 disposition was displayed, whether in Court, general, legal, 
 financial, or political circles. Such an expression as " Society " 
 to denote any particular set of people would be, and is, from 
 the nature of things to the educak ' mind unperverted by the 
 traditions and jargon of a scheming Press entirely senseless 
 and preposterous. 
 
 It seems that the Yankee newspaper proprietors, with that 
 acuteness which distinguishes the American journalist wherever 
 there is money to be made, shortly after the Civil War made 
 the discovery that their fellow-countrymen so far from being
 
 200 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 imbued with democratic sentiments in all that concerns the 
 social side of existence, retained with their Anglo-Saxon blood 
 so deep a taint of that " snobbery," or love of empty show com- 
 bined with an exaggerated respect for rank which has been 
 aptly termed " flunkeyism," that it only required the torch of 
 competition and advertisement to set alight a train which 
 would not only confer great pecuniary benefit upon the rapidly- 
 growing newspapers which were springing up in every village 
 of the States by supplying them with an endless fund of current 
 gossip, but go far also towards taking the place of the Court 
 anecdotes and descriptions of Court functions which are the 
 staple currency of Continental Gazettes. They could not but 
 observe that fortunes were rapidly increasing, that there was a 
 tendency in some circles to establish a kind of " Aristocracy of 
 settlement," graded according to the date of arrival, and that 
 the descendants of the old Dutch colonists, if not respected by 
 the latter English arrivals, were beginning to plume themselves 
 upon the term of " Knickerbocker," which had been applied to 
 them in derision by their Anglo-Saxon successors. With infinite 
 skill, therefore, the Boston papers set themselves to outbrag the 
 New Yorkers by ridiculing the " Knickerbocker " antiquity on 
 which the old Dutch families rested their aristocratic preten- 
 sions, while the New Yorkers gibed at the descendants of the 
 Puritan fathers, and ridiculed the aesthetic habits of the de- 
 scendants of the families who escaped in the historic Mayflower. 
 Finally, Maryland, not to be behind, retaliated by putting 
 forward the pretensions to a still earlier and more definite 
 pedigree of her own original settlers, many of whom could trace 
 descent to Cavalier families of high note and antiquity. To 
 such an extent was this carried, that it was a common joke 
 when I first visited America that one-half of Virginia claimed 
 descent from the romantic union of Tom Smith and Miss 
 Pocahontas, and the rest from Louis Fairfax, to whom the King 
 had given the Winter- Hoek. 
 
 Yet another mushroom aristocracy rose up to combat the 
 pretensions of the preceding four in the descendants of the 
 " Signers of Independence," and I have myself a distinct recol- 
 lection of the awe-stricken voice with which a charming old lady 
 of Baltimore presented me to an individual who shall be
 
 SOCIETY 201 
 
 nameless whom she announced as an illustrious descendant on 
 both sides, of a " Signer of the Independence ! " 
 
 Already in the sixties a flourishing trade had been set up 
 by these ingenious means of advertisement and counter-adver- 
 tisement ; each pork-butcher's wife rushing to communicate her 
 social doings and her latest hundred-thousand-dollar-purchase 
 of diamonds to the purveyors of the local press wherewith to 
 buy herself the notoriety for which her soul thirsted. 
 
 Action followed reaction. As in England we notoriously 
 love a lord, the same fever in our blood carried over to America 
 was easily fanned by an artful Press into a genuine yearning to 
 hear and read how "Mrs. Washington Buggins has appeared 
 at the Philharmonic with the largest tiara hitherto seen in New 
 York," or " Mrs. Silas F. Vandunk made a sensation in Broadway 
 by appearing in a sleigh drawn by thirteen Spanish mules, with 
 niggers on zebras for outriders," etc. Still they were not happy. 
 They had no Court to cluster round, nor titles to define their 
 rank, nor authorised table of precedence, so that your million- 
 airess, while free as air " to go one better," and so outshine her 
 neighbour in vulgar ostentation if she had but the dollars to do 
 it with, would nevertheless repine that the Press should report 
 the doings of a newly-enriched and uneducated pork-butcher's 
 wife in the same paragraph with her own. She had thus no 
 resource left but to insist upon her qualifications being described 
 at the fullest length, such as being the great grand-daughter by 
 the mother's side, or the fourth cousin by the father's side, of 
 a reputed " early Dutch settler," or a " Signer of Independence." 
 Failing facts, some such fable as fills the pages of Burke's 
 genealogies would be concocted, and the thing was done. 
 
 Seizing upon this as a pretext for an aristocratic assumption 
 of Privilege, the newspapers commenced to refer to the members 
 of certain party-and-ball-going assemblies in New York and Phila- 
 delphia, consisting of some three or four hundred members, as 
 "The Three Hundred" or " Four Hundred," as the case might 
 be. It was naturally sufficient for those who were not in these 
 greatly advertised clubs or cliques, to ardently sigh for admis- 
 sion, with the result that in a short time these assemblies or 
 cliques of friends who associated for social purposes, were 
 referred to in newspapers as the " Society " of Philadelphia or
 
 202 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 New York or Boston. Finally, the term " Society " was used 
 alone, and tenaciously adhered to as if it were some secret or 
 sacred circle or assembly to which none but adepts had a right 
 of access. 
 
 As New York and the other leading towns enlarged their 
 borders, and new millionaires from the East flocked thither to 
 build their brown-stone houses and their galleries in Fifth 
 Avenue, stuffed with foreign pictures, where they could best 
 attract attention by their profusion and extravagance, the 
 millionaire of yesterday became the aristocrat of to-day, and the 
 rivalry waxed hot and furious as to who could exceed his fellow 
 in attracting public attention by his whimsicality or ostentatious 
 profusion. Each successive effort of the newest millionaire to 
 outbid the millionaire of yesterday by the very latest freak of 
 extravagance that ingenuity could devise, or vulgarity suggest, 
 produced a fresh newspaper " record," which, exciting in its turn 
 a sporting interest in the reading public, resulted in a large 
 portion of the daily press devoting an ever-increasing share of its 
 columns to the imbecile doings of rival competitors for the 
 honours of social notoriety. 
 
 Such is the condition of Press-made " Society " in the 
 United States. Now let us turn to England and see how things 
 were managed there in order to bring us up to the trans- 
 Atlantic level, and to drill us into the same subjection to the 
 omnipotent Press by means of the same manoeuvres used to- 
 level up the pork-packers of the West with the " Knickerbockers " 
 and " Signers of Independence " of the East. 
 
 The invention of " Society " as an entity or a defined 
 aggregation of persons is as purely the invention of the Press in 
 England as it is in America. Here as there, the Press came, 
 saw, and conquered. Finding out that no money could be made 
 out of individual members until a definite newspaper standard was 
 established, the journalists were not slow to discover with that 
 fine nose for smelling out the prevailing weakness of their 
 victims which even their bitterest enemies cannot refuse to 
 acknowledge that, by applying ordinary trade methods to the 
 creation of a monopoly in a treasure which however little valued 
 by its real possessors, might with careful manipulation be 
 converted into a marketable commodity of rare value, succeeded
 
 SOCIETY 203 
 
 in setting up a market of which the Press would possess nearly 
 all the profits along with three-quarters of the control. 
 
 I cannot trace any mention of English Society as an entity 
 until towards the middle of last century. Thackeray, under the 
 pretence of laying bare the inherent snobbery of the rich middle- 
 classes, who, in his time, indeed, as in all others, have moved 
 heaven and earth to be admitted into the superior class into 
 which they consider their money entitles them to enter, really 
 laid bare his own soul when he depicts the wrongs and 
 sorrows of other aspirants to social distinction, and in trenchant 
 language portrays the griefs and pains of what he calls " Vanity 
 Fair." 
 
 I have heard old fogeys say, that time was when Almacks 
 and the Court list defined, more or less, the area of the Upper 
 circles of the Metropolis. The phrase " London Society" 
 marks the epoch, however, of the Press Creation in England. 
 
 I cannot say precisely at what date the Magazine of that 
 name made its appearance, but it was certainly in vogue in the 
 late sixties when I first "cut" lectures and shirked chapels, 
 risking the penalty of." gating " and being " sent down " for the 
 fitful joys of a day in town, with a London ball to finish up. 
 Barring the name of that popular Magazine, which was certainly 
 bestowed upon it by Thackeray, who, while alternately bemoaning 
 his fate, and performing incredible feats of self-abasement in the 
 attempt to obtain invitations to the houses of the great in his 
 " James de la Plush Papers," and other similar lamentations, 
 which were supposed to be a correct representation of his own 
 sentiments as to the inaccessibility of certain houses besprinkled 
 with bitter ridicule every one else who, like himself, desperately 
 strove to "get there " I cannot remember having ever used or 
 heard the expression " Society" as representing a defined set or 
 division of the human race, such as the Anglo-American Press 
 of to-day have invented, and in these latter days to a great 
 extent control. 
 
 One can easily imagine how three or four hundred families 
 of New York or Philadelphia who have grown rich two or three 
 generations earlier than the common herd around them, might 
 arrogate to themselves the term of " Society " as the only Society 
 in their eyes worth mentioning, and that they by dint of
 
 204 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 advertising themselves as such, by the usual trade methods in 
 which they are born and nurtured should create a factitious 
 desire on the part of some hundred others not so included, whose 
 habits and manners and education were not equal, in their judg- 
 ment, to their own. But common sense would easily show the 
 impossibility of so wild an undertaking, as either to wield the 
 heterogeneous elements of which London social existence is 
 composed, or compress its dissimilar and widely scattered parts 
 into anything approaching a common organism. Far be it from 
 me to deny that from the dawn of English History there were 
 aboriginal " Snobs " of all classes, whose highest aspirations 
 would consist in enlarging their acquaintances, by the elimi- 
 nation of the non-titled and the laborious cultivation of the 
 titled, as far as their skill or audacity would permit, until, by 
 the simple acquisition of a house in a fashionable quarter and 
 the acquaintance of a few titled friends, they have by supreme 
 efforts, or the possession of some special social talent or 
 peculiarity, gained admission to the intimacy of the great, and 
 even the companionship of dukes and " Eoyalties." Nor is it 
 imaginable that the highly developed social Snob of Thackeray's 
 day had not a long line of ancestry. 
 
 In a word " Society," as the phrase is used by the multiplied 
 newspapers which exist upon it and feed by it, is utterly un- 
 meaning to the alleged members of it whose position in the 
 land is beyond the reach of cavil or jealousy. Such simply 
 entertain their friends as and how they see fit, or if they have 
 the misfortune to own large town houses according to a system 
 which has grown up of late years are besieged and bombarded 
 by their friends and their friends' friends for the privilege of 
 displaying their girls to the largest obtainable audience, or for 
 launching, possibly cash down, the latest enriched City-bounder 
 in what he would possibly term High Society. But let us for an 
 instant consider the materials out of which the ingenious press- 
 man concocts what he calls Society. The Court contains about 
 100 members drawn from the richer classes, most of whose 
 relatives are thereby drawn into and obtain invitations to the 
 great Court functions. Add to this what has often been called 
 *' the upper ten thousand," but which, probably in these days, 
 amounts with its adult relatives to more than a hundred
 
 SOCIETY 205 
 
 thousand our democratic institutions gradually admitting ever- 
 increasing numbers of enriched merchants, tradesmen and pro- 
 fessional men into the ranks of the landowning classes among 
 which the six hundred peers, say a thousand baronets and 
 knights and their families, and as many more belonging to the 
 members of the Lower House all of which are expected to 
 present themselves and their children to Court. You have thus, 
 say, 120,000 people who are all potential members of the Social 
 firmament of which the throne is the centre, whose only homo- 
 geneousness consists in their supposed right to a Court invitation, 
 all of which collectively form in our present state of social chaos 
 only a part of the vast recruiting ground from which the smartest 
 or best-advertised fashionables, are and have been drawn. 
 
 Two things, as I have before hinted, have tended to decuple or 
 perhaps centuple the ten thousand described as roughly repre- 
 senting the families and members of families who are expected 
 to aspire to Court invitations and by inference to come up to 
 town during the period of the Court ceremonies and functions, 
 in order to be partakers of that inestimable blessing and these 
 are railway communication and rapid fortunes. For one fortune 
 made in the provinces fifty years ago there are probably a 
 hundred now. Eailways have tended to bring to town the 
 smaller and poorer members of, county families ; and Free 
 Trade, or at any rate its misapplication, and declining prices 
 have contributed during the last twenty years to thin the ranks 
 of the landowners who are wealthy enough to support a 
 London establishment. The multiplication of railways causing 
 greater inter-communication of classes gradually increased the 
 association, commercially or otherwise, of the landed and com- 
 mercial classes, and the waning fortunes of landowners have 
 obliged its members to descend from the lofty pedestal of 
 ancient superiority to earn an honest (or dishonest) penny by 
 " going into the City." It is surely unnecessary to point out 
 that this process, freely translated, means selling name or rank 
 in the highest market, and decoying the British snob into doubtful 
 speculations through the glamour of a title or a well-known 
 name, which process entails as a necessary consequence that My 
 Lord, or Sir Harry, finds it necessary and convenient to extend
 
 206 ABB WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 his hospitality to Snooks and Rosenbaum in order to stimulate 
 their financial exertions on his behalf. 
 
 There came the opportunity for the Hebrew herd. When rents 
 went down by one-half and prices had fallen to such a point that 
 the rich landowner of forty years ago found little but his reputa- 
 tion of a rich man as possessing so many thousand acres with 
 its accompanying obligation of being the subject of ever-rising 
 demands, he was, naturally, forced to sell his town house and 
 live in obscurity in a corner of his ancestral hall, happy if he 
 could pay the interest due on his jointures, and brothers' or 
 sisters' inheritances. This was the hour of triumph for Rosen- 
 baum and Hartman, who lost no time to step into his shoes 
 by the purchase of his mortgages and reversions. Not only were 
 bargains thus secured in Grosvenor Square from magnates whose 
 territory covered half a county, but " dukes and things " abounded 
 in the Bankruptcy Gazette, while Rosenbaum & Co. waxed fatter 
 and bigger as they swelled like bloated spiders upon the decay of 
 the territorial aristocracy. 
 
 The old German saying of the Middle Ages was: "Jeder 
 Graf hat seinen Jude " (each Count has his Jew) ; now the tune 
 is changed in Merry England to " Each Jew has his Earl." And 
 though Rebecca and her children are not, as a rule, fair to look 
 on or "pleasant to meet," their tenacity and determination 
 coupled with a marvellous skill in the arts of advertisement and 
 combination, joined to the highly perfected Press machinery 
 which they found ready to hand in the " 70's " and exported 
 wholesale from America, has enabled the Jewish-Yankee Press 
 in our midst by the skilful manipulation of the term " Society ,'" 
 which they represent to be a lofty and soul-inspiring organism 
 composed chiefly of dukes and themselves, to be a most effectual 
 machine for pecuniary extortion as well as social exaltation. 
 Sandwiching puff- seeking vulgarians between well-known 
 magnates is a particularly profitable system. Let us take up 
 any newspaper in proof of this. Angelica writes to the World as 
 follows : " The day being fine, many well-known faces were seen 
 in New Bond Street. The Duchess of Three Stars and Mr. 
 Jumblestein, the Duke of Threedashes and Mr. Stanley Buggins, 
 were conspicuous by their faultless attire and the elegance of 
 their equipages." Or Lady Sally Johnson (special correspondent
 
 SOCIETY 207 
 
 of the Lady] writes that " In the gayest throngs of the Park few 
 shone more by their beauty, their elegance, and taste, than the 
 Duchess of Two-sticks, and Miss Sarsaparilla Snooks, the lovely 
 new debutante whose millionaire papa has just bought the 
 Marquis of Dashes' magnificent mansion in Belgrave Square, 
 and Mrs. Isaacs, too, in her well-known barouche, whose faultless 
 attire bids fair to rival that of the Princess of Wales or Her 
 Serene Highness of Krumpelbaumstein." 
 
 Nor must it be supposed that the competition is not just as 
 warm on one side as the other. The Honourable Slingsby 
 Jimjam is at least as anxious to attract the heavily-gilt glances of 
 Miss Virginia Crumpet, only daughter of the senior partner of the 
 great banking house of Grayfriars, as that pompous city magnate 
 can possibly be to return the attentions of that amiable, if 
 impecunious, sprig of nobility. Yet there can be no question that 
 Miss Crumpet would give her eyes to be invited to the parties 
 given by the Honourable S. Jimjam's mother, " whose house in 
 Park Lane is the acknowledged centre " (vide daily press) " of all 
 that is brightest, loveliest and noblest in the land," nor can she 
 understand why she is not asked "everywhere" after having 
 recently moved into a palace in Belgrave Square through the 
 bankruptcy of the Marquis of Eackandruin, and caused herself to 
 be largely advertised at great expense in the World and Vanity 
 Fair as having lately bought and refurnished " Tumbledown 
 Castle " from the Earl of Bagshaw to say nothing of her sacrifice 
 in abandoning Grayfriars and her own social circles with a readi- 
 ness and completeness which does infinitely more credit to her 
 head than her heart. And in spite of what she had read 
 from childhood upwards in every shilling novel that had 
 passed through her fair fingers about money being the passport 
 to all Society and millionaires who had only to swoop down 
 upon the West End for the entire aristocracy to fasten upon them 
 tooth and nail, she soon finds out that without putting on the 
 screw of financial manoeuvre and Press diplomacy, it is not an easy 
 matter to attract any but the small and hungry fish into the gilt 
 cages of parvenu hospitality. On the other hand it would not be 
 difficult to strike a bargain, between the inordinate longing of 
 Mrs. Frumpington Jones (the wife of the eminent furniture 
 maker of Tinhammerton) to cross the threshold of the Marquis
 
 208 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of Scattercash, and the tactics pursued to obtain the coveted 
 hand of Miss Amelia Frumpington Jones by the penniless 
 younger son of that amiable if pompous Marquis. Nor is it a 
 secret that by the judicious intermediary of certain impecunious 
 members of the Press, who, under the pretence of interviewing 
 the newly-arrived patentee of the latest process for destroying the 
 sheep rot in Australia, have brought that somewhat overblown 
 and h'less individual into such close and amicable relations 
 with various male and female members of the penniless aris- 
 tocracy, that having begun by buying a house in Grosvenor 
 Square and furnishing a magnificent ball-room without a single 
 acquaintance in the entire metropolis by a judicious expenditure 
 of cash certain mysterious negotiations were entered into by 
 virtue of which in less than the space of a month he blossoms 
 out in the Morning Post as " one of the most popular hosts of 
 the London season," and his ball-room, which has been filled in 
 the flesh by the seediest of "Society" hangers-on, are freely 
 rendered in print as " a goodly sprinkling of the fairest and noblest 
 of England's sons and daughters." 
 
 That these things are done in other lands there can be no 
 doubt, but as far as my experience goes, it takes the Anglo-Saxon 
 with his deep-seated commercial instincts to address himself to 
 deliberate barter between wealth and birth, or rank and hard 
 cash, in the cold-blooded vein with which he approaches his 
 ordinary commercial transactions ; while to him alone is given 
 that amazing and unfathomed depth of stupidity, by virtue of 
 which he deliberately sacrifices his happiness, his associations, 
 and the respect and esteem of his former friends, in order to pur- 
 chase the adulations of the Press, by public advertisement of his 
 profusion and expenditure upon objects which neither give him- 
 self pleasure, nor secure the esteem or friendship or indeed any- 
 thing but the contempt, of the recipients of his favours. 
 
 Possibly the Anglo-Saxon conquering quality which has stood 
 us in good stead by flood or field may account for the extra- 
 ordinary desire of the new or self-made man to conquer by geld 
 the company of the cultivated, the well-born or the titled, and 
 that he seriously regards such acquisitions as the final aim and 
 highest use to which wealth can be put. 
 
 In France since the Revolution (when the best families were
 
 SOCIETY 209 
 
 ruined and robbed of well nigh all they possessed except their 
 titles) it is not uncommon for the impoverished noble to " manure 
 his acres" at the sacrifice of his "blood" by an alliance with a 
 well-dowered daughter of the trading classes, insomuch that a 
 large number of the oldest families have by such misalliances 
 become unable to show those quarterings which, before the 
 Revolution, were considered essential to noble descent. 
 
 In England and Spain alone up to a comparatively recent date, 
 through the absence of any serious revolution or civil disturb- 
 ance, our ancient families were probably purer in descent than 
 any in Europe. Since, however, the combined attacks of the 
 Press and the concerted pressure of poverty within, and Judaism 
 and Americanism from without, to say nothing of the corrosive 
 action of the Press in degrading public opinion and lowering 
 British nature to a vulgarity of disposition and a commercialism 
 of feeling to which, at least, upper-class Englishmen till lately 
 were strangers, it would seem that not only the highest names in 
 England vie with each other in " manuring their lands " from 
 American or any other sources, but even those who have not the 
 motive of financial difficulty seem equally desirous of tainting 
 their lineage by seeking their wives among the cosmopolitan 
 hotels of the Riviera, or the ranks of the ballet and the 
 music-hall. 
 
 At the present rate it is more than probable that there 
 will not within fifty years remain a single " clean-bred " family 
 in the British aristocracy. Nor will there assuredly be a 
 family left which, according to Continental canons, is entitled 
 to the honours of nobility, since the required minimum of 
 sixteen quarterings of descent will soon become as rare as an 
 auk's egg. 
 
 No doubt the entire Press will exclaim, " What of blood ! 
 Such notions are entirely exploded ! They are only fit for the 
 Middle Ages." To this I answer so far from that being the case, 
 nothing more clearly appears in the view of modern science and 
 research than that qualities not only descend through the blood 
 from a man's predecessors, but, to go still further, no quality and 
 no tendency can exist in a man except such as are possessed by 
 or derived from his ancestors. It consequently follows that there 
 is not only a sentimental, as used formerly to be supposed, but a 
 p
 
 210 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 very real and positive advantage in descending from men who 
 have for the greatest number of years exercised authority and 
 occupied positions of trust and high responsibility, and who, by 
 implication, have acquired habits and modes of thought superior 
 to the common herd.
 
 CHAPTEE XIX 
 
 DECLINE OF GOOD SOCIETY 
 
 BESIDES offering a ridiculous spectacle of scrambling vulgarity 
 and reckless ostentation only to be found (and paraded in the 
 Press) of Anglo-Saxon lands, what must foreigners think of the 
 open manner in which the mothers of our upper classes bring 
 their girls to market in April or May when winter sports grow 
 slack and the eligible youth of the nation flocks to the great 
 flesh fair, differing from the flesh markets of Babylon of old only 
 in this particular that marriage not slavery is the object or of 
 the extravagant profusion of the moneyed classes who desperately 
 scramble for a footing in the houses of the great or the calm 
 indifference and contempt of the young men, usually in a marked 
 minority to the girls at all social functions, and if rich, all too 
 obviously aware of their consequence and importance as prizes 
 in the matrimonial market or the slavish obsequiousness of 
 scheming mothers of marriageable daughters without beauty or 
 expectations towards the noted ball-givers of the season and the 
 multifarious wiles and underhand manoeuvres to obtain cards 
 for the ball at Piccadilly House or the garden parties at Straw- 
 berry Lodge whose unfortunate owners are, after the English 
 manner, expected to prove their title to give the best party of 
 the season by showing that no one is able, without alarming 
 risk to dress and person, to fight their way into its aristocratic 
 precincts. " But," cry their apologists, "what are we to do?" 
 The young men will only come to town when there is no shooting 
 and hunting. The more serious middle-aged with money and 
 position are brought to town on Parliamentary and business 
 errands as city guinea-pigs or courtiers, and these are the prizes of 
 the matrimonial market to be fought and haggled and manoeuvred 
 for in the space of two months, with the full knowledge that the 
 girls to be married outnumber the men who can afford to 
 marry by eight or ten to one ! 
 
 Again, the Continental critic, who regards social intercourse not 
 only as a fine art and the outcome of the highest refinement and
 
 212 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 cultivation, but also as an absorbing aim and occupation of his 
 existence, freshly arrived in New York or London and flung into 
 the whirlpool of what the Press advertise under the name of 
 Society, is utterly at a loss to know whether to be more astounded 
 at our vulgarity or to be scared with the almost crushing 
 hospitality of his effusive entertainers : while in the secrecy of 
 friendship or the recesses of his hearth and home, he inveighs 
 against the utter stupidity of a nation who concentrate the social 
 amusements and entertainments of a year into two months, and 
 those the hottest and least pleasant of the year and least suitable 
 for town life, who carry their commercial instincts so far as to 
 make a business of pleasure, who entertain not so much their 
 friends as their friends' friends, and, if they have a large house, 
 are not unwilling to rake in from the highways and byways men 
 and women whom they never saw before and hope never to 
 see again with the thermometer at 100, in the desperate 
 dread of not being crowded to suffocation, lest the Press should 
 say that the rooms were thinly tenanted, or lest it should be 
 whispered abroad that most of the eligible dancers and best- 
 dressed women crowded to Lady B.'s over the way. Nor can he 
 imagine why these strange English, who profess to love dancing, 
 regard no ball as successful unless the crowd is so great as to 
 make dancing impossible ! The reason is not far to seek. 
 Among the upper ten probably not more than a couple of hundred 
 houses in Mayfair and its purlieus are suitable for social enter- 
 tainment. These are hemmed in and surrounded by three or 
 four thousand other abodes of the " newly enriched," whose 
 occupiers ever press upon the flanks of the favoured few, hoping 
 by continual Press mentions, joined to the untiring efforts of their 
 male belongings in city office and grimy eastward dens, to induce 
 by cunning pretence or skilful manoeuvres their aristocratic 
 acquaintances, who are lured to their haunts by greed of gold, to 
 extend the coveted boon of social intimacy to their wives and 
 families. 
 
 Truth to tell, there is nothing mysterious in that paradise 
 tenanted with the houris of journalistic invention. Whatever it 
 may sound like at a distance when travestied by the super- 
 abundant fertility of the penny-a-liner imagination in novel or 
 Society paper, looked at from inside nothing can be more prosaic,
 
 213 
 
 more commercial, more unrefined, in short, more truly British, 
 than our London "Society" during a London season. Given 
 that Court and Parliament, its Press, and " hangers on " only 
 remain in town during the few months of Parliament session and 
 Court festivities, and that they, and possibly two thousand other 
 families of similar standing possessing London houses are all 
 equally anxious to present their own or their nearest relatives' 
 daughters at Court and secure them the best chances in the 
 matrimonial market; and given, moreover, four or five thousand 
 of their less fortunate relatives, friends without town houses, 
 who come up for a month or two to stay in lodgings or hotels, 
 who are equally desirous of showing their daughters without 
 being put to the expense of entertaining in return ; granted, too, 
 that alongside and intermixed with these are thousands of other 
 families whose members, especially the feminine part thereof, yearn 
 to realize the dream of inclusion within the mysterious portals 
 of the aforesaid paradise for which alone they have been tempted 
 to wander westward, and are prepared, nay burning, to spend 
 thousands to obtain ; add to this an overwhelming desire at 
 all price and at any hazard to show the aforesaid numerous 
 fledglings to the greatest advantage, and the ever-increasing 
 numbers of landed families who from waning rents and ever- 
 growing taxation are compelled to shut up their town houses, or 
 at any rate are unable to entertain and it may easily be guessed 
 that it only requires the intervention of the magic hand of the 
 journalist and the Press-invented go-between, a broken-down 
 sprig of nobility, male or female, to light the train and bring 
 about the greatly desired but somewhat delicate and mysterious 
 negotiation by which large sums of money are wont to pass 
 westwards, to enable Mrs. Eeuben Finkestein or Mrs. 
 Plantagenet-Thompson to gratify her social ambition by spending 
 untold thousands in entertaining a choice selection of the 
 hungering aristocrats aforesaid, who, however content to meet 
 their friends at her house at her own expense, use every art 
 and strategy to avoid her acquaintance. There's the rub. 
 For, while those who can afford to be independent and are not 
 overburdened with maternal cares and pressing debts are secure 
 in the possession of as many cards to their own friends' enter- 
 tainments as they can possibly desire, the ragged fringe of
 
 214 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 impecunious younger sons and half-pay colonels and maiden 
 aunts cast hungering glances at the flesh-pots of Egypt, and, 
 while joining with their richer relatives in ridiculing the senseless 
 pretensions of the new-comers, secretly allow themselves" to be 
 bribed into frequenting their society by the allurements of financial 
 and commercial assistance and bounteous hospitality, or the 
 prospect of a well-dowered wife. 
 
 Not content with this, just as the nobles of Louis the 
 Sixteenth's early reign eagerly devoured the pages of Rousseau 
 and Diderot which carried the record of their own shame, the 
 English aristocracy since the early 70's, deliberately, with a 
 simplicity which would be touching were it not the prelude and 
 sign of the imbecility which precedes destruction, encourage 
 every dirty rag, and cherish every vile caricaturist in Vanity 
 Fair or other illustrated paper, to hold up to contempt and 
 execration all that had hitherto been most respected and 
 esteemed about Court or Throne. By these means the democratic 
 Press has been able to obtain a similar footing to that which it 
 has acquired in the United States, while the degradation of 
 English social habits and the trumpeting abroad of its internal 
 weaknesses, and the pertinacious defamation of its members 
 through newspaper or novel for the delectation of the lowest 
 classes, have placed in journalistic hands a power over England's 
 social destinies which, combined with the skilful adaptation of 
 blackmail, not only lower the upper strata of the nation in the 
 eyes of the reading public, but cannot fail to re-act upon the very 
 foundations of our social stability.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 OUR NOBILITY 
 
 THE very notion of nobility, probably the earliest abstract idea 
 that impresses itself upon the human mind and finds its reflection 
 in every cultivated country of the world from all time, is to the 
 Briton entirely unfamiliar. Not as in other lands, a man whose 
 ancestors have held high places and position for centuries or 
 otherwise identified themselves with the history of their country 
 is called noble, but, forsooth, the members of his hereditary 
 legislature, of whom nineteen out of twenty, being as they are, 
 collected from the rag and tag of successful politics brewing, 
 banking, scheming, share-mongering, and financial interests, 
 differ as much from the idea and substance of nobility as the 
 wildest imagination can conceive. 
 
 It is not easy to see how the term "noble " came to be thus 
 applied at all. The very origin of the word seems to be lost to 
 us, and Englishmen have come to think as they do of all their 
 institutions, however preposterous, that Providence has placed 
 them upon a separate ledge and endowed them with a separate 
 understanding, superior no doubt to all others, and that their 
 so-called insularity is an effect approaching predestination devised 
 from all time by an all-wise Providence to differentiate Britons 
 from the common herd. 
 
 Before the Normans came over, there seems no doubt that the 
 idea of nobility was entirely foreign to our rude Saxon fore- 
 fathers. We know that there was a certain favoured class of 
 courtiers somewhat resembling the " mignons " or " companions " 
 of the later French kings, acting partly as councillors and partly 
 as hostages, and that the greater landowners were raised to a 
 similar rank and called Thanes by either the possession of wide 
 lands or, if in trade, of sufficient funded capital to maintain " a 
 hall, a barn, a chapel and a bell." Some few raised to high 
 office as representatives of the king in the several counties were 
 called Yealdermen, the parent of the modern earl, while all the 
 rest below were confounded in the term " ceorl " or " churl," 
 with the exception of those who were in absolute servitude or
 
 216 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 attached as chattels to be bought and sold with the land they 
 tilled. 
 
 Not having a word resembling noble, and probably not being 
 sufficiently advanced or civilized to appreciate the term, nor 
 language to express it, our Saxon forefathers scarcely realized 
 the essential distinctions conveyed by the various degrees of 
 "noble" or " gentle," " free" and "serf." To them it was all 
 in all to be free ; and in their rude Saxon terminology and their 
 rude common sense careless of fine distinctions or unable to 
 comprehend them, they were still well able to distinguish 
 between a man who had his rights under common law and the 
 unhappy wight who could be bought and sold like cattle at a 
 fair. Nor was the distinction clearly defined between the military 
 and the higher feudal ranks. Generally speaking, the Norman 
 who held a fee or part of a fee was equally designated as of 
 gentle blood along with the noblest in the realm, the term " noble " 
 being usually reserved as a complimentary adjective for the 
 higher ranks of the clergy and King's Council. When, however, 
 the Parliament came into being and the King's Council merged, 
 or, rather, were crystallised into the king's tenants or chief 
 landowners being called up from every county to serve the king 
 in his council (by summons) ; in short, when the House of Lords 
 was first called up by Henry the Third, no title of nobility was 
 conferred upon that body as a whole, and thereafter, as before, 
 the entire aristocracy of the nation consisted of the higher and 
 lower nobility; the higher consisting of the dukes and earls, 
 barons, abbots, and bishops, as the case throughout the con- 
 tinent, while the lower comprised the rest of the landowners 
 holding directly of the king under military tenure. 
 
 It may be interesting here to give some idea of what still 
 remains of our ancient nobility, judged by the standard of 
 civilisation throughout Europe. Unlike the rest of Europe, 
 England (alone with Spain) unmoved by any serious convulsion or 
 political upheaval, should possess as pure a nobility as any 
 country ia Europe ; but from various causes, among which not 
 the least is the :jew-found disregard or contempt of blood, and 
 the consequent frequency of plebeian marriages, our English 
 aristocracy is probably the least pure of any continental race in 
 spite of the preposterous revival of "female peerages " granted
 
 CUE NOBILITY 217 
 
 to individuals at an early date and descending to general heirs, 
 by which a continual succession, or reproduction rather, of an 
 ancient peerage may descend to the most plebeian blood, and 
 being practically indestructible may be said to defy all efflux of 
 time. Moreover, the enormous destruction of the aristocracy 
 during the bloody Wars of the Eoses and the equally rapacious 
 exactions of the Tudor monarchs, together with the practice 
 introduced from Scotland by James I. of selling peerages to the 
 highest bidder, combined with the continual and continuous 
 renovation of its ranks in accordance with political exigencies, 
 have produced the singular phenomenon that only a twentieth of 
 the class to which the technical term of nobility is exclusively 
 applied is really ntfble in common sense, fact, reason, or analogy. 
 Senators they are, as of their office, or, if you will, hereditary 
 legislators, but noblemen in no sense that has ever been known 
 to any nation modern or ancient. 
 
 According to Mr. Shirley, whose study and researches in his- 
 torical genealogy have met with wide acceptation among serious 
 genealogists no aristocracy is of a more mushroom description 
 than our own. While numberless French, Spanish, and Italian 
 families can trace their descent to heroes of the ninth and tenth 
 centuries, scarce any in England can trace a clear male descent 
 even to any of our Norman invaders, while as for our reputed 
 Saxon families, their histories and traditions as set down in Burke 
 are regarded by the critical genealogists of the day as pure and 
 simple myths. 
 
 Mr. Shirley finds less than three hundred families that descend 
 from authentic English families of position and landed possession, 
 so lately as the Battle of Bosworth. While if we extract from 
 these what may be called the truest nobility or aristocracy of the 
 land, by selecting those families whose ancestors undoubtedly 
 existed and contributed to lift the glory and power of England 
 to the highest point to which it has ever attained, namely, in 
 1350, under Edward III., barely two hundred can be discovered 
 whose male ancestors still survive and have continued to flourish 
 up to this day. It is, therefore, a fact that cannot be doubted 
 that adopting the best authorities in genealogy (which is far from 
 an exact science) the aristocracy or true nobility of England do 
 not exceed two hundred families (and these only dating from early
 
 218 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Plantagenet days, that is about six hundred years) fifty of which 
 having adhered to the ancient faith through fair weather or foul, 
 are for the most part reduced by their fidelity to a mere shadow 
 of their former wealth and greatness. 
 
 This brief sketch will serve to illustrate the mushroom 
 character of our real aristocracy ; and when we have added the 
 fact that of the old feudal nobility scarce half a dozen remain 
 who can trace their titles in male descent earlier than Henry the 
 Eighth, it will be easily seen how deeply we differ from all other 
 nations in the character, constitution, and value of our aristocracy, 
 and while they may serve to afford an explanation, or an extenu- 
 ition to be more exact, of the extraordinary tricks that we are 
 represented to play according to our Press certainly do not 
 contribute to our good fame, or the respect of foreign nations. 
 Nor does it tend to increase their estimation when they are 
 assured by the critical school of genealogists that " Burke" is a 
 tissue of frauds, and the holders of our most aristocratic names 
 are common vulgar impostors. 
 
 Now, if we were frankly to realise our true situation and 
 acknowledge that from a rough, straightforward, soldierly 
 people, who have risen by the sword and foreign conquest to a 
 position utterly disproportionate to our numbers and size, until 
 in Edward the Third's time we overran France, the most power- 
 ful and richest nation on the earth, slaughtering her chivalry 
 like sheep, bringing her powerful king to our knees, and dictating 
 terms, while the gallant Black Prince brought back to London 
 and locked up the kings of Scotland, France and Cyprus, and 
 held them to ransom we have come to be a thoroughly 
 commercial nation, with a strong dash of the corsair, who 
 seize all the bare spots of the earth and conquer all the 
 nations that we conveniently can, subjecting them to our rule 
 and compelling them to buy our cottons and hardware at the 
 sword's point, we should still make a brave show and play the 
 part of a strong, blunt nation, proud, and bold, and self-sufficing 
 as of old ; but for that we must lay our shoulders to the wheel, 
 purge away our luxurious tendencies, inculcate at home and 
 abroad a policy of retrenchment and improved administration, 
 good laws, and a strong central government. For without this 
 we cannot expect mercy from the nations who howl about our
 
 OUE SOCIAL SLAVEEY 219 
 
 footstepe, and who, if not deterred by our powerful navy, would 
 tear us in pieces as Poland was torn in pieces by the great 
 Continental powers scarce two hundred years ago ! 
 
 Intoxicated with our wealth, our extraordinary advantages, 
 mines and minerals, and the rapid expansion of mechanical 
 industry, steam, railways, and electricity, we resemble a 
 forced peach pushed hastily to maturity, unwholesome, puffed 
 up, and rotten at the core, as we turn a bloated face to the 
 nations, crying, " Which of you is like unto us?" " The highest 
 treasures that human art and industry can produce are at our 
 feet ! What artist, what writer, what poet, what musician, what 
 minister to human pleasures, but must come to London to pour 
 his treasures in our laps, and seek those rewards which only 
 Englishmen are willing or able to bestow ! " 
 
 Aye ! forsooth, lavish extravagance, profusion, luxury, barbaric 
 display, that and much more of the kind can be seen in London 
 and New York as well or better than in any other part of the 
 world ! But is it not exotic, forced, foreign, and unnatural? Do 
 we not, every one of us, feel that there is an air of unreality, of 
 sham, about our boasted civilisation ? Does any Englishman or 
 woman whose house is converted into a bric-a-brac shop really 
 desire to lift themselves by the contemplation of art treasures 
 into the highest aesthetic planes ? Do they surround themselves 
 with beautiful objects and pour their wealth into the foreigners' 
 lap in order to beautify their homes, or to make their life purer, 
 sweeter, and more worthy of cultivated beings ? 
 
 It is said that the exception proves the rule. No doubt there 
 are exceptions, but will any one, however superficial his acquaint- 
 ance with even the exterior of the English Babylon, believe that 
 one in a thousand exists upon whom the business of a London 
 season, with its mill-like round of noisy display and laborious 
 dulness, confers anything approaching to contentment or satis- 
 faction ? Compare the faces that file past in the crowded ranks 
 of the Ladies' Mile, Rotten Eow, or the Serpentine, with a 
 similar crowd enjoying a bank -holiday or by the side of a race- 
 course t Can sadder faces be seen anywhere than those who 
 crowd the boxes of the opera, theatres, and stalls, plastered with 
 diamonds, coated with paint, stiffened out with all the art of the 
 milliner and perfumer, or gasping at the top of a staircase while
 
 220 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 the stream of perspiring guests swarm up, and over, and around, 
 or fighting for their own turn in a stand-up feed at a Court buffet, 
 or storming a crowded ball supper. Or see the ladies three and 
 six deep in a London ball-room with the thermometer at a 
 hundred and a cold draught on their bare shoulders from the 
 open windows, or struggling in turn to obtain a breath of fresh 
 air like the victims of the Black Hole of Calcutta ! Can a sadder 
 spectacle be seen, or more piteous and disappointed faces be 
 discovered, upon the wide earth than among a fashionable 
 London crowd tossed to and fro in the social whirlpool ? 
 
 Nor can it be supposed that out of thousands who spend the 
 bright, sunny June and July days in such pitiful style there are 
 any but the very young boys and girls who either enjoy or 
 pretend to enjoy the deadly mill-round of enforced pleasures 
 which compose the routine of their existence. Why do they do 
 it? Because it " ts the thing" to do! How many Englishmen 
 and women I have heard use this phrase in apology and pretext 
 for partaking in the dismal business of pleasure of a London 
 season ! This it is which differentiates us from the foreigner. 
 This it is that sets the English man and woman on a different 
 pedestal from any other nation. This is the black spot of our 
 ration and our character. We do foolish things because it is the 
 thing to do them ! 
 
 Free and independent as we are in all else, in our social 
 exhibition, as in every branch of social life, we are guided, not by 
 reason or intelligence or even by what we want and wish to do, 
 but by what " it is the thing to do I " 
 
 But I shall hear my readers exclaim, " Surely fashion is as 
 powerful abroad as in London and New York. Yes, fashion as 
 to the mere shape of a hat or the cut of a dress, but in all other 
 respects there is more liberty in the little toe of any nation in the 
 world than there is in the whole body of an Englishman or 
 Englishwoman. If we are the freest people in the world and 
 have taught true personal liberty to all the nations six hundred 
 years ago, nevertheless, in all matters outside politics and 
 government English men and women are the veriest slaves that 
 the world ever saw." 
 
 From the earliest dawn of childhood it is always " This is the 
 thing to do," or, " That is not the thing to do." From tottering
 
 OUR SOCIAL SLAVEEY 221 
 
 youth to palsied old age the cry is still the same, "This is the 
 thing to do." It is never, "This is right or this is rational," 
 but, " This is the thing to do." If we are not all the slaves of 
 fashion, we are all the slaves of the " thing to do." 
 
 What is this mysterious "thing" that governs English men 
 and women and makes slaves of them? Apparently public 
 opinion, but what is public opinion but the combined ignorance 
 and imbecility of a thousand paid scribblers who, for 
 the most part, know nothing about what they are writing, 
 and, in all cases, write to order and not according to 
 truth or conviction? And yet this is the tyrant which 
 " makes cowards of us all." Under a former article I have 
 alluded to the scorn of foreigners at our slavishness of 
 opinion. One of our weaknesses is to intrench ourselves upon 
 the aggregate opinion set forth in the newspapers. It is not 
 what we think, but what the Times or Morning Post says or 
 thinks. No English man or woman ventures an opinion of their 
 own. Hence in great measure arises the absence of taste, For 
 taste supposes in the first place sufficient knowledge of, and 
 next due consideration of the grounds upon which all actions, 
 beautiful and noble, and great, are founded. " Society" in the 
 main has now become no longer a social intercourse but a 
 tedious and expensive system of self-advertisement. Even our 
 country pleasures, once so dear to Englishmen and so dis- 
 tinguishing a mark of the quiet, unostentatious refinement of 
 which the cultivated Englishwoman used to be (and still is, 
 when she can be found) an admirable example, has given way to 
 the mania for self-advertisement. Where the magnates of fifty 
 years ago could entertain their friends and conciliate their 
 tenantry during the whole of the shooting season by showing 
 moderate sport with the natural produce of their covers, they 
 must now show immoderate sport by killing thousands in a few 
 days reared at enormous expense in order to gratify their love of 
 self-advertisement by making a "record" bag. They do not 
 enjoy it, their friends do not enjoy it, but the newspapers do- 
 enjoy it, for they are doubly repaid, first, by the snob who- 
 entertains, and, secondly, by the snobs who devour the elaborate 
 details served up, describing how His Serene Transparency The- 
 Grand Duke of Schinkenund-Krautenburg honoured the Marquis-
 
 222 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of Tinkerton with his presence at his annual battue and succeeded 
 in making the record bag for the county of, etc., etc. 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with other English sports. Cricket, golf, 
 lawn tennis, football, have each been successively seized by the 
 omnivorous Press, swallowed up and marked for its own. 
 
 Just as the devotees of Juggernaut bow down and esteem it a 
 favour to be rolled over and crushed, so we free and independent 
 Britons kiss the hand that smites us and slavishly bow down 
 before the Juggernaut of the Press which makes willing puppets 
 of us all. 
 
 Nor does the tyranny of the Press stop here. From recording 
 social events it is only a step to regulate them ; from regulating 
 another step to imposing them, from imposing them the 
 transition is easy to blackmail unless their orders are complied 
 with. And yet so blind and stupid are we that we never get 
 upon our legs at banquet hall or public meeting without thanking 
 Providence and the Press for the blessings showered down upon 
 us by what may well be called in sober earnest, the Tiers Etat, or 
 Third Power in the State. 
 
 Your country magnates are not allowed to " shoot " too long 
 for the reading public would complain and the Press feel the 
 pinch. Nor must they tarry too long at their country seats, or 
 the public would be cheated out of the news that they had gone to 
 Norway in their yacht, or shot grouse in Scotland, or electrified 
 the Riviera by the multiplicity of their costumes or the expensive- 
 ness of their diamonds. The rich and high-placed along with 
 the flunkey train of ragtag and bobtail which jackal-like hang 
 upon their flanks trusting to pull down a Duke at Monte Carlo 
 or scrape an acquaintance with a Duchess at Homburg are alike 
 hurried by the Press from place to place throughout the livelong 
 year under the terrible threat that if they do not comply with 
 newspaper orders, they will be denounced by the Society papers 
 as no longer fashionable or as falling behind the times, or, 
 worse still, as not knowing what is the " thing to do." 
 
 If all this applies to the fashionable great, the Press tyranny 
 exercised over them is as nothing when compared with that 
 exercised over the creations of their own hands the " nouveaux 
 riches," whose very existence hangs upon their breath or rather 
 ink ! These are usually described as the " smart set," since their
 
 OUE SOCIAL SLAVEEY 223 
 
 sole excuse for existing, in the view of the Press who has 
 invented them, is to furnish smart paragraphs for Society rags, 
 about their latest feat of vulgar extravagance and folly. 
 
 If the young Duke of Euntherig " sports " a steam yacht fitted 
 with nickel throughout, your latest African millionaire astonishes 
 Cowes with a steam yacht plastered with silver. If the lovely 
 Countess of Thingeinbob dazzles Covent Garden with the largest 
 pearl necklace ever yet seen, the papers must instantly record 
 that Mrs. Eosenbaum electrified the royal enclosure at Ascot 
 by an exhibition of diamonds as big as walnuts round her ample 
 waist. No damned soul of mediaeval lore was ever tormented as 
 these are. The reporter's eye is on them morning, noon, and 
 night. They are his creatures, body and soul ; he has made 
 them and he farms them out to the best advantage. He tells 
 them what to do and what not to do. If they do not supply 
 copy, that is, produce some startling novelty surpassing what has 
 been before conceived in folly, extravagance, or vulgarity, then 
 woe to them. For as the Press has made them, it can unmake 
 them by a stroke of the pen. They live in perpetual fear of 
 dismissal. Euled by a rod of iron, blackmail is their lot and 
 anxiety their daily bread. Let them but kick ever so little or 
 refuse to pay the price, the rein is tightened, and their reign is 
 over. " Mrs. Montgomery Tompkins looked worn and haggard 
 in the stalls," or, " Mr. Finsbury Jones' team at the Magazine 
 yesterday showed a great falling off from last year," will soon 
 appear in a Society paragraph. Or, worse than all, the word is 
 passed round that his name shall be omitted at all parties or 
 social functions, whereby the condemned one loses all zest or 
 excuse for existence and sinks to rise no more, while the waters 
 of " Society " close over him ! 
 
 The suggestion has been seriously made by many thinking 
 foreigners that we are too busy making money to stop to think. 
 Can it be this that differentiates ourselves from all other nations ? 
 Was it of us the Prophet spoke when he said, " With desolation 
 is the earth made desolate because there is no man that thinketh 
 in his heart ? " 
 
 Would that the evil only extended to the idle classes among 
 the rich ! 
 
 Just as action causes reaction and the manoeuvres of the
 
 224 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Press recording at first the follies of the idle classes and their 
 vagaries, constitute by proclamation and wide advertisement a 
 code of laws which not even the boldest dares to infringe, 
 begetting cowardice and folly in turn ; so the lower classes from 
 the bottom to the top live not for themselves, nor dare to think 
 for themselves, nor are they subject to their own laws : they are 
 the very slaves of servile imitation of the class above them, the 
 creatures and grovelling tools of custom and fashion. 
 
 Consider for an instant how the whole face of the country has 
 been changed since English men and women have lost, mainly 
 through American contact, the power and will to shape their own 
 destinies, to wear the clothes suitable to their avocations, to 
 avow themselves what they are, in short, to play the part of 
 reasonable men and women. 
 
 INSINCERITY AND DISHONESTY 
 
 lie at the root of our social relations, and are themselves the 
 root of a thousand ills that infest our body corporate. 
 
 Looking down the ages at the customs of the past from Saxon 
 times, it will be seen that Englishmen of old, just as Continentals 
 do now, and indeed all races except the Anglo-Saxon, dressed 
 once in a manner suitable to their occupation. English men 
 and women alone, during the last fifty years, growing ashamed 
 of any distinctive dress announcing the profession or work 
 they follow, have abandoned every attempt at adapting their 
 dress to their work. Certainly, one would hardly recommend the 
 dress of the Saxon herd to be resumed, however superior in point 
 of wear and durability, to the one actually adopted for field work, 
 consisting as it did in a single smock, of which the long Sussex 
 smock is probably a relic. In winter they seem to have added a 
 kind of puttie of rolled strips of cloth or hide, around their legs ; 
 but the sandal of the past, exclusively confined (as in Ireland) to 
 transit over rough roads, avoiding as it did the necessity of 
 stockings (which are probably the most unsuitable, unhealthy, 
 and insanitary invention of man), must convince the least 
 observant of the long strides that England has made in the 
 wrong direction. 
 
 It cannot therefore be from economy, or a nice research of the 
 most suitable garment, or even a superior refinement which 
 urges each class in succession not only to ape the one above
 
 OUE DISHONESTY 225 
 
 them, but crowning triumph of all to leave no stone unturned 
 in order that no distinction may be discernible between the dress 
 of the highest and the lowest. Indeed a certain revulsion has 
 set in as our democracy wears on, until the very names of class 
 distinction have been reversed and the tendency of dress is rather 
 for the highest and richest to assume the simplicity that once 
 belonged to the working classes. Just as duchesses speak in 
 these days of each other as women, since their washerwomen 
 refer to each other as ladies (clearly an Anglo-Saxon weakness, 
 seeing that it is carried to its highest extent by our Anglo-Saxon 
 relatives), so the sporting peer is frequently attired in a costume 
 that would assuredly give greatest ease and freedom to the 
 working man, and as a matter of fact was the ordinary working 
 attire of the 17th century boors. What can be prettier than the 
 blue linsey home-made petticoat of the Scotch or English girl 
 of fifty years ago, with the single upper garment or smock loosely 
 tied about her waist, or in summer, linen, and in winter cloth- 
 tippet about her neck and shoulders made from the wool or flax, 
 raised on the farm in the long winter months ! Or again the 
 close-fitting frieze of the Irish peasant, who still in unfashionable 
 or out-of-the-way places dons the same rational attire, his neat 
 knee-breeches and home-made blue stockings with the Scotch or 
 Irish " straw shoon " of days gone by, serving for indoor work, while 
 the pattern, or clog, served for outside household duties. All 
 over England, Scotland and Ireland, even in the remotest 
 mountain villages of Wales we see now the same cheap, ill-made, 
 ill-fitting jacket, waistcoat, and trousers, only differing from those 
 of a peer in quality and durability. 
 
 The same may be said of domestic servants, who in the vain 
 attempt to conceal their occupation, must needs dress at home as 
 near as possible like their mistresses, and when they go abroad 
 array themselves with " cheap and nasty " finery in as close an 
 imitation to a duchess's daughter as can be attained at a moderate 
 cost, with the result that their wages are eaten up in cheap and 
 tawdry finery which the first shower destroys, and which even 
 when new are but a sham and a fraud. 
 
 Few sights are more admired by the English traveller in 
 foreign parts than the neat and graceful costume of the local 
 peasantry, or even the tidy dress of the French " grisette " or
 
 226 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 "bonne" with their distinctive caps or kerchiefs announcing 
 their various occupations. 
 
 Nor is it only in the article of clothes that this British insin- 
 cerity and dishonesty is apparent, which cannot but react fatally 
 upon the character of the people. Instead of the suitable food 
 consumed by the poorer classes fifty years ago throughout Great 
 Britain, we have the universal white bread, out of which all the 
 strength and substance has been winnowed for the sake of brown 
 bread and patent foods, till nothing but the starch remains ; yet 
 this is eagerly demanded and insisted upon by the poorest classes 
 of our benighted land, for the sole reason that no imputation may 
 be cast upon, or any difference discerned between, the bread of the 
 richest and that of the poorest ; and this, with weak tea of the 
 worst description and cheap jams of doubtful origin, now form 
 the staple diet of the working men and women of Great Britain 
 and Ireland. 
 
 Far be it from me to insinuate that the evil is confined to the 
 lower classes. The merchant shuns all allusion to his trade, the 
 shopman blushes to speak of his shop. If compelled to confess, 
 the former will own shamefacedly to his "business in the city," 
 making up for the degrading confession as far as may be by a 
 pointed reference to his " place in the country," which may be a 
 cottage at 10 a year or a mansion at Brighton. The shopkeeper, 
 not to lag behind if a silversmith, calls himself a merchant in 
 antique plate and diamonds, while the barber dubs himself an 
 artist in hair or a wig merchant. All alike are ashamed of them- 
 selves and of each other. 
 
 Each class, instead of living according to their income, 
 according to their reason, and according to their means, notori- 
 ously tend year by year more to live according to a standard 
 external to themselves, in short, to copy the ways of those above 
 them. As a natural consequence they ardently desire to enjoy 
 the society, and ape the manners, habits, ideas, and language 
 of those above them : not so much because it suits their pocket, 
 or because they aspire to raise themselves in culture or refine- 
 ment, but because they ardently desire to pass for members of a 
 superior class to that in which they move, and still more ardently 
 to be received into that society to which they do not naturally 
 belong. Whether this is deeply seated in the Anglo-Saxon
 
 OUE DISHONESTY 227 
 
 character or is a growth of the last hundred years is a difficult 
 matter to decide from the literature of the past. Personally, I 
 incline to think that it is of comparatively modern creation, and 
 that it flows directly from the "advertising competitions" and 
 false standards set up by the contemporary Press. That every 
 reasonable man should strive to lift himself beyond the station 
 in which he is born is a natural and laudable ambition ; but that 
 such an ambition is perceptible here in a greater extent than in 
 any other country I am greatly disposed to deny. 
 
 It cannot therefore be disputed that there is no nation in the 
 world where every individual is more closely bound by a cast- 
 iron code of conventionality affecting all classes alike and binding 
 with still closer fetters the poorest as well as the richest, preventing 
 all alike from following their own bent, taste, desire, and inclina- 
 tion, and constraining all alike to bow down before the " Thing to 
 Do." This weakness not only cripples happiness and diminishes 
 spheres of usefulness, but tends to develop in the highest degree 
 that dulness of disposition and that want of gaiety and simplicity 
 in act or speech, which are our leading characteristics. 
 
 Compare our working classes with their wives and families 
 and the herd of clerks and shop-boys and shop-girls issuing forth 
 to Hampstead Heath on an Easter Holiday, or deluging Southend 
 or the Crystal Palace on a Bank Holiday the workman and his 
 substantial spouse armed with a ponderous basket out of which 
 bulges a suspicious-looking bottle, whose waning contents at an 
 early hour coincide with an increasing redness of feature, pain- 
 fully foreshadowing the condition .which awaits him before the 
 shades of night close in, the more hilarious but less bibulous 
 clerk, in garments varying from the counterfeit presentment of an 
 Oxonian athlete to that of a smart young man about town, with 
 one or more shrill- voiced giggling female appendages whose noisy 
 laughter and demonstrative manners seem expressly intended to 
 attract the attention of the company in which they travel, and 
 which singularly belie their fashionable if flimsy attire copied 
 from the latest styles of Bond Street. Then turn to Vincennes 
 or the Prado, or the slopes of Posilipo, and compare the simple 
 workers of Paris, or Madrid, or Naples, disporting themselves 
 on a feast day on the grass, arrayed in clean but simple garments 
 distinguished alone by the exuberance of white linen, quietly
 
 228 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 diverting themselves with innocent games, much chatter and 
 unlimited gesticulation ! Why is it that our British clerks and 
 shop-girls and working men upon a Bank Holiday toil from early 
 morn to catch a slow excursion train, and pass a painful day 
 under a midsummer sun, seeking in vain a scrap of shade or 
 shelter on a shingly beach or a sandy shore, instead of resting 
 body and mind by a quiet picnic on the fascinating slopes of 
 Hyde Park, like their foreign contemporaries ? Simply because the 
 railways bribe the Press to insist upon the glory and delight of a 
 trip by train to a distant spot by the seaside from which thousands 
 return cursing their lot and vowing they will never be gulled by 
 the railways and newspaper puffs again till the next time f 
 Here again the same tyrants, Press and Fashion, govern all. 
 Instead of doing what they like, people waste their money in 
 uncertain "pleasures" at the bidding of an interested advertise- 
 ment as well as in concession to public opinion, while they 
 obtain neither rest, comfort, nor diversion, beyond that of being 
 able to tell their friends that they have spent their Bank 
 Holiday at Bournemouth or the Isle of Wight. 
 
 Look at the factory boys and girls of Lancashire. Instead 
 of putting by money for a cotton strike, or a mill closed down, 
 every penny is put by for the weekly or fortnightly " outing " to 
 Blackpool or Isle of Man. During this fortnightly pandemonium 
 their object is to spend the whole of their hard-earned yearly 
 savings as quickly, as recklessly, and as vulgarly as possible in 
 one continual round of noise, jostle, and endless, if inexpensive, 
 " shows," which are thinly-disguised pretexts for plunder. 
 
 Thus it seems more than probable that the whole of their 
 yearly savings are spent in simulating the fashionable dress of 
 a superior station joined to the natural habits, language and 
 manners of peasants, while from their deportment and appear- 
 ance one can easily guess that they are more led by current 
 fashion and practice than by their own inclinations, or they would 
 surely not select for their yearly outing a laborious succession of 
 physical exercises to which their mill work must seem light by 
 comparison. 
 
 Few things cause greater marvel to the observant foreigner 
 than the reckless expenditure of our working classes, for whom 
 thousands of trains in holiday times are sent out of the London
 
 OUE DISHONESTY 229 
 
 stations on excursions to every part of the kingdom. "If they 
 enjoy themselves" they say "the wonder would cease: one 
 would merely call them extravagant and profuse in expenditure : 
 but do they amuse themselves ? they certainly do not look like 
 it ! " And until the bottle is empty, and numberless public-houses 
 have been visited and the hubbub waxes fast and furious no 
 signs of jollity or merriment can be detected to explain the 
 mystery. This criticism may be correct or not ; it is certainly 
 a very prevalent one. Not being a conversational people, until 
 the eating and drinking begins, there is not much signs of life in 
 your average Briton of the working classes. 
 
 For it would seem that the Anglo-Saxon is still at that stage 
 of social existence and this applies quite as much to the highest 
 classes as the lowest when noise, pushing and jostling is far 
 more congenial to male and female alike than the more refined 
 equivalent in a higher stage of aesthetic development, as, for 
 instance, music, the enjoyment of beautiful gardens that " kif " 
 which forms a sufficient delight to the more sentimental Oriental, 
 or the " beare " of the Italian ; while the Frenchman or German 
 of similar class, if he has any superfluous cash to spend, instead of 
 an excursion to a sea place, which he neither looks at nor sits by, 
 nor enjoys when he gets there, would unquestionably prefer a 
 frugal " dejeuner a Therbe " in the prettiest garden or park which 
 he can reach, or, failing that, in any cornfield or wayside, or, 
 greatly daring, rise to the extravagance of a sixpenny seat at the 
 theatre or open-air concert. 
 
 Nothing is more remarkable than to watch our millions 
 trooping into the great centres of resort by sea or land. If bound 
 for the sea, do they ever go near it, sit by it, or look at it, or 
 lounge upon the shingle and sands and watch the " sad sea 
 waves "? Far from it. Their interests, their research and 
 amusements, such as they are, are sought for precisely as in the 
 London streets. If they take their nosebags with them, as the 
 indignant publicans complain they do in these days with a 
 disgusting frugality which they (the said publicans) cannot 
 sufficiently condemn, they will probably sit and eat it by the 
 shore ; but if, as is usually the case, they depend upon local refresh- 
 ments, it is almost certain that they will be found parading the 
 streets with a, pertinacity worthy of a higher cause till the last
 
 230 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 hour of their stay, disporting themselves precisely as they would 
 in Pimlico or Eegent Street on a day out, and largely patronizing 
 the local "pubs" and the cheap amusements which lie in wait 
 for their cash at every turn. 
 
 OUR EMPTY PRETENSIONS. 
 
 As I have before hinted, an important consideration which 
 weighs greatly with our foreign friends is purity of blood, as well 
 as length of descent. This is carried to such an extent that 
 numberless institutions upon the Continent are limited to such 
 as can show sixteen or thirty-two quarterings as the case may 
 be. Now, from an examination of many of our best pedigrees, 
 it is extremely doubtful if there are any who can show even 
 sixteen quarterings, from which it would appear that 
 Englishmen present the singular paradox of coveting rank and 
 respecting position, good blood, and length of pedigree as far as 
 my observation goes beyond any other nation of the earth, 
 while at the same time English men and women of rank and 
 station regard no more the female side than King Cophetua 
 when he married the beggar maid. 
 
 There seems to have been a certain prejudice regarding purity 
 of blood and the disgrace of a base marriage as lately as the 
 middle of the last century, but since that time, contrary to what 
 might be supposed would follow from German influence and 
 German ideas where strictness in this direction is carried to such 
 an extent as to be ludicrous, your duke or baron of ancient 
 lineage marries a penniless milkmaid, like Lord Huntingtower of 
 the ballad, to say nothing of a well-dowered lass, of the meanest 
 extraction, without calling forth the surprise of his friends or the 
 jeers of his enemies. From this it follows that besides having an 
 almost infinitesimal " Nobility " in its proper sense, consisting as 
 I have before said of about one-twentieth of the House of Peers 
 and a hundred or so other families besides, nearly all these have 
 so besmirched their escutcheons by base marriages as to be 
 excluded altogether according to the stricter Continental code. 
 
 Yet you may search a German, or French, or Italian paper 
 through and through without a mention of how " Lady So-and- 
 So filled her rooms with a distinguished assembly consisting of 
 So-and-So and So-and-So," or " Mrs. Stanley Tompkins
 
 OUK HYPOCBISY 231 
 
 once more repeated her delightful private theatricals which 
 were the success of last season," etc., etc., still less do they 
 cultivate newspapers devoted ostensibly to chronicling the doings 
 of what they please to call Society, but which in reality, as I 
 have above explained, are nothing but a gigantic fraud devised 
 to induce foolish purchasers to hawk about a heap of twice-paid 
 advertisements. 
 
 Nor is it as works of art that these singular productions of 
 modern Press industry can find purchasers, consisting chiefly, as 
 they do, of women in various attitudes and stages of undress, 
 combined with an enormous variety of beautifully depicted 
 " stays " and underclothing which for indelicacy bid fair to rival 
 the disgusting productions which, from being tolerated abroad by 
 too indulgent police regulations, are frequently a subject of 
 reproach and complaint on the part of our fair compatriots. 
 
 Nowhere, however, is our national hypocrisy displayed more 
 touchingly than at Monte Carlo, where we have all heard a- 
 thousand times the tenderest and most plaintive expressions of 
 sorrow at the degradation of so lovely a scene by the frequency 
 of suicides, and the shocking incitement to crime, with general 
 discursions upon the immorality of foreigners and the horror 
 with which English people regard these cesspools of iniquity I 
 It certainly is a singular thing that the said cesspool is more 
 frequented, and that probably more cash is there hazarded by 
 Englishmen than any other nation ; though, possibly, this may 
 be ascribed to their fervid missionary inclinations which impel 
 them to try what can be effected in the way of conversion 
 by precept and example. 
 
 In further confirmation of this flagrant example of British cant 
 I may say that I have been informed on the best authority that 
 Ostend, which for many years has been greatly resorted to by 
 English people of both sexes who continually declaimed against 
 the iniquity of public gaming tables in that town through the 
 medium of English and Belgian newspapers, has been entirely 
 deserted by our compatriots since public gaming has ceased to be 
 legally permitted. Perhaps a coincidence ! but one that speaks 
 volumes to the thinking mind ! Whether this is again an 
 attempt to throw dust in the eyes of the foreigner or not is very 
 difficult to say, but it exhibits in a striking light the tendency of
 
 232 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Englishmen to see specks in foreign eyes while they are utterly 
 oblivious of the beam in their own, since if there is a vice to 
 which English men and women are addicted in a higher degree 
 than any other people on the earth class with class, from the 
 housemaid to the duchess, and the dustman to the duke it is 
 that same gambling, racing, or share speculating mania which 
 pervades the entire community, invades every department of 
 sport to such a degree that football and cricket, which are at 
 present the most popular and engrossing sports of the lower 
 classes, are fast vying with the racehorse as a betting agency, 
 and day by day afford new harvests to the bookmakers and the 
 inevitable Press. 
 
 If, therefore, the lower classes in England are liable to the 
 charge of preferring the more primitive forms of enjoyment 
 usually associated with the indulgence in excess of stimulants, 
 such as tea and tobacco, whisky and beer, gambling and horse- 
 racing, football and cricket matches, and by way of social 
 diversions prefer noise and horseplay to quiet amusement or the 
 pleasures of conversation what are we to say of the classes 
 above them, who profess to greater refinement, and, for the most 
 part, are possessed of a higher degree of cultivation ? For idiotic 
 as is the average music-hall song, music, and dialogue, if our 
 playwrights truly urge in excuse of their misdeeds that they do 
 but write up to the public tastes, what are we to think of the 
 upper classes whose plays year by year are not only patterned 
 upon but actually made up from the inanities and witless 
 productions of what is most inaptly called "variety entertain- 
 ment," apparently because of its imbecility or absence of 
 humour ? 
 
 It may be truly asserted that not one in a thousand either 
 cares to listen to good music in England or does anything more 
 than tolerate it. In the best society it is almost impossible to 
 secure decent attention when a singer performs in a crowded 
 drawing-room. The same may be witnessed at any opera-house 
 on any night in the season. There is comparative silence during 
 the performance of a principal solo on account of the risk that 
 may be incurred of interruption or public interference, and 
 similarly in private houses when the eye of the mistress of the 
 house causes compunction in the breasts of the delinquents : but
 
 OUE MANNEES 233 
 
 that anyone should either desire to listen to good music or be 
 deterred by good manners or consideration for the singer is a 
 view of the case which rarely commends itself to the members of 
 "English Society." Similarly at concerts and operas the greater 
 part of the first act or division of the concert is entirely spoilt by 
 the rustle of dresses and the incoming of late diners, whose last 
 thought is to guard against the inconvenience and impoliteness of 
 spoiling other people's pleasure, and hampering the course of the 
 performance, by dining at an early hour ; nor do they stay to 
 the end of the performance if otherwise disposed two infractions 
 of ordinary politeness which are strongly resented by foreigners 
 as entirely contrary to civilized habits and practice. 
 
 I distinctly recollect a friend of mine whose first visit to 
 Covent Garden, with an excellent company, had been looked 
 forward to with some pleasure informing me that the first 
 half of the opera had been obscured by the ladies in arriving 
 late passing to and fro in front of him, and the second spoilt 
 by their premature departure. 
 
 Similarly, if English snobbery is obtrusively visible in the 
 lower classes in their desire to frequent the society of those 
 above them rather than their own, what are we to think of the 
 educated classes in England where a perpetual scramble is 
 apparent from bottom to top of the entire social edifice, 
 every class and rank scheming to be asked to the houses of 
 the class above them, or toadying party and ball givers with 
 every conceivable act of abasement that the human imagina- 
 tion can devise, in order to thrust themselves where they are 
 not wanted and obtain tickets for balls given by persons to 
 whom they are not known, or manoeuvring to be introduced 
 to people whose acquaintance they imagine to redound to 
 their credit; while as for the all-pervading British mania to 
 jostle, squeeze, press, crush, and crowd, the tendency is quite 
 as strongly marked in the Court balls as in the Surrey 
 theatre's pit or the crowded enclosure of a racecourse. Again, 
 in the matter of appreciation of art in any form, or essential 
 refinement, in the degree and measure of their education, the 
 ostentatious vulgarity displayed by our gilded youth who 
 systematically interlard their speech with musical comedy 
 phrases and Americanisms and the last cant phrases of the
 
 234 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 music-hall, the gutter or the racecourse taken in conjunction 
 with the introduction into the drawing-room of the lowest 
 music-hall songs which are notoriously and obviously attended 
 to and enjoyed in a far higher degree than good music by 
 the " Upper Ten," any contrast between the highest and 
 lowest classes in England must be admitted to show a 
 very slender balance to the credit of the more favoured 
 classes. 
 
 One hears a great deal about "kiss-in-the-ring" and 
 hugging and squeezing in the kitchen, and the village green, 
 and Hampstead Heath, and the barn dances' of the Kentish 
 hop-pickers, but when we see these transplanted into the 
 ball-room of the rich and educated classes what are we to 
 think of a nation whose so-called Society is not content 
 with culling their flowers of speech from the gutter and 
 introducing them into their own fastidious mouths, but 
 wearying of the graceful waltz and stately quadrille, and 
 envious of the license and freedom of the kitchen and the 
 ale-house, or the childish antics of the Southern nigger, 
 eagerly import the latest vulgarity of the tap-room into the 
 lancers, and substitute for the graceful mazurka or quadrille 
 the barn dance of the scum of East London and the cake- 
 walk of Louisiana cotton -fields? 
 
 What must foreigners think of a nation, whose Upper 
 Classes (if the term can be properly applied to those who live 
 in the best houses and spend most money) take their language 
 from the music-hall, their slang from the gutters of New York 
 and London, teach their sons and daughters the imbecile^ 
 when not indelicate, dances of the theatre and music-hall, and 
 the songs of the street ? abandoning formality, politeness of 
 forms and speech and manner to the lower classes, adopting 
 free-and-easy impudence for their standard of manners, 
 preferring the laconic familiarity of Whitechapel to the exhaust- 
 ing cereiuoniousness of Good Manners, reckoning " Epsom 
 chaff" and Billingsgate dialogue the height of wit, and 
 practical jokes the soul of humour banishing, in a word, all 
 self-control and restraint and all that distinguishes the man from 
 the beast.
 
 CHAPTEE XXI 
 
 PROFESSIONALISM 
 
 JUST as jackals hunt in companies and by a tacit under- 
 standing, however quarrelsome among themselves invariably 
 combine against their foreign foes or common prey, so too the 
 numerous professions in England partly through the newly- 
 imported fashion of trans-Atlantic Trusts which is spreading 
 through the country with that imitation which is said to be 
 sincerest flattery, and partly through the growing mania for 
 association in all things, coupled with the weakness of the Law 
 band themselves together for the maintenance of their charges 
 and exactions at the highest possible level as well as for mutual 
 protection, if indeed any is required where the Law itself is 
 summoned in defence of its own iniquities. 
 
 Since the days when first machinery well nigh a hundred 
 years ago fixed the capitalist on the shoulders of the working- 
 man to whom he has proved a veritable Old Man of the Sea, 
 the tendency has been for men with money and brains to unite 
 for greater efficiency of self-defence, in order to secure the 
 utmost immunity from the Law, and the more to tighten their 
 power upon the victims against whom they propose to operate. 
 
 Most of us well remember the flourish of trumpets with 
 which the early co-operative associations were preceded. A 
 new era of human felicity was to dawn upon Great Britain. 
 The consumer would be placed in more direct communication 
 with the producer, a strict cash system would take the place of 
 long credit and high prices, the^ " middleman grievance" would 
 be reduced in number and virulence, to the benefit of both 
 parties, and an inestimable boon would be conferred upon the 
 country at large ! It is strange that this system should not have 
 been adopted on an enlarged scale before the last quarter of the 
 nineteenth century, seeing that a hundred years before the 
 effect of machinery was distinctly perceived in practically 
 disestablishing the home factory, home industries, the small 
 loom, and the small workman, who henceforth was handed over,
 
 236 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 body and soul, to the tender mercies of the mill-owner with 
 capital. The effect of the former revolution was almost 
 precisely similar to the latter. 
 
 The Civil Service, Army and Navy, and other Associations 
 at first tempted the public, by the brilliant prospects held forth 
 to them, not only to abandon satisfactory tradesmen in their 
 favour, but actually to pay them a handsome subscription into 
 the bargain. It is needless to say that the retailers with small 
 capital who were affected by the withdrawal of custom so 
 induced, either passed into the Bankruptcy Court, or if 
 provided with sufficient capital started on their own account, 
 enforcing the cash system where possible and adopting strictly 
 co-operative prices. 
 
 It must, however, be admitted that one benefit arose through 
 this departure. The public, too long accustomed to the patience 
 and resignation of British tradesmen, which in turn reacted 
 disastrously on trade as well as on their own economic position, 
 became accustomed to the novel notion of paying cash on delivery. 
 
 Now, if there is one more glaring defect than another in the 
 English character, it is the touching, if stupid, fidelity to any 
 institution to which they have grown accustomed, and which has 
 been commended to them with sufficient persistency by the 
 Press. Slow to move, when once they have placed their affections 
 and belief in any movement or person or thing no matter what 
 change may take place or however circumstances may alter, they 
 remain faithful to the object of their affection. 
 
 Naturally, the Press was largely bribed to support these vast 
 undertakings. The foolish British investor jumped eagerly at 
 the bait, all forgetful of the well-known axiom, which cannot be 
 too often repeated, that where there is any conformity or 
 conspiracy on a large scale for -any vast undertaking in which 
 many Englishmen are concerned whatever be the professions of 
 philanthropy or public utility which are advanced in its support 
 the only safe rule for the public is to look closely to their 
 pockets. 
 
 When the Pneumatic Bread Company started on its adventurous 
 and successful career the papers were filled with "puffs" 
 announcing the usual cant about filling a " well-known want " 
 and supplying the comforts of the rich as well as the modest
 
 PEOFESSIONALISM 237 
 
 requirements of the city clerk and the dinnerless shop-girl, at a 
 hitherto unprecedented price even the most cynical and 
 suspicious customers were lured by their promises until they 
 discovered that these pseudophilanthropic co-operative com- 
 panies, instead of lowering their prices in conformity with their 
 vast profits following in the well-known footsteps of all other 
 similar British institutions from a bun shop to a monster hotel 
 proceeded little by little to cut down the quality of their goods 
 to a minimum, and hand over their enormous profits to a body of 
 shareholders, instead of to the consuming public for whose 
 interests at the outset they professed so much solicitude. 
 Whatever philanthropy is ever displayed in the formation, 
 conduct, and working of these companies has certainly found its 
 way into the coffers of greedy shareholders, who, with a truly 
 British conviction that charity begins at home, have speculated 
 in " public charities " of this kind, with the only appreciable 
 result of enriching themselves and of plunging the smaller 
 retailers into bankruptcy and penury. 
 
 Just as Machinery, Trusts, and Combinations of all kinds, 
 and, above all, anonymous Corporations, are able by their 
 concentration and large command of capital to secure practical 
 omnipotence before the Law, while wholly exempt from any 
 compunction or personal feeling for their victims by reason of the 
 impersonal nature of their undertaking, large Stores and 
 Co-operative Societies not only deceive the customer into 
 accepting inferior goods and paying higher for them by the 
 glamour of their wealth and supposed integrity, but are even 
 apt to captivate the confidence and lull the suspicions of their 
 own clients and subscribers to an almost incredible extent. 
 
 In another direction the want of discernment and bovine 
 stupidity of John Bull in following a beaten path, is never more 
 strikingly displayed than in connection with what he loves to call 
 " old-established firms." 
 
