2 MARCH 1934, Page 17

That the Englishman has been the great trader and colonizer

is perhaps evidence that his home binds him less closely than their homes bind the Frenchman and German. Where the Englishman colonized,. as in Eastern Canada or Australia, he did not build villages, but homesteads ; he was quite happy to be surrounded with pioneers of other races. He spends a life- time alone as a trader, and, while sentimentalizing about " home," shows very little appreciation of English company. Where the Frenchman or German settles, that part of the country becomes French or German. They build up com- munities round villages, and the villages focus round a town ; they transplant their culture. It is arguable that the Englishman, too, transplants his, an individualistic, culture. Certainly the Englishman leaving his village to make a fortune in the town feels no special urge to come back to his birth-place for his holidays and mix with the cronies of his youth, or, eventually, to retire and die there. If he had the intimate feeling of community interest of the German and Dane the English countryman would co-operate to finance his neigh- bours and to pool his marketing. But it does not follow, because he lacks the natal pull of other races, that he really lacks the community sense. He has it more widely, more 'liberally, and finds his recreation and contentment in the com- munity of countrymen, and in the countryside generally, more fully than the mystified young German could understand.

FRANK FREWEIT.