At least an Englishman never does. It never seems to occur to
him to do so. The English have no imagination.
I have a suspicion that if one of our railroads tried to operate
its train service on such a basis of confidence in the general
public there would be a most deceitful hiatus in the receipts from
passenger traffic to be reported to a distressed group of stockholders
at the end of the fiscal year. This, however, is merely a supposition
on my part. I may be wrong.
Chapter XVII
Britain in Twenty Minutes
To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English
have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs. The
average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own
concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things. If an
Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and
customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race
which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric,
he goes and learns them--and learns them well. Otherwise your
Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or
may not do.
An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire
to know about things; we do not understand his lack of curiosity
in that direction. Both of us forget what I think must be the
underlying reasons--that we are a race which, until comparatively
recently, lived wide distances apart in sparsely settled lands,
and were dependent on the passing stranger for news of the rest
of the world, where he belongs to a people who all these centuries
have been packed together in their little island like oats in a
bin.
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