20 JUNE 1925, Page 8

WHAT BRITAIN MIGHT LEARN FROM THE NEW AMERICA

T.—BIRCHAMPTON, U.S.A., versus BIRCHAMPTON, ENG.

E NORMAN ANGELL. A"NEW" America—new of our generation ? Certainly. One case will illustrate a social develop went which is general.

Thirty years ago "Birchampton, U.S.A." (named after a big industrial city in the British eastern Midlands), was already a sizeable town, not much smaller than it is to-day. But it has seen, nevertheless, in those thirty years a true social revolution—an adaptation to the changed conditions of life in the modern world which Britain has not yet achieved, though that adaptation is even more necessary to Britain than it is to America.

Three decades ago this American town was but an unpaved main street of long narrow wooden boxes with " false fronts " ; the " side walks " were of rough planks ; in winter time a buggy or waggon could only navigate thanks to the fact that Ed. Bailey, the livery- stable keeper, with great public spirit, had paved the road with his manure and waste straw.

At the best hotel, Joe, the clerk, welcomed guests in his shirt sleeves, chewing an unlighted and macerated cigar, flourishing large diamonds on hands and shirt-front, and punctuating his welcome with a plentiful use of the spittoon. Like most public servants of his generation, he found insolence a necessary part of personal indepen- dence, a means of impressing all and sundry with the fact that he was as good as the next man. No bathroom in the hotel (though Americans of this generation won't believe it), and an English family that once arrived with a tin bath were the subject of Joe's reminiscences until that particular wooden hotel was mercifully destroyed by fire. Typhoid, malaria, smallpox and what the local doctor called typho-malaria were endemic, although it was considered unpatriotic even to acknow- ledge the existence of these things.

As to certain other social values, I heard a party of ladies at one of the annual picnics agree that Queen Victoria was an abandoned woman because she had appeared at a State ball in a low-necked dress. But part of Birchampton, and a considerable part, was a " China-town " (not inhabited by Chinese at all) of " dives " and brothels which outdid in crude depravity the worst sinks of Paris or Port Said ; local government was in the hands of a camarilla of petty adventurers ; verdicts in murder cases turned almost entirely on the question of the personal popularity of the accused ; and the lynching party usually hanged the wrong man.

Knowing as I did in those days " Birchampton, Eng.," my comparisons as an English boy were so maddening to my American companions as to produce in them a deep rage and a very bitter hatred. From pavement to politics, I demonstrated quite unanswerably that the effete monarchy of Great Britain managed to produce a state of society which, alike from the point of view of material comfort, moral worth and the general art of living, put Birchampton, U.S.A., in the Dark Ages. • • • - . • • Early this year I made a pious pilgrimage to this middle western town of certain days of my boyhood. It has grown in size, though not much. But if its size is the same, everything else has altered. The Arlington hotel, with Joe and his cigar and diamonds and shirt sleeves, has given place to a' new Arlington, where a uniformed bellhop springs to your taxi as it drives up through the perfectly asphalted streets and carries.

your bag to the reception desk, where a quiet-mannered functionary, who has an uncanny capacity for addressing you by your name before he has heard it, assigns you one of the two hundred rooms, all of which have bath- rooms attached to them. The room itself is small but perfectly designed. The heating is controlled by a thermostat which keeps it at the desired temperature. There is a. writing-desk-provided with new pens and fresh blotting paper and the electric lamp arranged conveniently by it. On it stands the telephone, of course, giving instantaneous communication with any number in the town. A card on the table informs you that if busy you can have your meal in your room by asking over the telephone for " room service." Another card reading " Do not disturb," hung upon the door of the room, means that one is not to be bothered by chamber-maids or valets. There is also an announcement that laundry sent down before ten o'clock in the morning will be returned that same day at seven in the evening. The door of the room has a device which forms a cupboard accessible by servants from the outside : a suit that needs cleaning or pressing can be placed there in the evening, and the valet takes out the clothes somewhere about midnight, irons them and returns them at seven in the morning. On the occasion of this particular visit to Birchampton, U.S.A., I had given instructions to be called at seven in the morning. At 7 a.m. the telephone rings and the clerk below announces that. it is seven o'clock. I voted myself twenty minutes more in bed, but when I had been there ten minutes the telephone rang again and a pleasant feminine voice said, " Are you up ? " Wondering which of my old friends had discovered that I was in Birchampton, I replied : " Well, as a matter of fact I am not. But who is speaking ? " The feminine voice replied : " Oh, do please get up." " Certainly, but . . just why particularly? Who is speaking ?" " Why, this is the. telephone clerk, and it is my business to get you out of bed, since you marked a call for seven o'clock.

