I saw the procession of the local officials when the Frenchmen were here. The sheriff of the county rode in a beautiful old-style yellow coach, wore a three-cornered hat and a uniform of 200 years ago, with powdered wig and sword. The lord mayor of London was dressed the same way, with his hair down his back in a queue. If the sheriff of Reno county and the mayor of Hutchinson had any style about them they would not let these English officials outshine them. I am told it costs the mayor about a half-million a year to hold the office, as his principal duty is to entertain the city’s guests at his own expense. The lord mayor is more ornamental than useful. The local government is more like our State organization, with one legislative body, consisting of 118 county councillors elected by the boroughs, and another of nineteen aldermen appointed by the council. As London has about five times as many people as Kansas and much harder problems of administration to be solved, the government is a big thing. And London is well governed, better, I think, than American cities. The only thing that would grate on us is the great amount of regulation. You can’t build a house or go into business without permission, and then everything must be just so. The English people are law-abiding, more patient with regulations and rules than ours, and public opinion stands for the strict enforcement not only of laws but of what seem like absurd red-tape rules. Hardly any stores are open or business commenced until 9 o’clock. Nearly everybody takes one to two hours for lunch. Stores close at 6 o’clock and dinner is in the evening. Saturday afternoons all business houses are shut up, and there are a great number of holidays. An American gets nervous over the easy-going way of doing business. He is always in trouble because he has forgotten it is Saturday afternoon or a “bank holiday,” or because he can’t transact important business between 12 and 2 o’clock. In fact, if he wants to, an American can find a lot of things in London to make him miserable and cause him to abuse the country. But if he is patient and learns a little of the English ways he finds that he may live a little slower but he will live just as happily, and probably longer if he does as the English do. The American way of rushing things is well known and generally discountenanced in England. They think we are fools for working so hard, and resent the rather offensive criticisms by the Yankees of their slowness. Perhaps they are right. They tell me that on his first visit an American always tries to reform English business methods. After that first attempt he tackles the easier job of sweeping back the ocean with a broom.
IN RURAL ENGLAND.
London, England, August 21, 1905.
We have just finished a trip of a couple of hundred miles through southern England in a motor car. In France and the United States it is an automobile, but in Great Britain it is a motor car. This is a better way to see the country than from a railroad train, and not so good as walking. If you have a motor car or have a friend who has one, that is the best way to travel. If you have none and no prospect, a motor car is a delusion and a mistake. I happened to have a friend with a motor car and am therefore on the side of the motorists.
We left London at 10 o’clock in the morning, and by night had ridden a hundred miles and taken in Hampton Court, Windsor, Reading, Maidenhead, Alton, and Winchester, besides a lot of little places and the country along the way. The English roads are just about perfection. The main roads are made of stone or gravel with clay on top, rolled until they are as smooth as asphalt, and kept free from holes and bumps. Every bridge and culvert is of stone. There is no need to slow up except for people and other vehicles. I doubt if America ever has such roads. Perhaps in a thousand years, when our country is about as old as England, we will have equally as good thoroughfares, but it will be fully a thousand years. These English roads were good stone roads before the days of railways. They were constructed as business and military necessities by the order of the English government. I don’t think Kansas farmers will ever build graveled roads on which motorists can make high speed and kill the chickens and dogs that don’t get out of the way when the horn blows. However, Kansas farmers could, profitably to themselves, improve their roads so that one horse could haul a wagon-load in place of two horses, and so that the wagon could be hauled in muddy times. Such roads would be good enough for Kansas automobiles, and by that time they will be cheap and every farmer will have one. The Romans who conquered and held possession of England from the time of Julius Cæsar to several centuries later, were great road-builders, and fragments of their old military roads still exist. Good roads are a sign of civilization. Fortunately, they are not the only sign, for if they were, parts of Kansas would be uncivilized. We can beat the Old World on a good many propositions, but when it comes to roads and highways the old country has us skinned a good many blocks.
This is August, but the woods and meadows of England are as green and fresh as with us in May. An English summer as I see it is warm and moist. It is not near so warm as in the Mississippi valley, and the rain comes nearly every day. Rain does not often fall in sheets and inches, but drizzle-drazzles down and soaks in so as to do the most good. The English people don’t mind the rain at all. It is this moist climate which covers the walls with ivy and the trees with moss, and keeps the verdure fresh and green until the fall. Harvest is just now being finished. There is no corn in England—although they call barley, wheat and small grain generally, “corn.” The principal crop is hay and oats and barley, a little wheat, and vegetables in great quantities. England has 50,000 square miles, so it is over half as large as Kansas, but it has 30,000,000 people, and therefore much of the farming is for market truck. As a matter of fact there is very little actual “rural life.” The villages are so close together that it is often hard to tell where one town ends and another begins, and a country road is as nearly well settled as a city suburb in America. Here and there are vast estates, the beautiful show places and curse of England. With millions of people wanting work and thousands of tenant farmers who can get no title to the soil they till, it looks to me like a howling outrage for a lord, a duke or a brewer to fence up several thousand acres as a shooting-place, and remove from production a large per cent. of the land which ought to be doing good and providing some Englishman a chance to make a living and a home. The English people do not seem to mind it at all, and I suppose there is no call for me to get excited, but I can’t help it. We have gone by some beautiful parks, with great stately trees, deer grazing in herds and pheasants and quail flying at the side of the road. These belong to somebody who is off for the summer and who got them from his father, who received them from the king, who originally stole them from the actual owners. For quiet beauty the lanes and meadows of England, lined with fine trees and fenced with hedge or stone wall, cannot be beaten. The Arkansas valley is just as beautiful in June, but in August the Kansas sun can be depended on to do business and spoil the freshness of the trees and grass. When the wayside is not inclosed between high hedgerows, the fence is stone, but over the stone grow ivy and moss, out of the cracks come grass and flowers, so the coldness and bleakness of the rock is concealed. Every English farm seems to have a flock of sheep. I always heard the national meat of old England was roast beef, but that is a mistake. It is mutton-chops, and every English family has them at least once a day if it has the price. Along the main roads are little inns every mile or so with the peculiar names and signs that are characteristic. During the day I counted four called “The Red Lion.” One was “The Headless Woman,” and over the sign-post was the picture of a woman with her head chopped off below the chin. These inns are hotels and public-houses, and generally look interesting and clean. I am told their prices are reasonable to Englishmen, but they charge Americans in an automobile about all the law would allow.