Part 15

During our stay in London the French fleet has been visiting the British fleet at Portsmouth, and a large number of the officers and men have been brought to London and entertained. International politics is a subject of general interest in Europe. Emperor William of Germany has most of the rest of Europe so nervous that even the English and French, foes for centuries, are making up to each other. Just as in Germany I found a feeling that eventually Germany would have a war with America and England, I found the same impression here, and as France hates Germany more than it does England, the French, with the same thing in mind, would line up with the Anglo-American combine. The London papers have had numerous articles showing that the combined fleets, armies and financial powers of the three countries and Japan could lick the rest of the earth to a standstill. The most ordinary Englishman is posted on international matters as well as the ordinary American is on local State affairs. To illustrate the public feeling, at a theatre when the ballet-girls were carrying banners of the various nations the climax came with the English representatives and the French representatives clasping hands and the American dancers waving the stars and stripes over them. The audience cheered enthusiastically.

Speaking of theatres reminds me that London has the best in the world. The English people are great play-goers, and the city has such a large population that a play often runs here for a year. Prices are higher for the best seats and cheaper for the cheap seats than in America. A parquet seat is called a “stall,” and is usually $2.50. The “pit” is back of the parquet, and is about 50 cents. First balcony is called the dress circle, and is about $2. Second gallery is about 25 or 50 cents. I think the class distinctions account for the great difference in prices. An imposition in London theatres is that a charge of 12 cents is made for a program, filled with advertising, and no better than those given free in America. When the orchestra plays “God Save the King” the audience rises. Americans get up, too, and as the tune is the same as “America” the Yankees I know sing “Sweet Land of Liberty” while the English are saving the king.

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.

To-day we came from Southampton to Brighton, fifty miles along the southern coast. The beach is fine, and is the summer resort of England. Years ago royalty and nobility made Brighton their favorite sea-shore place, but the great plain people have gotten into the habit of going there in numbers, so the aristocracy has gone farther, to the continent and to Wales. Nearly every one of these old English towns has a cathedral and a Roman wall. The Romans were town-builders as well as road-makers, and they never even camped for the night without fortifying. The cathedrals were mostly built in the Middle Ages, when the church was a wealthy business organization with lands and revenues. They look old and quaint and are generally in good taste. When you read about a cathedral or castle being a thousand years old you may depend on it that if it is still in use it has been “restored.” Some of these very old cathedrals remind me of the boy’s jackknife. The blades wore out and he got new blades. The handle wore out and he got a new handle. But he still had the old jackknife. A cathedral built in the year 1000 may have new walls, new roof, new interior and new spire, but it is still the old cathedral, “restored.”

In a little old English inn on the bank of the river Thames we ate our lunch and watched the endless procession of boats that passes up and down the stream. The ocean reaches up the river as far as London, so that it is really an inlet, with a tide that rises and falls, and a deep channel for ships. Ten miles above London the Thames is about the size of the Little Arkansas, and all the way past Windsor, Henley and Oxford, historic for the boat-races, it is very little wider than Cow creek. By a system of dams and locks the Thames above London is really only a canal. There is a path alongside, and we saw several young men taking their sisters, or somebody’s sisters, for a boat-ride, the man walking the bank, pulling the boat with a rope, and the lady sitting in the boat. In some countries I have been in this summer the woman would have been pulling on the rope and the man would have been reared back in the seat, comfortably smoking a long cigar. As a river the Thames above London is not much, but as a pretty winding stream, carrying little steamboats and row-boats, filled with gaily dressed people, it is a success.

The place we stopped for lunch was at Runnymede, just about the greatest spot on earth for English and Americans. It was here in 1215 that King John met the rebellious barons and signed the Magna Charta. Up to that time the king of England had done as he pleased, regardless of law. King John levied taxes so heavily that the people could not stand it, and the big nobles suffered worst of all. So the barons combined, and when the king started out to lick them, his supporters nearly all went over to the rebels. In order to save his neck and his kingdom, John met the barons at Runnymede and signed the agreement which is at the basis of the English and American constitutions. He agreed not to levy any further unusual taxes except by consent of the Great Council of the nobles (origin of the English parliament), nor to deny or sell justice, and confirmed the right of an accused person to a trial by jury.

It did not make any difference if King John repudiated the Magna Charta as soon as he could. The principle was established, and while some English rulers after that tried to evade and escape its provisions, the English people held to it as their rock of refuge. England has no written constitution like ours. The English constitution is a growth of custom, laws, grants and statutes, and the Magna Charta is the basis on which it rests.

When John met the barons at Runnymede the people had no rights that king or baron was bound to respect. But John put a provision in the Magna Charta that the barons must treat their tenants as fairly as the barons wanted to be treated by the king. I suppose John was trying to get even with his powerful nobles by thus recognizing the common people, and deserves no credit for the article. But in a few centuries the development of this idea and the discovery that a musket in the hands of an ordinary man could shoot a hole through a knight, broadened the Magna Charta so that it protects every Englishman.

One of the things that strike Americans as odd is the rule of the road, “turn to the left.” This rule is rigidly observed everywhere in England. But when your motor car, running at 30 or 40 miles an hour, meets another coming at a like speed, and your driver turns to the left, the American on the rear seat shuts his eyes so as not to see the collision, while a cold chill travels down his backbone. Of course there is no accident, for the other fellow also turns to the left, but it is hard on the nerves. However, a Kansas man in Europe takes plenty of nerve with him and he is all right so long as his money lasts.

RAILROADS IN EUROPE.

LIVERPOOL, Aug. 24, 1905.