 Just as lying Peerages and Directories are paid to invent the 
 genealogies of mushroom dukes and the sham "aristocracy" 
 with which the land abounds so the Press has only to wave its 
 magic wand over the last new hotel, the last fashionable 
 restaurant, and even the latest gold mine, for silly folks to rush 
 after it helter-skelter, and unlike our neighbours over the-
 
 238 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Channel, instead of thrusting it aside after a few years' trial as a 
 thing out-of-date or "demode " let but its character once stand 
 high, with Eoyalty and the magnates of the land for its patrons, 
 it will most surely go on like " Charley's Aunt," " still running," 
 while there is a man, woman or child in the kingdom left to 
 taste its sweetness. 
 
 Those great singers and popular English favourites in their day, 
 Mario and Grisi, sang many years before my time. Nevertheless, 
 in my boyhood Mario was still singing at the age of sixty to 
 sixty-five upon the English stage, drawing the largest 
 audiences, and, in common with Mr. Sims Keeves in the concert 
 hall, enjoying the highest popularity though their voices had 
 long since departed, and a mere ghost of ancient recollections 
 repaid the public for their touching fidelity and devotion. 
 
 Similarly, the caterers and purveyors of our public amusements, 
 taking advantage of this well-known British characteristic, 
 delight in " fooling the Briton to the top of his bent." The 
 moment an hotel acquires notoriety, and by laborious exertions 
 at the start a certain popularity is attained, the modus operandi 
 is then, if an hotel, to turn off the French cook and put in his 
 place the housemaid or charwoman, then the paint and decoration 
 goes to rack and ruin, the whole management is abandoned, and 
 it sinks rapidly into the condition of the true-British sample, 
 which may briefly be described as a bloated or enlarged pothouse ; 
 and yet the public, not because they specially enjoy the fare 
 provided, for they are generally no judges whatever of what is 
 good and what is not, but simply because it has once had a great 
 reputation, will knowingly suffer its managers to take the fullest 
 advantage of their weakness by cutting down their expenses one- 
 half and over-charging as much or more than ever. We see such 
 as these everywhere monopolising the custom of the rich. 
 
 Your newest hotel, your up-to-date magazine, newspaper, 
 club, or theatre, after a reckless course of advertisement, 
 electrifies its delighted patrons for the first six months or so with 
 the profusion of its comforts and the perfection of its every detail. 
 Once firmly seated, however, upon the broad and hospitable back 
 of John Bull hey presto ! the scene changes, the edict goes forth 
 for strict economy at every point ; the ornamentals are discharged, 
 the luxurious accessories stopped, and the managers proceed to
 
 PBOFESSIONALISM 239 
 
 indemnify themselves for their early expenditure upon the public, 
 by stinting it for ever after to their own signal pecuniary profit, 
 without the smallest risk of discovery or public resentment, at 
 the hands of their stupid or long-suffering patrons. 
 
 When once a name for anything is made in England 
 fortune comes to stay. The same guns that the fashionable 
 New Bond Street gunmakers charge 160 a pair for, are 
 actually made and can be bought elsewhere at from 60 to 
 70. Furthermore the very guns which they sell to their deluded 
 customers are brought up in the rough from the Birmingham 
 makers, and after being engraved and touched up by the Bond 
 Street workmen, and inscribed with the magic Bond Street name, 
 the fortunate possessor or purchaser of that name is allowed by 
 a confiding public to pocket from 50 to 100 guineas upon the 
 transaction for no better reason than that the British Public has 
 been accustomed to associate the said name with good guns in the 
 past, although in nine cases out of ten the possessor of that name 
 no longer lives, or, if he does, has probably retired long ago or 
 started as a country gentleman on his own account ; nor at any 
 time, in any strict or proper sense, could he ever be called a 
 gunmaker at all ! 
 
 In my younger days I well remember that it was firmly 
 believed that only one tailor, one hosier, one bootmaker, a very 
 few gunmakers and saddlers, and undoubtedly one, and one only 
 billiard-table maker, existed in the British Empire. Trading 
 upon this undoubted British failing, the temporary possessors of 
 these magic names follow each other with bewildering succession, 
 because a tradesman's name, once firmly established, is practically 
 an undying corporation, which passes on through any number of 
 hands or is possibly turned into a joint stock company since 
 the main purpose of defrauding the public under false pretences 
 is equally well served, whether the name of the real owner is 
 Brown, or Jones, or Eobinson. Moreover, the price paid for these 
 magic names is so exorbitant that were these Bond Street 
 worthies by accident to speak the truth when asked the reason 
 for the enormous prices they charge above their Birmingham 
 rivals, they would explain that they were compelled to charge 
 double the price of their neighbours for the simple reason that 
 the premium which they paid for their goodwill that is, for the
 
 240 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 right to deceive the public by trading under a false name 
 requires them to apportion their loss over the guns or billiard- 
 tables which they sell. 
 
 But the chief triumph of the bloated companies, associations, 
 or societies for mutual protection, is the skill with which they 
 induce their unhappy clients by ingenious collusive action to 
 pay prices that are altogether out of proportion to the work 
 done, by the simple process of inventing an enormously high 
 tariff or scale of charges. Then when any dispute arises, their 
 collective or corporate interest with the Press and the Law is 
 such that not only the suitor who endeavours to escape their 
 exactions has no chance with either judge or jury, but if there 
 seems the slightest probability from the grossness of the wrong 
 inflicted that a suitor may obtain a remedy in the Courts of 
 Justice, their influence is sufficient to checkmate him, by 
 procuring the matter to be tried before a referee, who is 
 invariably guided by the skilled evidence (as it is facetiously 
 called) of those who belong to, or are strictly affiliated with, the 
 very corporation against which the complaint is brought. In 
 short, the machinery of corporations or societies, like those of 
 lawyers, barristers, doctors, dentists, architects, surveyors, 
 engineers, parsons, bankers, and railway companies, either by 
 their solidarity or collective influence in the Press and thereby 
 over judges, juries and referees, acquire such overwhelming power 
 that no private individual who is not a member of similar trades, 
 or castes, has any chance of fair play when brought into collision 
 with them. Finally, though their scale of charges has no higher 
 sanction than a careful computation of the highest fees that they 
 are likely to extort from their victims, qualified to a very slight 
 extent by the laws of demand and supply which they are 
 practically by their close affiliation in a position to defy for some 
 hidden reason which is difficult to determine, but is probably a 
 compound of stupidity and awe through the undoubted authority 
 they exercise over the minds of the great majority of Englishmen, 
 reacting upon judges and juries by means of their Press 
 supporters they manage to maintain an exorbitant level beyond 
 all reason or relation to external facts and prices, which, by long 
 immunity, obtains even in Courts of Justice a sanction amounting 
 to prescription. For such is the uncritical character of the
 
 PROFESSIONALISM 241 
 
 average Briton, his overweening respect for all trades and 
 professions, and his extreme aversion to be the first to assert an 
 opinion or to originate an idea, that in the same manner as he 
 raises the prices of hotels all through the Continent by his 
 unwillingness which he shares in common with the Americans 
 to dispute a bill or expose extortion, so in matters of Law he 
 has a marked dislike to be the first to " bell the cat," with the 
 result that there is scarcely any limit to corporate exactions and 
 professional fees but what their prudence and sagacity dictate. 
 
 To take one instance among many, most Englishmen who 
 have had experience of foreign doctors will admit that for care, 
 method, knowledge, dieting, and up-to-date information, com- 
 bined with reasonable charges, they offer a favorable contrast 
 to their pampered cotemporaries in these islands. Personally, if 
 I had a sick wife or child I would prefer in the light of my own 
 experience to entrust them to a country doctor in France or 
 Germany than the first physicians in Great Britain. Of course 
 I am fully aware that my fellow-countrymen with that touching 
 simplicity which they display alone in matters presented to them 
 by a lying and interested Press are continually assured in 
 articles, probably written by or for English doctors in foreign 
 countries, that the English constitution cannot be adequately 
 treated by foreign physicians, differing as it does in important 
 particulars, etc., with the result that fourth-class English doctors 
 abroad of no ability or experience and less instruction pocket 
 uncounted guineas wherever Englishmen do mostly congregate, 
 by the side of far more cultivated, able, and attentive native 
 doctors, who charge scarcely more shillings than the Englishmen 
 pounds. Nevertheless, I cannot admit that such fantastic views 
 of the insular constitution has any real foundation ; nor do I 
 imagine that any well-educated Englishman, who has any 
 acquaintance with the admirable system of instruction imparted 
 in the leading medical universities abroad, can have the slightest 
 hesitation in admitting that they are fully equal if not superior 
 to our own. Yet, with the exception of a few notable quacks, 
 who, understanding the British character and having fathomed 
 the heights and depths of his stupidity in such matters, manage 
 actually to draw an enormous British practice even in the 
 remotest towns of the Continent by the simple expedient of
 
 242 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 charging from ten to twenty times more than the leading 
 Continental professors, the charges usually made by foreign 
 professors are greatly below those of our own country. Nor can 
 the more moderate charges of doctors and lawyers on the 
 Continent be explained by their greater numbers per head of 
 population, or the higher prices of medicine, or the greater cost 
 of living in this country. It therefore follows as an undeniable 
 fact that when one obtains far more care, attention, dieting, and 
 systematic skill than at home, combined with an application of 
 the very latest discoveries for five shillings, or less, per visit, 
 instead of a guinea such a phenomenon cannot be explained 
 except in the light of the considerations which I have endeavoured 
 above to set forth. 
 
 The crowning iniquity, however, of the British system of 
 licensed professional roguery seems to lie in the system of 
 rating according to the fortune of, or, as a test of the former, the 
 house occupied by, the patient. Nothing is more consonant 
 with reason and common sense than that a service should be 
 paid for according to its subjective value, that is, according to 
 the intelligence, art, and skill deployed in the services rendered. 
 By what process of reasoning this monstrous excuse for plunder 
 is devised, beyond thac of offering a pretext for overcharging 
 those whom they believe to be unwilling to resist them, is a 
 problem which I must, in despair, abandon to my readers, or 
 to " professional" ingenuity. 
 
 When staying at Florence twenty years ago, being then in the 
 hands of an English doctor, and not having in those days yet 
 freed myself from the carefully disseminated British prejudices 
 against foreign medical skill, the jolly Irish doctor who attended 
 me and whose chief occupation seemed to consist in walking about 
 the town from one hotel to another, smoking a strong cigar and 
 scraping acquaintance with all and sundry, came in one day 
 rubbing his hands with unconcealed delight, telling me he had 
 met with a singular stroke of luck such as had not happened to 
 him for years. "Why," said he, "what do you think! The 
 Marchioness of B. . ., who was staying at the hotel just 
 opposite, having taken a slight chill in the train, inquired for an 
 English doctor, and as I always go round and tip the head- 
 waiters to resort to me in such cases, she sent for me." Naturally
 
 PBOFESSIONALISM 243 
 
 I rejoined, " I hope nothing serious." " Oh ! nothing at all," 
 says he. "Only a cold in the head she is going on to Borne 
 to-morrow." " Well," said I, " I see no great cause for rejoicing 
 as she will not be much use to you in that case." " Oh, 
 won't she ! " said he, " I have written her up a prescription, and 
 I shall charge her fifty guineas " ! ! I sincerely hope he did not 
 get it. 
 
 One hears much cant about the deplorable state of the law 
 in Sicily and Corsica, but from what I have known and the 
 personal experiences I have undergone, I deliberately declare 
 that the risks of a traveller who carelessly ventures into the 
 wilds of Ne^ Bond Street and Harley Street far greater than 
 any he may incur in those much maligned islands of the 
 Mediterranean. 
 
 With regard to dentists, here is another touching instance of 
 Britannic simplicity and the wiles of advertisers. Though it is 
 true that one or more of the most important inventions con- 
 nected with the purely mechanical art of dentistry have come to 
 us from across the Atlantic, there is no more unfounded notion 
 and more wholly baseless supposition than that American 
 dentists at the present hour have any superiority over 
 those of other lands. But, as I have before endeavoured to 
 explain, the art of wholesale advertisement and Press-combi- 
 nation, which has originated in the fertile brain of the Yankee 
 and is only slowly making its way in this country from the 
 gradual Americanisation of our institutions, gained for the 
 Yankee dentist such a long start over English or foreign in the 
 Press of the world that, just as a lie once spread by the wings of 
 the Press is traditionally supposed to endure for ever, the 
 average Englishman will continue to believe that there is no 
 dentist in the world to be compared with the American, until 
 the crack of doom. 
 
 It is perfectly true that large schools of dentistry have been 
 formed with State assistance in nearly every town in America, 
 for whether it be from drinking ice-cold water alternating with 
 hot gulps of tea, or the abuse of hot cakes and molasses or some 
 other reason, there can be no doubt that dyspepsia has marked 
 them for its own, with the result that dentists abound in every 
 town and village, and a cheap and efficient course of dentistry
 
 244 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 being within the reach of every dull boy who seems fit for 
 nothing else, the unfortunately wide diffusion of the fable 
 relating to the superiority of American dentistry over Conti- 
 nental, procures a handsome living, out of all proportion to the 
 value of their services, for an ever-increasing mob of youths, 
 highly endowed with American assurance, some slight mechanical 
 skill and a total absence of education, too often drawn from the 
 dregs of society. 
 
 It is, however, among the simple and unsuspecting populace 
 of Central and Southern America that the Yankee " drummer " 
 and travelling dentist finds the finest scope for his varied 
 rogueries. As they generally hunt in couples and play into each 
 other's hands by quartering the ground on the search for easy 
 victims, and are perfectly versed, however uneducated, in all the 
 ways of self-advertisement and cajolery, they are usually by the 
 adroit use of a seat at the table of the best hotel and a twenty 
 dollar suit of " Store clothes " enabled to pass among foreigners 
 as gentlemen of a sort, and easily win the hospitality of the 
 unsuspecting natives. The usual method is to worm themselves 
 into the confidence and, if possible, the society of their victim's 
 family under the pretext of professional assistance, stoutly 
 refusing to name their fee in advance when requested, preferring 
 to reserve a surprise for their patients after their services have 
 been rendered in the shape of an enormous bill from ten to 
 twenty-fold beyond what their work is worth, relying on the 
 delicacy or indifference of their clients for satisfying their out- 
 rageous extortions. 
 
 I knew a rogue of that description at Santiago, who by con- 
 siderable expenditure of whisky "sours" and brandy "cock- 
 tails " at the principal hotel, where he resided, combined with an 
 exceedingly loud suil of clothes and the manners and language 
 of the familiar Yankee " drummer," contrived to gain a certain 
 consideration from the hospitable Chilians, who considered him 
 in the light of a very distinguished if eccentric member of 
 society. He had two systems which could have only occurred 
 to the lowest and veriest blackguard (unless, indeed, it forma 
 part, as I have been assured, of the stock-in-trade of the average 
 American dentist) which was in the first place to create cavities 
 in the teeth of his patients by the sharp stroke of a case-
 
 PKOFESSIONALISM 245 
 
 hardened steel instrument, which subsequently afforded him an 
 occasion to make a "stopping" and could thus procure him 
 abundant business until discovery ; the second was a system of 
 blackmail by which, after he had acquired a considerable number 
 of patients among the Santiago ladies by discovering imaginary 
 " cavities " in surprising abundance owing to the aforesaid 
 methods, he would threaten to show the diagrams of the teeth 
 so operated on (of which he kept a book specially printed for the 
 purpose) to their male or other acquaintances unless his 
 nefarious charges and various impostures were acceded to. 
 Luckily a boasting confession to the above effect in the bar of 
 the hotel, however well received by his Yankee boon-companions 
 who regarded his tricks as " real cute," made it advisable for 
 him to quit the scene of his triumphs in a somewhat hasty and 
 undignified manner. 
 
 In these Southern countries, and above all in the land of his 
 birth, the Yankee dentist, or doctor either for the matter of that, 
 would find little support in a Court of Law for his exorbitant 
 charges and pretensions. In England, however, the case is 
 totally different ; for, as we have remarked above, judges 
 and juries in all matters relating to professional extortion 
 invariably refer the matter to the extortioners themselves, with 
 the result that the complainant against doctors' or dentists' 
 charges, or indeed those of any professional rogue whatever, is 
 practically without remedy, unless he can show by incontestable 
 evidence that he has bargained in advance for the work to be 
 done at a particular price, and, what is more, is prepared to prove 
 the same in a Court of Law. 
 
 Well do I remember how, permeated from my earliest 
 recollections with a touching belief in the superiority of the 
 Yankee dentist, I imprudently committed myself to the hands of 
 one of the craft who possessed a high reputation in the fashion- 
 able district of Park Lane, and who, on examining my teeth and 
 declaring there was nothing the matter with them, proceeded, 
 however, to perform an operation which he said would improve 
 their appearance by scraping them on three successive days, 
 charging me six guineas for the three half hours he had so 
 employed, that is, at the rate of four guineas an hour ! I have 
 also a distinct recollection, when I had stoutly refused to do so,
 
 246 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 that my solicitor recommended me to pay the same, explaining 
 that, unless a previous contract for price had been made, there 
 was no chance of checking or limiting the demands of pro- 
 fessional men, since the verdict of the judge or jury was 
 invariably determined by professional or expert evidence. In 
 other words, the American dentist in question would certainly 
 obtain whatsoever fees he claimed unless I brought other 
 American dentists to prove that the charge was exorbitant 
 which it was needless to say would be an utterly hopeless task. 
 
 It will be remembered that ten years ago two or three 
 daring barbers of German extraction were brought up at the 
 Police Courts for this novel method of extorting money (evidently 
 patterned upon the American dentist) and for which they 
 suffered a considerable term of imprisonment, they having per- 
 formed precisely the same feat as my friend of Park Street at a 
 much lower rate, because the Police Magistrate was satisfied on the 
 evidence of the complainants that the barbers in question, having 
 shaved their customers, offered to scale their teeth as well, and, 
 having done so, made the extravagant charge of ten shillings and 
 refused to allow their customers to depart until the money had 
 been paid. 
 
 The difference, therefore, in the view taken by the law upon 
 these separate cases consists not in the remuneration extorted 
 but in the summary means taken to enforce the payment, which 
 is surely most interesting, as a sample of the ways and means of 
 British Law. 
 
 For in this country the man who steals a penny bun or the child 
 who puts his hand in a bag of raisins or plums outside a grocer's 
 shop is far more severely punished than the trusted agent or 
 cashier who takes advantage of the complete confidence which is 
 reposed in him to falsify his accounts and withdraw large sums 
 from his till. In the first place, imprisonment is the reward ; and 
 in the last, the convictions are so few and far between as scarcely 
 ever to be brought before the magistrate the theory of the law 
 apparently being that if an Englishman is such a fool as to trust 
 another Englishman, he deserves anything he may get ! 
 
 To return to our dentists it is surely unnecessary to remind 
 intelligent English men and women that, while it is natural and 
 fitting that the reward of Science should bear a due proportion
 
 PBOFESSIONALISM 247 
 
 to the time and intellect spent in its acquisition, it is utterly 
 monstrous to expect that purely mechanical labour like teeth- 
 stopping, to say nothing of teeth polishing, should be rewarded on 
 anything like the same scale as surgery, although the dentists 
 cunningly apply the term " operation " to each alike, and besides 
 have the intolerable impudence to assume the title of surgeon 
 dentists. 
 
 Here again we are met by the illimitable collective stupidity 
 of the public which allows itself to be gulled by the ludicrous and 
 transparent fraud of an usurped title ; for presumably it is by 
 nothing so much as the impressive variety of their imposture 
 (as seen in such titles as " pharmaceutical chemist " " surgeon- 
 dentist," " scientific artists in dentistry," etc., etc.), which 
 induces Britons to submit to the frauds to which they are daily 
 subject at the hands of these individuals. 
 
 Excessive competition in these later days, and possibly a 
 slight awakening to their monstrous pretensions, has lowered the 
 public appreciation of the mysterious powers and capacities of 
 our " Pharmaceutical-chemists " which, by the way, is itself utter 
 nonsense, and corresponds to a Butchering-Slaughterer or a 
 Sheep-killing Butcher who, though they pay less for drugs than 
 any drug-makers or drug-mixers in Europe, are apparently 
 entitled to charge from four to six times as much as they do 011 
 the Continent by virtue of the awe which their magnificent title 
 inspires in an unreasoning public. 
 
 In more favoured lands, when individual chemists, either 
 from their rarity or greater impudence, charge abnormal prices 
 for drugs of the highest value to the inhabitants, such as quinine, 
 mercury, etc., practically cornering them and depriving the poor 
 of their use, the Governments of such nations as, for example, 
 Peru, Chili, Italy and Spain, and other non-commercial countries 
 upon whom Englishmen are never tired of venting their con- 
 tempt and disesteem consider it their duty to place such drugs 
 within the reach of the public at cost price, besides providing 
 public dispensaries where the highest medical assistance can be 
 gratuitously obtained. 
 
 As to tooth-drawing, it is needless to remark that here we 
 have an art which may be placed on the same level with that 
 of basket-making or chair-bottoming, consisting as it does
 
 248 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 in the exercise of the barest mechanical skill combined with 
 moderate experience ; yet, while tooth-drawers abound in 
 England, and indeed there is not a village, however small, where 
 the local blacksmith or carpenter is not ready to perform in this 
 direction to any extent desired instead of a franc or a shilling, 
 which is the usual charge on the Continent, five shillings is often 
 charged by the smallest local practitioners, and, judging by 
 my own experience, no man who goes to a dentist in a frock 
 coat and a silk hat will be charged less than a guinea in our 
 modern Babylon of roguery and imposture. 
 
 Nor is this all. With an ingenuity and a cunning worthy of 
 a better cause, there is scarcely a dentist in London who has not 
 some poor relation, brother, or cousin, in his den along with him 
 for the express purpose of extorting another guinea under the 
 pretence of being specially gifted and qualified to administer 
 anaesthetics. Now as this person is generally a mere hack, and 
 undoubtedly would not waste his time in such trifles had he 
 the talents for anything better and seeing, moreover, that when 
 a, person so treated dies under it from careless handling or 
 inferior gas no notice whatever is taken (as I know, from two 
 instances of undoubted authenticity), and furthermore, that the 
 time occupied in application and materials used is scarcely worth 
 a, shilling to charge two guineas for taking a tooth out with gas 
 is nothing but an ingenious combination of roguery and impu- 
 dence. Nor do their iniquities end here ; for, as is well known to 
 the profession, the dangers of anaesthetics and their irregular action, 
 combined with their uncertain and ever-varying effects upon 
 different individuals, with the chance of at least a death in 
 every three or four thousand operated upon, have discredited 
 their use for trifling operations, the local injection of cocaine 
 being far safer, painless, and absolutely efficient in destroying 
 every sensation in tooth-drawing, or any similar local operation 
 upon a limited area. The English and American West-end 
 dentists, however, having the entire Press and their own powerful 
 organization behind them, utterly defying public opinion and 
 private pressure alike, continue to charge two guineas for the 
 painless extraction of a tooth, hunting in couples as aforesaid, 
 being well aware that if they adopted the safer and simpler 
 Continental method of local application of cocaine they would
 
 PKOFESSIONALISM 249 
 
 have no excuse for extorting any more than the few shillings 
 charged by their Continental rivals. 
 
 It would be beyond the limits of these remarks to successfully 
 expose the varying, if closely related, tricks of various trades and 
 professions in order to delude the British customer (most patient 
 -of mortals) into paying exorbitant fees without the slightest 
 guarantee for success or fulfilment in return. Though usually 
 inferior to their Continental rivals in accuracy, design, finish, or 
 assiduity, the fees of all artistic professions and their scale of work 
 is, as a rule, from a third to one-half higher than abroad, and 
 the sub-division of work, which I have not unfairly illustrated in 
 the case of the dentist, is carried to an extent in England which 
 is quite unknown upon the Continent. For while in England an 
 architect is not only paid a high proportion of the total cost of a 
 building for the estimate of that cost (which, by the way, he is 
 never legally bound by, and scarcely ever kept to), and, secondly, 
 exacts another large slice for his computation of materials, which 
 is usually incorrect and can scarcely ever be relied upon he 
 invariably makes a point of astonishing his employer by another 
 wholly unexpected charge for supervising the work, which, having 
 once undertaken, he seldom personally condescends to re-visit or 
 inspect ; while the foreign architect, charging far lower prices, not 
 only computes with greater accuracy, but is always willing to 
 undertake that his building should not exceed a certain sum, and, 
 what is more, overlooks, inspects, and directs the entire work 
 personally without further charge. 
 
 I have already, under the heading of Law, described how in- 
 geniously the British solicitor contrives by division of labour, like 
 the dentist and his confederate, to double expenses and halve his 
 responsibilities with the barrister; while the foreign notary 
 manages the whole business from beginning to end for about half 
 the money with far more successful results, being, as he is, the 
 sole depositary of the complainant's tale, and consequently more 
 likely to present a suitor's case accurately than when it passes at 
 second-hand. 
 
 The surveyor and engineer (who if he were to call himself an 
 " Archimedian-geometrical- surveyor," after the manner of the 
 chemists, might extort even higher fees) is a vague and 
 mysterious being of uncertain import and ambiguous learning
 
 250 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 to which John Bull attributes an almost sacred worship and 
 reverence, presumably on the principle of " Omne ignotum pro 
 magnifico." His scale of fees, which, as (is usual) is prepared by 
 the Surveyors' Society without any kind of legal sanction, but 
 which in practice is more binding on the public than the laws of 
 the Medes and Persians, is not to be regarded as an unvarying 
 scale of fees, or, indeed, to be binding on any of their members in 
 any way, except that when an unfortunate employer finds one of 
 these august beings to be totally devoid of skill, knowledge, or 
 competence, and sustains severe damage thereby, he may rest 
 assured that whatever damage he (the employer) may have 
 sustained, the fullest scale charges of his Company or Society 
 will undoubtedly be awarded to the delinquent by a subservient 
 jury. As for the higher members of the profession, they soar to 
 such a stupendous height in the arts of imposture and extortion, 
 and thrive so magnificently, not so much by reason of their talents 
 in their own line of business as by successfully advertising the 
 same and keeping themselves before the public by Press notices 
 and numberless collateral artifices among which not the least 
 lucrative are Arbitrations and Special- witness-ships, that their 
 charges advance by leaps and bounds to such a point as only those 
 can believe or realise who have had occasion to call in their 
 services or witness the illimitable faith that Englishmen place in 
 leading members of the various professions. Nor are their pro- 
 fessional fees the principal source of their income. When their 
 reputation is once sufficiently advertised, few harvests are more 
 lucrative to the leading professional than those arbitrations and 
 expert-witness-appearances in court, which, as I have before 
 mentioned, constitute such a remarkable feature of our Law ; for 
 since the uncertainty of Law is so great and so universally 
 recognised, when important matters involving thousands of 
 pounds are at stake, turning as they generally do upon technical 
 matters in connection with contracts, public works, etc. the 
 parties concerned, nay, the judges themselves by tacit inter- 
 professional collusion, remove the cases from the Courts of Law 
 to public arbitration. These arbitrations are nothing but 
 grotesque caricatures carried on for the behoof of the lawyers 
 and expert witnesses. Enormous fees are paid, when the case 
 pending is of the highest importance to all, the most noted or
 
 PBOFESSIONALISM 251 
 
 best advertised professionals connected with the matter in hand 
 (as a rule the more witnesses the greater the money involved), 
 and barristers at hundreds of guineas apiece are flung in by the 
 dozen without rhyme or reason to aggravate the confusion and 
 increase the expenses, for no better reason than the well-known 
 oft-repeated one, that " there's any amount of money on both 
 sides." 
 
 It is also in England thoroughly understood that the expert 
 gives his evidence according as he is paid, without any regard for 
 truth or any attempt to justify the same except in so far as his 
 wit will serve him as a defence under cross-examination, when his 
 professed opinions, adopted for the occasion only, are frequently 
 altogether too grotesque for belief. N aturally the other side has 
 to spend an equal sum of money for experts who will swear to the 
 opposite view, all of which causes greater protraction of the trial, 
 more expenses, and, therefore, brings in more grist to the legal 
 and professional mill, the whole being a gigantic fraud provided 
 for the mutual benefit of the interested professions, no real 
 attempt of any kind being made to attain the truth or any 
 tangible result except great profits to the lawyers and special 
 witnesses, a scandalous waste of money by the suitors concerned, 
 and a striking display of judicial impotence and inefficiency. 
 
 Can anything be more appalling than the revelations which 
 were recently made of the universal commercial roguery in 
 high places in the United States, when millions were openly 
 stolen from the profits of the great Insurance Companies by the 
 wealthy capitalists to whose care their funds had been entrusted ? 
 Still more deplorable it is to hear that the general belief still 
 exists there that whatever the State may do to multiply checks 
 and safeguards such is the wide dearth of honesty in that 
 country, and such the sordid rapacity of their highest public 
 officials, that do what they may to protect the public, the 
 "magnates of finance" and " commerce " will show themselves 
 equal and ready to pursue their nefarious system of organised 
 robbery, and to set all laws at defiance.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 VULCAN OB CHRIST? 
 
 IT is not enough that we independent Britons, who " Never, never, 
 will be slaves," allow ourselves to be trampled on by the Press, 
 the lawyers, and the parsons, all of whom not only delight to 
 dance upon our prostrate bodies, while, stranger still, we deem 
 ourselves highly flattered in being so used ; we must also set up 
 another idol before which to bow down, whom I will call Vulcan, 
 as the appropriate patron saint of engineers and surveyors. 
 
 Looking back over the history of the last one hundred and 
 fifty years, I can see no greater public misfortune, and none that 
 has so deeply affected the general weal as Machinery. I am aware 
 that nothing is more difficult than to roll back the tide of opinion, 
 even if current opinion is obviously false, and its reverse as plain 
 a fact as the sun at mid-day. It must be admitted, however, 
 that this particular opinion in favour of the blessings of machinery 
 (though it rages through the country like a roaring lion, pelting 
 us on every platform and re-echoed in every newspaper), un- 
 doubtedly takes its origin, not in those affected, not in the millions, 
 but in the ruling, and, above all, the commercial and capitalist 
 classes. 
 
 There is probably nothing more difficult than to divest oneself 
 of the opinions of one's youth, more especially when they are 
 dinned into you in novel, speech and Press, " with most damnable 
 iteration." Indeed, they become a second religion to most of us, 
 and are as ineradicable as the first lessons learnt at a mother's 
 knee. 
 
 I am strongly reminded here of the Greek fable of the lion who, 
 as was not uncommon in those privileged days of old, walking 
 through a picture gallery, was surprised to see a picture of 
 Hercules strangling the Nemsean lion. " What is that?" says 
 the lion. " Surely, methinks, a little overdone ! But to be sure 
 it is a man who is the painter," added he on further reflection. 
 " If we lions were painters it would have been just the opposite." 
 Has it never occurred to any of you, my gentle readers, that 
 while in the first place there is nothing that is specially lofty
 
 VULCAN OE CHRIST? 253 
 
 or soul-inspiring about this boasted age of iron, whioh our 
 orators, writers, and politicians delight in glorifying, in the 
 second place the praise seems invariably to come from the top and 
 never from the bottom of society ? from the wage-payers in short 
 and not the wage-earners? Who ever heard a working man 
 getting on a hustings in these days of labour orators and Socialism, 
 to tell us that machinery and coal, steam and iron, have been the 
 salvation of the working men, and since their advent everything 
 has been for the best "in this best of all possible worlds"! 
 Finally, let me entreat of you to remember a fact which we all 
 find so difficult to keep steadily before us ; namely, when we 
 speak of our nation, our people, our land, that "the people" does 
 not mean Society primarily, or even secondarily, nor the clubs, 
 nor the scribbling clan, nor the lawyers, nor even the Army and 
 Navy, nor the Court, as historians would fain persuade us. Let 
 us keep steadily before us, first, that the workers of the land form 
 the overwhelming majority, and, secondly, that they have a pre- 
 potent right to be considered first of all, because the minority 
 above-mentioned are in a far higher degree qualified to meet and 
 endure national misfortune than their less favoured fellow- 
 countrymen. 
 
 Alas ! how far have we travelled since Englishmen were the 
 envy of the Continent, the cynosure of nations, the spoilt children 
 of the earth ? It is scarce five centuries ago since Sir John 
 Fortescue, Lord Chief Justice of England, wrote his celebrated 
 work, " De Laudibus Angliae," in praise of Merry England and her 
 happy people, whose liberties, customs, dress, lodging, food, and 
 wages, were all quoted triumphantly in proof of his assertions. 
 True it is that the rich are far richer than they were then, but 
 what of that, if the poor are far poorer, which is surely as certain 
 as any fact in this sublunary world can be, and above all, far less 
 merry. For, indeed, they have little enough to be merry for now. 
 The Sunday they have still ! but how much longer will that be 
 left to them as times are going ? 
 
 Before the Reformation we are told that such was the degrada- 
 tion of the people, such was their inconceivable darkness and 
 blindness to the obvious whole duty of man which consists in 
 enabling the rich man to grow richer by the sweat of the work- 
 man's brow, in order that the Daily Mail may tell us how Joseph
 
 254 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Chamberlain, wholesale screwmaker, of Birmingham, died worth 
 
 a million, or J e C gs is making twenty-thousand a year out of 
 
 Belgian locomotive building, or that a Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 exults that he has been able to raise his annual budget by ten 
 millions by merely adding sixpence to the Income-tax that 
 Englishmen actually abstained from work and enjoyed themselves 
 as they pleased upon no less than forty feast days in the year. 
 Think of that instead of your poor four Bank Holidays of these 
 latter days ! Why, they might as well have been Spaniards, or 
 Portuguese, or Corsicans, or South Americans I For are we not 
 told that the downfall of Spain who once reared herself above 
 the nations " like a Colossus between whose legs we little ones 
 used to creep in and out" is mainly owing to her numberless 
 Saints' days, which leave her so little time for honest labour that 
 millionaires in that woe-begone land are scarcer than the black 
 swans of antiquity? 
 
 I know full well that at this late hour of the day it is sheer 
 midsummer madness to say that toil is made for man and not 
 man for toil, that to forge iron and steel, delve coal, and fatten 
 manufacturers, is not the highest ideal to which man should 
 attain, and that the happiness of the greater number and the 
 contentment of the entire nation is and should be the objects of 
 our hopes and desires. Nevertheless, having lived many years 
 among many people who hold these opinions, and being ever- 
 increasingly struck with the absence of general happiness in the 
 land of my birth, I hold these opinions myself very strongly, and, 
 what is more, so far from being ashamed of them, I glory in 
 them. 
 
 Strangely enough, too, I know no people more deeply impressed 
 than English men and women, whose fortune or health compels 
 them to live abroad, with the universal contentment and vivacity of 
 the simple peasants, workmen, and artisans of these despised 
 countries; nor can I believe that any one of these peasants, 
 artisans, or workmen would willingly change their lot for that of 
 our more highly-favoured countrymen. Speak to these de- 
 graded peasants, and you will find them as intelligent as any of 
 your own acquaintance I Doubtless they labour under the 
 disadvantage of being neither under the guidance and authority 
 of a parson or a squire, nor dependent upon the condescension of
 
 VULCAN OR CHEIST? 255 
 
 Mrs. Parson, or the blankets and coals at Christmas of Mrs. 
 Squire ; for in all probability they have their humble little cot 
 -with their bit of vineyard or their hill-side pasture, their goats, or 
 sheep, or pigs, where their ancestors have toiled and milked their 
 herds and spun their simple clothing in much the same way for 
 .a thousand years. They care nothing for newspapers, and know 
 little or nothing of the Japanese and Russian War, no Daily Mail 
 soothes their idle hours, nor Sunday News to tell them of the 
 Money Market, the last football match, or the latest odds on the 
 Derby ; yet, strange to say, their life is full of human interest and 
 human sympathies, and though they know nothing of The Fashion 
 and wear the clothes and simple finery that their parents wore in 
 ages past, they make as brave a show at a village wedding or a 
 church fair and enjoy themselves as keenly as the very best of us. 
 But are we not constantly told, in fancied justification of the 
 prevailing theory, that the natural results of these abundant 
 holidays, these feasts, these Mayings, these village dances which 
 have passed away here with the Reformation, but which, alas ! 
 unhappily, still nourish in these benighted lands are the causes 
 of the " universal laziness " and "poverty," which can be traced 
 to it as truly and directly as the light to the sun ? Hard as it is 
 to dispel so oft-repeated an illusion which I can only reconcile 
 with the well-known truthfulness of my fellow-countrymen by the 
 fact that they start with a foregone conclusion in their minds and 
 record what they look for, or imagine what must be the case 
 instead of what they really see I doubt if more hard-working, 
 industrious, and painstaking agriculturists, gardeners, cow- 
 keepers, and cultivators generally can be found on the entire globe 
 ^than the " lazy, lounging, mandoline-playing Italians," the " Yodl- 
 singing Tyrolians," and the " indolent, cigarette-smoking, cafe 1 - 
 ihaunting Spaniard and Portuguese " of English literary fame. 
 Were I not intimately acquainted with the habits of my beloved 
 countrymen and their intense desire to prove their own superiority 
 over all other lands by searching out any weakness in their 
 armour which can give colour to their own pet theories and sup- 
 port their favourite arguments, I should greatly incline to the 
 opinion that, whatever their powers of description may be, 
 ^sincerity and truth were not their leading characteristics. 
 Possibly their ignorance of the early-rising habits of foreigners,
 
 256 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 unknown to our own industrious populations, may account in a 
 measure for one of their most constant mistakes. The English- 
 man who travels in his comfortable first-class carriage upon the 
 Continent might, no doubt, if he were to raise his head from his 
 snug cushions when he happens to travel at night, see the Italian 
 peasant or the Swiss mountaineer working among his vines 
 or tossing his hay between three and four o'clock in the 
 morning of a summer's day ; but as this is a matter of rare 
 occurrence it is far more probable that his observations are con- 
 fined to the comfortable landau in which he lolls back luxuriously 
 as he surveys the busy streets or perambulates the country after 
 an ample breakfast, about the hour when the tired toilers return 
 to their family to enjoy their morning meal, after having worked 
 from early dawn till the sun has risen high in the meridian. Nor 
 do our critics generally find out that in these early-rising countries 
 the summer work is done almost exclusively before the sun rises 
 high, when, after a light breakfast, often taken outside their 
 doors, the hours of the siesta are passed in light household work 
 or sleeping under the roof-tree or shady vine bower, till the slanting 
 rays send them again forth upon their evening errand of toil. 
 
 What is it that chiefly differentiates such countries from our 
 own. I say unhesitatingly, Machinery ! and I assert that 
 what we are taught to call the blessings of Civilisation steam, 
 iron mechanical inventions, and electricity tend from the very 
 nature of things to break up all natural human ties with their 
 endearing bonds, thus causing the grinding capitalist, who 
 invests his money in this or that business, to regard his depen- 
 dents as mere counters to whom he bears no other relations but 
 those of master to servant, and whose spiritual and moral 
 concerns have no more to do with him than those of the horses 
 which he drives, or the dog which follows at his heels. Add 
 to this, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the capitalist 
 himself has nothing to do with the management of the firm or 
 factory from which he derives his wealth, but merely nominates 
 a manager to do his dirty work, and to drive and grind his 
 teams of human implements in order to extract the highest 
 possible work at the lowest possible wage. Now let us pause 
 to think how things were in former days. 
 
 Throughout Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Lancashire, and York-
 
 VULCAN OR CHEIST? 257 
 
 shire, or wherever light land and hilly downs favoured the 
 growth of sheep, there the family of the shepherd would carry 
 home their wool, to spin in the winter nights with the help of 
 their women folk ; or the big flock-master, selling to the small 
 looms the produce of his sheep, provided work for small wool 
 staplers who filled the ample villages, which still though now 
 empty and desolate cover the hill-sides of the Southern 
 counties. Machinery being then unknown, instead of sending 
 up, as now, the wool in bales to the great centres where coal 
 and iron abound and steam supersedes the use of human 
 hands, the man who wove his woollen stuffs and cloths, lived 
 where the wool was produced, in the sheep-growing lands, with 
 his wife and family and perchance a few apprentices whom he 
 fed and maintained in his own house and bred up with his own 
 children. Thus there grew up the careful oversight and close 
 relation between master and man that still binds in ties of 
 affection and common sympathy the farmers and farm servants 
 of our own more modern experience. 
 
 Two evils resulted from the change. When the population 
 naturally followed their work, the towns and wolds of Lancashire 
 and Yorkshire and nearly all the Southern counties, whose 
 dwindling villages may be seen on every hand in every stage 
 of ruin, became empty and deserted : while year by year their 
 population moves away from the land into the crowded centres 
 to the detriment of the health, comfort, and stamina of our 
 people ; and in the second place, instead of enjoying country air 
 and the moderate hours and comparatively interesting work of 
 the handloom, the weaving population of this country, through 
 the help of Machinery, have been converted into mere human 
 cogs or levers or parts of an engine which, however powerful 
 for multiplying human effort, reduces man from a free agent to 
 a mere mechanical instrument; while, by destroying home life, 
 entire generations are weaned from domestic influences and 
 condemned to the sterility of the barracks, the dreary tenement, or 
 the comfortless bothy. Search Europe through, you will find 
 the same sad story repeated, the more Machinery, the more 
 Misery, Unthrift and Disruption of Home Life. 
 
 Nor is this the only evil that befalls the workers jn mill or 
 factory. I will not harrow my readers by recalling to their
 
 258 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 minds the horrors that beset the early introduction of Machinery, 
 which is fully detailed in the almost incredible reports procured 
 for Parliament at the instance of the great Lord Shaftesbury. 
 In these tear-stained pages are fully recorded the hideous tale 
 of unfeeling greed of the earlier mill and mine owners who 
 ruthlessly herded men, women, and children into holes worse 
 than the Black Hole of Calcutta inducing savage and drunken 
 parents to sell the services of their unhappy children to be 
 harnessed by chains to trucks, and toil at trolley, wheel or 
 shuttle from early dawn to dusk. Thank God that such things 
 can no longer be ! but that such things have been and are 
 possible in our land, should at least make us more charitable 
 and lenient in our views of the fancied misdeeds of other lands, 
 and dispose us to display more modesty in the glorification of 
 our own supposed superiority. 
 
 With all the advantages of close supervision by earnest male 
 and female officials, few but those who are acquainted by actual 
 experience have any idea how often even now the modest 
 provisions of the Factories' Act, destined to protect them, are 
 evaded, and how helpless girls and boys are handed over to 
 ruthless taskmasters in factory, mill, and workshop, to grind 
 out a monotonous life of toil in surroundings and under con- 
 ditions to which the life of a slave negro (as I can assert from 
 experience) is one of happiness and comparative ease. I have 
 myself often seen herds of unkempt, unwashed girls torn from 
 their mothers at an early age, to satisfy, too often, the greed of 
 a drunken and dissolute father, practically disabled for all 
 domestic life, chained as it were to the loom, from early morn 
 to dusk, too debased by the grinding monotony of their work to 
 care for their appearance or fulfil the simplest personal require- 
 ments of cleanliness or neatness, except on a Sunday when 
 the dark stuff dress and modest shawl which constitutes their sole 
 weekday attire is exchanged for the gaudier hues which repre- 
 sent for them the nearest imitation of fashion stream out of 
 a shed where the thermometer is kept at little under boiling 
 point and a steaming atmosphere scarcely allows them to see 
 their next neighbour. Thus saturated with steam and heat, wet 
 through with perspiration, they pass out of the gaslit sheds and 
 furnace-like hovels in which they are condemned to work into
 
 
 VULCAN OE CHKIST? 259 
 
 perchance a freezing temperature, which in spite of their 
 precaution in wrapping their shawls tightly around their necks 
 and heads, too often produce pulmonary complaints which carry 
 them to an early grave. Others I have seen where loom and 
 shuttle in a crowded area present a pandemonium of noise 
 which defied the stoutest voice to penetrate. Here the unfortu- 
 nate victims, who are often entered at an early age (now 
 happily lengthened by the judicious exertions of the Education 
 Board), sustain such injury to their immature systems that 
 they are generally deaf before the age of five-and-twenty. 
 Besides this, think for a moment of the sufferings of countless 
 unfortunate children, of whom thousands are sacrificed annually 
 in the making up of lucifer matches, paints, and other com- 
 pounds, which inflict early troubles, Saint Vitus' Dance, and 
 painful inflammations of the jaws and bones, in the service of the 
 modern Baal, which we mis-call Civilisation. I will not dwell 
 upon the miserable lives of thousands who toil day by day in 
 the murky atmosphere of a Birmingham Grinding-shop, in- 
 haling the fine particles of steel with which the air is filled, till 
 they slowly sink towards an early grave between thirty and 
 forty years of age, without hope of recovery. Nor need I 
 harrow the reader's mind with the tales of early blindness 
 induced by the saturation of the atmosphere in chemical works 
 with acrid fumes which eat away the texture of the delicate 
 membranes lining the eyes and nose and mouth, producing 
 premature blindness, horrible disfigurement or grave injuries 
 which lead to a variety of painful diseases ending in a painful 
 and premature death. And all these horrors ! to what end, 
 except to stimulate excessive production, enrich manufacturers, 
 and breed future misery, which, at the approach of bad prices, 
 recoils upon the heads of its working producers ! 
 
 In order, therefore, to thoroughly realise the full extent of 
 these national evils which have beset us through our reckless 
 worship of Vulcan in all its manifestations and developments, 
 it will be perhaps well to begin by setting forth clearly the 
 leading consequences which are directly traceable to this blind 
 and unrestricted Gultus, which may be said to have fairly passed 
 by frequent repetition from the axiomatic stage into the phase 
 of Eeligious Acceptation.
 
 260 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Let us first consider the net result of Machinery upon the 
 condition of the working classes, bearing well in mind that fully 
 seven-eighths of our nation are born into the world without wealth 
 or goods, without so much as a share of the land which they call 
 their own, and, as a natural result, that they have only their arms 
 and health and strength wherewith to gain their daily bread. 
 
 Modern Machinery multiplies from a hundred to a thousand- 
 fold the work of human hands. Consequently it diminishes to 
 that extent, or nearly, the value of human work, and raises 
 thereby the machine or engine to the same extent above human 
 efforts, placing thereby the capitalist who owns or can produce 
 that machine, in a position to displace, or to do without, the 
 work of as many men and women as would have been required 
 formerly to produce the same amount of work. 
 
 Obviously, therefore, it follows from these premises that : 
 
 1. Machinery puts men out of work and diminishes the value 
 
 of their labour. 
 
 2. Since every machine does the work of from one hundred 
 
 to a thousand men, far less labour is required than 
 before its invention in any given industry or art. 
 
 3. The effect of Machinery is that, being in itself, and above 
 
 all to the workers, utterly uninteresting and exhausting 
 through its unvarying regularity and monotony, it reacts 
 upon the human mind, converting it into a mere semi- 
 conscious piece of machinery, paralysing the exercise of 
 nearly all the senses and all the higher attributes of the 
 Intellect and Will. 
 
 4. With the exception of the engines requiring special skill, 
 
 and which it must be noted enables a single individual 
 to inspect and govern twenty or thirty in a single work- 
 shop, the remainder of those who " tend " or " feed " 
 the machine inasmuch as but little skill, intelligence, 
 , or anything more than subconscious or mechanical 
 attention is required command low wages, and thereby 
 place labour in a great measure at the mercy of the 
 capitalist, besides creating the "unemployed." 
 
 5. The total production of goods being increased by tens of 
 
 thousands beyond what human labour could effect before 
 the introduction of labour-saving machinery in Arts,
 
 PSEUDO-SANITATION 261 
 
 Industry, and Agriculture, not only thousands who 
 would have otherwise found a market for their labour 
 infallibly crowd into the towns in the vain hope of 
 earning their bread there to produce an ever-dwindling, 
 starving population, deficient alike in size, stature and 
 stamina, who are becoming rapidly unfit to supply the 
 materials for adequate National defence or even to earn 
 their own living but we are compelled to embark upon 
 a perilous competition with other nations to wrest from 
 them by fraud or force the command of the world's 
 markets and to grab all the lands of weaker peoples of 
 the earth in order to oblige them to buy our superfluous 
 goods to satisfy the ever-growing demands of taxation, 
 and pay for the food which our own population at home 
 is unable any longer to raise. 
 
 Of* course I shall be met with the natural objection that in 
 this respect we are in the same boat with a large part of Europe, 
 with the essential difference that having got the start of the 
 rest we are in a better industrial position and produce more 
 per head of population than any other. But surely a moment's 
 reflection will satisfy the most thoughtless, that while it is 
 perfectly true that all the nations of Europe suffer in their 
 degree from the universal worship of Vulcan, it is reserved for 
 England alone to present to the world the peculiar conditions of 
 dense population, exaggerated industrial production, shrinking 
 and neglected agriculture, and restricted territory, which 
 aggravate these evils to their highest conceivable point. 
 
 But these are not the only charges at the door of the Engineer 
 since the advent of the New Iron Age. 
 
 PSEUDO-SANITATION. 
 
 If an intelligent Chinese were set himself to criticise us in 
 the light of his own experience at home, one could easily 
 imagine the incredulity mingled with stupor with which he 
 would regard our so-called engineering feats in the direction of 
 sanitation and agriculture by comparison with his own more 
 favoured land. " Here is a people," he would exclaim, "who 
 having a ridiculously small island to live upon, not only neglect 
 their agriculture in order to convert themselves into a large
 
 262 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 workshop to make goods which they cannot possibly use, 
 trusting to the strength of their enormous navy to compel others 
 to buy them in order to buy the bread which they cannot 
 produce for themselves (just as they bombarded us at Canton 
 thirty years ago because we would not allow them to sell us the 
 opium without which they cannot meet their Indian bills), but 
 with a still more fatal madness, instead of using the manurial 
 values of their vast population, as we do, to extract from the 
 ground by careful cultivation the utmost that their restricted 
 territory can produce, they deliberately and carefully at 
 enormous expense allow their engineers to use up nearly all 
 the drinking water they possess in the country, in order to carry 
 away that same invaluable element of life into the rivers 
 and streams to the great expense and danger of their inhabitants 
 and the almost total destruction of their oyster and fish 
 supplies. Nor have they intelligence enough to make the most 
 of the actual supplies afforded by Nature, for they allow their 
 merchants to waste and destroy the fish supply of the ocean in 
 order to keep up prices, to the great injury of the poor, while, 
 with all their boasted knowledge, they have not even learnt the 
 A. B.C. of fish-farming in their inland waters, where we are 
 accustomed to raise fish crops that would enable them at the 
 lowest cost to keep their entire pauper population ! ! ! " 
 
 Probably, with that incredible blindness or partiality of 
 vision which distinguishes the Briton, there is nothing he is 
 more proud of than his universal " Sanitation," as he calls it, 
 his hot and cold water pipes, baths, sinks, water closets, etc. 
 Yet think for a moment at what price this superiority has been 
 obtained ! One hundred years ago the advent of the Age of Iron 
 and the triumphs of our inventive Engineers, coupled with the 
 Cheap Production of iron and steel, had already placed us in the 
 forefront of commercial nations, as we often proudly boast, 
 though we should more truly say in the forefront of the 
 worshippers and slaves of Vulcan. Still we should not forget 
 that we were once the dirtiest people in Europe, and that every 
 successive traveller visiting our shores testified to the absence 
 of cleanliness, thrift, and domestic neatness which distinguished 
 our homes. It seems, therefore, that this new-born national 
 virtue of Cleanliness upon which we so greatly pride ourselves,
 
 PSEUDO-SANITATION 263 
 
 and which we invariably hurl in the teeth of our Continental 
 friends, is not only of exceedingly late birth, but is probably 
 nothing more than the direct result of the ingenuity of the 
 engineer, surveyor, and architect, Vulcan's favoured Trinity, to 
 force upon us their pipes here, and pipes there, and pipes every- 
 where, through that science misnamed Sanitation, which it is 
 probably no exaggeration to say has claimed more victims as it 
 certainly has cost more national treasure than all the wars of 
 the Middle Ages. Nor have we even here touched the bottom 
 of British stupidity and recklessness in national concerns of the 
 deepest and most far-reaching importance. After having 
 polluted all our rivers and spring-waters with poisonous mills 
 and chemicals, instead of using their refuse and those of the 
 population upon the land according to the clear suggestion of 
 Nature and Science, we not only give full sway to the architect, 
 the engineer, and the surveyor to exercise their fatal art in 
 filling our houses, streets, and towns with myriads of miles of 
 piping for the benefit of their own trade and that of their fellow- 
 conspirators, but we have deliberately set ourselves to help in 
 developing an universal system of Sanitary Water Carriage, as 
 these gentry euphoniously term it ; which in plain English 
 means to carry away a valuable product of national importance, 
 to where it will certainly do harm to our neighbours without doing 
 good to any one, and at the same time using up for this same 
 "water carriage" the springs, lakes, and reservoirs of pure 
 water which Providence has expressly bestowed upon us as one 
 of His most precious gifts, for the refreshment and delight of the 
 community ! 
 
 Another flagrant result of the advent of the Eeign of Iron is 
 the enormous increase of pauperism which, along with the rise 
 of the middle classes to unexampled wealth and prosperity, 
 signalized the opening of the last century. About the Battle of 
 Waterloo, the strange contrast between our reckless expenditure 
 upon the Napoleonic wars, which brought up the National Debt 
 to nearly nine hundred millions, sterling, and the condition of 
 the great bulk of the people which was infinitely worse in point 
 of ignorance, immorality, drunkenness, squalor, and wholesale 
 misery than any other people in Europe reached its highest 
 point. This lamentable state of things, described by a foreign
 
 264 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 observer as a land of " Millionaires and Misery,'' which, added to 
 bread at a shilling a quartern loaf, absolutely deba rred the poorer 
 classes from tasting wheaten bread, and drove thousands to 
 subsist upon the refuse of horse and pig troughs, and turnips or 
 potatoes which they stole at night from the fields produced 
 the phenomenon of a growing population not far in number 
 from the entire population of England in the glorious days of 
 King Edward the Third deprived of all means of sustenance 
 actually living, or rather starving, upon public bounty. Such in 
 a word was the immediate results of the opening of that 
 glorious Iron Age, which the Press, the Law, the Parliament, 
 in short, all our Professors, Preachers and Teachers conspire 
 to flash in our faces at every opportunity, with most " damnable 
 iteration," as if to silence the still small voice of the national 
 conscience that slowly but surely must rise reproachfully within 
 us when we see the straits to which it has brought us. 
 
 All honour to the Liberal Party, who, shocked and touched 
 by the condition of the nation, the heartless domination of the 
 manufacturers and the despotic rule of the land-owning classes, 
 strove desperately to redress the people's wrongs, and, as far as 
 might be, to admit them to a fair share in the government of 
 their country. The great Reform Act of '32 went far to 
 remove the gross inequalities which had previously existed, by 
 virtue of which the bulk of political power, through the means 
 of the so-called corrupt boroughs, enabled the rich and 
 unscrupulous to sway and control the destinies of the nation, 
 while the great growing towns of the Midlands and the North of 
 England, with their teeming millions and their divergent 
 interests, increasing wealth and education, were deprived of all 
 weight in the political balance. Another great measure by 
 which the corn duties were removed in order to free the food of 
 the poorer classes from taxation gave undoubted relief to the 
 millions, while it still further embittered the Plutocracy, whose 
 wings had already been severely scorched by the enactments 
 of '32, and the extension of political power in the direction of 
 the middle classes. Led, however, by that reckless and unscru- 
 pulous politician, Benjamin Disraeli, the infuriated Conservatives 
 soon revenged themselves by the strange device of recovering 
 the ground which they had lost in popular estimation and
 
 POOE JOHN BULL 265 
 
 regaining the power which they had so long enjoyed, by out- 
 vying their Liberal opponents in the popular extension of the 
 Franchise. The rock of Sisyphus, which, with an infatuation almost 
 incredible in the light of after events they set rolling, soon recoiled 
 upon their own heads. And here we are met with the amazing 
 paradox (were it not once more repeated in our own days) that 
 the man who taught his party to gain a temporary advantage 
 over the Liberals, by selling their own privileges in order to 
 obtain a brief period of power, and setting up the competition of 
 popular rights to auction until every vestige of their ancient 
 power and influence had been bartered away, still retains the 
 highest place in the love and veneration of English Tories ! 
 Also, regardless of the fact that he was the author of their down- 
 fall and political annihilation, they see in him only the avenger 
 of their wrongs and the champion of Prtection, which along with 
 their exclusive privileges had been swept away by the rising 
 Liberal tide. 
 
 I will not here describe at full length the devious ways of folly 
 (for which after all in the last resort the entire nation is answer- 
 able) by reason of which, through the insane jealousies and 
 unpatriotic selfishness of both Parties in the State, the 
 Conservatives outvied the Liberals in reckless haste to put up 
 political power to auction under the guidance of Benjamin 
 Disraeli. Suffice it to say, that the nation calmly endured the 
 spectacle of the sacrifice of the commonwealth to the insane 
 rivalry of political parties without any serious attempt to inter- 
 fere or foresee the results, till she found herself, as she still finds 
 herself, in a position of difficulty from which it is well nigh 
 impossible to extricate her. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment, in the light of what we have 
 laid down above, what her obvious needs and most pressing 
 wants must necessarily be. In the first place she is an island, 
 that is, circumscribed in territory without any power of enlarging 
 her frontier. Secondly, she is not only densely populated, but 
 has a rapidly increasing population. Thirdly, thanks to the 
 reign of Vulcan, she is a nation of shopkeepers, and is taught that 
 to be the workshop of the world and distribute her goods to the 
 entire world is her hope, her refuge, and her glory. Fourthly, 
 she has depressed agriculture in favour of factories until she is
 
 266 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 unable to grow her own food supplies. She is the workshop of 
 the nations, and her ships distribute over the ocean her goods to 
 every land. 
 
 It follows from this that with a stupidity and imprudence which 
 seems to justify the old Roman saying 
 
 " Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat"* 
 
 we are, deliberately and open-eyed, rushing to our doom. For 
 while our only safety obviously lies in keeping up to the highest 
 point the antique valour of our sons which, in the glorious reign 
 of Edward the Third, enabled us to sally forth and meet the 
 serried ranks of France and Spain our far more populous and 
 powerful rivals, we now carefully avoid taking those steps which 
 even our more favourably-situated Continental neighbours think 
 advisable and necessary for their safety, by our fixed resolve not 
 to train up our sons to defend us ; and while dependent on 
 foreign sources for our food supplies, reck nothing that party 
 strife has banned agriculture in favour of the shop and the 
 factory. Nor do we take heed that our success in commerce 
 stings the jealousies of the world to madness while we grow more 
 defenceless every day and the war clouds gather about us, and 
 the nations around howl for reprisals like wolf-hounds straining 
 at the leash ! 
 
 Are we showing any signs of amendment in this year of grace, 
 1906 ? Fresh awakened from our dream of perpetual peace and 
 prosperity by the rude shock of the Boer War into which we had 
 placidly drifted while the newspapers told us that all that was 
 required was to send a large army of fifty or sixty thousand men 
 which should so envelop and surround the foolish farmers who 
 defied the might of Britain as to disarm them and prevent all 
 resistance, we speedily found that our mercenary army, which 
 we had always considered, if small and expensive, at least highly 
 trained and invincible, proved totally inadequate for the stress 
 put upon it. Had it not been for the old spirit lurking in our 
 midst which sallied forth to the rescue from field, shop, forge, 
 workshop and factory, and millions of money poured out like 
 water upon the thirsty soil of Africa, causing England with all 
 her wealth to reel under the shock, where would we be now ? 
 
 * " Whom the gods design to ruin, they first make mad."
 
 POOE JOHN BULL 267 
 
 "Within an ace of discomfiture, our military prestige all gone, 
 beaten by a handful of sporting farmers without training or know- 
 ledge of war, all the nations of the earth almost to a man against 
 us espousing vigorously the cause of the weak prey in the jaws 
 of the angry mastiff, just as we ourselves had done a thousand 
 times before, and would have done again had our cases been 
 reversed ! where are we now ? We all know that John Bull 
 can only get one thing into his head at a time, and not always 
 that either. He has been severely hit in the breeches pocket, 
 and is a sadder if not a wiser man. In vain the Press has told 
 him not to mind two hundred and fifty millions after all, not 
 half the amount he spent in his death struggle with Napoleon 
 the Great a century ago, a mere flea-bite, forsooth ! for is he not 
 ten times richer now, what with gold and diamond mines, etc., 
 than he was then ? etc., etc. 
 
 Nevertheless, John Bull is far from easy in his pocket or his 
 mind. He has just enough wit to suspect that the Press is not 
 always an image of truth, nor can he forget how egregiously 
 their prophets misled him, or how merrily they raked in the 
 merry harvest of halfpence with their "Echoes" and "Stars " 
 and " Evening News," while they fattened like ghouls with 
 equal delight upon the dismal record of blood of Boer or Briton 
 alike, upon news false or true. One spasmodic effort he has made 
 to bring the authors of his cruel deception to the bar of national 
 justice ; but even here the Press has gulled him and fooled him 
 to the " top of his bent " by telling him that if even they, the 
 omnipotent and all-knowing, were unable to foresee the trap into 
 which the Boers had led us (which has indeed, to use the 
 immortal words of Kruger, " staggered humanity") how could 
 John Bull expect the innocent and harmless guardians of his 
 purse and liberties to avert the calamities which have befallen 
 us ? Nay, has not even the philosophic Balfour explained that 
 " we have always blundered, from the dawn of the world's history, 
 and in all probability always shall," one of the finest national 
 pronouncements in the person of our chief representative of 
 stupidity and incompetence that the world has ever heard, or 
 probably ever will hear.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 OUR POPULAR HEROES 1 
 
 THEN uprises the champion of the loom, the workshop and the 
 factory, the colossus of Birmingham whom John Bull, in his 
 anguish, bluffed by the Government, pooh-poohed by Mr. Balfour, 
 and mocked by the Press, now clasps about the knees, 
 crying, " Sweet Joseph, defend me in my hour of need." Now, if 
 anything is certain under heaven, it is that the Bight Hon. 
 Joseph Chamberlain was the prime cause, instigator and 
 immediate author of the Boer War. This is no caricature, no 
 far-fetched tale, nor even so much as exaggeration, but plain, 
 simple, downright truth. The ex-minister of the Colonies is at 
 this moment, without doubt, the hero of the hour. Ask any 
 Briton why he is a popular idol, as I have asked hundreds of all 
 ranks in life from peer to peasant, and he will probably tell you, 
 " His language is so clear, his meaning so plain, and above all 
 he hits so straight." After that can we complain that the 
 foreigners call us a stupid people ? 
 
 We are told, two thousand five hundred years ago, that Cleon 
 the tanner's voice when he raised it in the public assembly could 
 be heard from Athens to Sparta, and for that reason alone the 
 populace followed his lead ! It may be a far cry from the 
 modern Babylon to Athens, but there is a very close kinship 
 between democracies in all ages and in all times. Could a better 
 satire be invented upon the folly of deliberately placing the 
 power within the reach of the greater number, that is, the 
 greater number of fools? By this I do not mean "fools" in 
 the sense that the English use the word, that is, a man who 
 cannot keep his money from his neighbour's grip, but men 
 who know nothing, who think of nothing, who care for nothing 
 that they cannot touch or eat in short, who know nothing of the 
 principles which govern State policy, and who necessarily follow 
 men, not measures, for the simple reason that they think they 
 know the men, but as for their measures, they neither know nor 
 care to understand them.
 
 OUE POPULAK HEROES! 269 
 
 From this we may pass to a brief review of our popular 
 idols to see if we can throw any light upon these otherwise 
 unintelligible phenomena. 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain's first appearance in the political arena, fresh 
 from the triumphs of Birmingham municipal politics, was as 
 the advocate, along with Mr. Trevelyan and Sir Charles Dilke, 
 of the extreme Radical party. He desperately strove to frighten 
 the Court and the Conservatives by the violence and virulence 
 of his democratic sentiments, affecting a Republican attitude, 
 which he assumed in various hostile speeches against Queen 
 and Court, while he vainly attempted to curry favour and 
 gain the confidence of the extreme Radical wing who were 
 rapidly growing dissatisfied with Mr. Gladstone's more moderate 
 tendencies. His first manoeuvre was to expound the doctrine 
 of " Ransom for the Rich," in the vain and delusive hope of 
 tickling the ears of the extremists and, possibly, of succeeding 
 to the Liberal lead upon the death of that eminent statesman. 
 Unable, however, to cope with him openly, while professing to- 
 fight under his banner, his next plan seems to have been to 
 detach slowly and patiently the extreme party from their 
 allegiance to his banner by a profession of extreme Radicalism, 
 relying upon undermining Mr. Gladstone's influence with the 
 Nonconformists by strenuous declarations of Nonconformist senti- 
 ment, and a fervent adoption of their favourite hobbies, namely, 
 educational and teetotal views, and above all by threatening a 
 campaign in favour of the disestablishment of the English 
 Church, which he believed would be the most effective means 
 to the end which he really had at heart, to wit, the dis- 
 establishment of Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 His next move was to open a mine by which he sought to 
 win over or delude the Agricultural party, by holding forth the 
 promise to such as were foolish enough to listen to him or 
 believe in him, of a kind of Mohammedan heaven in which 
 the rawest agricultural labourer should, whatever his merit or 
 industry, at least possess three acres and a cow. This specula- 
 tion having fallen flat amid the profane laughter of the 
 Conservatives and the scarce concealed contempt of those for 
 whom he had professed so fervent a desire to benefit, the 
 unhappy Joseph, deserted by his brethren, who by this time
 
 270 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 had come to see through him all too well, soon found himself 
 cast away into the political pit of isolation, out of which he 
 perceived it was vain to expect to rise without changing his 
 skin. His next move was, therefore, to take advantage of Mr. 
 Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to desert his banner, and 
 after eating up the various speeches and expressed opinions of 
 old which seemed to interfere with his new excursion, proceeded 
 to fawn upon the leaders of the opposite camp, and, after a brief 
 season of reptile-like writhings of a dubious and grub-like exist- 
 ence, soon emerged as a full-fledged Conservative under the thin 
 disguise of a Liberal Unionist till a decent interval had elapsed, 
 when, casting off all Radical deception and Republican pretence, 
 Joseph displayed himself in his natural colours of Court toady, 
 popularity-hunter and aristocrat. 
 
 Having now come into the land of Egypt, fattening greatly 
 upon the flesh-pots thereof, and richly indemnified for the title 
 of Judas, with which he was greeted by the party he left, by the 
 warm affection and sympathy of the Court and the aristocracy, 
 Joseph soon drops every vestige of the Republican style and affects 
 the dress, habits and language of the Court Sybarite, seldom 
 appearing in public without an expensive cigar in his mouth, an 
 eyeglass in his eye, and a costly orchid in his button-hole. 
 
 Once the terror of the Court and the unbending Cato who lifts 
 his stern voice against the endowment of German princelets with 
 a nation's money and opposes royal grants, he now becomes the 
 willing servant of the Queen and her most devoted courtier, 
 the trusted counsellor of dukes and the cherished guest of 
 duchesses. Still there was a rift within the lute. He had 
 captured the higher classes, but how about the lower with whom 
 the real power resides ? What of them ? The rest might do for 
 show and ornament. But Birmingham likes something sub- 
 stantial; he wants the beefsteak within as well as the shiny 
 pie-crust without. His next step, therefore, is to make another 
 last bid for popular favour, and, after two or three vain efforts at 
 tinkering the Bankruptcy Laws, the Shipping Act, and a strong 
 bid for the lost favour of the working men by an Accident 
 Compensation Bill, Joseph begins to talk very loudly about a 
 national system of old-age pension ; and although it seemed 
 absolutely incredible that a man who had spent his political life
 
 OUR POPULAR HEROES! 271 
 
 in promising everything and achieving nothing should still be 
 listened to, listened to he undoubtedly was, strange as is the 
 tale. However, he could not talk for ever without doing some- 
 thing, so, after having set the working classes all agog, especially 
 the idlest among them, to whom such a proposal was nothing 
 short of a glimpse of Paradise, once more the ghost of a renascent 
 popularity waxed and waned, with the discovery that the scheme 
 was utterly impossible and involved an expenditure of something 
 approaching 300 millions sterling. It was whispered even 
 amongst Joseph's most dpvoted admirers that he would have 
 done well to have paused before promising, and that this was 
 indeed the last flicker of Joseph's lamp. Nothing of the kind. 
 Joseph knew his England too well for that. As Colonial 
 Secretary it was more than suspected that Joseph was guilty of 
 secret collusion with Rhodes, and had tacitly consented that if 
 the wild-cat scheme in which Jameson was destined to pull the 
 chestnuts out of the fire proved successful, it was to receive 
 the stamp of official favour. Unfortunately poor Jameson went 
 off at half-cock; the scheme was ill-laid from first to last, and 
 the finishing touch was given to England's disgrace not less by 
 the intrinsic folly of the attempt than by the facility with which it 
 was detected and extinguished. " Here comes the chance of a 
 lifetime,'' thought Joseph in his innocence, believing that a 
 successful sweep of England's mighty hand would easily tumble 
 gold mines, diamond mines, Orange State, and Transvaal, like 
 ripe apples, into her lap, if only a plausible device could be 
 invented. The astute politician next laid a train, with the help 
 of a willing Press, of British sympathy for the Outlander, a 
 mythical being invented purely for strategic purposes, popularly 
 described (vide penny papers) as endowed with a lofty sense of 
 patriotism combined with a burning love for forensic fame, 
 whom the cruel and licentious Boer had inhumanly deprived of 
 his only pleasure in life by depriving him of a seat in the 
 Councils of his adopted land. The Boers failing to jump at the 
 proffered bait, there was nothing simpler for Joe than to send 
 Kruger a warlike ultimatum, which Joseph proceeded to do with 
 such abundant verbiage and insincerity as to make it even now a 
 moot point whether he had framed the same for the purpose of 
 inveigling the Boer or of affording himself a subsequent pretext
 
 272 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 for denying that he had any share in a war which he had 
 evidently hatched and fostered from the beginning. 
 
 If common sense ever had sway with Britons or ever affected 
 their political calculations, the impartial spectator would suppose 
 that nothing more unlikely could be dreamt of or imagined 
 than that Joseph should have emerged as a popular favourite at 
 the end of the Boer War. Yet such is the plain, certain, and 
 undoubted fact. 
 
 While nothing seems more clear than Joseph's chief part in 
 the transaction, from the moment that by his collusion, or at any 
 rate sympathy with the Jameson raid the jealousy and suspicion of 
 the Boers had been awakened ; and, in view of the undoubted 
 fact that the Colonial Minister, or, at all events, the extreme 
 land-grabbing division under the name of Imperialists, of which 
 he had constituted himself chief patron, were confessedly 
 hungering for Boer soil nothing was more natural than that the 
 Burghers should arm and await with unshrinking patriotism the 
 hour that was to bring them face to face with their relentless 
 foes. Every despatch, every mail brought to the Colonial Office 
 the tale of Creusot guns, Mauser ammunition and rifles packed 
 in piano cases, of secret recruitings and private drillings at home 
 and abroad in the secret recesses of their mountains as well as 
 in the friendly territory of the Portuguese ; yet not a complaint 
 was uttered, not a step was taken ; Joe was biding his time. 
 
 The plain man sees but one of two things, either that this 
 boasted Imperialism, of which Joseph professes to be the leader, 
 is an enormous fraud and sham, without meaning, head, or tail, 
 designed only to gull Englishmen into abetting the follies and 
 vagaries of would-be statesmen in order to perpetuate their name 
 withal ; or else that it should be directed to an effectual defence 
 of its shores wherewith to guard itself against danger, and 
 possess such machinery as will enable it to face events and be 
 prepared for all contingencies. But instead of pressing his 
 Government in the light of the military preparations of which he 
 had full warning and knowledge, and which he well knew could 
 be designed for the destruction of no other but their English 
 neighbours, to take instant measures to repress, disarm, or crush 
 them before their own armament and organization was completed 
 relying upon his own sagacity and superior wisdom, he smiled
 
 OUR POPULAR HEROES! 273 
 
 complacently at the advice which poured in from a thousand 
 quarters in the vain endeavour to awaken him to a sense of the 
 coming thunder-cloud, and, with a fatuousness which would be 
 incredible were it not proved to be true, calmly awaited the 
 moment when he and his confederates should, by a course of 
 gentle irritation, compel the Boer to take the first step towards 
 an outbreak of hostilities which all well knew could not much 
 longer be deferred, while firmly believing in common with the 
 other incompetent wiseacres then juggling with the destinies of 
 the Empire, that the war could be terminated in England's 
 favour with scarce a perceptible exertion of military strength. 
 
 The next in popular favour is beyond all question General Sir 
 Redvers Buller. 
 
 To recount General Buller's history seems quite unnecessary 
 in view of the fact that his popularity and public distinction 
 dates from the commencement of the Boer War, to which he was 
 appointed Commander-in-Chief with full powers of dealing with 
 the forces and material sent out to him in what manner he saw 
 fit. Whether his appointment was a gross act of favouritism or 
 whether it proceeded from a profound contempt of the enemy 
 has never been clearly made out. Certain it is, as appears 
 plainly from the evidence of the Royal Commission, that he was 
 left with a perfectly free hand to do as he thought best and call 
 out as many regiments of infantry as he deemed necessary ; and, 
 having already fought in Africa, he might be supposed to have 
 some acquaintance with the geographical features of the country 
 and the special character of the foe. No doubt there is much 
 difference of opinion as to whether the whole blame of the 
 non-success of the campaign in its earlier stages was due to him 
 alone, or whether in part to his subordinates. There can be no 
 question, however, that much valuable time was lost in 
 determining the plan of campaign which the Royal Commission 
 proves clearly had been originally settled on the same lines as 
 was afterwards adopted by Lord Roberts, but was altered by 
 General Buller in compliance with the urgent demands of Natal, 
 resulting in a complete change of programme and a delay of 
 several weeks in transporting the troops from the Cape to Natal, 
 which naturally enabled the enemy to mass their forces around 
 the Natal frontier and occupy passes which we ourselves should
 
 274 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 otherwise have been able to occupy, and thus probably have been 
 able to force the war into their own territory. The next step for 
 which he is strongly blamed was the choice of Ladysmith as a 
 centre of stores and ammunition and its selection as a military 
 stronghold. Lord Wolseley, with that indifferent off-handedness 
 which marked his evidence in the Eoyal Commission, disclaimed 
 having been responsible for a mistake which he " never imagined 
 anybody could possibly have committed." But it further 
 transpires in the same Commission that whatever he may think 
 now, he was well aware that the stores had been thrown into 
 Ladysmith, and that he had only to raise a strong objection to 
 have prevented that serious strategic mistake as to our forward 
 advances which was so strongly blamed in the light of after 
 events. It may here be well to add that the only wisdom and 
 forethought of which the Eoyal Commission produces evidence 
 may be fairly ascribed to that wisdom which we all possess after 
 the event. The plain English of the whole business is simply 
 that we had not the remotest idea that the Boers would turn out 
 to be the gallant and skilful soldiers we subsequently found them 
 to be in the field ; secondly, nothing was less expected than that 
 they should plump their balls into our camp by the use of siege 
 guns which they had dragged with astonishing patience and skill 
 to the top of a commanding hill, while we, with our usual want 
 of caution and forethought, were unprovided with any artillery 
 possessing a range approaching their own. The third and capital 
 blunder was the non-occupation on our side of the strong strategic 
 line of the Tugela, with the inevitable result of being compelled 
 to attack that strongly entrenched point ; and fourthly, Buller's 
 manner of handling his troops upon that fateful occasion, when, 
 after committing possibly every mistake that a commander could 
 in sending his column over an unfordable river under full exposure 
 of a closely entrenched enemy, and posting his artillery within 
 range of the same with the result of losing all his gunners and 
 horses ; and lastly, perhaps worst of all for the national credit 
 and highly discouraging to the entire army, was his neglect to 
 cover up these mistakes by pushing the battle home, since nothing 
 takes the heart out of an army so much as a heavy loss incurred 
 to no purpose without any resulting gain. 
 
 The foreign critics seem to be at one upon this latter item of
 
 ODE POPULAE HEEOES! 275 
 
 his indictment : the general opinion abroad being that he lost the 
 battle because he lost his head. 
 
 We need not follow him through Spion Kop, a tissue of 
 blunders which he, moreover, apparently strove to fix upon his 
 subordinates, but which history will certainly ascribe, if not 
 wholly, at all events principally, to the Commander-in-Chief. 
 
 Need we refer to the painful episode of the various telegrams 
 in which General Buller, losing all heart after his first reverse at 
 Colenso, told Sir George White, at Ladysmith, in plain English 
 to fish for himself and make the best terms he could with the 
 enemy as he (Buller) could do nothing for him. 
 
