THE NEW ENGLISHMAN.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 June 1919, Page 12

THE NEW ENGLISHMAN.

HOW BRITONS BECAME MORE GENIAL. The following appears in The London Daily Mail, written by Hugh Eraser, of New Plymouth:— I like the man I meet casually in England now much better than the men I met over here six years ago. Now the average Englishman does not strike me as being so cold towards the stranger. Often when here before I used to think he was suspicious. If I tried to open conversation or offered him my newspaper in a train or in an hotel he was invariably polite, but his face seemed to say, "I don't know you; what right have you to speak to me?" I could never make any headway with him. i

I was puzzled, because out in the Dominions it was so different. Staying in hotels or travelling out there people make some of their best friends;, though they have never been introduced to them. What made -it more difficult to under stand was that I never found the Englishman travelling abroad to show such reserve. In hotels in India I have met Englishmen casually and we have become good friends—in after years'those chance friendships have been preserved by correspondence. Once in Sydney I had only been a few hours in an hotel when some English tonrists whom I had never seen in my life before invited me to make one of a party to vis.it the Blue Mountains. I went, and I was glad, because that was one of the jolliest lit • parties I have ever journeyed, with. And on board ship the Englishman readily makes a friendly companion. But how changed in his own country! When I came here six years ago T was frequently embarrassed and sometimes snubbed.

And now as I travel about England I find him changed. He is the Englishman you met abroad. He will cheerily respond to your efforts 1 to make conversation on a railway journey, and over the fire in the hotel smoking-room ho is the happiest of good fellows. I waS dining alone in a restaurant the other evening and the second seat at my table happened to be the only vacant one in the room. A voting man—obviously not long out of "khaki—asked if I would mind if he sat there. We talked. Yes, I had been to Francs, and we exchanged experiences. To that vacant chair I owe the friendship of a charming English family. France, fiallipoli, and Salonioa go a long way towards providing the. secret of a more genial Englishman. The fine English character has not suffered, and we who come from abroad like the Englishman better for it.