N o doubt a Martian arriving on earth for the first
time would perceive little difference between an inhabitant of Great Britain and an inhabitant of New Britain (off the coast of New Guinea), except perhaps that the former showed a greater propensity than the latter to get drunk and scream in public. Similarity and difference are what G.E. Moore would have called nonnatural qualities, and are in the eye of the beholder: as a woman was overheard to remark in a Dublin bus, now that the Emerald Isle has become an El Dorado, ‘Russians, Nigerians, Chinese, they all look the same to me.’ It was Freud who remarked on the narcissism of small differences: but what, exactly, are small differences? As I travel between Britain and France, I notice a lot of differences, but whether they are large or small I cannot say with any certainty.
On the other hand, I see a lot of similarities when I read the newspapers. For example, the other day on the front page of Le Monde, I saw the following headlines of stories: ‘Record overcrowding in French prisons’ ‘Youth in peril: students eat badly, take drugs and don’t look after their health’ Gosh, I thought, it could be England. Of course, when you read further, you discover that French students are some way behind the English. Indeed, they seem, by our exalted standards, touchingly well-behaved. Only 33 per cent of French male students drink beer more than once or twice a week, for example, whereas in England you would get the same figure for those who drank beer more than once or twice a day.
As to prisoners, the French have 20,000 fewer of them than we do, though the overcrowding is more severe because they have fewer prison places. A judge, commenting on the overcrowding, delivered herself of the immortal opinion that: ‘The best way of emptying the prisons is to stop making laws that put more and more people into them.’ It’s not the burglars who are the problem, then, it’s the laws against burglary. In England, of course, she’d be Lord Chief Justice by now.
What a relief after reading the newspapers to talk to an acquaintance of ours, a real salt-of-the-earth French type, a man of good sense and sound principles. He is having a little difficulty with his neighbour who, no doubt from envy (the great fear of the French being that someone is doing well), is ruining his small bed-and-breakfast business by making a lot of noise with a drill whenever anyone comes to look over the rooms.
This calls for retaliation, and our acquaintance has devised three methods. First, he is going to dig a septic tank with an exhaust pipe pointing in the direction of his neighbour’s swimming pool; second, he is buying a flock of very noisy geese which he will put as near as possible to his neighbour’s house; and third, he is installing a sawmill to send sawdust over the fence along with the mephitic fumes.
All this is quite within the law. As John Stuart Mill so perceptively remarked in his Autobiography:
I felt the contrast between the frank sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of existence in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few or no exception) was either an enemy or a bore.
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