GENTLEMEN
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The reviewer in your issue of July 9th of von Stutter- heim's England : Heute and Morgen, gives expression to a not uncommon antipathy to the idea of, or to the word, " gentle- man." Whatever uneasiness the idea or the word may cause us, that both the one and the other have a certain respectable currency in the world at large may be illustrated by the following. Some two years ago the Revue de Paris published (of course in French) some extracts from the diary of a Russian girl—the original being probably in Russian—describing her experiences as a member of a middle-class family living in a small Russian town at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917. One night her father's house was visited by a delegation from the local Soviet, which after a thorough search, departed in the small hours with several sacks of papers. Before they left they handed the diarist a paper which they required her father, who was ill in bed, to sign. The paper contained a formal recognition by the signatory that throughout their visit the visitors had behaved as Pieteln:ans.—Yours, &c., M. S. Amos. Ulpha, Broughton-in-Furness.
Previous page
