THROUGH OTHER EYES

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 38, 13 August 1932, Page 22

THROUGH OTHER EYES

"England Muddles Through," by Harold E. Scarborough, might be called "As an American Sees Us"—"us" being England. The author was for eleven years the London correspondent of the "New York Herald Tribune." His theme is the gradual realisation of the disappearance of pre-war England and of the emergence of new conditions. He finds the English, more liberal, more humanitarian, in face of adversity a steady and tolerant people. Social conditions are genuinely improvod, the population being more amply fed, more :wisely fed, and better exercised than before the war.

A change frequently ignored by Americans, says Mr. Scarborough^ is tho recent "mechanisation'? of England, the fact that the popularisation of motor-cars, the telephone even, motion pictures, mechanical ■ household appliances, has taken.plapo almost entirely in the last decade. In tho'industrial sphere- he-finds: us, less, advanced, ana hazards ,_ the. opinion :• that the real trouble is' the attempt' to ."perpetuate a nineteenth century system of economics in a twentieth century world. The remedy is a slow one. "The cruder kind of Socialism, with dukes and dustmen receiving the same standardised wages, has been abandoned, by everybody except Mr. .George Bernard Shaw and the Communists." : -

It strikes him, too, that the Englishman is always going home, the American always going' to business. Hence, perhaps, the absence' of night life, as understood abroad, in London. Tho lack of road sense he takes to bo responsible for the appalling toll of the roads. '' The only safe rule for a driver in London is an assumption that every pedestrian and 90 per cent, of other drivers are potential homicidal lunatics." Mr. Scarborough is greatly impressed by English tolerance. There was a lady, he says, who used to walk along Aldwyeh/ every day leading a magnificent but rather bored-looking leopard. "In New York everyone would have stopped to see what she was advertising; in Paris she would have caused a riot. But in London it was assumed —if anyone really thought about it a? all—that the ,lady. doubtless had her own good reasons, and, well, what of it? It was her own affair.