Do get up, or you will miss your train." No perfunc- toriness about the service at the New Arlington Hotel, Birchampton, U.S.A.

In the town are changes in the standard of comfort just as great ; good restaurants of the " cafeteria " order, where the food is cheap and perfect of its kind and where you can help yourself to it (" self service ") ; several of them are open all night. Taxis arc available all night.

Politically and intellectually, too, it is a new if still somewhat self-conscious Birchampton. The Women's Club, which in earlier days had regarded Queen Victoria' as so scandalous a person, now has weekly lectures given largely by visiting foreigners for fees of from twenty, or thirty up to fifty 'pounds. The local college is for- girls as well as boys. The churches are organized into a union and for any social purpose act as a unit.

The China-town of the old days is no more. The theoretically bad political system is made to work by virtue of the fact that, if things at any time reach the degree of a scandal or a nuisance, the Rotary and the Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce and the Women's Club combine forces, and in fact impose the policy, which they see fit.

• • • . • Taking stock of all this, I did not, upon meeting the friends of thirty years before, dwell upon the superior: virtues of Birchampton, Eng. For the year previous, business had taken me to Birchampton, Eng., and the points of comparison ran in my mind. I had stayed at the best hotel in this English city of a quarter of a million inhabitants and paid as much for my room- as I had at Birchampton, U.S.N. But in the English hotel bedroom there was no bathroom attached, there was no running water, there was my writing-table, there was no heat, although it was the depth of winter, no means really of ordering a meal to be sent up so that I could have it while at work. I had pressing business to arrange in the English Birchampton, but the only place where one could write letters was in a general public room, reeking of stale tobacco, with the writing-desks usually occupied, no means of spreading out one's papers and notebooks, no possibility, in other words, of quiet or comfort.

tried having a fire in my room and a table brought in, but by the time I had succeeded in finding the chamber- :maid who found the boots who had the coal brought in and who got the fire to burn and the room to warm,. and by the time a table had been found and brought in by the manager's intervention, the morning was gone and the staff had voted me a public nuisance. The hotel boasted one wheezy telephone. It was quite impractic- .able to do business over it because it was in the public hall, and in case of a call the porter, who as likely as not would be busy with departing guests, would be obliged to hunt over the hotel for the person asked for. To make arrangements which would have been completed in an hour in the American Birchampton of 30,000 inhabitants took two temper-trying, shivering, exasperating days in the English city nearly ten times as large.

An evening engagement had taken me into an outlying suburb, and returning at about eleven o'clock on Sunday evening, not having dined, I wanted a light meal. Not to be had in Birchampton, Eng., with its two hundred and seventy-nine thousand inhabitants. The hotel restaurant was closed. Beer and whisky the city would provide in plenty ; but no food. Not a single restaurant so far as I could discover was open. On subsequent visits to the city I found that the only food that I could count on getting at such an hour was " fried chips " from a stall, out of a paper bag, in the market place. Nor could I discover that this very frugal night fare was compensated for in Birchampton, Eng., by a high thinking to which Birchampton, U.S.A., did not attain. I could not gather that the Women's Club in our Birch- ampton ever paid a visiting foreigner thirty or forty or fifty pounds to talk to it ; nor, indeed, that the city had a women's club ; nor that the youth of all clasSes alike went to college ; nor that the citizens were better organ- ized outside politics for the better social- governance of their community.

It will be said that all these things are external and trivial ; that bathrooms and running water, telephones, habitable hotel rooms, decent restaurants and elaborate mechanical conveniences do not make up civilization or " the good life." I am not urging that they do: I am merely calling attention to the fact that the good life for a country in the position of Great Britain, dependent to the extent of half its population on a highly organized industry and commerce, cannot be achieved without them. They are not all-sufficient, but they are indis- pensable. For good or ill, the prompt and efficient management of life in the western world of to-day demands an infinite number of adjustments for which an apparatus of post and telegraphs and railways, telephones, type- writers, labour-saving devices are necessary. The country's daily husiness—its industry, commerce, govern- ment, instruction—is made up of that multitude of arrangements and adjustments to which all this apparatus is necessary.

In this short period of thirty years the English city, from being much in advance of the American, has fallen much behind. The ease and efficiency of English life is hampered by the absence of those things in which we were the pioneers and about which we used to boast, so that to-day the English worker who lives by industry uses less than two-thirds of the mechanical power which the American worker manages to direct. In an age of machinery that difference is fatal.

What is the cause of it ? And what the remedy ?