A railroad is a railroad anywhere in the world, only it is sometimes different. Every country has its own peculiarity in railroads as well as in everything else. The first European train we saw was at Queenstown, Ireland, and we laughed. It looked like a toy, small engine, small coaches and strange in appearance. I decided to wait until I had more observations on the subject before putting my ideas into a letter, and since then have gone from one country to another in Europe, traveling first, second and third class, on main lines and branch roads, on through trains and accommodation trains, and gaining all the knowledge possible for an American traveler who gets his information from experience. While each country has its peculiarities, there are certain ways in common.

In the first place the European idea of a passenger car is taken directly from the old stage-coach. It is composed of from three to six compartments, like that many stages fastened together. In each compartment there are two seats running across the car, facing each other, and holding eight or ten passengers. As a rule there is no communication between the compartments. You get in the little room, the door is shut and locked, and there you stay until you get to the next stop, when the door is opened if anyone wants to come in or go out. There is no toilet-room, and no way to go to the smoking compartment unless you are in one, and no way to get out if you are in. I think all third-class cars are of this pattern. On the main lines, on a few trains and in some cars, there is a corridor running along the side, making it possible to go from one compartment to another, and sometimes there is a toilet-room. This pattern of cars is often called “American,” and usually there are extra charges. The cars are short and light, with two wheels under each end like wagon-wheels, and not the double trucks of our cars. There is very seldom any ventilation at the top, and as the rule is that the passenger next to the window can regulate its opening, the other passengers can freeze or roast as the case may be. In Germany the cars have appliances for steam heat, but they do not seem to usually have them in England or elsewhere on the continent. Travelers carry rugs, blankets and footstones in cold weather.

And right here let me explain a difference in traveling that accounts for much of the seeming shortcomings of European cars. The people in Europe hardly ever take long journeys. Sleeping-cars are rarities and only carried on a few trains. A European who takes a twenty-mile railroad trip thinks he is a “traveler.” They do not have our magnificent distances and long journeys, and therefore do not expect the comforts and luxuries which we consider necessities. Almost the only people who make what are called “long trips” in Europe, that is, ten or twelve hours, are American and English tourists, and they are given a shadow of American comfort on certain first-class trains, for which they pay right well. For example, Mrs. Morgan and I wanted to take the night train from Paris to Marseilles, twelve hours’ ride. One train carried a sleeping-car. It left Paris at 9 o’clock at night and reached Marseilles at 9 o’clock the next morning. Only passengers with first-class tickets can ride on it. I bought my first-class tickets (nearly twice the second-class, which is the usual way), and then asked how much the sleeper would be. “Twenty dollars!” In America we would have paid $2.50. And this in a land where we were told everything was cheap! I have often been heard to rail at the high rates charged by Mr. Pullman, but I will be slow to do so again. I lifted up my voice to the French agent on the extortion of charging twenty dollars for one night, and he shrugged his shoulders and said we could go on the day train,—that Frenchmen never used the sleeping-cars, and that if the rich Americans wanted them they could pay the price. We did not buy that sleeping-car, but a few days later, when it became very important to hurry to Rome, we gave up eight dollars for a sleeper from Genoa to the city of the Cæsars. A berth in a European sleeping-car is a little compartment with two beds, one above the other, about the size of pantry shelves. Two people cannot comfortably stand in the compartment, and when one is dressing the other has to stay on his shelf or go out in the corridor which runs along the side. There is no ventilation, and the toilet-room, about as big as a barrel, is for both sexes. As some American said, there is one good thing about a European sleeping-car, and only one: you do not mind having to get off at an early hour.

The railroad language is different in England. When I bought a ticket in London I went to the “booking office,” and “booked for Liverpool.” There is no conductor, but a “guard,” who is conductor, brakeman and porter combined. Freight trains are “goods trains.” The engineer is a “driver.” Baggage is “luggage.” A grip is a “bag,” a trunk is a “box,” and anything is a “parcel.” Nobody calls the stations. When you reach your destination you get off, and if you are a stranger you are always in trouble wondering whether or not you have gone past. I have never learned the theory of their tickets. When I “book” I get a ticket about like ours. Often no one looks at it or takes it up until I leave the station at the end of the trip. We rode one day in Italy nearly all day before anybody looked at our tickets, although usually it is necessary to show them to get on the station platform. It would seem as if such carelessness would be taken advantage of, but it does not seem to be. One reason probably is that in every country it is a crime to ride on a railroad train without a ticket. In America if the conductor catches you riding without a ticket he collects the fare. In Europe he can send you to jail, and I don’t doubt but he would. In America it is not considered even bad morals to beat a railroad. In Europe it is a felony.

I had been told that railroad traveling is cheaper in Europe than in America, but it is not. To understand railroad rates you must remember that population is very dense and traffic heavy, much like suburban travel around New York or Chicago. England is not near as large as Kansas, but it has twenty times our population. Practically all of the travel is short-distance. The same conditions prevail on the continent. You can ride third-class, second-class, or first-class. In most countries third-class is a good deal like riding in American box-cars fitted up with seats. That costs about two cents a mile. Second-class means cars such as I have described with upholstered seats, and the price is close to three cents a mile. First-class means plush or leather and a guarantee that your traveling companions will be nobility or Americans or fools. The first-class rate is about four cents. In most European countries no baggage is carried free. You pay extra for fast trains, “corridor trains,” and for the use of toilet-rooms. In order to travel in clean company and in ordinary decent style, after you count in your “extras,” the railroad fare is just about the same in Europe as in America, and not as cheap as it is on similar trains in the populous sections of our country. In the stations there are separate waiting-rooms and separate lunch-counters for first, second and third-class passengers. The high-class European can eat his lunch with the happy thought that no rude third-class citizen is on the next stool.