Belittlement of England Sir John Russell, of Rothamsted, has been
visiting Soviet Russia, not for the first time ; and his impressions, given after his return in the Manchester Guardian, cover many points of interest. One, on which he insisted strongly, is the great harm done in Russia by English visitors, especially the younger among them, who ignorantly belittle their own country out of sheer ignorance of her social and scientific achievements. Ignorance of that kind is certainly a distinct and noticeable phenomenon among many—by no means all, of course—of the keen young men today. They do not realise the extraordinary• achievement of their own nation in the sphere of personal liberties, because they have never really stopped to think what those liberties are, or what it would be like to lack them, or how largely in other great countries people do lack them. Similarly they do not realise the immense progress made in Great Britain by the working class, because most of them are totally out of touch with any normal working-class life, and fail to realise what it was forty years ago. Mr. J. A. Spender's new book, Men and Things, contains some very just comments on the prevalence of ignorance of this sort. But Sir John Russell's comment from the Russian end seems particularly illuminating. jt has been a virtue with England not to blow her own trumpet. But possibly it has been overdone.
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