72 



The Review of Reviews. 



IN PRAISE OF ENGLISH MANNERS. 

 Bv AN Englishman. 



A VERY cheery paper on the social EngHsh is con- 

 tributed by Mr. G. S. Street to the Nineteenth Centwy 

 (Dec). He states his beHef " that our manners are 

 more agreeable and easy than they have ever been, are 

 indeed distinctly civilised, and a credit to us gene- 

 rally." The belief of old people that manners are 

 worse than they were is an illusion. " Old people 

 have good manners because they are old, not because 

 their manners were better than ours when they were 

 young." 



" KINDER ALL ROUND." 



Pleasant manners, the writer goes on, are mainly 

 based on friendliness and kindness, and " it is quite 

 certain that we English are a kinder people than we 

 were " Our treatment of factory workers may be hard 

 still, but It is no longer inhuman. Our care for the 

 sick and old, and our attitude to prisoners and 

 offenders against the law, prove the change. Our 

 tenderness and solicitude for children run into 

 an unwholesome worship of them. Every middle- 

 aged person must have noticed the disappearance ot 

 brutality m the treatment of the other animals. We 

 are kinder all round. W'c may be softer, 



CHAFF AND .SLANG. 



The art of conversation is said to be dead. If it 

 consisted of the competitive rudeness and snubbing 

 of old times, the monologues and breezes, the writer 

 rejoices at its decease. Our conversation is said to 

 be full of chaff and slang The writer welcomes 

 chaff It is, at its best, the salt ot conversation. 

 Slang is better than the oaths of our ancestors. 

 Swearing is said to be occasionally offensive at 

 present. But chaff and slang make for ease and 

 friendliness, which are the basis of good manners. 

 The writer prefers the downrightness of the modern 

 English girl to the frigid civility of bygone times. 



SOCIAL MIXING. 



The causes of the change he finds in the increasing 

 kindness and in the ever greater fluidity of our classes, 

 all of us being mi.xed up together socially every day 

 with greater and greater freedom. Snobbishness, the 

 first result of breaking down the barriers between 

 class and class, is diminishing. These and the 

 thousand other causes work on the whole for a com- 

 fortable sociality. In our attitude towards technical 

 inferiors we may be favourably compared with some 

 peoples abroad. An ap[)arent democracy, by making 

 for a common form in manners, tends vastly to 

 improve them. 



ATTITUUli OF MKN TO WO.MIiN. 



In relation to women Englishmen have got beyond 

 the Mussulman attitude. They have passed from the 

 attitude of chivalry, or idealised chivalry; they have 

 reached the third attitude, professed by modern 

 Western civilisation, of considering them beings free 

 to think and act for themselves, and worthy of 



attention on equal terms. It dc»s not exclude the 

 saner chivalry. In the attitude of men to women we 

 English have gone " beyond the other peoples of the 

 ^Vest in a sincere respect and friendliness which has 

 nothing to do with se.x." We have dispensed with 

 the compliments that used to be considered the fit 

 trilnite to the other sex. "To put it roughly, we 

 make love when we make love, but we do not make 

 half-love on inappropriate occasions, counting it ill 

 manners." So during the last twenty years there 

 has been a very great improvement in our English 

 manners. 



CHRISTIANITY VERSUS ISLAM. 

 Sir Harrv Johnston, writing in the Nineteenth 

 Centurj (Dec.) on Europe and the Mohammedan world, 

 which he computes to contain 220,000,000 of human 

 beings, does not hesitate to speak out very strongly 

 on the defects of Islam and the superiority of tlie 

 Christian religion. He says : — 



The only hope of ultimate reconciliation between Christianity 

 and Islam, and of the raising of the peoples now Muhammadan 

 to absolute equality, intellectual and social, with the leading 

 Christian peoples, lies in " the defecation of Islam to a pure 

 transparency," through which may penetrate the only real value 

 yet discovered in religious development : the actual teaching of 

 Christ and of some amongst Ifis immediate disciples. The" 

 greatest foe of Islam is undenominational secular education, and 

 at present this is impossible of attainment in any professedly 

 Muhamuiadan school, college, or university. All hu nan know- 

 ledge, especially the most marvellous developments of the 

 human mind in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ha? to 

 be subjected to the intolerable sieve of the narrow mentality of 

 Muhammad, an illiterate, uneducated, bandit-mystic of the 

 seventh century A.c. 



If I might submit the question to the arbitration of an inter- 

 national court composed of impartial agnostics (many of them 

 nominal Christians, nominal Muhammadans, or religionless 

 Japanese), I do not hesitate to say that the verdict would 

 be that there were very few sentences in the Koran which 

 deserve quotation or which shine with that striking, convinein'^ 

 beauty of truth and practical application which "characterises 

 — whether we wish to admit it or no— so much of the wording 

 of the gospels and epistles on which the Christian faith is 

 lounded, or the Psalms and the prophetical and poetical 

 utterances gathered together in the Hebrew Bible. 



The language of the Christian Magyars and that of the Muham- 

 madan Turks are nearly related in origin, and the Magyars and 

 Turks came from the same ethnic stock ; but in the course of 

 history one became Christian and the other Muhammadan. Can 

 any impartial critic maintain that the two peoples at the present 

 day are on the same level of civilisation, or place alongside 

 Ilungarian achievements in art, music, architecture, literature, 

 biological science, engineering and political government similar 

 achievements on the part of Turkey? 



Sir Harry closes by saying that at the rate at which 

 the world is advancing all civilised peoples in the 

 Old and New Worlds may be agreed fifty years 

 hence on a common basis of religion, the service of 

 man. In the meantime he would ask Mohammedans 

 to look closely into the facts and practice of their 

 faith, and ask wliether Islam — 



however superior it m.ay be to the moonshine of Buddhism, and 

 the nightmare nonsense of Brahmanism, the ancestor-worship 

 of China or the fetish idolatry of Africa— is a religion which 

 can maintain a people at the same high level of "civilisation 

 as that which exists throughout Christendom. 



