ENGLISH—AND RESPECTABLE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19965, 6 December 1926, Page 14

ENGLISH—AND RESPECTABLE.

REGARD FOR LAW AND ORDER. FREEDOM OF TRAVEL. England is tbe paradise of the absentminded, tho casual, and —if one may use the term —the law-abiding lawless. England is the only country where they never want to sco those mysterious objects which they call your “papers.” I have never known just what one’s papers are supposed to consist of, but 1 believe one's birth certificate, one’s marriage lines, and one’s “cartes d'identite” (which contain endless recondite information) form part of them, writes “A Woman Traveller” in the Daily Mail. Tho carte d’identite,” it appears, contains your life-history and that of most of your relations. Personally, I have never possessed such a thing, and a zealous Swiss official once completely refused to let me go from Lausanne to Bale unless I could tell him what he regarded as being a vital piece of information —the age of my mother. 1 said I had no idea how old she was, and anyway I was sure she would hate me to tell him, at which trifling with sacred matters ho instantly sent for a higher official, who decided that tho absence of all proper papers proved that I really was English and respectable! I wonder what a French railway guard wuold do if, for instance, he was placed on the platform of (let us call it) Little Muddlethorpo, in Essex, and saw man after man walking through the barrier with a bland murmur of “Season” to the smiling official at the gate, or if he saw the number of people who “pay at tho other end,” having cast themselves frantically into the train at the last moment. In no country abroad can you hope to get round officialdom because, for instance, it knows your face and will consequently be lenient. On the contrary, the more it knows your face the more it will hate you; and only a large tip can stop its hating even temporarily. Foreign officialdom is paid by tho Government to harry the public—this is its simple view—and harry it will, possessing none of that easy kindliness which makes tho British official, from a “Bobby” to an omnibus conductor, a very present help in trouble. The fact is that England is still, in spite of certain recent restrictions,, tho country which combines the maximum, regard for law and order with the minimum of interfeernco with the liberty of the subject. In every tube lift do we not see “No Smoking Allowed,” aggressively displayed and contemplated by dozens of peaceful, law-abiding men with pipes and cigarettes in their mouths, who take this little joke in the spirit in which, presumably, it is meant? But place a Frenchman or a German in front of this notice, and with an exclamation of horror at his own remissness he will tear his pipe from his mouth and stuff it into his pocket—to the amusement and amazement of all the law-abiding English around him !