 Sir Eedvers Buller's reward for his incompetency was to 
 withdraw him from the scene in favour of General Eoberts, and, 
 as consolation, to appoint him to the command of the Second 
 Division at Aldershot. Surely a singularly twentieth-century- 
 British way of encouraging other officers similarly placed to exert 
 themselves to the utmost for the credit of their country. How- 
 ever, by a singular intervention of retributive justice, a speech 
 which he shortly afterwards made at a large public dinner 
 emphasized with such distinctness his unfitness for command, 
 that he was speedily relieved from further military exercises and 
 restored to his Devonshire tenantry after he had done about as 
 much harm to English prestige and military credit as any single 
 man during the whole of the nineteenth century. 
 
 In the century before last it is more than probable that he 
 would have been shot, and it is absolutely certain that he would 
 have been tried for his life. If Admiral Byng was justly 
 condemned to be shot because he saved his life along with that 
 of the gallant fellows who stood by him when little more could 
 have been gained by courting a watery grave, it is highly unlikely 
 that General Buller would have escaped in those sterner and less 
 sentimental days. 
 
 I have briefly alluded already to the disgraceful tale of mingled 
 incapacity and folly of which Dr. Jameson was both the hero 
 and the cat's-paw, and, without being a pro-Boer, I cannot but 
 bear my unqualified share of testimony to the admirable 
 manner in which that abortive and rash, if ridiculous, foray was 
 promptly nipped in the bud by the superior skill and smartness 
 of Kruger and Joubert, as well as to the magnanimity with
 
 276 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 which they waived their undoubted right to hang them all on the 
 nearest tree, an act which would have not only been in accordance 
 with common practice, but also strictly in accordance with every 
 known theory of poetic justice. Nor was the case improved, 
 sickening and sordid as it was in every detail, by the clearly 
 proved but dastardly attempt of the conspirators to mask their 
 act of violence under the pretence " of being called upon to rescue 
 the women and children of Johannesburg." If Englishmen did 
 not habitually do in the mass precisely what every single 
 Englishman abhors and loathes, one would marvel at Dr. 
 Jameson's and his fellow-raiders' popularity surviving such 
 incidents as these. Again, if his popularity could be attributed 
 to his unblemished character as a man and a benevolent 
 physician, as it was in the early days of Kimberley, or if one 
 could imagine that Buller's sudden popularity was merely late in 
 blossoming forth and was really the result of his gallant act of 
 saving life when he won the Victoria Cross by saving a comrade 
 out of an Indian river, there might be some way out of the 
 difficulty, but alas ! I fear that the explanation is to be found in 
 the blatant and conspicuous follies of democracy, who 
 invariably prone if possible " to get hold of the wrong end of the 
 stick " are led by the first straw of fancy that crosses their path, 
 and, as soon as their interest or passion is involved, rush madly 
 ahead, looking neither to the right nor the left until, like the 
 swine of the Gadarenes, they drown themselves in the sea of 
 their own folly. 
 
 Verily, wondrous are the ways of the British People. When 
 I was a young man about town, nothing was further from my 
 thoughts and remoter from my suspicions than a deep and abiding 
 loyalty for the then Prince of Wales. The first indication I had 
 of the existence of such a sentiment was his enthusiastic reception 
 upon occasion of the historic Te Deurn sung in St. Paul's, in 
 honour of his recovery from typhoid fever. Up to that time, 
 whether in public or in private, he was referred to with a certain 
 good-humoured tolerance such as the British generally accord to 
 their Princes. When resolutions of a distinctly Republican 
 character were brought on in Parliament, in which allusions 
 were made to the excessive expenditure of the Prince of Wales, 
 and invidious comparisons drawn between the cost of a Monarchy
 
 
 OUR POPULAR HEROES! 277 
 
 and a Republic, the feeling against such opinions was tolerant 
 and dispassionate, and current opinion was divided as to whether, 
 at the rate democratic views were then advancing, the Prince 
 of Wales would succeed to the throne. 
 
 Possibly, the whole machinery of enthusiastic grief for his 
 illness and delight for his recovery was negotiated for, managed, 
 carried out and handsomely paid for, by her late Majesty Queen 
 Victoria, in order to revive the failing fortunes of the Guelphs. 
 At any rate, such is the only alternative explanation that I am 
 able to offer for the surprising phenomena exhibited. Manifestly, 
 the Press reaped an abundant harvest. Like the foul birds of 
 prey that scent carrion from afar, they crawled or hovered around 
 his bedside at Scarborough, and produced their special bulletins 
 and royal evening news, true or false, by the million. Perhaps 
 it was merely a " new excitement " that kept the public 
 on the tip-top of expectation ; and when the crisis had come and 
 gone, and the Prince was plucked from the very jaws of death, 
 the revulsion of feeling may have occasioned in an excitable 
 people that sudden relaxation of nervous tension, which in 
 hysterical subjects turns to laughter or tears. Whatever the 
 cause, such are the facts, which I leave to my readers to fit in as 
 best they may. 
 
 I have before alluded to the gradual change of the English 
 people during the last 100 years from a beer-drinking to a tea- 
 drinking people, as having had a marked effect upon their 
 temperament and conduct. If there were anything in the British 
 character generally which pointed to abnormal altruism or 
 excessive sensitiveness, or a disposition to mysticism, or that 
 worship of abstract qualities, with which we credit the Greeks 
 of their earlier Republic, it might be possible to explain the 
 phenomena of popular outbreaks of excitement almost amounting 
 to frenzy, such as the last half of the century witnessed when 
 the Prince of Wales proceeded to St. Paul's to give thanks for 
 his recovery, or, for example, on the occasion when Garibaldi 
 dined at the Mansion House. Though I yield to no man in my 
 admiration for that rough and rugged patriot, the theatrical 
 exhibition of his person in a slouch hat and the familiar red 
 flannel shirt in the barouche of an adoring Duchess, after the 
 style of Captain Webb or Sandow at the Aquarium, surrounded
 
 278 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 by a frantic, yelling crowd, trampling each other for the honour 
 of kissing his hand, presented an exhibition which was, to say the 
 least, humiliating to every true lover of his country. 
 
 Nor is it possible to predict the ways and means of British 
 popular favour, or estimate the complex mixture of facts, fiction, 
 and folly which go to make up a popular reputation after death. 
 Take for example that astute Hebrew, the Dizzy of my early 
 days, and the Beaconsfield of the present generation. It was 
 early in the 50's when Dizzy already then past middle age 
 was beginning to emerge from the chrysalis stage of almost 
 universal loathing and contempt, aggravated, in his desperate 
 attempt to secure notoriety, by a more than usual Hebraic 
 vulgarity of dress, and to earn the fear, if not the esteem, of his 
 fellow-members of Parliament by his keen and caustic wit and 
 his bold and venomous tongue. At length the moment came to 
 realise his long pent-up ambition. Stung to madness by their 
 defeat at the hands of the Liberals, and still more at the defection 
 of their once fervent ally, Sir Eobert Peel, the Tories found an apt 
 mouthpiece in Benjamin Disraeli. All the pent-up venom and 
 compressed spleen of thirty years of suppression and opprobrium 
 was poured forth in the service of a party who felt keenly, but 
 could not express adequately, their disgust and indignation for the 
 leader who had, as they considered, betrayed and abandoned 
 their cause. 
 
 From being the hired assassin of the Tories to making himself 
 necessary to them was but a step. Upon the death of Lord 
 Derby, to grasp at the Leadership he had so ardently waited for 
 and so patiently schemed, led on naturally to that perennial duel 
 with Gladstone upon which he had so eagerly entered, and 
 carried on with such virulence and success, that the Tory party 
 soon perceived that Dizzy was the only man who could devise 
 effective stumbling-blocks to check the great demagogue in his 
 wild career. 
 
 It would be idle to recount how the Tories gradually found 
 out to their grief and pain that Dizzy, once seated, could not 
 easily be dislodged. His next step was to checkmate Gladstone 
 and the enthusiastic Liberals who were burning to redress the 
 people's wrongs (as they imagined) by extending the Franchise 
 in outbidding them with an even more liberal measure of
 
 OUE POPULAR HEROES! 279 
 
 enfranchisement than the one proposed by the opposite side. 
 This was the commencement of Dizzy's system of auction in 
 politics, and one in every way worthy of the commercial instincts 
 of a Hebrew premier. 
 
 When Dizzy's master and Prime Minister, Lord Derby, 
 who had hitherto enjoyed the highest reputation for straight- 
 forward and honourable conduct, was reproached with having 
 listened to the voice of the serpent and cast his opinions and 
 pledges to the wind in offering so radical a measure as the 
 extension of the Franchise, it must be recorded as an instance 
 of how deeply " Evil communications corrupt good manners," 
 that he is reported to have justified that base action by " the 
 satisfaction of dishing the Whigs," than which surely a more 
 immoral sentiment never emanated from Jew or Christian ! 
 
 Having wormed himself into the confidence of the Queen and 
 won her heart by those flatteries which the Italian-bred Jew 
 knew so well how to administer when advancement or interest 
 called for its use, his next move was to give practical effect to 
 that Oriental gaudiness and vulgarity which in early youth 
 excited the astonishment and contempt of his warmest admirers, 
 and caused him in middle age to amuse and amaze all beholders 
 with his garish attire and still gaudier oratory by adding to the 
 historical title of Queen of England the upstart denomination 
 of Empress of India ! 
 
 But what proved the finest stroke of Oriental display, 
 accompanied with a blatant vulgarity which one might have 
 hoped would have only appealed to the lowest and most servile 
 ranks of a servile nation, was Dizzy's performance as 
 plenipotentiary at the Paris Conference, where, after an incredible 
 amount of swagger about what England was going to do to 
 frighten the Russians from taking possession of Constantinople, 
 ending in a show parade of the Mediterranean fleet in the 
 Bosphorus, he not only artfully concealed the disgrace and 
 exposure with which he was threatened upon his return home in 
 consequence of the discovery that he had attended the Conference 
 with his hands tied by a private and secret convention with 
 Turkey that if she would give up Cyprus to us, England would 
 refuse to abet the other powers in their determination to compel 
 Turkey to ways of decency and civilisation but he had the
 
 280 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 astonishing effrontery to glorify himself therein as having caused 
 England to triumph at the Conference over her assembled rivals 
 and as having brought them back an Island which he represented 
 to be a valuable naval base in the Mediterranean to protect the 
 interests of Egypt and the Suez Canal (a fable which it seems 
 now almost incredible that his most ardent admirers should have 
 dared to support), crowning all by a self-gratulatory speech, 
 in his best histrionic style, ending in the famous declaration 
 ibat he had brought back " Peace with Honour 1 " 
 
 Some years ago, walking through Parliament Square, West- 
 minster, I was attracted by a dense crowd of all classes, male 
 and female, of whom a large number, apparently well-dressed 
 and respectable, were waiting their turn to file past a statue of 
 Benjamin Disraeli and present their floral offerings and wreaths, 
 precisely as the peasants in Southern Italy decorate their 
 patron saint's statue on May-day with primroses and violets. A 
 more ludicrous spectacle I never saw than the grimy, soot- 
 smeared bronze surmounted by the Mephistophelianface, with the 
 familiar saturnine smile and historic curl, swathed about the 
 body with wreaths and garlands, looking exceedingly like a half- 
 clothed Kaffir, black above, and yellow below. Bound about the 
 base of the statue were huge shields with " Peace with Honour," 
 " Our Empire," and other familiar legends. One almost expected 
 the cynical smile to break out upon his grim face at this scene of 
 human folly, which none more than he had so often mercilessly 
 ridiculed. 
 
 " 'Ere's yer Empire wreaths, yer h'Empire badges and yer 
 primroses." A particularly brawny, noisy ruffian with a 
 large basket of primroses, on being mildly asked, " Who the gentle- 
 man might be with the primrose apron," instantly answered, in 
 a tone of indignation, " Why, don't yer know ! that's the Hurl 
 of Beaconsfield, him as built the ' h'Empire.' " " What, the one 
 in Leicester Square? " " To be sure, where helse should it be? " 
 
 "These be thy gods, O Israel." 
 
 Three hundred years ago the lasses of London flocked to 
 Charing Cross to lay their primroses at the Virgin's feet. We 
 have disestablished the Virgin Mary, but we still have Saint 
 Dizzy to worship. We have abolished the worship of Saint 
 Joseph, but we are doing our best to canonize " Brummagen Jo,"
 
 OUR POPULAR HEROES! 281 
 
 and, at the rate we are going, it will be a miracle if we do not 
 succeed. Then shall we see Joseph with his nose turned heaven- 
 wards as if seeking new Empires to conquer, eye-glass in eye, 
 and the never-failing orchid in his coat. But how about his 
 favourite flower ? Never mind, we shall all be so rich through 
 Protection except those who will be too poor to stay in the 
 country that we shall never grudge the expense. 
 
 It is a far cry from Dizzy, twice Prime Minister of England, 
 to Little Tich. Nevertheless, I am assured that if he were to 
 stand for Westminster, and Dan Leno or the White-Eyed Kaffir 
 were not to stand in his way, his popularity is such that he would 
 have every chance of being elected : and for my part I would just 
 as soon vote for him as the average briefless barrister who, having 
 nothing particular to do, is sent down to a constituency with 
 Mr. Balfour's blessing, and a short but firm request from the 
 Head Wire-Puller of his Party, that he may be elected with all 
 despatch. I am not sure, however, that the late Fred Archer 
 would not have run him very close, being the hottest popular 
 favourite that I can recollect in these last forty years. But 
 it would be idle to weigh their respective merits or to dive into 
 the secrets of the popular breast, since Democracy, being a 
 female, must not be too closely pryed into, or her actions too 
 closely scrutinised. 
 
 We all know how little it takes to start a woman's love, but 
 when once started (never mind how) there is no limit to its 
 course. It may be a curl on the forehead or a well-varnished 
 boot, a cock of the eye or a lovely moustache. So it is with 
 Democracy false, fickle, and unfair all rolled into one. 
 
 I cannot forbear from closing these remarks with the 
 apostrophe of the " Good Lord Shaftesbury," whose name is a 
 household word wherever English men and women have eyes to 
 see, and ears to hear, and hearts to feel when he first beard of 
 the renowned Dizzy being called to the premiership : 
 
 " Disraeli, Prime Minister ! He is a Hebrew ; this is a good thing. He 
 is a man sprung from an inferior station ; another good thing in these days, 
 as showing the liberality of our institutions. ' But he is a " leper " ' without 
 principle, without feeling, without regard to anything human or divine 
 beyond his own personal ambition. He has dragged, and will continue to 
 drag, everything that is good, safe and venerable, and solid through the dust 
 and dirt of his own objects." (Le e r-LoED SHAPTESBURY, in 1868.)
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 OUR POPULAR FAVOURITES 
 
 POPULAR favourites may be broadly divided into heroes of the Press 
 and heroes of the people. 
 
 In literature the people's favourites who hold their ground, as, 
 for example, Dickens and Tennyson, without the help of, or in 
 spite of, the Press, are usually men of genuine merit. Mere merit 
 has no influence one way or the other in determining whether an 
 author or poet shall become a popular favourite or otherwise. As 
 often as not a kind of unreasoning obstinacy impels the reader of 
 light literature to go directly in the teeth of the Press and the 
 critics, while there are other writers equally highly gifted, who 
 make no way whatever in popular estimation. As a general rule 
 the popular taste is not only erratic but incomprehensible, since 
 no man has ever attempted to gauge or lay down either its laws 
 or its likes and dislikes. Authors who are connected with 
 journalism and can, therefore, command an enormous amount of 
 cheap "criticism" and unpaid advertisement reach astonishing 
 heights of popularity at first, since the public is always ready, how- 
 ever often deceived, to swallow the bait of a seductive puff. This 
 transient glamour, however, does not last long, and the man who 
 wakes to find himself famous, or, in other words, has induced the 
 morning papers for hard cash or otherwise to tell their readers 
 that he is the man of the century, is too apt to go up like a rocket 
 and come down like a stick. Not that I meau by this that he 
 will be taken up by the public and then dropped for the excellent 
 reason that there is nothing in him, or that the little he has to 
 say will just go far enough to fill one book and no more ; for the 
 special peculiarity of the Briton is that unreasoning fidelity to the 
 object of his admiration (better named stupidity) which never 
 fails to astonish foreigners beyond anything else. Hence it comes, 
 as regards books, poems, paintings, hotels, restaurants, or any other 
 known production of human labour, that any impostor, once firmly 
 established, may play any trick he chooses or belie his original 
 talent to any extent, and the British public is sure to go on buying
 
 OUE POPULAR FAVOURITES 283 
 
 his productions, belauding and bellowing over him until the hour 
 of his death. Moreover, in all probability, the name of the novel, 
 or possibly even its binding and the colour thereof, and certainly 
 to a very great extent the eccentricity or any marked peculiarity of 
 the name of its author, such as " Rudyard Kipling," or " Rider 
 Haggard," will often have quite as much influence upon the sale 
 of a book, or the popularity of its author, as any intrinsic merit 
 possessed by their works. 
 
 No more desperate efforts were ever made to boom a fellow- 
 journalist than fell to the lot of Mark Twain or Bret Harte at the 
 hands of the American Press, and singularly enough the fulsome- 
 ness of their praise, which would have turned the stomach of a 
 crocodile, generated a kind of false appetite for their ephemeral 
 trash which had been originally poured out in the comic columns 
 of Californian newspapers. English light literature was instantly 
 flooded, and for a time almost swamped, with the refuse of the 
 Yankee comic newspapers in book form to satisfy this new-born 
 taste, which in its turn stimulated an increased demand and a crop 
 of imitators of the Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain'" 
 variety of humour, chiefly consisting in a hash of bad spelling, 
 Yankee phrases, and gutter slang, mixed in equal proportions and 
 served up to suit popular taste. 
 
 A desperate newspaper attempt was similarly made to dub a 
 writer of barrack-room songs the " Poet of the Empire," whose 
 title to distinction is apparently based upon the fact of his having 
 given the name of " Tommy Atkins " to the British soldier, and 
 having written some doggerel rhymes with a strong Indian- 
 cantonment-cum-guard-room flavour, interlarded with Hindu - 
 stanee phrases, whose jingle seems to please the public by 
 its unusual sound, and its absence of point or meaning. As to 
 the title of " Tommy Atkins," for my part I have never been able 
 to understand where the wit comes in, or how it is that the 
 British soldier tamely submits to be typified under that childish 
 if uneuphonious denomination ; while it appears to me to speak 
 volumes for the good temper and easy-going disposition of the 
 lower ranks of the British Army, that such journalistic liberties 
 are met with indifference rather than active resentment. 
 
 *As this book goes to press I read that the authors of "The Innocents 
 Abroad " and " Tommy Atkins " have been canonised by Oxford University t 
 Was it for "cash down," or at the bidding of the Daily Mail? Alas! poor 
 Oxford. No wonder there is a cry for reform t
 
 284 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 I have seldom been more wounded in my national self-love than 
 at a widely-announced concert upon the Continent, where the 
 prima donna was to sing the latest production of the " Poet of the 
 Empire." Naturally, after so much flourish of trumpets and 
 expectation, we had hoped that the poem would not be altogether 
 unworthy of the theme and the occasion. I will say nothing of 
 the music, which seemed to be neither better nor worse than the 
 words, but, with respect to the words, I failed to gather anything 
 tangible except a not too tasteful allusion to " Cooks' sons " and 
 "Dukes' sons" coupled with an exhortation to "pay, pay, 
 pay." The inferences drawn as to the average quality of our 
 national poetry, of which not a few foreigners present were un- 
 happily as well qualified to judge as ourselves, was of a kind 
 which, however varied the terms used, were far from pleasant to 
 British ears, or flattering to British intelligence. 
 
 A striking proof of the want of connection between the intrinsic 
 merit and popularity of British songs was brought before 
 public notice in the course of a trial some years ago where copy- 
 rights were in question. One of the suitors, a hero of the music- 
 halls, called "The Great Vance," pleaded guilty to the perpetra- 
 tion of several music-hall abominations, of which he variously 
 estimated the value in succession. "But was not your most 
 successful song something about ' Jolly Dogs ' ? " said the cross- 
 examining counsel. " Oh, but that was long ago," said the 
 great man apologetically, "it was the worst song I ever wrote." 
 " All the same, it brought you in more money than any of them, 
 did it not ? " " Well, perhaps it did." 
 
 Perhaps the most painful and depressing spectacle to one who 
 is proud of his country is to see the recrudescence of American 
 taste upon the stage and the music-hall the Press, comic and 
 serious the bookstall and circulating library. Had the United 
 States made notorious progress in art, letters, and music during 
 the last half century even then there would be a certain humilia- 
 tion in witnessing the universal invasion of Yankee phraseology, 
 style, and manners, upon every stage and bookstall. But since 
 the very reverse is nearer the truth, and, with the exception of a 
 marked improvement in the direction of engraving and design, 
 her native progress in music, art, and literature, has been 
 infinitesimal compared with her population and wealth, I can see 
 no explanation, except that we are rapidly approaching dotage,
 
 OUE POPULAR FAVOURITES 285 
 
 for the prevalence of American work and the undoubted 
 popularity with which not only her actors and actresses, 
 but her successful dramatic novelties, dances, and other 
 " Yankee notions " generally, are received by the people of this 
 country. 
 
 No doubt this condition of things is greatly due to reciprocal 
 commercial relations between the Press of the two countries. 
 As I have before explained, the Press in America and England 
 may be regarded as a joint commercial concern for buying 
 and selling public opinion in the two countries to the highest 
 advantage of those engaged in the traffic. Probably much 
 more American and Hebrew money is invested in this manner 
 than English; and if any marked inferiority in grammar and 
 composition be the natural result, it is fully made up for by the 
 predominance of American and Jewish writers and their ex- 
 ceptional powers of co-operation and acuteness for turning 
 journalism to commercial use. 
 
 The solidarity between the Press of England and the 
 United States is fast becoming so complete and the strings are 
 drawn together so closely, and, however much they affect to 
 deny it, their ever-growing cosmopolitanism, or, in other words, 
 the subservience of public interests and patriotism in both 
 countries to the prime purpose of financial strategy, has 
 attained such heights in these days, that while it clearly explains 
 the enormous power that it possesses for "dumping" upon us 
 American comic, literary, and theatrical refuse, undoubtedly 
 constitutes one of the most powerful barriers against the 
 formation of " good taste " in either of the countries affected. 
 
 An American critic might object that a nation whose upper 
 classes testify such unbounded delight in such productions as 
 " Lord Dundreary," or "Charley's Aunt," cannot afford to turn 
 up their noses at the latest imbecility from " Niblo," or 
 " Wallack's " ! Still, while I am free to confess that good taste is as 
 foreign to the soil of Britain as that of the United States, I contend 
 that our self-respect as members of the parent nation should at 
 least " assume a virtue if we have it not," and decline, in spite of 
 the delicate persuasions of the Press, to be flooded with Yankee 
 productions, or to believe that a play or novel must necessarily 
 succeed here because it succeeded " over there." To expect good 
 taste from a people whose leisured classes are so dissatisfied with
 
 286 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 their own- society and surroundings that they bring up their 
 children, if they can, in Europe, and, where possible, either import 
 a thoroughly European atmosphere back with them to the States, 
 or else take up their residence in Europe for good and all, would, 
 indeed, be to look for grapes on thistles ! It would be little short 
 of a miracle if the commercially-bred native-born Yankees, of 
 whom the older and more refined sections regard the theatre 
 with Puritanic suspicion and distaste, or the foreign half-breeds, 
 descending originally from the scum of the world should exhibit 
 a refined or cultivated taste in the choice of their theatrical or 
 literary diversions still less produce entertainments which 
 should satisfy the older, and presumably more refined and culti- 
 vated, countries from which they sprang. 
 
 Forty or fifty years ago the nigger melodies of the United States 
 were the " rage " of London. The original melodies and plantation 
 dances upon which they were founded, which in their turn brought 
 out a crowd of imitators, and to which musicians of considerable 
 merit were not ashamed to contribute, had already in the middle 
 of the nineteenth century captured the popular taste of the United 
 States and thence travelled to England, being introduced to the 
 public by a troop of spurious niggers, singing for the most part 
 spurious music written chiefly by the ordinary ballad-singers of 
 the day after what they believed to be the nigger style of melody, 
 ' covered by a thin veneer of nigger humour and sentiment. 
 
 It is probably needless to remark that while all novelties, 
 musical or otherwise, are sure to tickle British popular fancy for 
 a time in proportion to their taste, or want of taste, to speak more 
 truly, it is certain that none but a people in a low or primitive stage 
 of musical perception would long be delighted by such barbaric 
 or elementary " concord of sounds," consisting as it does mainly 
 in rhythm, or striking measures of time, rather than melody or 
 combinations of harmony. That such music should " catch on ' 
 as the Yankees term it, in the States, is but natural ; but that 
 after thirty years of comparative neglect of the original Christy 
 Minstrel ballads, closely patterned as they were upon the genuine 
 productions of the African slave in the cotton plantations of 
 Alabama and Carolina, it is surely a sign of pitiful backsliding for 
 not only the music-halls, but by an ominous progression which 
 is unknown in other countries, namely from gutter to palace
 
 OUR POPULAE FAVOURITES 237 
 
 instead of the reverse the highest classes as well as the lowest, 
 after glutting their refined ears during the last lustrum with the 
 senseless inanities of Costerdom, have now and for several years 
 past reserved whatever enthusiasm their languid condition will 
 permit, for the still more imbecile utterances of a kind of Nigger- 
 Music-hall revival, which they term " coon songs." The significant 
 feature of the case lies in the fact that in strict imitation of the 
 American managers who found that an indifferent song could be 
 eked out by a German or Irish accent or the black face of a nigger 
 so as to procure a comparative success (as it probably would in 
 the nursery), our English managers, nothing loath to profit by 
 their example, hit off the British taste so effectually with spurious 
 nigger-songs full of drivel about " coons and moons " and what 
 not, that orders were instantly given for a dozen or more weak 
 imitations of the same to be produced, all of which are as unlike 
 in language, manner, and character to African melody as anything 
 that can possibly be conceived; while as the word "coon" 
 appeared to be the feature which explained its otherwise incom- 
 prehensible popularity, that same magic word was necessarily 
 introduced into all the succeeding songs so ordered, in spite of the 
 fact that the term " coon," however dear to the Carolina nigger 
 as an animal to hunt or to eat, is, as a term of endearment, a word 
 wholly unknown in the nigger vocabulary ! 
 
 I have remarked that the observant foreigner invariably wants 
 to know why our holiday places of resort, racecourses, and 
 seaside towns are thronged with itinerant minstrels who insist on 
 blacking their faces when they perform the latest music-hall 
 inanity, and dance the latest music-hall step. The only answer 
 that can be given is that Britons take such a long time to get 
 anything into their head, and, when once in, it sticks so long, that 
 having vaguely heard that a certain Company, called " Christy 
 Minstrels," had delighted their fathers or grandfathers by their 
 black faces, striped calico clothes, curious antics, and plantation 
 songs, the tradition is so tenacious among them, and a name, 
 however antiquated, has such sway over us Britons, that even 
 now nigger minstrels hold the field against all comers. Operettas, 
 burlesques, farces, pantomimes, have passed away in fact and 
 substance beyond all possibility of recall, nevertheless the names 
 are still used and still attract crowded houses by the sheer force
 
 288 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of an attraction which has long ago ceased, and of which the 
 present performances are unreal shadows. For such is the slavish 
 adherence of the British public to the idols of the past, and such 
 his cowardice to assert his likes and dislikes, that he will tamely 
 and cheerfully submit to performances which do not amuse him, 
 and subscribe to impostures which he sees through and despises, 
 as if he hugged the chains under which he secretly groans. Is 
 not this but another manifestation of that servility to habit or 
 disinclination to reform ' which is at the same time our weakness 
 and our boast ? 
 
 This brings us by a natural sequence of thought to a recent 
 disturbance in Wyndham's Theatre which the papers have been 
 duly recording, and which singularly emphasises the views I have 
 been setting forth respecting the slavish tendency of the British 
 Public to "shut their eyes and open their mouths" and take 
 what the managers give them. 
 
 Nothing is more clearly understood and admitted in every 
 country, from Timbuctoo to St. Petersburg inclusive, except in 
 that country where Britons declare they " never, never, never 
 will be slaves," than the absolute right of the play or concert- 
 goer 10 reject or approve the entertainment for which he pays, 
 and, what is more, to express it in as forcible a manner as he 
 sees fit short of personal violence. I have actually seen a 
 cabbage despatched with such force and precision as to knock a 
 man off his balance to the imminent risk of a fall through a side- 
 scene amid a howling babel of well-deserved derision. It is not 
 unusual abroad to see a play frequently interrupted or even 
 altogether suspended : and I once saw an Italian audience rise 
 up and refuse to allow a singer to proceed, drowning his voice 
 with the polite injunction of " Fuori, fuori " (get out), refusing to 
 be pacified until the singer had departed and their favourite 
 tenor had been produced in his place. 
 
 Two peculiarities seem strongly to favour those who attempt 
 to impose upon honest John Bull. One of his most conspicuous 
 qualities is the dislike to put himself forward or to take the lead 
 in anything, unless elected to that end modesty in putting 
 oneself forward being a special characteristic of the Englishman 
 as well as a cardinal rule of social conduct. His second 
 peculiarity is an egregious respect for authority, police, etc., and
 
 DUE POPULAE FAVOUEITES 289 
 
 inordinate " mauvaise honte " as the French call it, or fear of 
 personal ridicule. This it is that makes Englishmen so stiff and 
 stilted in society, and strongly contradistinguishes them from all 
 others. It is the overpowering dread of doing something that i& 
 not correct, which banishes all natural action, sentiment, or 
 speech among Englishmen of all classes. 
 
 To return to our muttons, however, contrary to what is usual 
 in England, where the tamest toleration is usually displayed 
 towards the most pitiable exhibitions of dramatic drivel and 
 histrionic futility, it seems that the gallery being, as it might 
 well be, dissatisfied with the quality of the fare afforded, expressed 
 its displeasure by certain comments which so enraged the 
 proprietor, Sir Charles Wyndham (whose recent elevation seems 
 to have had the effect upon him, as the vulgar say, of a swollen 
 head), that he was induced to exchange bad words with the 
 disturbers, and, what is more to the purpose, succeeded in 
 inducing a policeman (quite illegally, as I believe) to charge one 
 of the noisiest of the dissentients at the Police Courts with rioting 
 and breach of the peace, for which he was " bound over " upon 
 the following day by the magistrate. I can only say in the most 
 emphatic manner that if the Higher Courts sustain this view, 
 which I greatly doubt, the words of the immortal Bumble that 
 the "Law is a Hass" are more than amply justified. It is 
 surely a gross caricature of our boasted liberties if playgoers 
 should be unable to express their dislike or contempt of the 
 performance for which they pay in any manner they think fit 
 except by personal violence ! I am myself a lover of the drama, 
 and take great pleasure in frequenting the theatre in whatever 
 country I live, but, with the exception of a Shakespearian revival 
 or two which through the declining good taste of English 
 playgoers invariably proves a dead loss to the managers, I cannot 
 remember having seen anything on the British Stage which 
 might not have been far more appropriately hissed off (and in 
 most other countries undoubtedly would be), since the remote 
 days of the graceful, if namby-pamby, burlesque operettas set to- 
 pleasing melodies, which, while possessing no dramatic merit 
 whatever, unlike the so-called plays of to-day were neither 
 conspicuous for their vulgarity nor insulting to the playgoers* 
 intelligence by their total absence of fun or wit. 
 u
 
 '290 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 The slightest reflection must show that if the Law steps in to 
 take away the only means that the public possess by which they can 
 express their free and spontaneous opinion of the merits or demerits 
 of entertainments provided, a double injury is inflicted upon the 
 community first, by enabling the manager or actor to call in the 
 Law in defence of whatever rubbish he may think fit to inflict 
 upon his helpless hearers ; secondly, by placing an artificial 
 impediment upon free and open competition by the establishment 
 of a law-aided monopoly, which has practically the effect of driving 
 better work out of the field. 
 
 SHOPKEEPEBS. 
 
 The transition from this to what seems to be the manifest 
 effect of British Municipal Laws in encouraging fraud and 
 rascality brings us by easy steps from the Stage to the 
 Shopkeeper. 
 
 I may at once give it as my solemn and earnest opinion that, 
 after having spent the best years of my life in foreign countries, 
 it is my painful duty to state that the traveller with a well-filled 
 purse stands in greater danger of being beguiled of his cash and 
 plundered without mercy or remedy in New Bond Street than in 
 Central Asia, Central Africa, Central and South America, or 
 Oceania. This is the more worthy of remark and notice in my 
 case, from the fact that during many years' residence in Southern 
 and Central America and Mexico (whose inhabitants all English 
 writers concur in placing as low as any people of the world in 
 morality and commercial honesty), although necessity compelled 
 me to defend my own interests, being as I was in a position of 
 total isolation and for the most part engaged in buying and 
 selling horses and mules and undertaking enterprises demanding 
 both credit and local co-operation, and while in Bolivia, deprived 
 even of the advantage of diplomatic protection, I can truly say 
 that during all the years I spent in South American countries 
 though twice robbed and plundered by violence I have not met 
 with so much and so many varied forms of human roguery as I 
 met with during the first year that I spent in England after I 
 came into possession of my estates ! Moreover the difference is 
 the more marked, and the discount, so to speak, to take off the 
 English side in this comparison is the greater by this that in
 
 SHOPKEEPEES 291 
 
 the former instance I was comparatively a poor man thrown 
 entirely upon my own resources in a strange land, with scarcely 
 any introductions, and pursuing methods for obtaining rather 
 than conferring wealth, while on attaining possession of my 
 estates, my financial relations assumed a totally opposite 
 character ; for instead of striving to acquire, I was wholly 
 occupied in expending large sums of money, in contracts 
 for furnishing, building repairs, and the construction of various 
 important works. 
 
 I do not pretend precisely to know how foreigners are struck 
 by the commercial relations which they enter into in this 
 country. There is no subject upon which they show a more 
 polite reserve than upon this : and, whenever pressed, they 
 seem to take refuge in vague generalities. As to Europeans 
 generally, it is astonishing how little they buy in England unless 
 it is boots, clothes, and watches, the more florid taste prevalent 
 on the Continent proving a bar to any great expenditure of money 
 on objects of domestic or decorative character. The purely 
 business men I have met, who come as buyers from Hamburg, 
 Frankfort and Paris, are exceedingly reticent about their 
 opinions in regard to the honesty and commercial integrity of 
 those with whom they deal, but all agree that for quickness and 
 despatch Englishmen must unquestionably be placed in the first 
 rank. 
 
 As to our suicidal commercial practices, of which I have seen 
 such strong evidence along the whole length of the Pacific Coast 
 from Acapulco to Talcahuano, and from Buenos Ayres to 
 Vera Cruz on the Atlantic side, I have myself seen our calicoes 
 and shirtings gradually displaced by the Americans (through the 
 roguery of our manufacturers in loading their wares with 
 fraudulent adulterations of every kind), and Sheffield knives and 
 hardware of all kinds successively give way to American, French, 
 and German, by reason of their growing inferiority and the 
 preference naturally extended to serviceable articles, over our 
 inferior, if cheaper, manufactures. I have also seen South 
 Bolivia seized by Germans, driving out English trade through 
 their perseverance, their accurate methods, and their close 
 attention to business and the wants of the inhabitants ; and the 
 Huddersfield and West Yorkshire looms, which formerly produced
 
 292 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 nearly all the bayete or plush of Ecuador, superseded by their 
 enterprising German rivals : while in the Chinese Sea from 
 Singapore to Tientsin I have watched the successful invasion of 
 the German and American element owing to the luxurious 
 idleness of the careless, ill-taught, pleasure-loving Britons, who 
 once held the commerce of those lands almost without effective 
 opposition. 
 
 The same painful story I could tell of the Pacific Ocean, from 
 Honolulu in the Sandwich Islands, and Yokohama and Yedo in 
 Japan, to the Southern Pacific Islands of Otaheite, Samoa, New 
 Hebrides, Fiji, and the Friendly Islands, round to Auckland in 
 New Zealand, and in Sydney in Australia. It is ever the same 
 sad story of Englishmen being pushed out by the inferiority of 
 their wares and their growing tendency to sacrifice efficiency to 
 cheapness, the carelessness of their travellers, and the general 
 slackness of their efforts to retain their supremacy against German 
 and American competition. These reasons alone should be quite 
 sufficient, one would imagine, to explain the state of things which 
 Mr. Chamberlain so bitterly laments, and which, under his 
 fervid but partial exposition, has deeply touched, not to say 
 alarmed, the conscience of the people. 
 
 Let us pull ourselves together like men, show ourselves 
 worthy of our antique honesty, our reputation of old for straight- 
 forwardness and integrity, and bear in mind the well-known 
 Greek fable of the tortoise and the hare. Though we had the 
 first start in the race of commerce, let us not forget that the race 
 is not always to the swiftest, but to the man who watches his 
 opponent and takes every care to secure the victory. Above all 
 let us remember that while other nations have been for these 
 seventy years or more remodelling their systems of education and 
 fomenting technical schools and the strict application of science 
 to industry under government aid and control, their governments 
 lending assistance by consular reports and other methods to 
 develop commerce by every means that modern science or 
 instruction can devise, we alone of nations are but recently with 
 difficulty awakened to the disgraceful chaos into which our 
 greatest educational institutions had fallen by corruption and long- 
 established abuses, and failed to take any steps to reform public 
 elementary education until the gutter children and savages of our
 
 SHOPKEEPERS 293 
 
 great cities so lately as thirty years ago had become a menace to 
 our civilisation and a by-word among the nations. 
 
 No doubt it is a moot point among legists how far Laws 
 influence human conduct. Many have said that a nation obtains 
 the Laws which she deserves. But I am strongly inclined to 
 believe by a comparison of the Laws of various countries that you 
 may judge of the morality of the country by the Laws under 
 which they live. How much more, then, must the Laws influence 
 Englishmen when it is admitted on all hands that Englishmen 
 have more respect for Law and Order than any living people. 
 A mob of Englishmen is more easily contained by a couple of 
 policemen than an equal mob of Spaniards, Frenchmen or Italians 
 by a regiment of Grenadiers ! 
 
 I boldly assert that there is nothing in the history, character, 
 or temper of the Englishman which induces a belief in their 
 inherent and original immorality in relations of business as 
 compared with other nations, while at the same time I maintain 
 that no one who carefully follows the conduct of business 
 disputes, the prosecution of fraud, and the verdicts of our Law 
 Courts, can dispute the fact, that the trend and teaching of the 
 Law is wholly in the direction of fraudulent dealing and im- 
 morality. Besides the direct teaching and incitement of the 
 Law, which instructs the least observant how to avoid the meshes 
 of detection and to escape disgrace in prosecutions for fraud and 
 roguery, the system of Anonymity, which has received great exten- 
 sion by the conversion of small " businesses " into large; and the 
 destruction of the retail trader in favour of the " General Store " 
 of American extraction, has tended to make the character of 
 all business more impersonal. Next, the customer being brought 
 less in contact with the responsible head of the firm or workshop, 
 a strong tendency has grown up to adopt the methods of public 
 companies, which latter tend in their turn, apparently from the 
 weakness of Company Law and the ever-growing variety of 
 Company Swindles, to draw the criminal population from the 
 race-course and gambling hell into the more profitable if less 
 congenial atmosphere of the city ; and thirdly, the system of 
 paying commission to successful salesmen, which has the effect 
 of delegating the responsibility and oversight of a principal, to 
 the tender mercies of an ill-paid schemer without position or
 
 294 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 education these and other causes conspire to produce a state of 
 things which is forcibly pictured to the public day by day in the 
 Press, and cannot but react unfavourably upon commercial 
 honesty, as well as operate in deterring intending purchasers from 
 spending their money in a country where the Law offers such 
 inefficient protection against fraud and imposture. 
 
 Nor are the teachings of the Law thrown away upon the work- 
 ing classes. Where is now the British workman of whose skill, 
 fidelity and industry we used to hear so much at home and 
 abroad ? Ask of the Trades' Unions, the pothouse politicians 
 and the Labour Members ! Pampered by vote-seeking Ministers, 
 flattered by interested demagogues his children educated gratis 
 his taxes remitted his wages secured to him however great 
 his incapacity his worst offences condoned by indulgent judges, 
 with an eye on the penny papers his deserted wife or neglected 
 children fed and clothed by a hundred charitable sympathisers 
 is he not truly our lord and master, before whom all bow down 
 and worship ? 
 
 It will be a bad day for the English workman when capi- 
 talists, abroad as well as in England, have so completely lost 
 their confidence in him that they prefer to take up contracts in 
 France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy as thousands do already 
 rather than commit themselves to the tender mercies of British 
 workmen, architects, engineers and surveyors, more especially 
 when the conviction has taken root among them that no effectual 
 protection can be looked for by employers of labour, when the 
 Law comes to be invoked in their relief.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 "BUSINESS," AMONG "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS" 
 
 I KNOW no more conspicuous instance of collective British 
 stupidity than the indifference among the English landed and 
 upper classes generally to the imperative necessity for a businea 
 and legal training for our youth. 
 
 To listen to the Press and the scribbling fraternity one 
 would suppose that there was nothing more simple than to 
 manage a farm profitably, to make money by breeding cart- or 
 race-horses, or to manage a large estate. Nor have I ever seen 
 any indications among the trash which passes for literature and 
 informs the millions, that the conduct of a large estate involving 
 as it does enormous personal responsibility towards a large body 
 of tenantry, the decision of continual feuds or disputes between 
 neighbours and numberless contracts of every kind involving 
 every department of engineering and surveying art was a 
 matter of greater difficulty, or that more judgment was required 
 or a more extensive training and higher qualifications for its due 
 administration, than that of the millionaire whose fortune i& 
 invested in Three per Cents., whose possession involves no graver 
 care or thought than how to get rid of it in a manner that will 
 advance his interests, or buy him a place in good society. 
 
 Now since the total number of considerable landowners, 
 according to the Government returns, are about ten thousand, it 
 follows that at all events three or four times that amount must 
 devote their energies, and will be closely attached to, the 
 management of such estates as they are connected with, or will 
 emigrate and attempt sheep-farming or horse-raising or other 
 pursuits kindred to those in which they have been bred up, which 
 altogether must form a very large section of the upper classes 
 for whom the leading public schools are primarily intended. 
 Yet incredible as is the fact, and damning as is the confession to 
 our national vanity, our tendency to the " happy-go-lucky,"
 
 296 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 coupled with a rigid adherence to old methods, is carried to such 
 a point, that up till quite lately none of the public schools have 
 thought fit to set down as an object of study those branches of 
 instruction which are likely to qualify a boy to successfully cope 
 with the difficulties and risks of such a career. 
 
 Probably the next largest contingent, if not in these democratic 
 days an ever-growing proportion of the frequenters of these 
 schools, are the sous of men who have made their money in 
 commerce, and who have to look to the due conduct of their 
 parents' business or industry in the future for a continuance of 
 the wealth and influence they enjoy. From my own experience 
 I should say that at the present time the latter class was the 
 larger of the two, and was increasing in proportion to the 
 landed ; while a minority of from a sixth to an eighth are 
 destined to make their way in life through the legal and other 
 "genteel" professions in which no doubt a business education, 
 however useful, is not of absolute and paramount importance. 
 According to this calculation it is clear that more than three- 
 fourths of the inmates of our great public schools, however 
 necessary it may be that as educated men they should obtain a 
 fair knowledge of French and German, and sufficient Greek and 
 Latin and History to understand their own language and appre- 
 ciate their own history and literature, should above all and before 
 all at the earliest possible age be thoroughly indoctrinated with 
 the highest and best methods of business and of such branches 
 of elementary civil and banking law as tend to elucidate and 
 explain its leading features and constitution ; add to this a 
 thorough knowledge of the grounds and definitions of the 
 Law of Contract, the terminology of Business, and of Common 
 Law, and, as far as may be, the Practice and Exercise of 
 foreign Exchange, Correspondence, and general commercial 
 routine, besides a fair acquaintance with the history and growth 
 of commerce, banking and finance. 
 
 Nevertheless, with a blindness thac fills the foreigner with 
 amazement, our teachers and pedagogues, whose ideas are 
 frequently confined to the narrow circle of the class-room or 
 the University common-room, insist on placing the cart carefully 
 before the horse, and, mistaking the necessary for the subsidiary, 
 bend all their exertions to load our upper-class youth with the
 
 "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPEES" 297 
 
 ornamental features of education while they utterly neglect and 
 despise the essential. 
 
 Here I am reminded once more of our friend quoted in the 
 earlier pages of this book, who rushing into the pages of the 
 Daily Mail to tell us what everybody knows already as to our 
 conspicuous culinary inferiority to other nations, proceeds by 
 way of defence to declare, "It is very bad, I admit, but it is 
 English, and as such I am perfectly satisfied ! " I greatly fear 
 that all too many upper-class parents support the schoolmasters 
 on these grounds: first, that what was good enough for them is 
 good enough for their children ; and, secondly, that it stands to 
 reason there is not much to complain of in a system which has 
 produced a Pitt, a Wellington, a Peel, and a Gladstone ! I have 
 heard these two sentences from childhood upwards in more or 
 less identical form used by perfectly sane persons on numberless 
 occasions ; and as it is perfectly useless to argue with persons of 
 that mental calibre, we can only hope that the frequent jeremiads 
 in the daily papers may have some effect in eliciting from their 
 fears, if not their convictions, some gleam of reason, which may 
 tend eventually to operate a useful reform. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment what is Business as applied to 
 the ordinary transactions. In its plainest and practical every- 
 day sense it is the art of so ordering and defining your share in 
 any contract, work, purchase, sale or other transaction, as to 
 insure the complete carrying out of your side of the transaction 
 without incurring any unforeseen risks ; while the other party, 
 whom you must invariably regard as your adversary, shall be 
 placed in such a position by your precautions and forethought 
 and the accuracy of your language, that he can take no advantage 
 to your detriment. Ingenuous youth is all too apt to forget that 
 business is generally transacted with men who approach business 
 from the point of view of making themselves safe, while they 
 provide abundant loopholes for either overcharging or providing 
 an inferior quality of material, or by any and every trick or 
 deception transferring as far as in them lies the largest amount 
 of cash from their adversary's pockets into their own, and for 
 enabling them, in the second place, to " scamp " their work or 
 deceive their employer (or adversary) as much as possible, in 
 the carrying out of the same. If, therefore, he has not been
 
 298 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 brought up among the sordid money-grubbing classes who from 
 their earliest youth have laboriously striven to get the better of 
 their fellow-men by every conceivable trick that their large 
 acquaintance with the practice of the Police Courts or their 
 inherited instincts teaches them to be safe and practicable the 
 honourable and well-intentioned youth who glows with a manly 
 desire to take part in the active strife of English political or com- 
 mercial life, will, setting aside all suspicion of deception, infallibly 
 incline to accept the statements made to him, and imagine 
 that his adversary will be possessed of the same honest desire 
 as himself to carry out his work in a creditable manner. He 
 will fondly believe that great firms whose names perchance are 
 known throughout the land, who " are employed by the Govern- 
 ment " and are " patronised by the King," etc., etc., will have 
 some regard for their reputation, and out of his inexperience he 
 will imagine that these things will be a guarantee for honourable 
 conduct and a pledge of good faith and efficiency. He will be 
 astonished to find that so far from striving to act up to their 
 advertised reputation, the firms with which he deals rely on 
 their magnitude and importance for the support of the Press, and, 
 if occasion requires, upon its influence with the Courts in stress 
 or difficulty, and that they are solely guided by the principles of 
 selfish interest and immediate gain, without being deterred by 
 any consideration of risk to that " good name " which, by the 
 usual means of self-advertisement and Press bribery, is prac- 
 tically placed beyond the reach of private assault. Nor can it 
 be too often repeated that the indignation or sympathy of the 
 English Public cannot be counted upon in the slightest degree as 
 a check upon private dishonesty : for, be it remembered, Public 
 Opinion, properly speaking, does not exist in this Press-ridden 
 country. English men and women derive all their ideas and 
 opinions from their pet newspaper, except that which filters 
 through the current gossip of the parlour and the tap-room, 
 the drawing-room and the club. Thus the greatest safeguard 
 against outrage, whether to good taste or to good morals, is 
 entirely absent in England and the United States, since the 
 Press in those countries is in the pay of the offender if 
 powerful or rich enough to secure its defence. 
 
 Besides, current sympathy, that is, the real or intimate
 
 "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS" 299 
 
 opinion of English men and women, whether it is expressed 
 in the language of Belgravia or the jargon of the East End, is 
 generally on the side of the rogue. For, whatever English- 
 men may profess when they are writing or speaking on morals, 
 if we do but take them off their high horse, in other words, 
 catch them in a state of Nature, are they not always ranged 
 on the side of "smartness," that is of roguery? And here we 
 come to the inner kernel of "business" by easy stages. Your 
 true English man and woman at heart love a rogue, though they 
 would perish sooner than explicitly avow it. Listen to the 
 language of the Press ! What can be nobler and higher than its 
 strains when it describes the iniquity of Eussia in coveting 
 Manchuria, or laments the anti-Semiticism of France and 
 bewails in heartrending tones the injustice meted out to Captain 
 Dreyfus ! It would bring tears from a stone to hear it discourse 
 in general terms of that magnificent abstract respect for virtue 
 which is supposed ever to animate the Briton. But let us 
 descend from the general to the particular. Observe the British 
 reporter describing the latest City swindle in the halfpenny 
 papers, or the most recent roguery on the Stock Exchange ! How 
 lovingly he will dilate upon every feature of the rascal's face in 
 order that the duchesses and housemaids who were unable to 
 gloat upon his features and admire his easy impudence, may at 
 all events be acquainted with the colour of his eyes, the set of his 
 trousers, and the most minute particulars of his deportment in 
 the dock ! Neither the reporter (who is now, mark you ! off his 
 high horse, and comports himself like any simple Briton) nor the 
 noble Earl, who is, as the papers will tell you, offered a seat by 
 the magistrate ; nor 'Arry, who nudges his " pal " in the back 
 rows and enjoys the gratuitous spectacle better than any 
 pantomime, has the slightest sympathy with the victim of the 
 unblushing rogue who sits before them twiddling his moustache, 
 knowing full well he is the cynosure of every eye, the darling of 
 the ladies and the subject of universal envy and admiration ! 
 What reck they of the misery he has wrought through his 
 villainies! Who of those who read the daily papers that 
 describe the squalid story of his career, waste a thought, or care 
 a fig for the hecatomb of human sorrows involved? The tragedy 
 is regarded as simply in the light of an amusing social pastime
 
 300 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 nothing more. The newspapers teem with loathsome details of 
 crime which have been painfully raked out of the social sewer 
 for the express amusement of the idle of both sexes as if Pro- 
 vidence had ordained it from all time that it might be dished up 
 to an Englishman's breakfast to tickle his ears with a new 
 sensation. The public sympathy assuredly goes out to the man 
 who carries off his crimes with a high band ; and having won 
 his way to public notice by free-and-easy impudence, he will 
 retain it undimmed to the end, though convicted of a thousand 
 villainies. Alas ! why is this? Simply because from the drawing- 
 rooni to the gutter, and the gutter to the drawing-room, opinion is 
 much the same at bottom. All alike adore a " sensation." All 
 alike adore a clever rogue. 
 
 We are often told that what with our frivolous Press and 
 hurried life, we have no time to think or talk. Fifty years since 
 it was found out that we had lost the art of talking if ever we 
 had it. Now we have lost the art of thinking if ever we had 
 that. We have neither the time nor the inclination for anything 
 but sensual enjoyment. Steam and telegraphy, telephones and 
 special editions have put an end to all that : we buy our thinking 
 ready-made nowadays in the evening papers and such thinking ! 
 But after all what can you expect for a penny ! 
 
 One of the wisest men of old Greece said these noble words, 
 " The fool thinks he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to 
 be a fool." 
 
 But what is a fool in England ? From the drawing-room to 
 the gutter the definition is the same, if couched in different 
 language. The fool is the man who cannot keep his own money 
 or get anybody else's. In other lands, the fool is the man who 
 knows not, that is, who lacks wisdom; but in England and 
 America, it is he who lacks money. For the Anglo-Saxon races, 
 the world is divided into two principal sections rogues and 
 fools. This is what our Press and our Law has done for us. 
 We do not publicly set up roguery as a fitting subject for 
 admiration, but we admire men for their roguery and cunning, 
 which surely comes to the same thing in the end. "Arry at the 
 East End calls him the " right 'un." The Duke at the other end 
 calls him a " far-seeing man " or " one of the right sort." The 
 difference is almost imperceptible. Let him but make a mistake,
 
 "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS" 301 
 
 however, and the scene is changed. He then becomes a " wrong 
 'un " delightful euphemism ! Can any word speak fuller 
 volumes to the human mind than this ? The successful rogue 
 who "gets on" better than his neighbours in any field of life 
 as the Englishman understands it, that is, by methods of business 
 which transfers his neighbour's cash into his own purse by what- 
 ever means so long as the law is kept at bay he is one of the 
 " right sort ! " He enjoys the undisguised envy of his fellows ! 
 Men will nod approvingly at his name in the enclosure at Ascot 
 and the Turf Club or Ranelagh for we are not enthusiastic as a 
 rule, or eloquent in praise or dispraise and say " he's no fool," 
 or " he's got his head screwed on the right way," and so forth. 
 Is this not truly Anglo-Saxon? Yet who will dare to deny the 
 truth of it? We have just enough foreign veneer, imported by 
 the Normans, no doubt, when we compose our orations for 
 public consumption, or write our leaders for the daily papers, to 
 assume a grace we do not possess. But will any of us search 
 into his own heart, or look out honestly abroad upon this land 
 of ours, and say we are not for the most part Anglo-Saxon to the 
 core ? Our very language betrays the secret ! " King," " konig," 
 or " koning " is not that Anglo-Saxon for " cunning " ? precisely 
 the same word as "knowing"? In other words, no doubt, we 
 elected oar king in Saxon days as the most cunning or " knowing "" 
 amongst us, our admiration being centred, as it is now, on the 
 man with the most cunning, in a word, one who knew better than 
 any one else how to " do " his fellows ! 
 
 HYPOCRISY OUR MOST CONSPICUOUS VIRTUE. 
 
 We may vow as much as we please that we love Art, 
 Literature, Poetry, that we admire the graceful, the beautiful, 
 the noble in nature or man, but do we believe each other ? 
 Certainly not ! We may pretend to do so, perhaps, for we are 
 told it is the right thing to do ; but when we put off our hypocrisy, 
 in short, doff our armour and sit at our ease, gentle reader, 
 you know as well as I do that we will have none of it. The Kings, 
 the " Konings," the "cunnings"; they are the men we really 
 admire. The fools are those we despise, to wit, those who do 
 not understand "business"; those, in short, who are the 
 natural prey of " business men." Here you have English life
 
 302 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 in a nut-shell. To be or not to be, Rogue or Fool ? that is the 
 question. 
 
 Let me, in all soberness and sincerity, address my words to 
 the ingenuous youth of Britain. Would you earn fame, wealth and 
 distinction, or shall you content yourself with the applause of your 
 own conscience and the conviction of your own superiority to your 
 fellows ? If you would be respected, honoured, admired, strive to 
 belong to the former category, and above all learn enough Law 
 to avoid its meshes. A very little will suffice. Enrol yourself 
 in the "most honourable" body of Benchers! which can be 
 easily done by " eating a term " or two : the dinners may be 
 indigestible and the port new : but though you may injure your 
 stomach you will steel your heart against all good by hearing 
 more cynicism and more perverted axioms, acquire more 
 cunning, more " brass," and more contempt for abstract justice, 
 in short, fit yourself more completely for success in English life 
 than by any other known means. Next, if you can scrape to- 
 gether sufficient money or credit, set up a stud of race-horses, 
 buy a lodge at Newmarket, and your education is complete. 
 You may then go into any business you like, or plunge into the 
 City with a certainty of success. They cannot harm you even 
 there. For you shall be a " Koning" or a "king" in England, 
 and you shall rise higher and higher. You will in time learn to 
 invoke the Law to defend your frauds and to confound your 
 victims till you come to treat her terrors with scorn. But 
 beware of the slightest carelessness, for a single mistake may 
 ruin you, for all your law. Though you be Director of this or 
 that Company, or Promoter of this or that swindling Association, 
 boon companion of the King, or even a " Celebrity at home " ; 
 not all this shall save you, if you are caught tripping at last ! 
 For though the great ladies will gaze at you in the dock, and 
 crowd and crush into Court to see you cross-examined, and 
 keenly watch you to see if your moustache is as well curled or 
 your head as well brushed as of yore, though you have ever so 
 much the sympathy of the penny papers and the thoughtless 
 triflers of the clubs, and though halfpenny Specials interview you 
 and belaud you ever so fondly, it shall not avail to save you ; for 
 from a " Koning " you shall have been hurled headlong into the 
 Limbo of Fools : and from this there is no Redemption.
 
 "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS" 303 
 
 Here is your true worldly wisdom, unadorned naked but 
 unashamed. How like you the picture, Mothers of England? 
 Do I exaggerate, and if so, where? I never see a merry, bright - 
 faced boy running out to cricket or football with his curly hair 
 and blue-grey eyes, clear and limpid as an English summer sky, 
 without lamenting the fate that awaits him. Look into his face, 
 it would seem as if such a boy could not deceive or tell a lie to 
 save his life : and yet, what is the social lesson which he learns 
 during the long years at Eton, Harrow, or Eugby, but to mis- 
 trust his fellows, to disbelieve all he hears, to learn all evil, and 
 doubt all good ? With all this, he must never be caught telling 
 a lie, though Heaven itself should fall. Thus the lesson of his 
 young life is never to trust his nearest and dearest, and yet 
 never to tell a lie ! Must not, then, his whole life be a lie ? Does 
 he not slowly but surely learn that all the business of life is 
 deception ? and yet he is told that the greatest disgrace that 
 can befall him is to be detected in a lie. What is this but to 
 saturate a boy at his most impressionable age with that in- 
 sincerity, that artificiality, that want of naturalness and 
 spontaneity which, above all things, divides the Britons from 
 men of other lands ? From his first entrance to school, and his 
 first admission to the companionship of other boys, his earliest 
 lesson is to disbelieve his school-fellows' statements and the 
 egregious lies with which he is crammed. The whole delight 
 and highest aim of the British schoolboy is to surprise and 
 perplex the last new-comer by his exceptional powers of lying, 
 while the new-comer in his turn, having been deprived of every 
 vestige of modesty and truth, looks forward to the time when he 
 can distinguish himself by " selling " those who come after him, 
 Can any one deny this ? Is not this the very basis of that 
 English democratic education which is so often held out to be the 
 crowning glory of a public school? And must it not react upon 
 the entire democracy in coming years, or must we suppose that 
 the vice is inherent in the Saxon, and regard it as ineradicable ? 
 
 Yet, like the Persian of old, whose three chief lessons were 
 " to shoot straight, ride well, and tell the truth," the English 
 boy is ever told that no English gentleman should tell a lie. 
 What a hollow mockery ! No verbal inaccuracy at any price, 
 but insincerity and untruth everywhere ! Is it not, then, almost
 
 304 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 certain that this early lesson will bear fruit, and that a 
 boy's chief aim will not be so much to avoid lying as to avoid 
 detection ? Or if truthful by nature, and loathing deception in 
 itself, can he fail to be infected as time goes on, when he sees 
 Roguery and Deceit around him everywhere ? In business, or 
 pleasure, in the smoking-room, the club, the billiard-room, the 
 race-course, the Stock Exchange, in shop or workroom, in the 
 crowded marts of the City Lying and Deception everywhere ! 
 He goes to College. Here he is met with a new apprenticeship 
 of Lying and Deception. New " crams," new " sells," new tests 
 to see if aught remains of juvenile greenness, or aught of sim- 
 plicity and purity to rub away. He takes up the newspaper, 
 what learns he there ? The same lesson. He looks at the 
 advertisement sheets. Lying and Deception from end to end 
 tales of hair lotions which will bring out hair on the baldest of 
 heads, of pills which cure every known disease, etc., etc. But 
 why repeat the same disgusting tale which all know that have 
 reached man's and woman's estate ? Even the comic papers, 
 one and all of them, English or American, what is their wit 
 but Roguery and Deception, all teaching the same lesson 
 and harping on the same string ? Roguery and Deceit, Deceit 
 and Roguery ! 
 
 Worse still is the lesson of the comic papers, for they at 
 least must surely answer to some chord in the English 
 heart. We shall be told, " Their only aim is to sell well. Their 
 pressing need is to outbid their fellows in a competition that grows 
 keener every day of the year." But tell me not that theirs is 
 not the wit that English men and women love. How else would 
 it suit their owners to keep repeating the same dull theme? 
 Take up a dozen comic papers and analyse their contents. Do 
 they not in nine cases out of ten harp upon Roguery and 
 Deception ? 
 
 The truth is that the Englishman finds nothing funnier, no 
 subject more worthy of his wit, than the deception of his fellow- 
 men. Go to the theatre, the club, the smoking-room, the race- 
 course, hear the fast man about town or the coatless ostler in 
 the stable yard ; or cross the Atlantic Ocean and traverse the 
 Continent from east to west, listen to the talk of the Wall Street 
 speculator or of the cowboys out West, as they circle round their
 
 "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS" 305 
 
 cattle to " round them up," or lounge about the stove when their 
 day's work is done. What is the topic of their conversation, 
 what moves them to greatest joy and delights them above all 
 measure? Why, to be sure "jossing" a "tender-foot," or, 
 wildest delight of all " putting a joss " on each other, if indeed 
 such a thing be possible. What does all this mean, if not that 
 Anglo-Saxons worship Deception and Trickery above all things 
 else. And if I atn told, " But surely nowhere in the world is an 
 honest man and a straightforward more highly appreciated than 
 with us," I confidently reply , " On paper, yes ! but in the flesh, 
 never." 
 
 Alas! that it should be so. From " Merry England " to a 
 nation of Shopkeepers " What a fall is there, my countrymen ! " 
 Yet to whom shall we turn for help or example ? Not certainly 
 to the helter-skelter, Jew-led mob who dub themselves Society and 
 into whose foul vortex day by day the best names of England 
 are sucked and submerged ; not certainly to that tiny handful 
 of the " real old blood" of England who, did they but dare to 
 affront the Press and public opinion and the smiles of Court 
 favour, could stand alone and bid defiance to the ever-growing 
 throng, nay, perhaps roll back the tide by their example ; not 
 certainly to the pleasure -loving aristocracy whose wives and 
 daughters dance attendance upon German-Jews and Yankee 
 millionaires, and whose sons seek the heiresses from across the 
 Atlantic while their fathers prostitute their titles to fish guineas 
 out of the troubled waters of the City. In vain we look for the 
 steadfast courage of the "noblesse" of France, who during the 
 long years of Louis Philippe, the Presidency, and the Second 
 Empire, with but a few contemptible exceptions, denied them- 
 selves all pleasure and forsook the splendours of the most 
 brilliant Court of Europe rather than take part in a social 
 system which they could not approve. 
 
 FAVOURITISM 
 
 has always been the reproach of Oriental nations ; Nepotism has 
 always been the standard charge brought against the Popes and 
 the Papal system. One would suppose from the scorn we con- 
 tinually level at the manners of the East, and not less eloquently 
 pour upon the rulers of modern Rome, that these almost 
 x
 
 306 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 synonymous ills were unknown to our more robust people. This 
 is apparently another of the many instances of our incredible 
 blindness to our own defects shall we say it is one of the colossal 
 "Cats in the bag" of which we are so tenderly careful, and 
 above all so discreet, in the presence of the foreigner ? 
 
 Day by day our eyes are affronted with the strange vagaries 
 of Law and Justice at home, yet with what eloquence and scorn 
 we turn up our righteous eyes, and weep over the sorrows of the 
 Dreyfus trial, or denounce the painful irregularities of Monte 
 Carlo which, by the way, we of all nations are the most active 
 in supporting the horrors of the bull-ring, the sad superstitions 
 of Southern Europe, and the squalor and misery of Ireland, 
 which for more than a century we took infinite pains to 
 promote. It is a queer thing, nevertheless, that our intimate 
 history, memoirs, letters of public men, etc., for the last three 
 centuries are loaded to the brim with complaints of Favouritism. 
 Scarcely any feature is more conspicuous in early or modern 
 English literature than this Army, Navy, Civil Service, Politics, 
 Court, ever the same story ! The impartial reader would 
 imagine that it was an especially English characteristic, so 
 common is the complaint and so far-reaching its extent, unless 
 indeed we are to accept it as a universal human failing from 
 which no nations are wholly free. But if this is the case, the 
 less reason surely to boast of our exemption, unless, as I have 
 hinted before, we are apt to brag of the virtue that we least 
 possess, following out that primitive natural law which urges 
 men and women to " lay especial stress and store " by those 
 virtues which they fail to possess. Nor does it seem that we 
 have made any progress since the days of Queen Anne, for 
 the current literature with which we were deluged after the 
 deplorable Crimean muddle of the middle of the century, or the 
 Boer muddle at the end, whose expensive and disastrous results 
 we are still suffering from, teems with glaring instances upon 
 every page. For all that, our attempts to reform usually 
 take the shape of a momentary outburst of indignation, 
 during which the Government lies low, waiting till the 
 clouds roll by. 
 
 We are continually complaining that there is not enough
 
 "A NATION OF SHOPKEEPEKS " 307 
 
 taste in England to beautify a public square or lay out a public 
 garden. But why ? Nobody will deny that English country- 
 houses are and have been, inside and out, crammed with beautiful 
 objects these three hundred years and more, though whether by 
 foreign or native art it would be well not to inquire too closely. 
 Why is it, then, that if ever we succeed in designing a fine building 
 we invariably place it where it should not have been placed, or 
 where it cannot adequately be admired ? If we succeed in carving 
 a good monument or a handsome memorial, are we not sure to 
 put it where it will obstruct a public thoroughfare and become a 
 nuisance instead of an ornament ? When we take an occasional 
 fancy to lavish extravagance, do we not pile our ornaments 
 all together as in Trafalgar Square, so that each one clashes with 
 its neighbour and presents an unpleasing and confused whole ? 
 When by an unhappy suggestion it is thought necessary to 
 ornament Piccadilly Circus, the highest expression of national 
 art takes the form of an insignificant sprite on the top of a tub ! 
 And why is this ? Simply because there is a most plentiful lack 
 of Honesty combined with a superabundant contempt for 
 Justice, which lies at the root of Favouritism. But do these 
 ill-doers not fear reprisals ? " Certainly not," why should they ? 
 For in England and America every man " grinds his own axe " 
 and thinks it his first duty to help his friends to " roll their 
 log," and as for Public Taste, Criticism, or fear of public re- 
 proach, like Gallio he " cares nothing for such things." John 
 Bull, as I have often remarked, is of a patient and bovine dis- 
 position. " Live and let live " is his motto, and, however glaring 
 the scandal, Indignation is not popular among a nation of 
 Shopkeepers. The upper classes call it "Bad form," the middle 
 classes say it " doesn't pay," and the lower classes " do not care a 
 
 d for the whole blooming concern ! " I have already enlarged 
 
 sufficiently upon this head in commenting upon the disgraceful 
 decay of Oxford and Cambridge and the wholesale peculation 
 and mismanagement of its funds, now happily reduced to com- 
 parative harmlessness by State interference. Nor need I further 
 allude to the wholesale Favouritism of Church appointments 
 with its notorious abuses still rife and rampant wherever yet 
 un pruned by strong external pressure. 
 
 While I write, the halfpenny papers are howling at the
 
 308 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 iniquitous mismanagement of the Chantrey Funds and slinging 
 in vain their cheap and harmless satire at the complacent rulers 
 of the Eoyal Academical Olympus. 
 
 The War Office is at the present moment issuing a special 
 " Order in Council " which is aimed directly at the prevailing 
 system of army Favouritism. But until a social ban is placed 
 against such practices, so long will it be vain to stop them. For 
 here even more than elsewhere the Law will never succeed in 
 outstriding the average morality of the nation. The Royal 
 Commission exposed roguery and thieving during the Boer War 
 in every department of public expenditure and each successive 
 act of plunder was detailed by the chairman, proved, and com- 
 mented upon in turn with pretended horror, not unmingled 
 with private admiration. 
 
 Will the chief engineers of the aforesaid Treasury robberies 
 be treated like felons or even prosecuted and imprisoned ? 
 Certainly not, the whole thing is a solemn British farce like 
 the Public Enquiry into the Jameson Raid. The Commissioners 
 thoroughly enjoy it, the chairman enjoys it, and the public enjoy 
 it, and the offenders become enrolled as popular characters along 
 with Fred Archer, Mr. Chamberlain and Dan Leno.
 
 CHAPTEE XXVI 
 
 WIT AND HUMOUR 
 
 THIRTY years ago it was a customary gibe on the Continent 
 that Englishmen and Americans were so devoid of humour that 
 their newspapers supplied it along with the morning milk. We 
 suffer (they say) so much from the spleen, which, as far as I 
 know, is a kind of French invention to explain the causes of 
 our saturnine and unsocial temperament, that they suppose such 
 antidotes to be absolutely necessary for the digestion of our 
 morning meal. 
 
 In those days, if I rightly recollect, the Charivari was the 
 only comic paper of any note, and, like Punch, appearing 
 weekly, was devoted almost entirely to a political agency whose 
 chief aim was to render the French Government ridiculous in the 
 eyes of the public. It tickled Frenchmen immensely to think that 
 the American papers devoted every day a column to more or less 
 stale jokes, hunted up from Heaven knows where, and laboriously 
 quoted by what they called " Our Comic Correspondent." 
 
 With the exception of " Cham," who made his name during 
 the Crimean War, we English may be said to have invented 
 Caricature ; since nothing like Dicky Doyle's work for combined 
 skill, humour and draftsmanship has ever been produced on the 
 other side of the Channel. 
 
 Still the ever-growing flood of comic papers in our midst is 
 undeniably a sign of the times ; nor can it be doubted that the 
 foreigners' surmise is in the main correct, that there is a very 
 real demand for manufactured jokes on the part of the general 
 public : while it seems equally clear, from the number yearly 
 imported from the States, that the British output of humour is 
 insufficient for current needs. 
 
 I have always considered it a singular proof of deficiency of 
 "wit in the upper classes that they should maintain such an 
 expensive paper as Punch, which in spite of the competition 
 of scores of penny and even half-penny papers, at least 
 its equal in wit and drawing, if not in the quality of print 
 and paper still maintains its high price and popularity 
 despite the fact that whatever wit or reputation it ever once 
 possessed seems long since to have departed. Surely the well-
 
 310 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 known Conservatism or fidelity of the British people is never 
 more beautifully illustrated than by its willingness to support 
 Punch at three times the price of its upstart contemporaries. 
 I have still at this date a distinct recollection of wondering how 
 long its subscribers would endure the continuance of a page or 
 so of weekly drivel entitled " Happy Thoughts," which were per- 
 sistently published week after week as if for the express purpose 
 of testing the patience of a long-suffering public. 
 
 In the light of what passes for wit in Punch, I have often 
 asked myself, "Do we really know wit when we see it?" 
 Evidently we want wit badly, or we should not pay so highly for 
 it. We seem to imagine we know wit when we see it, or we 
 should not gibe at the Scotchman, and say that it requires a 
 surgical operation to get a joke into his head, which to my 
 mind is a very unfair libel upon our brethren from the Land o' 
 Cakes; for, as far as my experience goes, the average Scotchman, 
 especially of the lower middle class, has as ready a wit and as 
 keen an appreciation of a joke as any man living. Indeed, 
 I have a shrewd suspicion that the Irish and Scotch do not 
 waste their money in buying wit to anything like the extent 
 that we do, and this I take to be a very strong argument in 
 favour of their humoristic capabilities. 
 
 That an enormous and ever-growing capital must be wasted 
 yearly in the purchase of bad jokes is evident to anyone who 
 stands by a railway bookstall. And the cry is " Still they 
 come." Day by day fresh comic papers, or fresh comic ventures 
 under new names, meet the eye. Clearly, an ever-present 
 temptation is thus afforded for the encouragement of the idlest 
 conceivable use to which human brains can be put. Nor can we 
 hesitate to believe that buyers abound, or the wares would 
 certainly tend to diminish in numbers and volume. 
 
 Let us consider for an instant their quality and character. 
 Probably sixty per cent, of their contents turn upon successful 
 roguery in buying and selling, and the rest in vulgar buffoonery, 
 eked out with the latest Yankee slang. Now since it may be 
 fairly supposed that such stuff as this is more likely to be devoured 
 by young stomachs than old, what must be the effect on the 
 youthful digestion of literature of this kind, in which a carefully 
 distorted view of the probable, the desirable, and the moral
 
 WIT AND HUMOUE 311 
 
 side, is presented to the budding mind, and the earliest pictures 
 of life shown to him in a topsy-turvy condition accompanied 
 by that prestige and authority which printed matter necessarily 
 possesses for immature youth? To be sure, our comic papers 
 may be credited, both in England and America, with one quality 
 which must be denied to their Continental rivals. However un- 
 refined and vulgar our comic papers may be, neither their 
 pictures nor their letterpress contain the indecent and disgust- 
 ing illustrations which seem to delight our Continental neigh- 
 bours, and in a striking degree disfigure their streets and 
 thoroughfares. We are, however, straining every nerve to reach 
 the level of our Continental rivals in this as in all other branches 
 of lucrative commerce. Nothing but Police Regulations bar the 
 triumphant progress of our enterprising traders in that direc- 
 tion. It will be noticed that P rs' Soap Co. at the present 
 moment cover London with as meretricious and lascivious a 
 picture as can be found on any Parisian or Belgian hoarding, 
 and the Stage is only deterred by the reputed severity of our 
 Police laws* from still further spreading their corrupt influence 
 among the youth of Great Britain. 
 
 It is often a matter of discussion, in view of the marked 
 difference between Gallic salt and English humour, and their 
 mutual incomprehensibility, which of the two nations possesses 
 the highest title to a keen and genuine appreciation of Wit. Two 
 things have struck me as militating strongly against our pre- 
 tensions to discernment in such matters. Setting aside the 
 venal or " made-to-order " wit of the comic papers, and confining 
 ourselves to well-known traditional examples, not excluding in 
 our purview the ordinary British stock joke, handed down 
 through generations as the "Capital story" of So-and-so, 
 commonly styled the "Joe Miller" (in consequence of a large 
 collection of such having been published under that name), and 
 with all due consideration for the public taste as exhibited by 
 comic characters upon the Stage or the preference shown for 
 certain characters in well-known novels it seems as if British 
 caste in Wit rarely rises above vulgar buffoonery. 
 
 * I apologise to the Police. As this goes to press (June, 1907), I am credibly 
 informed that the Police is powerless to prevent men and women from being 
 exposed, naked, to the public gaze under the name of " living statues " so 
 long as their bodies are whitened or gilt ! (How truly British I)
 
 312 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 There seems to be no really popular demand for anything beyond 
 coarse fun ; and it does not seem probable, judging by the 
 reputation which our leading humorists have left behind them, 
 that refinement or delicacy of wit has ever been an English 
 characteristic, or, if produced, that the public would have 
 appreciated them, or cared to hand them down to posterity. 
 
 Some years ago, at a General Election, a youthful nobleman 
 made a considerable reputation as a wit upon the hustings, and 
 indeed, I have understood, in the more elevated sphere of the 
 British House of Commons, by answering a rude elector who 
 jeeringly asked him, " Does your mother know you're out ? " 
 " Yes, and what is more, she will soon learn that I am in." 
 
 It would be idle to quote the multifarious traditional 
 imbecilities that set the Theatre in a roar, and in all probability 
 have done duty since Shakespeare's days, or to remind my 
 readers how the popular comedian, who is invariably greeted with 
 laughter as soon as he shows his face, convulses (or, in my view, 
 insults) the audience by defacing his author's dialogue with 
 idiotic " gags " of his own manufacture, usually quite devoid of 
 anything approaching wit, and which usually consist in 
 interpolating irrelevantly the cant phrase of the day, or the 
 latest product of Music-hall tomfoolery. Let us turn to a 
 " serious critic " in the person of the late Edmund Yates, 
 " the distinguished novelist," who in his " Recollections and 
 Experiences," in the course of a description of the various 
 managers and contributors to Punch, writes, that he con- 
 sidered Shirley Brooks to have been the only entirely successful 
 editor and manager of that popular periodical, and, indeed, 
 the only man among all those connected with it, of whose 
 " wit " he speaks in terms of unqualified praise. I subjoin his 
 actual words : 
 
 " Shirley Brooks' verses were better than nine-tenths of the 
 poems of his day. His style, both in verse and prose- writing, 
 was excessively neat, but his neatness never swamped his 
 humour. He was charmingly witty, but at the same time 
 broadly funny, e.g. : 
 
 " ' What are the wild waves saying?' 
 
