POLITE ENGLISH.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17633, 9 December 1922, Page 9

POLITE ENGLISH.

"You are going to visit the most interesting people in Europe," a wise old American friend of mine remarked to me when I took/the Paris train for London (writes an American visitor to England). I had been in non-English-speaking countries for seven years. I had not seen London, or England, since a boy, and then I saw through the wide, unseeing eyes of youth—saw what I was looking for, an historic lands of castles and Kings, people and thing which all Americans knew about' through Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, Shakespeare, up and down through a long.list of writers. I knew by popular international vote that the English, are very impolite. That is mystery number one. Where are these impolite people? Do they live abroad? In the Channel boat a gust of wind took my hat overboard. At once an elderly gentleman put on his own hat so that he might give me his cap. Other people, too, proved courteous, such as policemen, railway porters, hotel maids. Everyone says "Thank you" at every turn. Mystery number two. Where are your silent people? Where is the frigid reserve for which you are famous? The old gentleman who lent me his cap talked a great deal to me and invited me to his office—he proved to be the head of a'great banking establishment. Scotland Yard detectives, as everybody knows, are secretive, silent people, as are detectives the world ever. Well, I chanced to ask a stranger a direction one day, and we fell to talkink, and he told me he was a Scotland Yard man and manv other things besides. Silent? Hardly 1 I approach the third mystery with hesitation. Where are those sweet peach and cream blondes history, fiction, and report inform us grow in the British Isles? Where are the AngloSaxon types? I have seen more Saxon blondes in Austria in-a day than here in a week. Fine, handsome girls you have in plenty, but they are oftener brunettes. Another mystery. Where do all the omnibuses come from? Plentiful as the stars in heaven, winding up and down, back and forth, cheap and quick, a royal chariot for the poorest, itbey awaken wonder. Has a thoughfnl Government provided them with stairs and tops as anti-obesity remedy? Is this whv the English are so thin? Really, England is a land of mvstery. Where are your drunken peopie to whom the American prohibitionists can point? I have yet to see one. Finally, where is your Red Revolution which the Bolsheviks advertise so confidently abroad? '