SWISS FEELING TOWARDS ENGLAND. [TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR. " ]
Sts,—In fairness to the Swiss, will you publish the altogether contrary experiences of another Englishman, by way of counterblast to your correspondent from Lausanne, in the Spectator of March 17th ? I was travelling in Switzerland during the week which culminated in Cronje's surrender, and had to visit most of the larger towns. My business was to beg a number of citizens to grant me interviews on a subject which happens to interest me; and even my Swiss friends in England, who took their news from English papers, were a trifle anxious lest this war feeling should throw difficulties in my way. To most of these gentlemen in Switzerland I had only the slenderest of claims for trespassing on their patience; and this was especially the case with the editor of one of the Lausanne papers which your correspondent mentions. Yet my experience was one of the greatest kindness and courtesy ; and I have come back with a still higher regard for the Swiss people. It was often impossible to avoid war topics; but my plea for my country was always listened to with perfect fair- ness. The Boer cause has enough superficial appearance of justice (and as for what lies under the surface, how many even of the English have ever waded through the whole wilderness of conflicting evidence ?) to make it only natural that it should find warm support among the majority of that nation which has a right second to none in Europe to express sympathy for the cause of freedom. At Zurich nobody said a word to pain the foreigner who squeezed in among the rest to read the telegrams at the newspaper office; and two young Swiss who sat next me at lunch, though not of a specially refined class, cut short their conversation on the war evidently for the sake of the Englishman who sat next to them. At Geneva, again, an Australian lady who had lived for years in the town, while a good deal distressed by the general pro-Boer feeling, made no complaint of in- civility. On the contrary, she mentioned incidentally that she found the Swiss much easier to get on with than the home-born English: I fear this is the explanation of much of that unpopularity which we so complacently put down to mere envy. I have never lived more than a month at a time at Lausanne, but know the town quite well enough to see the same causes at work there as those which made our nation unpopular in the German University town in which Ionce lived. Our schoolboys and our unfledged youth make them- selves an eyesore and a nuisance in the place ; and even our elders show constant disregard for the feelings of a people who, after all, are their hosts. Foreigners see too little of us to recognise our solid qualities, while our bad manners are often painfully conspicuous. I have long been convinced that, in spite of an " envy " which does no doubt exist in some quarters, two of the main causes of our unpopularity are : (1) our self- complacent indifference to others' feelings ; and (2) the serious doubt aroused in the foreigner's mind as to whether we really possess the solid qualities which would justify our monopolising so much wealth and territory as we do. I, for one, believe that we have those qualities, but much travel on the Continent has made me increasingly unwilling to blame the foreigner for not seeing that which we take immense pains to conceal from him. Our own countrypeople abroad make themselves too often the worst enemies of England. In any case, Sir, I beg to protest that your correspondent's letter does injustice to an essentially manly and generous nation.
—I am, Sir, &c., AN ENGLISH SCHOOLMASTER.
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