48 



The Review of Reviews. 



July 1, 1906. 



The Prime Minister would be its natural head. 

 With him would be the Foreign Secretary, and to 

 these two would be added from time to time such 

 advisers, official or otherwise, as the Prime Minister 

 might consider useful. They would meet from time 

 to time to consider what steps should be taken to 

 promote friendly relations or to dissipate interna- 

 tional prejudices. 



Below this Imperial Council for Peace, acting 

 under its general direction, but with considerable 

 independence and initiative of their own, there 

 should be two Permanent Commissions or Com- 

 mittees nominated, in the first instance, by the 

 Government, with power to add to their number from 

 time to time as circumstances might dictate. The 

 first, which would be charged with the disbursement 

 of most of the Budget, would be the Committee for 

 International Hospitality. The second, which would 

 be a smaller but not less important body, would be 

 the Intelligence Department of the Peace Campaign, 

 whose primary duty would be the propaganda of 

 fraternal internationalism and the dissipation of pre- 

 judices, falsehoods, and misconceptions which 

 imperil peace. By the aid of these two com- 

 mittees, in touch with the Prime Minister, and ren- 

 dering annual account to the House of Commons, 

 these two Committees would enable us to secure 

 the maximum of indef)endent initiative with the in- 

 dispensable minimum of Government control. 



III.—" GIVEN TO HOSPITALITY." 



Hospitality is one of those qualities the lack of 

 which is the distinctive note of the churl. " To be 

 given to hospitality " was insisted upon by St. Paul 

 as indispensable to a bishop. But St. Paul was a 

 modern man of yesterday, and the rites of hospitality 

 were held in high repute long before the earliest 

 recorded p>eriod of the life of the race. From this 

 fundamental social virtue most of the neighbourli- 

 ness of the world has sprung. To-day as in the 

 times when the neolithic man chipped his flint flakes, 

 it has been the surest key to the human heart. If 

 you want to make friends with a man you ask him to 

 eat with you ; and in primitive countries the tie .set 

 up by eating bread and salt with anyone is so close 

 that even the fiercest tribal or personal feuds are 

 unable to break it. This which is true of individuals 

 is equally true of the congeries of individuals which 

 we call nations. The institution of the practice of 

 international hospitality is the open door to the 

 establishment of international friendship. 



John Bull prides himself upon the hospitality of 

 the Englishman. Good old English hospitality is pro- 

 verbial. But while individual Englishmen are hos- 

 pitable enough, the collective British entity which 

 we call John Bull is a niggard churl, who absolutely 

 ignores the obligations of international hospitality. 



The King entertains Royal guests. The Lord 

 Mayor lunches and dines distinguished foreigners. 

 But with these two exceptions there is no national 



exercise of the rites of hospitality. The ignoring 

 of the obligations of national hospitality is a glaring 

 instance of what might be called arrested ethical 

 development. 



As a State we have not emerged from the semi- 

 barbarous atmosphere of the earlv days, in which 

 our ancestors felt ■ themselves authorised by the 

 sacred law of self-preservation to slay at sight any 

 stranger who crossed unbidden the mark constitut- 

 ing the boundary of their little world. 



We no longer kill him, it is true, nor do we even 

 heave half a brick at him. But collectively as a 

 nation we deal with him, not as a friend and a 

 guest, but always as a suspect. We do nothing to 

 bid him cordial welcome to our shores ; we take no 

 pains to make him at home when he is sojourning 

 in our midst — in short, so far as relates to the 

 whole range of the moral duties which we owe to 

 the stranger within our gates, John Bull acts like 

 a churl. It is no justification to say that in many 

 respects he is only doing as his neighbours do. All 

 of our guests have to cross our ocean moat, and 

 many of them arrive on our doorstep suffering 

 acutely from that malaria of our moat seas which is 

 known as mal de mer. 



How do we receive them ? On the national 

 doorstep we station uniformed representatives of 

 John BuU, whose sole duty it is to treat every ar- 

 riving guest as a suspected smuggler, to search his 

 boxes and to ransack his clothes in order to prove 

 that he is not endeavouring to cheat his host by 

 smuggling into Britain alcohol or tobacco. To 

 these officers of the Customs — what significance in 

 the phrase '" Customs " I — barbarous customs indeed . 

 — the late Government superadded others, who treat 

 every visitor as a prospective criminal, or a possible 

 pauper, or an actual leper. The Aliens Act surely 

 was the last word of national incivility and churlish 

 inhospitality — the culmination of Antichrist in this 

 department of practical religion. 



The first duty of the National Hospitalin- Com- 

 mittee — ^which it is to be hoped will be constituted 

 for the purpose of securing the most effective ap- 

 plication of the Hospitality Fund created by the 

 levying of Decimal point one per cent, upon the war 

 estimates — would be to provide that at all the na- 

 tional thresholds there should be at least one repre- 

 sentative of the Master of the House capable of 

 speaking the language of the incoming guest, whose 

 sole duty it would be to offer him such friendly 

 hospitable services as he might need on landing on f 

 foreign shores. These services should be available 

 for all without fee or reward. The rich man travels 

 with his courier. The p>ersonally-conducted tourist 

 has his guide. But for those who are neither pluto- 

 crats nor Cook's tourists there is no agency existing 

 which will act as helper and counsellor to the ar- 

 riving guest. It would not entail a heavy indent 

 upon the Hospitalit\- Fund to secure, bv arrange- 

 ment with the railway and steamship companies, the 



