My native town is young and strenuous and guileless. Its vanity is the vanity of the clever youngster who loves “showing off” in his exuberant way. So young and guileless is it that it is the easiest thing in the world to deceive it. How easy it is to deceive Manchester is illustrated by the case of Captain Schlagintweit, the German consul for some years in that city.
Schlagintweit was an enormous German whose mission in life it was to induce Manchester to believe that Germany was our bosom friend, that Germany’s first thought was to help Great Britain, and that the two peoples were so closely akin in their spiritual aims that a quarrel between [160] ]them, even a temporary misunderstanding, was utterly and for ever impossible. As I have said, he was enormous: a great man with a fair round belly: a man who talked a lot and ate a lot, and who, when he talked even with a solitary companion, spoke as though he were addressing a huge audience. He “bounded” beautifully and with so much aplomb and zest that it seemed right he should bound and do nothing else.
I met him everywhere—in the Press Club, at concerts, at the Schiller Anstalt, in restaurants; and nine times out of ten he was in the company either of a journalist, a member of the City Council, or a Member of Parliament. I never knew any man who worked so hard for his country as he did. He distilled sweet poison into our ears and we believed him every time.
I must confess I felt rather flattered by the way in which he constantly sought my company. I thought for a long time that he loved me for my own sweet sake, and it was not until the, for him, tragic dénouement came that I realised that it was because I was a journalist, and for that reason alone, he dined and wined me and talked discreetly of Germany’s heartache for Great Britain. As I very rarely wrote on international politics, I do not think his evil counsel had any appreciable effect on my work, but it is impossible to imagine that his overflowing bonhomie, his cleverness, his subtle scheming did not greatly influence the thought of Manchester. He was made much of by more than one member of The Manchester Guardian staff.
His daughter came to sing at a concert I organised, and it was after this concert that he so overwhelmed me with flattery that I looked at him in amazement. I said to myself: “You are a humbug.” But on looking at him again, I said: “No; you’re not a humbug: you’re a fool.” A third scrutiny, however, left me in doubt, and I said: “I’m damned if I know what you are.” Certainly I never [161] ]suspected he was first cousin to a spy, that he was paid handsomely by his Government for his propaganda work in Manchester, and that he secretly despised and hated us.
Shortly after war broke out, many things were discovered about Schlagintweit that had hitherto been unknown, and he was led, handcuffed, to Knutsford gaol, but not before he had broken through the five-mile radius to which, as a German, he was confined, and not before he had motored through a far-off district where tens of thousands of our soldiers were encamped.
I do not believe London would have been deceived by him, and I am sure that Ecclefechan wouldn’t. Yet Manchester was.
Manchester is young, ingenuous, trusting, guileless.
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Have you ever noticed (but you must have done!) that the self-made man—and half the prosperous men in Manchester are self-made—will frequently part with a ten-pound note much more readily than he will with a few pence? The economical habits of his youth still cling to and dominate him, and he counts the halfpence and is careless of the pounds.