Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 139, vol. III, August 28, 1886

No. 139.—Vol. III.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 1886.
To do at Rome as the Romans do is sage advice, not always nor often followed by those of us who wander afield. Voluntarily placing ourselves among people whose ways and habits are different from our own, and whose principles of action are as sacred to them as ours are to us, we ‘fling our five fingers’ in the face of rules and regulations which are to them the very sign and substance of social decorum. Principles which are stricter than our own we call prejudices; and pooh-pooh as valueless those virtues in which we are wanting, while condemning as unpardonably immoral everything whatever which is of laxer fibre and looser holding than the corresponding circumstance at home. Thus, we fall foul of the southern nations for their want of straightforwardness, their sweet deceptive flatteries, their small short-sighted dishonesties; yet we count it but a little matter that they should be sober, abstemious, kind-hearted, and charitable; that they should not beat their children nor kick their wives to death; nor spend on one gross meal of beef and beer half the earnings of the week. We forget, too, that if we are ‘done’ in the vineyards and the orange groves, others are as much ‘done’ in the hop gardens and the hay-fields; and that: ‘Here is a stranger—come, let us rob him,’ is the rule of life all the world over. We deride the costly political efforts made by young nations struggling to obtain a place in European councils; but we have not a word of praise for the patience with which the people bear their heavy burden of taxation, that their country may be great with the great, and strong with the strong. In short, we find more barren land than fertile, all the way from Dan to Beersheba; and, once across the silver streak, very few points, if any, attract our admiration, while fewer still compel our adhesion.
One of the most striking acts of unconformity lies in the charter of liberty given to our girls, compared with the close guard enforced among the bold wooers and jealous possessors of the fervid south. An amount of freedom, which is both innocent and recognised here, is held as dangerous and improper there; but few English girls will submit to more personal restraint in Palermo or Madrid than that to which they have been accustomed in Cornwall or Cumberland. And indeed, they often launch out into strange license, and do things in foreign cities which they would not dare to do in their own native towns. They think they are not known; and what does it signify what people say of them?—the honour of the English name not counting. If you reason with them, and tell them that such and such things are ill thought of by the natives, they look at you blankly and answer: ‘What does it matter to us? Their ways are not ours, thank goodness! and we prefer our own. Besides, they must be very horrid people to think evil when there is none.’ Mothers and chaperons are no more sensitive, no more conformable, than their charges, and quite as resolute to reject any new view and trample under foot any rule of life to which they have not been accustomed. Tell one of them that, in a purely foreign hotel, the girl must not be let to sleep in another corridor—on another floor—or away from her own immediate vicinity, and she asks: ‘Why? My daughter is not a baby; she can take care of herself. And what harm should happen to her?’ Tell her that the girl must not wander unaccompanied about the passages, the gardens, the public rooms of the hotel, nor sit apart in corners of the salon talking in whispers with the men, nor lounge on the benches with one favoured individual alone—and she scouts all these precautions as foolish if not insulting. Say that it is not considered correct for the young lady to come to table-d’hôte by herself at any time of the meal it may suit her to appear—perhaps dashing into dinner in her hat, breathless, heated, excited—and again the advice is rejected. Her daughter has been accustomed to be mistress of her own time as well as actions, and lawn-tennis is a game which cannot be interrupted nor determined by one person only. She did just the same last year at Scarborough, and no one made unpleasant observations; so, why should she be under more control now? Yes, she did all these things at home, where they are compatible with ‘well-and-wise-walking.’ But in a foreign hotel, tenanted by men who respect young women only in proportion to the care that is taken of them, they are not well nor wise; nay, more, they are looked on as criminal acts of neglect in those who have the guidance of things.