 Said a maid in a round straw hat, 
 On the sands of Margate playing 
 ' Papa, can you tell me that ? '
 
 WIT AND HUMOUR 313 
 
 Her sire in grim displeasure, 
 
 No kind of an answer made, 
 Till she fetched him a slight refresher 
 
 With the flat of her wooden spade." (sic verbatim.) 
 
 These few words seem to me to speak volumes to the 
 thinking mind. They are worth a world of controversy. Here 
 we have the Pride of English Journalism and Letters, who 
 was not only able to publish two volumes of drivel in reviewing 
 the scribblers of his day with sufficient success to find their 
 way into the Tauchnitz Edition, and, therefore, presumably with 
 the approval and applause of his fellow-countrymen, but who 
 takes occasion therein to give the palm for wit and elegant versifi- 
 cation to Shirley Brooks, and to justify his preference by a 
 sample, of which it is perhaps enough to say that it would not 
 disgrace a small boy in the Fourth Standard. 
 
 Though I have earlier adverted to Punch, I cannot but quote it 
 again as an instance of that peculiar reverence for an old-time 
 reputation which causes a people who rarely think for themselves, 
 and hate to go against the tide of common talk by which alone 
 Good-taste is set up and maintained, to cling fast to old landmarks: 
 thus rendering Merit, Skill, and Good Management entirely 
 superfluous. Now, since the Press tells them that Punch, as the 
 dearest, and " Our only Original Comic Paper," is at the head of 
 the comic literature of the world, Englishmen and women natur- 
 ally accept the statement as an axiom, and duly pay their 3d. 
 for it as if it were an institution of the country which every 
 patriot ought to maintain. While admitting that its frontispiece 
 is a most elegant performance, that Dicky Doyle and John Leech 
 as draftsmen have cast an undying halo around its past, and that 
 John Tenniel's cartoons, even as late as the 70 s, went far 
 to galvanise it into life and rescue it from absolute contempt, I 
 can hardly think so ill of my fellow-countrymen as to believe 
 that they would support a newspaper, whose only pretensions to 
 wit and merit is its price and antiquity, were they not thoroughly 
 convinced that its wit and merit were indisputable. Further- 
 more, as a natural consequence, Punch is taken by foreigners to 
 represent the highest standard of British wit, and as such 
 subjects us to much unmerited sarcasm and contempt. 
 
 As to our real inner private taste (by far the safest guide
 
 314 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 since it is controlled by the Press to a less appreciable extent) 
 the demeanour of the British Public at plays, concerts, and other 
 entertainments generally, may well be taken as the best 
 Criterion of Judgment. In most countries the humour that tickles 
 the stalls is quite distinct from that which appeals to the 
 gallery. I have always remarked, however, that in England, 
 the stalls and the gallery, however different their manner of 
 manifesting their delight, are at one in their solid enjoyment 
 of what is styled " broad farce," which may be more correctly 
 termed vulgar buffoonery. Now broad farce forms a definite 
 class of comic action invented at least as early as the twelfth 
 century by the Southern Italians. It may be described as 
 foolery in action, which was slowly filtered into our country under 
 the familiar disguise of our street Punch three centuries ago : 
 and, something like a century later, in its silent form, produced 
 our modern pantomime. It is eminently suited for children or 
 people in a very low stage of intellect and imagination. Delicate 
 satire and that partial concealment or veiled suggestion of 
 absurdity which is the essence of good wit, are entirely wasted 
 upon the uncultivated intellect, which, possessing little imagina- 
 tion, is unable to grasp the subtlety lurking within. Many English- 
 men admit that the Scotch and the Irish take the palm in sly 
 humour. Most of us have not enough perception of the 
 nature of wit to comprehend that suppression or reticence is the 
 kernel and Ultima Thule of true wit. Like the violet it bides 
 itself shyly beneath its leaf, and is invisible to all but the prac- 
 tised eye or ear of the faithful. 
 
 I have said elsewhere that nothing betrays a nation's bent 
 so much as its likes and dislikes exemplified by the meat it feeds 
 on. Newspapers, comic writers, plays, music-halls, fairs, public 
 entertainments, alike cater to what they suppose to be the 
 public taste. It is significant to note that while Italy reserves 
 her buffoonery for the open-air performances which still delight 
 the children of the lower classes in every town, her " panta- 
 loons "and her "scaramouches," filtering through the French 
 " pierrots," still delight the higher-class audiences of our 
 watering-places with their comic songs and antics ; while, more 
 significantly still, in her pantomime which found its warmest home 
 in England towards the middle of the last century, the graceful
 
 WIT AND HUMOUR 315 
 
 figures of Columbine and Harlequin, which constituted its chief 
 and distinctive charm, were soon weeded out in favour of the 
 more attractive vulgarities of Pantaloon and Clown. It cannot 
 but be interesting to students of National aesthetic to note the 
 gradual elimination of the elegant and graceful, until only the 
 brutal and unrefined remain. The unerring instinct of managerial 
 observation soon found out that the performances of Clown, 
 personifying greed and roguery, whose audacious conspiracies 
 against Law and Order are usually nullified by the stupidity and 
 clumsiness of Pantaloon, were far more to the taste of British 
 boys and girls than the subtle beauties of the invisible Harlequin, 
 who typifies with the sprightly Columbine that ideal of Love and 
 Mystery which, through the fairy's power of concealment and 
 transformation, is given to Spirit over Matter. 
 
 Once more, what is it that really and truly unlocks British 
 hearts and wreathes their faces in an universal smile ? Sitting 
 in a box, I have often looked upon the impassive faces of the 
 decorous and well-dressed stallholders and wondered if anything 
 could make those dull faces relax. Suddenly the " low comic " 
 reels upon the stage, disguised in liquor, and all is changed as if by 
 enchantment. A broad grin of unconcealed delight passes from 
 mouth to mouth, turning darkness into day. And no sooner 
 does the vulgar wretch plunge heavily at the hostess' hand and 
 " land " head foremost in her husband's white waistcoat 
 eliciting an involuntary " Damn " than the mirth of the stalls, 
 now carried to its highest point, is drowned in the joyous shouts 
 that resound from the gallery and pit, and, in the words of the 
 reporter, " The entrance of Mr. Snooks, the eminent comedian, 
 was signalized by his usual drollery, and was rewarded with 
 universal applause." 
 
 At one time, early in the 90's, being afflicted with in- 
 somnia, for which I had tried every known remedy, I entered a 
 music-hall for the first time, at the advice of a facetious friend, 
 who told me that if that did not make me sleep, nothing would. 
 I found his recipe excellent. What with the noise, jingle, 
 clatter, and the amazing imbecility and monotony of the 
 spectacle, and an atmosphere compounded of the fumes of 
 tobacco, beer, brandy and whisky, I went home in a condition 
 of mental and bodily stupefaction which plunged me at once
 
 316 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 into the deepest slumber. While taking this unpleasant cure 
 with the utmost regularity and conscientiousness for several 
 weeks, I was surprised to observe that while applause of the 
 most violent and noisy description, possibly bought and paid for 
 was impartially distributed to all the performers in succession 
 without distinction, one individual, whom I discovered on 
 inquiry to be afflicted with the singular name of Dan Leno, at 
 once attracted my attention as possessing an originality and 
 humour which placed him in a totally different category from 
 the vulgar Music-hall herd ; while, to my still greater astonish- 
 ment, I found that this Phoenix of the Halls was in no degree 
 distinguished from his fellows by the special approbation and 
 favour of the spectators ! How or when Dan Leno attained his 
 later fame, I cannot say ; but for many years after I first heard 
 him, although he was then certainly at his best and freshest, he 
 was undoubtedly entirely unknown to public fame or newspaper 
 comment. For such is the total inability of the average Briton 
 to distinguish good from bad in anything under the sun until 
 the newspapers point the way, that, as it was with most other 
 histrionic notabilities, Irving included, Originality or Merit 
 remains entirely undiscovered and unappreciated until the Press 
 suddenly praises them to the skies (no doubt for cash down), 
 when they at once start off at a gallop upon the road to 
 Fame and Fortune, until guineas like daisies strew their path, 
 and what little Merit and Originality they ever possessed is 
 entirely out-grown. But what matter? English men and 
 women do not delight in good work, but a good name. The 
 difference between a street ballad-singer and a Patti or a Grisi 
 is to most of them just the difference 'twixt Tweedledum and 
 Tweedledee. If they fight and crush and jostle to see 
 Paderewski play the Carnival of Venice on one string, or to be 
 the first to flatten their noses as far as the rope will allow 
 them against the marvellous "symphony in yellow" of Tompkins, 
 R.A., about which all London raves it does not follow that 
 they love fiddling or dote on pictorial art but that in the first 
 place they love fighting and crushing and jostling for itself, 
 and secondly they want to say they have seen Paderewski or 
 Tompkins' picture, and cannot rest, until they do.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 KING AND SOCIETY 
 
 SOME may be inclined to doubt my assertions that the 
 English are changing their nature and fast becoming a pleasure- 
 loving, luxury-seeking, light-hearted, cigarette-smoking, and tea- 
 drinking population, instead of the staid, sober, phlegmatic, pipe- 
 smoking, and beer-drinking Englishman of Continental fame, 
 who, while admittedly "calm and correct," was said to take his 
 pleasures sadly ; yet none will deny the transformation in the 
 public attitude towards the Prince of Wales after his narrow 
 escape from death by typhoid fever, when the popular outburst 
 of a hitherto unsuspected personal loyalty served to dispel any 
 doubts about British monarchical tendencies and contributed to- 
 seat the Guelphs upon their legs in a manner that their most 
 sanguine supporters had scarcely hoped for. 
 
 In the 60's, which is the furthest point to which my boyish 
 recollections extend, my impression is very distinct that, 
 though a certain measure of personal devotion to the Queen, 
 at first evoked by her innocence and youth, and afterwards 
 strengthened by her simple if determined resistance to current 
 evils, Court abuses and political quackery, had tended to fan 
 the expiring embers of Guelph popularity, the unfortunate ultra- 
 Germanism of the Prince Consort and his stiffness to conform 
 to the views and ways of the English Court struggled hard with 
 the increasing veneration for her spotless domestic life and the 
 sterling qualities which endeared her to her subjects, and con- 
 siderably abated the early fervour which had greeted the first 
 years of her reign. 
 
 The Land-owners, who formed the backbone of the loyalty 
 of the country, regarding it as a creed which they had learned 
 and sedulously fostered rather than a matter of principle or 
 discretion, were dissatisfied with the repeal of the Corn-tax, 
 which they firmly believed would bring about their ruin. The 
 Middle class discovered, to their deep disappointment and disgust,.
 
 318 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 that the enlarged Franchise produced more apparent than real 
 change in the balance of power, and were impatiently fretting 
 for the political whirligig to give them that influence which they 
 had so fondly hoped for ; and the lower classes had not yet 
 derived the advantage in food and wages which the new Fiscal 
 system was destined later to produce. There was restlessness 
 in the air, and doubt in men's minds. 
 
 With the Queen's premature bereavement she had retired 
 completely from public life, sinking entirely her interest in the 
 country in the sorrows of widowhood. Her withdrawal from 
 her position as mainspring of the social machine was the signal 
 for an outburst of reaction against all that had been driven out 
 and trampled beneath the resolute foot of the imperious 
 little Queen. The pleasure-loving Prince of Wales and his 
 brothers contributed not a little to set " the ball a-rolling," and in 
 a society where each class follows the one above it and a prying 
 and inquisitive Press "communicates" every tittle of infor- 
 mation that money or cunning can elicit to tickle the public 
 ear, it is scarcely wonderful if the highly -flavoured tales and 
 scandalous anecdotes which filtered through Court gossip, 
 losing nothing in force and intensity on their passage to 
 public print, shattered the illusions still cherished by a Puri- 
 tanical middle class, that with the age of Victoria the evil odour 
 that had clung about rank and riches since the days of good old 
 George the Third had disappeared for ever. While it could 
 hardly be strictly said that there was a definite Republican 
 Party in the country, it was clear from the speeches of many of 
 the Radicals, along with not a few Irishmen of wit and learning, 
 that it would not take much to set alight a train in that 
 direction ; and had it not been for the mysterious accident of 
 the Prince's illness while yet our neighbours were struggling to 
 be free from the Pinchbeck Empire across the Channel which 
 enchained so many by its brilliancy and splendour, it is hard to 
 say whether we should not have been infected with the same 
 feeling that inspired France in 1870 to adopt a Republican form 
 of Government. 
 
 Myself, coming fresh upon town in the later 60's, brimful 
 of the high-flown monarchical notions with which the youth 
 of the land-owning classes are usually saturated from birth as a
 
 KING AND SOCIETY 319 
 
 kind of second religion, yet strongly moved by the force of 
 reason and logic and a generous belief in the superiority of my 
 own countrymen to dream of the re-birth in my own country of 
 the glorious Republics of Greece and Borne, I confess that my 
 attitude, in common with many others to whom pleasure or 
 business left time for serious thought, was one of complete 
 indifference to the alleged advantages of Guelph kingship ; and 
 though I yield to none in my admiration for the domestic virtues 
 of Queen Victoria, I doubt if I was ever enough of a thorough- 
 going Briton to regard that as an argument for believing her to 
 be the best possible Queen, or her family the best possible 
 selection that the nation could make. Thoroughly persuaded as 
 I was, and am still, that personal loyalty to a ruler is the surest 
 guarantee of order and good government if it really exists in the 
 heart of the people, I had never seen or heard of any authentic 
 proof that such a sentiment did really exist until I witnessed 
 the amazing display of popular enthusiasm elicited by the 
 Prince of Wales's recovery from typhoid fever, which proved a 
 revelation alike to his political enemies and his own most 
 fervent admirers. From that time forth, however strong my 
 theoretical belief in favour of Republican government, after a 
 close inspection of all the Republics of the world, I have come to 
 the conclusion that only a predominance of citizens imbued with 
 firmness, virtue, and an intense love of their country can ever 
 be expected to make headway against the enormous facilities 
 for plunder to the few, and the dangerous attractions always 
 proffered by irresponsible demagogues to the many while the 
 proofs I had obtained of the latent forces of popular loyalty in 
 this country led me to the conclusion that however repulsive the 
 notion of being governed by a German Dynasty, loyalty to any 
 dynasty soever was far better than none at all, and that the 
 rule of a constitutional king, who is not specially distasteful to 
 the bulk of his subjects, offers the best assurances of peace and 
 good government. 
 
 Whatever convictions I had formed in the late 60' s upon 
 the growing deterioration of English morals and social usages 
 were more than confirmed after an absence from England of 
 three or four years. A return to bachelor life in Paris after the 
 war with Germany, convinced me that the fall of the Empire,
 
 320 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 followed by the lawless reign of the Commune, had acted as an 
 invigorating tonic which had brought the Parisians to their 
 senses and induced more thoughtful, thrifty and less frivolous 
 ways and manners ; while, on the other hand, a plunge into the 
 London Season of '72 first satisfied me of what I had long 
 suspected, that the close intimacy subsisting between the two 
 countries which Napoleon the Third had laboured unceasingly 
 to foster during that Eeign of Corruption known as the Second 
 Empire, was bearing fruit by a gradual exchange of qualities 
 which, at first chiefly social and external, seemed not unlikely 
 to penetrate the entire mass of our people. 
 
 From the time Louis Napoleon had got himself firmly seated 
 on the necks of his compatriots nothing seemed to give him 
 greater pleasure than to vouchsafe a glimpse of his magnificence 
 to his quondam boon-companions across the Channel. The 
 Tuileries were crowded with English visitors, and none there 
 were so bold even among his political enemies as to assert that 
 Louis Napoleon ever forgot a favour or failed to make a hand- 
 some return for the hospitality and kindness which had been so 
 lavishly extended to him during his English exile. Luxury was 
 then at its extreme height. The very necessities of the situation 
 demanded a reckless profusion of extravagance in a ruler whose 
 only chance of success was to dazzle the people with the glories 
 and pomp of his Court. On the other hand, the splendid isola- 
 tion of the old blood of France, whose fathers had shed undying 
 lustre upon the sordid drama of the Eevolution by their 
 gallantry and lofty bearing, which not even the scaffold could 
 abate, compelled him to hunt the highways and byways in 
 imitation of his great predecessor Bonaparte to satisfy the 
 Parisian love of pageantry by filling "the Tuileries" and 
 Compiegne with a garish crowd of male and female adventurers 
 of every country, whose habits and antecedents, while they gave 
 abundant material to contemporary chroniclers for the exercise 
 of their satirical wit, created a centre of social disorder whose 
 corruption deeply infected not only the society of Paris, but 
 rapidly extended to the neighbouring kingdoms. Never more 
 attractive by her growing beauty and the fabulous expenditure 
 of countless millions, ravished as only German-Jews know how, 
 from the toiling masses, by the Foulds, Mornays, Lepelletiers,
 
 KING AND SOCIETY 321 
 
 and Persignys, whose boulevards, kiosks, palaces, and bridges 
 arose as by enchantment under the hands of Hausman Paris, 
 like the Babylon of old, beckoned all the pleasure-lovers of the 
 world into her lap, while adventurers, male and female, of all 
 countries and qualities, flocked in their wake as vultures gather 
 to the carrion, with not a little hope of winning place and 
 fortune in a Court where the highest prizes were open to the 
 boldest gamester and the most daring courtezan. 
 
 Nor were oar own Princes free from the glamour and glitter 
 of the Court of the Imperial Charlatan. Even their royal 
 mother had not been proof against the fascinations of the nine- 
 teenth century Babylon, and, unable to withstand the desire to 
 witness that fairy land whose beauties filled the world with 
 dazzling rumour, did not hesitate to place the stamp of her 
 undimmed respectability and virtue upon the Imperial pair who 
 masqueraded so successfully on the throne of Saint Louis. Nor 
 was the lesson thrown away upon the more full-flavoured of our 
 British aristocracy, to whom the dull delights of Windsor or 
 Balmoral alongside of Les Tuileries or Compiegne suggested the 
 comparisons between a funeral and a wedding. Englishmen 
 were well to the fore in the great " rastaqouaire millennium." 
 The Duke of Hamilton, Sir William Wallace, and Lord Henry 
 Seymour, of French Jockey-Club fame, and many others were in 
 the front rank of Parisian favour, and proved to the world how 
 easily Britons could at will shake off their ancient reputation of 
 calm sobriety and assume the cap and bells of Parisian frivolity. 
 
 With the death of the Eoyal Consort and the Queen'& 
 retirement from social functions, the Prince of Wales and his 
 even more volatile brother, alike luxurious and pleasure-loving, 
 delighting in the free-and-easy gaieties of the Parisian whirlpool, 
 were not slow to relax at Marlborough and Clarence Houses 
 the rigid German etiquette under which they had so long 
 impatiently fretted, for the airy if undignified freedom of the 
 French capital. Great was the rebound and joyful the reception 
 of the change by all but the refined minority, who comprising as 
 they do the best blood of England and all that is respectable 
 and self-respecting, while they ceased to afford food for newspaper 
 paragraphs, had risen to the envied position of standing aloof 
 from the " Society " of the Press. The greater bulk of the 
 
 Y
 
 322 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 upper classes, especially the younger members, already deeply 
 infected by the garish joys of Paris, welcomed and treasured up 
 each Court tale or anecdote which proclaimed in high quarters 
 the advent of a second Eestoration ; while the example of Paris 
 and the success of the " rastaqouaire '' invasion across the 
 Channel, emboldened German-Jews, American millionaires, 
 shady financiers, and what not, whom the " leaps and bounds " 
 of English prosperity had brought out in swarms like summer 
 flies, to lay siege to the icy barriers of British aristocratic 
 disdain, by methods and arguments which the waning fortunes 
 of our once wealthy peerage rendered them quite unable to resist. 
 
 Now, while it is indisputable that the abundant and ever- 
 increasing ragtag and bobtail which, by patient and costly self- 
 advertisement, has earned the title of " Society," had every 
 reason to thank the Heir Apparent for anticipating their hopes 
 and desires by his timely aid, it must not be forgotten that 
 to his charge must also be laid much of that change for the 
 worse which has been wrought in the social system. Just as 
 Charles the Second introduced the worst habits of France, 
 grafted upon the coarse sensuality of Flanders acquired in his 
 early days, so through the tiny rill of blood that flowed from 
 the Stuarts to the Electress Sophia and thus onward to our 
 present King, history repeats itself almost at the same date 
 two centuries later in the introduction of foreign license, to the 
 undisguised delight (it must be avowed) of the pleasure -loving 
 classes of England. 
 
 It is often said that " on-lookers see most of the game." This 
 will account for my growing astonishment, as, upon each 
 successive visit to my native shores, I was more and more 
 painfully struck with the evidences of a deterioration in 
 British tone, and a levity and a frivolity unknown to my early 
 youth which seems to penetrate all classes. As in human 
 affairs great changes often follow upon trivial events, I think the 
 change may be set down in part to three leading changes in 
 social usage, amongst which ranks the introduction of cigarettes 
 instead of the familiar cigar or pipe which gradually permeated 
 all classes. The Royal Princes, both ardent smokers, who had 
 long chafed under the restraint which the Queen's strong dislike 
 to tobacco had rigorously imposed within the sacred portals of
 
 KING AND SOCIETY 323 
 
 Windsor and Buckingham Palace, and possibly encouraged 
 thereunto by foreign practice, succeeded in abolishing the separa- 
 tion of sexes after dinner which must after all be considered a 
 survival of bibulous barbarism the abolition of which deserves 
 the thanks as well of the ladies as of all lovers of civilisation and 
 progress but in so doing introduced cigarettes, coffee and 
 liqueurs into the drawing-room. The effect of this was far- 
 reaching in a country where as yet no lady was ever known or, 
 at all events, seen to smoke. The natural dislike of the hostess 
 to the pollution of her drawing-room caused the dispersion of the 
 votaries of tobacco to the conservatory or billiard-room, to which 
 they were, naturally, followed by the more enterprising members 
 of the opposite sex. 
 
 Thus the harmless but now necessary cigarette, which was 
 first seen upon English soil after the visit of the Prince of 
 Wales to India, was the thin edge of the wedge which finally 
 dethroned the English hostess and disorganised the social system. 
 Just as the transition from the Pallaiian architecture of White- 
 hall to the cramped Dutch architecture, and later, the cosy 
 corners and low-ceiled rooms of Queen Anne, too plainly foretold 
 the national fall from claret and rapiers, grand manners and silk 
 hose, to bag-wigs, beer and bowls so a tobacco-smoking, ease- 
 loving, lounging generation quickly disestablished the elegant if 
 artificial conversation of a polished society, for the sprawling 
 comfort of the club and the free-and-easy ways of the tap-room. 
 
 I have already referred to the senseless patronage so warmly 
 accorded to foreign caricaturists, by virtue of that indulgence 
 which English men and women, possibly in imitation of 
 Guelphic Court tradition, delight in extending to undesirable 
 aliens with a recklessness and want of discernment which 
 fills even its recipients with surprise not unmingled with 
 contempt. 
 
 The ladies, not to be behind their spouses in the matter of self- 
 advertisement, and bitten even more than their male belongings 
 by every passing novelty, eagerly jumped at this newest trans- 
 Atlantic Press device, by virtue of which the most insignificant 
 faces and personalities may be adroitly beautified for public 
 show and accompanied by a "puff" to correspond, varying 
 in texture and intensity according to the purse or fancy of
 
 324 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 the customer. These acts of suicidal folly put the finishing 
 touch to the growing contempt which the light thrown by 
 the gutter Press upon the follies of the "smart" or self- 
 advertising section of Society inspired in the middle and lower 
 classes ; and the rank crop of society-scavenging papers which 
 rake up whatever is unsavoury for vulgar perusal, and thus 
 deliberately foster the crimes which they pretend to deplore, 
 cannot but have a disastrous effect in stimulating the curiosity 
 and imitation of the social strata beneath. 
 
 In the England of fifty years ago there was yet too much 
 sturdy independence and self-respect for Court manners and 
 fashions to penetrate deeply, or for the still more blatant 
 vulgarities of the " smart sets " to infect other classes but their 
 own. Scarce did the distant echo of their doings reach that 
 refined and cultivated minority which constitute the genuine 
 society of the land, who, for the most part, not unmindful of 
 the cause for which their fathers had bled in centuries past, 
 and yet resigned as a matter of political choice to the German 
 dynasty, pursued their tranquil life, seeking nothing from a 
 Prince's favour, and viewing the ways of Court and the 
 scrambling turmoil which the Press dubs "Society" with equal 
 composure and contempt. 
 
 Little by little, with the aid of a fostering Press and a well- 
 advertised backing reeking of gold, from those to whom it was 
 all in all to bask in royal sunshine, a system of well- 
 understood, if tacit barter, grew up, by which the Tomkinses- 
 and the Goldsteins manoeuvred not in vain for a Prince's smile 
 or the consoling presence of a Serene Highness at their bed or 
 board or " shoot." And with few exceptions, consisting in 
 the main of Scotch and Irish broken-down peers ready to sell 
 their rank to any one or anybody for cash down, Court Society 
 has come to be chiefly recruited from the ranks of the 
 "rastaqouaires," while the old blood of the country grows more 
 and more conspicuous by its absence. In any other country than 
 ours the result of social decay among its richer and idler members 
 would not have been so fatal or far-reaching in its effects. Th e 
 seed thus cast abroad would not have rooted itself in the body 
 politic, nor would its influence have been so widely extended, had 
 not the Press bent all its efforts to flourish it in the public eye
 
 KING AND SOCIETY 325 
 
 as if the follies and vulgar ostentation of the richer classes were 
 a subject of general edification. 
 
 What regeneration, alas ! can be hoped for, or what antidote 
 applied in a country, where it has come to pass partly through 
 the abolition of all class distinctions, partly through the 
 diffusion of cheap clothing and cheap-and-nasty literature, and 
 partly from a want of backbone in all classes that the dustman 
 copies and toadies the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper the merchant, 
 the merchant the squire, the squire the peer, the peer the duke, 
 the duke the king, and the king (having no one else to toady) 
 toadies in turn the people to make the circle complete.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 THE LADIES 
 
 VULGARITY is the dominant note of the last quarter of the 
 nineteenth century. Its infection, like influenza, is impossible 
 to resist. It penetrates everywhere ; brazen, self-asserting, self- 
 advertising, self-rejoicing and self-contented. At one time the 
 ladies of England might have done much to resist its onrush, but 
 the time has gone by now. Nor is it doubtful that they them- 
 selves have contributed largely to such a result. 
 
 In my early days there was a lingering tradition that the high- 
 bred Englishwoman was the most refined hostess in the world. 
 There are no hostesses now. Why should there be? The 
 aspiration of the young man of the period is to be made as 
 comfortable and as much at his ease as possible. His ideal is a 
 snug hotel, and his acme of delight an up-to-date restaurant. 
 What he wants is a manageress, not a hostess. When asked if 
 he enjoyed himself at Springfield Cottage or Dumbleton Tower 
 he will, ten to one, reply either that " Mr. Jones has a rotten 
 cook and poisonous wine," or that " they do you splendidly at 
 Lady B.'s!" A hostess nowadays is merely expected to 
 minister to the creature comforts of her guests, provide them 
 with pretty, well-dressed girls to amuse them, a good cook, good 
 wine, good shooting, golf links within easy reach, and a motor 
 " handy " to save undue exertion. If she were to attempt to enter- 
 tain them or lay herself out to be agreeable she would, ten to 
 one, be described as an " awful bore," and if she took trouble to 
 contrive entertainments, plan diversions, or make elaborate 
 arrangements for her guests' amusement, her pains would be 
 rewarded by rude repulses or possibly the flight of one or more 
 males, by whose departure her " party " would be threatened 
 with proximate dissolution. Such fuss and refinement might 
 have done very well for the gentlemen in trunk hose and ladies 
 in fardingales, or even the beaux of George the Fourth, but for 
 modern "men" and "women" who aspire to be smart, why, 
 the thing is perfectly ridiculous ! A luxurious and up-to-date 
 country hotel, with free-and-easy barmaids to chat with, and a 
 first-rate chef and cellar, such is the ideal country seat of to-day. 
 Manners, ceremony, refinement ! All these were good enough
 
 THE LADIES 327 
 
 for the early Victorian age, when people called themselves and 
 felt they were ladies and gentlemen, and no Society paper existed 
 to chronicle their movements or to make it worth their while to 
 ruin themselves on jewels and dresses. How well I remember the 
 last of that extinct race, the ladies and gentlemen of England 
 with their highly artificial manners, their profound bows, their 
 studied waves of the hand, their stiff, unbending backs, their 
 upright carriage, and their flowing periods ! They still lived, a 
 few of them, well into the 60's, and were looked upon with awe 
 not unmingled with admiration as survivals of a period of 
 restraint and discipline which, however much admired by the 
 rising generation in the abstract, we were wholly unwilling to 
 bestir ourselves either to imitate or attain. In vain these lofty 
 beings used to impress us with their own lofty sentiments and 
 feed us upon the glamour of a day that was past and gone, 
 killed by the hustle and bustle of a vulgar, restless, rushing age,, 
 pushed out by pork pies and crinolines, peg-tops and sacques. 
 In vain they told us "noblesse oblige" when we lolled on easy 
 chairs, smoked before ladies, or lounged in the drawing-room- 
 with hands in trousers' pockets. In vain their attempts to 
 galvanise into life the old-world courtesy and deference, the 
 respect for age, the reverence to parents, the subordination to- 
 superiors, the self-control, self-repression and self-denial, which 
 accorded so well with buckram and lace, buckled shoes and 
 silk stockings, high stocks and ruffles. Away with it all ! We 
 would have none of it. Ease, self-indulgence and comfort, 
 such were the idols of the rising generation! It is not sur- 
 prising that by the end of the nineteenth century democratic 
 vulgarity should boldly stalk abroad, mocking at refinement 
 and jeering at the manners of an age that will never return. 
 
 Few things in the whirligig of events and fashions are more 
 significant than the recent disestablishment of the "lady" and 
 " gentleman," partly under democratic pressure and partly at the 
 bidding of the Anglo-American Press. Whatever the theory to- 
 the contrary may be, as would appear from the French legend 
 about equality and fraternity, the tendency of a democracy is not, 
 and probably never was, to imbue the upper classes with an 
 abiding sense of fraternity towards the lower, but rather the 
 reverse. In the United States the doctrine of equality is trans-
 
 328 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 lated in a singularly one-sided manner. It invariably takes 
 the form of gross presumption on the part of the lower classes 
 towards the upper, which, in the trans- Atlantic variety of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race, has been well typified in the saying of the 
 New York " tough " (Anglice, rough), " I guess I'm as good as any 
 other man, and a damn'd sight better too." 
 
 My first democratic awakening on landing in the States was 
 when the conductor of the train pointed out to me a certain 
 person as the " gentleman who had cleaned my boots," adding 
 that " he guessed I was the man who had to pay." No self- 
 respecting nigger in those days (whatever be his demeanour 
 in verse upon the boards of the Empire or Alhambra) ever 
 ventured to refer to any of his companions in society in any 
 other terms than that of a " coloured gentleman." I have a 
 distinct recollection at Chicago, at a complimentary benefit 
 to a well-known pugilist, of an eloquent speech by the chairman 
 of the opera-house, who wound up his high-flown eulogy with 
 the remark, " In a word, ladies and gentlemen, I can only say 
 of Mr. Shady F. Buggins, that he is a perfect gentleman ! " 
 
 It is scarcely surprising that the highly-advertised and 
 fastidious plutocracy of Newport and New York, who, to quote 
 their own favourite jargon, " are just about the most tony and 
 high-minded society that the world ever saw," shrank with 
 horror from a term which had become so long vulgarised by 
 familiar adaptation to the inmates of the bar and the kitchen, 
 and with which, in consequence, they were disinclined to be 
 further associated. The result was that with an unconscious 
 truthfulness which singularly belied their intentions, but, at the 
 same time, strictly coincided with the demands of fact, New 
 York "Society" resolutely abdicated the inappropriate title of 
 41 lady " and " gentleman " in exchange for the despised 
 designation of " man" and " woman " ; while, not to be behind- 
 hand, our English ladies, unashamed in this and other things to 
 lavishly copy the follies of their trans- Atlantic cousins at the 
 suggestion of the omnipotent Press, followed suit and abolished 
 in name what they had long ago abolished in fact. For where 
 all self-restraint is banished, and reverence for all things human 
 and divine are alike thrown into the melting-pot of private 
 opinion, while the upper classes have resolved not only to take
 
 THE LADIES 329 
 
 their language from the gutter Press of America, but their wives 
 from Chicago and their novelties from New York, it is no marvel 
 that upper-class girls and boys jostle each other like 'Arry on 
 a holiday and copy the dances of the kitchen, the manners of 
 the public-house, the slang of the street, the songs of the music- 
 hall, and, as far as they dare, the dress of the actress or courtezan. 
 
 Just as the honesty of the greater number will always be 
 exactly gauged by the strict limitations of the law, and, conse- 
 quently, loose laws bring loose morality so, too, the manners 
 and {habits of women will never rise much above those of the 
 men of the society which they frequent. 
 
 The vast superiority and greater refinement of American 
 women over the men must be largely attributed to their superior 
 culture, the debasing effect of trade upon the men, and the 
 emancipation of women from male control, which is a marked 
 feature of democracy in the States, while it forms another of 
 many striking points of resemblance with her sister Eepublic 
 of France. 
 
 One would suppose that Englishwomen might have done 
 much to stem the rising tide of coarseness and vulgarity, by striving 
 to insist upon a higher respect for women, more reverence 
 for age, a stricter discipline, and by discouraging freedom of 
 manners and license of conversation at least in their own homes 
 by the due exercise of authority in their characters of hostess or 
 parent. But again from America, upon the wings of the Press, 
 more epidemic than influenza and more catching than scarlatina, 
 comes that subtle spirit miscalled the "Breath of Liberty," which 
 laughs at respect, reverence, discipline, and authority, and 
 scorns the parental yoke which our ancestors raised to the rank 
 of a sacred duty, and which the most ancient and polished 
 nations of the world have always counted the first and highest of 
 virtues. This it must be confessed has greatly contributed to 
 increase the difficulty of reformation. Much blame, however, 
 must still be set at the ladies' door. Had they but firmly resisted 
 the invasion of their greatest rival, tobacco, and stoutly defended 
 the sacred portals of the drawing-room and the boudoir from its 
 profane inroad, they might at least have retained the more timid, 
 and by that no less attractive, nymphs in her train, and so 
 beguiled the enemy man from his natural lair of smoking-room
 
 830 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 or snuggery. For the effect of this surrender sinks far deeper 
 than would at first appear. The first step consists in refusing to 
 the hostess and her fair retinue those attentions of acknowledged 
 allegiance and duty which are, or at least used to be in former 
 days, their due ; secondly, the magnetic power of sex-attraction 
 influence of woman over man, now alas ! reversed seldom fails 
 to draw the young ladies in man's wake to billiard, smoking- 
 room, or conservatory ; from that to ladies smoking cigarettes is 
 but a step; next, it naturally followed that the elder ladies, 
 deserted by the men, frequently adjourned to the billiard-room 
 or the conservatory in self-defence, and by so doing sanctioned the 
 unhallowed orgy, which in its turn reacted so deeply upon the 
 erstwhile habits of civilised society that individuals are to be 
 found who firmly believe themselves in every way entitled to the 
 name of gentlemen, who do not blush to come to table in the 
 easy but pestilential smoking-jacket of bachelor life ! 
 
 The very furniture soon marked the change from refinement 
 to comfort. The graceful if fragile chairs of the last century 
 gave way to the divan of Oriental listlessness, or the Chesterfield 
 sofas, and roomy lounges of the club, the billiard and the 
 smoking room Furthermore, with slovenly attitudes an uncon- 
 ventional mood arises which favours the slip-shod talk of privacy, 
 the smoking-room story, and the retailing of the current 
 newspaper trash of the day, which year by year, with their 
 increasing fertility of social scandals, invite public attention 
 more and more to the follies and immoralities of the idle rich. 
 Nor is this the only evil brought in its train. A free-and-easy 
 " camaraderie " springing up between young men and women of 
 similar tastes, which begins by calling each other by their 
 Christian names, rapidly degenerates into that mutual contempt 
 which the copy-books tell us is the result of undue familiarity. 
 This again reacts upon the matrimonial market, since young 
 men who can bike and golf, shoot and smoke with girls to their 
 hearts' content, are obviously less likely to confine themselves 
 for life to the society of one ; while, on the other hand, undesir- 
 able attachments spring up which later become difficult to shake 
 off, or else thoughtless marriages are secretly hatched up, which 
 neither reason nor a parent's wiser counsel can afterwards thwart 
 or prevent.
 
 THE LADIES 331 
 
 And here we arrive at the "Great Divide" or "wasser- 
 scheide " which separates the Anglo-Saxon from all other 
 civilised nations, and of which I may at once say, the more the 
 foreigner gets to know our country and our ways the more sense- 
 less and idiotic does he hold to be our social habits in this 
 cardinal respect. I have before observed that, incredible as it is, 
 our nearest neighbours, the French, with whpm we have been in 
 the closest relation for the last fifty years, still differ more 
 egregiously at every point of the compass from ourselves than any 
 other nation upon the globe. I will even go as far as to say 
 that I defy an Englishman or woman to understand French 
 people, or vice versa unless they have lived among them from 
 infancy and know their language as well as their own : and the 
 rather for this reason, that though there are probably far more 
 Englishmen of the upper classes who are fairly well acquainted 
 with the French language and frequent the social circles of the 
 gay capital, they can never expect to gain that knowledge of 
 good French society and that friendly hospitality and admission 
 to the intimate home-life of the people, which it is so easy for 
 Frenchmen to attain in England. 
 
 What concerns us here, however, is the outcome and result : 
 and any of us who examines current Parisian literature, Press 
 and novels, cannot but feel his cheeks burn at the unmerited 
 insults which are levelled at our fair compatriots. While, on the 
 other hand, however disinclined one may be to admit their 
 conclusions, or averse to believe that the case is as bad as they 
 assert, one cannot exculpate Englishwomen from the strongest 
 blame, and deny their powerful contribution to the formation of 
 such an opinion. For, strange to say, much as it shocks the 
 Frenchmen that so helpless a creature as he believes a young and 
 innocent girl to be, should fight the world for herself and travel 
 or walk about unprotected and unwatched, our American cousins, 
 who share in very much the same practices with ourselves, only 
 rather more so, are not nearly so harshly dealt with by the 
 foreign critic. With much truth and acuteness he does not fail 
 to observe that their education, however destructive to that 
 delicacy and refinement which is associated with maidenhood, is 
 expressly designed to secure that independence and freedom of 
 thought and action which enable them to make their way in the
 
 332 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 world single-handed. An American girl is trained from childhood 
 to rely upon herself, and is virtually at an early age turned out 
 of the parental nest, so to speak, to shift for herself, encouraged 
 to chose her own companions, to form her own connections, live 
 her own life, and select a husband for herself. 
 
 It cannot be denied, by its most partial upholders, that the 
 English system, as far as the higher classes go, has nearly 
 all the disadvantages of the Continental, without any of the 
 advantages of the American. Her education is even now, 
 although in every vice and folly we seem to hang on to 
 America's tail with ever-increasing assiduity, just as unsuitable 
 as ever it was, or perhaps more so, because the important 
 element of reliance and respect for parental opinion and 
 authority, along with that reserve and bloom of innocence 
 which formed the charm of the older generation of English- 
 women, has given way under the assault of a democratic press and 
 the influence of a vicious stage and literature to a contempt of 
 control joined to an affectation of universal irreverence, garrulous 
 gush, boisterous freedom, or affected rakishness, which, added 
 to the reckless disposition that comes of ignorance and 
 inexperience, is apt to contrast strangely in the foreigner's mind 
 with the timid ways and downcast eyes of the virgins of his 
 own native land. Yet these same self-willed, self-confident 
 young ladies, full of ignorance and animal spirits, rejoice in kicking 
 over the traces of maternal subjection when and wherever they 
 possibly can, and, not content with throwing old-fashioned 
 conduct and chaperonage to the winds coming and going, 
 riding, byking, and even travelling alone (or otherwise), at 
 their own sweet wills insist on being permitted freely to 
 rove as they please among the fields of literature, art, and 
 philosophy. The newspaper and the circulating library with its 
 ample stores are at their full disposal for better or for worse ; 
 the theatre with all its seductions and degrading influences is 
 their ordinary recreation ; while the newest gossip of the clubs 
 and the last society scandal, along with the dress, features, shape, 
 and doings of actors and actresses, form their familiar topic of 
 conversation. The natural results of this seasonable and well- 
 designed education can be easily discerned, and the consequences 
 naturally flowing therefrom can be daily studied in the gutter-
 
 THE LADIES 333 
 
 press, where divorces, and all the varied scrapes which flesh is- 
 heir to, are daily dished up at breakfast time to a delighted 
 public. 
 
 While stoutly refusing to believe that my fair countrywomen 
 invariably throw themselves at the head of every good-looking 
 foreigner they come in contact with upon a first introduction, or 
 that they habitually flirt with their grooms, make love to their 
 coachmen, and frequently invite them to fly with them to a 
 foreign land, according to the current belief of our volatile 
 neighbours, I have myself witnessed, abroad and at home, so 
 much that tends to confirm that impression, that I can hardly 
 wonder at the prevalent opinion entertained about English girls 
 on the Eiviera and wherever else they mostly congregate ; while 
 beyond all question and cavil, both at home and abroad, the 
 conduct of Englishwomen in their intercourse with foreigners of 
 all kinds, from a waiter to a count and such is the credulity of 
 the British matron that the two individuals are frequently inter- 
 changeable display a freedom and audacity which even an 
 American girl cannot equal or excel. 
 
 As to the well-known foreign legend, which so many English- 
 women are apt to treat with scorn, and affect to disbelieve as a 
 childest invention of the fertile brain of the carping foreigner, I 
 may say that, while I write, the daily papers here in Tuscany are 
 recording as a matter of common occurrence that " another 
 English Countess " has married her coachman. And at any rate 
 it is rare that a month passes without distinct proofs being 
 afforded, that however fateful to feminine charms in other lands 
 is the garb of Mars, the ladies of England find nothing more 
 seductive and enthralling than the scent of the stable and the 
 shiny hat and white leathers of the pad -groom. If any doubt 
 arises upon this head, let the incredulous ride in Hyde Park at 
 any time of the day and they will see enough to satisfy them- 
 selves as to two equally remarkable facts : first that parents, 
 knowing the propensities of their daughters, constantly allow 
 them to ride out alone, accompanied by these fascinating 
 messengers of Cupid ; and, secondly, that ladies of all ages and 
 degrees are manifestly eager to take advantage of such oppor- 
 tunities, to the utmost extent that their public situation admits. 
 I hear the ladies exclaim, "But surely it is far better to let
 
 334 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 girls make or mar their own fortunes ! or are we expected to 
 believe that the foreign methods are so successful as to be worthy 
 of imitation ? " The answer to the first objection is contained in 
 the previous paragraph, which proves in itself that at any rate a 
 very large proportion of English girls, and still more notably 
 women, either from fault of education or excessive independence, 
 are not only unprepared, but conspicuously incompetent to direct 
 their own lives or secure their own happiness. It is surely 
 unnecessary to study the Divorce Courts to satisfy oneself of 
 this : " Si monumenta quaeris circumspice." In the next place 
 the English matron invariably objects, " Surely you would not 
 have a girl taken out of a convent and given to a husband she has 
 never seen ? " To this I have only to say that the notion that 
 French girls are married willy nilly to a man whom they had 
 never seen, or, in other words, that they are bartered for money 
 or position by their parents, is a legend of precisely the same value 
 and accuracy as the ancient French equivalent, that Englishmen 
 sell their wives at Smithfield. In the words of the grammarians 
 "the exception proves the rue." From my own experience I, 
 should say that a far larger proportion of marriages of all classes 
 turn out well in France than in England, and, furthermore, that 
 the subordination which religion and training alike closely 
 enjoin upon their daughters, tends to foster a high respect 
 towards the choice and opinion of a parent in matrimonial 
 matters, with results which are wholly beneficial, as is apparent 
 to all who have eyes to see. Finally, their entire system of 
 education leads to an elevation of sentiment and refinement of 
 mind which would cause any union that was not sanctified 
 by their parents' desire, and consent, and cemented by the indis- 
 pensable sympathy of common tastes, to be eminently repulsive. 
 
 It is erroneous to suppose that young couples abroad are 
 betrothed by their parents without their consent or approval, or 
 that they have not ample time and opportunity to become 
 acquainted with each other before their marriage, while, on the 
 other hand, they are carefully shielded from the dangerous 
 intimacy permitted in England and America, which is too often 
 attended with undesirable results. As a fact, the education and 
 training of our young women of every class is, like nearly every- 
 thing else in England, the fruit neither of reason nor experience
 
 THE LADIES 335 
 
 and still less of forethought, but rather a confused jumble of 
 tradition, of old practices inapplicable to present circumstances, 
 and time-honoured prejudices destined in some incoherent 
 manner to fit girls to enter a world where vulgarity is in the 
 ascendant, refinement is unknown, and self-advertisement the 
 " be all and end all." After all, why should we expect more of 
 our girls than of our boys, or indulge the vain hope that wives 
 and sisters should soar so high above their husbands and 
 brothers ? For are they not made for each other ? and are they 
 not mutually formed and moulded by common sympathies and 
 interaction, more especially in these days of intersexual liberty ? 
 Before remodelling the wife and daughter, depend upon it we 
 must first remodel the male youth of the nation and renew in 
 him the antique virtues which have run to seed. 
 
 When evil days fell upon the French nobility, who, with all 
 their grace and elegance, their high code of honour, and 
 unrivalled eloquence, followed the example of the dissolute Regent 
 of Orleans and the still more infamous Louis Quinze in ruining 
 their country and dissipating their estates, not a few sacrificed 
 their cherished blood by a base alliance with the daughter of a 
 city shopkeeper or contractor. Not so our English gentlemen, 
 who for the last century have jostled each other in debasing 
 their blood and ruining their pedigree, not from any financial 
 necessity, but because their elegant and refined tastes tempt 
 them to scour the ranks of the Chorus, the bars of the beer- 
 shops, nay, even the back streets of New York or Chicago for 
 the mothers and wives of the future English aristocracy. It is 
 not for money that Dukes marry actresses, marquises dancers 
 and music-hall singers, or prominent politicians, beguiled by the 
 novelty of a Yankee twang and Yankee assurance, prefer the 
 Newport belle or the pork-packer's daughter to the best-bred 
 beauty of Belgravia ; but because their depraved tastes turn 
 loathingly from refinement and virtue, preferring the husks of 
 swine to the calmer enjoyments of a cultivated home. 
 
 SHOPKEEPING IN HIGH LIFE. 
 
 Nor is this, after all, very surprising in a country where every 
 one toadies and mimicks the ways of the rank above them, and 
 where even their Princes delight to bask in the smiles of American
 
 336 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 actresses and shopkeepers' wives, in preference to the more 
 refined, if monotonous, company of English ladies. Moreover, 
 since no social stigma is attached to mis-mating however far- 
 fetched or grotesque, but rather the reverse, why should we 
 expect that a young man without taste or self-restraint should 
 hesitate to marry the first object of his passion, when he has 
 neither the refinement to feel her deficiencies, nor the wholesome 
 dread of social ostracism before his eyes ! Indeed, in these days 
 it is not easy to find out what really will secure social ostracism 
 so long as the sinning individual duly pays his quota to society 
 by entertaining handsomely, and, above all, keeping a good cook. 
 Indeed there is scarcely any limit to the depth of self-abasement to 
 which an English matron, with daughters to sell, will descend iu 
 the pursuit of tickets for a highly-advertised ball or concert, 
 though its giver were Beelzebub himself : and, to hear her talk, 
 one would suppose that the future happiness of herself and her 
 charges depended on their " breaking the record " of ball-and- 
 party-going during the Season. 
 
 Naturally, the same broad toleration is exhibited towards 
 social crimes as towards City rogueries and Company swindles, 
 as regards which, what seems at first to be Christian charity is 
 really nothing but the promptings of vulgar interest and self- 
 advancement. The same commercial instinct which properly 
 belongs to a nation of shopkeepers is beautifully displayed 
 in every act and transaction of " Smart Society," which, 
 although novelty and show is as the breath of its life, is nothing 
 if not up-to-date, and alive to every trick and turn for gaining 
 an honest or dishonest penny according as opportunity offers. 
 
 Even in the 80's, when gentlemen were just beginning to eke 
 out their living by dabbling in trade and commission agencies, 
 one looked already askance at one's neighbour at a bachelor 
 dinner lest he should pull out his price-list and offer you a 
 sample of his celebrated brand of cigars ; while nothing was 
 more usual than to be button-holed by a smart young man of 
 irreproachable exterior, as the merits of the host's wine were 
 being impartially discussed, and to be quietly informed in a 
 mysterious whisper that he was prepared to supply you with a 
 better wine at the lowest price for cash ! 
 
 In former days the dull boy of the family in the higher classes
 
 THE LADIES 337 
 
 was invariably sent into the Army under the two-fold, if absurd 
 supposition, first, that brains were not required, and, secondly, 
 brains and timidity being in some mysterious way associated 
 in the popular belief that absence of brains was a sure indica- 
 tion of valour ; while, in the middle classes, the dull boy was 
 always sent into a solicitor's office, as being the only profession 
 in which wits go for nothing, since whate'er befalls his client, a 
 lawyer always wins, however the cat jumps. Of late years it is 
 not unusual for parents to argue similarly as to their less studious 
 offspring, concluding with equal want of logic that because they 
 are unable to master either Latin or Greek, or any other qualifi- 
 cation of a gentleman, they must be eminently suitable for a- 
 commercial career. Their career, as far as my experience goes, 
 however brief, is seldom glorious. After a short experience in 
 dunning their acquaintances for orders, which is apparently the 
 only commercial labour they are ever known to undergo, they 
 usually become too offensive (if impecunious) to be endured in any 
 kind of society, and gradually drop out of notice until they re- 
 appear in the Bankruptcy Court, and thus secure a passing 
 share of public attention and sympathy. Time was when such 
 catastrophes were considered disgraceful, but the only remark 
 one hears nowadays on such occasions is : " Very unfortunate for 
 Jones, to be sure it must be an awful bore, public examination 
 and all that, don't you know ! " etc. 
 
 But the worst was yet to come, when the money-making 
 infection spread to the ladies. It must not be supposed that the 
 fair ones are less inclined than their husbands and brothers to 
 court the golden shower. I know ladies of the bluest blood, 
 especially Scotch, who have scarcely an idea in the world beyond 
 " doing their neighbour." For it is a strange fact, which no one 
 of experience will contradict, that the gentleman or lady who 
 are not bred and brought up in a commercial atmosphere and 
 trained to it, not only go to far greater lengths, but develop far 
 more reckless forms of roguery than anything that can be found 
 on "'Change" or Leadenhall Market. In short, the familiar 
 French expression of " jeter le froc aux orties," as applied to the 
 abandonment of all moral principle which proverbially charac- 
 terises the unfrocked monk, is singularly applicable to the 
 situation. Nor do they stick at commission agencies. 
 z
 
 338 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Unless you know your neighbour's character, it is unsafe 
 nowadays to talk of flowers at a garden-party, lest the charming 
 young woman with whom you discourse should use her fascina- 
 tions to press a contract upon you for a firm of which she is agent 
 41 to do your table decorations for you, or flower your house inside 
 and out." You hesitate while you praise the electric fittings of 
 your lovely hostess lest a sweet voice should exclaim in most 
 insinuating tones that she is " doing electric on commission and 
 would be charmed to fit you up throughout on the shortest notice 
 at the most reasonable terms " ; while an incidental observation 
 that you think of going to Homburg at the end of the Season 
 produces an instant assurance from some lady present that " if 
 you are uneasy about your health " she " will be delighted as an 
 agent of the ' Buryemquick insurance Company ' to get you 
 better and cheaper terms than any other office in London." 
 
 Nor do they stop here. There are lady perfumers, lady 
 packers, lady photographers, lady dress-makers, lady hat-makers, 
 and lady picture-dealers. Before long no prudent lady of 
 experience will venture to compliment another upon any article 
 of her attire, for fear of being seized, clapped into a brougham 
 and carried off to " dear So-and-so, who makes such lovely 
 hats (or dresses) with such taste, don't you know, and awfully 
 cheap, quite a treasure," etc., etc. As for the lady motor sellers, 
 you can hardly walk out without treading on their toes. For 
 besides the ladies who tout for a thousand-and-one companies 
 (mostly fraudulent, or they would not want ladies to boom them), 
 there are other unauthorized ladies who, with less excuse and 
 more impudence, delight in deceiving nine of their intimate 
 friends into paying a " delightful motor firm " 10 per cent, more 
 than their electric broughams are worth, in order that they may 
 get their own out of it for nothing ! Others there are who, 
 having arranged for a commission as tout for an amateur dress- 
 maker, spend their time in beguiling their friends to go to " dear 
 Mrs. So-and-so, whose wretch of a husband ran through all he had 
 on the turf. Such a nice woman, you know, my dear, and such 
 taste I You remember how well she used to dress, and how 
 H.R.H. used to admire her well, she has set up in Dover 
 Street, and will make you a dress for forty guineas as good as 
 you can get at Paris for fifty," etc., etc.
 
 THE LADIES 339 
 
 Our " Society" is at last reaping the full benefits of its stage- 
 training. 
 
 In April, 1907, after reading in the Epoca, at Madrid, that 
 so-called " Living Statuary " was drawing large audiences in 
 London " that asylum of pretended prudishness and real 
 hypocrisy" I myself, with my own excellent eyes, saw at the 
 magnificent Empire Theatre in Leicester Square, men and 
 women exposed naked to the public view, under the pretext of 
 representing sculptural groups, their bodies whitened or gilt, 
 apparently in order to evade the police laws against public 
 exhibitions of naked men and women but to all intents and 
 purposes as devoid of clothing as any corybant of heathen days, 
 or any slave-victim of the cruel circus in the wicked days of 
 Nero or Caligula. 
 
 The splendid theatre glittering with a thousand lights revealed 
 among the audience as many bejewelled maids and matrons, 
 aye and barer limbs and shoulders, than ever the heathen ladies 
 of old Eome dared to display in theatre or circus. I turned 
 to the young soldier by my side " How is it possible that these 
 women tolerate such a sight as this, and are not even ashamed 
 to bring their daughters with them ? " 
 
 "I suppose," he replied, " they think that whatever they see 
 upon the stage is all right ! " How true ! yet what a plain 
 admission of the corrupting effect of the stage. Englishwomen, 
 it would seem, do not try to raise the stage, but are content to 
 follow it to its lowest depths. Nor is this all. 
 
 As this book goes to press I read that Manchester has long 
 ago revolted against these revolting exhibitions, and that there the 
 more healthy and active forces of morality have caused them to 
 be discontinued in all but the very lowest music-halls. The 
 London County Council, however, till 3 months later, take no 
 steps against them and the police, it seems, are powerless to 
 act without their initiative. At length the London C.C. is 
 shamed into bringing the scandal before their board upon 
 strong pressure from divers Eeligious bodies. A resolution 
 against the "Living Statues" was carried by a very narrow 
 majority. And it is significant that nearly all the Rank and 
 Wealth of the L.C.C. what the Press calls "Society" were 
 arrayed in favour of these bestial and unchristian exhibitions !
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 FASHION 
 
 As the Roman Matrons of old reserved all their warmest sym- 
 pathy and attachment for their Bona Dea, so ours for Goddess 
 Fashion, who perhaps ought more properly to be considered 
 under the article of Religion in view of the undoubted fact that 
 the conduct and daily life of those who aspire to have their 
 doings chronicied in the newspapers, as well as the still larger 
 crowd who struggle to follow in their wake as best they can, 
 worship no other during six and three-quarter days out of seven. 
 She it is, too, whose magic law divides the ladies, very much as 
 it does the men, into two camps of Rogues and Fools. But with 
 this striking difference that whereas among men, as. I have 
 before remarked, the Rogue, by which we understand the undis- 
 covered rogue, is the envied, admired, and the respected of all, it 
 must be admitted that among the ladies, the simple sisterhood 
 outnumber so largely the wily minority, and the natural tendency 
 is so strong amongst women, however much they like a bargain, 
 to despise and disown the commercial element even when they 
 trade in secret, that the position of commission-seekers and lady- 
 schemers generally is far from pleasant or agreeable. 
 
 Let us pause an instant to dissect, and if possible disarm, the 
 Goddess before whom all women alike bow the knee. What is 
 she ? Fashion, here in England, is nothing more than a carefully- 
 planned conspiracy, first practised by the American Press, and 
 later transported into England, by which certain leading manu- 
 facturers of ladies' goods, in council assembled, alter existing 
 fashions, or in plain English get rid of their old last year's stuff 
 and induce the asinine and much-led-by-the-nose public to 
 believe that salvation is only to be found by wearing the 
 particular goods with which they are, or intend to be, heavily 
 stocked. To an inner council formed in close relation, but 
 subordinate to them, is assigned the more difficult and delicate 
 task again through the Press, and Pressmen and women of 
 deceiving the ladies into the belief that " nothing else will be
 
 FASHION 341 
 
 worn this year " than the goods they have resolved to " push." 
 Now as the primary intention of these gentlemen is, firstly, to 
 induce women to throw away last year's clothes, and, secondly, to 
 waste as much money as possible upon such tissues and fripperies 
 as shall last them the least possible time, they may be fairly 
 described as a vast organization for the spread of wasteful 
 luxury. 
 
 And remember this, ladies of England ! that it is yourselves 
 who are responsible for the follies of those around and beneath 
 you. You fondly imagine, or try to, that you are doing credit 
 to yourselves and your family, by buying the clothes that the 
 shopmen tell you are in fashion, by decorating your fatuous 
 persons with whatever trash your tailor or milliner suggests, by 
 adorning your empty heads with any ridiculous object which 
 your hairdresser advises, by piling up or otherwise distorting 
 your appearance in copying the last Ethiopian atrocity or the 
 latest Japanese fancy, by painting your faces with the latest 
 powders and cosmetics, or disfiguring your head with the latest 
 erection prescribed by your hat-maker ! and after making your- 
 selves the slaves of five separate designing rascals, you will vow 
 and declare that you have done all these things to please your- 
 selves, while you know in your innermost heart that you are ruining 
 yourselves solely and wholly in order " to be in the fashion." 
 
 The same state of things applies to every woman and girl in 
 the kingdom. Each one of them in her degree does her best to 
 ruin herself to keep in the fashion, and fondly hopes to look well 
 in the eyes of the men, who for the most part laugh at her for 
 her paihs : and thus the infection spreads through the land : 
 while you, ladies of England, who ought to know better, and do 
 know better, commit these follies with your eyes wide open, and, 
 what is more, willingly endure, nay, glory to wear, the livery of 
 intriguing rogues who pocket your money and laugh at you for 
 your pains. Then when the gentlemen carp at your follies and 
 fashions, you vow that you never dress to please them, but to 
 please yourselves. Most true it is that the gentlemen usually 
 refuse to believe this assertion, and out of their foolish vanity 
 contend that the only possible aim of woman in decorating and 
 adorning herself is to waylay and subdue the enemy man. But 
 in this, as in many other ways, they do women a great injustice ;
 
 342 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 for, being well aware of the intrinsic ignorance of the average 
 man in regard to the shades and subtleties of female toilette and 
 their possible combinations, as well as of his intense indifference 
 and contempt for feminine efforts in that direction, it would be 
 but labour lost for woman to put herself to any special pains 
 to please him were she not spurred on to exertion by a far 
 stronger stimulus, namely, that of outvying her sisters, and 
 obtaining the stamp of their approval in the race for good 
 dressing and elegance, and above all in that still more thrilling 
 Public Dress Competition, which, however carefully hidden from 
 the prying eyes of the opposite sex, constitutes one of the most 
 powerful organisations for the joint purpose of extracting cash 
 and enlisting the entire available female energy and talent of 
 the richer classes upon the side of " Millinery." It is this 
 " secret council " that develops woman's noblest efforts and 
 stimulates the feminine soul to its highest activities. Woman's 
 Epsom is the Park, the Theatre, the Carlton, and Piccadilly. 
 They are all " runners " : and the Blue Ribbon of their Turf, is to 
 be written up in the Press as " the best dressed woman in 
 London." 
 
 Now as this organisation is entirely framed to gain power on 
 one hand and place their victims in the position of utter subjection 
 on the other, the utmost unanimity and secrecy are desirable if not 
 necessary for the proper conduct of operations. As I have 
 before stated, the manufacturers are the prime movers of what is 
 called the Fashions. They have their agents scattered about in 
 Society and Press, just as the French Government has its plain- 
 dress and official spies scattered evenly throughout the land, and 
 having settled the plan of campaign for the following season and 
 what stuffs they will produce and put upon the market, their 
 next step is to artfully gain its acceptation by skilfully directed 
 Press articles and the tactful co-operation of highly-paid but 
 impecunious members of the aristocracy, who are not ashamed, 
 for pay, to minister to the nefarious conspiracy. 
 
 The uninitiated, that is, the greater number of ladies who 
 enter for the "Great Dress-and-Beauty Stakes" in London, 
 have a touching belief in the genuine origin of fashions as 
 attributed to this or that Princess, or this or that Duchess, 
 which must be followed and copied under pain of social
 
 FASHION 343 
 
 ostracism ; nor do they doubt but that they can attain the 
 suffrages of the Press through the suffrages of their sisters 
 in ball-room or evening party, wholly unconscious of the fact that 
 praise is only accorded in the newspapers for services rendered 
 and expected, or for " cash down." 
 
 Much astonishment has been caused of late and much 
 discussion aroused as to the reasons of the change which has 
 taken place in the social customs in regard to dining out in 
 restaurants and hotels ; but the explanation is perfectly simple. 
 The large hotels, who conspire with the Fashion-mongering 
 Press for their mutual benefit, duly post their myrmidons at 
 every lobby, as is well known to those who frequent such places 
 though the fact is carefully hidden from all male belongings in 
 order to " enter " the female starters, as they, so to speak, " strip 
 in the paddock," precisely like fillies starting for the Oaks. 
 They are then written up or written down, humbled or exalted , 
 purely and simply according to their strict cash value. It will 
 be perhaps thought that this criticism refers to dress alone. 
 Not at all. For those who aspire to have their beauty lauded, 
 the same Organization serves for both. I once knew two very 
 ordinary girls, who eventually, through the machinations of 
 their clever mother who was a past mistress in the art of 
 advertisement and diplomacy succeeded in capturing two 
 wealthy earls. They fell easily and willingly into the nets of 
 the spoilers, and were soon induced to spend fabulous sums in 
 dress by the emissaries of the " Secret Council." Not satisfied 
 with being written up to their hearts' content as the best-dressed 
 Countesses in England till people began to believe it, they 
 presently aspired to be also the most beautiful. Scarcely had 
 the bargain been struck and the cheque changed hands when, 
 hey presto ! allowing a gentle graduation of praise so that the 
 change of tune might not appear too abrupt, they were first 
 described as looking nice in such and such a dress, and then look- 
 ing " handsome," so that the public might not be struck with the 
 suddenness of the transformation, then " lovely," till in less than 
 two years they not only found themselves famous as accredited 
 beauties of the first water, but stranger still, their friends, from 
 hearing their praises continually sung in every key soon began 
 co doubt whether they were not themselves mistaken in
 
 344 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 considering them as plain as ever ; and at the present hour, 
 though considerably on the wrong side of forty, they can hardly 
 cross New Bond Street without paragraphs in a " Society " 
 paper describing their clothes, their elegance, and their beauty, 
 much to the astonishment of their male acquaintance, and 
 presumably to their own private satisfaction ! 
 
 Thus, then, the fascination for women of frequenting restaurants 
 and hotels can easily be explained, when we consider that each 
 timid debutante who has got the " tip " from her dress-maker, 
 virtually " enters" at Claridge's or the Savoy for the " Universal 
 Dressing Stakes," with the distant expectation that she may 
 possibly carry off the honours of Press approval, and win the 
 blue ribbon of the best-dressed girl of the day. 
 
 But I shall perhaps be told, " Surely the Greenferns and Mes- 
 dames Violettes, and Muchchinkas have much to say as to what 
 shall be or shall not be the fashion ; anyhow Lady So-and-So 
 and the Duchess of So-and-So have done much to suggest if not 
 start certain fashions with which they have been invariably 
 credited." Let me assure them that this is a complete delusion, 
 though, to be sure, it is a special feature of their crafty system 
 for the Press-cum-Manufacturers-Fashion-Combiuation to let a 
 certain number of their most lavish customers into the secret, 
 and indeed pretend to admit them to a partnership in their 
 proceedings. But the utmost tangible result, in return for the 
 honour done them in pretending to take their advice, is an 
 empty profession of the deepest deference and condescension 
 in language on the part of an adroit ambassador of the tape and 
 scissors, who, after extorting by judicious flattery or cajolery a 
 certain acquiescence to his scheme, forthwith proclaims in the 
 Society journals that such and such a fashion has owed its 
 origin entirely to the well-known skill and taste of Her Grace 
 the Duchess of Two Stars or Lady Dash, who expressed herself 
 delighted with the examples and illustrations presented to her 
 by the eminent dress-designer, Flanigan O'Slattery, Esq., whose 
 well-known artistic skill had succeeded in realizing her most 
 fervent dreams and aspirations ! On the other hand, the 
 retailers are the mere servants of the manufacturers, and are 
 practically ruled with a rod of iron by the "Secret Council" 
 which determines the course of fashion in conjunction with the
 
 BOND STEEET PESTS 345 
 
 leading dress-piece manufacturers and wholesale costume-makers 
 who form the governing coalition. 
 
 As an example of how easily the fair sex can be hoodwinked 
 and betrayed against their own interests, it was found that the 
 plain and simple hairdressing style of four or five years ago was 
 ruinous to the interest of the knights of the curling-tongs. 
 Needless to say, the all-important consideration as to whether 
 women collectively were improved or the reverse by the costly 
 manipulations of the hairdresser did not enter into the question. 
 They simply subscribed a large sum of money, and bribed the 
 managers of the Fashion-Mongering-Association to publish an 
 edict or two in their favour, with the result that we now see ; 
 namely, that the various systems of torturing the female head 
 which were in vogue in Paris a year or two ago are now in full 
 swing in England, to the wholesale destruction of Englishwomen's 
 peculiar charm and the unbounded satisfaction of our tonsorial 
 aliens. 
 
 BOND STREET PESTS. 
 
 And here it may be worth while to speak a passing word of 
 protest against the scandalous view adopted by the powers that 
 be with regard to the fortune-telling and chiromantic rogues 
 which infest the fashionable purlieus of New Bond Street. 
 
 One of the many signs of decadence which we observe in the 
 later and more corrupt days of the Eoman Empire, and one 
 which invariably points to the enervation resulting from excessive 
 luxury and self-indulgence, is the decline of religious faith, and 
 the corresponding rise of superstition. With the universal greed 
 and longing for luxury and excitement and restless forms of 
 amusement, the mind, precisely as the body is similarly acted 
 upon by alcohol, forsakes the placid faiths and simple beliefs 
 which constitute the surest ground of virtue in the Individual as 
 well as the State, and gives place to a craving for short cuts to 
 wealth, which gambling with cards, or stocks and shares, and, 
 given the necessary credulity, supernatural assistance, is alone 
 able to satisfy. 
 
 It is often said nothing can be more incongruous than the 
 spectacle of Atheists and misbelievers of all kinds resorting to 
 gipsies and clairvoyants and soothsayers to learn their future 
 destiny; but the explanation is not far to seek. There is nothing
 
 346 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 more strongly founded in the mind of man than the belief in 
 some external supernatural agency which in his weaker moments, 
 or hour of stress and sickness, he invariably implores for help, be 
 his skin black or brown, yellow or white. 
 
 When a nation falls away from Eeligion and no longer regards 
 it as absolute truth, but as a system which one man may adopt 
 and another reject according to individual fancy, the eternal 
 desire to pierce into the future, and the ever-recurring springs of 
 hope which are always present in the human mind, and need but 
 the slightest encouragement to revive, urge them to resort to 
 any agents, however unpromising, who profess the power of 
 obtaining for them a glimpse into the future, or the possession 
 of such temporal benefits as they specially covet. 
 
 In many important nations of the past, and many inferior 
 nations of the present day, where no definite teaching of a 
 Supreme Being exists, men propitiate what they imagine to be 
 the powers of evil, by practically worshipping that which we 
 designate as the devil, holding it to be more important to stand 
 well with the authors of evil than to sacrifice to the author of 
 good. For, as they acutely argue, " The good spirits will do us 
 no evil, so we can safely afford to disregard them ; whereas bad 
 spirits will surely do us some evil unless we buy them off, by 
 humbling ourselves before them, and suing for mercy at their 
 hands." 
 
 It is well known that the gipsies who offer to cross a servant 
 girl's hand with silver, telling her that she will meet a dark man 
 and a fair man, advising her to prefer the latter to the former 
 or the former to the latter as the case may be, are severely 
 prosecuted by the police as deceivers and swindlers, while it has 
 been held by the highest judicial authority that this legal 
 insurance against private folly and credulity, which is so liberally 
 extended to the more ignorant classes, should be rightly withheld 
 from the educated in view of their superior education and the 
 consequent knowledge which that education is supposed to 
 impart. But nothing can be more fallacious than to imagine 
 that our so-called education diminishes credulity or prevents 
 imposition. It would be just as absurd to lay down a rule 
 that only the poorer classes should be defended from swindlers 
 and thieves, though it must be confessed that in point of
 
 BOND STEEET PESTS 347 
 
 stupidity such a view would match many other of our judicial 
 theories. 
 
 It is more than probable that the closer realisation of the 
 struggling aspects of life and earlier intimacy with commercial 
 usages tend to diminish natural credulity, and to fit the poorer 
 classes rather than the richer for grappling successfully with 
 roguery, swindling, and the varied methods by which money is 
 unlawfully obtained. And even if the higher classes were more 
 equipped for coping with commercial roguery by their superior 
 education, it would not follow by any means that they would be 
 more proof against that peculiar form of credulity from which 
 those who resort to chiromancers and other similar rogues 
 usually suffer, and which may be defined as a mixture of equal 
 quantities of inborn credulity and religious yearnings gone astray. 
 Added to this, a gambling spirit and the continual craving for the 
 acquisition of wealth by sudden or surreptitious means tend to 
 foster a certain blind belief in chance and the mysterious- 
 operations of luck, which, so far as the description and definition 
 of its own votaries may be trusted, closely resemble the 
 attributes of those inferior divinities which engrossed a large 
 share of the worship of the " decadents" of old Eome in pagan 
 days. 
 
 Numberless are the stories, no doubt more or less authentic 
 for where there is much smoke, there is always some fire of 
 ladies who have been vaguely informed by these expensive if 
 monotonous sibyls that their youngest child would be brought 
 to the verge of death, or that their eldest son at the war would 
 perish, and who have been so strongly impressed with the 
 prophecy, that their brain (if any) has received, from the constant 
 stress of expectation and anxiety, a shock which has been 
 attended with fatal results. 
 
 If New Bond Street and its neighbourhood has become the 
 recognised Alsatia of these pernicious parasites of the human 
 species who batten upon the follies of the idle rich, in almost 
 equal quantity swarms of disreputable aliens have of late years 
 camped down in that fashionable quarter, and with the 
 connivance of the gutter Press through specious advertisements 
 and lying testimonials, ladies of the upper classes with more 
 money than brains are decoyed into their dens, and with an.
 
 348 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 artful mixture of coaxing, threatening, and blackmailing are 
 robbed with far mere skill, ingenuity and perseverance, and 
 exposed to far greater risks under the very nose of the police in 
 the centre of the greatest metropolis in the world than in 
 the wildest parts of Sicily, or amongst the most savage tribes of 
 Central Africa. 
 
 Then there are the beauty doctors, the manicurists, the horde 
 of arch-liars who promise new skin and face and busts, and all 
 the rest of the filthy crew who prey on woman, and subsist upon 
 her evergreen credulity. 
 
 It may be appropriate here to repeat what I have often said 
 before, and is in this connection amply justified, as to the solid 
 conviction entertained by misdoers of every class and of every 
 country, that England is the paradise of the rogue, the swindler, 
 the adventuress and the impostor. Daniel O'Connell used to 
 boast that he could drive a four-in-hand through every English 
 statute that was ever invented. No doubt he spoke the truth, 
 or, at any rate, he managed to prove the truth of his assertion in 
 a great many cases. Certain it is that whatever fresh criminal 
 statute we enact or amend, the lawyers always manage to 
 " draw" or define it in such vague and indecisive language, that 
 the judges frequently fail to construe it in the sense in which it 
 is intended, the police misunderstand it, and after endless 
 litigation it is generally resettled on a completely new basis, 
 almost invariably on the laxer side, and leaning in nine cases 
 out of ten to the advantage of the guilty rather than the innocent. 
 God alone knows thanks to the gutter Press and its hellish 
 associates how many an undiscovered conspiracy or secretly 
 organised web winds itself about rich women and draws a 
 mysterious net around them, separating them at first from the 
 influence of husband, brother, or lover, and gradually but too 
 often dragging them down to a life of shame and misery, in 
 which not the least active agents for their destruction are the 
 ladies' maids in whom they frequently place the highest reliance 
 and confidence ! Other agents, too, are employed, female demons 
 in disguise, under the pretence of buying second-hand lace and 
 shoes and such cast-off raiment, to obtain lists of the female 
 inmates of the best houses. They closely ascertain the habits of 
 all the richest ladies in London, and their invariable practice is
 
 BOND STEEET PESTS 349 
 
 to first suborn the maid and bribe her to induce the ladies in her 
 charge to frequent some of these foul establishments. Being, as- 
 a rule, the most ignorant and credulous of all the human family 
 (for some occult reason) since the days of Terence and Plautus, 
 the lady's maid, even if honest and well-disposed, usually forms 
 an apt and quick scholar. Ever ready to accept any belief, and 
 believe in any promises however contrary to sense and reason, 
 she is either used as a dupe to decoy " her ladies " into the toils 
 of the spoiler, or, if she proves to be more than ordinarily vicious, 
 she is gradually elevated to the position of a willing and highly- 
 paid confederate. In nine cases out of ten the lady, from a, 
 feeling of half shame, half timidity, dreads to put the fallacious 
 promises and offers of universal beautification which she receives, 
 to the test of scientific experience, by inquiry or consultation in 
 quarters less open to suspicion. The natural tendency of women 
 to secrecy and mystery seconds their nefarious schemes. 
 Fearing to consult her mother or family doctor, or let a word 
 fall that would arouse the suspicions of her brothers or parentsr 
 she easily slides down into a path which she dare not disclose 
 and which too often leads direct to misery and ruin. Still 
 greater is the danger and more sure and safe the conspiracy 
 where young ladies possess a fortune of their own or large dress- 
 money allowance or any other source by which money can be 
 obtained without applying to parent or guardian. In all cases, 
 "to compromise" is their Alpha, and" to blackmail" their Omega. 
 Lady Beauty-doctors, with their thousand-and-one cosmetic 
 appliances and lying promises of facial improvement, restoring 
 youth, hiding wrinkles and grey hairs, and what-not, form an enor- 
 mous co-operative association who play into each other's hands by 
 that system of mixed commission out of which the greater number 
 of the subordinate members of the various professions make their 
 living. Precisely as in the case of the dressmaker- and-manu- 
 facturing coalition, which operates upon the ladies in the 
 direction of leading them, often by force and fraud, it is true, 
 but, where it is possible, by the more gentle means of persuasion 
 and cajolery into the flowery paths of fashion, so, too, the beauty- 
 giving fraternity maintain in their pay, besides a host of touts, 
 certain impoverished hangers-on of the aristocracy, who keep up 
 their snug cottage at Maidenhead, or their little house in Green
 
 350 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Street and their well-appointed brougham, entirely by acting as 
 decoys to the scoundrels, male and female, who prey upon the 
 follies and credulity of fashionable womanhood. 
 
