Here is another tale, similar in moral. This occurred at Brest, in France. In the Y hut sat an English lady, one of the hostesses. To her came a young American marine with whom she already had some acquaintance. This led him to ask for her advice. He said to her that as his permission was of only seventy-two hours, he wanted to be as economical of his time as he could and see everything best worth while for him to see during his leave. Would she, therefore, tell him what things in Paris were the most interesting and in what order he had best take them? She replied with another suggestion; why not, she said, ask for permission for England? This would give him two weeks instead of seventy-two hours. At this he burst out violently that he would not set foot in England; that he never wanted to have anything to do with England or with the English: “Why, I am a marine!” he exclaimed, “and we marines would sooner knock down any English sailor than speak to him.”
The English lady, naturally, did not then tell him her nationality. She now realized that he had supposed her to be American, because she had frequently been in America and had talked to him as no stranger to the country could. She, of course, did not urge his going to England; she advised him what to see in France. He took his leave of seventy-two hours and when he returned was very grateful for the advice she had given him.
She saw him often after this, and he grew to rely very much upon her friendly counsel. Finally, when the time came for her to go away from Brest, she told him that she was English. And then she said something like this to him:
“Now, you told me you had never been in England and had never known an English person in your life, and yet you had all these ideas against us because somebody had taught you wrong. It is not at all your fault. You are only nineteen years old and you cannot read about us, because you have no chance; but at least you do know one English person now, and that English person begs you, when you do have a chance to read and inform yourself of the truth, to find out what England really has been, and what she has really done in this war.”
The end of the story is that the boy, who had become devoted to her, did as she suggested. To-day she receives letters from him which show that nothing is left of his anti-English complex. It is another instance of how clearly our native American mind, if only the facts are given it, thinks, judges, and concludes.
It is for those of my countrymen who will never have this chance, never meet some one who can “guide them to the facts”, that I tell these things. Let them “cut out the dope.” At this very moment that I write—November 24, 1919—the dope is being fed freely to all who are ready, whether through ignorance or through interested motives, to swallow it. The ancient grudge is being played up strong over the whole country in the interest of Irish independence.
Ian Hay in his two books so timely and so excellent, Getting Together and The Oppressed English, could not be as unreserved, naturally, as I can be about those traits in my own countrymen which have, in the past at any rate, retarded English cordiality towards Americans. Of these I shall speak as plainly as I know how. But also, being an American and therefore by birth more indiscreet than Ian Hay, I shall speak as plainly as I know how of those traits in the English which have helped to keep warm our ancient grudge. Thus I may render both countries forever uninhabitable to me, but shall at least take with me into exile a character for strict, if disastrous, impartiality.
I begin with an American who was traveling in an English train. It stopped somewhere, and out of the window he saw some buildings which interested him.
“Can you tell me what those are?” he asked an Englishman, a stranger, who sat in the other corner of the compartment.
“Better ask the guard,” said the Englishman.