THE CHINA MAIL, FEBRUARY 7, 1988.
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS
American-magazine recently
AAT
a nation wide straw bal-
lot in whigh 54 per cent of the vot-
ers decided that American inter-
a
AMERICA
BY- JAMES HILTON
As one Am can la New York magazine editor said to me pun- gently: "Of course we have graft. Nothing but graft could have built
vention in the last war had been a some of its roots, reluctant. More wegian ice-skater and the Oriental up America in anything. Üke the same time---transcontinental rail- mistake. When some of my Ameri- harm than good is done by the sen yogi merchant.
Eschewing sentiment, however, ways, mass-production factories, can friends have tried to apologize timentalists of both countries who for or explain away such a percen- stress the bonds of race and lan- there is much to hearten the En- schools, public works, one car for tage, I have replied (usually to guage. To begin with, the bonds glishman who feels that Anglo- every five persons, radios and re- every house. their surprise) that a similar vote of race do not apply to a majority American friendship is the bright- Trigerators in nearly taken in England might well lead of Americans; and there is no rea- est hope of the world to-day. There Oh yes, Upton Sinclair is right to a similar result
son why the bonds of language is, to begin with, America's slight the whole thing is just as full of Such opinion in both countries should be, of themselves, any more ly wistful admiration for the En- graft as a machine is full of oil
We shall be differ- of managing things, and why not? is, indeed, more a reflection of feel- efficacious than they are between glish way ing about the next war than about England and Southern Ireland, or Even that part of the American ent when we can afford to be, and our present troubles are Northern press which no one could accuse maybe the last. Never, perhaps, have between Germany and America and England without Switzerland.
of beingAnglophile is always caused by wondering whether that knowing it been nearer to
I was struck by America's huge pointing out the greater sureness time has already begun to arrive.” In all this one has to remember common determination. That deter interest in our Coronation last May and celerity of British justice. mination is to have peace at almost
yet I feel that it should not be Wall Street admires the sound re- that the most vitriolic things are context, cord of British banks. Washington always likely to be said by Ameri- any price. The British refusal to exaggerated out of its
labour conciliators sigh for the cans about themselves. They are take a strong attitude in the mat-
spirit of tolerance, that enabled mercilessly self-critical; and if we ter of protecting shipping off the
England to offer the spectacle of English laugh at Babbittry, let us coast of Spain seems to parallel the
the world's completest general, admit that they themselves laughed Washington decision that in any
strike without the loss of a single first. And, anyhow, let's be honest future war America will trade with
about Babbittry. life. cash-and- belligerents only on a
mid- The other day I was in In all these things America carry basis.
This is not cowardice. It is not
likely to forget, or to ignore, the Western town that might have been comparative recency of the stan Zenith. At the drug-store counter even the Wilsonian gesture of be-
En with me were typical American ing too proud to fight. It is just Americans love pageantry, and are dards she admires so much, the sane man's decision to keep worshipers of most things that glish public life in the eighteenth small-town businessmen and work- out of trouble as long as he can, they haven't got i.e., ancient ri century was as corrupt as the do- men, all eating the same standard-
of
modern American ised fifty-cent lunch and talking any cathedrals, main In fact, as one American expressed tual, fifteenth-century
traditions, "When a drunken thousand-year-old
Sea Bubble about real estate, stock-markets, himself to me:
ward-boss; the South
the Wall Street "boom" prospects, and so on. man in a crowded bar challenges Royal Family. People in Los An- was madder than
Through the window I could see everybody else to fight, the answer geles stayed up half the night to crash of 1929; and the works of is usually silence not because listen in to the Coronation broad- Dickens provide an antidote to any a row of parked cars, a gaso- station and, beyond it, the everybody else is afraid, but be- cast from England; but this did complacency Englishmen may feel line cause everybody else is sober." not prove that they were pro-Bri- about yesterday's behaviour. It, al- town's solitary, heavily-mortgaged
During the last few months I tish. It merely showed the most seems as if nations have to and perfectly unnecessary have had the chance to talk to American's typical eagerness to accelerate through the same gear- scraper. But, I reflected, these men many Americans in many different get a personal “kick" out of any changes, and that America, com- sta es, from New York to Califor- thing that
him from nia; and there is, is seems to me, abroad - a sort of childlike re a growth of kinship with England cecptivity which enriches alike the that is all the better for being, in British novelist-lecturer, the Nor
.
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comes "to
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pressing our own thousand years into her own hundred and fifty, has not yet emerged into a smooth- running "high."
FAREWELL BAND CONCERT
by the Band of the 2nd Btn.
THE ROYAL WELCH FUSILIERS
(By Kind Permission of Lt. Col. D. M. Barchard and Officers)
AUGMENTING
THE ROYAL WELCH FUSILIERS' CHOIR
OF 40 TRAINED VOICES
RENDERING WELCH AIRS, ETC.
IN THE
PENINSULA HOTEL
LOUNGE
WEDNESDAY 9TH FEB.,
AT 9 P.M.
NO ADMISSION CHARGE
1938
THE HONGKONG & SHANGHAI HOTELS, LTD.
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00000000000
00000000000000
a
+
sky-
than
business men and artisans alike—– would return later in the day to more creature-comfortable homes many an Italian palazzo or English manor house; their children, well- fed and healthy, would squander the their youth in college, not on parade-ground; and the skies above them would remain as safe as a
If. million years ago Heavens! you despise Zenith, would you rather have Guernica?
Two points are bound to crop up in any discussion of Anglo-Ameri- can relations, First, the debt ques- tion. I have met few Americans who expect the debts ever to be paid, and fewer still who can un- derstand why we can't pay them. To argue that transfers of money between two nations are technically impossible or harmful merely makes the intelligent American (and per- haps some intelligent Englishmen, too) ask why, in that case, cash al- ways comes pouring across the At- lantic from London whenever there is a lift on Wall Street. To argue that, in equity, we should not pay unless and until we have been patd by, others, bores where it does not exasperate.
As a matter of fact, the average American isn't, unless he is remind- ed of it, especially interested in the debt question. Like a businessman who has already cut his losses, he doesn't enjoy counting them over and over again; and a partial re- sumption of payments would be such a drop in the ocean of his own budget deficit that he can't feel especially concerned, still less- grateful at the prospect. Further- more, he suspects rightly wrongly the familiar financial manoeuvre of paying back one dol- lar in order to re-borrow five.
or
The second point-and perhaps, by implication, the more significant one is the detached yet predomin- antly sympathetic way in which America is watching the British re- armament programme. Most Ameri- Ican's regard British rearmament as
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