 In order to appreciate the rational character of our Criminal 
 Law and enjoy the full flavour of the judicial pantomime, it may 
 here be observed that while everywhere else in the world it is 
 considered necessary for the protection of that portion of the 
 community which is worth preying upon, to carefully register and 
 obtain a return from every lodging-house keeper in the town of 
 the ways, occupation, and means of existence of their lodgers in 
 England, from an excessive respect for the individual, as it is 
 averred, but, in my belief, out of sheer indifference and dislike to 
 rule and method, the police not only know little or nothing of 
 these criminal classes and their habits and ways of life except 
 what can be obtained by an occasional visit in plain clothes as a 
 pretended customer, and only then in specially suspicious cases. 
 And even though they become thoroughly aware, from the nature 
 of their advertisements, that designing rogues insert them with 
 the sole motive of fleecing the idle rich, the beautiful British 
 theory of personal rights like the " Cherub that sits up aloft and 
 watches over the life of poor Jack " is sure to step in to befriend 
 and shield from harm the swindling brotherhood in our midst. 
 
 OUR CIVILISATION. 
 
 Few words in the English language are more misapplied than 
 civilisation. It is interesting to listen to the average instructor 
 of youth in school or college, the parson in lecture hall or pulpit, 
 or the politician illuminating the public at large on platform or 
 in the columns of the Daily Press, and hear the same self- 
 gratulations, the same familiar compliments, the more acceptable 
 because flattering to ourselves and our self-esteem, about our 
 numberless items of superiority over those who have gone before 
 us, the glories of our world-wide Press, commerce, commercial 
 navies, and the modern delights supposed to be conferred upon 
 us by the far-reaching inventions to which we owe our modern 
 conveniences and much of our modern luxury, our quick means of 
 travel and social intercourse through steam and telegraphy, and 
 our latest annihilation of time and space through the medium of 
 telephony.
 
 DUE CIVILISATION 351 
 
 So often are these overpowering advantages hurled at our 
 heads from every platform and in every daily paper, that few of 
 us stay to dispute or qualify the blessings which they are 
 supposed to dispense, or challenge our right to look down upon 
 our forefathers, to whom such discoveries would have appeared, 
 not only improbable, but impossible. Just as the oft-quoted old 
 lady who confessed " that she did not understand very much of 
 the sermon to which she had listened, but drew much consolation 
 from that blessed word Mesopotamia " how many of us, if we 
 were competent to fully analyse our innermost sentiments, can 
 deny that they feel through their frames a glow of pride when 
 preacher or speaker refers to the magnificent progress of our age 
 as compared with the benighted beings that have gone before us ? 
 
 Now civilisation, an exotic addition to our language imported 
 from old Eome, however exhilarating when applied to ourselves, 
 calling forth as it does the horrid memories of Imperial Eome, 
 must surely be tinged with a lurid light. For what is civilisation 
 but Eoman for " townification " ? to use a mongrel if expressive 
 term which may well be " understanded of the vulgar." 
 
 I will not found an argument on the trite axiom that God 
 made the country and man the town, beyond stating the incon- 
 trovertible fact which every day brings home more forcibly to 
 those who look beneath the surface of events, that the growing 
 townification of the country is the most alarming symptom of our 
 body politic which we have to provide against, and that one of 
 our leading and universally recognised problems for the improve- 
 ment and preservation of our race is the countrification of our 
 great cities. 
 
 But surely my impatient critics will exclaim, " It cannot be 
 denied that enormous progress has been made in all that relates 
 to the well-being, comfort and happiness of men and women since 
 the dark days of the middle ages. A man must be blind, deaf, 
 dumb or idiotic to deny our advancement in all that makes for 
 human improvement. Let him but look around him in every 
 street of London, monuments of human activity in every sphere 
 rise up to tell the tale for themselves, of human effort and human 
 improvement. Perhaps he considers the London of to-day 
 inferior to the London of the Black Prince, and prefers the 
 dimly lit streets with their narrow parapets, ill-paved roadways
 
 352 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 and the overhanging, half-timbered houses that almost met each 
 other in the narrow streets of old London, with each their 
 creaking signs instead of convenient numbers over the doors to 
 our broad thoroughfares, crowded with every conceivable means 
 of locomotion, cabs, trams and omnibuses, to say nothing of tubes 
 and underground railways ; the shops with their plate-glass 
 windows and gay fronts ; the public-houses and restaurants 
 inviting the thirsty traveller to stay at every step, instead of the 
 latticed windows and dingy hostelries which have now for the 
 most part crumbled to dust ; and last, not least, the level, smooth 
 and well-swept roads which make locomotion a pleasure, instead 
 of the slippery or rough-paved streets of old London or Paris, of 
 whose ruts and holes and unsavoury contents we have such 
 graphic accounts from the diaries of travellers of other days." 
 
 To this I reply, if material comforts, or, in other words, what 
 ministers to the grosser part of man's nature, is to be the gauge 
 of human happiness and prosperity, it might be doubtful whether 
 our gross and material age should not carry off the palm of 
 superiority, where human effort is almost exclusively directed to 
 the invention and elaboration of some fresh ministration to 
 bodily comfort and sensual pleasure. Or if, again, it could be 
 shown that a greater number of the English people participate in 
 these advantages, such as they are ; or, again, if it could be shown 
 that these inventions and multiplied incentives to luxury had 
 produced a sensible amelioration of the lot of the greater part of 
 our race ; then, indeed, much might be said in its defence. But 
 is there any honest man who looks below the surface and divests 
 himself of the cant of the platform and newspaper and froth of 
 every-day talk, who will lay his hand on his heart and declare 
 that to the best of his belief and information the greater part of 
 our race at the present moment enjoy a larger measure of even 
 material happiness and comfort as compared with the picture 
 presented, say, by Sir John Fortescue in his "De Laudibus 
 Angliae " five hundred years ago? There is no question that 
 luxuries for which we now pay a comparatively moderate sum, 
 five centuries ago were almost unattainable, and that the variety 
 of food set out in every shop to tantalize the penniless passer- by f 
 exceeds the wildest dreams of ancestral luxury ; nor is it so 
 certain that they would have enjoyed them as we do, or whether
 
 OUE CIVILISATION 353 
 
 their healthier palates would not have scorned the manifold spurs 
 to a jaded appetite which underlie the thousand-and-one 
 stimulants, sauces and spices which modern invention calls into 
 being. At all events, it must be owned that even if their diet 
 was more simple, and the variety of their food, their attire, their 
 means of locomotion and of entertainment of mind or body were 
 greatly circumscribed as compared with the present, we have 
 every reason to believe that the quality was better, the work 
 more sincere and the articles sold more genuine, and therefore 
 that the body and mind were more wholesomely nourished and 
 more happily provided for, than iu our own age of chemical, 
 literary, artistic, and in short universal falsification. 
 
 Nor can it be honestly said in our defence that material wants 
 are more cheaply satisfied in these days. Obviously, the common 
 necessities of life comprised in the term of meat, drink and 
 clothing were necessarily much lower five centuries ago than 
 now, as rated by money value ; but let it not be forgotten that 
 even here the ability to purchase these necessities of life by 
 current wages were far greater in those so-called dark days than 
 they are now, and though wages have risen two and three 
 hundred per cent, in some cases, the greater number of wage- 
 earners were far more able to lead a life of comparative comfort, 
 so long as they were prepared to work, than they are at the 
 present hour. Without passing beyond the bare requirements of 
 healthy subsistence into the sphere of luxury and what may be 
 called unnecessary stimulants which have come in our degene- 
 rate age to be almost objects of prime necessity, I boldly maintain 
 that more money has to be spent, and the money so spent is 
 more likely to be wasted and spent in vain, upon almost all 
 objects that minister to comfort and indulgence of luxury in 
 modern than in ancient days. With the solitary exception of 
 male attire, where usage in bygone days demanded more show 
 and splendour than in the present, there is but little difference in 
 the values or, in other words, the cost if properly estimated, not 
 by the amount of coin paid, but by the relative price of material 
 and labour required to produce the article, between olden days 
 and now ; while, as for the quality of the ancient article, either 
 in the genuineness of the material or the faithfulness of the work 
 and make, and the more rational adaptation of the material to 
 AA
 
 354 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 requirements, the palm must certainly be accorded to our fore- 
 fathers. It must be admitted that at no time in the history of 
 man of which we have any record has wastefulness in food or 
 dress reached its present height ; nor, as far as we know, has more 
 national wealth been dissipated in the production of useless, 
 flimsy fabrics born for the hour upon which infinite labour is 
 expended and which are constructed entirely to attract the 
 purchaser's eye rather than commend themselves to his reason. 
 
 But even admitting our material progress in many particulars, 
 it would be a narrow purview which merely took in the external 
 and visible signs of progress and omitted the moral, physical 
 and aesthetic progress which make up the higher and nobler 
 requirements of our complex human nature. I say advisedly 
 physical, as it is all too common to find modern educationists so 
 little impressed with the admirable Eoman axiom, " mens sana 
 in corpore sano," that they think education consists of an operation 
 similar to pouring beer into pint pots and leaving off when they 
 are full oblivious of the fact that unless the body is concurrently 
 strengthened in proportion to the imagination, the gravest evils 
 result. Indeed, to this perhaps a larger portion of our current 
 ills may be traced than any other ; and nothing is more singular 
 than the fact, that in spite of greater medical and official 
 interference and the boasted lights of modern science, chiefly 
 owing to the curse of Machinery, which I may parenthetically 
 observe is always quoted " ad nauseam " by the wiseacres of the 
 press and platform as among the chief blessings of our age, our 
 physical degeneration during the last century and a half is even 
 more conspicuous than our mental and moral deficiencies. This 
 is the more inexcusable because Germany and France had 
 already shown us the way as early as the middle of the last 
 century, when their governments, becoming alive to the great 
 vils resulting from the overcrowding of towns and the confine- 
 ment of the younger folks in mills and factories, had already 
 taken every means to abate the evil by establishing and encour- 
 aging public and private " turnvereins," and other measures to 
 which their system of universal conscription greatly contributed. 
 
 Unfortunately, when at length Great Britain awoke in 1870 to 
 the conviction that her system of national education was the most 
 backward and the most scandalously inadequate of any national
 
 OUK CIVILISATION 355 
 
 system in Europe or America, instead of applying the remedy 
 which our neighbours had adopted to abate the physical evils 
 wrought by machinery upon the working population, she confined 
 her national efforts and system to that branch of education which 
 may be termed " mental development " without any effective 
 admixture of discipline or bodily exercise. Nor was it till thirty 
 years later, shortly before the outbreak of the Boer War, when 
 the large demand for volunteers and recruits had exposed 
 more clearly the difficulty of attaining the material required, that 
 serious attempts were made to apply some remedy to the physical 
 deficiencies which were admitted upon all hands. And it should 
 be noted that this uprising of the loom and workshop, the mill 
 and manufactory which not only degrades our free-born British 
 workman, but chains him to the bench for long hours under the 
 slavery of Vulcan, and exchanges for the open-air life of the forge, 
 the booth, and the small workshop, the fetid air of the poisonous 
 factory, the steaming atmosphere of the cotton sheds, the 
 death-dealing chemical works, the steel-grinder's shops or the 
 sweater's den was strictly coincident with the observed physical 
 degeneracy of the working classes. 
 
 Machinery is also responsible for the fouling of the fair face 
 of nature, causing millions to toil in blackened grimy hovels or 
 foul factories, standing amidst blackened mounds of slag, instead 
 of working like men in the open sunshine among God's works, 
 looking forward as a respite from toil to cheir poor but homely 
 fireside in the comfortable old-world cottages under shady elms, 
 which are still the delight of our country-side and which we 
 moderns seem unable to reproduce. 
 
 If physical well-being be the test of our civilisation we have 
 only to look back upon the records of the past and read of their 
 manner of living to be well persuaded that " there were giants in 
 those days," and that the ordinary life of even the well-to-do, five 
 centuries ago, would put such a strain upon the endurance and 
 constitution of us degenerate moderns that none but the strongest 
 and toughest could have possibly outlived the ordeal. Then, too, 
 each man from hour to hour was prepared to defend himself and 
 his possessions and all he held dear from the robber, the midnight 
 thief or armed adventurer. Each day might bring him a conflict 
 upon which his family; nay, all he had in the world, might rest
 
 356 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 upon the issue. From earliest boyhood his play-hours wero 
 serious lessons in self-defence and military art, where carelessness 
 or inattention was a matter of life and death, and a rigid disci- 
 pline of which we have no idea in these days was exacted from 
 the mimic sports of childhood equally with the ruder contests of 
 mature years. The higher classes, who in a measure shared the 
 indifference to book learning which characterised the meaner 
 sort, at most possessing a smattering of Latin and French, so 
 that they could follow the priest's words at Mass, pay compliments 
 to court ladies, or indite a sonnet to their mistress, made the use 
 of arms and the study of the art of war their chief object in life, 
 unless, indeed, they were devoted from childhood to the priest- 
 hood. All luxury and relaxation were forbidden as tending to 
 enervate the body and render them unfit for their martial career : 
 and, with the exception of a Court pageant or an occasional 
 masque or dance, hunting was the only pastime or relaxation 
 from the sterner duties of keeping watch and ward, heading a 
 foray, or sharing with the meanest trooper, toils and hardships, 
 and privations of which in these days of luxurious commissariat 
 and quick communication we can scarcely form any adequate 
 idea. 
 
 VULCAN IN WAR. 
 
 If engaged with the enemy, however, each man at least felt 
 that he would not be murdered in his sleep by a shell, or blown 
 out of his hammock by the skilful application of a hand grenade 
 on land, or a torpedo at sea, but relying on his good sword, his 
 strong arm, and above all upon his God and the justice of his 
 cause, sallied forth to fight with a light heart and easy mind as 
 blithely as to a fair or village green. Compare him with the 
 soldier of to-day, compressed into a tight tunic, numbered and 
 marked like sheep, and forced to keep time as part of a rigid 
 machine of which each human being is but a cog, hired to fight 
 for quarrels he neither knows nor cares for, hurled into action by 
 too often incompetent officers, to whom the death of a thousand, 
 more or less, is a matter of small concern, his wants provided by a 
 commissariat who deprive him of even the minor joys of loot and 
 plunder which went far to make war palatable in olden days 
 uncertain at any moment whether he shall be struck down by 
 shell or ball emerging from a distant wood or masked battery,
 
 VULCAN IN WAE 357 
 
 while smokeless powder and extreme distance almost defy 
 retaliation, or even discovery. Or if his lot be cast at sea; 
 instead of sailing in the good old wooden walls which one could 
 cannonade all day without sinking, and which served to protect 
 old England's honour in days gone by, or boarding the foe with 
 cutlass in hand, trusting to his strength and skill to overbear his 
 enemy what is his lot now ? Cooped up in an iron pot which 
 in the tropics greatly resembles a heated cauldron, knowing full 
 well that in time of war the chief object of his enemy will be to 
 sink him with all his fellows, night or day, by a well-directed 
 torpedo or a cleverly adjusted mine, or if he survives all treacher- 
 ous midnight murderous attacks and succeeds as far as getting 
 into action, the odds are even, that the first broadside he receives, 
 perhaps even while the enemy is out of sight, will sink his vessel, 
 and all his share of honour and glory will be confined to a watery 
 grave, along with five or six hundred of his fellows, without having 
 the proud satisfaction of feeling that he has struck a blow for his 
 country ! Here, indeed, again is the dread slavery of Vulcan 
 displayed in its grimmest colours. 
 
 No longer the English knight puts on his armour and gaily 
 advances to the fray with his mistress* glove in his helmet, 
 trusting in his good cause and his strong right arm to earn death 
 or glory ! Perchance an evening paper may record that my Lord 
 Tom Noddy, incautiously cantering forward upon the staff of 
 
 General , was drilled through the heart with a Mauser bullet 
 
 proceeding from an unknown rifle at some distant spot which 
 was not located owing to the use of smokeless powder : or a 
 paragraph will explain that owing to the careless buoying of a 
 submarine mine that promising young officer, Captain Mont- 
 gomery, who but lately obtained command of the finest ship in 
 His Majesty's Service, was unfortunately torpedoed, or possibly 
 blown up by a submarine mine just as he was sighting the 
 enemies' ship in the offing, and was sunk with five hundred men 
 all told of various arms, causing a loss of between two and three 
 millions to the nation. If this is our boasted civilisation and 
 this the end to which our progress tends, for Heaven's sake let us 
 turn round and go backwards. If any redeeming feature could 
 be recorded in the manner of doing, the object attained or the 
 philosophy which dictates our course, there might be something
 
 358 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 to be said upon the other side ; but to drift like a cork upon the 
 sea of events and follow we know not whither the insane vagaries 
 of the high priests of Vulcan, each nation following its own blind 
 prophet's mark, is surely a most pitiful ambition. At the present 
 rate of progress it needs but to follow the lead of Vulcan and his 
 minions for a century more, for us to fight like water rats or 
 crabs at the bottom of the ocean, until the very stones will rise 
 and judge us, and the flat fish at the bottom of the sea will look 
 pityingly upon our vain efforts to rival them in their own element, 
 while the shrimps and lobsters will ask each other in their 
 moments of leisure whether the all-devouring monster man is at 
 last attempting to qualify himself " to be a man and a brother? " 
 
 Can any worse reproach be brought upon our so-called 
 civilisation than to think that we are breeding up men to value 
 their lives so lightly, and are able to purchase their degra- 
 dation at so cheap a price, that the sons of those who fought at 
 Trafalgar and Waterloo are not unwilling, for extra pay, to fight 
 the enemies of their country in a "submarine" like crabs and 
 shrimps upon the ocean floor, with nothing but a Japanese 
 mouse between themselves and eternity ! 
 
 It is true that from time to time a faint awakening of 
 national conscience is perceived, when solemn meetings in 
 deference to its more tender manifestations are held at the 
 Hague or Paris, and, wondrous to relate, resolutions are come 
 to, placing beyond the pale certain of the very latest devilries 
 of Vulcan, which are invariably adopted by the majority of 
 nations represented, in those cases where they find the advan- 
 tage is not on their side ; or otherwise, where the violence or 
 numerical military strength of the objector makes it dangerous 
 to resist, humble apologies are offered, and diplomatic polite- 
 nesses are exchanged without appreciable results. Thus dum- 
 dum bullets, for example, are unanimously tabooed, and Great 
 Britain brought to shame for her use of explosive bullets upon 
 inferior races, for the simple reason that such explosive 
 weapons had not been already adopted by the greater number 
 of nations represented at the conference. In all probability, if 
 another conference should chance to ventilate the question, the 
 dynamite-charged hand-grenades invented in their more deadly 
 modern form by the Japanese, and quickly adopted by the
 
 VULCAN IN WAE 352 
 
 Eussians by which the rifle-pits and trenches into which these 
 missiles are thrown become instantly converted into a heap of 
 mangled limbs wrenched from the sockets, and faces from which 
 every human semblance has departed will, if the same are not 
 already adopted by the other nations, be suppressed with a vast 
 show of indignation, while the majority, having recently spent 
 enormous sums in competing with each other for the very latest 
 dastardly invention for blowing up vessels in the dead of night, 
 will as surely escape all reproach or comment. 
 
 Let us never forget, and take pride as Englishmen in the 
 fact, that a hundred years ago our Parliament put the French to 
 shame by publicly disowning the acts of our Indian allies in the 
 great French War for the possession of Canada, denouncing the 
 atrocities committed by the Indians employed on the side of each 
 belligerent, and in a full house declaring that Englishmen would 
 have no act or part in carrying on war by means of midnight 
 slaughter, surprises, and such treacherous and murderous 
 methods as formed the staple of Indian fighting. Nevertheless, 
 let us also recollect, that if this marks the high water of 
 British pride and British humanity, it also proves the distanca 
 we have travelled on the down grade of incivilisation ; for, while 
 we read in our evening papers of the destructive effect of the new 
 dynamite-hand-grenade, and how, when used in the Kussian 
 trenches, instead of decent burial of the heroic defenders, all that 
 could be done was to sweep up the shreds of bone and flesh and 
 mangled limbs that marked the scene of the devastation, so far 
 from expressing horror at the scene and registering a vow that 
 such inhuman methods shall at all events be confined to Asiatic 
 nations, our engineers are already vexing their infernal brains to- 
 equal, or, if possible, better their example ! 
 
 I will not again repeat the tale of how, following blindly the 
 lead of the blind prophets of Vulcan, we have poisoned our seas r 
 which should, as in old England and in modern Japan, furnish 
 the chief food of our inhabitants by pouring out recklessly the 
 manurial products of the country, destined by Providence to- 
 quadruple our food output, and nourish our ever-growing popula- 
 tion, into every creek, estuary and river of our land, thereby 
 filling our oyster beds with typhoid and diphtheria, driving our 
 shore fish further and further afield, and, crowning disaster of all r
 
 360 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 using our entire resources of pure fresh drinking water to carry 
 the foul flood to the sea upon its death-dealing errand ! Nor 
 eed I advert, with more than a passing mention, to the reckless 
 folly with which Gladstonian - versus - Disraelian - Competition 
 has placed the balance of power in the bands of a town-dwelling 
 artisan class divorced from the soil and interested solely in the 
 uninterrupted enjoyment of cheap foreign food, so that every 
 measure which might be devised, protective or preferential, for 
 the improvement and reinforcement of agriculture, and the 
 increase of our food supplies, is, unlike in any other civilised 
 country, a task too dangerous for any government to face. 
 Hence an impoverishment of our supply of strong, healthy men 
 fit to fight for their country, and the deterioration of the fine 
 old breed of British mas-tiffs, who defied the power of France 
 and Spain in days of yore. 
 
 Can we derive any satisfaction moreover from a survey of the 
 human products of our boasted Civilisation ? Shall we be 
 comforted by seeing the hobbledehoys who emerge from the 
 distasteful confinement of city-den or noisome workshop at the 
 evening hour with unkempt hair, grimy sallow faces and shamb- 
 ling gait, to sally forth an hour later, cigarette in mouth, leaning 
 upon the arm of a long-legged precocious, over-dressed hussy, 
 making night hideous with their snatches of music-hall songs or 
 cockney repartee, or, if time and money serve, scrambling in 
 at the end of a " gallery-tail " ; or, on a Bank Holiday, dragging 
 the same feminine appendages, who not infrequently tower 
 above their " apology-for-an-escort " in a manner that suggests 
 female rather than male protection, in the third-class carriage 
 of a cheap excursion train bent on airing at seaside or 
 remote country spots the flaunting vulgarity of the London 
 streets ! Or again, is it consoling to observe the habits of the 
 adult working-man, for whom the British tax-payer has been 
 compelled to make such fruitless sacrifices during the past thirty 
 years : who too often spends half his last wages on a Saturday 
 night without thought of the morrow, and whose painfully 
 acquired smattering of unsuitable knowledge, obtained at the 
 public expense, is on leaving school instantly thrown aside in 
 the vast majority of cases, leaving not a trace behind ; whose im- 
 provement, except in the matter of greater pretentiousness of
 
 OUR CIVILISATION 361 
 
 dress, is confined to the ability to skim the Daily Mail or painfully 
 spell out the police reports of Lloyd's or Reynolds', and whose 
 powers of association, which constitute the only direction in 
 which he displays any mental energy, are entirely directed to 
 increase the pay and lower the quality of his work ! Or shall 
 we pride ourselves upon the improvement effected in his woman- 
 kind, who, through cheap education which seems to serve the 
 sole purpose of engendering distaste for work of any sort, sub- 
 stitutes for the home-made clothing suitable to their rank and 
 work, the ready-made flimsy finery, and for food the cheap ready- 
 made patent-mixtures gathered from every corner of the earth, 
 tempered with artificially-whitened bread and dubious tea, which 
 we owe to our boasted advance in chemistry and transport, 
 instead of the good old English beef and honest beer and bread 
 which won us the fields of Cre9y, Poitiers and Agincourt ! 
 
 Or shall we take pride to see my Lord Tom Noddy, who, after 
 an expensive course of education, to which all the wisdom in the 
 world is supposed to contribute, is understood, as far as he can 
 articulate, to divide his views upon life between what he dis- 
 approves of, to which he applies the elegant term of " Rot," and 
 what he likes, such as golf, polo, or pheasant-shooting, which he 
 describes as " awfully jolly " who refers usually to his public 
 duties as a " fag," and his civic duties and obligations generally 
 as a " grind " ; or who, if condemned by family practice to 
 the painful exertion of taking a seat in the Lower House while 
 awaiting his hereditary privilege to determine the affairs of the 
 nation in the Upper, is usually understood to deplore his fate 
 with (for him) most unusual emphasis, upon the ground that the 
 Council of the Nation has greatly deteriorated by containing a 
 larger selection of pushing, thrusting business-men drawn from 
 every class, instead of being as formerly the most gentlemanly 
 and easy-going club in Europe, 
 
 Or again, can we derive any contentment from the appear- 
 ance of our towns ? In the North of England the very air is 
 obscured and the trees and corn perish under the poisonous 
 fumes of the glass and chemical factories, while in the Midlands 
 whole tracts of country are blackened with grime and covered 
 with the refuse and slag of the adjoining mines, and the distant 
 views, obscured in part by the thick smoke which hangs in the
 
 362 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 damp air and is only dissipated by a gale of unusual severity, are 
 disfigured by the tall chimneys and hideous external marks of 
 Machinery and Modern Progress. Wherever a beautiful valley 
 delighted once the eye, so surely now a hideous viaduct, like 
 a box planted athwart, spans the once-smiling space the 
 shriek of the locomotives and the rattle of the waggons disturb 
 the summer air and pain the ear, while even the eye, which 
 would fain rest on pleasant fields, and rural scenes, where 
 formerly one could at least commune with nature " far from the 
 madding crowd " is now distracted with hideous advertisements 
 setting forth the merits of Pears' Soap or warning him against 
 the consequences of neglecting Beecham's Pills. 
 
 Nor need we penetrate into the gloomy recesses of the Lan- 
 cashire and Yorkshire manufacturing towns with their eternal 
 smoke and fog, their deafening clatter of hammer and shuttle, 
 their tall warehouses blackened with foul mists, their dull, dark 
 streets filled with noisome smells and sounds, and their popu- 
 lation, pallid and yellow, bent, deformed and sickly, lifeless and 
 listless in their grimy rags as if oppressed by the dark shades of 
 Pluto, from whose dens they emerge in the intervals of their 
 toil ; let us turn rather to London, the premier city of the world, 
 the seat of the wealth, the rank, the beauty and power of our 
 world-wide Empire. There too our senses are painfully assailed 
 by the hideous sounds that proceed from a thousand objects 
 all vying with each other in unpleasantness and ugliness, 
 the discordant shriek of the steam whistle mingling with the 
 rattle of omnibus, lorry or tramcar, each crowded with loathsome 
 advertisements of every hue and form, varied by the dismal hoot 
 of the motor-car, foul bird of ill-omen, closely followed by a deadly 
 stench which Styx itself can scarcely rival, or Erebus produce. 
 Or, as we strain our eyes for some pleasant object in the 
 distance, our vision is curtailed by the dense fog of winter or 
 the brown haze filled with minute particles of straw which 
 rises in summer from the wooden pavements ; and we a,re 
 doomed to feast our souls upon the dull monotony of the 
 hideous rows of houses, or rather of walls with holes in them 
 for doors and windows, alternating with vast spaces under con- 
 struction where unsightly hoardings display a discordant jungle 
 of advertising imbecility, profanity or indeceney. Or if the
 
 OUR CIVILISATION 363 
 
 eye, painfully seeking rest, endeavours to gain a glimpse of 
 Heaven above, it will surely rest upon a perplexing network of 
 telegraph and telephone wires s chimney pots and smoke abaters 
 of every shape that can be invented to rack the human brain or 
 eye, while the few trees here and there where nature is a 1 lowed 
 to exert its beneficent influence, are, except in midsummer, black, 
 dreary, and forbidding, as is our own boasted Civilisation. 
 
 Is it our dress that can assuage our aesthetic irritation or 
 convince us that perchance in some details we have not gone 
 wholly backwards, but are still enabled to lay claim to progress 
 in the right direction ? Having in male costume arrived at the 
 conviction that nothing exceeds in appropriateness or beauty 
 the horizontal section of a stove pipe fit emblem of our modern 
 civilisation we have this hundred years and more tenaciously 
 clung to that eccentric form of headgear along with the cus- 
 tomary frock-coat and the leg-bags we term trousers, confessedly 
 as ill-suited for displaying the perfections of the human frame, 
 but at the same time as cunningly adapted for the conceal- 
 ment of their deficiencies, as any garments invented since the 
 Fall. Not content, moreover, with nourishing these horrors in 
 our midst, by virtue of our enormous trade we scatter these 
 strange blessings throughout the globe, and, with a fervour sur- 
 passing our missionary zeal, supplant the more suitable and 
 picturesque dress of savage and Oriental alike by the introduc- 
 tion of the stove-pipe hat, the tight-fitting varnished boot, the 
 black frock-coat and dusky trousers of our gloomy civilisation. 
 
 It is a significant fact, that when our oracles of the Press 
 think fit to enlighten us by glancing at our progress, or whenever 
 our statesmen or our politicians set themselves to tickle our vanity 
 upon the platform, they rarely, if ever, compliment us upon our 
 growing wisdom, virtue, or culture, but reserve all their eloquence 
 to describe our growing wealth ! They tell us how our income- 
 tax produces yearly more and more ; how our Post Office returns 
 testify to our increasing prosperity, and they pelt us with 
 statistics about our imports exceeding our exports, and such- like 
 phenomena, which they describe as highly gratifying and satis- 
 factory ! What a truly British picture ! On one hand, the 
 vampires of the Press much like the doctor who, while feeling a 
 millionaire's pulse, is considering how many guineas he is likely to
 
 364 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 extract from his patient's pouch smack their lips as they 
 appraise the fortune and dog the doings of the latest schemer 
 from " The Band " in anticipation of tasting his blood, gleefully 
 reckoning up each addition to their ranks as a fresh victim upon 
 which to fasten their fangs while, on the other hand, the hungry 
 politicians, not unlike a butcher who tenderly feels his fat 
 bullocks one by one, and surveys them with an air of grim com- 
 placency, turning over in his mind their various " points " and 
 considering at what date they will be fit for killing, cynically 
 regard the British public, not so much in the light of human 
 beings, as subjects for further taxation according as their collec- 
 tive profits become greater or less. Surely no foreign satirist 
 need exaggerate the unconscious humour of such a tale as this ! 
 We pride ourselves no longer on being " merry and wise," just, 
 prudent, pious, truthful, valiant, healthy or strong, but upon 
 rearing in our midst an ever-increasing stock of plutocrats bursting 
 like ticks with the product of their fellow-countrymen's labour ! 
 Such are the fruits of our modern civilisation I 
 
 The wise old Greek and Indian philosophers, two thousand 
 years ago and more, cudgelled their brains to find out the 
 " summum bonuin," the be-all-and-end-all of existence. Thank 
 Heaven no such lot is ours. For now we know from the lips of 
 all that is highest and wisest in the land, that the supreme test 
 of civilisation is the accumulation of pelf. And here once more 
 we perceive an instance of that strange British habit which I take 
 to descend as straight from the cant of our Puritan forefathers as 
 rain from the clouds, viz. that tendency to publicly maintain by 
 precept and example systems and practices which we privately 
 abhor. For which of us shall lay his hand upon his heart, and, 
 looking round him, assert that we are better or wiser than we 
 were before we were inoculated by the microbe of modern so- 
 called progress and civilisation ? 
 
 But where shall we fix the date of our inoculation ? Shall it be 
 since we first made a god of Vulcan, who by steam, electricity, 
 submarines, torpedoes, and other diabolical inventions claims his 
 hecatomb of yearly victims, and poisons the land with the fumes 
 of his workshops and the air with his smoky chimneys? Or shall 
 we say before the deadly era of statistics, when nations were free 
 to work out their own salvation in their own way in the fear of
 
 VULCAN IN WAE 365 
 
 the Lord, and the accursed race of politicians had not yet learnt 
 to put bit and bridle in their jaws to drive them to their own 
 perdition in the mad race of competition and insane over- 
 production ? Or shall we say since kings and statesmen for their 
 own selfish ends learnt to make barrack-yards of their countries, 
 keeping half their male population under arms, like wolf-dogs in 
 the leash, ever ready to hurl them upon a foe, and with an irony 
 still more bitter, grinding their families to the verge of starvation 
 in order to make them pay the cost of their own enslavement, 
 by teaching them the lying tale that the country demands the 
 sacrifice, while in truth and fact they merely serve to gratify 
 their rulers' pride ? Yet of such is our boasted civilisation made 
 up ! These be thy gods, O Israel ! 
 
 Or who, again I ask, in camp or smoking-room, in public-house 
 or drawing-room, in parlour or in workshop, will venture in the 
 privacy of friendship or in the society of his fellows to assert 
 that all is well with us, and has no misgivings as to the 
 route laid down, or the direction in which we travel ? Or which 
 of us in private life would say that men are happier now, or more 
 contented with their lot, or have more faith and trust in Provi- 
 dence, or that they talk more earnestly and soberly or discourse 
 more wisely in pulpit or Press, in magazine or pamphlet ; that 
 there is more wit or learning in discourse, more eloquence in 
 Parliament, more sincerity in politicians, more honesty in lawyers, 
 more truthfulness in tradesmen, more trustworthiness in servants,, 
 more purity in woman, or more filial respect in children so far 
 as can be learnt in book or story than in days of yore ? Nay, 
 do we not, day by day and hour by hour, in Press or pulpit, 
 market-place, tap-room, or ball-room, hear the same unending cry 
 that we are going from bad to worse, that our education is a failure 
 and our civilisation a lie ? Progress we certainly have, but is it 
 upwards or downwards? there's the rub! That we go faster 
 through the air in express trains, motor cars, or what not, cannot 
 be denied ; nor is it unlikely that we shall soon add balloons to 
 our experiences of quick travelling ! But " Oui bono ? " That is 
 the question ! For if we are not the arbiters of our own destiny, 
 but permit ourselves in these days of multiplied associations and 
 limited companies to be hurried along at the bidding of our new 
 gods, whether Vulcan or Pluto I care not, without our express
 
 366 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 desire, intention, or consent, then surely we are abdicating our 
 manhood, and are falling lower than the beasts of the field. Or 
 do we elect to be the mere slaves of momentum and gravitation 
 like the astral bodies, and being once for all intimately persuaded 
 that in this world " pace is everything," suffer ourselves to be 
 projected like sky rockets, telegraphic messages, or comets, at 
 the highest possible velocity, we know not whither ! and when 
 told, like children, by the inventors of each novelty in turn, " that 
 we ought to like it if we don't," we tamely swallow the specious 
 tale, and hold our tongues, suffering, in the cause of Vulcan and 
 Pluto, whose minions wax fat and thrive on our simplicity, more 
 ills and torture than we should be willing to undergo for the 
 Christ Whom we falsely profess to follow? 
 
 Or are we to find consolation in our motor cars and motor 
 'buses, which claim their yearly hectacomb of victims and fill our 
 highways with dust and fetid stench to gratify the tastes of the 
 idle rich, who lyingly tell us that it is a " valuable industry " 
 and a national boon, in order to fill the land with foreigners and 
 foreign productions, paid for with English gold?
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 THE " BOUNDER-ON-A-BOILER " 
 
 THE road pest of earlier days was the " scorching fiend " who 
 scoured the country-side as well as the suburbs of London, 
 darted past your leaders, or swished past your carriage, un- 
 seating the unused equestrian and unnerving deaf old ladies in 
 the roadway by a sudden whistle, or the still more irritating 
 insult of a sudden blast blown in their ears. The comic papers 
 I recollect gave, in their free-and-easy way, the descriptive 
 title of a Cad on Castors to these objectionable beings. 
 
 The pest of to-day, however, is the Bounder -on-a-Boiler. 
 
 Whether we look at him in the concrete, as an evil-smelling, 
 oily, grimy individual with dusty hair and goggles a cross 
 between a German Professor and a bewitched miller or at his 
 female companions, even more unpleasant to look at if possible 
 than himself, or dwell upon the ludicrous incongruity of his 
 noisy, stinking boiler on wheels, and its amazing ugliness, or 
 consider him in the abstract as a ridiculous person always in a 
 hurry to get to nowhere in particular, it is difficult to say 
 whether the whole turnout is most offensive to the eye, ear, 
 nose or the aesthetic perceptions of the impartial spectator. 
 
 By what means the Bounder-on-a-boiler came to be firmly 
 seated on our backs like an " old man of the sea " it needs no 
 ghost come from the grave to tell us. In Anglosaxondom, when- 
 ever in doubt, it is safe to guess that money is at the root of the 
 mystery. In plain English, Bribery has doubtless brought us 
 to this pass : for I have too much faith in the sanity of my 
 fellow-countrymen to suppose that members of Parliament would 
 have chosen the moment that foreign commercial methods are, 
 according to Mr. Chamberlain, on the point of overwhelming 
 British Trade, to sell their country to the foreigner and fill the 
 country with foreign stokers, engineers, drivers, and machinery, 
 were they not highly paid to do so. All that can with any 
 certainty be ascertained is that motors were suddenly and
 
 368 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 surreptitiously empowered to set all the reasonable laws of the 
 highway use at defiance, and make a railway track of the public 
 roads, to the great annoyance of horse and foot-users thereof, by 
 virtue of an Act of Parliament which varied and abrogated the 
 existing law confining steam carriages to a maximum of 4 miles 
 an hour. 
 
 Of course, like true British patriots, they must have highflown 
 reasons to explain and justify their conduct and these they 
 duly flourished with tongue in cheek and complimentary fully- 
 paid shares in foreign Motor Cos., swelling the pockets of their 
 overcoats. Lying is ever the handmaiden of bribery all the 
 world over I beg your pardon, hon. gentlemen, I meant to say 
 (more Anglico) Imagination ever waits on Beneficence ! (and 
 bank-notes, or fully paid shares, on both !) Rule Britannia I 
 
 The first and most popular mis-statement used by these 
 gentry was to the effect that to introduce a flood of foreign 
 motor drivers, mechanics, and engineers, supplanting a like 
 number of Englishmen and filling up the country with foreign 
 untaxed machinery and manufactured stuff paid for by British 
 gold was to be the salvation of British Trade and the next, 
 well whopper, was that if hon. gentlemen ! (Save the mark !) 
 refused to set the foreign motor going on British soil they would 
 nip a valuable British Industry (which did not exist !) in the bud ! 
 
 From that time to this the foreigner has swallowed up the 
 lion's share of the nation's " luxury surplus " (which would 
 otherwise have been spent on British horsebreeders, dealers, 
 farmers, saddlers and coachbuilders), and the country is flooded 
 with non-producing and most objectionable aliens of the worst 
 type from all parts of Europe. Such English mechanics as are 
 admitted, merely desert other branches of skilled labour, which 
 are thereby displaced or superseded without any corresponding 
 national advantage. And to what end ? why, of course, to enable 
 my Lord Tom Noddy and Mr. Plantagenet Brown, M.P., to brace 
 his nerves and ward off the spleen, by going " there and back " 
 at 40 miles an hour, to the annoyance of the reasonable users of 
 the highways, poisoning the pure country air with his stench 
 and dust, heralding his approach by an unmusical and offensive 
 screech, and parading his ridiculous disguise to the disgust of 
 the rural population.
 
 THE "BOUNDEK-ON-A-BOILEK" 369' 
 
 Now no one can reasonably object to such engines of self 
 and other destruction being used in their proper place, any more 
 than one would object to the Holyhead express going 80 miles 
 an hour on its appointed track. Indeed, my own private opinion 
 has always been that Alpine climbing, motor racing and 
 ballooning are merely nature's efforts to expel otherwise ob- 
 jectionable elements from our midst. 
 
 There can, however, be little doubt that Motormania involves 
 a more complete and greater waste of national wealth than 
 any known amusement or luxury. The Motor Kegister of 
 the United States for 1906 shows that out of 121,309 cars, 
 thus far registered, 40,000 or, practically, one-third, have 
 been disused or sent already to the scrapheap ! By the same 
 ratio it may be fairly argued that 1 in 3 motors in good 
 order on 1st January, 1906, are already worn out, smashed 
 or otherwise inutilised by September 1st of the same year. 
 Thus, supposing English motors (as some estimate them) to 
 be 35,000 in number, in full working, on 1st January, 1906, 
 there would be 11,066 condemned or incapacitated by 1st 
 September of the same year, and putting 500 as the average 
 figure paid to foreigners upon each of them, out of 17 
 millions sterling paid out of the country mainly to foreign work- 
 men, about 5f millions would represent an absolute loss of 
 national wealth to England, plus a relative loss to her trade by 
 benefit to her competitors' trade abroad, plus a relative loss by 
 displacement of her own kindred trades, which the said amount, 
 spent in idle luxury, would otherwise have benefited to a like 
 extent. 
 
 Two arguments were advanced and two only, as far as my 
 memory serves me, in favour of throwing open the highways to 
 motors. 
 
 1. Motoring promises, as abroad, to become a valuable 
 Industry, therefore why nip it in the bud ? 
 
 2. They " motor " abroad, therefore why not in England ? 
 
 As for the first argument, it would seem by the above, in the 
 light of the facts above stated, that "the Motoring Industry" 
 must be regarded as a servile, venal and altogether unpatriotic 
 introduction into this country of a flood of competitive trade, oi 
 foreign tax-free materials, and highly objectionable aliens. 
 BB
 
 370 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 In regard to the second argument, the fact that it was 
 seriously advanced furnishes an amazing specimen of British 
 stupidity, which cannot but impress foreigners deeply. 
 
 It is difficult to decide which notion is most repulsive to 
 British patriotic pride, to perpetrate a breach in the most 
 valued rights of Englishmen upon the plea of copying the 
 foreigner, or to ignore the essential difference between our island 
 and the Continent of Europe. 
 
 The most cursory knowledge of England and the Continent 
 would enable any one of ordinary intelligence or honesty to 
 remark that for motoring purposes the conditions are not only 
 dissimilar but even the antipodes of each other. 
 
 The dullest traveller by rail from Dover to Brussels or Paris 
 cannot but notice that our highways are rarely if ever straight, 
 but curve and wind about and often suddenly narrow to a mere 
 lane, even in the very suburbs of our Metropolis; secondly, 
 they are usually, unless lately widened, far narrower than is 
 common abroad ; thirdly, generally closely beset with hedges and 
 trees, blocking all but immediate view ; and fourthly, in most 
 parts of the South of England, deeply set and consequently 
 running between high banks which prevent all look-out ahead : 
 while the principal highways of the Continent, being mainly 
 intended for the safe transport of troops and materials, are con- 
 spicuously the reverse. It follows that if logic and reason 
 ever prevailed in England where money is concerned, national 
 common-sense would have saved the situation, by virtue of the 
 simple argument that no country on earth is less adapted to 
 rapid road-travel than ours. But that is not all. Our land 
 being far more densely populated, and railways traversing it 
 in every sense, the danger at every point to inhabitants here is 
 far greater, and there is far less pretext for making use of motors 
 instead of railways, than there is in any Continental country. 
 
 The most striking feature of this innovation over and above 
 its unsuitability as above demonstrated, is undoubtedly its 
 Illegality, in the sense of being an unjustifiable invasion of one 
 of the most cherished and widely-spread rights enjoyed by 
 Britons of all classes, age and sex. 
 
 If I am told that this Act, being once entered on the 
 Statute Book, cannot be properly termed illegal, then I return
 
 THE " BOUNDEK-ON-A-BOILEK " 371 
 
 once more to the common charges brought against my country- 
 men, that there are no rights in England however sacred which 
 are not at the mercy of a Catch- Vote in a thin House expressly 
 packed with red-hot partisans ; and secondly, that the vast 
 majority of Britons are too unpatriotic and indifferent to 
 provide effective checks to this evil, or, indeed, care to place 
 anything whatever out of reach of party vote or party passion, 
 but cheerfully acquiesce in a condition of things, which, 
 to all other civilised nations, seems fraught with the gravest 
 peril. Beyond and above the special unsuitability of the 
 Motoring Facility Act (as I may call it) to this particular country, 
 and its Illegality, or if the purists prefer, its gross and uncalled- 
 for invasion of our road rights, which must surely be reckoned 
 among the most ancient as they certainly are the most valued 
 of our civil rights there remains the question of Eeasonableness. 
 For when the earliest and most cherished right of a people is 
 threatened, if not superseded, it surely behoves the innovators in 
 all cases to prove abounding and undeniable grounds of public 
 utility. Can any such be advanced in favour of this new invader 
 of the highways ? 
 
 The idle rich, who appear to principally favour, abet and 
 uphold motors, and unquestionably own at least nine out of ten 
 of those now on the road, can scarcely plead pressing business 
 as an excuse for the excessive speed which forms the principal 
 count of my indictment, since their sole object is to enable 
 themselves or their female companions to promote their 
 digestion, or brace up nerves and stomachs worn out with 
 overeating and underworking, by going " there and back " at 
 forty miles an hour. 
 
 I freely admit that it may be pleasant for a drunken or 
 half-tamed savage to dash through peaceful English villages in 
 the dead of night, making night hideous with glare of electric 
 light, and blare of fog horn, now waking the slumbering 
 villagers and spreading dismay among quietly browsing herds, 
 now terrifying belated old women or sleepy carters in the deep 
 dark lanes almost, indeed, if not quite as amusing, as to run 
 amok like a Malay maddened with hashish or tumpek, without 
 the inevitable penalty of death to end up with. Death, do I 
 say ? Oh, dear, no ! We English are far too civilised too
 
 372 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 up-to-date for such brutal methods. We must not shoot down a 
 motor-maniac like a mad dog, even if he acts precisely in the 
 same manner: for he is under special legal protection. Who 
 knows he may possibly be a Scotch premier, "going a-golfing," 
 or a German prince in a hurry for his dinner ! 
 
 I submit we have no room for drunken or half-tamed savages 
 here. Besides, we grow plenty of our own in all conscience 
 without importing them from abroad. Nor does it seem exactly 
 reasonable to provide them with legal engines of mischief like 
 80 h.p. motors, or airships with grapnels hanging at the end of a 
 ship's cable. Not that I would for a moment insinuate that 
 every man who drives a motor is necessarily a drunken savage, 
 but what I do emphatically assert is that every drunken, reckless 
 savage is most assuredly a motorist. 
 
 Similarly, in explanation of my heading, though every man who 
 bestrides a boiler is not necessarily a bounder, none will dare to 
 deny that every bounder who can possibly raise the money will 
 infallibly bestride a boiler. And herein lies the special danger. 
 The wild reckless drunkard or ruffian of other days would ride 
 down the weak and inoffensive occupants of the King's highway 
 on horseback, and his latter-day counterpart in my younger 
 days would still sometimes terrorise quiet travellers as they 
 swooped along the roads in roystering parties on their stealthy 
 bikes in the dusk of evening, spreading terror among the peaceful 
 community. But at any rate such men from the nature of things 
 were necessarily fairly sober, or if overcome by liquor were 
 speedily revived by the fresh air and rapid movement and the 
 violence of their exertions ; and in the second place a horse or bike 
 implies sound health, good nerves and courage. Your motor 
 obviously requires none of these things, while it supplies pre- 
 cisely the fillip which the drunkard or debauchee demands in 
 order to complete his equipment, and make his happiness com- 
 plete. Besides, your true out-and-out ruffian is nearly always 
 cowardly and cruel, and your broken-down debauchee, or self- 
 indulgent sot, who has no longer the nerve or pluck to sit a horse 
 or bike, can still give full play to his vicious instincts. He can 
 loll back in the luxurious cushions of his 80-horse power Mors or 
 Daimler, urging the foreign miscreant who holds the wheel to 
 " drive like hell, and scatter the yokels ! if we flatten out a
 
 THE "BOUNDER-ON-A-BOILER" 373 
 
 few of them we shall only have to pay a hundred or two apiece 
 they don't imprison people for running over them, thank 
 goodness, as they do in your own country, Gaston." Such 
 are the ipsissima verba of a late Welsh Railway Contractor, as 
 reported to me by a reliable witness* 
 
 If any one disputes my proposition, will he dare to deny 
 that Tiberius or Nero, if they were now alive, would most 
 assuredly have delighted in flattening out their subjects in a 
 80 h.p. motor ! 
 
 Lastly, are motorists entitled by reason of urgent need to race 
 upon the highway, while the horseman or pedestrian is very 
 properly debarred from similar pastimes on the grounds of 
 public danger? Certainly not. The overwhelming majority 
 of motors are owned and used as a tonic, an appetiser, rather 
 than a means of locomotion, by the idlest of the idle rich, who 
 do not so much mount a motor because they want to go any- 
 where in particular, but go there and back, because they have 
 a motor and nothing else to do. Finally, they go as fast as they 
 dare, according to their (usually Dutch) courage, partly because 
 their female companions "love it" and partly because it's so 
 " awfully-jolly don't yer know," and not unfrequently for the 
 more practical reason that they want to get home for dinner or 
 supper. 
 
 And such are British ideas of fairness and justice, at least 
 among our legislators, that we landowners and farmers may be 
 ere long double and triple taxed (though guiltless of motors 
 ourselves) to provide roads for drunken and other male and 
 female bounders out of the Metropolis to travel over, deface, 
 and destroy, because forsooth " We can't do without our 100-mile 
 spin in and out once a day, don't yer know." 
 
 In corroboration of the proposition I lay down, " that while 
 there may be motorists who are not bounders, none will dispute 
 that every bounder is a motorist," I open the Standard of to-day, 
 August 16th, 1906, as a fair average specimen of the new perils 
 to which peaceable road-users are exposed, and read, " Mr. 
 Threestars Hennesey, of Tiptree Hall, Northampton, was at 
 Malvern Sessions yesterday fined 6 and costs for driving a 
 motor car in a reckless fashion in Wells Eoad, Malvern. An 
 expert said the speed was 40 miles an hour." A little further
 
 374 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 down I read under the heading, " Thief's Lavish Expenditure " : 
 " F. L., a German, was brought up on remand for sentence 
 at Newington Police Court. . . . Inspector Simmonds said 
 F. L. had committed jewel thefts at fashionable hotels in the 
 States, and after the robbery at the Langham Hotel spent 160 
 in six days entertaining his friends to champagne luncheons, and 
 motor drives " (of course !). Verbum sapientibus, 
 
 When motors were first loosed upon a peaceful community by 
 a group of " able and disinterested legislators " (whose names 
 and portraits I should be glad to possess in order to compare 
 them with those that adorn the Chamber of Horrors at Mme. 
 Tussaud's), it was commonly asserted by those who defended 
 this outrage of popular rights that at any rate they would be a 
 godsend to road-makers and a relief to ratepayers, inasmuch as it 
 was obvious there would be less abrasion, less contusion, and 
 consequently a greatly diminished road-repair bill to pay. Will 
 it be believed that experience has demonstrated the very reverse 
 to be the case ! and according to the universal opinion of County 
 Surveyors in all parts of the country, the injury done by motors 
 is said to be far greater than that done by any horsed vehicle ! ! 
 The Kent County Council Surveyor estimates the annual upkeep 
 of many of his roads to have been doubled since motors have been 
 in common use. Another County Council Surveyor declares 
 " they strip the top coat of a road like a wet steam-roller." 
 
 This seems, therefore, to knock away the last prop from 
 under a rotten concern. There remains only for motorists to 
 say, " We've got the law, we've got the leave, we've got the 
 money too, and if we haven't the reason on our side we certainly 
 have the laugh." And they have. 
 
 If I shed so much ink upon a falling cause it is not with 
 a view to convert my friends of the boiler-bounding persuasion 
 so much as to impress upon the countless majority of "In- 
 differents " the iniquity of a small minority of the idle rich, 
 prostituting one of the oldest and most valued legal rights of the 
 people to their own selfish purposes. For manifestly, if they 
 want fast road travelling, let them have it and welcome just 
 as one may fairly say to the balloonists, "For heaven's sake 
 go and discover the North Pole or anything else that wants 
 discovering, but don't go fooling about among our roofs dragging
 
 THE " BOUNDER-ON-A-BOILER " 375 
 
 off slates and chimney-pots with your grapnels, as is your 
 favourite pastime." 
 
 I am entirely in favour of races for motor-maniacs and 
 plenty of them, upon their own racecourses. My objection 
 to their habits is not theoretic or academic, it is purely social 
 and legal. The oldest and most primitive right of English- 
 men is to enjoy freely without molestation the public highways, 
 where all may pass to and fro on foot or horseback, or on wheels, 
 at such a pace as may not cause danger or annoyance. Horse 
 racing has been always very properly tabooed wherever attempted, 
 upon the same grounds, and yet we are expected to quietly 
 endure the transplantation of the locomotive from the railway 
 track to the people's highway, and what is more, to what is too 
 often the people's children's only playground ! 
 
 We all remember reading how fifty years ago there were " old 
 fogeys " without number, who publicly and privately opposed the 
 introduction of railways, but I never read that there were any 
 in those days who were selfish, ignorant or impudent enough to 
 promote a bill for running their new-fangled engines upon the 
 King's highway. Yet it has come to this. The more's the pity. 
 
 To recapitulate, my indictment is just this. To admit steam 
 carriages to exceed the pace limits of horse traffic is, (1) to 
 confer special rights upon new comers, to the detriment of the 
 old ; (2) to seriously mulct, annoy, endanger and damnify users 
 thereof and dwellers near by, and is consequently a gross out- 
 rage and an invasion of the civil rights of Englishmen. 
 
 Motors increase road rates, they afford a ready weapon for the 
 reckless and ill-disposed, they waste national wealth, they cause 
 millions to be paid to our foreign trade competitors, they father 
 the foreigner at our own expense, they are a real danger to 
 children and deaf old folks, and a curse to people with families 
 living by roadsides. They damage roadside crops and greatly 
 annoy roadside dwellers by their dust and noisome stench. They 
 frighten people at night and young horses at all times with their 
 glare and groans, and finally serve no end, for the most part, but 
 to amuse the idle rich. 
 
 If the aggrieved and insulted majority tamely submit to this 
 oppression on the part of the ruling classes, why, then, our 
 ancient British spirit must indeed be broken !
 
 376 ABB WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 However hopeless it may seem to roll back the tide at this 
 time of day it may surely be allowable to add that even 
 supposing we English are doomed through the stupidity, or worse, 
 of our representatives in Parliament to have motors, like the 
 poor, always with us, in spite of our land being the only one for 
 which motors are utterly unsuitable and therefore a source of 
 perpetual danger only a peculiarly stupid people would neglect 
 to use every ordinary means, such as must suggest themselves to 
 every rational being, for abating the evil by minimising danger 
 and securing detection. 
 
 Now, everyone knows that our wiseacres have thought fit 
 to place their Numbers precisely where they are usually, when 
 travelling fast, enveloped in a cloud of dust and consequently 
 invisible. When motors are used for burglary or other illegal 
 acts, as they frequently are, a great coat or shawl thrown over 
 the back of the car effectively conceals identity, and secures 
 complete protection from prying eyes. Clearly then, nothing could 
 be simpler than to compel them to put their numbers upon a 
 high stanchion or support or if the car be covered erected on 
 the roof after the manner of roof advertisements. 
 
 In the direction of minimising danger from run-over accidents 
 and collisions obviously, a statute compelling motors to 
 exchange their present bellicose and ramlike form for the more 
 domestic semblance of an india-rubber portable bath-tub or a 
 diver in full costume by surrounding their wings, forepart and 
 sides, with a padded or inflated rubber fence carried down to the 
 ground, or a semi-circular cow-catcher well lined and padded 
 for catching up dogs and babies and pigs, etc., without injury 
 much would be done to propitiate public opinion and conciliate 
 opposition. If motorists object to the foregoing obvious remedies 
 for an acknowledged evil, upon the grounds of disfigurement and 
 expense, let me hasten to assure them that nothing can con- 
 ceivably, in non-motoring eyes, spoil the appearance of the average 
 motor or add to their ugliness while the cost of reducing 
 motors to comparative harmlessness must be a fleabite when 
 set against the cost entailed upon the County Bates and Police 
 in the vain endeavour to confine their outrages on the public 
 within reasonable limits !
 
 CHAPTEE XXXI 
 
 THE DECLINE OF EESPECT FOK WOMAN 
 
 I HAVE in an earlier chapter glanced at the decline of woman's 
 influence from the high respect in which she was once held by our 
 remote Teutonic ancestors in the forests of mid-Europe, but I am 
 tempted once more to return to the theme in order to point out 
 the striking similarity in our modern life with the leading features 
 of the declining days of old Borne. 
 
 It is impossible to deny the singular resemblance between our 
 own modern peculiarities and those of pagan Rome in its later 
 days as set down in the pages of its own chroniclers, or in the 
 terrible arraignment of Holy Writ in the mystical language of the 
 Apocalypse. These signs or marks are, first, the growing 
 degradation of woman ; secondly, excessive luxury ; thirdly, the 
 carrying of productions of their commerce to every part of the 
 world ; fourthly, attracting all nations of the earth by her wealth 
 and splendour ; and fifthly, the cruelty of her people as mystically 
 foreshadowed in the Book of Eevelation by the scarlet woman 
 (which was Babylon) devouring her own flesh, that is, being eaten 
 up by her own children. And if this was true of old Eome which 
 is no more, and of Babylon its prototype before that, is it not 
 surely time to take heed lest we, too, of whom it can be truly said 
 that all nations come and worship before us, shall at last excite 
 the anger of the nations of the earth till the ten horns of the 
 beast (which are ten kingdoms) (who knows, perhaps, our own 
 Colonies ?) " shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her 
 flesh and burn her with fire "? 
 
 We are apt to be deceived by the more important position 
 occupied by woman in these days in the external affairs of life, 
 her more assured position in regard to the control of her own 
 business, and her greater share in the business of life, into the 
 belief that the esteem and regard in which she is held in the 
 England of to-day is greater than that of five hundred years ago. 
 But this is precisely one of the most dangerous fallacies that ever 
 beset the human mind. It is in great measure the retrogression
 
 378 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 in our views of woman's purpose, mission, and sphere of action, 
 which causes our women of to-day to seek a desperate channel for 
 their activities and a means of escape from the ills of their position 
 by invading the province of man and competing with him in the 
 unsexing arena of physical labour and public strife. And whence 
 comes this desire on the part of women ? Not certainly of its own 
 accord as the natural prompting of their own breasts ; but as the 
 result of the keen competition for life which animates them in 
 common with all human creatures, and which in an ever-increasing 
 degree through the injustice and falseness of our civilization, tends 
 to deprive millions of women of their means of support and pro- 
 tection, and like the ugly blundering machine which it is, tends 
 more and more to crush out the weakest, and oppress all who are 
 unable to resist its cruel and unequal pressure. 
 
 It is this blundering machine which we miscall civilization and 
 progress, this Frankenstein of our own raising, this Juggernaut 
 which, distinguishing neither good nor evil, sparing neither sex 
 nor age, blindly works out the Cosmic forces and wreaks the ill- 
 will of Mammon and Vulcan upon the human race ; while under 
 the aegis of individualism, which flows directly from the teaching 
 of the Eeformation, each man and woman deeming themselves 
 authorised to expound the divine revelation in his own fashion, 
 soon tend towards becoming in turn, each one, a religion and a 
 law unto themselves. 
 
 There can be no question that the respect for woman which 
 chivalry fostered and raised to its highest limits, was due in a great 
 measure to the special worship accorded to the Virgin Mary by 
 the teachers of the ancient faith. The culture of the Virgin Mary 
 in her three-fold attribute of Virgin, Daughter and Divine Mother, 
 could scarcely fail to impress the youthful mind with a three- 
 fold respect for woman in her triple character, more especially 
 when the lessons conveyed were instilled with the dawn of its 
 earliest years. 
 
 The observant traveller can scarcely fail to see this in passing 
 through the various countries of Europe, nor can he fail to perceive 
 that though the name of mother brings endearing associations in 
 all parts of the world, the term acquires a more lofty and more 
 sacred meaning where the Catholic religion has taught the child 
 from its earliest years to venerate in the Virgin Mary the spiritual
 
 THE DECLINE OF KESPECT FOE WOMAN 379 
 
 mother who guides and protects his footsteps from the cradle to 
 the grave. 
 
 Doubtless the lessons of the past, as well as the experience of 
 the present, alike tell us that woman rarely rises beyond her 
 environment, and that degrading passions, public vice, gross 
 abandonment to the pleasures of the table, and the coarse 
 entertainments of a licentious drama, all tend to degrade and drag 
 her down ; so that it may be said with truth that woman's position 
 in a country can be accurately determined by the coarseness or 
 refinement of the stage, of the literature, and of the habits of 
 her nation. 
 
 Among the Celts, where songs, and romantic if childish 
 melodies, dances, and recitations, have since the dawn of history 
 stirred the people's spirits, as only tales of blood and rough sports 
 can do among our ruder Teuton races, be it Welsh valley, or 
 Highland glen, Briton household or Irish cot, woman always 
 has and still holds a post of supremacy in her three-fold 
 capacity of maid, wife and mother. In spite of what Tacitus tells 
 us of the astonishment of the Eomans at the high place occupied 
 by women in the families of the Teutonic race, it is certain that 
 nowadays the respect and esteem and position of woman decreases 
 from the African and Oriental borders to the northernmost limits 
 of Russia, Sweden and Norway, with startling precision and 
 accuracy. Indeed, the degradation and utter contempt of female 
 chastity evinced in the extreme northern peoples and conspicuous 
 among the Swedes and Danes down to the present day is such as 
 hardly can be believed but by those who are intimately acquainted 
 with their domestic habits. If we may trust the memoirs of Mary 
 Wolstenholme, a highly cultivated writer of a century ago, the 
 condition of the Scandinavian races in those days must have been 
 even more deplorable than at present ; while not to go too far 
 from home, the proportion of illegitimate births in Scotland 
 exceeds that of any of the Southern or Latin countries, and the 
 songs and literature of Burns, and other popular writers, too 
 plainly attest the, immorality and low esteem in which woman is 
 held, in the land where, to judge by Walter Scott's novels alone, 
 we have ample proofs of their elevation and influence in past ages. 
 
 It is difficult in these days to believe that up to the Eeformation 
 it was thought unchristian and indelicate in the highest degree
 
 380 ABB WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 for a woman to earn her bread as in the days of old pagan Borne 
 by acting, to say nothing of displaying her undraped limbs upon 
 the boards of a Christian stage. Think of the distance we have 
 travelled when we read in the daily papers without blinking that 
 certain eccentric and old-fashioned magistrates seem to doubt 
 whether they ought not to interfere to prevent little girls of 
 tender years from being trained up to stage life ; or when we are 
 told that thousands are brought to the verge of starvation by 
 pursuing a profession which possesses such overwhelming 
 attractions for the female sex as to draw thither far the largest 
 share of the grace and beauty of the land, while the competition 
 among its members scarcely suffices to procure them a bare 
 subsistence with the natural result that the stage is, according to 
 tbe best and most authenticated reports, nothing else but a feeder, 
 or universal provider, of female prostitution. 
 
 Think, too, of the degrading spectacles which seem to please 
 more than aught else in these days ; of the millions that have 
 been poured into the lap of the fortunate shareholders of the 
 Gaiety, the Alhambra, or the Empire, whose boards have gained a 
 European reputation for exhibitions of female flesh that recall 
 the days of Nero, in the heart of this unchristian city ; where 
 costume, if any, serves but to accentuate rather than to conceal 
 the dancers' charms, and which, accurately to describe, would 
 shame even the pen of the most licentious scribbler of this pseudo- 
 artistic age. 
 
 Think, too, of the miscalled musical comedies, or to be more 
 exact, the string of ill-written drivel, bearing the title of a " Girl " 
 of some sort or other, as a bait to lure dissolute youth or senile 
 obscenity, each carefully designed to tickle the jaded palates of 
 luxurious sensualists by dances, songs and dialogues, which, while 
 wholly unredeemed by any tincture of wit, or sequence, are at 
 one in debasing woman to a standard worse than Pagan. 
 
 Think, too, of the Circuses where little children, by whip and 
 strap, are painfully trained by cruel teachers worse than the 
 lanistae of Pagan days, to writhe and torture themselves into 
 reptile-like designs as if to defy and insult their Maker by 
 parodying His beautiful designs, " to make a Briton's Holiday " 
 or borrowing from heathen Africans their lascivious dances 
 young girls of tender age, white slaves of the United States,
 
 THE DECLINE OF EESPECT FOE WOMAN 381 
 
 intersperse their " coon songs " with strange contortions which 
 share the popular applause with tender maidens of our own 
 rearing, similarly trained to divest themselves of every trace 
 of modesty under the lying pretence of Art. 
 
 Think, too, of the deluge of noisome stories which flood the 
 land in newspaper, novel or magazine, the greater number of 
 which deface and defile the image of woman, portraying her, 
 and, alas ! too often by a woman's hand, as something worse 
 than beast and little less than devil. 
 
 Think, too, of the example of the London season's flesh 
 market, with its noisy, blatant, chaffering crowd, each press- 
 ing their virgin wares upon reluctant bachelors like hawkers 
 in Billingsgate or City Eoad. 
 
 Well might those who are still uncorrupted enough to revolt 
 at the sight of the universal debasement of woman which 
 meets the eye in every novel, play, or magazine or comic paper, 
 or strikes the eye on every stage and in every ball-room, 
 exclaim in the words of Shakespeare, " Under which king, 
 Bezonian ? " " Do we worship Christ or Diana ? " 
 
 Nor is the rage for female exhibitions of risk and daring 
 and all unfeminine sports and displays by any means decreasing. 
 On the contrary. Since when first, as a boy, I joined with 
 many others in a memorial to the late Queen to use her influence 
 to abate the growing passion for display of feats of female 
 daring and endurance which filled the circuses and theatres to 
 over-flowing, resulting frequently in sad catastrophes, I have 
 carefully noted the waning influence of her womanly protest on 
 behalf of her degraded sex, and year by year, a steady increase 
 in the tendency to produce " startling novelties," as they are 
 well named, in which the human mind is racked to devise some 
 new stress or strain to put upon these helpless slaves of the 
 boards or the arena. Children sold to remorseless villains, by 
 demons in the shape of mothers, doomed to daily torture from 
 their very infancy under the cruel discipline which supples their 
 limbs and steadies their nerves, goaded by the whip to feats of 
 daring and agility that they may fatten the slave drivers who 
 own them, still fill our ever-growing hippodromes and circuses 
 and delight our people as of yore. Fortunately, indeed, it is that 
 the law, bad as it is, places at least some limit to the showman's
 
 382 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 power, or we should certainly see boys and girls of tender age as 
 ruthlessly murdered upon the stage or circus, amid popular 
 shouts, as in the worst days of old Eome, and hear once more 
 the voice of Cant assuring us through the pen of the paid critic 
 that " it is all done wholly in the purest interest of Art." 
 
 It is frequently a matter of wonder whether our self-deception 
 and insincerity, twin daughters of cant, are really so over- 
 powering with us as completely to obscure the light of truth. 
 Or are we merely so ready to hearken to the voice of the serpent 
 just because it flatters our own base inclinations? Let a 
 matron in magazine or- newspaper but deplore the growing 
 tendency to undrape our women in private as well as in public, 
 she is surely told that she is devoid of artistic sensibility and 
 preception ; or if she complains that she dare not take her 
 children to play, entertainment or picture show, lest their ears 
 or eyes be defiled by revolting spectacles or loathsome dialogues, 
 once more she is put to flight by the imputation of being old- 
 fashioned or out-of-date. Let but a man of taste and culture in 
 private intercourse or public press express his regret that no better 
 use can be found in these days for a young and lovely woman 
 than to hang head downwards from a trapeze by her toes, with 
 a fat man hanging from a strap between her teeth, or say he 
 fails to see the merit of a "split" or "head over heels" as an 
 adjunct to a domestic ballad in a musical comedy, he will most 
 assuredly meet with critics who are not ashamed of invoking the 
 name of Art in defence of such monstrosities. Truly, in these 
 days, one might exclaim, paraphrasing the words of Mme. Koland 
 on the scaffold, "Oh, Art, what crimes are done in thy name." 
 
 GALLANTRY. 
 
 In an earlier chapter I have adverted to the lack of politeness 
 which, in the opinion of nearly all foreigners, sets up a barrier 
 between ourselves and our European neighbours. It is not 
 infrequently urged, more especially by the fair sex, who are 
 painfully sensitive to any reflections upon this head, that we 
 British are superior to the men and women of other countries, 
 if not in the lighter graces, at any rate in the principal essen- 
 tials of politeness and civilisation. How often it has been said 
 in deprecation that if we have not quite so much French polish
 
 THE DECLINE OF EESPECT FOE WOMAN 383 
 
 as our neighbours we largely display that amiability and good 
 nature which is, or should be, the basis of all true social polite- 
 ness. There is surely more sincerity on our side, the ladies 
 declare, if less polish ; less compliments, but more truth ; less 
 show, but more substance ; less pretence, but more reality. 
 To a certain extent this is undeniably true, though in this, as in 
 many other human things, it is precisely upon the exterior 
 signs, not the real motives, that judgment is too frequently 
 passed. Just as we judge the foaming tankard by its froth, so 
 we are all too apt to mistake appearances for realities, and out- 
 ward signs for inward merit. It has been said, no doubt with 
 much truth, that a well-varnished boot has often secured the 
 affections of a desirable heiress, and there are few who have 
 never heard of the story of the old lady who left a colossal 
 fortune to the young gentleman who had once helped her into 
 her carriage in a moment of difficulty. It is, however, vain to 
 argue that even in England, where we pride ourselves upon our 
 straightforwardness and sensible disregard of external show, 
 that we are therefore " to lay the flattering unction to our 
 souls " that we alone of all nations are totally exempt from the 
 weaknesses and follies to which the entire human race is liable. 
 Is not all this, in great measure, mere talk, mere special 
 pleading ? in short, an attempt to cloak our vice of rudeness and 
 bluntness under a pretended veil of honesty and sincerity ? And 
 even if it were true, we only push the problem a little further 
 off; for surely it must be admitted on all hands that there is 
 nothing that tends to oil the wheels of Society more pleasantly, 
 and, in short, to perform all the essential services of good will 
 and charity, as to cultivate that sympathy and condescension 
 to others which we are fain, however unwillingly, to admire in 
 those who possess them. 
 
 But if further argument were wanting, I cannot do better 
 than adopt the thoroughly John Bull method of proving the 
 pudding by the eating. Let us for a moment dive deeper 
 beneath the surface, and consider whether we have not widely 
 departed and are still widely departing from our own ancient 
 standard of true gallantry, to the absence of which we so often 
 take exception in our Gallic neighbours, conceiving our own 
 more substantial views of chivalry to be infinitely preferable
 
 384 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 to theirs. Our proudest boast has always been that in common 
 with the other branches of the great Germanic family, we have 
 consistently shared in that proud distinction which excited the 
 admiration of the Eoman historian in the days of the early 
 Caesars, namely, their high respect for the weaker sex and the 
 honourable place which they accorded to woman in the social 
 commonwealth. 
 
 Can it still be said that we are faithful to our ancient pledges 
 and traditions, or that "our vows are little more than words," 
 when we look more closely into the conditions of Society, the 
 pregnant tales of the Stage, the Tribunal, and the Press which 
 slowly but surely unroll before our eyes the story of the rise and 
 fall of woman's empire in the land ? It is true that of late 
 years woman has at last been reinstated in that power and 
 independence and control of her own property, which had been 
 conceded even to Oriental women, whom we affect to despise, so 
 long as fourteen centuries ago. In all other essential points I do 
 not hesitate to say that woman has fallen sadly "from her high 
 estate." Nor is it doubtful that she has herself largely contri- 
 buted to such a result, partly by injudicious condescension and 
 indulgence to the weaknesses and sensual inclinations of her 
 male belongings, but still more through the persistent deprecia- 
 tion and revilings of their own sex by the traitress scribbling 
 sisterhood who are answerable for two-thirds of our current 
 literature ; to which must be added the ever-growing contempt 
 engendered in the youth of the land at its most impressionable 
 time of life by the corrupt Drama, the Music-hall, the Circus, 
 and the Comic Literature of the day. 
 
 1 have already adverted in another place to the prominent 
 part taken by the Prince of Wales, now Edward VII., in con- 
 tributing largely to this result in the upper classes of the social 
 strata, just as his venerated mother brought her powerful 
 influence to bear upon all that tended to refine, to elevate, and 
 to widen the sphere of woman's usefulness. Having, however, 
 in its place considered at some length the causes which have 
 tended to destroy our ancient ideal of gallantry and chivalrous 
 respect to woman, I will here confine myself to the theme in 
 so far as it relates to the treatment of woman when she appears 
 at the Bar of Justice, either as a suitor, a witness, or a litigant.
 
 THE DECLINE OF EESPECT FOE WOMAN 385 
 
 1 have frequently assisted as a witness and spectator at the 
 Courts of Justice at Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Florence, Naples, 
 and Vienna, and I can safely say that in the very few times- 
 that I have been compulsorily present in our own Courts of 
 Justice and Police Courts, I have seen more instances of callous 
 indifference, cynical jocularity, and public as well as private 
 disrespect towards female witnesses and litigants than I have 
 ever seen collectively in the whole of the rest of Europe. 
 
 Whether this state of things is mainly to be attributed to the 
 depraving and hardening influence of daily contact with vice and 
 deceit in all its forms, or original blackguardism on the part of 
 the English Bar, it is not easy to determine, but I can boldly 
 attest that, from instances derived as a personal eye-witness 
 as well as from the evidence of newspaper reports, the fate 
 of the woman who appears either as a witness or a litigant 
 in an English Court of Justice is more unenviable, and her 
 rights, good name, and self-respect are more at the mercy of a 
 callous and brutal cross-examining barrister, and is less likely 
 to be protected by the presiding judge from the insults to which 
 she may be subject, than in any Court of Justice in Europe. 
 
 Nor is it only that insult and reckless outrage to person and 
 good name is too frequently the lot of the girl or woman whose 
 chivalry or generosity too frequently tempts her to take the part 
 of the oppressed, or avenge the innocent, in a Court of Justice, 
 but even the more substantial benefits of Law to which she is 
 nominally entitled are practically denied her in a degree which 
 is unknown upon the Continent, where her sex and weakness 
 invariably entitle her to higher consideration and place her in a 
 more favoured position than the members of the opposite sex. 
 
 It must also be set down to the credit side of the balance in 
 favour of the United States that, whether from dislike of her 
 ancient oppressors or from general antipathy to British public 
 opinion, our trans-Atlantic cousins carry that respect for women 
 which has made them notorious in every land, to even a higher 
 pitch than any nation of the Continent, in spite of, or possibly 
 because of, the older Civilisation of the latter. As an instance of 
 this, the disinclination to hang women for serious offences is so 
 marked in America that the extreme penalty of the Law has almost 
 ceased to exist in regard to women. Indeed the Champions of 
 c c
 
 386 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 women's rights carry their passion for equality with men so 
 far that they are said to meditate a strong and united repre- 
 sentation in order to set themselves right in this respect and 
 prove their fitness for equal rights, by insisting upon sharing the 
 privilege of the scaffold with the coarser sex ! 
 
 In France the woman who has any cause of jealousy, 
 or for whom love or passion can be pleaded in any degree, is 
 almost sure to gain her cause. It is reserved for England alone 
 to pride itself upon its stoical disregard to women's tears and 
 women's smiles, and to carry its Puritanic insensibility to her 
 weakness and her charms to the extent of turning her fears and 
 sorrows into ridicule in Law Court and Press, and denying her 
 even that bare meed of Justice to which her fellow-men are 
 indefeasibly entitled. 
 
 Coming down gradually to the concrete instance which I 
 have selected at hazard from the pages of the daily papers, it will 
 be seen that whereas in France and America, Italy and Spain, 
 and in a less degree perhaps in Germany, the betrayed or ill- 
 treated maiden who generously if recklessly bestows the 
 treasure of her love upon an unworthy object, and deserted, 
 abandoned, perhaps scoffed by her deceiver, turns to the tribunals 
 of her country for relief, or, maddened with pain and shame, 
 destroys the child that her lover refuses to own or support 
 more surely obtains the sympathy of a compassionate judge or 
 jury in any other civilised land than our own. 
 
 In the case I have here before me of a murderous attack upon 
 a girl by a British sailor, it is scarcely possible to present the 
 Law in a more revolting aspect to the eyes of (I trust) a 
 disgusted public, and if no other argument were found against 
 a free Press, every right-minded person must admit that no 
 more powerful plea could be advanced for the control and due 
 bridling of its omnipotence than such a galaxy of anti-judicial 
 circumstances as are here portrayed, or a more powerful indict- 
 ment framed against what we please to call our up-to-date 
 civilisation. 
 
