A COLONIAL VIEW OF BRITAIN.
ITO Tan Kerma or ma "SraeraMa."1 SIR,—The letters of Lance-Corporal Richards and " M." have stirred me up to write upon a subject that has come before-me in various aspects at odd times during the last thirty years. My experience may help to elucidate a puzzling problem. as I can fairly lay claim to being both a Colonial and an Englishman and a bit of an alien besides.
My grandfather came from a Jewish family in Stuttgart. He married an Italian lady, and settled in London in the " thirties." My father married a Welsh lady, and I wee born near Calcutta, and arrived in England when two years of age, and was brought up by an uncle and aunt in the South of England, something like Thackeray and Rudyard Kipling. In fact, my father know the latter quite well in India, and has Rene unpublished verses i• his scrap-album written for my stepmother by our Poet of Empire. I was educated at an English Public School, and came out to Canada in MI6 in my eighteenth year, just after leaving school. I returned to England with my wife iu 1905, and this was my first visit home. I used to know may way fairly well around the West End of London, because I used to spend my holidays with my grandfather in Manchester Square; but though that particular neighbourhood had not altered, I found myself hope- lessly at sea when trying to get front my hotel near the British Museum to my father's office in one of the small streets running off the Strand to the river.
The first thing that threw both my wife alai self into ecstasies after landing was the English landscape as seen from the special boat train that carried us from Liverpool to Ruston. The next thing (we were not in ecstasies this time) was, after dinner that same evening, watching the antics of Iwo youths. who looked like the descriptions of hooligans I had read of in the papers. They had a piano organ, and one of them was trying to dance a jig to the tune the other was grinding out; this in front of the hotel. I thought to myself that during the nineteen years of my absence I had never seen anything so degrading. Both the youths looked exactly like that advertisement that used to appear in Punch of the man who was writing: " Two year. ago I used your soap, since when I have used no other." And besides the jig was a wretched fake; he could not use his feet even to keep time to the music. Finally a " Bobby " such as I bad known of old, and " blown " about to my Colonial friends and relations. came along and moved them off the immediate foreground, and it was a delight to watch the calm, dignified, and in every way efficient Manner of his doing it. My sense of pitying contempt for the hooligan vanished in admiration for the representative of civilization, and this was a sample of my experiences during a never-to-be-forgotten three months in England. I have never been back since, so that my impressions are still very vivid, and the prevailing one I still have with me is that England is the land of contrasts. Never since I left home have I enjoyed such perfect cooking as in the big London restaurants. I said. and still soy, that in England the science of living is further advanced than in the Colonies. The Englishman gets infinitely more for his money, in solid comfort, in the matter of housing accommodation and food and service, than the Canadian. Oa the other hand, both ray own clothes and my wife's fitted us much better than our English relatives' apparel, though the material was equally good; but then they held up their hands in horror when we told Mont what we paid for them—El for an ordinary " lounge suit " for self, and ZI2 for a tailor-made coat and skirt for the wife.
But to get back to the contrasts. We visited some relations in Leeds, and they took us to the market, as we were anxious to compare prices with Montreal ones; and while moving about from one stall to another suddenly from nowhere in purticular a troop, or pack, of hardly distinguishable human beings raced through one of the alleyways, made up of about fifteen or twenty children in the most filthy rags, and covered from head to foot with filth, pouncing on banana-peels or a rotten apple like a pack of pariah dogs, and yelling and snapping at one another quite oblivious to their surroundings. We visited Kirkstall Abbey. and were surprised at the taste that was responsible for removing the ivy from the ruins and buttressing up the crumbling lowers with incongruous modern masonry, making a noble ruin look like a burn-out factory building. And then the smell of the River Aire—phew! And we eat down near it and arose covered with ordure. But Roundhay Park is a glorious and soul-satisfying panorama, and it was clean and fresh and in every way wholesome. The contrasts followed so all over England: hack in London, to see the palaces on one side of Piccadilly- and the awful wrecks of humanity lying out under the trees in the Park opposite. Some one has said: " England is the paradise of the rich, the boll of the poor, and the purgatory of the wise." It did seem so to me in 1905. In the South of England it was the eame thing, the contrasts. I remembered some real green lance of England that I used to go blackberrying in *hen a youngster with my cousin.. and I took my wife a couple of miles out of the town we were
,haying in to show them to her. Well, we climbed over a stile and were in the heart of rural England, when we came suddenly upon something which we gave one glance at and fled. Whether it was a corpse or just a plain drunk we never discovered, but the smell, ye gods! and the filth on the ground! Will we ever forget it I said to myself : "England is certainly overpopulated." It was the same along the beach. There was scarcely a spot near the town where one could sit down in safety.
But with the fair and foul so constantly mixed, still I want to go biome. After thirty years in Canada, I still feel an exile, and can echo the Highlander's lament (though I've never been there):— " From the lone shelling in the misty island Mountains divide us and the waste of seas, Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides."
—I am, Sir, &c., C. E. B.
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