 We have a halfpenny paper's word for the damning fact 
 that an English judge to be sure the youngest on the Bench 
 if that is any excuse for one who so greatly prefers his reputation 
 as a wit to his own self-respect and, what is far more to the
 
 THE DECLINE OF EESPECT FOE WOMAN 387 
 
 purpose, to the credit of the public Law of which he is a 
 dispenser is unable to resist a childish joke, more fitted for the 
 pot-house than the Forum, when trying a crime which, by the 
 common consent of all civilised nations, is the most dastardly and 
 unmanly of which the most debased humanity can possibly be 
 guilty ; in the second place, be it noted that the cowardly 
 assailant, who seems to have been a stoker on a man-of-war, 
 could invent no better defence than that he was so drunk that 
 he did not know what he was doing when he threw vitriol in the 
 face of a girl to whom he had been formerly engaged, but who 
 refused to marry him on account of the information which she 
 had received about his antecedents ; in the third place, "pour 
 encourager les autres," this " Ornament of the English Bench" 
 in his wisdom thought fit to restore this " Ornament of the Navy " 
 to his shipmates with a light-hearted joke, for no better reason, as 
 far as could be divined, than that his drunken condition prevented 
 him from succeeding in his atrocious design ! Though it must be 
 avowed that this three-fold scandal was only flaunted in the 
 public eye by newspapers whose glaring indiscretions and whole- 
 sale contempt for common decency and reverence have gained 
 them a profitable if shameful notoriety, it is deplorable to consider 
 the harm that may result from the lesson thus afforded to a 
 community whose rapidly waning respect for women, and 
 whose ever-growing list of dastardly crimes by disappointed 
 lovers, which in years past were almost unknown except among 
 the Celtic inhabitants of Southern nations, point too surely to 
 British deterioration and the decline of British gallantry. 
 
 It is impossible to close this chapter without adverting to the 
 alarming daily proofs of our growing conformity or shall I say 
 declension?' to a familiar type of Eoman degeneracy which until 
 lately was almost unknown in England. The constant resort to 
 secret assaults secret assassination and murderous attacks upon 
 unarmed men and, in respect of women, the frequent recurrence 
 of dastardly onslaughts upon girls by their rejected lovers 
 points to a marked increase of cowardly brutality by no means 
 confined, as abroad, to the dregs of the people which speaks 
 volumes for the decline of gallantry and fair play, which were 
 once our most cherished characteristics.
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 OUR COUNTRY BOYS AND GIRLS 
 
 CLOSELY connected with the decline of home life is the subject of 
 modern servants. This is a question which, like the poor, is 
 always with us, and which powerfully influences the closely 
 allied question of home versus hotel life, which is so striking and 
 painful a characteristic of our modern ways. 
 
 Our new-born craze for Education, which we share in common 
 with all the European nations, has much to answer for. It 
 reminds one of Lamb's silly if wide-read libel upon the Chinese 
 nation, in which he asserts that that practical and highly intelligent 
 people, having discovered, through the burning down of a hut in 
 which a pig was kept, that roast pig was an excellent dish, all 
 the neighbours at once, allured by the delightful odour, set their 
 houses on fire in order to procure a similar delicacy. 
 
 In common with the rest of the European concert (probably 
 so named on account of its resemblance to a German band, where 
 every man plays a tune on his own instrument) we are apparently 
 expected to set fire to our houses, or in other words attempt to 
 fill up every unfortunate child in the public elementary schools 
 who falls into our hands with as much knowledge as he can 
 possibly hold to his own destruction and the dislocation of the 
 entire social system, in order that one per cent, or less may 
 become a genius. For the only perceptible effect of School 
 Board Education seems to be to gain a smattering of every 
 branch of knowledge coupled with a vast amount of conceit, 
 to exchange reasoning powers for " cocksuredness," and a natural 
 desire for acquisition of information for a settled conviction 
 that there is nothing more to be learnt after leaving school. The 
 deadening effect on the mind of the children of the poorer classes, 
 especially in agricultural districts, is a subject of remark by all 
 observers. It would seem that the brains of their forefathers, 
 having been left comparatively fallow and unused to high 
 pressure, when subjected to the unnatural forcing which must 
 necessarily accompany the attempt to put a quart into a pint
 
 OUE COUNTRY BOYS AND GIRLS 389 
 
 pot, tends rather to obfuscate and depress their intelligence to a 
 lower standard than that reached by their predecessors. 
 
 The universal opinion in country districts points in the 
 direction of a complete reform of existing methods. All are alike 
 dissatisfied with the observed results. The farmer can get no 
 lads to take interest in their work, the farmer's wife no maids to 
 help her in her daily duties ; the dairy maid is a thing of the 
 past. The boys have their imagination filled with stories of 
 rapid fortunes and the joys of town life, and care no more for the 
 rustic pleasures and merry-makings and Christmas games which 
 delighted their forefathers. They sigh for the gas-lit streets, and 
 are lured away to the cities by the garish pleasures, the bright 
 posters which announce untold delights, the well-lit streets with 
 their bright shops to beguile the evening hours, the music-halls 
 and theatres of which they dream and read in penny novelettes, 
 telling them of a fairy-land of hopes and pleasures, which a country 
 life seems unable to bestow. The girls, on the other hand, spurn 
 the tame pleasures of the poultry-yard and the calm if unexciting 
 daily routine of country life, after having once tasted of the joys of 
 the town with the gay shops which to their childish gaze seem 
 a glimpse of Paradise, and, like their brothers, inspired with the 
 modern craving, greatly aggravated by cheap literature, of a short 
 cut to fortune, begin to loathe the monotonous if peaceful round 
 of labour in their cottage 01 farm homes and seek a freedom, 
 which is denied them by the stricter customs and discipline of 
 the country, in the noisy workshops and bright stores glittering 
 with seductive objects which have left an effaceable image upon 
 their youthful imagination. Thus the great Babylon, like a huge 
 wen, absorbs the fresh young blood of the country through a 
 thousand veins, that they may struggle for bare life and ever- 
 sinking wages with the denizens of the town, finding too often 
 a grave for their hopes, their health and their expectations, in the 
 muddy streets whose glittering gaslights yearly attract so many 
 silly moths to self-immolation. 
 
 Undoubtedly the sights presented by the streets of our 
 principal cities before the education era was one that no lover of 
 humanity can recall without a blush. The School Board has, if 
 not in education, at least effected a magnificent reform in clearing 
 London streets of its " arabs " of both sexes, and in presenting
 
 390 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 to the children of the poor a higher standard of cleanliness, 
 order and decency, has brought happiness to many homes. 
 
 It is to be feared, however, that the direct and specific effects 
 of the system adopted in the public elementary schools has 
 tended rather to prove a stumbling-block and impediment 
 than an aid to the better and fuller comprehension of the 
 duties of life. Better far to train children of the labouring 
 classes in the country, after brief instruction in the mysteries 
 of reading, writing and arithmetic, to fitly understand and 
 appreciate the beauties and benefits of an agricultural life, by 
 interesting them in the history of domestic animals, by teaching 
 them the names and qualities of flowers and useful plants of 
 which Providence has been so bountiful and in which every 
 country district abounds, inciting them by gifts and encourage- 
 ment to till to the best advantage, and observe the growth of the 
 plants and fruits and flowers in a plot of land attached to the 
 school, in order to develop in the youthful mind at its most 
 susceptible age the love and interest in God's benefits which 
 cannot fail to attach them to a country life and country 
 objects, and so serve as an antidote to the excitements of 
 modern life and the incentives of modern literature. Instead 
 of this, their brains are congested with crude facts of geography 
 or history, which are no sooner learnt by heart than destined to 
 be replaced by the cheap novel or the trashy newspaper, 
 temptingly presented with an attractive cover and pictures to 
 catch the eye and enchain the fancy. 
 
 Every care should be taken to provide a number of 
 counter attractions within the reach of young children, 
 which, while entertaining and written in a lively style, should 
 convey the higher lessons of morality and the foundations of 
 truer aims by inculcating a love for country life and country 
 matters, an affection for domestic animals, and interest in the 
 beautiful works of Nature and the marvels of plant life, and 
 thus reveal to them the hidden secrets of Nature's realm. No 
 fairy tale can enthral a child's mind more usefully than the 
 life story and habits of the commonest country denizens the 
 ant, the bee, the mouse, the flowers, with each their life story, 
 cause of existence, and benefit to man all such would arouse 
 in the budding mind of the child, if imparted at an early date,
 
 OUE COUNTRY BOYS AND GIELS 391 
 
 as much and even more delight and interest than the most 
 exciting of novels or the most entrancing of romances. The 
 Scriptures say that men ask for bread and we give them a stone ! 
 Surely this is the way we treat our children. When their 
 little minds crave for truth our practice is invariably to fill 
 them with lies. The first stories placed in their hands are 
 falsehoods about giants and dragons of the most primitive type. 
 This is nothing but direct demoralisation of the intellect, it is 
 the process of feeding children with gin or brandy a moral 
 dram-drinking, which makes simple things and simple ideas no 
 longer pleasing, because their minds have been already debauched 
 by unnatural and exaggerated expectations.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 THE DECLINE OF HOME LIFE 
 
 FEW things surprise the foreigner who visits our shores more 
 than the easy desecration of our homes and the contempt of home 
 life which strikes him at every turn. If there is one thing that 
 even the most dissipated Frenchman respects, reveres, nay, almost 
 venerates, it is "le logis," " le chez soi." To him the sanctity of 
 family life, the- love of the home of his parents, or his own if 
 married, however humble it be, resembles the respectful awe felt 
 for Sanctuary in olden days. Whatever his conduct, however 
 reprehensible his life, it is rare, even with the most debauched 
 and corrupt, that there remains not in his heart some sense of the 
 sanctity of home ; and scarcely ever do the police courts or 
 newspapers abroad reveal such appalling incidents of brutality to 
 wives and children, such cynical debauchery in the inner domestic 
 circle, such open disregard of what is due to wife, children and 
 parents, or such scenes of drunken bestiality, as in England form 
 the staple of police intelligence, and furnish the choicest gems of 
 daily popular literature. 
 
 Not only Frenchmen, but all Continentals, however little 
 English they know, have surely heard, if only through the 
 beautiful ballad " Home, Sweet Home," that English men and 
 women are of all others most domestic in their habits, and 
 above all nations attached to the sentiment of home life. 
 If it is painful to be forced to confess that the romance of 
 home life and home associations, and all that is connected with 
 it, is rapidly passing away from amongst us, not a little 
 aided by our new-found attachment to trans-Atlantic ways, 
 it is even more humiliating to feel that perhaps, after all, our 
 reputation for attachment to home life is mainly attributable 
 to that touching and simple melody. 
 
 Searching our literature of the past for the story of home and 
 home life and its credentials, so far as can be gathered from 
 popular literature and drama, I have come to the conclusion, 
 however crushing a blow my national self-love may sustain, that
 
 THE DECLINE OF HOME LIFE 393 
 
 whatever title we have, or ever did possess to special distinction 
 in this direction, is either of exotic origin in accordance with the 
 passing fashion of the day, or attributable, to the universal 
 popularity of the beautiful melody afore-mentioned. It seems to 
 have appeared for the first time as the pale reflection of the 
 sober and blameless life of the third of our German kings and 
 his dull but harmless consort, which slowly but surely, among a 
 people who are above all apt to imitate the example of those 
 above them, weaned the masses of the people from the outdoor 
 life and grosser delights of the tavern and ale house, and the still 
 more licentious pleasures of Eanelagh and Vauxhall, to the more 
 decent if monotonous festivities of their own homes, where one 
 would suppose the customary bottle or two of claret or strong 
 port per head, could scarcely have conduced greatly to the 
 harmony of the domestic circle. 
 
 The next two reigns represent the natural recoil from the 
 uncongenial decorousness which, to a certain extent compulsory, 
 at least in Court circles, during the respectable reign of George 
 III., was vigorously made amends for by the collapse of all order, 
 sobriety and decency during the Regency ; while with the rise of 
 the Byronic school of sentiment and the romantic novels of 
 Walpole, Lewis, Mrs. Eatcliff , and Beckford where dissoluteness 
 was openly glorified, and tales of midnight murder, abductions 
 and adultery were the order of the day all sentiment of home 
 or home life seems to have utterly departed, until, like a Phoenix 
 from its ashes, virtue once more became fashionable under the 
 benign and peaceful reign of Queen Victoria and her consort, 
 whose blameless lives and incomparable zeal for all that was 
 loftiest and most ennobling in the national life furnished an 
 example which could scarcely fail to secure respect, if not 
 qualified imitation, among their subjects. It is a singular fact 
 that scarcely had " Albert the Good " been taken prematurely 
 from our midst when the reaction, powerfully aided by a pleasure- 
 loving prince and the retirement from social life of his distracted 
 Queen-Mother, set in the opposite direction with an intensity 
 which left little doubt as to the inclinations of at least the upper 
 classes of society. Thereafter that home life which, though we 
 certainly imported no shining examples with our first three 
 foreign sovereigns, is perhaps the only boon we can credit to
 
 394 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Germany as a set-off against Hanoverian domination, has become 
 even more unfashionable than it was in the riotous days of 
 Charles II. Year by year fresh encroachments are devised and 
 fresh insults cast upon Wife, Family, Marriage, and all that goes 
 to make home life sacred and respected ; while ribald jokes upon 
 these themes which serve to " tickle the ears of the groundlings 
 without, alas! making the judicious grieve," in entertainments 
 which I dare not call plays, serve to satisfy such dramatic yearn- 
 ings as are left to our Corinthians after a luxurious dinner at the 
 Carlton or Clarendon. On the other hand, the divorce courts and 
 police news tell too plainly the result of the latter-day reversion 
 to tavern life and outdoor dissipation, which takes us back in 
 memory to the worst days of the Regency, to Paul's Walk and 
 the Eanelagh and Tunbridge Wells in Queen Anne's time, or 
 Whitehall and the Savoy in the shameful days of the Eestoration. 
 
 THE IDLE EICH ON THE DOWN GRADE. 
 
 Just as Pepys in his diary marvels that my Lady Castlemaine 
 and the Duchess of Cleveland should be so lost to shame as to 
 take pleasure to parade their charms with dishevelled hair and 
 bare bosom before the rabble of Whitehall, or of the playhouse, 
 and tennis courts, so in our days women of the highest rank, not 
 satisfied with the more restricted audience of their friends at 
 home, prefer to display their naked busts in the stalls of a play- 
 house or music-hall after a dinner at the Savoy or Cecil, reserving 
 their gayest dresses and brightest jewels to win the approbation 
 of the vulgar, and, if possible, secure what is dearer still to the 
 feminine heart, a flattering paragraph in the penny papers. 
 
 That in the United States the new-fledged millionaire, who has 
 risen from the mud by the discovery of rock oil or the successful 
 packing of bacon, should feel that his dollars are wasted unless 
 his expenditure is duly recorded in the current press is scarcely 
 to be wondered at, but that English men and women with the 
 tradition of centuries of good breeding and gentle nurture behind 
 them should prefer the glare of the gaslight and the glitter and 
 the noise of the public hall, with its accompanying notoriety, to 
 the refined society of an elegant home, can only be explained by 
 the collective deterioration of the upper classes through contact 
 with the Tribes of Israel generally made in Germany whom
 
 THE IDLE EICH ON THE DOWN GKADE 395 
 
 the King especially delights to honour, or with other moneyed 
 vulgarians from every clime who, by their lavish if barbaric 
 profusion, find no difficulty in securing for their entertainments a 
 select assortment of English noblemen and German princes. 
 Here, as elsewhere, Eoyalty goes far to abet this state of things, 
 and unconsciously contributes to its own downfall and discredit* 
 by patronising not so much what is most respectable, but what is 
 most luxurious, novel, lavish, and ostentatious. Hence in 
 London, as in Paris in the worst days of the Empire, it is well 
 known that it is only necessary to dip deeply into one's purse 
 and scatter royally to secure royal patronage, with the result 
 that the smiles of royalty are in these days of agricultural decay 
 denied to the greater number of the English aristocracy, and 
 have become the habitual appanage of the brewer, the banker, 
 the Jew, and the "rastaqouaire." 
 
 It is noteworthy that Grosvenor and Belgrave Squares, Park 
 Lane, and all the choicest sites in Mayfair are rapidly becoming 
 the inheritance of the children of Israel. Ere long tLe Ghetto of 
 the future will be the east end of Hyde Park, and the time is not 
 far distant when Uncle Sam, who knows better than any other 
 how to bring his pigs to a good market, continuing the conquest 
 of social, as he has already that of commercial London, will 
 abandon Paris in order to complete the social regeneration of 
 his effete relatives on this side of the Atlantic ! 
 
 No doubt the absence of servants sufficiently trained to satisfy 
 the requirements of civilized hosts causes families of distinction 
 in the " States " to abandon their houses and live in hotels or 
 flats, where they can obtain their meals with greater despatch 
 and comfort than would be possible in their own houses ; and 
 it is not unlikely that in England as well, a contributing cause 
 towards the abandonment of home in exchange for the more 
 garish enjoyments of restaurants, is partly referrible to the 
 same cause. Both proceed from the same root-evil injudicious 
 education of the masses, who, in the public elementary schools, 
 learn just enough to despise work and to regard domestic service 
 in the light of a degradation, thus reducing the supply of 
 intelligent domestic servants, .and inducing a corresponding 
 congestion of the lighter and more genteel professions. This evil 
 or deficiency, according as it is viewed, is far more pressing and
 
 396 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 conspicuous in the United States, where the greater room for 
 expansion and higher wages obtainable in other ways, relegate 
 domestic service almost exclusively to the poorest German, Irish, 
 and Negro population. In England it is not the quantity so 
 much as the quality which is becoming yearly more deficient ; 
 and it can scarcely be denied that the decline of quality or 
 capacity in the domestic servant of to-day is largely attributable 
 to the mistress of the period, who, ignorant and untrained 
 herself in domestic duties, and distracted by the all-pervading 
 passion for gaiety, diversion, and general unrest, is wholly unable, 
 or, if able, unfitted, to bestow time or thought on those domestic 
 duties which she despises and abhors. 
 
 Again, by reason of the passion for continual change of 
 residence, and for gadding about from place to place, tempted by 
 railway facilities or specious advertisements, or it may be pricked 
 on by that neurosis which is the bane of our generation, it can 
 scarcely be expected that the modern servant, even if he would, 
 should form a strong attachment to masters or mistresses who 
 possibly twice a year break up their establishment, and at best, 
 offer to advertise for a temporary place for him during a trip to 
 Monte Carlo or a German watering-place. 
 
 In my younger days it was only the Scotch nobleman of large 
 but unremunerative estate who showed himself ever ready to let 
 his highland castle or lowland home to the first southerner whose 
 proffered " bawbees " proved too strong a temptation for his 
 dignity. But, alas, nowadays "nous avons chang6 tout cela," 
 your modern Yankee of much dollars and small refinement 
 delights in bribing aa English duke to part with his most 
 treasured residence for a term of years by the pertinacious 
 application of that golden key which in these days of greed and 
 luxury few, if any, profess to withstand. 
 
 Indeed, so well known is the greed for pelf which per- 
 vades every class, from the highest to the lowest, that I have 
 heard an American millionaire openly boast that he would pick 
 his residence in London wherever he chose from among the 
 finest homes of our proudest aristocracy, provided he had ten 
 minutes' conversation with the owner and was prepared to 
 furnish the necessary cash inducement 1 
 
 All this fills the Frenchman with horror and disgust. Nothing
 
 THE IDLE EICH ON THE DOWN GEADE 397 
 
 shocks the Continental observer, and the Frenchman in par- 
 ticular, more painfully than our glaring want of respect for the 
 sacredness of home. It strikes him at every step, meets his 
 eye in every advertisement, and impresses him in every coterie^ 
 One may safely say during a London season that if the conver- 
 sation does not turn upon the last entertainment or the next to 
 come, the topic must surely be the last house change of Mr. A. or 
 Lady C., with appropriate comments as to his or her solvency or 
 talent for making ends meet, or "raising the wind" as the 
 occasion seems to require. Nor are the country folk behind 
 their town neighbours. It would scarcely be an offence 
 nowadays to drive up to the seat of a county magnate and ask 
 him what he will take for his house, servants, carriages, horses, 
 and all as a " going concern " and that it is daily done by 
 Jews and millionaires of all sorts, or their agents, is a matter of 
 common knowledge, however studiously the secret be kept, lest 
 prices should suffer in consequence. As for delicacy or refine- 
 ment entering into the matter, in imitation of our trans-Atlantic 
 cousins, we have long since outgrown all such puerile and old- 
 world fantasies. For have we, indeed, any real home in these 
 days of continual gaiety and perpetual movement ? Your smart 
 up-to-date family with pretensions to fashion scarcely ever spend 
 a fortnight in one place, and, indeed, when they say they are at 
 home it only means that they sleep there, and after " putting in 
 an appearance at some fellow's place " (in the detestable slang of 
 the day) forty miles out of town by means of a motor car, 
 finishing up with a dinner party at the Hotel Cecil and a night 
 at the theatre and so on, it can hardly be said what with the 
 demands of country fetes and town dissipations to boot which 
 motors enable its votaries successively to achieve that there is 
 any wide margin left for the enjoyment of " Home, Sweet 
 Home." 
 
 There is yet an aspect of this question which throws a still 
 more lurid light upon our modern ways, and marks still more 
 clearly the downward path of social England. 
 
 Insincerity (which, be it noted, is the equivalent of Cant in 
 action, as I have repeated ad nauseam), is not only a source of 
 just reproach on the part of foreigners, but I fear is all too- 
 deeply ingrained in our national life to admit of doubt or denial.
 
 398 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Here once more the cloven foot of cant and insincerity peeps out, 
 which so powerfully contributes to the undoing of that love of 
 home, whose perfume and sentiment still lingers faintly in our 
 midst. For how is it likely we should be so desirous of letting 
 our friends into our home secrets or of enabling them to gauge 
 the secrets of our prison-house, when our conscious if unavowed 
 aim in life is to act a part, to deceive our friends and the world 
 at large as to our real condition, and, in short, appear to be 
 what we are not? 
 
 " Esse quam videri " was the grand old rule of two thousand 
 years ago, but the motto of to-day is "Videri quam esse" (to 
 seem rather than to be). We might go further, and say that in 
 these days all that is wanted is to seem. For in a land where 
 imposture is rampant from peer to peasant, where hundreds of 
 peers, and dukes, too, are not ashamed to don false names, false 
 titles, and strut in borrowed plumes is it wonderful that seeming 
 is all that is held necessary to achieve, while only fools trouble 
 their heads about being ? In the light of these undoubted facts 
 can we marvel that your counter-jumper, when he drops the yard 
 measure on early-closing days and spends the rest of his day in 
 the character of a gentleman at large, in clothes undistinguishable 
 from a duke's, should prefer when on hospitable thoughts intent 
 to entertain his brother impostors, all dukes for the nonce, at a 
 restaurant, in preference to the garret on a fourth floor which he 
 hires in Pimlico ; still less, when he has succeeded in beguiling 
 other youths more foolish than himself into the belief that he 
 really is what he seems, would he risk, by taking them to his 
 humble home, to stand confessed the scion of a poor if 
 respectable charwoman. 
 
 Nor can we reproach Mary Ann, who, by virtue of her good 
 looks and skill in external adornment, simulates with astonishing 
 accuracy the airs and graces of a fashionable beauty until she 
 opens her mouth to speak, if she prefers to saunter through the 
 park or accept refreshment at a "cafe" from the youth whom 
 she fascinates by her attractions, in preference to the risk of a 
 sudden death to her romance through the disenchanting avowal 
 that her home is in Soho, where her mother takes in washing for 
 a living. Nor can we wonder if the lawyer's clerk or dressmaker's 
 apprentice, who through a chance meeting at Scarborough or
 
 DRINK BELOW STAIES 399 
 
 Margate, have realised in the sweet moments of secret intercourse 
 the thrilling raptures of the titled lovers of their favourite novels 
 who through various vicissitudes, and similar adventures to their 
 own, have arrived at the haven of a wealthy marriage should 
 look forward to a repetition of the same experience in private 
 life ! This and the like is what turns our lives into a lie and a 
 fraud, and stains our whole being with the hue of insincerity. 
 But there are yet two potent causes flowing from the above, at 
 any rate in lower life, which tend even more directly to weaken 
 our home, and through home our national life. I allude to 
 drinking and bad cooking, two closely linked and fruitful causes 
 of home decay. 
 
 DRINK BELOW STALES. 
 
 The frequenting of public-houses by men of the lower classes is 
 nothing more than the correlative of " club-and-restaurant-going " 
 among the upper classes. Their causes are identical, and their 
 effects equally ruinous to the nation. The poor man is driven 
 out of his home too often by the bad management of his wife 
 an ill-regulated household and a bad dinner ; the rich man's 
 home goes to the dogs because his wife is hardly ever there. 
 
 We hear a great deal of drunkenness in this country, indeed 
 parsons and statesmen seem to belabour this theme as if it lay at 
 the root of our national decay. Closer examination would show 
 this to be a complete fallacy. That we were a hundred and fifty 
 years ago, up to, perhaps, fifty years ago, the most drunken race 
 that ever the world saw, is only to say that our degradation had 
 reached its lowest depth in the earlier half of that period : but 
 one must be blind not to see the enormous improvement that has 
 taken place in this respect, and one for which we were largely 
 indebted to the youthful efforts of Queen Victoria and her royal 
 Consort, who purged the Court, and, by a gradual process of 
 infiltration, society at large, of its most unpleasant failing. 
 
 Perhaps the most powerful agent in procuring this wholesome 
 reformation, is that imitation of those above them which is so 
 marked an English characteristic. So soon as it became a 
 disgrace to be seen the worse for liquor among the upper classes, 
 and the common phrase " drunk as a lord " had ceased to have 
 any meaning, the gradual progress of sobriety became only a 
 matter of time ; and I can answer from personal observation
 
 400 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 that the progress in that direction, during the last thirty years, 
 leaves little doubt but that without any resort to legal compulsion 
 England will eventually free herself from what was once & 
 world-wide reproach. 
 
 DRINK ABOVE STAEBS. 
 
 Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the disruption of home- 
 life, caused by our mistaken education of women, or the effect 
 of a little knowledge upon ill-regulated minds, has combined 
 with the ever-increasing distaste for home and the restlessness 
 of the leisured classes to exert so powerful an influence for evil 
 upon the classes who imitate their example, that a recrudescence 
 of drink is greatly to be feared in the near future. Already, if 
 we may trust the newspaper correspondents and the warning 
 cries of the clergy and the medical profession, the-old time 
 public inebriety of all classes is now exchanged for an equally 
 dangerous over-indulgence which stops just short of intoxication 
 among the higher classes, and in both upper and middle 
 classes (the latter more particularly) a very marked rate of 
 increase in female inebriety, which is not likely to decrease 
 in these days of feminine-club, flat and hotel life, where, as is 
 well understood in America, the opportunities of over-indulgence 
 are plentifully afforded. 
 
 It must not be imagined that the same causes always 
 operate in producing the same results. The growing mania for 
 the organisation of more or less useful societies, choral, artistic, 
 musical, aesthetic, philanthropic and religious, and the growing 
 pride and ambition for public life to which woman has been 
 recently admitted, conspires with an imperfect education 
 destined rather for show than use, to urge the English lady of 
 to-day to desire distinction in the public arena rather than that 
 of the domestic household. Is it, then, surprising that the old- 
 world mysteries of housekeeping, the treasured recipes of the 
 dispensary and the kitchen have no longer charms for a genera- 
 tion, who, if they cannot achieve newspaper fame by the bright- 
 ness of their eyes or the brilliancy of their diamonds, must needs 
 seek reputation in golf or hockey competition, or, if aesthetically 
 inclined, aspire to the distinction of a novelist, a playwright, a 
 paintress or an amateur actress? As it is with the higher
 
 DRINK ABOVE STAIES 401 
 
 ranks, so it is with the middle. Only the residuum, or in 
 other words those who neither have the inclination nor the 
 talent for outstripping their fair competitors, are left to keep up 
 the old traditions of an English home, with the painful but 
 natural result that these latter are regarded by their more 
 flamboyant sisters as "poor things" devoid of spirit or energy, 
 precisely as in a lower sphere the stronger and abler girls betake 
 themselves to the drapery counter and the public services as. 
 clerks, typists or waitresses, rather than stoop to the discredited 
 duties of domestic service. It has been well said that a nation 
 gets the laws which it deserves. So it may be said with truth 
 of the ladies of England that they get the servants they deserve. 
 It is no wonder, when mistresses think so lightly of their homes 
 as to hire them to the first comer for pelf, and betray their 
 entire ignorance of the simplest domestic duty and their com- 
 plete unconcern for the safety and comfort of their husbands and 
 families snatching eagerly at any chance of passing amusement, 
 a trip to Italy or a month at Homburg, as a welcome inter- 
 ruption to the hateful monotony of a distasteful home life if 
 her household are infected with the same spirit and in their turn 
 think lightly of the cares and responsibilities which they observe 
 their mistress ever willing to slur over and avoid. Again, how 
 can one expect that the working-man's wife shall be impressed 
 with the necessity of economy, order, cleanliness and culinary 
 skill when she finds the same neglect, contempt and indifference 
 in those to whom she looks for guidance and counsel ? 
 
 When I referred above to Ignorance as the root and cause of 
 this falling off, I say, advisedly, that in the light of modern science, 
 that is according to the clearest teachings of experience and 
 reason, every man of sense must now regard culinary science in 
 its widest sense, as well as in the general treatment of the 
 human subject in health or disease, as being the highest and 
 noblest duty that a woman is destined to fulfil : since a child, that 
 is a man in embryo, that is, our future race, is confessedly made 
 or marred by his food and surroundings, and a full-grown man's 
 ability and capacity is modified in the highest degree by the 
 quality of the sustenance he receives. Consequently it follows 
 that no higher duty or more sacred trust can be placed upon the 
 shoulders of a Christian who desires to fit herself for a due- 
 D D
 
 402 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 performance of her obligations as a wife and mother, than to excel 
 in every detail of domestic economy. Here we might do well 
 to take a leaf from the books of our German distant relatives. 
 If the sense of Religion is stronger with us than with them and 
 its coercive force superior, assuredly Duty amongst the northern 
 nations is as conspicuous as its absence amongst ourselves. 
 With German women it is not a question of whether cooking 
 spoils the face or hands or roughens the complexion or whether 
 it is more amusing to paint a fan or embroider a handkerchief 
 than to draw out a bill of fare. In vain would they plead that it 
 is more fashionable to pay a housekeeper to attend to matters for 
 which the lady of the house must alone be responsible, or that 
 it is more comfortable to shirk housekeeping cares for good and 
 all, by contracting with the neighbouring cook-shop or restaurant ! 
 These and other sophisms would fade away from amongst us 
 were Duty firmly impressed by the early discipline of youth. It 
 was Duty which broke the serried ranks of the fiery Gaul at 
 Sedan and Gravelotte, it is still Duty which causes the German 
 clerk from Panama to Shanghai to live frugally and work 
 earnestly, while his English rival dreams of cricket or polo ; and 
 if England in the decrees of an All-wise Providence is fated to 
 succumb to her Teutonic rival in the race of commerce, it will 
 not be Free Trade so much as an incomplete sense of Duty 
 which shall have caused her downfall.
 
 CHAPTEE XXXIV 
 
 COOKEBY 
 
 OUE national cooking stands forth like a beacon to impress upon 
 the minds of the entire world the lesson that I have so often 
 attempted in these pages to bring home to my readers. Other 
 nations there are who do worse than ourselves in many ways, 
 and in many spheres of action, but we alone take pride in what 
 we should be deeply ashamed of. They, at least when con- 
 vinced of their errors, strive to mend them, but it is reserved for 
 Britons alone, probably because they " never, never, never, will 
 be slaves," to tell each other repeatedly how defective is their 
 system of Law, how illogical their Church and Constitution, how 
 chaotic their form of Government, and how hopeless their 
 national Cooking, without ever lifting a finger to find a cure or 
 even propose a remedy. 
 
 As usual, our stupid nation falls naturally into several classes 
 in dealing with such questions. The worst offenders are those 
 who, like our friend, whom I formerly quoted, publicly confessed 
 in the newspaper, that though our national cooking was abomin- 
 ably bad, it was thoroughly English and therefore he could not 
 but uphold it and even glory in it ! just as the common expression 
 as to the " glorious uncertainty " of our Law sufficiently proves 
 the existence of similar views respecting the even administration 
 of Justice, which has ever been regarded as the supreme test of 
 civilisation in more fortunate lands. 
 
 A second and still larger division embracing nearly all that 
 solid, substantial, sober class which is generally described as the 
 backbone of our nation, and which I may add for its extreme 
 stolidity, not to say stupidity, undoubtedly forms an efficient 
 barrier to political revolution will tell you it has always been 
 so for hundreds of years and that we have no wise suffered from 
 it, that no finer, healthier, or stouter boys and men can be found 
 than in our own country, and, lastly, in all probability will 
 produce that fine old crusted argument that what was good 
 enough for their parents is good enough for them.
 
 404 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 A third and by no means an inconsiderable section, imbued 
 with the same spirit of unreasoning Conservatism as the 
 former with more than their pride, aspire to place the subject 
 on a still higher plane. They will unblushingly tell you that 
 our bad cooking is nothing but the outcome of our Spartan 
 severity and self-denial, which scorns to exercise our talents 
 or our wits upon such petty matters. Of such are Carlyle, 
 Dr. Johnson, and indeed the greater bulk of our would-be 
 philosophers, who, be it remarked, as their stomachs grew 
 weaker and their teeth fell out, recanted in their old age the 
 errors of their youth and unconsciously disproved the truth of 
 their early boasts by bewailing bitterly the lost digestion which 
 neither drugs nor science could avail to restore. Among ladies 
 another plea will often be raised. They will tell you that 
 French men and women have a natural turn for these things 
 which it is hopeless for average English women to rival, no teaching 
 will avail where there is no talent, etc., and in proof they will 
 quote you, as a matter of common knowledge, how this or that 
 girl can never be taught to cook, while this or that woman takes 
 to it like a duck to water. 
 
 But is not this a clear confirmation of our alleged neglect and 
 our insane indifference to what science, experience and common 
 knowledge tell us? Is it probable or possible that an art of 
 consummate importance to the nation as well as to the 
 individual can be so easily acquired that it comes to us 
 without striving ? Must we be told that we cannot hope to 
 vie with other nations in any art or industry, because there 
 will certainly be some who excel and others who lag behind ? 
 Must our boys not run, or read, or write, because all cannot win 
 the prize ? Most true it is, and " pity 'tis, 'tis true," that 
 neither in England or Timbuctoo is it given to all to be Soyers 
 or Francatellis, but is it reasonable, that none should try, 
 because so many fail? And here we touch upon the central 
 blot and fault of Englishmen in this and many other matters. 
 They scorn to do their best, because their conceit lures them on 
 to a false security. In war they are never prepared : but are 
 always convinced that as they have won in the past so they will 
 win in the future, not so much by dint of skill or merit as by 
 virtue of being Englishmen. This is the spirit, or to be more exact,
 
 COOKEEY 405 
 
 a manifestation of that manifold spirit of Englishmen which 
 foreigners cannot easily endure. It is this " triple brass " of 
 conceit, self-complacency and faith in themselves that "hits the 
 foreigner in the eye," so to speak. And well for England that 
 it should be so. But let us take heed that it remain so ; for this 
 lofty disdain of the foreigner nay, far worse, our faith in our- 
 selves is fast passing away, and it is to preserve this high resolve, 
 this imperial bearing, that I am chiefly induced to pen these 
 lines. Time was, when we could afford to act thus Time was, 
 when every Englishman thought himself equal to ten French- 
 men, even though his cooking was bad and he possessed " but 
 one sauce to three hundred religions." But alas ! we are now 
 fast losing our self-confidence. We turn hither and thither for 
 help and instruction, not shaming even to invite the criticism of 
 our own Colonies and craving the gracious support and sympathy 
 of our erstwhile rebellious kinsmen across the Atlantic. We are 
 beginning seriously to ask ourselves, " Are we the men we 
 were ? " 
 
 But to return to our muttons, or rather our mutton chops. 
 In cookery, as in war, we trust to luck rather than to art. In 
 war we say, " Englishmen always win : they have stout hearts, 
 strong arms, and indomitable pluck, what more do you want ? " 
 But what is the result? Confusion, useless expenditure of 
 national wealth, and, what is more deplorable still, of human 
 hearts and lives. Think of the sorrowing homes, think of the 
 desolate hearths that have been caused by the trifling neglect of 
 an official here and there, of public indifference as to a vote-m- 
 aid, or perhaps from mere want of system a still more notably 
 British defect. So it is in Cookery. Think of the brutal 
 husbands, the outraged wives, the deserted hearths that are 
 caused by bad Cookery. No doubt the Northern nations have 
 always been given to hard-drinking ; hard, fierce men have 
 always drunk hard. From the earliest dawn of Northern 
 history we hear of heroes drinking to their enemies' confusion 
 out of the skulls of their slaughtered foemen. But let us 
 not forget that we cannot play the plundering Norsemen and 
 the pioneer of civilisation at one and the same time. If we did 
 not continually flaunt our superiority in the eyes of the world 
 because we turn out more ginger-beer bottles, waterproofs,
 
 406 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 paper boots, and calico lengths than any nation in Europe, we 
 might explain away our bibulosity, just as the defects of a 
 savage are pardoned in consideration of his savagery. 
 
 In truth, much of our propensity to drink must be set down 
 to bad Cooking. Instead of the insane measures for harassing 
 publicans and brewers and the idiotic attempts to make men 
 more sober by Act of Parliament, we would do well to make laws 
 for purer and cheaper beer, and bestir ourselves to form a 
 National School of Cookery and oust the foreign cooks who 
 live upon our plunder. 
 
 Do we not hear every day, " Anybody can cook. It only 
 requires a little care and a little patience, you have only got to 
 put your mind to it," etc. ? The truth is Englishmen despise 
 cooking as an art. They have ever scorned to practise the arts 
 of war in time of peace, and thus are never prepared to take the 
 field. So is it with Cookery. They have never been able to 
 get it into their stupid national head that Cookery is not only 
 the most elemental, but also the most indispensable of human 
 arts. 
 
 Take any Englishman singly, and he will gladly admit 
 especially if he has crossed the Channel or has some smattering 
 of Taste that British Cookery, as a whole, is not only incredibly 
 bad, but incredibly wasteful, and incredibly extravagant. And 
 yet I ask my readers what collective attempt on a truly national 
 scale has ever been made to remedy this error : for example, to 
 start a National School for Cookery, or in view of this special 
 national defect, to establish municipal kitchens or compel an 
 examination to be passed by every woman before she takes to 
 herself a husband, in order that she may not make a drunkard of 
 him, or drive him to the public-house out of sheer desperation. 
 
 It is surely pertinent, that so long as the Norman spirit 
 overbore the Saxon, our Cooking, to judge by the elaborate 
 Cookery-books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, must 
 have been more French than the French, and as un-English in 
 our modern sense as it well could be. Perhaps there may be 
 some subtle connection between speech and palate which we 
 may not in our present state of science understand. It is at 
 least curious that with the fall of the Norman-French and the 
 full-fledging of English sentiment, English language, and what
 
 COOKERY 407 
 
 many call a true English King although in the male line Henry 
 VII. must have been a pure-bred Welshman we should have 
 abandoned the varied if highly-flavoured bills-of-fare of the 
 Norman-French cookery and gradually fallen back, possibly out 
 of sheer antipathy to our Norman masters, to the ponderous 
 meats, and the gorging and guzzling proclivities which originally 
 earned us from our conquerors the title of Saxon hogs. 
 
 It cannot be said that we lack teachers in these matters, nor 
 the example, nor even, thanks to our love of travel, the ex- 
 perience of other countries. Some of the first pioneers of 
 Hygienic, Sanitary, and Domestic Science have been English- 
 men, who have written long and largely upon such matters. So 
 deeply persuaded was the great Duke of Wellington of the 
 wastefulness, extravagance and incompetence of English camp 
 cooking, that he procured the services of one of the greatest 
 masters of the French School of Cookery to remodel entirely the 
 system of British Canteen and Commissariat. But in vain. 
 Scarcely had the hand of the Iron Duke relaxed its hold than 
 the " vis inertiae " of the British stomach prevailed and the 
 movement failed literally through the want of taste of those 
 whom it was intended to benefit ; in short, John Bull sighed for 
 the flesh-pots of Egypt, and eagerly returned to the tough half- 
 cooked meats of his childhood in a spirit of cheerful impenitence. 
 
 Let us then take it for granted that we are all at one upon 
 the imperfections of our Cookery. Surely from this it is but a 
 step for each one of us to bend all his energies to pluck from 
 among us this stain, this national reproach. Must we abandon 
 our oft-repeated boast, shall we give up our noble and all- 
 worthy determination, to stand in the van of civilisation, for the 
 want of a dainty chop ? Shall the sons of the heroes of Poitiers 
 and Cre9y and Waterloo, who have faced Europe in arms, quail 
 before the difficulties of a fried potato ? Perish the thought ! 
 
 Nor is it surely a want of appreciation on our part that can 
 stand as our excuse, as is clearly proved by the herds of 
 foreigners, objectionable or otherwise, who in the most literal 
 sense prey upon our vitals, and minister, with more or less 
 imposture, at rates quite disproportionate to their services, to 
 our higher culinary requirements. There can be no doubt about 
 the demand. Is it not, therefore, lamentable that the women of
 
 408 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 England cannot rise to the occasion and prove to the world that 
 they can satisfy the higher needs, as well as the bare, gross 
 necessities of their male belongings ? 
 
 Look to it, women of England ! that you do not tarnish that 
 reputation for frugality and housewifery which was once yours 
 and which has now passed away to the haus-frau of your 
 German congeners. Shall the fair name of the British matron 
 be jeopardised for the want of a brown sauce ? Yet it cannot 
 be doubted that, unless women set their houses in order 
 and apply themselves to cooking reform, our race must surely 
 degenerate. Let every woman who cooks her husband's dinner 
 badly, remember that she is from carelessness, stupidity, or 
 neglect, which but a very little care and knowledge would avoid, 
 not only shortening her husband's life but contributing to the 
 decay and final elimination of our race. For nothing is more 
 sure in the light of modern science than that a nation can only 
 survive through its fitness to keep the lead. We are already 
 becoming a toothless and, by leaps and bounds, a hairless race. 
 It only remains for us to have no stomach. Dyspepsia is fast 
 becoming the sign of the Anglo-Saxon race. One has only to 
 look at the advertisements of nerve-tonics, stomach-pills, drugs, 
 and so forth to realise the full extent of the evil. 
 
 Again, let us reflect upon the enormous national loss incurred 
 through this same want of culinary skill, which is at once our 
 boast and our shame. For not only do we put hundreds of 
 thousands into the pockets of undeserving foreigners who haunt 
 our shores to minister to our luxury and literally take the bread 
 from the Englishman's mouth, but by this same culinary ignorance 
 the well-to-do classes in search of change of air and scene never, 
 as in other lands, seek recreation at home if they can possibly 
 find the time or money to spend it abroad, with the result that 
 no class of caterer has yet arisen at home that can in any way 
 compare with the worst of any other European nation. The 
 restaurateur, the hotel-manager, the high-class caterer throughout 
 England is, and has been for the last fifty years, a Frenchman, 
 a German, a Swiss, anybody but an Englishman, to the enormous 
 national loss, and by slow degrees the almost complete extinction 
 of the native article. 
 
 In those few cases where Englishmen of the upper classes
 
 COOKEEY 409 
 
 with money to spend, either from being unable to travel or being 
 tied by business or other reasons, are compelled to satisfy them- 
 selves with taking their pleasure in an English watering-place or 
 an English health-resort while they will probably be waited upon 
 by half-taught German apprentices or other undesirable aliens 
 whose only talent consists in mangling the King's English, and 
 if the hotel be "first-class " according to British ideas, most surely 
 a German manager will preside, the prices will as surely rise 
 to a scale which is unknown in other lands, and as surely be 
 wholly disproportioned to the refreshments and food supplied. In 
 a word, there is no more gross and inexcusable disparity between 
 value received and money paid out, than in our average British 
 Hostelries, and no more unblushing extortioners than our 
 British " Hosts and Hostesses ! " whose only object seems to be 
 to deter a traveller from repeating the experiment of " leaving 
 home "if he can possibly help it. 
 
 Indeed, we have no hotels at all, properly so-called from a 
 Continental point of view ; they are simply public-houses to 
 which a certain number of rooms have been added ; no order, no 
 discipline, no service, nothing that can fairly be said to compare 
 with ordinary foreign hotel accommodation. In London, in three 
 or four fashionable places of resort, and in some large English 
 cities there certainly are some magnificent hotels of recent con- 
 struction which cannot be included in the former category : but 
 they are equally chargeable with the defect that used to be 
 attributed to the Dutch " of giving too little and asking too 
 much." They lavish enormous sums upon marble, gilding, 
 external show, and interior magnificence, without conferring any 
 special advantage upon their clients beyond that of paying an 
 exorbitant amount, in exchange for what would be considered 
 abroad third-class attendance, cooking, service, and accommoda- 
 tion. In a word, throughout England it may be safely said that 
 the principal difference between the most pretentious and palatial 
 hotel and the humblest public-house consists in the greater or less 
 variety of ill-cooked food, and the greater or less amount of 
 extortionate charges. The British wayside inn is occasionally 
 moderate of charge, and at times provides good wholesome 
 country cheer and snug withal, if situate in an out-of-the- 
 way untravelled region : but let an " attraction " arise in the
 
 410 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 neighbourhood a Roman villa fresh dug out, or a ghost seen in a 
 neighbouring ruin and at once a wing of bedrooms is added, 
 London prices are unblushingly charged, while the accommodation 
 and fare remain entirely unaltered. 
 
 In a recent riding tour through Cornwall and Devon, I met 
 everywhere with uniform London-high-class-hotel-charges from 
 each aspiring "pub" which had the hardihood or cunning to 
 write itself down Hotel. Whether built of clay or granite, mud 
 or brick, roadside banglo or seaside " palace," the beds, the 
 fleas, the food and the cooking and, above all the bread, were all 
 alike from nrst to last indistinguishable except by their bills from 
 the average country inn, and in all cases greatly inferior to the 
 remotest tavern of the Continent in comfort, cleanliness or board. 
 At Blackpool, where I write these lines reluctantly compelled 
 by sleeplessness to spend a week at that strange Medley of 
 unequalled Air, Dirt, and Prices, though comfortably housed in 
 what I am assured to be its premier Hotel I am compelled to 
 take my meals at a neighbouring " grillroom " because the Hotel 
 Restaurant (save the mark !), which is wholly managed by aliens, 
 and aspires to French cookery (!), whether in comfort, cooking, or 
 quality of food and wine, is little better than a " guingette " at 
 Montmartre, or a riverside speishaus of Berlin. Again, if one 
 could expect Hotel- Keepers anywhere to put their best foot 
 forward, it should be Bournemouth, the queenly and aristocratic 
 paragon of seaside resorts. I can only say I have tried them all 
 in turn and found them " all worse than one another " (what- 
 ever that may mean). Is it then surprising that Englishmen 
 in search of holiday retreats pour their millions into foreign 
 coffers instead of visiting the numberless beauties (which abound 
 in every part of the three Kingdoms), from which the ordinary 
 tourist is deterred not only by the fearsome quality of the 
 cooking he encounters, but even more, by the incredible extortion 
 of rapacious innkeepers ?
 
 CHAPTEE XXXV 
 
 THE DECLINE OF THE SENSE OF HONOUR 
 
 TIME was when the imputation of falsehood between man and 
 man, or boy and boy, could only be wiped out in blood. Britons 
 displayed a sensitiveness upon this head to which no other 
 nation bore comparison. It is difficult to say whether English- 
 men were always more jealous of their honour in this respect 
 than men of other lands, or whether it is fair to deduce from this 
 trait that they were more truthful. The fact remains that in 
 this respect at least they were at one time more punctilious than 
 any other race of men. The reason may be possibly sought in 
 this, that a wider distinction is made with us than with others 
 between a fib, or a white lie, and a black lie of the deepest dye 
 to which alone amongst ourselves the term of lie is usually 
 confined. On the Continent there is no such subtlety and 
 sophistry ; the term " lying " is applied to all categories alike, 
 and it is not unusual, especially among the southern races, to hear 
 two men tell each other that they lie, meaning that they err or 
 do not speak the truth, or are attempting to " cram " and so 
 forth. Whatever the cause, they often give the lie to each other 
 without either party considering that a deadly insult has been 
 perpetrated which only blood can wipe out. 
 
 The smallest schoolboy in England in my younger days at 
 the word or imputation of a lie, even from his closest and 
 dearest school friend, would straightway fall upon him vi et 
 armis in mortal combat. Your Irish gentleman, who was even 
 more jealous of any imputation in this regard, probably because 
 he is of all men most inclined thereto, was even more certain to 
 avenge instantly with any handy missile from a poker to a 
 decanter the charge of being a liar, with results to the company 
 and furniture generally in the good old drinking days, if one 
 may trust tradition which were, to say the least, highly 
 unpleasant. 
 
 After a long residence abroad I was struck to find the change 
 among my countrymen which runs alike through every class and
 
 412 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 grade from highest to lowest. Is this change merely to be 
 attributed to the greater distance we have travelled from the 
 time when every gentleman who wore a sword by his side was 
 bound to avenge affronts at the peril of his life, and could only 
 regain the esteem of his fellows, after being called a liar, by a 
 combat of life and death? Or is it that as a nation of shop- 
 keepers according to the all too true sarcasm of the great 
 Napoleon our commercial instincts have so quickly sapped the 
 finer feelings of our pre-shopkeeping era, and gradually permeated 
 every class of the nation ? Or, again, is it that the decline of 
 sensitiveness to insult upon this head is to be sought in the 
 rapid increase of lying which business habits most surely 
 engender, whereas the same being formerly regarded with greater 
 horror, detection was naturally visited with a higher penalty ? 
 That the Englishman of pre-machinery days, before commerce 
 had corrupted his blood and turned his head, was less truthful 
 and straightforward than his Continental neighbour, or that he 
 was more quick to avenge an insult or to perceive an affront, 
 cannot be for a moment maintained in the face of history and 
 tradition. Or that he was by nature of a pugnacious or quarrel- 
 some disposition it is equally impossible to believe : for all history, 
 current literature and caricature alike, concur in describing John 
 Bull as slow to provoke, but when once roused fierce and valiant 
 in the extreme. Swashbucklers and bullies rarely, if ever, com- 
 pared with other races, were to be found among them. Even 
 when duelling was at its height, if history and current tales be 
 trusted, the practice here was far from universal, and seemed 
 rather the result of foreign importation introduced with the fashions 
 and courts of our various foreign rulers, than an indigenous 
 habit. If we mount higher to the days when we were ruled by 
 British Kings, Tudors and Stuarts, Welsh and Scottish in 
 turn, the practice of duelling, or even the milder exercises 
 of chivalry, were scarcely as popular or widely esteemed 
 in England as upon the Continent ; and few things astonished 
 our foreign visitors of a later date so much as to see English 
 gentlemen, when insulted by a working man, pull off their coats 
 and set to work to fight him according to the rules of the prize 
 ring, or if annoyed or insulted by one of his own degree often 
 avenging himself by " punching his opponent's head" instead of
 
 THE DECLINE OF THE SENSE OF HONOUE 413 
 
 resorting to the arbitrament of the sword, which alone, according 
 to Continental ideas, befitted a quarrel among gentlemen. 
 
 The lesson which it seems safe to draw is that chivalry, with 
 all its accompanying graces, qualities and defects, only prevailed 
 among the rough English in so far as Norman prevailed over 
 Saxon, and that, as the Anglo-Saxon element prevailed, chivalry, 
 refinement and sensitiveness would naturally decline among a 
 rough and coarse-fibred race such as the Saxons undoubtedly 
 were, with the result that such duelling as occurred among 
 Englishmen, at least since Plantagenet days, has been mainly 
 instigated by court fashions and foreign ideas coming in the 
 train of their foreign rulers ; while the observed peculiarity of 
 noblemen "punching each other's heads," and those of lower 
 degree who thwarted them in street fight or tavern brawl, 
 proceeded rather from their own coarse habits not unmixed with 
 that good-humoured love of sport, which sought rather than 
 avoided the occasion of displaying personal strength and prowess. 
 
 Two questions then arise of the utmost interest. In abolish- 
 ing duelling, which, as we have seen, never flourished in our 
 midst outside the circle of a foreign court or the compulsory 
 practice of an alien code of honour in the army and navy, have 
 we not given ourselves credit for a self-denying reformation of 
 national habit which is neither supported by history or any 
 known succession of facts ? 
 
 The practice of duelling, which had at an early date almost 
 died out in England, though still rampant as ever among the 
 more fiery Celts of Northern Scotland and Ireland, acquired a 
 greatly increased stimulus during the Peninsular War, where 
 Spanish and Portuguese intercourse and military practice both 
 tended to its renewed exercise : while the Allied Occupation after 
 the Battle of Waterloo, when French fire-eaters revenged them- 
 selves upon their defeat by " calling out " and insulting on every 
 occasion their foreign invaders, was the cause of such wide- 
 spread disaster and prejudiced the nation to such an extent 
 against a practice in which, more especially with the sword r 
 their foreign rivals displayed so marked a superiority that the 
 tide was definitely turned against a habit which, as we have 
 seen, was rather exotic than indigenous. 
 
 As time went on, however, that love of Cant, and Hypocrisy,
 
 414 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE 
 
 which we owe to the unfortunate religious and political quarrels 
 of post-Reformation days, naturally suggested the notion of 
 glorifying ourselves upon this " noble act of self-sacrifice and 
 devotion," till Duelling has become a favourite subject, along 
 with Monte Carlo, to cast in the teeth of our European 
 neighbours, as a signal difference which marks out an Englishman 
 from other civilized beings, and one which enables him to hold 
 up his head among the nations and stalk abroad decked in 
 broadest phylacteries, thanking his stars that he is not as 
 other men ! 
 
 There remains the portentous question : Are we a people that 
 can afford to do without duelling ? Strong as is the conviction 
 that was borne in upon me long before I had any experience of 
 foreign residence and travel, that we of all people of the earth 
 are less adapted to dispense with what must be considered the 
 most efficient check against the rudeness and incivility or 
 brutality of its most objectionable members, my conviction is 
 ten-fold increased by my revised survey of the England of to- 
 day where the "snob" of yesterday or the "bounder" of 
 to-day, especially in the upper classes, has well-nigh succeeded in 
 placing society at his feet. There can be no question that, 
 philosophically speaking, there is little or no reason in duelling : 
 for the self-constituted judge of the social offender having no 
 special rights, and being guarded by no special sanction, naturally 
 runs the risk of turning poetic justice to naught in his attempt to 
 right the wrongs of outraged society, unless he be a more adroit 
 swordsman or a better shot than his adversary. 
 
 According to the common argument, in a settled society, where 
 competent judges are provided to right wrongs and redress 
 injury, there can, or should be at any rate, no pretext for 
 establishing such extra-judicial rites. But such argument is 
 futile ; because it is not the criminal who inflicts the deepest 
 wounds upon social order, but the sneaking or hectoring ruffian, 
 who, while cunning enough to keep his neck from the noose and 
 his valued person from the grip of the policeman, too often 
 conceals under a fashionable exterior the coarseness and 
 brutality of the gutter. While it must be owned that Sensitive- 
 ness and Delicacy are scarcely our National attributes, few 
 men are more patient, more long-suffering, more tolerant of
 
 THE DECLINE OF THE SENSE OF HONOUE 415 
 
 their kind, than Englishmen, or give more freely scope for 
 eccentricity and peculiarity ; indeed his whole training from 
 school upwards is democratic in the extreme. Consequently, 
 the checks of social control and delicate manoeuvres devised 
 to oust unpleasant and obnoxious members, are almost, if not 
 wholly, absent, or if exercised, fall utterly flat, in a country 
 where the rights of the individual possess such abnormal weight. 
 On the other hand the real, if unavowed, leaning of English 
 society, tending strongly, as it unquestionably does, towards 
 vulgarity and horse play, however thinly concealed under the 
 veil of propriety, accords the widest hospitality to all who seek 
 to enliven our society confessedly the dullest and least versatile 
 of human gatherings by originality of any description. 
 
 Nor has our natural brutality and coarseness been improved 
 by closer intercourse with North American habits and Yankee 
 methods of business or speech. With even more than our own 
 native mealy-mouthedness and disinclination to call a spade a 
 spade, your American male or female is at bottom a more 
 sensuous and unrefined animal than his cousins on this side of 
 the water, and though he guesses that he can " teach 'em to 
 sit up " as he elegantly terms it, and possibly even " to take a 
 back seat " in the latest varieties of commercial and financial 
 roguery in matters of taste, culture and refinement, they must be 
 ranked in all ways our inferiors, with this important exception, 
 that up to the present date at any rate, your American is not 
 only courteous and gallant but distinctly more amenable to the 
 firm if secret control of the gentler sex, than is his English cousin. 
 
 For however much the Teutons astonished the Eomans, 
 if we may trust Tacitus, by their respect for woman, so marked 
 in itself and so different from the position held by woman among 
 the other savage tribes with which they were acquainted, it 
 cannot be denied that there is no country in which so much 
 brutality towards the weaker sex is displayed from the cottage 
 to the palace as in ours. Our very laws, to say nothing of our 
 police-courts, reek with instances of the sad and ever-declining 
 position occupied by woman in this country. While, however, 
 it must be admitted that the highest and lowest classes here in 
 England treat their wives and womankind generally with scant 
 respect, the ennobling and elevating laws of chivalry unquestion-
 
 416 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 ably lifted women in England to a higher level throughout the 
 middle ages surviving even the debasing circumstances of the 
 Eestoration, as may be easily seen, through the veil of history 
 and tradition, by a certain grace of speech and refinement of 
 manner on the part of men of birth and education as plainly 
 appears in the Court life of Elizabeth and onwards, even down 
 to the very verge of the Eevolution. 
 
 Unfortunately, while freeing England from the domination of 
 Rome by the rejection of our last British King, the still coarser 
 manners and habits of our Dutch masters, followed later by the 
 dull gluttony and unrelieved dissoluteness of our new German 
 rulers, inaugurated between them, through precept and example^ 
 an era of drunkenness and debauchery which dragged the 
 nation down to an unexampled depth of degradation by the end 
 of the eighteenth century. When John Bull's chief resource was 
 Drunkenness and Pugilism and so-called Sport, consisting mainly 
 of setting on dogs to torment and worry wolves, bulls, and bears 
 chained to a stake, or the betting of huge sums on the life or 
 death of a cock, it is scarcely surprising that the already 
 brutalized Saxon temperament released from the irksome code 
 of chivalry, and fortified by the example of foreign masters 
 even more degraded than himself, should have dragged down 
 Woman along with himself into the slough of national decay 
 from which she was destined to emerge through the fiery ordeal 
 of blood which ended in Waterloo. 
 
 Professor Max Muller surely of all men the mildest, most 
 tolerant, and imbued with the highest feelings of a noble and 
 exalted Christianity when he held the Professorship of English 
 Languages at Oxford, being questioned on a notable occasion, in 
 respect of the duels he had fought at Leipzig University, 
 justified duelling as a dire necessity whereby the better and 
 more refined might thus keep in order and awe the rougher 
 elements ; and he admitted that few things astonished him more 
 than to find that the practice of duelling at Oxford was practi- 
 cally unknown. Here his biographer, who tells the story with 
 truly British self-complacency, adds as an appropriate comment, 
 " We at Oxford are luckily able to dispense with such necessity." 
 To this I reply, Are we ? Can anyone who has followed the 
 newspaper reports of the exhibition of upper-class blackguardism
 
 during the Cambridge University riots of November, 1905 ; or 
 can anyone who has had the experience of a London season, or 
 who has lived the life of a " man about town," who has shot 
 pigeons at Hurlingham, or played polo at Eanelagh, or gambled 
 at Monte Carlo, or raced at Newmarket and frequented the 
 fashionable clubs can any of them doubt, that unless the 
 regeneration of English Society is brought about by the return 
 to duelling or some similar alternative tribunal for the due 
 conservation of social rights, such as that which under the term 
 " Bagging " in the army has been of late with no small advantage 
 to society, adopted our collapse into a social state of primitive 
 barbarism cannot be long deferred. 
 
 It has often been remarked of late how detection in the most 
 disgraceful crimes brings little but temporary disgrace or 
 rejection by society in these unregenerate days. Not long ago 
 an English judge was fain to say that in his early days bank- 
 ruptcy was considered disgraceful. Now-a-days to be a bankrupt 
 here as in America seems rather a feather in one's cap, and is at 
 any rate amply made up for if a man by swindling his creditors 
 can prove that he is "smart" enough to keep his money and 
 shake off his debts by one and the same act. Similarly 
 swindling, provided it is not done on too contemptible a scale, is- 
 quite a fashionable means of acquiring notoriety. A baronet of 
 good family acquired high popularity by having proved in the 
 Transvaal that an English soldier was not considered to have 
 disgraced himself or his regiment by taking a prominent part in 
 a ridiculous and ill-concerted attack upon a friendly power; 
 while a Scotch nobleman not unconnected with Court became 
 quite a pet of the season through rumours, not wholly misplaced, 
 that he had succeeded in carrying away a very large share of the 
 spoils in a swindling company, of which he was a dummy 
 director. 
 
 As for divorce, some of the most charming and interesting 
 women that adorn London Society have not only been divorced, 
 but are in a fair way, as far as the eye can judge, of repeating the 
 same operation as soon as a suitable chance occurs. While as to 
 card cheating, by male or female, the bare suspicion of possess- 
 ing the art of turning up an ace whenever desirable, is rather 
 considered to lend an additional charm, and excites the deepest 
 E E
 
 418 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 interest and speculation about the lucky man in question on the 
 part of the gentler sex. As for any penalties attaching to the 
 discovery or connection with crime or concerted roguery, unless, 
 from long impunity the performer grows careless and suffers 
 public conviction, the idea is too ridiculous for discussion ; the 
 only question that really interests us moderns in such a 
 connection being, whether or not the game is worth the candle. 
 
 Let us take, for example, a certain newspaper which, for so 
 many years, has controlled public opinion in England that its name 
 has come to be almost synonymous with British Providence. I 
 ask once more if the disgraceful exposure of the Piggott versus 
 Parnell conspiracy has ever dimmed its fortune or lost that 
 newspaper so much as a single subscriber? or has the vulgar 
 iteration with which its pitiful Encyclopedia was pressed upon a 
 deluded public, exerted any permanent influence in modifying 
 its successful career? Indeed, do we Englishmen ever really 
 care for disgrace unless cash or loss of place be the result ? or 
 do we ever now-a-days reprobate crime where it is inconvenient 
 to do so, or declaim against wrong-doing except to turn a 
 sentence, to emphasise an opinion, or illustrate an anecdote ?
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 OUR EGREGIOUS GOVERNMENT 
 COUPLED WITH A FEW REFLECTIONS UPON OUR EMPIRE 
 
 IN the Political World our state of chaos is not less remarkable. 
 Beginning with the wholly groundless and truly British assertion 
 that we are blessed with what we call a " Glorious Constitution," 
 whereas alone among civilized nations we possess no constitution 
 at all which same deficiency constitutes one of our most 
 glaring national dangers our system of government if such a 
 name can be applied to what is not a system at all but rather a 
 collection of traditional habits and usages with an occasional 
 maxim of a distinguished statesman thrown in, the most striking 
 features whereof consist in an insane clinging to obsolete 
 phrases, offices, and methods wholly inapplicable to modern 
 ideas coupled with ceremonial usages, wholly farcical, meaning- 
 less, and out of date, which make up in British eyes for their 
 intrinsic absurdity and uselessness by their respectable 
 antiquity in spite of many honest attempts at reform has 
 successfully resisted all innovation or improvement. 
 
 So we blunder along, with what we please to call our Govern- 
 ment, which in the flesh usually consists of a large number of 
 amiable friends or relatives of the champion talker of the 
 House, successively nominated at an enormous salary to various 
 posts whose titles are derived from the middle ages and whose 
 sphere of action and responsibility is as ill-defined and dubious 
 as their names trying to "carry on His Majesty's Govern- 
 ment" as the slang phrase goes or, as a matter of fact, 
 to stave off as long as possible the popular indignation and 
 disgust at the slovenliness and unbusinesslike character of their 
 methods, in which they are largely aided and abetted by six or 
 seven hundred individuals, who, while avowedly despatched to 
 Parliament to check the ever-rising expenditure of government 
 and to represent the interests of their section of country, are 
 mainly concerned to advertise their own talents through the 
 Press, and devise fresh burdens for the patient taxpayer. 
 
 When at length the neglect of public business or the reckless
 
 420 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 disregard of public requirements evinced by the Premier, or his 
 cynical indifference to all or any public advantage except 
 maintaining his party in power by a reckless expenditure of 
 public money upon his greedy followers, or an unfortunate war, 
 into which, as is usual with us, we have accidentally tumbled 
 without knowing how or why, or an unusual crop of expensive 
 offices mainly invented to stop the mouth of the opposition or 
 a combination of all these things, lashes John Bull to the verge 
 of madness, he turns angrily upon his oppressors and hunts them 
 from office, until he is once more pacified by the lying pro- 
 fessions of his new masters, who penitently vow to him, that 
 nothing will ever cause them to swerve from the path of duty, 
 and that retrenchment of Governmental expenses will be their 
 sole object of solicitude. Then, all reform is abandoned, apathy 
 reigns once more, and for six or seven years the same pantomime 
 continues, the taxes rising higher and higher with unfailing 
 regularity, while the long-suffering taxpayer finds that the 
 change from Government to Opposition and vice versa, 
 represents the difference betwixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee. 
 
 Nor does our stupidity end here. Because there were two 
 parties in the State two hundred years ago, one of which 
 desired to oust the hereditary line of monarchs for reverting to 
 the ancient religion, while the other determined at all hazard 
 to secure a Protestant succession, we are doomed apparently so 
 long as Britons exist to call ourselves Tories and Whigs, 
 though the very origin of those recondite terms are only known 
 to the skilled antiquary, and the analogy of meaning, and still 
 more its connection with present-day policy, is wholly lost in 
 the mists of tradition and antiquity. None can deny that a large 
 majority of Englishmen are guided solely in recording their 
 vote by the memory of ancestral usage or the tradition that 
 their fathers before them were accustomed at election time to 
 wear a yellow or blue rosette. National interests and the 
 common weal do not necessarily enter at all into the strife 
 for power between Government and Opposition, which is the 
 beginning and end of British politics. Suffice it for the Govern- 
 ment to propose a scheme for public advantage, for the 
 Opposition to put forth all its powers of argument, satire or 
 denunciation, to prevent or obstruct by any means in their
 
 DUE EGEEGIOUS GOVEENMENT 421 
 
 power, the same being carried into effect ; not from any rooted 
 dislike of the measure, nay, it is not unusual to see them 
 adopt it themselves when they have an opportunity, but solely 
 and entirely for the purpose of unseating their opponents. 
 From this it may be easily seen that when seven hundred 
 councillors are assembled, four hundred of whom are banded 
 together to pass a popular measure of utility and the remaining 
 three hundred spare no trick or device to prolong the debate 
 night and day in order to tire out their opponents and so 
 compel them to abandon the Bill it is not surprising that 
 progress is slow, important business is shelved, and Government 
 tactics rather than the advancement of public measures become 
 the order of the day. Add to this that the Irish members, who 
 through some chicanery of bygone days, have even more than 
 their due share of representation, and consequently import more 
 than their due share of useless interruption and mischievous 
 obstruction into general business for which they have neither care 
 nor concern exert their monkey-like ingenuity by an adroit use of 
 the " forms-of -the- House " as they are euphemistically termed 
 but which might more truly be called absence-of-form, or 
 " happy-go-lucky " methods to gain more than a fair share of 
 attention to their numberless grievances and requirements. 
 This in turn acts disastrously upon English and Scotch business, 
 simply because the collective stupidity (called " Conservatism") 
 of the majority of Englishmen refuses to accept the common- 
 sense method adopted by every other civilised nation of 
 delegating business to those whom the business concerns ; with 
 the natural result that English business cannot be carried 
 through on account of the jealous or mischievous interference 
 of the Scotch or Irish members, while in their turn the English 
 members revenge themselves when Irish and Scotch business is 
 brought forward for discussion, by paying off old scores in maiming 
 or thwarting the cherished demands of the sister countries. 
 
 I am quite aware that many thoughtless if fervent Imperialists 
 will exclaim that we have at any rate made an Emperor of our 
 King during the past hundred years, and have acquired vast 
 accessions of territory which have placed us on a different footing 
 as regards other nations from that which we occupied a century 
 and a half ago.
 
 122 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 To this I reply that it cannot surely be disputed that little 
 England single-handed held her own with some distinction six 
 centuries ago, when the gallant Black Prince overran France at 
 his will and had the French Monarch, the King of Scotland, 
 and the King of Cyprus locked up in London at one time. Nor 
 is it easy to see how Englishmen have benefited by their monarch 
 bearing in addition to the proud title of King of England, the paper 
 Crown of conquered India conferred upon him through a Jewish 
 adventurer whose garish and theatrical instincts caused him to 
 entertain the eccentric notion that by the late Queen's assumption 
 of the title of Empress the sway of England might become less 
 distasteful to the Indian princes under her rule. Few at the time 
 attached much importance to an act which was expected to enhance 
 the importance of the sovereign in the eyes of her Indian subjects 
 at the expense of a harmless if foolish display of court pageantry. 
 But since an Emperor or Empress supposes an Empire, the 
 scattered dominions acquired by Britain's venturesome traders 
 and colonizing sons in various parts of the earth's surface, 
 loomed bigger and bigger in the nation's eye, until from colonies 
 they acquired the importance of a settled and connected Empire. 
 These ideas, carefully fomented by the "Jingo Press" of the 
 country, rapidly infected the entire nation, and, above all, the 
 rising generation, with an exaggerated estimate of Britain's 
 position and policy, not only out of all proportion to existing 
 facts, but, what was far worse, had the effect of directly tending 
 to launch England into a score of wild enterprises, either for the 
 preservation of her own or the acquisition of fresh territory, 
 which, while adding but little to her resources, has crippled the 
 nation and fixed upon her children for ever a crushing burden of 
 debt wholly disproportionate to the resulting gain. 
 
 As usual the consolidation, or indeed anything approaching to 
 an attempt at unifying the vast territories which acknowledge 
 the English rule, has been either futile or scarcely attempted 
 for any sincerer purpose than to gain a party triumph. In no 
 sense in which the word " empire " has been hitherto applied can 
 Great Britain be seriously considered to be an empire at all. 
 Large possessions she certainly has, scattered here and there over 
 the globe, but those that are colonised by her own children are 
 of no more service to her in an Imperial sense as contributing to
 
 OUE EGREGIOUS GOVERNMENT 
 
 her wealth and power than if they were wholly independent. 
 Indeed, the tendency is entirely in the opposite direction. 
 
 As for India, with a cynicism and cruelty which cannot be 
 sufficiently deplored, we have persisted year by year in depleting 
 that once rich and prosperous country which our sons had won 
 for us by the sword, till it needs but the failure of a monsoon or 
 an unequal distribution of the yearly rains for millions of our 
 unhappy fellow-subjects to be doomed to a frightful death. 
 
 Only the Englishman who is utterly ignorant of the true 
 condition of the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of 
 Hindustan, or else is utterly case-hardened to every sentiment of 
 humanity or national honour, can derive any satisfaction front 
 the possession of a country which, while it affords an unequalled 
 hunting-ground for needy adventurers and fattens an unlimited 
 amount of British officials, brings so little profit to the English 
 Exchequer and such discredit to its masters, that were it not for 
 the jealousy of neighbours and dislike of letting it fall into 
 the hands of a rival, no valid reason for its retention could 
 easily be advanced. 
 
 The latter quarter of the last century was spent by Englishmen 
 in a spirit of growing optimism and buoyant anticipation, the 
 preceding quarter having raised our national finances to a 
 position that seemed unassailable. The last ten years of the 
 century have forcibly brought before us the painful fact that we 
 were at last giving way to our foreign rivals whose originally bad 
 start in the race of commerce had filled us so long with the 
 rooted conviction that England was the rightful mistress of the 
 commerce as well as the seas of the world. 
 
 The Boer War has completed our awakening. Those among 
 us who look ahead and read the inexorable logic of facts cannot 
 but see that while we talk so much of empire, all that we really 
 can rely upon in bad times is the assistance of a handful of 
 gallant kinsmen over the seas who will help us in our little wars 
 to the best of their ability so long as we pay their expenses to 
 the full not only in times of war but even in times of peace. 
 That our amateur administrators in days of stress or hurry lose 
 all control of the reins of government and bid everyone come and 
 help themselves as they please out of the national purse that 
 when things go badly and the tide turns against us, the gallantry
 
 424 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 of our fighting race that triumphed at Cre9y, Poitiers and 
 Agincourt is sure to come to the front, and, all untrained as it is 
 and therefore unfitted to meet the professional armies of the 
 Continent on equal terms, seldom fails by sheer courage and 
 self-sacrifice to rescue the name of England from the obloquy to 
 which the failures of her generals and the want of forethought of 
 her amateur statesmen have so often brought her is but to 
 repeat a well-worn tale. 
 
 It was plain to the thoughtful that with all the talk of Empire 
 and Imperial designs the entire machinery for Imperial Govern- 
 ment was absent. No effective provision had been made, nor 
 even now can the wit of our statesmen devise a plan for averting 
 in the future such and similar calamities. For the first time 
 England's credit was seriously shaken, to say nothing of the 
 credit of her army, upon whose efficiency in the last resort the 
 credit of the nation must always stand or fall. Consols fell 
 from 109 to below 80, and her spending power, which 
 has not yet recovered the severe blow upon her resources 
 involved by the Boer War, tell too plainly the tale that the 
 reckless piling up of debt, fostered by a careless administration 
 and abetted by a time-serving and unpatriotic Press ever ready 
 to defend the extravagance ofeach successive Government whose 
 booty they share, have brought us to the point when instead of, 
 as in the last century, looking out for new worlds to conquer, 
 we should do well to look to our finances, demand a contribution 
 from our Colonies proportionate to our outlay for their protection, 
 set our house in order and purify the government, and, abolishing 
 our system of administration, civil and military, by amateurs, 
 set up competent machinery and train up a body of skilful 
 administrators for adequately managing our vast possessions. 
 Or else, abandoning our Imperial pretentious of the past, we 
 should forestall the future by turning our Colonies adrift before 
 they adopt the same course towards ourselves, and be content to 
 play the part of old England as gloriously as in the past, without 
 hankering after visions of Empire, to which our position as 
 an island must prove always a serious, if not an insurmount- 
 able, bar. 
 
 The Boer War has shown us, at all events, that we cannot go 
 on for ever falling into wars through the incompetence of our
 
 OUE EGEEGIOUS GOVERNMENT 425 
 
 statesmen, trusting to luck to fall out again, without severe loss 
 paying fabulous sums wrung from the already impoverished 
 taxpayers in supporting gigantic armaments at sea and land, and 
 squadrons in every part of the habitable or inhabitable globe, 
 patrolling the shores of such unprofitable deserts as west and 
 north Australia and Guinea for the sake of a handful of 
 inhabitants who form part of our so-called Empire, but 
 who refuse with a firmness and good sense which does them 
 infinite credit to pay a single penny for our enormous outlay in 
 their exclusive behalf, so long as we are vain or foolish enough to 
 furnish them for nothing. 
 
 In considering the whole situation one is puzzled to know 
 whether stupidity or thoughtlessness or vanity plays the larger 
 part in the ridiculous situation in which we find ourselves. Is 
 there a practical man with any knowledge of business in the first 
 place who would act as a British Government acts and always 
 has acted in the past ; who, instead of training up adminis- 
 trators for the difficult duties they are called upon to fulfil, from 
 all time have been accustomed to consider a Government post, 
 whether it be a Colonial Secretary or a High Commissioner, as 
 an appropriate reward for the man who has shown the greatest 
 talent as a thick-and-thin supporter of the Government ; who 
 habitually nominate to the anxious and responsible position of a 
 British judge the man who displays the most wit in getting the 
 Government out of a tight place ; who makes a bishop because he 
 writes a good pamphlet supporting a Government measure, or is 
 ready and willing at all times to back his own political party, 
 and, above all, the sacred decrees of the Privy Council ; or 
 deems a smart youth with talent for repartee newly-come from 
 Oxford to be the most suitable person for placing at the head of 
 our Army as a War Secretary, not because he is likely to carry 
 on that intricate business with skill or efficiency, but solely and 
 wholly as a target in Parliament against the " heckling " of 
 unpleasant reformers ? To all this the only answer that can be 
 made is surely the immortal saying of Galileo, " Eppur si 
 muove" (Still she keeps on). 'Tis true Great Britain still rules 
 the waves, but it cannot be denied that her axis has been rudely 
 shaken of late, our Army, the shuttlecock of party politics, 
 utterly gone and discredited in the eyes of the foreigner, whose
 
 426 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 hatred and jealousy of the mistress of the seas, slowly rising 
 since the days of Trafalgar and Waterloo, seeks but an early 
 chance of humbling her in the dust and sweeping away once for 
 all her naval and commercial supremacy. 
 
 If we seriously mean to build a real Empire out of the 
 scattered territories under the Union Jack round about the 
 world, let us for heaven's sake play the part of reasonable and 
 practical men. Let us apply the methods which we know so 
 well how to fit to the requirements of business and commerce to 
 the needs of our scattered forces instead of petting the Colonies 
 as we have done for the past fifty years, with the result that 
 they do nothing for us while we are compelled to make vast 
 sacrifices for them. Let us bring the matter to a head once for all 
 lest further disaster befalls us. If our Colonies refuse to share our 
 burdens without which our so-called Empire is a fraud and a 
 sham, would it not be wiser to cast them off before we are 
 ourselves ruined by supporting them, or, more ignominiously 
 still, be ourselves discarded by our ungrateful children ? 
 
 Surely here is an example of colossal stupidity, or thoughtless- 
 ness, or vanity, which offers a singular contrast to the ancient 
 British character which, as I have tried to show throughout this 
 book, is fast drifting from its old landmarks, and slowly but 
 surely losing one by one its boasted characteristics. Our love of 
 travel and our insane greediness for territorial acquisition, our 
 effusive hospitality to foreigners and our reckless importation of 
 aliens who minister to our luxury, seem to have turned John 
 Bull into a flabby, invertebrate cosmopolite who is neither " fish, 
 flesh, fowl, nor good red herring " who, while seeking to conform 
 himself to and adopt all the airs and graces and talents of other 
 nations, for which he is utterly unsuited, has lost the ancient 
 manly attributes which enabled our fierce breed of island 
 bulldogs to overrun the world. 
 
 I have advisedly placed vanity in the third position among 
 the motives which induce us to retain our present impracticable 
 position, and few of my readers will gainsay the fact that in nine 
 cases out of ten vanity or empty pride will be found at the 
 bottom of any attempt to defend our illogical quandary. Indeed, 
 as far as regards India, where no tie of affection or humanity or 
 desire for the improvement of the subject races can be urged in
 
 CUE EGREGIOUS GOVERNMENT 427 
 
 defence of our rule unless it be by a past master of cant and 
 duplicity what is it but vanity keeps us there ? Is it that we 
 may brag of having won by the sword and held by the sword, 
 despite Russian and French bayonets, two hundred and sixty 
 million beings whom, by our superior arms, we have reduced to 
 the veriest slavery and deliberately dragged down to the verge of 
 starvation, murdering them as surely as if another Herod from 
 amongst us had decreed that each year every male child should 
 be slaughtered, by the measures that we have adopted to destroy 
 their trade and diminish their sources of existence? And for 
 what? In order that Manchester and Leeds shall flourish on 
 her ruins and the British taxpayer shall be relieved to a trifling 
 extent out of all proportion to the evil wrought ! 
 
 It is incredible, if the greater number of Englishmen could 
 only ascertain the real condition of India and the hopeless misery 
 and poverty that our rule has entailed upon this enormous 
 section of the human race, that they would not exclaim with one 
 voice that Indians must no longer be governed by England so 
 long as she finds herself unable to better their lot and rule them 
 in their own interests. It is no exaggeration to say that if we 
 were to pour into Hindustan the entire value of the national debt, 
 entrusting it to honest administrators to lay out for the benefit 
 of India, it would be impossible to restore the vast population to 
 the condition of prosperity which they enjoyed under the rule of 
 the Moguls. What a satire upon our British civilisation ! Well 
 might a famous Frenchman exclaim, after visiting the magnificent 
 relics of Mogul art and the great national works now crumbling 
 into decay, that " If the English after a century of possession 
 were to be expelled from the country the only monument of their 
 rule would be a pyramid of empty beer-bottles " ! 
 
 Again I repeat, be it on a platform or in clubs or in lectures 
 or in articles by soldiers and sailors, do we rise higher in our 
 responsibility towards India than devising the latest naval or 
 military plan for frustrating the Russian's designs by land or 
 guarding India against the dangers of revolt or foreign invasion 
 by sea ? Are we to play the parts of mastiffs defending a stolen 
 bone from another hungry dog watching it from afar, not be- 
 cause we value it or because we treasure its possession, so 
 much as because we cannot endure to have it taken away?
 
 428 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Other nations grind their poor to maintain the armies and 
 navies which they think necessary to avert destruction : but it 
 remains for the practical Briton, who glories in his sound good 
 sense, to patrol the entire world at the expense of his own 
 suffering people in order that he may say that " the sun never 
 sets upon his empire" and that its total population (dead, alive 
 or starving) exceeds that of the Caesars of Imperial Rome !
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 KATES AND TAXES 
 
 How is it that we are the only civilized nation who seem to- 
 think that nearly all our taxation should be raised at the 
 expense of the two articles which seem, if not necessary, at any 
 rate most conducive to the happiness of the greater number of 
 working men ? If we were purely spiritual beings it is probable 
 that we should follow the strict dictates of Science and neither 
 smoke, nor drink coffee or tea, but confine ourselves to pure water 
 like the beasts of the field. But whether rightly or wrongly, the 
 experience of the entire human race demonstrates the apparently 
 ineradicable tendency of humanity towards some or other 
 stimulant which may compensate him, as it would seem, for 
 that loss of nerve and muscle which is the result of severe 
 bodily or intellectual effort. I have before dwelt at some length 
 upon the absurdity and want of logic of a Government which 
 penalizes drink to the highest extent, deliberately raising its 
 price in order to gain the wherewithal to govern, and, while it 
 professes to deplore the bibulous excesses of the nation, is 
 depending almost solely upon that same very vice for its sources 
 of supply. And not content with that, with a canting hypocrisy 
 incredible anywhere but in England, while the Government 
 declaims against and penalizes the drunkard by every con- 
 ceivable method, it practically drives him to the use of spirits 
 and other highly intoxicating beverages by placing every possible 
 impediment in the way of his obtaining the lighter alcoholic 
 beverages upon anything like moderate terms. For the Govern- 
 ment tax doubles the price of beer, which is not so much a 
 luxury as a necessity to the working man, while at the same 
 time in the higher ranks the lightest and cheapest clarets of 
 France are similarly mulcted to the extent of more than cent, per 
 cent., as if for the express purpose of driving poor and rich alike 
 to resort to the stronger and more intoxicating kinds of drinks ! 
 
 It would seem, according to the practice of other nations, 
 and the dictates of common-sense, that instead of placing an.
 
 430 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 enormous tax upon income and so discouraging the exercise of 
 men's brains and faculties by indirectly penalizing them, and so 
 directly diminishing the incentive to capital accumulation, or 
 by imposing huge and almost confiscatory death duties, which, by 
 curtailing capital, cut at the root of industrial and other 
 expansion and indirectly dimmish the Wage Fund of the nation, 
 it would be more reasonable, at least where an unusual war, 
 expenditure, or other temporary causes require special relief, to 
 graduate the taxation as is done in other countries by taking 
 first in order what is least necessary, and proceeding from 
 luxuries to articles of prime necessity. 
 
 After the Franco-German War, the enormous indemnity 
 payable to the Germans was raised in France according to a 
 classified tariff in which luxuries came first and amusements 
 next, graded in order of necessity. No attempt of this kind was 
 made after the Transvaal War, nor, as far as I know, on any 
 preceding occasion when any special strain has been put upon 
 the reserve power of the nation. In an age of luxury where 
 the millionaire is set up as a popular idol by newspapers, novels, 
 stage and society alike, the tendency must ever be upwards or 
 downwards according to the point of view from which you look 
 at it, and sensual gratification, ministered to day by day by 
 fresh inventions, fresh machinery, and fresh methods, must 
 necessarily increase at ever accelerated pace. Further, the states- 
 man, who places an impediment in the use of such luxuries as are 
 not made or manufactured in England and which, consequently, 
 while doing an injury to our own people, confer advantage alone 
 upon our rivals, thereby works a double benefit by first abating 
 the use of luxury and discouraging its increase, or penalizing 
 those who use it to the highest extent, and secondly preventing 
 English capital from being devoted to transient and useless 
 employment for the sole enrichment of the foreigner. 
 
 As for amusements, I can hardly think so ill of my nation as 
 to suppose that there would be any hesitation in compelling 
 amusements and entertainments of all kinds to contribute a very 
 large quota towards our national indebtedness, were it not 
 abundantly evident that government in England is so cursed 
 with the obligation of obeying the Press, and the Press is so 
 closely bound up with the prosperity of entertainments, that
 
 EATES AND TAXES 431 
 
 nothing short of a national rising would compel the Government 
 to look at the matter from an unbiassed point of view. No other 
 but a stupid nation, nevertheless, would endure such a state of 
 things, and just as the present monstrous anomaly, through 
 which we are deliberately starving the food-producing com- 
 munity of our country upon which the greatest number of our 
 fellow-citizens depend for their existence, prevents us from 
 substituting a real for a deceptive system of Free Trade lest we 
 offend our masters the town artisans therewith, so too, like a 
 helpless flock of sheep we permit our Government to be tied at 
 the heels of scribblers who band themselves together for the 
 purpose not so much of supplying us with news, which is their 
 avowed pretence, as of swaying us to their own selfish ends by 
 what they please to call the agency of Public Opinion, which, 
 freely translated, is the collective use of the longest purses. 
 
 The taxation of amusements, in a word, as it was practised 
 in France after the Franco-German War would seem to be the 
 fairest and most rational source of recruitment for the national 
 purse. There a proportionate sum was levied upon every 
 seat in every theatre and every place of amusement. Not a 
 photograph could be taken without its tax or stamp being paid 
 to the Government in excess of the purchase price. In England 
 and America it would seem most useful and reasonable, 
 considering the plague of written matter, to place a tax on 
 newspapers and magazines, along with other useless and objec- 
 tionable ministers to pleasure, such as motors, bicycles, kodaks, 
 and other like pastimes that are more honoured in the breach 
 than the observance, which would not only be a benefit to the 
 rising intellect of the nation by reducing the annual output of 
 brain-destroying drivel, but would perhaps operate beneficially 
 in deflecting the energies of the scribbler and the photographer 
 into more useful and artistic directions. 
 
 EATES. 
 
 Nothing better exemplifies the collective recklessness of the 
 British Public than his indifference to retrenchment, or any 
 rational system of control, in rates. Having been flattered 
 during the last century for his extraordinary capacity for 
 colonization and self-government, the average Briton looks
 
 432 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 upon himself as a heaven-born financier who cannot go wrong 
 do what he will. Being informed by his Press, which is always 
 in favour of money being spent in any manner for whatever 
 purpose by everybody, that the more rates and taxes rise the 
 more obviously the nation is on the up-grade, he is rather proud 
 than otherwise of high taxation and high rates. So far from 
 viewing the rising expenditure of the nation, which in thirteen 
 years has almost doubled itself, with distrust, the average 
 Briton points to it with an air of pride and says, " Look what a 
 rich nation we are ! What other nation in the world can afford 
 to spend 150,000,000 a year ? " 
 
 As it is with our Government, so it is with our rates ; for the 
 " public man " of the Municipal or Urban District Council is but 
 a faint reflection of the M.P., and, to paraphrase the words of the 
 immortal Jorrocks, Parliament may be truly described as the 
 image of the Urban Council with all its excitement and expendi- 
 ture and only 10 per cent, of its danger ! For it must be 
 remembered that proud as most of us generally are, probably 
 in the ratio of our ignorance, of our great national law-making 
 machine, sentiment and claptrap aside, it may be considered to 
 be about the most unsuitable machine imaginable to carry out 
 the purpose for which it is conceived. Its checks are nil, and 
 the responsibility of the units which compose it are in like 
 manner hypocryphal. Bad as is the system of raising and 
 spending public money by " local bodies," there are two striking 
 advantages which they possess over our big spending body at 
 Westminster : first, a closer personal responsibility, or at any rate 
 identification of men with measures, and in the second place the 
 greater facility for removing offenders and reversing their policy, 
 whereas once firmly established in public favour and once lauded 
 to the skies by the omnipotent Press, our leading lawtinkers at 
 Westminster are placed beyond human criticism upon a quasi- 
 sacred pedestal of immunity.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 
 DECLINE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PRESS AND DRAMA 
 
 THE key to the degradation of the British and American mind as 
 reflected in its Press and current literature is cheap literary 
 education. The ways of the American Press and the ever- 
 growing desire for what is latest and newest instead of what is 
 best and truest, is the cause of our literature being flooded with 
 cheaply-educated men, whose chief quality is daring and 
 impudence. Imperfectly instructed, with a mere smattering of 
 classical culture, and scarcely a speaking acquaintance with our 
 accredited authors, they start boldly upon what they term a 
 journalistic career, spilling gallons of ink in daily paper, 
 periodical, or magazine work, supplying their shortcomings by 
 what they call "dash," "push," and "ginger," in the elegant 
 slang of their trade. 
 
 Is it then marvellous that the produce of such minds goes to 
 swell the literary garbage on which our youth in these days are 
 fain to pasture, to the exclusion of the less exciting, but more 
 solid mental food of pre-American days ? It is not easy to see 
 to what end the United States literary purveyors have of late 
 set their minds as well as their dollars to capture the British 
 Press, as they have already attempted to capture our mercantile 
 navy, and, as far as can be seen, are in course of annexing and 
 bending to their own purpose the entire British Drama, lock, 
 stock, and barrel! That there is "money in it," according to 
 their favourite expression, appears likely from the fact that 
 Americans embark upon it. Just as the Jews, whose example 
 they seem to have closely followed in this respect, were at 
 one time totally unable to obtain a footing in British high- 
 class society or politics, but having once firmly seated themselves 
 in the financial and political supremacy which they had so long 
 coveted, soon reaped an abundant social harvest through their 
 wealth and exceptional advantages of advertisement obtained 
 by the subjugation of a large section of the British Press so, 
 to our American and Canadian cousins, with their keen nose for 
 F F
 
 434 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 dollars and enterprise, coupled with an astonishing pertinacity, 
 it has been easy under the guise of friendship to humiliate the 
 parent country and convert her to Yankee ways, partly through 
 our hospitable indifference, and still more through that doting 
 partiality for the children of their loins which animates too 
 many otherwise sensible Englishmen. 
 
 In still worse plight is our modern theatre, if we are to 
 believe all the piteous cries that emanate from the theatrical 
 toads under the Yankee harrow. It is but a few days ago that a 
 writer of authority in the St. James' Gazette declared that, " Great 
 as is the consternation and alarm among theatrical folks at 
 the present condition of popular dissatisfaction and dramatic 
 ineptitude," Mr. Charles Frohman (who, it appears, has already 
 headed a syndicate which successfully bought up several of our 
 London theatres) ' ' is now the most commanding figure on the 
 British stage, and that so long as he is with us there is no 
 occasion to worry." 
 
 Coming as it does as an anonymous, and therefore official 
 declaration, that one of the most aristocratic organs in England 
 has finally been seduced by American blandishments to espouse 
 the cause of British dramatic slavery, it is interesting to recall 
 the fact that the aforesaid Mr. Charles Frohman carefully 
 heralded forth the paragraphs of a friendly Press some three 
 months ago, "that the edict had gone forth" (presumably from 
 the voice of his "combine ") " that foreign plays no longer go 
 down in London and the United States," and that " United 
 States dramatists are destined to quickly supersede the English 
 as being more cosmopolitan and up-to-date " which, freely 
 translated, appears to mean that the American combination for 
 exploiting the British stage, having first bought up, or other- 
 wise obtained the control of several London theatres, and fore- 
 stalled all competition by buying out the services of our principal 
 dramatic authors, has succeeded in making what is called a 
 "corner " in theatrical matters. 
 
 Apparently they hope before long to control with such com- 
 pleteness the entire dramatic output on both sides of the ocean 
 that they will be able, with the help of a venal and corrupt 
 Press, to foist whatever rubbish they please upon a patient and 
 unresisting public, and, little by little, wean the British play-
 
 DECLINE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEESS 435 
 
 goer from good English pudding, to " Yankee notions," knowing 
 full well, that, so timid and modest is the average Briton in 
 forming his own critical opinion in such directions, it will suffice 
 that the entire Press warmly welcome in the future, as they 
 have done in the past, American stagework and American 
 theatrical methods as specially devised by an all-wise Provi- 
 dence from all time for the regeneration of the British race. 
 
 In short, drama as well as literature in general are respon- 
 sible for two serious wrongs to the public. 
 
 In the first place they underrate the public taste, inasmuch 
 as they have been long accustomed to sell their wares, good, bad, 
 and indifferent, at their own price, that is, not so much according 
 to their intrinsic value as according to the estimate which they 
 have bribed the Press to form of their work. 
 
 The second evil is that public opinion, to which these gentry 
 appeal, is practically non-existent or dumb in England and 
 America. In America, because the proportion of the people 
 who are competent to judge or who think they are competent to 
 judge, is extraordinarily small ; and in England, because the 
 average playgoer and novel-reader has been for many years so 
 carefully trained to servile submission by the impudent self- 
 assertion of an ignorant and venal Press, that he has long since 
 given up all attempt to assert himself, and patiently bows to 
 the judgment of thinly-veiled advertisement, miscalled dramatic 
 and literary criticism. 
 
 It has been reserved, however, for America to reap the full 
 use of the Press in milking the dramatic and literary cow to the 
 last drop, squeezing whatever pecuniary benefit could be trans- 
 ferred, by fair means or foul, from the pocket of the producer 
 into the pocket of the journalistic middleman. Upon the same 
 principle of trade by which the producer is robbed of the just 
 fruits of his toil, and the consumer by the same stroke is com- 
 pelled to pay four or five times the value of the article he buys, 
 Anglo-American ingenuity, aided by a corrupt Press, succeeds in 
 squeezing the author on one hand, and the dramatist on the 
 other, so as to obtain their dramatic stuffs at the lowest 
 possible rate, by a judicious mixture of so-called newspaper 
 criticism varied with thinly disguised blackmail foisting, so to 
 speak, margarine upon the public at an outrageous advance on
 
 436 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 prime cost, while the genuine butter is either put away to be 
 produced when wanted, or dangled in the eyes of the consumer 
 labelled as " the very best procurable " after being largely 
 adulterated, partly to suit the fictitious taste which they them- 
 selves create, and still more to suit the exigencies of their own 
 pockets. 
 
 Few things are more profitable than to invest capital in buy- 
 ing out, or by skilful blackmailing destroy, the production of 
 good wares where the market is practically unlimited and the 
 demand for the wares extensive ; since a monopoly in high- 
 priced literary and dramatic goods enables an unlimited supply 
 of rubbish which is obtained for an old song, to be charged and 
 entered against the public as first-class commodities fully 
 guaranteed by a self-constituted Press tribunal from whose 
 verdict there is no appeal. 
 
 For, as I have often in the course of this work remarked 
 and insisted, the bold Britons who vow so frequently that 
 they " never, never, will be slaves," in aesthetic matters 
 are ever ready, nay, anxious to be led by the nose, and to 
 take from the Press those opinions in all matters of taste and 
 culture which they are either too modest or too cowardly to 
 set up and maintain with the result that public opinion in 
 America and England, apart from the muffled whisper of the 
 club and drawing-room, the public-house and markets, is 
 practically denied expression if it runs " against the money." 
 From this it naturally follows that the current of predominant 
 opinion being hidden beneath the surface, nothing is easier for 
 the Press than to "follow the money" and boldly stick to the 
 paying line of scent, by the simple process of " writing up " 
 whatever most money can be made out of, by stamping out 
 adverse criticism among the highly placed through anonymous 
 sneers not far removed from blackmail, or by ignoring letters of 
 expostulation wherever such a course can be taken with 
 impunity. But we shall be told, can the dramatic authors be 
 accused of serious default so long as the public crowd as they do 
 to the theatre, and the stalls which twenty years ago were 
 comparatively empty, are now frequently filled to overflowing ? 
 The reason is not far to seek. Since managers discovered that 
 the modern lady, having too many irons in the fire to attend
 
 DECLINE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEESS 437 
 
 to her household, has followed the American fashion in this, as 
 alas ! in so many others, of entertaining her friends in hotels 
 and restaurants, they have not been slow to find out that 
 a dinner at a public place of entertainment as necessarily 
 implies theatre to follow, as fish after soup. Add to this what 
 the most cursory observation of feminine nature will enable the 
 dullest to perceive, that when a woman has got guests to enter- 
 tain with the responsibility of success or non-success of a 
 party upon her shoulders, she is not likely to be over critical 
 about the play to which she has beguiled her guests. Nor is 
 it easy, on the other hand, for even the sternest critic, who finds 
 himself condemned to sit out three hours of " tomfoolery " under 
 the title of musical comedy, to resist the chorus of admiration 
 showered upon the adorable frocks of " Lottie Flyaway " or the 
 exquisite set of " Mr. Plantagenet Languish's " dress shirt, 
 when echoed and re-echoed by the fair creatures with which he 
 is surrounded. Difficult, therefore, as it may be, for even the 
 well-disposed British Manager to acquire a play that is worth 
 putting on the stage, he feels that he can at any rate please the 
 ladies, in whose power it lies to mar or make him, by tasteful 
 furniture and dainty dresses, which in ninety cases out of a 
 hundred are the sole and absorbing objects of interest to lady- 
 playgoers in this trivial and luxurious age : while any symptoms 
 of disaffection that may arise from our gilded youth can always 
 be effectually stopped by a judicious application of pretty faces, 
 shapely limbs and dances, in which street-tumbling, and the 
 fallen arts of a ballet that is past, are strangely mixed up and 
 spiced with as much indelicacy and vulgarity as the fear of the 
 County Council and its myrmidons will admit. 
 
 If collusive roguery, euphemistically termed " cornering," 
 flourishes in the City and the Strand in a manner that speaks 
 volumes for the readiness with which Englishmen adopt 
 American fashions New Bond Street is far from behindhand 
 in the race. There the ring of critics, music-sellers, publishers, 
 and contractors drive a roaring trade, much after the manner of 
 the Jewish master-tailors of the ready-made trade in the East, 
 by importing foreign musicians and singers, tempting them with 
 imaginary tales of enormous gains, and then sweating them 
 ad libitum until their slender means are entirely exhausted.
 
 438 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 If they are poor and of mediocre talent the contractors fatten 
 upon their labour by the simple process of charging them for 
 their "appearances" instead of remunerating their services. 
 Should they, however, gradually succeed in winning the public 
 favour, and are by that means able to break from their task- 
 masters' toils by securing their own appointments direct, the 
 game is up, and the rascals have no choice but to hunt other 
 victims. Unhappy foreign bandsmen suffer most of all. In- 
 variably let out to customers for two guineas a day, five shillings 
 to seven and sixpence is the utmost that falls to their own lot, 
 while the remaining thirty-five shillings or so per head is 
 pocketed by the contractor who generally continues to fatten 
 upon them, until at length, stung to desperation, the foreign 
 musician makes a bold bid for freedom, and heads a party of 
 fellow-sufferers, who exact from fresh paymasters a more 
 equitable salary at first hand. Another favourite trick by which 
 the New Bond Street gentry bring " grist to the mill " is the 
 system of publishing new songs, of uncertain popularity and 
 elusive value, marking them four shillings, to be sold according 
 to demand as low as two shillings and costing a shilling or even 
 less to the trade, thereby easily enabling music-masters and 
 mistresses to cheat their pupils to the extent of three and four 
 hundred per cent. ! while on the other hand, by the simple 
 device of taking the entire output of the few really popular 
 song-writers in advance and so monopolising their produce, 
 they can afford to unify or bring up in value the entire stock of 
 rubbish which is thrown at their heads for little or nothing, and 
 deceive the public at the same time by an adroit use of Press 
 criticism, into paying the music publishers the same exorbitant 
 figure for what they themselves get for next to nothing, or, in 
 the case of amateurs, literally get paid for accepting.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 UNEMPLOYED 
 
 WHILE I write, a mass of unemployed will hold a meeting in 
 Hyde Park and endeavour to arouse the sympathies of the 
 cockneys by a procession through the principal London streets. 
 Their leaders do not hesitate to declare that they place the 
 utmost reliance upon the formidable show they expect to make 
 not only by numbers, but by their aggressive and quasi-military 
 bearing, a point which has been strongly impressed upon them 
 as forming an important lever for obtaining the end they pro- 
 pose : and it is an open secret that, despairing and disgusted 
 with the attitude of the Government in their regard, they see 
 no remedy except what must be extorted by the fears rather 
 than the sympathy of their fellow-countrymen. 
 
 Few countries have done more to create for themselves an 
 unemployed question. No doubt it exists among all countries 
 to a more or less extent. Our inheritance, however, dates from 
 fully three hundred years ago when we allowed a selfish and 
 rapacious king, under the lying pretext of sparing Parliament 
 any further demands or requisitions, to put into his own purse 
 and expend for his own selfish pleasures, the funds which may 
 well be described as our national assurance against poverty, 
 misfortune, and pauperism. Up to the time King Harry de- 
 voured the lesser, and subsequently the greater Abbeys and 
 later the Hospitals and Chantries of England, the religious 
 bodies who possessed and governed these beneficent institutions 
 were not only particularly adapted for watching the ragged 
 fringe of labour and healing the wounds that disease or loss of 
 the head of the household inflicted upon families within the 
 ambit of their jurisdiction, but besides, were able and willing 
 to devote certain sums entrusted to them by kind benefactors in 
 helping the deserving poor, lifting them up when they had 
 fallen by the way, assisting deserving widows to rear their 
 families when deprived of their husbands, and performing in 
 short the part of Providence in sustaining those whom calamity
 
 440 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 or disease prevented from gaining a livelihood. More than this, 
 the system of tenure adopted in most of the large conventual 
 establishments, consisting as it did of part service and part rent, 
 was admirably adapted for those who were unfitted to enter 
 the general competition of labour, by misfortune, ill-health, or 
 exceptionally large families, and who, if not assisted by occasional 
 help, would surely fall on a downward path, to swell the 
 army of paupers which we now begin to look upon as a national 
 institution. The result of this confiscation was very soon 
 visible. As early as Edward VI. it was found necessary to 
 seize the able-bodied men ejected from the abbey lands and 
 wandering homeless about the country, and through laws 
 expressly enabling to this end, hand them over to anyone who 
 was willing to give them the coarsest food in exchange for 
 their labour, chaining them, if necessary, to prevent their escape, 
 and in all ways treating them as convicts rather than free men, 
 and lastly, providing the severe punishment of being branded 
 with the letter " V" on the forehead, upon their recapture after 
 attempting to escape. 
 
 Later, in the time of Elizabeth, we hear that so many thousands 
 assembled in the neighbourhood of London and gave themselves 
 up to robbery, etc., from the inability to obtain work, that it is 
 noted in the Chronicles of the times that her Eoyal Highness 
 commented severely upon the laxity and negligence of the Lord 
 Chief Justice to abate the nuisance, and insisted upon his taking 
 steps at once to put an end to the disorder. Finding, however, 
 that hanging did not abate the nuisance, it was ordered, in the 
 earliest poor law passed in Queen Elizabeth's reign, that each 
 unemployed working man if found outside his own parish should 
 be reconducted there and a rate should be levied upon the 
 parish to which he belonged to maintain him at the public 
 expense. Thus the first pinch of the national shoe was detected 
 within fifty years after the Eeformation, when the curse 
 of pauperism descended upon the land for the first time, and 
 substituted for private charity the stern economic regulations of 
 the workhouse and the vestry; and when it was too late to 
 retrieve the past it was perceived that a burden would be cast 
 upon the workers of the land for ever to maintain, willy nilly, the 
 suffering or failing members of the community.
 
 UNEMPLOYED 441 
 
 Subsequently a more humane, but probably a still more 
 injudicious treatment was adopted towards those whose only 
 crime was to be unable to earn their bread. Marriages were 
 not only permitted but encouraged : with the result that 
 pauperism multiplied and increased till at the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century considerably over a million or something 
 like a twentieth of the entire population were supported by public 
 bounty. Numerous emendations of the poor law have been 
 attempted since that time. The public feeling has vacillated 
 between extreme indulgence and extreme severity. But upon the 
 whole it may be said that, owing to the increased prosperity of 
 the latter half of the nineteenth century, the advance of medical 
 knowledge or the greater abundance of places intervening be- 
 tween rough labour and comparative sinecures such as caretakers' 
 places and so on it is certain that a large diminution has taken 
 place, relatively with the increase of the population, of late years : 
 though partly from a decrease of prices and partly from the 
 keen competition of foreign trade, the taint of pauperism which 
 has prevailed during three centuries in what may be called the 
 ragged fringe of the ranks of labour, has recently developed a 
 condition of things which must be termed acute. 
 
 The unemployed consist mainly of four classes. Those who 
 are unable to obtain work, those who cannot work, and those 
 who spend their lives in avoiding work, and merely make a pre- 
 tence of looking for work to hide their real intentions of prowling 
 in search of public assistance or private charity ; among which 
 may be included the entire army of tramps who, owing to the 
 growing sentiment or leniency of legislation which is the curse 
 of the Anglo-Saxon race is fast proving a serious drain upon 
 industry in England, the English colonies and the United States. 
 
 Lastly, there are those who from either taint of disease or 
 ill-health, inebriety or misfortune, are either unable to support 
 their families, or if single, are unable to do a full day's work. 
 
 The next question which arises, and one which has repeatedly 
 perplexed our Parliament is this : To whom shall these men be 
 made chargeable" ? Are they to be relieved to some extent by 
 national effort, that is, out of the exchequer funds, or should they 
 be dealt with as the paupers of old were, by the parish where 
 they were born?
 
 442 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 Manifestly the growing weakness or good nature which has 
 enabled, nay facilitated, vagrancy in a high degree under the 
 pretext of enabling the labourer to seek work wherever it can be 
 found, has not only promoted that tramping habit which is one 
 of the evils from which we suffer, but it has also largely encour- 
 aged the influx into towns and brought about the double evil of 
 depriving the country of the workers it requires, and of laying a 
 heavy burden upon the ratepayers of the great towns. Again, 
 it is clear that so long as crowds of unemployed shall obtain, or 
 believe they can obtain, assistance from the fears or sympathy of 
 Government, there will be no decrease in their numbers or any 
 probability of a diminution of their source of supply ; whereas if 
 their relief were declared to be upon the shoulders of the parish 
 or the greater authorities (such as county councils) of the areas 
 which produce them, there would thus be a strong stimulus to 
 such authorities of either providing them with work or doing their 
 best to prevent them falling into the ranks of the unemployed. 
 These remarks must be held to apply almost entirely to the first 
 and second categories of unemployed people, since the third 
 division should rather be treated as criminals of a secondary class, 
 analogous to the reformatory type among boys, and subjected to 
 such discipline as will be likely to restore them to the condition 
 of useful members of the community. 
 
 Little or nothing can be done until, as I have before fre- 
 quently remarked in the course of this work, an uniform system 
 of Eegistration is adopted by which the local authorities and the 
 police will be enabled to learn through their registers the place 
 of origin, and within certain limits the life history, of every 
 individual in the realm. Public offices under Government super- 
 vision should be opened in various quarters of London and 
 other principal towns of the United Kingdom where a list would 
 be kept of the available labour and the character and suitability 
 of the applicants defined (where employers would naturally 
 resort), and by carefully-prepared lists, the labour managers 
 would be able to form a correct estimate of the balance between 
 the workers and the current demands for labour. The condition 
 of the labour market would then be notified to the police, who 
 would in turn warn off those who flocked into London under the 
 pretext of a genuine desire of employment, taking their names
 
 UNEMPLOYED 443 
 
 and ascertaining the truth or otherwise of their story and 
 making it thereby impossible for an indefinite body of men to 
 allege that they remain out of work from being no longer 
 required by their employers or from shrinkage of employment or 
 cessation of manufacture, short time, etc., which are the usual 
 grounds urged at present in behalf of the genuineness of the 
 existing deficiency. No doubt in an immense town like London 
 the difficulty is greatly increased of ascertaining within positive 
 limits the power of absorption of labour, and its relative 
 activity according to the season of the year. At all events an 
 effective step would thus be taken in the direction of a correct 
 ascertainment of the truth or otherwise of the allegation that 
 has been made of late that there is a large shrinkage in 
 the demand of labour, and a long stride would be taken in the 
 direction of classification of the ranks of which it is composed. 
 
 With regard to the remaining division of semi-criminal indi- 
 viduals, nothing short of a parliamentary statute will suffice, enab- 
 ling public bodies to seize and segregate all those who are known 
 to depend exclusively upon public bounty and cannot show that 
 they have done work during the preceding year. Such men 
 should not only be deprived of their vote (as they are in this 
 country), but (as abroad) should be committed by the magistrate 
 for at least three years to a labour farm, which might be 
 usefully brought into being by the county and borough 
 councils, and its subjects released from such farms only when 
 they prove themselves able and willing to earn their own 
 livelihood : lastly, all private charity should be placed under heavy 
 penalty, and all tramps or mendicants punished with the 
 utmost severity, without which all system of relief or punish- 
 ment would be rendered nugatory. 
 
 As to drunkards, of late years Englishmen have gradually 
 come to believe (which has long been the case in other lands), 
 that whether drunkenness is regarded as a form of madness or 
 a criminal offence, enforced separation from society, and in 
 extreme cases deprivation of all civil rights combined with 
 strictest discipline, is the only method which is either effectual, 
 or reasonably fair to the rest of the community. 
 
 There remain those who, by misfortune or ill-health, or loss 
 of the head of the family, being reduced in circumstances^ fall
 
 444 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 upon a downward path from which they find it difficult to 
 raise themselves and are thus condemned to casual labour by 
 having been obliged to pawn all their furniture or even 
 possibly lost their home. Here it would seem that the Govern- 
 ment could, as has been done in Italy and France, through the 
 agency of boards consisting partly of charitable people, and 
 partly of members nominated by the Government administrating 
 charitable funds derived from all sources, establish Govern- 
 ment Pawnshops where the fullest economic value is given on 
 the articles deposited, since no profit is required as is the case 
 when such operations are left to private speculators. No better 
 object of charity can be devised than extending a helping hand, 
 and upon due inquiry advancing such sums as shall be deemed 
 necessary to set a deserving man upon his legs, or help a 
 struggling family to tide over their difficulties. 
 
 It will be perhaps said, in the system adopted by General 
 Booth, which has proved an exceedingly useful if expensive 
 means of utilizing casual labour upon farms or factories for the 
 production of certain articles of common use, that no compulsion, 
 such as is here shadowed, has been found necessary. This, 
 however, is a popular mistake. For though General Booth has 
 not been entrusted by any special powers by any Act of 
 Parliament, he is well known to provide with great care and 
 acumen that everyone who commits himself to his care 
 and casts in his lot with his army, abandons the privileges of 
 liberty, for the mild and beneficent, if autocratic, rule of the 
 Salvation Army. 
 
 OUE MILITARY AND NAVAL ESTABLISHMENTS. 
 
 Closely allied to Empire, and directly flowing as a conse- 
 quence therefrom, is the question of our military and naval 
 establishment, which, it is needless to say, has emulated the 
 " leaps and bounds " of Mr. Gladstone's celebrated commercial 
 dithyramb. Time was, when, upon the Marshal of England 
 setting up his array in the counties, and the lieutenant calling 
 those who were liable to take up arms in a war with France, 
 every man that could muster the arms required for service would 
 flock to the standard of his feudal chief and start out for a three 
 months' campaign as if for a summer's holiday. Since, however,
 
 MILITAEY AND NAVAL ESTABLISHMENTS 445 
 
 our German rulers, in order to secure themselves against the 
 unpopularity and dislike of the people, surrounded themselves 
 with paid mercenaries, which, gradually creeping up in numbers, 
 came to serve all the purposes of State defence patriotism, in the 
 sense of a practical spirit of self-sacrifice for one's country, has 
 nearly died out from among us. For so strange is the constitution 
 of human beings, that if you do but take away the incentive to 
 practise, and the purpose of a virtue, virtue will soon take wings 
 unto itself and fly away. Just as a passion grows by what it 
 feeds on, so the elementary innate passion for possession, and 
 retention of that possession at all hazards when gained, coupled 
 with a certain ferocity and aggressiveness, backed by not a little 
 pride, go to constitute the all-important virtue of patriotism, 
 which once faded away is as impossible to revive as the last 
 rose of summer. 
 
 We are told more must be made of the army, " teach our 
 youth to respect the red coat," " let more be .made of it in the 
 high places." All such ideas are entirely mistaken. They come 
 of a misapprehension and confusion between cause and effect, a 
 contempt of human nature and a belief in the omnipotence of 
 favour and patronage, which lies at the root of so many of our 
 national mistakes. The tendency of patriotism, deeply rooted 
 as it is in human nature in the early stages of its progress, is 
 like all other primitive passions, apt to wax and wane. While 
 it is acquiring dominion, fighting with the enemy that surrounds 
 it, and keeping them desperately at bay by the stoutest exertion 
 of self-sacrifice, passion, is maintained at red heat : but just as 
 a fierce mastiff, whom when half-starved it is dangerous to 
 approach as he crunches his plateful of bones glowering around 
 with a distrustful and suspicious eye but when fattened and 
 pampered with abundant meals, lolls in his kennel with placid 
 mien encouraging the advance of every passing stranger so 
 a nation gorged with empire, pampered with wealth, and 
 softened with comfort, loses sight of all peril to a State which 
 it has long been taught to regard as impregnable, and waxing 
 day by day more cosmopolitan and good-tempered, welcomes 
 instead of eyeing suspiciously the stranger 'at his gate and 
 refuses to listen to danger or rumours of war, treating them a& 
 the vain cry of foolish alarmists.
 
 446 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Another deep-seated human weakness is, that what we gain 
 easily we value not. Where each youth is trained to arms, or 
 possibly compelled by sumptuary laws, as in the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries, to spend high days and holidays in perfect- 
 ing himself to bear his part in defending his hearth and home, 
 having thus the necessities of his country and the endangerment 
 of his own welfare forced upon his notice day by day, he is 
 not only kept alert and watchful by that very vigilance which 
 he is compelled to exert, but the fire of his patriotism is kept 
 alight, causing his entire nature to glow with a fervour and 
 enthusiasm which lies at the bottom of all great enterprises and 
 virtues. So true is this, that the mother who entrusts the 
 care of her children to a hireling in order that she may be free 
 for the pleasures and exacting requirements of fashionable life, 
 rapidly blunts the maternal instinct in her own breast, and 
 ceases to care for the children towards whom she feels no obli- 
 gation and acknowledges no duty : while in the heart of the 
 struggling mother whose life is a continued series of self-sacrifice 
 and self-denial, and who painfully rears her offspring, giving her 
 life-blood like the pelican to afford them sustenance and exis- 
 tence, there burns a fire that prosperity cannot quench or sorrow 
 and misfortune extinguish. 
 
 The volunteer movement, which went far to cause the glowing 
 embers of patriotism in England to burn up with a fierce light 
 under the terrors of a French invasion, undisturbed through 
 sixty years of prosperity by so much as a cloud or even shadow of 
 invasion, has slowly but surely brought down the temperature of 
 England's patriotism to its lowest ebb. With what result, the 
 sad tale of the Boer War which, if the naked truth be told, 
 caused the might of England before the attacks of a patriotic 
 handful of farmers to tremble in the balance is there to show ; 
 and while plan after plan and scheme after scheme were 
 hurriedly and nervously pressed upon the country's atten- 
 tion scarce four years after that imminent catastrophe was 
 upon us, we find the public interest entirely centred upon 
 whether the Liberals or the free-fooders or the fiscal reformers 
 shall prevail in a three-cornered fight. 
 
 One fact, if no other, has clearly stood forth among the babel 
 of tongues and the contradictory counsels which have been flung
 
 MILITAEY AND NAVAL ESTABLISHMENTS 447 
 
 upon our rulers with such abundant vehemence during the past 
 three years, and that is, that no party in the State, and no section 
 of any class is willing to make that sacrifice of -universal military 
 service on behalf of its country, which forms the common lot of 
 the rest of humanity. It is true England is willing to build untold 
 ships and expend fabulous sums, more or less judiciously, in order 
 to guard her island home from attack seemingly oblivious of the 
 fact that this novel policy, of shirking national defence by the 
 people and through the people as practised in other lands, 
 mainly proceeded from the policy of isolation and complete 
 reliance on our island position, which culminated in the indiffer- 
 ence and laconic spirit of the Manchester school. 
 
 I would go further and declare that this deliberately adopted 
 system (which could only occur to a nation of shopkeepers) to 
 set aside, in lieu of the arms and hearts and sinews of her 
 people as a bulwark against the enemy, so many millions as an 
 assurance against untoward accidents, forms part of that com- 
 mercial canker which eats into our national life, and which, if an 
 antidote is not provided, will infallibly corrode the vitality of the 
 nation and bring about that decadence, which from similar 
 causes reduced Imperial Rome to be the prey of barbarians. 
 
 And here, again, is it stupidity, or that insanity that an- 
 nounces premature decay, which impels us open-eyed to advance 
 gaily on the path of acquisition and gather an ever-increasing 
 burden of conquest and obligations, while deliberately clinging 
 to the methods which were considered in bygone days to 
 secure sufficiently our freedom from attack, by reason of our 
 special advantages of isolation and our consequent indifference 
 to the quarrels and dissensions of our Continental neighbours? 
 For, in the first place, when such ideas were rife the fatal 
 objections to the feasibility of such a system did not exist. We 
 were still a nation self -maintaining and self-maintained. No 
 crippled, half-alive community were we then, as now, unable to 
 maintain itself without the help of foreign support. Nor, on 
 the other hand, was it possible to land a hostile army on our 
 shores within the space of an hour. But even if the most 
 sanguine calculations upon which we rest our immunity from 
 attack were beyond all suspicion, with our new aspirations for 
 Empire, it is not only our island home and our commerce which
 
 448 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 we must defend, but with our ever-growing and increasing trade 
 and the jealousies which gather about it, we must be prepared 
 at any moment, not only with one fleet to land an army on any 
 given point of attack, but at the same time to maintain our own 
 communications with another fleet in order to keep us from 
 starvation, and operate at the uttermost ends of the earth with 
 a third. In the face of all this, with our usual improvidence we 
 have run wildly into this novel scheme of unlimited Empire first 
 suggested by a renegade Jew, who clapped a paper crown upon 
 the late lamented Queen Victoria wherewith to tickle the vanity of 
 the Indian princes subsequently allowing ourselves to be further 
 inflamed by the cajolery of a disappointed colonial minister 
 while we neither possess the machinery for imperial administration, 
 nor have the forethought to make such terms with our colonies 
 as to secure their co-operation and support (financial or com- 
 mercial), and, to crown all, instead of putting our house in order 
 and setting ourselves to knit together the bonds of Empire, so 
 that from a " paper " it shall be converted into a real and lasting 
 Empire, we allow ourselves to be drawn into a fruitless and 
 unending controversy as to whether this or that colony can be 
 induced to tighten the Imperial bond by this or that commercial 
 bribe, after having carefully divested ourselves of all power and 
 authority in their regard, and of any lever which can serve to 
 inspire our negotiators with reasonable hopes of success !
 
 CHAPTEE XL 
 
 OUR OWN TONGUE 
 
 THERE is no more glaring national instance of want of fore- 
 thought and slovenly stupidity than our neglect of our own 
 tongue, which, however mongrel of origin, has been hallowed and 
 reborn by the genius of a Spenser, a Milton, and a Shakespeare. 
 Besides, as Touchstone said of his rustic love, " 'tis an ill-favour'd 
 thing, sir, but my own." 
 
 Setting aside all question of intrinsic or literary merit, every 
 true lover of his country cannot but desire that the pure fount of 
 English as we read it in the Bible, should be preserved untainted 
 and undefiled. 
 
 Here however as usual, what every Englishman (so far as can 
 be discovered) privately scouts and denounces is more often than 
 not precisely the public policy of the country. Contrary to the 
 usage of every civilised land, " Go as you please " is here as 
 elsewhere the only rule. No standard, no reform, no tribunal of 
 appeal as abroad, has ever been demanded or attempted, with 
 the natural result that our language is at the mercy of every 
 vulgarian and the sport of every conceited innovator. In a 
 former chapter I have glanced at Americanese, which bids fair by 
 its popularity and annual output to swamp in time the mother 
 tongue entirely, but I cannot also forbear to raise a protesting 
 voice against desultory or partial spelling-reforms, especially by 
 amateurs, without any effective attempt at the same time to 
 replace the numberless losses sustained in the course of the last 
 four centuries through the carelessness of the greater number 
 and the foolish vanity of the few. For it must be generally 
 admitted that by far the greater of our losses occurred not so 
 much of late years when so many authors have done good 
 service in bringing back good old early words into circulation, 
 but during the days of the Tudors, when novelty and quaintness 
 of speech born of the new learning drove numberless common 
 words out of fashion and supplanted them with foreign 
 equivalents. Each Latinist in those days just as now in French 
 
 GO
 
 450 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 and German, must needs display his learning by latinising as 
 best he knew. Then other would-be literary fops would naturally 
 compete, with even less knowledge than their model producing 
 still more disastrous results : while it goes without saying that 
 the fools without any Latin at all would be the very first to adopt 
 the new-born mongrel, instead of the good old English equivalent, 
 and then as now would scorn to use any Saxon word of one 
 syllable, where they could possibly substitute one of four. What 
 was the result ? Why just as might be expected. The selection 
 of new words being wholly haphazard and governed by no 
 controlling mind, still less subject to any uniform rule, made 
 two-fold havoc of our unhappy tongue by not only introducing 
 Latin and other linguistic equivalents in their longest and most 
 unwieldy form but by driving, as might be expected, their 
 English Congeners into provincial exile, as surely as the Britons 
 sought refuge in the Welsh hills from the tyranny of their 
 Norman invaders. 
 
 Hence our tongue bristles with monsters " informe, ingens, 
 cui lumen ademptum," which are neither good English nor 
 Latin, and ill compare with the words they were brought in to 
 replace, whose only merits are their syllabic length and greater 
 pomposity, and whose very sound sets the true Latinist's teeth on 
 edge. On the top of these comes the flood of American coinage, 
 with their craving for more and ever more adulteration and 
 novel reduplication. Thus even " to place " (villainous Latin 
 English for " to set "), bad as in the best it is, must needs become 
 " to locate " in Yankee mouths, while their atrocious habit of 
 verbalising nouns ad libitum may be said to render grammar 
 superfluous. Thus, a loan, to loan, a house, to house, a station, 
 to station, a dog, to dog, a bag, to bag, a scythe, to scythe, a 
 voice, to voice, etc., etc. It needs but to carry this practice 
 to its logical conclusion to transform our tongue completely, and 
 while simplifying it into an universal language to bs " picked 
 up in a week," such antics must surely rob it of all variety and 
 beauty. 
 
 It would be long to show all the hideous adaptations of 
 foreign words which have crept into our tongue, of which the 
 most offensive are those where the English verb is wrought out 
 of the gerund or past participle or any other verbal form that
 
 OUE OWN TONGUE 451 
 
 comes handy, as if it was a matter of entire indifference, providing 
 the general style of the word accords with the average type. 
 
 That custom has so dulled the edge of our taste here as in 
 everything else that is English, I am free to confess, but that 
 educated men like Thomas Carlyle and others should coin and 
 adopt, for example, the verbal adjective " cultured " as an improve- 
 ment upon " cultivated," which in its turn is an atrocious but all 
 too common elongation of the true word " cultivate," is a mystery 
 that I am at a loss to solve. 
 
 Most true it is that owing to our haphazard method of word- 
 annexation, words like "to cultivate," or as our American 
 oousins might say "to culture," are far from uncommon. 
 Pleasant as it is to see in the works of " nice " scholars such as 
 Sir Thomas More a determined attempt to train our Anglo- 
 Latin ' imports ' into a creditable form, we have to content our- 
 selves amid a tangle of exasperating abortions, with an 
 occasional true born adjective like " cultivate and situate," which 
 our American cousins insist on converting into verbs. 
 
 None but a hopelessly stupid people would calmly acquiesce 
 year by year to see their tongue killed by inches, and what is 
 worse, welcome as eagerly the inflow of the scum of all nations 
 into their language, as they do the refuse of the earth into their 
 homes and cities. 
 
 They would surely, like their neighbours, have opened the 
 ball by establishing a Tribunal like the Sorbonne at least 200 
 years ago, when our spelling, which was generally the most 
 constant blunder of the greater number, began to crystallize into 
 a constant form : or failing a tribunal, they would have laboured 
 for unity of speech and accent and endeavoured to (1) determine 
 what was good English, and what was not ; (2) how words 
 should be spelled so as to represent their sound in the plainest 
 manner without doing undue violence to their origin ; (3) 
 eliminating all mongrels, unnecessary foreign words, and correct- 
 ing, where required, the form of Latin and other " imports," in 
 accord with common sense and grammar. 
 
 The result of this neglect is absolute chaos, a hotch-pot of 
 " nonsequitur's," and absurdities in meaning and pronunciation, 
 a legacy of years of useless labour to our children in learning 
 to spell what has generally no reason for its being, and more
 
 452 AKE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 often than not is no guide to its proper pronunciation, and in 
 conning fantastic Latin or Greek words of barbaric construction, 
 which have no excuse for their introduction, and have only 
 served to oust better Saxon equivalents. 
 
 Again, in most civilised lands, it is recognised that the use of 
 writing is to set down words so that the reader can at once 
 gather the correct sound from the spelling. 
 
 In Spain, France, Germany and Italy, the student upon 
 learning to spell learns to speak properly, and conversely, by learn- 
 ing to speak properly, he spells correctly. With our unhappy 
 children, the case is far different. Spelling is no help to right 
 reading, nor is even right reading easier than any other depart- 
 ment of learning, since in many cases correct pronunciation is 
 alternative and optional, and accent a matter of taste or opinion. 
 Thus a child's best years are in England devoted to Spelling 
 which has no sense or value or relation with its origin, and is no 
 help to pronunciation, and consists mainly in the accumulated 
 mis-spellings of successive generations of dunces and Arithmetic 
 which, owing to our insane clinging to the worst and most 
 barbarous metric codes extant, demands ten times the labour to 
 acquire and when acquired is ten times worse than the 
 dekametric system of our foreign competitors. 
 
 Of course I shall be told, " then I suppose you want the 
 ' fonetic nuz ' to spread the light amongst Britons? " Certainly 
 not. I see no cause for a radical sweep, but I seek first gradual 
 improvement by the avoidance of obvious follies like plough for 
 plow or though for tho', through for thru', etc., and I plead 
 strongly for the removal of all senseless stumbling blocks, such 
 as scheme, schedule, sceptic, architect, etc., which have their 
 equivalent (whether " Chi " or " Kappa " in the Greek) in the 
 English K and consequently have no conceivable excuse for being 
 spelt otherwise than with a K. Only a vandal and a fool 
 combined, would suggest the idiotic substitution for Latin nouns 
 in "tion" of "shun"; (1) because it obliterates the Latin 
 origin ; and (2) because it is no easier or shorter to write than 
 its predecessor. 
 
 Next a scientific committee might surely decide among the 
 many ancient mis-spellings of Saxon words, what form represents 
 best its sound and where possible adopt it, and among the Latin
 
 CUE OWN TONGUE 453 
 
 words retain the most suitable forms like, e.g. to construe, imbrue, 
 receve (all these congeners, deceve, conceve, bsleve should be 
 reduced to their simple sound, since there is no rhyme or reason in 
 their variations unless to puzzle children withal), and when this 
 is done common sense would easily suggest a more complete 
 uniformity between spelling and sound without violence to origin, 
 even if we had to abolish, or add " fire," to " grate " in order to 
 restore a " gret tung " in the eyes of the world.
 
 CHAPTER XLI 
 
 PRIMOGENITURE AND OTHER LAWS 
 
 THE French and other European nations who have adopted 
 the Napoleonic Code have committed the folly of disestablishing 
 human nature by laws that have the double drawback of, firstly, 
 compelling parents to divide their goods and property equally 
 among their children instead of handing down the chiefdom of 
 the family to their first-born son as is the natural instinct of 
 man since the days of Abraham, and, secondly, of scattering 
 human acquisitions, so as to deprive them of that sense of 
 " permanent possession " which is the chief incentive to effort 
 and improvement. 
 
 Nevertheless, while these measures were adopted in the mis- 
 taken interest of a selfish State, which dreaded prosperity in the 
 subject and adopted the Tarquinian system of cutting off the 
 heads of all those who rose above their fellows, a safety valve 
 for human affection and ambition was still provided, which 
 enabled the parent to legally confer an extra quarter of his 
 goods upon the child of his choice, or, in fact, to make " an 
 eldest son " in a qualified degree. 
 
 We English, on the other hand, rushing into the opposite 
 exaggeration have erected Primogeniture like Free Trade into a 
 kind of national religion, and one equally fertile of vast evils to 
 the nation. We have committed the astounding folly at the 
 bidding of a selfish landocracy of not only calling in the law 
 to compel the fulfilment of a natural human tendency by handing 
 over (where no will has been made) all the " real estate " of 
 a deceased person to his next heir male, but we enable the owners 
 of landed estate to call in the law (through entails) to establish 
 permanence of property in a given family, and thus literally, 
 to insure the possessor against the consequences of his own 
 imprudence or folly. Frenchmen, therefore, while very generally 
 deploring the policy which tends to scatter paternal lands, and 
 more and more to diminish the size of their holdings, when 
 apprised of our position in regard to land legislation, are filled
 
 PBIMOGENITUKE AND OTHER LAWS 455- 
 
 with amazement that a people who have shaken themselves free 
 from the domination of a selfish aristocracy nearly a hundred 
 years ago, should still tolerate so immoral a compact, and one 
 so prejudicial to the public weal. 
 
 For what measure strikes more deeply at the root of paternal 
 authority than the law of entail, which places the eldest son in 
 a position of complete independence of his father's will and 
 control, if it does not set up a rivalry and jealousy which, 
 leads to mutual suspicion and aversion. 
 
 Nor can a father thus situate exercise that control to which 
 he is naturally entitled, so long as his eldest son knows that 
 however bad his conduct, and however undeserving of his 
 inheritance he may be, his father is barred from exercising 
 his just discretion in replacing the unworthy son for a more 
 worthy, or otherwise vindicating the just rights confirmed to 
 him by the highest sanctions human and divine. 
 
 No doubt the admirable Settled Estates Act of Lord Chancellor 
 Cairns has gone far to mitigate the hardships and more 
 unjust features of the Entail system, but the principle of 
 customary, if not compulsory Primogeniture is still there, and 
 nothing but a strong popular current setting against the vicious 
 principle of compulsory Primogeniture and the public sanction of 
 private immorality, will suffice entirely to purge the nation of one 
 of its most pregnant evils. 
 
 Again, from a national point of view, can anything be more 
 detrimental to our highest national interests, and in short, more 
 stupid, than to allow the law to step in and prevent the 
 possessor or heir of entailed estates from paying the price of his 
 own folly or incompetence. Clearly the tendency of Entail is to- 
 agglomerate land into as few hands as possible. Now, all experi- 
 ence has proved that the highest political security of a nation, as- 
 well as its agricultural prosperity, depends upon the wide distri- 
 bution of the land. To this belief our own rulers have themselves 
 given a complete adhesion, as witness the legislation of the past 
 quarter of a century. Nevertheless, with a determined pig- 
 headedness, which can only be surpassed by our Fiscal, Excise, 
 and Colonial policy, we continue year by year to obstruct the 
 beneficent operation of economic laws which, but for the law of 
 entail, would automatically break up overlarge estates and throw
 
 456. ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 landed property into the market with greater plenty and fre- 
 quency. 
 
 Time was when the foolish but oft-quoted adage as to the 
 utility of keeping up the " fine old families " might have had some 
 weight in this connection. But where are they now ? when 
 each peer, once " of high degree," hastens to barter his coronet, 
 or blue blood, if any, for a Yankee heiress, or a City directorship, 
 and instead of living like a gentleman upon his ancestral domain 
 exalting his humbler neighbours to a higher plane of refinement 
 by the bright beams of his presence and hospitality, prefers to 
 make town his headquarters, from whence he can " motor" out 
 to his " shoots " or week-end parties, or take the Sud express to 
 Nice as fancy or weather may suggest. 
 
 As to those unhappy beings (chiefly dukes and things) whom 
 the law of entail has encumbered with a dozen or more palatial 
 residences, since " Noblesse " no more " oblige,'' and conse- 
 quently in this vulgar age the possessors of such superfluities, 
 especially if Scotch, are reduced to being mere professional 
 lodginghouse-keepers for a living, there can surely be no 
 adequate reason for preserving these hardworking, if familiar 
 landmarks, at the expense of the national well-being. 
 
 PARTY GOVERNMENT v. AGRICULTURE AND COMMERCE. 
 
 The same tale may be told in slightly altered language of our 
 agricultural methods. 
 
 Each one of us, as he sees what is done in Belgium, France, 
 Italy and Germany and Austria, and the enormous strides made 
 by them in these departments mainly at the instigation of their 
 Governments who labour unceasingly by precept, encouragement, 
 and example, to wean their people from following up the old ruts 
 and to guide their energies into the new paths suggested by 
 science, marvels at the backwardness and antiquated processes of 
 our people who follow the same systems and (machinery excepted) 
 cling to the same methods as their grandfathers before them, 
 regardless of the changing world outside. And yet nothing is 
 done. We still go on wondering and writing about it as before, 
 and where all are agreed that something must be done do 
 nothing.
 
 PRIMOGENITUBE AND OTHER LAWS 457 
 
 Whereas Prussia gives seeds gratis to the possessors of waste 
 lands, and ransacks the globe to discover new ways and induce- 
 ments to landowners to bring the entire fatherland under cultiva- 
 tion or profitable uses we, on the other hand, place, through 
 our wise and " antick " (?) laws, every obstacle in the way of re- 
 clamation, plantations, and home colonisation, by the retention 
 of vague prehistoric Crown Rights, obsolete Common Public 
 Uses, and preposterous Jack-in-office rural "building authorities," 
 with their red tape and pettifoggery at every turn. 
 
 In short, why need we marvel at all, when by a brief study 
 of the purposes and functions of " Government " abroad and 
 " Government " at home, we easily discover that so far from 
 being concerned in the general well-being of the people at large 
 and the advancement of national designs, our government, 
 thanks to that " party " system which is our bane, is almost 
 entirely concerned, to the exclusion of all else, in maintaining 
 itself in power and keeping " the other side " out. 
 
 " But does your Government not bestir itself at all in furthering 
 national interests, in fostering trade and agriculture, in developing 
 or husbanding its resources, in lessening the pressure of foreign 
 competition and pointing out the teachings of modern science ? " 
 cries the bewildered foreigner as he lands upon our shores. 
 Certainly not. Its progress, or rather proceedings, backwards 
 or forwards, as the case may be, are purely determined by the 
 tactics of the " Opposition " and the demands of the supporters 
 whom it cannot afford to ignore. It takes no initiative, but 
 always squats, like a timid hare in a fallow, in the safest spot 
 where it is least likely to be disturbed : it trembles at every 
 sound, and avoids taking any step whatever except upon 
 absolute compulsion, dreading alike friend and foe. Having no 
 policy or principle except avoiding toil and trouble, it naturally 
 does nothing until frightened into it by outside pressure which 
 it deems more dangerous to resist than to conciliate. In short, 
 the only safe thing to predict about an English Government is, 
 that whatever it may do or not do, it will certainly not abolish 
 a single abuse, remove a blot, repair a scandal, or diminish by a 
 penny the national expenditure while its supporters can derive 
 any benefit from their continuance. 
 
 But there is yet another lamentable evil about our party
 
 458 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 system. Since the chief aim of the party in power is not to 
 make good laws or help the country, but to keep the other side 
 out and avoid as far as possible making good the pledges upon 
 the faith of which they have been elected, their leader is 
 necessarily a " Dodger," not a Statesman. Hence Scotchmen 
 have always been in great request for such purposes. As far back 
 as my memory goes, " Dodgers" were always in power. " Old 
 Para," Dizzy, Gladstone, Eosebery, Salisbury, Balfour, are all 
 Dodgers first and foremost, though with other qualities, it must 
 be admitted besides with perhaps the exception of the first two. 
 But worse remains. When once the "side" have got used to 
 their leader's ways, and have agreed that he is the best 
 Dodger in their crew, according to a well-known British idiosyn- 
 crasy, be it fidelity, stupidity or obstinacy, they vow as they do 
 about their boot or gun makers or tailors, that he is the "only 
 man who can keep the party together ! " Therefore, once Head 
 Dodger, always Head Dodger. What is the result ? I will 
 give an instance in point. Englishmen generally like plain 
 dealing and hate prevarication. They could not swallow Lord 
 Bosebery, and they cannot stand Mr. Balfour's sophistries 
 about Free Trade. But why did they make such a volte face ? 
 Simply because thousands of anti-Radicals voted " Liberal " to get 
 rid of Mr. Balfour and his pernicious tail. Had the Tories 
 " shunted " and disavowed their old Cabinet and Head Dodger, 
 there can be no question that their party would be in now. 
 Everybody foresaw this, everybody knew what would happen. 
 But all the King's horses, it seems, and all the King's men 
 cannot dislodge Messrs. Balfour and Chamberlain or divorce them 
 from Tory Leadership. Is it pigheadedness of party, or mere 
 British stupidity ? I pause for a reply.
 
 CHAPTEE XLII 
 
 OUB BOYS AND GIRLS 
 
 THE example of the corruption and sensuality of the idle rich 
 blazoned forth in a hundred daily newspapers through the land 
 the lying and grossly exaggerated pictures of their life and habits 
 on the stage, and in the novels and cheap literature of the day, 
 can hardly fail to affect the rising generation. It may be that 
 the Court and higher circles at the Eestoration, or under the 
 Eegency, produced a ranker crop of debauchery and corruption 
 than is known to the present age but in those days, at any rate, 
 there were no eager social scavengers and omnipresent reporters 
 as now to dish up the last gossip or scandal for the morning 
 papers, where all who run may read. Consequently the canker 
 of a dissolute Court and a debauched King was happily confined 
 to a smah 1 area, and its echoes scarcely penetrated the immediate 
 circles which surrounded them. In these days, however, through 
 the curse of the universal Press, there is nothing hidden, nothing 
 sacred, nothing secret. A young lady will scarcely think it worth 
 her while to elope with her lover nowadays, unless she has been 
 suspected beforehand and properly " interviewed," so as to make 
 sure that her misbehaviour will be duly discussed in the evening 
 newspapers ; while most boys and girls in the land, before they 
 reach the age of fourteen or fifteen are usually indoctrinated by 
 current plays, comic or " Society " papers and magazines, into 
 a condition of revolting cynicism and disbelief in the existence 
 of all goodness, honesty and truth, which, to judge by past 
 chronicles, can never have been equalled in our history. It has 
 been well said that examples are worth a dozen theories, and, 
 while it would be easy to adduce a hundred explanations of the 
 concurrent causes, and show that no other result could possibly 
 flow from admitted premises it would seem that no better 
 mode of driving my lesson home can be devised than by 
 quoting suitable examples. Here are two samples taken at 
 random from lower and upper class life. (At a Police Court)
 
 460 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 " Surely your honour knows that a girl may be keeping company 
 with a man without being engaged to him ? " 
 
 Here we have a simple confession of plain straightforward 
 contempt (or ignorance) of the difference between right and 
 wrong, between that which beseems and that which shames a 
 modest woman that speaks volumes to the thinking mind! 
 She sees, in common with thousands of her sex and age in 
 Anglo-Saxondom, at home and over seas, so little harm in 
 assuming the relations of an engaged couple out of sheer sport 
 or idleness that she waxes indignant that any one should credit 
 her with honourable intentions and the conduct becoming a maid. 
 Go all over the Continent, from St. Petersburg to Seville, or 
 Sicily to Drontjem though there you may find the bad and the 
 good as elsewhere I greatly doubt if you will find a girl whose 
 natural modesty is so seared by habit and custom, as not only 
 to own to the practice, but above all to see no shame in it. 
 
 We have heard too the plaintive wail from a carefully-educated 
 young lady of 18 apparently reared amid rustic and old- 
 fashioned surroundings whose natural modesty has not yet been 
 worn away by social friction, who confides to the editress of a 
 popular girls' magazine " her grief on discovering that most of the 
 nicest young men of her acquaintance are in the habit of kissing 
 the young ladies they met," and, moreover, " that the young girls 
 of her set habitually allow themselves to be kissed by men to 
 whom they were in no special degree attached, without the 
 remotest idea of marrying them." That there is much truth in the 
 assertion none will be prepared to deny. How far we are to 
 attribute this to the general relaxation of morals beginning at 
 the top and spreading gradually to the lower strata or to the 
 universal example, precept and solicitations of plays, newspapers 
 or novels, or the increase of American imitation leading to greater 
 intersexual freedom, combined with a marked and growing 
 independence and distaste for parental control, or the decline of 
 positive religion bringing in its train that flippancy and frivolity 
 which is the note of the age ; or, again, the flabbiness of public 
 opinion, or a combination of all these things it may be safely 
 said that no graver evil can exist or one more sure to sap the 
 nation's strength and introduce the seeds of national decay in a 
 more insidious form.
 
 OUE BOYS AND GIBLS 461 
 
 For despite the sympathetic editress, who vainly attempts in 
 her answer to the aforesaid wail, to still the maiden's grief and 
 pour balm into her soul with sophisms and irrelevant platitudes- 
 " that would make angels weep" none can surely doubt that 
 the maid who lets a man kiss her in secret without betrothal 
 is no better than a potential harlot deceive herself as she will. 
 Nay, worse. For the painted harlot, whom she affects to despise 
 betrayed perchance by a perfidious scoundrel, and reduced to 
 a mode of life from which her nature abhors, has at least the 
 excuse of misfortune and necessity while the girl who without 
 the overwhelming, and in a sense ennobling sentiment of 
 passion, surrenders her lips to the first comer who evokes a passing 
 sense of animal enjoyment, not only disgraces her sex, but most 
 assuredly when detected meets with swift retribution in the 
 loathing and contempt of her male and female companions. 
 All men and most women, nay Divinity itself, cannot forbear to 
 look compassionately upon the excesses of the passionate soul who 
 gives up all for the man she loves, but for those who disgrace their 
 womanhood and drag their names through the mud for a pastime, 
 there never was and never will be either mercy or toleration. 
 
 I will not dwell more upon the smart ladies seated semi-nude, 
 as if on show, at public dinner-tables, and in the stalls of 
 theatre or opera-house who might be supposed by a charitable 
 onlooker to be paid by the management to attract the idle and 
 dissolute by a parade of their charms since it would be vain to 
 expect reformation where shamelessness is become ingrained and 
 inveterate : but I would entreat every lover of his country to read 
 what foreigners, aye, and Americans, too, in their healthier and 
 uncorrupted days, have said and written about English women 
 and their attire, and if then he remains indifferent to their 
 sarcasm, and sees no shame that our English matrons disrobe 
 their unwilling daughters to attract husbands, as in old Babylon, 
 let him at least cease to be surprised that the gilded youth of 
 Britain too, is beginning, along with his modern habits of 
 self-indulgence and effeminacy, to regard womankind from an 
 Oriental standpoint. 
 
 Can we wonder, when our modern dandy can scarcely get 
 through his breakfast in time for a late meet and thinks foxes . 
 and hounds grouse and pheasants must be manipulated in
 
 462 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 such a way as to concentrate his " sport " (as he still has the 
 assurance to call it) so that he can be sure of a hot corner or 
 two, or a fast gallop, and motor back to a late lunch and bridge 
 that he should decline, after "doing himself well" at Claridge's 
 or the Bachelors', to exert himself to entertain young ladies, still 
 less to " fag round " a ball-room with them, " in a Turkish bath, 
 don't yer know," when he can stretch himself out on an easy- 
 chair and smoke a strong cigar, and sip his coffee in the con- 
 servatory, with some " ripping " girls around him to prevent him 
 from being bored ? 
 
 No doubt it is difficult to banish in a generation the accumu- 
 lated effects of two generations of Oriental self-indulgence in 
 our men, and of waning self-respect in our women. Nor 
 need we go as far back among our rulers as Charles II. with his 
 royal harem to discover the fatal facility with which English 
 women can accommodate themselves to royal standards, and 
 copy royal models ! Most assuredly unless pride comes to the 
 rescue of our countrywomen, and the boys and girls of the 
 rising generation are reined in with a sharper bit and led by a 
 healthier example than heretofore, the sooner we frankly adopt 
 Eastern habits and keep the girls out of the boys' way until 
 marriage, the more likely we shall be to avert our national 
 downfall. Pride and religion are the efficient safeguards of free- 
 born women in a free country. But where royal fashions hold 
 omnipotent sway, and Eastern habits and views have taken root 
 deep root in the classes who are most copied there is no remedy 
 but to clear off the whole crop and replant on a fresh system 
 or, in other words, if we cannot save the present, let us take 
 measures to save the generations to come.
 
 CHAPTER XLIII 
 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES SPORTS OF THE IDLE RICH OUR EMPIRE 
 UP TO DATE ARMY GOLF POLICE 
 
 LIKE the old Romans in their decay, we are abandoning the 
 time-honoured rural sports of which we hear and read so much in 
 bygone days for "panem et circenses." The modern youth, 
 especially of the lower ranks, " takes it easy." His ideal of 
 sport is a good seat at a football or cricket match and a packet 
 of Woodbines. 
 
 The well-read foreigner, who explores our beautiful land, in- 
 variably exclaims, " But your village greens, your football and 
 your cricket of which we hear so much, I see them not, etc." 
 " "Tis true, 'tis pity ; pity 'tis 'tis true." Gone are the informal 
 rural matches of married i>. unmarried, and the Saturday evening 
 football or wrestling matches in which the stout youths were 
 wont to show their prowess before the rustic maidens and old 
 folk of the village, who sapiently discussed the "points " of their 
 rival champions as if the affairs of the nation hung in the balance. 
 Gone the old tables before the alehouse where the rural ' ' con- 
 script fathers " settled the politics of the village over a pot of real 
 old English malt and hops " rara avis in terris." A run to 
 town, or a cheap ticket to the nearest " gate meeting " or music- 
 hall is more to the taste of the modern yokel, and in all this it 
 must be confessed he is only following the lead of those above 
 him in the social scale. For, just as simple tastes, views and 
 habits are alike tabooed in fashionable circles and everything 
 " bores" that does not "excite," and, above all, cost money so 
 in the lower ranks, the fever of the Stock Exchange, the race- 
 course, the gas-light flare, and the full-flavoured advertisements 
 lure our unfledged rural youth with 10,000 horse-power from the 
 bower'd cottage and the sweet lanes of country life to the roaring 
 streets and unknown joys of our modern Babylon. 
 
 Well has it been said that it is not " allotments " or " small 
 holdings," or even "Parish Councils" that will keep our youth 
 upon the land. In imitation of our Anglo-Saxon cousins over
 
 464 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 the water, with our country youth as with our country gentry, 
 the fever of restlessness, of speculation, of dissipation and change 
 has entered our blood. A state-maintained circus or music- 
 hall would do more than a thousand beneficial devices. But how 
 long would it avail? 
 
 Our wiseacres in Parliament tell us that the labouring classes 
 have a right to a living wage whether they earn it or not, and 
 John Burns glories openly in the House in having carried out 
 useless public works by means of the "unemployed" in diverse 
 parts of the country, at higher than current wages out of the 
 taxpayers' pockets ! Is not this "Pane met Circenses"? We 
 pay the idle "ransom," to keep them from " agitation," which 
 means unpleasant discoveries. Surely the obvious duty of 
 enormously overpaid amateur ministers such as ours, whose only 
 qualification is a plausible tongue, is to prove their sympathy for 
 the unemployed, if real, by contributing, not the hard-earned 
 taxes of the industrious community, but a proportion of their 
 own bloated salaries and allowances which swell the budget to 
 such a colossal and disastrous figure ! 
 
 SPORTS OF THE IDLE RICH. 
 
 And as for the idle rich, what of their sport ? See their 
 gymkanas, surely as pitiful a sample of combined imbecility, 
 with a minimum of sport and a plentiful lack of invention, as can 
 well be conceived. 
 
 Go to Ranelagh and Hurlingham. See the young ladies and 
 gentlemen twisting their unhappy ponies with a snaffle bit and a 
 rein in each hand, like a butcher boy behind time with his meat, 
 twirling round posts in trap or on horseback like children 
 playing " chairs." Or see them at polo, as they call it, save 
 the mark! (better call it pull -oh !) tugging at the bleeding or 
 callous mouths of their miserable hacks, or whacking their 
 devoted shins instead of the ball, with the same cruel and 
 senseless snaffle and two-handed style of misequitation. "But," 
 says our foreign critic, " is this the far-famed Britannic importa- 
 tion from the East ; is this their boasted superiority in riding 
 and driving that we hear so much about ? " 
 
 The same old story, the same weary tale ! We never tire
 
 SPORTS OF THE IDLE EICH 465 
 
 rummaging the world for novelty in sport and yet cannot discern 
 our own powers or gauge our own capacity. Your Englishman 
 is unequalled " on the flat " or " over a country," but put him on 
 a charger, a park hack or an Arab pony, he is a fish out of water. 
 Yet just as he is unable to gauge or perceive the exceptional 
 beauties of his own unrivalled Tudor and Jacobean architecture, 
 his old world gardens, his " rosbif " au naturel, and his high 
 class native cuisine, so he must needs dabble in Italian villas and 
 mock- Versailles and rake the Continent for incompetent sculliona 
 of every cation who rob and poison us at their own sweet wills. 
 
 So. too, John Bull must needs disport himself on the nearest 
 approach to an Arab pony in the Eastern game of polo, while 
 he is totally devoid of any of the suppleness or corporal graces 
 which qualify the Rajput for that fascinating and elegant 
 amusement. As for pigeon shooting, while only crack-brained 
 sentimentalists can carp at its cruelty, so long as covert-shooting 
 which involves the same slaughter with far greater animal 
 suffering flourishes in our midst, enough to say that only a 
 very low type of the human family can conceivably spend his 
 days in so trivial and monotonous a pursuit ; and were it not 
 for auri sacra fames, it is not improbable that the chief pursuit 
 of Hurlingham in its palmy days would be numbered among the 
 things that were. 
 
 Englishmen of former days were closely copied by would-be 
 " horsy " foreigners since the days of Egalite d' Orleans, over 100 
 years ago. Even yet the flavour still clings to us, and your 
 Boyard or provincial Pole still marvels when he comes to 
 England that we do not disport at the counter or on change 
 the leather breeches and top boots with which the sporting 
 prints of the Regency have made him familiar. Still more now- 
 a-days does your horsey Austrian or Frenchman, while greatly 
 struck with the smartness and skill of our hansom drivers, marvel 
 at the plentiful lack of good driving and slovenly equipages 
 which each year become a more marked feature of our London 
 streets ! Where, alas ! the tall big-limbed barouche horses of 
 seventeen hands, which Howden and Lincoln fairs turned out by 
 the hundred for the London " season." Where, too, the square- 
 built upright coachman on his lofty perch with upright whip, 
 and light but strong hand, turning them hither and thither 
 HH
 
 466 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 through the dense traffic with a confident smile on his face as if 
 it were the easiest task in the world ? Why, where our coal is 
 gone to be sure, to the discerning foreigners, who, having cleared 
 out all our best mares, come to gibe at our nakedness. 
 
 Compare our Lifeguards or Scots greys chargers with, not a 
 picked, but an average French, Austrian or Piedmontese 
 regiment of cavalry, and see the difference. Are the former 
 intended for use, or ornament, for tittuping in the Bow, or riding 
 across a difficult country ? Or is it possible (as the dealers will 
 tell you) that they are expressly selected for their length of 
 legs and back (the two worst defects a charger can possess) so 
 as to show off their dyed sheepskins and varied accoutrements 
 to greater advantage I Shades of Julius Caesar I It has then 
 come to this, that our crack cavalry regiments pay high prices 
 for animated towel-horses, with uniform colour and unimpeach- 
 able tails, without any thought beyond their appearance in the 
 London streets and their presumable effect upon the Cocknies of 
 both sexes. As for our modern drivers, with their legs tucked 
 under them like tailors, and a hand on each rein, we shall soon 
 have to resort to Paris for our smart private coachmen, or get 
 them off hansoms or omnibuses where alone decent coachman- 
 ship remains to be found. Whether it is that the twentieth- 
 century youth will not condescend to learn, or since the decay of 
 coaching the " School " has died out, all that can be safely said 
 is, that the British coachman is as dead as the dodo, and unless 
 the few remaining true-lovers of horses bestir themselves to 
 found an Academy of Coachmanship, the sooner he converts 
 himself into a stoker, as many do, and makes way for a more 
 competent horseman from other countries, the better it will be 
 for man and horse in this once most Philippic land. 
 One word more on 
 
 OUR EMPIRE UP TO DATE. 
 
 Our present craze is Empire. We have no empire except India, 
 which, won by the sword, is being slowly but surely smothered 
 by the toga (or red tape) of our prefects. We are well aware that 
 for nearly a century she has been governed by "John Com- 
 pany " entirely in their own selfish interest, and that she hates 
 us as ever Spain or Numidia hated her old Boman masters. Yet 

 
 OUR EMPIRE UP TO DATE 467 
 
 we play fast and loose with India as with Ireland. Instead of 
 either treating her as a conquered nation to be ruled as we her 
 conquerors see fit, or, on the other hand, setting ourselves to 
 content her, and after duly educating her people politically 
 by a gradual concession of rights, allowing her as soon as we are 
 satisfied of her attachment to our rule, to work out her own 
 destiny as usual, we do neither, but vacillate between the two 
 policies, blowing now hot, now cold ; at one moment encouraging 
 her Press to free agitation and her youth to aspire to a share 
 in her government, at another treating her with the greatest 
 harshness and contumely. 
 
 As for the rest of our Colonial possessions they are either 
 self-governing or on the road to become such, and in no sense 
 contribute to our strength, wealth or security, or, in short, 
 either to realise the idea or fact of Empire in any degree ; and 
 yet, strangely enough, while imagining ourselves to be a practical 
 people, the collapse of the Imperial machinery and the costly 
 awakening which too surely proclaimed the hazardous strain 
 of the Boer War upon England's resources, has rather, under 
 the skilfully applied red herrings drawn across our path by the 
 astute engineer of this latest Imperial blunder, served to 
 increase than to damp the ardour of British Imperialism. We 
 had hardly recovered from the stunning blows dealt upon our 
 army, our credit, our pseudo-imperial management, and our 
 pockets, than with a truly British generosity which does more 
 credit to our hearts than our heads, we are ready and willing 
 to join in a paean of thanksgiving to our gallant Colonial troops, 
 at the bidding and suggestion of a certain machiavellian ex- 
 Colonial Minister, and bless our stars for being aljle to rely on 
 such an Empire, such fellow-Imperialists, and, above all, such a 
 Colonial Minister, in our hour of need. 
 
 But even if we had these loosely-linked and scattered 
 possessions, which we dignify by the name of Empire on our 
 own terms, or rather if we had foreseen three centuries ago the 
 Imperial " boom " of Messrs. d'Israeli and Chamberlain and 
 their followers commonly known as Jingoes, and so prepared 
 our relations with them as to have in them a real power and 
 mutual support, financial, fiscal and military, where we have 
 none whatever has not History and Experience shown the
 
 468 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 world long ago that Democracy and Empire cannot co-exist 
 that they are mutually antagonistic and destructive. For since 
 Empire requires one will, one eye, one arm, and one ambition, 
 Democracy connotes as many as the fabled Hydra. Add to 
 this our Party Government, in itself a galaxy of divergent 
 purposes and changing orders, and it must be confessed that 
 unless by a miracle of self-immolation on the part of our 
 Colonial partners no approach to a workable Empire can be 
 devised or imagined. 
 
 If these scattered parts were homogeneous, or even of like 
 disposition and circumstances, and more closely grouped about 
 the parent body, there might be a hope of Federation or Con- 
 junction for mutual purposes of defence, fiscal freedom, and trade 
 benefit, with adequate representation in a Federal Diet or an 
 Inter-Colonial Council for general purposes affecting a common 
 policy ; but " Empire," which supposes direct use and control 
 of the parts of the Empire for its own behoof, as applied to our 
 case, is a foolish dream, a fairy tale to soothe political babes 
 withal, which can neither be realised or seriously discussed 
 except in relation to Hindustan and her dependencies. 
 
 Nor is it at all likely that such a Federation for commercial, 
 military, naval, and fiscal purposes would be entered into with- 
 out common terms of equality among the members or parts, 
 which would be incompatible with monarchical forms, and 
 would almost certainly require them to be recast upon a 
 Eepublican model. 
 
 My main purpose here, however, in referring again to this 
 subject is to draw my reader's attention to the national temper, 
 of which this new Imperial fever is the symptom. 
 
 It is all part of the same craving for foreign novelty, for 
 display, for superficial childish show, born of a new and most 
 un-English distrust of ourselves, and our powers. We are losing 
 faith in our own destiny. We are no longer content to be free- 
 men of England, we want to "run" an Empire, more upstart 
 and certainly far more unreal than that of the brand new 
 Empires of Germany or Eussia. With empire our newly-acquired 
 characteristics seem to be entirely at variance. For, an empire 
 to be successful, needs unity of aim, of policy and action. Demo- 
 cracy breeds diversity, and each man or section fights for his
 
 OUE ARMY 469 
 
 own hand. Democracy begets selfishness and frivolity, since the 
 State's care is everybody's care, and patriotism soon withers upon 
 such soil. No Empire can long subsist without being sup- 
 ported by self-sacrifice and patriotism, and such high sentiments 
 are only inspired by the loyal devotion or admiration of a worthy 
 ruler, deep set in the hearts of his subjects. 
 
 Finally, Empire, possessing one head, presents to the people a 
 definite ideal, while Democracy, being all heads, presents none. 
 Moreover, where there is not a definite ideal and a visible head, 
 the overwhelming mass of human beings will feel no sense of 
 patriotism, and love of country will become among them a mere 
 platform metaphor. 
 
 To return to our army, surely no more lamentable symptom of 
 the age can there be than to shirk one's country's defence which 
 to every properly constituted mind is not so much a duty as a 
 delight. The happy conditions of our island home render foreign 
 service unnecessary. Let us continue our voluntary system for 
 foreign service, but if our patriotism and good sense neither sees 
 the advantage nor necessity of training up all our youth without 
 exception to a state of thorough military efficiency so that they 
 may at least in repelling invasion be able to rival the capacity 
 and gallantry of our late enemy in South Africa, then indeed we 
 no longer deserve the name of freemen, and shall only have 
 ourselves to thank if we become the prey of the first marauding 
 adventurer with an army and navy at his back. 
 
 From this consideration we pass naturally to 
 
 OUK ARMY. 
 
 An Empire constitutes a perpetual challenge to the Nations. 
 It virtually proclaims to the nations its own transient success 
 in grabbing more lands than its' neighbours and having usually 
 no more right to such possessions than any other power is at 
 once a cause of jealousy and envy to its less fortunate 
 neighbours. In order to exist then, it must be ever ready 
 to fight in defence of those coveted possessions, and to fight 
 effectually, it must sacrifice its sons and treasure. Are we 
 prepared to do either ? and, if not, why not ? Because we 
 are eaten up with luxury. The last two generations have
 
 470 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 known no serious war to try our metal and bring out our 
 latent good qualities, and the past fifty years has, been a period 
 of unexampled prosperity. Comfort is now our nly god, and 
 enjoyment, distractions, and amusement, our summum bonum. 
 " Why ' fag ' at mimic war, as Etonians say, when we are never 
 likely to be attacked. If you want drill and like it, why take 
 the shilling at once and be joyful! It was all very well in 
 the 60's, when Napoleon III. was looking about for someone to 
 quarrel with but we are all right now and can afford to pay 
 for a good army, without playing at volunteers ! " Do we not 
 hear this or similar speeches constantly ? Not so, however, was 
 the language of the gallant bands who left the loom and the 
 plough t& trail a pike behind the Black Prince in France and 
 Spain. Not so spoke the bowmen of Craven who avenged the 
 defeat of Bannockburn on the field of Flodden. As the gallant 
 Switzers to this hour mindful of their ancient strife for liberty 
 on many a hard fought field still love to spend their hours of 
 leisure from toil and business in drilling and rifle practice ; alas, 
 our degenerate youth, no longer as of yore delight in waging 
 mimic war on village green and common with cricket, hockey 
 or football, or other manly contentious games, but prefer a 
 shilling seat and a packet of Woodbines at a football or cricket 
 match, while our gilded youth lounge in their luxurious motors 
 or fill the luxurious deck chairs of their steam yachts at Cowes, 
 or " do a round " of golf. 
 
 GOLF 1 INDEED ! 
 
 How typical of our age of luxury and ease ! A game for 
 elderly Scotchmen to smoke and gossip over in friendly pairs or 
 fours known to Englishmen for three centuries suddenly fills 
 so fully the demands of a lazy and frivolous age, that it is not an 
 uncommon thing to hear of steady fathers of families and able- 
 bodied young men, too, who spend their lives going round the 
 country from links to links, driving with a long stick a small 
 white ball over purposely constructed banks and ditches, deeming 
 their labour and time well spent if they succeed in " going 
 round " in less time than their fellows ! Its main characteristics 
 of extreme selfishness and aggressiveness, fitting so closely as it
 
 OUR POLICE 471 
 
 does to the newer motor craze now so rife, must surely indicate 
 a prevailing symptom of our age. No breezy moor is safe, no 
 people's park sacred from the all-devouring " goffer." He takes 
 a deal of room, rides roughshod over all and sundry, ousts cricket 
 and football by his bloated bribes, swaggers as if our little island 
 was meant for nothing else but to make links out of, in short, he 
 is as widely objectionable as a " chauffeur" or an Orangeman ! 
 
 OUR POLICE. 
 
 Police is a kind of home army for private consumption, and is 
 akin in its methods and ills to the British Army, inasmuch as the 
 former proclaims us to be a purse-proud and unpatriotic, and the 
 latter a stupid and short-sighted race who place every legal 
 obstacle in the way of detection of crime shelter, nay invite, the 
 ruffians of every land by our hospitable but fatal laws, and not 
 content with fostering an extensive breed of foot-tramps of our 
 own are now importing yearly thousands of still more dangerous 
 motor-driving tramps (usually the offscourings of foreign prisons) 
 and through the action of our newspapers, impelled thereto by the 
 insatiable curiosity of the public, we usually contrive to hamper 
 so effectually the investigation of crime that an escaped murderer 
 at large, or a popular railway assassin, has only to invest a half- 
 penny in the Daily Mail to learn precisely what course it is safe 
 to pursue in order to baffle his pursuers. 
 
 And as it is with the papers, so it is with everything else. 
 \Ve and our American cousins have become of late so inquisi- 
 tive, and frivolous possibly through too much newspaper 
 feeding, since Shakespeare tells us "appetite grows by what 
 it feeds on " that it would seem that we really prefer to be 
 amused than to detect or abate crime. That many get to love 
 a noted assassin, and that a much-be-printed swindler earns 
 popular admiration we have the most certain evidence ; and if 
 we had it not, we might guess as much by the ink shed over 
 him. For it must be that not only the profane vulgar, but the 
 governing minority as well, sympathize with the ruffian as 
 against the police, or they would never take so much pains to 
 give the former the advantage over the latter by preventing 
 any rational measures being adopted for due registration of our
 
 472 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE ? 
 
 own people, and the close scrutiny and inscription of foreigners 
 coming to our shores by exacting strict police-returns from 
 all hotels and lodging houses, while they kindly furnish an 
 additional inducement to malefactors by our closed unpatrolled 
 railway carriages and the total absence of any system for 
 checking, registering or safe-guarding travellers' baggage. 
 
 And now comes the crucial question. Are we to acquiesce 
 to this state of things, and treat them, as we are all too prone to 
 do, as things that are engrained in our habits and which it is 
 hopeless to extirpate. Surely a counsel of despair and one boding 
 ill for the future of our nation ; for while there is life there is 
 hope, and only where the national life burns low and the springs 
 of a people energy's are quenched in despotism or sunk in 
 Oriental listlessness, should a free nation confess its impotence 
 to reform its own admitted errors. Let us shake off our apathy 
 and recollect in the light of the experience of the great democ- 
 racies of Greece and Eome, that not chains and rods alone go 
 to make up the slavery of a people. Far worse than all these 
 are the slavery of the mind, the will, and the passions. While 
 we surrender our minds to the dictates of a self-seeking and 
 corrupt Press, our will to the guidance of interested politicians, 
 and the demands of a phantom Fashion which has no reality or 
 substance and is but the reflection of our own folly and fears, 
 or open-eyed make a god of comfort and luxury forgetting alike 
 our duty to God, country and family rending one another at 
 the bidding of designing priests who have sundered us into a 
 hundred warring sects for their own selfish ends how can we 
 stand before the nations and say we are truly free ! 
 
 If there is exaggeration in what I have written, or if I am 
 the victim of hallucinations which have no foundation excepting 
 my own disordered brain, let my readers be my judges. I will 
 stand or fall by their verdict. But if the small still voice 
 within tells them that I have said nothing that any dare deny, 
 or if in doubt may not verify, then once more I entreat my 
 beloved countrymen and women, while it is yet time, to ponder 
 on the trend of Anglo-Saxon habits, and to consider if all is 
 well with us. All history tell us there is in the lives of peoples, 
 as of men, a moment which determines once for all their 
 upward or downward directions. Let us above all be English-
 
 DUE POLICE 473 
 
 men and women once again. Let us try to be, not to seem. Let 
 us gauge our own forward or backward progress, if you will, by 
 a comparison with our foreign neighbours and, above all, in the 
 light of past history since, however it may be true of the 
 material world, it is certain that man's nature has ever been 
 and will be the same till the crack of doom : nor let us be 
 unmindful of foreign criticism, for where there is much smoke 
 there must surely be some fire ; above all, let us cultivate, as 
 did our mid -Asiatic ancestors, the sense of Duty in our children 
 to God, country and family in short, Eespect, Patriotism and 
 Discipline and if it is hopeless to entirely break off all relations 
 with Goddess Fashion, at all events, let us teach them the dignity 
 of life, that they may be proud of being free Englishmen and 
 Christians with a will of their own to mar or make themselves 
 withal, not mere pawns in the game at the mercy of designing 
 priests, lawyers, pressmen and politicians. 
 
 Thus, fashion once scotched, English men and women would 
 once more dare to live their own simple natural lives instead of 
 being bad cosmopolitan mimics : Cant would die out amongst 
 us for want of sustenance, and Insincerity for want of motive 
 for pretending to be what we are not. Then should we be no 
 longer the slaves of fashion and foolish prejudice and habit, the 
 obedient victims and humble servants of venal scribblers and 
 politicians. We should chase the filthy crew of mongrel 
 foreigners, cooks, dressmakers, hairdressers, musicians and 
 " chauffeurs," who devour our wealth and denationalise us by 
 making us ashamed of working out our own destiny in our own 
 way. Let us for heaven's sake have our own cookery, and let its 
 improvement be a national concern instead of striving in vain 
 to import or acclimatize inferior foreign imitations. Let us have 
 our own distinctive dress and hair styles, and only employ our 
 own English workmen. Let us rebuild our old national 
 renown for music by fostering English talent accounting it a 
 disgrace to let our own music and musicians starve, while we 
 fatten all the musical offscourings and impostors of the world.
 
 CHAPTER XLIV 
 
 OUR STATE CLERGY AND THEIR DOCTRINE OF "CONTINUITY" 
 
 FEW things surprise the well-informed foreigner so much as 
 the devious and Jesuitical ways of our national clergy. 
 
 He says, "How is it, that they are on the one hand, like the 
 other Lutheran bodies, ever railing at " Eome " and " Romisch " 
 practices (betraying thus their German origin all too surely) 
 and on the other hand loudly protesting that they changed 
 nothing at the " Reformation, and are precisely the same 
 Church in every respect as before." 
 
 Now as I have found even Englishmen express the same 
 surprise at the tactics of the parsons, and endeavour to explain 
 the anomaly by the intestinal dissensions of that amiable body, 
 whose mutual jealousy is such that it suffices for Low Church- 
 men to assert that the moon is made of cheese, for the High to 
 vow it's made of chalk I think it will not be found amiss if I 
 venture here on a brief statement of the Anglican financio- 
 political position. It will serve, I think, to drive home my 
 strictures against our public ideas of honesty and sincerity 
 which will give even John Bull's tough conscience a twinge. 
 
 The Nonconformists and Dissenters generally, together with 
 Atheists, Jews and Unbelievers (euphemistically called Agnostics) 
 believe that they collectively amount to considerably more than 
 one- half of Englishmen, and see no logical reason why the Law- 
 made Church should monopolise the entire Church wealth of the 
 nation. But such is their profound distrust in the honesty and 
 sincerity of their fellow-citizens in general and of their own 
 co-religionists, apparently, in particular, that they are ever loath 
 to put the question to the test by adopting the usual means of a 
 Religious Census, as is the way of other civilised nations. Upon 
 careful enquiry it would seem that hypocrisy and insincerity is so 
 engrained in British nature that it is not uncommon for men, es- 
 pecially in the minor towns and villages, to profess adherence to the 
 Establishment, and even attend Church to please their employers 
 or gain favour in the eyes of the omnipotent parson or squire of 
 the parish, while they secretly sing Psalms on a Sunday night
 
 OUE STATE CLEBGY' 475 
 
 as in the days of persecution at the particular Bethel of their 
 predilection, where Jack is as good as his master, and any 
 tinker or cobbler, with the " gift of the gab," may aspire to be a 
 judge in Israel. 
 
 Two things here must strike the least observant. What must 
 be the servility and baseness of these trucklers, to sink so low 
 as this ; and what the bigotry of squire and parson where such 
 subterfuges are held expedient; and finally, how great the 
 insincerity of all alike : that of the labourers, in order to gain 
 their bread, and worse still that of the employers, who while 
 vowing on platform, in Press, and lecture-hall the most liberal 
 sentiments, are even now, at this hour, as ready and willing to 
 persecute those who differ from them, as ever were their blood- 
 thirsty predecessors of bygone days. 
 
 When the first knell of the one-sided Church was sounded in 
 the House of Commons, the parsons, under the vigorous and 
 astute leadership of Archbishop Benson, who typified in his- 
 methods and person the ideal Jesuit of the penny dreadful, quite 
 unmindful of the good old copy-book heading that " Honesty 
 is the best policy," started an amusing if effective " joss," as 
 Westerners say, upon the British proletariat. 
 
 They seem to have conceived such a lofty, and to my mind not 
 undeserved opinion of the fair-mindedness of the working- 
 classes in whose hands their fate lies, that they resolved by 
 fair means or foul to convince them that the present Parlia- 
 ment-stablished Church and Eeligion are actually identical in> 
 every respect with the Church and Eeligion of Magna Charta, 
 and that consequently their Church is not only rightfully 
 possessed of all her immense wealth, but that she derived them 
 from a period antecedent to the very existence of Parliament ! 
 
 They, therefore, began by inventing the doctrine of " Con- 
 tinuity," and quite forgetful that, according to the old saw, " what 
 is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," their theory 
 would be easily discredited by the fact that, of their many 
 Lutheran brethren on the Continent who are precisely in the 
 same boat, none regard it with anything but pity and contempt, 
 they proceeded to flood the entire country and more especially 
 the rural districts where ignorance of history and respect for 
 parsonic authority would tend to favour their grotesque pre-
 
 476 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 tensions, with paid and unpaid lecturers and magic-lantern 
 illustrations of the same, and endless teas, with mixed diversions 
 for old and young of both sexes, beginning with the mild 
 Bohea and inevitable bun and as surely terminating with the 
 still more indigestible list of historic falsehoods which form the 
 stock-in-trade of a modern " Church Lecture." 
 
 As it may be interesting to the unobservant, it may be well 
 here to place these falsehoods in all their naked ugliness, upon 
 the pillory of historic criticism. 
 
 1. The Church of England having existed before the State, by 
 what right can the State resume or deal with the same ? 
 
 2. The Church of England is not, as heretofore supposed, 
 350 or so years old, but thirteen, or even according to some 
 Anglicans fifteen centuries old (sic) apparently oblivious of the 
 fact that the Church, whatever it was, was assuredly not English 
 (or Anglican) before there were any Englishmen in our islands. 
 
 3. The Church never having been established, but having 
 grown up independently of the State, cannot be disestablished. 
 
 The cloven foot of " Jesuitism " or " sophistry " is here plainly 
 discerned. The phrase " Church of England " is used to mystify 
 and juggle with. 
 
 The Church of England founded by Pope Gregory, which 
 was abruptly ended by the "godly motion" of Edward VI. 
 (aged 10) at the bidding of Cranmer and Co., egged on by the 
 abbey and church- robbing landowners, was no doubt older than 
 any Parliament, and if its corporate life as the State Church be 
 carried on through its somewhat erratic British predecessors, 
 the epoch of its birth in the land might be set at the decline of 
 Roman dominion in Britain. But these Anglican and British 
 Churches were undoubtedly established by Popes, and as certainly 
 conformed as far as they could to Roman ritual, liturgy and 
 practise ; while " the Church of England of to-day is as surely 
 established by virtue of the statute of Parliament of 2 and 3 
 Edward VI., as it was thereby cut off from the Church Uni- 
 versal, by the adoption of its Lutheran articles and the abolition 
 of the Roman Mass." It is childish quibbling to say, with 
 Prof. Freeman, because there was no change of names, or offices, 
 or even discipline and liturgy to a large extent that the post- 
 reform church was identical with the one that it displaced
 
 OUR STATE CLERGY 477 
 
 seeing that the former was built up upon anti-Roman, and the 
 latter on Roman usage, belief, ritual, and obedience. In short, 
 it is not the form or names of this, or any other body of men, 
 which defines and characterises them, but their faith, their 
 practises, their sources of origin, and authority. 
 
 Finally, the legal style of the Church of England is the 
 "Reformed Church as by law established." But this style or 
 definition could not possibly apply to the Ancient Church of 
 Gregory of the sixth century (1) because it was not " reformed " 
 and (2) because it was not " by law established," but rather on 
 the contrary had conduced to establish the law, whereas the 
 reformed religion of Cranmer was indisputably established by 
 2 and 3 Ed. VI. as witness the statute of the very next 
 year, which refers to it having been "established by law" ! 
 Therefore it follows that the Church of England is not the 
 Ancient Church and cannot truly be described by the same name 
 or style. 
 
 As to the powers of Parliament, the Parliament of Edward VI. 
 by abolishing the ancient liturgy and providing heavy penalties 
 for " saying Mass," virtually transferred all the churches, 
 cathedrals and chapels (undoubtedly founded and endowed for 
 the celebration of the " Mass ") to a set of men who were 
 willing to abandon the Roman Rite and Communion, in order to 
 conform to the terms imposed by Parliament upon parish incum- 
 bents. Since, then, Parliament thus ousted the incumbents of the 
 ancient faith by virtue of their novel statutes and replaced them 
 by their own creatures of the new, 350 years ago, how can it be 
 said that Parliament having already dealt with the national 
 Churchwealth and tithe once, is not at liberty to redivide or 
 reapportion them again to-day? 
 
 Nevertheless, such is the collective stupidity of the rank and 
 file upon questions of this kind, that it suffices for the foxes of 
 the establishment who see no other way to preserve their precious 
 monopoly but by hard lying, to repeat such childish fables 
 over and over again, until the geese of their flocks terrified by 
 their pastor's woeful, if imaginary, prognostications, not only 
 swallow wholesale statements which they have neither the 
 leisure to examine, or the sense to verify, but fill the land with 
 their noisy cackling, until even the indifferent are drawn into
 
 478 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 the vortex of their dissensions, and take sides in the quarrel, 
 "utmosest inter Britannos," without knowing or caring two 
 pins about the matter. 
 
 As often happens, however, in religion as well as in politics, 
 the truth is generally to be found, by conning the ravings of all 
 parties and extracting a common denominator. 
 
 The extreme Kitualist calls himself a " Churchman," though 
 he usually rejects all the changes of the Keformation except, 
 perhaps, the Lutheran belief in private judgment. To him who 
 as a stickler for Catholic precedent desperately strives to find a 
 period in past Church history to suit his purpose, it is life or 
 death to prove that the " Church of England " underwent no 
 organic alteration at the Keformation, and flourished far into the 
 heyday of papal opposition of the fourth and fifth centuries, so 
 that he may discover examples and a state of things similar to 
 his own. 
 
 The Low Churchman contradicts the latter flatly in every 
 particular, and grumbles because the Reformation did not go far 
 enough. He not only glories in the abolition of a central 
 sacrifice (the Mass) at the Reformation, but sighs for the Geneva 
 gowns, and movable tables instead of altars of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, being in cordial agreement with Bishop Ridley of glorious 
 memory, who most truly said that " a priest doth import an 
 altar and an altar a sacrifice," and therefore condemned the 
 whole priestly business from first to last. There remains the 
 Broad Churchman who usually regards Ritualists as harmless 
 lunatics, and ridicules alike his childish millinery and his apish 
 Catholic pretensions. Frankly ascribing his origin, in common 
 with his Low Church friends, to the sixteenth century, and 
 heartily thankful that the state of the Reformation freed him from 
 papal domination, the Roman Mass, and the chains of priestly 
 authority he thanks Cranmer for having put us out of the 
 Catholic Church, and Luther for proclaiming to all Christians 
 the liberty to read whatever religion they please out of the 
 Bible. So far from desiring, or rather pretending to desire, 
 union with " our separated brethren " abroad he generally 
 regards uniformity as a proof of want of originality, and unity of 
 faith as a sign of narrowmindness, and of an unprogressive form 
 of religious belief.
 
 CHAPTEE XLV 
 
 BRITISH RELIGIOUS REFORM 
 
 AN overwhelming majority of this country are professed 
 Christians. Nevertheless, recent events show that not only 
 Christian concord amongst us is as far off as ever, but that we 
 prefer our sectarian bickerings to the welfare of our school 
 children. The champions of these sects, without exception, will 
 unblushingly assert in pulpit or lecture hall, that each and all of 
 their Christian varieties were founded in the purest interests of 
 truth upon the Divine Word as revealed in the Gospel, while 
 everyone who is well informed, or cares to examine their origin, 
 will plainly see that they were all invented by ambitious or 
 cantankerous priests or both, who being unable to get promotion 
 in their respective churches, took a short cut to command and 
 public favour by heading a new sect. 
 
 The paramount Christian sect in this country, itself a sect of 
 the Ancient Church of the Eealm despite the discreditable 
 attempts of Dr. Benson and his followers with Professor 
 Freeman's aid to prove that it is precisely the same national 
 church as existed before the Eeformation would never have 
 had its new forms and articles of creed thrust upon it had it 
 not been for royal exigencies, Cranmerian intrigues, and a futile 
 political attempt to effect a compromise into which it was hoped 
 all Christian dissidents would ultimately be forced by fair means 
 or foul. Considering, therefore, the total want of success which 
 attended these manoeuvres, and the terribly antisocial and un- 
 Christian results from which we grievously suffer to this hour, 
 the thought must arise in every thinking mind, would it not now 
 be possible to do what a sincere ruler might possibly have 
 attempted with success 400 years ago when the New Learning 
 first disposed men's minds to closer religious criticism, and by an 
 united resolve to sink trivial differences, strike out a common 
 level of Christian Belief and Eitual which would satisfy alike the 
 consciences of the earnest members of all our Christian sects and 
 still be sufficiently consonant with Catholic usage as to procure 
 our affiliation and intercommunion with the central Church of 
 Peter at Eome ?
 
 480 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 From historical analogy it seems highly probable, more especi- 
 ally in the light of the letters which passed between Henry VIII. 
 and Clement, that an influential representation which should 
 have satisfied the Curia of Borne that the majority of earnest 
 English and German Churchmen were as firmly resolved upon 
 reasonable reforms as they were at the Synod of Dort (where 
 they met and effected a tolerably amicable religious settlement), 
 and if, further, Henry VIII. and Charles V. had lent the movement 
 their powerful support, that the Pope would have found means to 
 induce his Cardinals to draw in their horns very considerably, 
 and to take up a widely different attitude from that which they 
 subsequently assumed at the Council of Trent, where the new 
 party of internal reform had neither fair play nor a chance of 
 making their voice effectually heard. Nor can there be any 
 doubt that were it not for the accidental difficulties of bringing 
 about a union of Christian churches, then as now, from the jars 
 and jealousies, national spite, and royal antipathies, and above all 
 the ferocious passions and theologic hate of clerics threatened 
 with extinction, the main objections to the old pre-reformation 
 religion such as celibacy of clergy, auricular confession, a Latin 
 liturgy, and whether or no Communicants regarded Communion 
 as a Commemoration Act or a real consumption of the body and 
 blood of Christ (which was optional until a majority at the 
 Council of Trent declared in favour of the latter opinion) there 
 would have been no schism at all. As for the smaller fry of 
 indulgences, images, medals, scapulars, relicks, holy water, 
 pilgrimages, and such minor matters about which so much stir 
 was made at the Beformation by the Northern nations and 
 which are nothing more than pious habits appealing to the 
 warmer hearts and more demonstrative and ardent tempera- 
 ment of the Southern races, at first tolerated and at last 
 consecrated by use as helps to devotion, but which to the more 
 cold and critical eye of the Northern races savour of profanity 
 and idolatry the concessions continually made to various bodies 
 of Christians who have subsequently been reconciled or affiliated 
 to the Holy See, retaining their own liturgy, language and ritual, 
 amply prove that all that is required to gain admittance into 
 the wide portals of the Catholic fold is a firm stand, a solid 
 faith, and a united front. Obviously there are some preliminaries
 
 BEITISH EELIGIOUS EEFOBM 481 
 
 to be overcome. It is very difficult to regard as anything but 
 
 moral and rational suicide the act into which the Church Universal 
 
 by political stress was hurried at Trent, in dubbing itself a sect 
 
 by changing its style into the " Roman Catholic Apostolical 
 
 Church," instead of the Church Catholic (or universal), the 
 
 object of which was to convey to the Mistress Church of Borne 
 
 the direct domination of all the other affiliated national churches 
 
 by fusing them into one, and at the same time reducing to 
 
 subjection the heads of the various national churches by the 
 
 curtailment of their independence and jurisdiction. Still less 
 
 can we accept the specious explanation of theologians, that they 
 
 merely " consolidated " the Catholic Church by the simple 
 
 process of substituting for the time-honoured "Primacy " of the 
 
 Pope, an entirely novel claim first put forward in the thirteenth 
 
 century, of supremacy and immediate jurisdiction over all the 
 
 churches of the world! " Quos deus vult perdere prius 
 
 dementat," sang the old Boman poet. It is certainly remarkable 
 
 that at the same unlucky Council the unchecked vanity of the 
 
 Pontiff and his autocratic minions, should have similarly taken 
 
 advantage of the weakness or dissensions of the northern nations 
 
 of Europe to discontinue the practice of admitting the various 
 
 Christian nationalities to an equal participation in the election 
 
 of popes, with the natural result that from that time not only 
 
 no non-Italian Popes have been chosen, but the Curia of Borne, 
 
 as if to emphasize the radical change in the constitution as well 
 
 as in the title of the Church since that date, has sedulously spread 
 
 abroad among the faithful the absurd notion that Italians being 
 
 born diplomatists (I had almost said dodgers) were the most 
 
 qualified to rule the Church of Christ. 
 
 Surely a strange view of the functions of the Vicar of Christ upon 
 earth ! more especially when one reflects upon the oft-repeated 
 boast that ' ' her enemies shall never prevail against her, " and that 
 " the Holy Spirit shall abide with her for ever," involving the 
 necessary corollary that the Holy Ghost makes Himself respon- 
 sible for Papal elections. Yet while each Pontiff in turn is 
 solemnly declared to have been selected by special favour of the 
 Holy Ghost, each Pope in turn exhibits his mistrust in Providence 
 by filling the College with Italian Cardinals, being apparently of the 
 same opinion as the immortal " Bed Comyn " " A'll mak sikker." 
 i i
 
 482 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Thus scarcely had the Roman Pontiffs regardless of aught but 
 their increased authority effected a radical change in the 
 character of the Catholic Church, by converting a group of national 
 churches in union with the Apostolic, or Roman Church (which, 
 as the See of Peter, always held an undisputed primacy among 
 Christian Churches) into one Roman Catholic and Apostolic 
 Church under the supremacy and direct jurisdiction of the Pope 
 when they must needs do their best to depose it from its proud 
 title of Universal, by changing it into an Italian Church ! For 
 how can a Church be properly said to be Universal, when not 
 only its Government but its Governor is Italian ? Nor are the 
 consequences that flow from these " administrative departures " 
 less disquieting and revolutionary. For if the Catholic Church 
 is virtually Roman, i.e. Italian the national Churches, which 
 are parts thereof, must necessarily be likewise Italian and 
 consequently foreign and if directly subject to Rome, as they 
 have been since the " Tridentine Consolidation " (!) their 
 bishops and priests are not only divided in jurisdiction and 
 allegiance between their civil and religious capacity, but must 
 frequently be exposed to the most grave and perplexing 
 difficulties. 
 
 There remains the terrible stumbling-block of Papal Infalli- 
 bility, which again at first view seems to be expressly invented 
 in order to debar all outsiders from scaling its Church walls, and 
 to break off once for all with all terrestrial notions of reason 
 and proportion. Yet when it is regarded in its theologic aspect 
 there seems to be some " method in its madness," inasmuch as 
 under the reasonable view that (1) she is the one and only 
 fold of Christ, and (2) that the Holy Ghost has ever covenanted to 
 dwell in her and keep her from all error (which said exemption 
 from error has ever been attributed to General Councils) it is 
 difficult to see why (in that view) the Holy Ghost should not 
 assist as much and as effectually the Pontiff when he in like 
 manner defines matters of faith or morals and publishes the 
 same urbi et orbi. Still the profanum vulgus is naturally 
 suspicious and thinks that Pontiffs who at one time " consolidate " 
 the European Churches by grasping their supreme direction, 
 and gradually exclude members of their churches from the 
 College of Cardinals so that the Holy Ghost shall have no chance
 
 BRITISH RELIGIOUS REFORM 483 
 
 of providing a non-Italian Pope without a miracle, and finally rid 
 themselves of general councils for good and all, by placing them- 
 selves in a supernatural, or at any rate praeterhuman category, 
 well, it savours a little too much of " hanky-panky " to commend 
 itself, at all events "in the flesh," as St. Paul says, to the sober 
 judgment of matter-of-fact Englishmen. To those, however, 
 who would rashly infer from these events that the Church is at 
 least since we Northerners abandoned it a mere gigantic engine 
 of human fraud and imposture, it will be well to ask, if not 
 the true heir of the Church of the Apostles, which is ? also to 
 remind them that humanity, being naturally corrupt, ever seeks 
 to debase the noblest institutions and turn them to its own 
 interested purposes. The chosen people, as we read in Holy 
 Writ, often rebelled, and its most trusted leaders forsook their 
 God and worshipped the false gods of the Gentiles, and yet were 
 led back again and again into the straight path. 
 
 Again, I insist, if the Church of which Rome is the Central 
 See, and from all time in the East and the West held to be the 
 depository of Apostolic faith and traditions if she is not the 
 visible Church which Christ came upon earth to establish the 
 only remaining theory is to contend that He did not foresee the 
 necessity of any human organisation to carry on His teachings 
 after His death and that Peter, to whom He said, "Feed my 
 lambs Feed my sheep," was to appoint no successor! 
 
 It seems then reasonable for all who believe in Christ, and 
 that outside His fold there is no salvation, to make every effort 
 to verify His words " so that there shall be One Fold and One 
 Shepherd." Such an effort can never be made but by laymen 
 all history shows that clerics thrive on discord and fatten on 
 dissensions, and that no imaginable terms would ever be likely 
 to satisfy or suit them. My hopes are entirely centred in the 
 devout and reasonable denizens of England, France, Belgium, 
 Germany, Sweden and Norway bound in a league for joint pre- 
 liminary consultation and subsequent presentation of their 
 terms not of submission but of federation, upon acceptance 
 of which they would be affiliated to the Apostolic See and 
 admitted to inter-communion with the Church Catholic or 
 Universal precisely as were the pre-Reformafcion National 
 Churches, reserving alone to the Pope (or, failing satisfaction, to
 
 484 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 a General Council) the decision of faith, ritual and liturgy, with 
 possibly an appellate jurisdiction from the Metropolitan Synods 
 in certain determined cases. The times are ripe for such a 
 league as this to succeed. In the first place, while the pseudo- 
 scientific puerilities of Voltaire, and later, of the followers of 
 Darwin, which turned the heads of millions of Christians of a past 
 generation, have faded away and given place to a more general 
 reaction towards Christianity, especially among the cultivated 
 classes, than ever before there has grown up on the other hand 
 among nearly all well-informed Catholics an impatience of the 
 expansion of devotion in frivolous directions as well as of the 
 petrified formalism of Catholic ritual, coupled with a strong 
 desire to sweep away the numberless accretions of the middle 
 ages, whose childish, if often harmless, usages, ill accord with a 
 more intellectual stage of civilisation. 
 
 No doubt there is a wide belief abroad that submission com- 
 plete and unreserved according to the formula laid down at the 
 Council of Trent must be extorted from every one who desires 
 to be received into the Eoman Communion. Nevertheless, the 
 enormous concessions of autonomy in usage, ritual, and liturgy, 
 made by the Curia to large bodies such as the Euthenians, Copts, 
 Unionists, Armenians, Mosarabes, &c., &c., testify to the elasticity 
 of Home's portals, when anything approaching to a national 
 Bomeward movement claims her attention and sympathy. 
 Above all now when Vatican funds are low and Italy, justly 
 incensed at the protracted animosity of the Vatican which 
 virtually places the Court and Government of Italy under a 
 perpetual religious ban, is slowly but surely feeling her way to a 
 second and final act of spoliation which will probably ere long 
 drive the Pope and his Cardinals to seek refuge in one of the 
 Mediterranean islands it is not likely that any terms of union 
 would be rejected unless they contain articles which expressly 
 contravene the teachings of the Gospel. The rather should the 
 Churches of Lutheran foundation adopt the course suggested, 
 seeing that their principal prop, the Bible, has been shrewdly 
 shaken and is likely to be even still further discredited under 
 the solvents of critical research. 
 
 The strongest arms against Borne were furbished from the 
 Biblical Armoury ; and the Beformers, from Luther onwards,
 
 HOUSE OF LORDS 485 
 
 entrenched themselves upon " the Bible, and nothing but the 
 Bible," holding any divergence, real or apparent, from Biblical 
 lore to be an all sufficient disproof of Roman doctrine. 
 
 With greater reason then should they now repair to the 
 fountain head of Christian doctrine, for the pure and undefiled 
 source of Revelation which it has ever been the care and office of 
 the Roman Church to preserve and cherish throughout the ages. 
 
 Closely knitted up with Party Politics is the discreditable 
 fetish known as the 
 
 HOUSE OP LORDS. 
 
 Like our other fetish, "Free Trade," it has ceased long ago to 
 be what it once was useful and respectable. 
 
 Still it is kept up, in status quo ante, to the amazement of the 
 world and the confusion of the realm, through the obstinacy 
 of the Conservatives, whose pet preserve it is, and the stupidity 
 of the greater number of ignorant Britons who have been 
 taught by their Prayer Book, along with their Catechism, to 
 worship a lord. There is no secret there is nothing 
 mysterious about the House of Lords. When it was a 
 Peerage, consisting of Peers (or equals) in broad acres and 
 ancient lineage, it was exceedingly useful, because their collective 
 dislike to violent changes caused them to taboo risky legislative 
 experiments, while their small numbers tended to intensify their 
 solidarity and pride of place, which, in turn, acted powerfully upon 
 the nation in reinforcing their Esteem and Authority. 
 
 But from the moment that Charles II. abolished their feudal 
 rights, and James I. began to sell Peerages, Esteem and Authority 
 rapidly vanished, leaving them legislative power alone, i.e. 
 (Anglice) something to sell or barter ; in short, a vote. Thus 
 they ceased to be a Landed Aristocracy, or a House of Lords, and 
 became a mere Upper House. With the eighteenth century, 
 which may truly be called the Age of Barter and Corruption, 
 when, according to Walpole (who ought to know), " every Briton 
 had his price," and (be it noted) even the " Glorious Revolution," 
 and the Union of Great Britain, and eighty years later, that of 
 Ireland, were bought and sold by "noble lords" like any other 
 vulgar commodity Party Politics, little by little, swept the 
 entire Upper House into its dirty net. Next Gladstone and
 
 486 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Dizzy, bettering their instruction, and with the full consent 
 of a stupid, party-ridden nation, turned the Peerage into the 
 Beerage. Lucky if it does not shortly earn the title of " Jewry " 
 as well. 
 
 What is this Beerage now-a-days ? Lawyers, Brewers, 
 Bankers, Jew Financiers, and Manufacturers, who have backed 
 'heir " party " through thick and thin, or endowed it heavily, 
 or else are worth " buying out " by the other side. Many of 
 them, as all round men of business, are the very men we ought to 
 have had at the head of affairs during the Boer war, who, 
 unfortunately, rarely reach the Upper House until their intellect 
 is waning, and their energy is spent. 
 
 Their sons usually revert to the shop-keeping type from which 
 the parental talents have raised them, and lacking the incentive 
 to exertion, imagine their whole duty in life consists in " making 
 the money fly." Finding themselves greatly worshipped by their 
 own relatives and footmen as " my lord," and in great demand with 
 " Society " so long as the money continues to fly as aforesaid, they 
 commonly clinch their aristocratic pretensions by getting a post at 
 Court, marrying a duke's daughter, and ruining themselves on the 
 turf. They are greatly surprised that the old peerage do not 
 welcome them as a man and a brother ; and consequently, rarely, 
 if ever, trouble the Upper Chamber with their presence, except 
 on those very rare occasions when the Whip of the side to whom 
 they owe their creation, prevails upon them to " save their 
 country " by voting upon intricate matters of which they know 
 little, and care less. 
 
 Is it then surprising that the new Beerage does not "work," 
 and that even John Bull, dull as he is, is beginning to see what 
 all the other civilised nations have discovered for a century or 
 more namely, that an hereditary aristocracy should be reduced 
 to the smallest possible compass, and heavily diluted with 
 current notables and successful men of business if they are 
 to serve any useful purpose in the State, or command the respect 
 and confidence of reasonable citizens. The cry of the Liberals 
 is, " Let us all be peers, and so capture it for our side or else do 
 away with it." The Tories exclaim, " Let it alone, we have a 
 majority there, it suits us exactly as it is." 
 
 Obviously, in the light of reason and experience, what is really
 
 TEMPERANCE REMEDIES 487 
 
 required is to concentrate its useful elements by allowing the six 
 hundred Peers to elect fifty useful men (if they can) out of 
 their ranks, and, say another hundred part-elected, part-nominated 
 (for life) by the Crown. In most civilised lands, such a similar 
 balance of the hereditary-landed, and the elective or nominative 
 (or both) elements have been found useful and necessary, in 
 order to secure what every reasonable man must hold to be of 
 prime importance namely, that they shall be a respected and 
 powerful body, which is strong and independent enough to 
 hold the balance between Crown and popular rights, and so 
 guard the country against the dangers of sudden and unprovided 
 popular ebullitions and passions. 
 
 TEMPERANCE REMEDIES. 
 
 With regard to Temperance my remedies are short, sweet, and 
 I believe, perfectly practicable. 
 
 Granted that moderate and reasonable entertainment is a 
 desirable boon, the cause of excess in England is traceable to- 
 Seclusion and Secrecy every facility for getting light, sound 
 beer and wines should be provided. Let bars, snuggeries and 
 bar-parlours be abolished, and family frequentation of comfortable 
 and amplified beer saloons be encouraged, where temperance 
 drinks and refreshments are compulsorily on sale. Let 
 municipalities gradually acquire, at a fair price, the public- 
 houses, selling the same to builders, creating 5 per cent. 
 Stock for that end ; and when occasion offers build a People's 
 Palace or "Pleasure-house" in some central spot, where cheap 
 concerts, lectures, or a town band might attract, and cheap copies 
 of pictures and statues instruct. There all the displaced brewers 
 might compete in selling their beer to the public, and workmen 
 would bring their families. Publicity would banish drunkenness, 
 and serve to civilise and educate the masses to good behaviour 
 and self-control, and the softening influence of woman would be 
 added to the elevating and restraining tendency of public life. If 
 any one doubts these results let them visit Blackpool or the 
 Isle of Man in August, and they will be abundantly convinced 
 that, given the same conditions of public entertainment, the 
 working masses behave at least as well as the classes who are 
 usually called their superiors.
 
 CHAPTER XLVI 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Mr task is done. It remains for my readers to judge if I have 
 spoken ill or well, truly or falsely, of my fellow-countrymen and 
 their failings. At least it can scarcely be denied that we are apt 
 to collectively acquiesce in public follies and blunders which we 
 should scorn to commit in private life and which we never cease 
 individually to denounce and deplore, and that we are prone to 
 rest content under the general imputation of reproaches which 
 we individually abhor. 
 
 Which of us is so bold except in sport as to maintain that it is 
 reasonable to elect for a judge the man who has shown most 
 acuteness in deceiving juries, or him who has done best service as 
 a thick and thin supporter of the Government then in power or 
 that, when thus caught, the best way to secure his permanent 
 good behaviour is to place him irremovably on a pedestal above 
 the breath of criticism or public reproof, thereby encouraging 
 him to indulge every whim or excess to, which his temper inclines, 
 or his love of notoriety suggests or, again, that the best way of 
 presenting a suitor's case to a judge or jury is to filter it through 
 two distinct persons, solicitor and barrister, of whom only one 
 has had the advantage of hearing the original story at first 
 hand ? Or which of us in his saner moments will contend that 
 the dekametric system is not superior to our barbarous old system 
 of computing weights, values and measures, and that its 
 compulsory adoption, along with a wide measure of spelling 
 reform, would lighten the school labour of generations to come by 
 one-half, and prove an inestimable boon to the commerce and 
 industry of this country ? 
 
 In like manner, every reasonable being in England is at one 
 in desiring and even requiring as a measure of national self- 
 preservation that the children of the poorer classes of the towns 
 who, up to 1870, were allowed to grow up like the wild dogs in 
 Constantinople, should be caught up and compulsorily trained in 
 schools like their brethren in the country villages, but demur at
 
 CONCLUSION 489 
 
 the same being supported by their more provident neighbours, 
 except when orphans, or where from ill-health their parents are 
 wholly incapable of paying their school fees ; still less is it 
 palatable to the average taxpayer to contribute vast sums to 
 erect palatial edifices for those whose parents fail to comply with 
 their manifest obligations, or to fatten able-bodied men in comfort 
 upon the rates, or encourage tramps to perambulate the country 
 and provide them with lodgings at the ratepayers' expense. 
 
 Similarly, while most Englishmen are in favour of compulsory 
 charity in the shape of a poor rate for the benefit of the helpless 
 indigent, they fail to see why palaces should be erected out of 
 the public rates for housing people who have been accustomed to 
 the straitest circumstances or see any reason for encouraging 
 the able-bodied pauper to overshadow the land by enabling him 
 to rear large broods at the expense and to the detriment of the 
 long-suffering community who are destined to support and 
 educate them. 
 
 Nor does the average Briton usually repine at the religious 
 dissensions which distract the land and render all useful 
 co-operation for moral improvement abortive, regarding, as he 
 does, religion not as abstract truth but as a matter of relative 
 prepossession and inclinations. Yet what Englishman can be 
 singly picked who will admit the justice of conferring on one out 
 of 300 bodies the monopoly of the Church wealth of the nation 
 just because it was established or proposed to be made the one 
 and only Church of the Eealm three hundred years ago ? 
 and yet, in the next breath, the overwhelming majority of 
 Britons, who are at one in desiring for every child the amplest 
 school facilities for being taught the religion of their parents, 
 calmly endure the preposterous spectacle of the British Parlia- 
 ment vainly endeavouring to bring about that desirable result 
 after a year of incessant strife and bickering, because of the 
 pedantic imbecility of a large number of their representatives, 
 who demur at public money being used to support private 
 religions. 
 
 Nothing outside the land of "Cocagne " or a comic opera, can 
 be more incongruous than for so-called Liberals in one session to 
 disestablish the Irish Church, by bribing the possessors of the 
 illgotten church goods of a disinherited nation to disendow
 
 490 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 themselves by endowing them with a larger share of the aforesaid 
 church's goods than they could possibly have obtained by 
 remaining where they were, and in the following session proceed 
 to spend the money left over in helping Irish tenants to buy out 
 their landlords, and a few short years later nailing their colours 
 to the mast and challenging the supremacy of the House of 
 Lords, rather than acquiesce to the iniquitous principle of 
 applying the collective rates of A, B, C and D to the religious 
 instruction of the offspring of W, X, Y, Z, whereby, terrible as it 
 is to contemplate, the sovereign painfully extracted from the 
 reluctant pocket of a low Churchman might conceivably help to 
 pay for the instruction of a Ritualist's child in the very latest 
 novelty of " Anglo- Catholic " doctrine. 
 
 I will not pursue the harrowing subject any further, but I 
 cannot forbear remarking that only an exceptional degree of 
 national stupidity can account for wide-spread measures of 
 utility being opposed upon grounds of uniformity and parity, 
 while our statute-book and national usages literally bristle with 
 inconsistencies of every shape and kind. 
 
 But if we desire to surpass ourselves and afford the observant 
 foreigner the strangest mystery ever presented to public eye, 
 and stimulate his highest wonderment at our national per- 
 formances, surely 
 
 IRELAND 
 
 must be placed in the very forefront. Catholic Ireland, whom 
 we have oppressed, insulted, betrayed, beaten down, deliberately 
 ruined and handed over to the Protestant garrison (that handful 
 of her hereditary foes who had contrived by legal chicanery or 
 open violence to seize the greater part of the land and all the 
 power), and later out of sheer fright of a rebellion, enfranchised, 
 and reinstated upon an equality with their quondam masters in law 
 polity and religion thereby carefully placing political weapons in 
 the hands of our former slaves for the express purpose of 
 harrying our native legislators in Parliament and making 
 English and Scotch legislation impossible ! But more remains. 
 
 Having carefully fixed the " garrison " landlords on the backs 
 of the Catholic majority, and empowered them through one-sided 
 laws of their own making, to ruin their tenantry first, and
 
 IEELAND 491 
 
 themselves after, we suddenly discover towards the end of the 
 nineteenth century that our national treatment of Ireland upon 
 the whole has surpassed in cold-blooded cruelty and perfidy that 
 of Spain in the sixteenth century, or Eussia in the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth in respect of her Polish and Jewish subjects ; so 
 turning right about face ! we lay the entire blame of Ireland's past 
 rnisgovernment and present misfortunes upon the unhappy 
 descendants of the aforesaid Protestant garrison, and conclude, 
 just about one hundred years after the palmy days of croppy- 
 hunting and rapparee-slaughter by the Loyalists, and no- 
 questions asked that the landlords were the curse of Ireland, 
 and must be got rid of at all costs ! Well, perhaps they were at 
 one time ; but in view of the fact that, a few returns to coercion 
 apart, the Irish Members for the lasfc fifty years have extorted 
 from the fears or folly of their English colleagues, or by a skilful 
 use of their voting powers, almost every concession they asked 
 for or desire without any increase of attachment or gratitude on 
 their side that can be discerned with the naked eye it is 
 surely little short of madness firstly, to uproot most of the 
 industry, energy, talent, and intelligence of the country in order, 
 seemingly, to hand it over to the squireens and priests and the 
 representatives of all that is the reverse of progress and industry, 
 until such time as Transatlantic Ireland is rich and strong enough 
 to wrest the country from our grasp, and, secondly, to advance 
 130 millions for that purpose to men whose undying hatred for 
 six centuries of wrongs and whose love of freedom we can 
 neither appease nor eradicate. 
 
 Surely, a more complicated piece of folly was never perpetrated ! 
 What madness, after centuries of oppression and misrule, to 
 imagine that a sop of money will secure fidelity from a race 
 nursed up and fed upon hatred of the Saxon oppressor, whose 
 only dream and hope is to gain their independence and " be a 
 nation once again " ! 
 
 Time was, perhaps, under the more sympathetic regimen of 
 Mr. Gladstone, when a liberal scheme of Autonomy might have 
 softened the heart of Ireland and ended our mutual strife, but 
 the day is long past when a bone thrown to a dog could avert 
 the coming of our just retribution. We have deliberately sowed 
 the wind and must needs reap the whirlwind.
 
 492 AEE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 Nor is this the least of the marvel ! Had it been a ferocious 
 crew of "sansculottes," drunk with the blood of their old-time 
 masters, and quite overbalanced by their rapid rise from rags to 
 regal power who hurled the Irish landlords from their ancient 
 seats, or ruined and drove them into exile, one would not so 
 much wonder at their violence as deplore their petulant folly 
 but when one reflects that this astounding leap in the dark is 
 the act of the steady, slowgoing, cautious Tories under the 
 guidance of the cynical author of " Philosophic Doubt," who never 
 had a good word for, or ever attributed any but the blackest 
 motives to Irish Catholics or Nationalists, and on all and every 
 occasion were wont to vow that whatever of honesty, skill, 
 energy, and industry were to be found in all Ireland were to 
 be found in the Protestant or Anglo-Scottish ranks the 
 wholesale abolition of Protestant landlords and substitution 
 of the English-hating Celts in their room is assuredly the 
 most astonishing plan for preserving the "Union" that it ever 
 entered the mind of man to devise. 
 
 And yet if we closely examine John Bull's devious paths in the 
 past, and consider that owing to our plague of party government 
 thousands, perhaps millions, of Englishmen care much more for 
 their party than good government, and as the triumph of the 
 Liberals can only be obtained by offering the public the precise 
 opposite of the Conservative tactics which have occasioned their 
 disgrace, not only no continuity of national policy can be 
 expected, but, were it not for the solid ballast of British aversion 
 to change which is, or was, our saving mark, we should carry out 
 a series of exaggerated revolutions, which would render us even 
 more inexplicable to foreign eyes than we are already. 
 
 The plain and undeniable facts are not disputed, that for six 
 centuries 
 
 1. We have conquered, plundered, cheated and oppressed 
 
 Celtic Ireland without mercy, and placed over them a 
 dominant and long-favoured garrison of Anglo- Scotch 
 race who have seized two-thirds of the land. 
 
 2. We have deprived them for three centuries of the means 
 
 of superior education in order to stifle their religion, 
 and having bought up their leaders, succeeded in 
 cheating them out of their own parliament.
 
 IEELAND 493: 
 
 3. When the Liberals were on the very verge of yielding to 
 
 their just demands, the Conservative and Anglo-Scot 
 majority dashed the cup from their very lips. 
 
 4. Then when the Boer war had given us ample proofs of 
 
 the deep-seated hatred and rancour of the Irish nation 
 towards us, we think it an opportune moment to kick 
 out the Anglo-Scottish garrison and to leave Ireland 
 to the real Irish, making our enemies our creditors- 
 for 130 millions. 
 
 Unless all past experiences belie and deceive, the Irish will 
 never rest until they are free ; they will bide their time, till 
 America picks a quarrel with us, or, until their Irish citizens are 
 numerous and influential enough to invade us, or, at all events, 
 make Erin independent. Will Irish tenants then go on paying 
 those rent -charges for which the English taxpayer pledges his 
 present and future substance ? It seems more than likely that 
 they will say, " Why not do what the Liberals did for the Irish 
 Church ? We are only robbing the robbers and re-entering on 
 our own ! " 
 
 With not less madness, we prate of Empire, because our 
 adventurous sons have planted flourishing Colonies in divers 
 parts of the world, which, having extorted every condition of 
 self-government and independence unfettered by any obligation 
 or tie on their side, securely rely on our gratuitous protection, 
 until they are strong enough to fly alone and to start a republic 
 of their own in imitation of the United States. Not only did 
 we neglect to bargain for military or naval subsidies in exchange 
 for their autonomy, but we did not even take the precaution of 
 binding our Colonies in an Inter-Colonial Custom League so 
 that we might not only prevent their competition but benefit 
 by their future food production to feed our foodless millions at 
 home on a free trade basis without being forced to depend upon 
 possible foes for subsistence. (Hence Joseph's tardy lament.) 
 
 Need reference be made to the ludicrous incongruity of our 
 
 Outcry against Chinese Labour for the Colonies 
 and its evil effects, when we seem to have exerted our 
 ingenuity in stocking London for 100 years past with all 
 the objectionable offscourings of Europe ; as if, forsooth, lacking 
 a negro population, we must needs mimick our transatlantic
 
 494 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 brethren even so far as to get up a Polish Jew " difficulty " 
 in our midst ? And to make ourselves still further a laughing 
 stock to Europe, at the very time that one-half of the nation 
 is thundering against Chinese coolie introduction and the other 
 half agitating against the East End being the dumping ground of 
 diseased and homeless Oriental Jews, Anarchists, and destitute 
 aliens of all sorts, " all the King's horses and all the King's men," 
 with all the combined wisdom and wit of our Law and Police, 
 .are unavailing to expel a troup of German gipsy marauders, who 
 have been carefully tended by a numerous escort of sympathetic 
 constables during their prolonged tour through the country, 
 and whose travelling expenses have been thankfully discharged 
 at the cost of a grateful nation. 
 
 COAL. 
 Why do we allow it to be exported ? 
 
 Every one knows (except myself) that coal is our most valuable 
 asset. Personally, I stoutly maintain that it is our greatest 
 curse excepting perhaps our Reformation, or, as I prefer to call 
 it, our Christian Disintegration, for, in my view, it is coal the 
 " spacious possession " of coal that has proved our ruin, since 
 it has brought along with " machinery " unnumbered ills upon 
 our people, and while engendering the Anglo-Saxon plague of 
 " millionaires " and all that follows in their wake, has distracted 
 us from the real prosperity of a nation in order to follow the 
 will o' the wisp of industrial progress. It was an ill day when in 
 our land we came to think that all is well where, as Goldsmith 
 
 sang, 
 
 " Wealth accumulates, and men decay." 
 
 Only a stupid people would place, on one hand, her 
 agricultural prosperity in jeopardy, which, after all, can be 
 restored, and on the other squander recklessly for the foreigners' 
 advantage her greatest asset, which once gone can never be 
 restored. 
 
 Or can there be anything more comic to foreign eyes than 
 our lavish and untrammelled bounty in bestowing the rare gifts 
 of our Smokeless Navy Steam Coal upon our Naval Competitors
 
 COAL 495 
 
 throughout the world, and in order that they may not run 
 short of that inestimable treasure when they may chance to 
 declare war upon us, we afford them every facility of buying 
 and leasing the same without impediment, and decline to place 
 even a poor shilling per ton of duty, in order that it may be 
 transferred in ever-increasing quantities into our competitors' 
 hands. 
 
 I will not allude again to our crazy attempts to compel our 
 people to be sober by Act of Parliament, except once more to 
 repeat that here, as in a hundred other instances, we have acted 
 with such reckless stupidity in ordering our national existence 
 that we are not only unable to feed ourselves for more than 
 three months in the year, but we cannot afford to be sober for 
 fear of depriving our Government of the means of existence ! 
 since a full third of our Eevenue depends on our alcoholic 
 consumption. 
 
 Here's a pretty fix for a civilised nation ! She, open-eyed 
 ruins her own agricultural prospects to please the town artisan 
 and fatten the foreigner ; she cannot do right to India because 
 she thrives on opium and the salt tax, and she cannot afford to 
 be temperate for fear the profits of excise should shrink below 
 thirty millions ! Was ever Hypocrisy like this ? Our Eulers 
 are for ever pretending to deplore our national failing for drink, 
 while they are bound to secretly rejoice at its yearly increase. 
 They do their best to drive us to spirits and maddening or 
 poisonous rye and potato spirits, which it ought to be a crime 
 to sell at all firstly, because their heaviest profit is derived from 
 the manufacture of such cheap poisons, and secondly, because 
 they penalise and practically keep out of the country the 
 harmless light hocks and clarets of France, Germany and 
 Algeria by charging a duty which doubles their cost to the 
 consumer ! 
 
 We are at last becoming convinced that there is " something 
 rotten in the State of Denmark." We feel somehow that we 
 ought not to have found the Coercion of the Boers such a very 
 serious and costly matter as to send our Consols down from 
 108 to 82 and shake our national credit in the markets of 
 the world, unless there was something the matter somewhere. 
 The complaints of waning business and greatly reduced profits
 
 496 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 can scarcely be groundless, and the share lists and stock 
 exchange prices point to an enormous reduction of investments, 
 and our almost stationary exports too plainly tell a tale of 
 waning " foreign business," with all but our Colonial brethren. 
 Nevertheless, the calm and prudent Party, the cold-blooded 
 and even-minded Conservatives, who have not the excuse of 
 the Liberals who are ever burning (so they say) to redress 
 wrongs and reform " abuses," cost what it may but on the 
 contrary glory in "abuses" and thrives upon national wrongs 
 which they invariably maintain to the last gasp have managed, 
 during their nineteen years of almost unbroken command, with 
 an industry which can hardly be sufficiently admired, to pile up 
 debt upon debt to almost double the annual expenditure of 
 Government, and to bring up the National Debt to nearly its 
 old alarming figure. 
 
 And yet at the very same time that they openly repine 
 at the hopelessness of army reform, lament our waning 
 credit, never cease to deplore our stationary exports, the 
 shrinkage in private expenditure, which deeply affects the 
 home retail trade, and our greatly reduced profits on the 
 national turnover, the obvious duty of retrenchment of 
 government expenses seems to be furthest from their thoughts. 
 Some see no remedy for our acknowledged ills but a reversal of 
 our cherished national doctrine of Free Trade, which up to the 
 last few years was supposed to be the cause of all our 
 commercial superiority, and is now suddenly charged with all 
 our backslidings and national misfortunes. Others, chiefly 
 Liberals, disputing the Tory position as in duty bound, prefer 
 to throw the entire blame of our rebuffs in National Commercial 
 Progress upon our notoriously inferior technical schools and 
 national system of education in general, and straightway, 
 instead of providing a well-ordered system of Educative 
 Ascension for the talented poor from village school to Laboratory 
 or Art School as abroad, combined with a thorough reform of 
 Secondary National Schooling, can find nothing better to do 
 during the whole of their first year in power than to air their 
 theological differences and pay off their old religious and 
 educational scores in an aimless and futile sectarian campaign, 
 which left matters just as they were, plus ferocious sectarian
 
 EEFOEMATION OF POLITICAL AMATEURS 497 
 
 passions roused, time and money wasted, while peace among the 
 sects and children's education are as far off as ever. 
 
 THE EEFOEMATION OF POLITICAL AMATEURS. 
 
 I shall be told : "As usual with critics, you pull down every- 
 thing and build up nothing." Keeping firmly in view my text 
 that our stupidity lies in collectively acquiescing in a state of 
 things which we severally, by an enormous majority, condemn 
 What are our chief complaints ? 
 
 1. We find that owing to Britons being trained to place their 
 " party " before their country, patriotism is extinct (except in 
 words) among us, and the State, which is ourselves, a thing to be 
 plundered, " Hinc illae lachrymae." Hence all our woes, from 
 Boer Wars to National wastefulness, inclusive. 
 
 2. We find that our Members, mostly 1'yars, as they say in 
 Lancashire, are all chiefly concerned, firstly, in keeping their 
 seats by humouring their constituents ; secondly, in satisfying 
 their " Party Association " ; and, thirdly, in truckling to their 
 leaders and his whips. And where does the Country " come in " ? 
 Nowhere. 
 
 3. From these premises flow directly such follies as Home 
 Eule to a people who collectively declared their disloyalty to the 
 flag during the Boer War, and to whom we have insanely 
 pledged our credit for 130 millions after the said measure has 
 been twice over rejected by the predominant partner 1 Also, 
 say, old age pensions, maintaining the unemployed out of the 
 rates, and other logical results of the silly notion that the State 
 should penalise industry and thrift by making the industrious 
 support the idle and thriftless which marks the beginning of 
 the end d la Bomaine free lands to chaffer with, free baths and 
 circuses to " loaf in," and free loaves to eat without working 
 for. There's nothing new in all this. Greece tried it and 
 perished. Imperial Eome died of it. Australia is trying it 
 with signal want of success, and would-be Imperial England must 
 needs follow in her wake. 
 
 The remedies are obviously, firstly, to make our legislators as 
 strong and independent as possible. How ? By concentrating the 
 Upper House, reducing them to fifty by the selection of
 
 498 ARE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 their fellow-peers, adding thereto the Heads of the leading 
 Churches and perhaps Chairmen of County Councils, Lord Mayors, 
 or any men representative of trade and important industries and 
 national interests and arts (other than brewing, since that art is 
 amply represented already) then fill up to the required number 
 (say 100 or 150) with life peers in nomination of Crown. 
 Secondly, as for the Lower House whatever system is adopted, 
 be it plural voting or cumulative, or by colleges as in Belgium, 
 etc., let it be indirect, so as to prevent, as far as possible, our 
 members being the slaves of their constituents, viz. going into 
 the Council of the Nation with their hands tied, and their votes 
 and opinions already purchased. Finally, no member of either 
 House should be allowed to spend any money on or in his con- 
 stituency, or ply the guinea-pig trade, which would remove the 
 curse and stain of political trading, and thereby kill the trade of 
 politics and eliminate those who covet a seat merely to sell their 
 M. P. -ship in the city to the highest bidder as well as that still 
 more numerous body of candidates, who are solely elected for 
 their suitable "plucking" properties. 
 
 Now, since these two orders of undesirables abound in both 
 Houses, it may be fairly claimed that these two rules alone, and 
 possibly a third besides, excluding lawyers d la Edward III. of 
 blessed memory would have a more direct influence in purifying 
 the political quagmire than any reform that can be devised. 
 Finally, the leader, and, perhaps, the Cabinet Ministers should be 
 elected each session by the entire " side " of their followers. 
 
 We should then be spared the preposterous, though accustomed, 
 scandal perpetrated ad lib. by the late Lord Salisbury and 
 Mr. Balfour of filling the Cabinet with their friends and relations, 
 mostly well-meaning but incompetent amateurs who, though 
 possibly " nice young men for a small tea-party," were scarcely 
 the men to save the situation. Nor would the ridiculous dilemma 
 continually recur, as last year, that the country becomes utterly 
 disgusted with the trifling or vacillation of a Premier and is 
 compelled to throw itself upon the opposite "party" not from 
 any special disgust for Unionism or Conservatism, but because 
 there is no other course which ensures a clearance of the obnoxious 
 Premier or Cabinet. For example at the last election it seems 
 certain that numberless Unionists turned to the Radicals in
 
 EEFOEMATION OF POLITICAL AMATEUES 499 
 
 despair, not because they were averse to Conservative measures, 
 but because their only hope of shunting Mr. Balfour and his gang 
 of incompetents lay in throwing out their party. Surely an absurd 
 necessity to which only a patient and ass-like nation would 
 submit ! But to go farther and seek out the root evil the same 
 old story recurs want of system in short, amateurism or 
 dilettantism, which is our bane in Army, Government and Law. 
 
 Our officers are as gallant a body as ever met an enemy, but 
 they are mere amateurs. 
 
 Our statesmen are usually well-meaning and honest, but they 
 are amateurs. 
 
 Our legislators try their best to make our laws, and fail 
 miserably because they know no system, follow no plan, and, 
 being amateurs, have no accurate training for their work, with 
 the fatal result that our statutes are hotchpotch, our judgments 
 haphazard ; nothing in law is fixed, certain, or constant, and 
 since amateur lawyers are good enough for amateur-made law, 
 we have amateur barristers whose slip-shod utterances and care- 
 less talk, show all too plainly that glibness, impudence, and 
 deceit (or the art of " bluffing a jury ") are more common than close 
 reasoning, accurate logic, and legal knowledge and amateur 
 judges, whose sole qualifications for the "bench " arise out of 
 their talking performances in the House in defence of dubious 
 Government measuresnot unfrequently, like Lord Brougham, 
 reach the woolsack without finding the necessity of acquiring " a 
 little law." 
 
 Would any but a stupid people endure the outrage of 
 being the sport of amateur judges and lawyers who muddle and 
 endanger their vital concerns of an Army which costs more 
 and does less for the money than any other or a Government 
 whose chief idea of the State is to afford impecunious youth an 
 easy stepping-stone to wealth and honours ? 
 
 We should be free to impose what terms we saw fit upon 
 our Colonies, and found an Anglo-Saxon (or, more correctly, 
 Teuto-Celtic) Federation which would suffice to feed us, and defy 
 the world in arms. Even then there would remain the difficulty 
 of selling our surplus manufactures when the Colonies should 
 have attained their full industrial development. 
 
 Our principal want must always be : (1) Cheap food-stuffs for
 
 500 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 the labouring and landless millions ; (2) Cheap and abundant raw 
 materials, iron, coal, cotton, wood, etc. 
 
 Clearly, therefore, our aim should have been to so handle our 
 Colonies as to make it worth their while to produce the largest 
 amount of these articles, and to stimulate our own farmers to the 
 highest production by a tax on foreign wheat of, say, one 
 shilling a bushel, at the very least, which must, and would 
 have that effect, without any appreciable rise in bread. 
 
 Adopting the only reasonable rule, viz. of taxing the foreign 
 articles which we can ourselves produce, while letting in free (or 
 nearly so) those we cannot, we should take off nearly all the duty 
 on Colonial tea, coffee, chocolate, wines and spices, and charge 
 heavy duties upon the foreign grown articles ; thus providing the 
 working population with what is a real boon and a necessity to 
 them, at almost prime cost. Iron, coal, cotton, and non- 
 Colonial timber should be highly taxed : a five per cent, preferential 
 duty levied on all partly, and ten per cent, preferential duty on all 
 fully manufactured articles. Then, for the special purposes of 
 public debt extinction, a super-duty, strictly graduated according 
 to its greater or less necessity, should be put on all articles of 
 luxury, possibly in the following order : magazines, newspapers, 
 comic papers (double), theatre tickets; Paris dresses, hats, etc. ; 
 motors, hunters, photographs, matches, champagnes, ports, 
 sherries, and foreign brandies and liqueurs ; Havana tobacco ; 
 truffles and all other foreign fish, game, fruits, vegetables, and 
 delicacies, at the same time reducing to the lowest point the duty 
 on light clarets and hocks, as a sanitary counterpoise to native 
 grown alcohols. 
 
 But can this be done at this hour ? Can we afford to be either 
 honest, or logical, or even sober, without financial ruin in 
 view of our past extravagance and imprudence? I greatly 
 doubt it. 
 
 There can be no greater illusion, however, than to suppose that 
 we can regain our waning position in the finances or commerce of 
 the world without a new departure, a trained legislature, a 
 trained and skilled cabinet, and a trained administration. Above 
 all, we must mend- our ways, give up our present education, in 
 which there is no real technical training except in athletics, and 
 abandon our easy-going non curante habits for a rational and well-
 
 OUE UNCONQUEBED NAVY 501 
 
 directed system of commercial instruction. However perfect our 
 fiscal system, and however much we reform our administration, 
 \ve cannot regain our lost ground without first reforming our- 
 selves. We must teach our youth to be as fit to defend their land 
 as the Swiss, to practice the self-denial and thrift of the German, 
 to imitate the patriotism and self-sacrifice of the Japanese. 
 
 What is, then, the conclusion to be drawn from the considera- 
 tions which I have tried to place before you ? That, if true, or 
 indeed, if there be ever so little of generally admitted truth in 
 my observations and strictures, there can be none among you 
 that will not search his own heart to see if he, too, has no blame in 
 these matters. If I succeed in arousing some honest pride in 
 those whose ears must surely tingle as they peruse these lines, I 
 am content, so they shall resolve not only in the presence of the 
 foreigner but among their own countrymen as well, to mend 
 their ways and refurbish their tarnished patriotism at home and 
 abroad. Let us at once admit that we have long been the 
 spoiled children of Europe the privileged nation of the world, 
 to whom the good things of the globe have come as a matter of 
 course in right of our all-conquering Navy, and commercial 
 supremacy, largely due to our original wealth in coal and iron 
 stores and our early progress and inventions in steam and 
 machinery. For well-nigh one hundred years, thanks to our 
 encircling seas, we have not only been free to develop our own 
 material prosperity while revolutions and desolating wars were 
 decimating our European neighbours, but by our wealth and 
 all-pervading trade were enabled to snap up most of " the un- 
 considered trifles " of the earth and defy the fast-rising jealousy 
 and envy of the nations, until at last we have come to forget we 
 are human and subject to the common laws of human existence. 
 Imbued from youth with the belief that our " Constitution " is 
 the most perfect creation of the intellect of man, and oblivious 
 of the fact that for nearly one hundred years we have allowed 
 each prentice-hand to tinker and hammer at it as best him 
 seemed, we are one and all penetrated with the unquenchable 
 conviction that our laws, our government and our institutions 
 generally are indestructible and everlasting, that our com-
 
 502 ABE WE A STUPID PEOPLE? 
 
 mercial and naval supremacy has been ordered from all time by 
 a beneficent Providence as a beacon of light to the inferior 
 nations around us, and that to Englishmen alone belong the vacant 
 spots of the earth as an hereditary right. Softened with a lon^ 
 period of peace, bloated with wealth, luxury and ease, John 
 Bull has had a severe awakening in the Boer War. His credit 
 shaken, his financial prepotence lost, he rubs his eyes to find his 
 costly army useless, his administration corrupt, his government 
 paralyzed, his educational plans abortive, his criminal law 
 discredited, his exports stationary, his "free trade" shibboleth 
 exploded, his boasted municipalities venal and reckless, his 
 National Debt almost at high- water mark again, diminished 
 profits everywhere side by side with a scandalous contempt for 
 public retrenchment on the part of politicians in short, 
 universal uneasiness and distrust, and "for all these ills a cure." 
 " Our only quack, the Prophet of Birmingham," suggests a 
 shilling duty on Corn, and Our Government a Colonial Conference ! 
 Now considering our excellent Colonial friends, while generally 
 willing to give us a certain preference over foreigners in exchange 
 for a free food-stuffs import, are at one in refusing to allow their 
 own tariffs to be remodelled in our own interest, to contribute to 
 our naval or military defence, or to enter into any system of 
 joint Imperial representation, or, in plain English, to convert 
 the name of Empire into a reality, it must be confessed that the 
 prospect before us is far from encouraging. 
 
 Still, we English, unless we have greatly fallen from our high 
 estate of bygone days, are, above all, gifted with an extraordinary 
 power of recuperation, Ccs diables d' Anglais (Bonaparte used to 
 complain) ne savcnt pas quand ils sont battus I Let us take 
 heart of grace and refuse to be beaten now ; and let us show 
 the world the spirit we displayed in the long drawn-out wars 
 of a century ago, when we confronted a Continent in arms 
 undismayed. We know that all nations have their ups and downs, 
 and that it is not given to all men or all nations to bear 
 success, while adversity, more often than not, serves but to test 
 their metal and deploy their best qualities. Waterloo was our 
 apogee. When the Peninsular veterans who rolled back the 
 tide of Europe in arms at Waterloo were born, England was 
 still a race nation of warrior freemen, helplessly inveigled into
 
 OUR UNCONQUEEED NAVY 503 
 
 becoming a race of mechanics and shopkeepers to quench their 
 masters' greed. Machinery turned us into a nation of shop- 
 keepers, and Waterloo turned our head. Since that turning 
 point of our military glory, we have contrived to waste 
 more money with less favourable results upon our little wars 
 and our army than any of our neighbours, and have suc- 
 ceeded in squandering the splendid inheritance of success in 
 arms which came down to us from the days of Wellington and 
 Marlborough. There remains to us yet the untarnished, because 
 untried, reputation of our unconquered Navy. Let us see to it 
 that we do not rashly dissipate that as well. Let us see to it 
 that Cant is banished from amongst us, so that Insincerity and 
 Hypocrisy shall be no longer imputed to us alike by friend or 
 foe. And to this end, let us strive to be rather than to seem, esse 
 quam videri, and train our children once more, as of old, to 
 respect their elders, to venerate the past, with all its lore and 
 wisdom of tradition and experience, turning their young minds, 
 as far as may be in this bustling, hustling world of to-day, from 
 the material to the spiritual and intellectual side of existence, 
 that they may not only strive for personal success but recognise 
 a national destiny to be attained by collective effort. In short, 
 let us teach them to be earnest and sincere, faithful and dutiful, 
 patriotic and loyal to their God, their family, and their race. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 GILBERT AND RIVINGTON LTD., CLERKENWELL, LONDON, B.C.
 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 imped below. 
 
 Form I,<)-;i7m-.V57 (C5424s4)444
 
 X" 000 953 530 3