FLEET STREET, SATURDAY.

The English people passed with credit to-day when a searching examination of the national character was made by Mr. H. A. L. Fisher for the benefit of members of the City of London vacation course. He was lecturing on the foundations of England. These he summed up as being, first, a good climate and a central geographical position, and, secondly, a national character, active rather than contemplative, moderate in its passion, singularly free from envy and rancour and the settlement of revenge, respectful of social differences, adventurous, sensitive to the code of public duty, and with that underlying seriousness without which no great achievement was possible.

Praising the English climate as wholesome for plants, animals, and men, Mr. Fisher said that transplanted Englishmen and women never did so well as those who remained at home. Though we were apt to call ourselves an insular people, we were actually in a moral sense the least insular people in Europe. We learnt languages better than any other people except, perhaps, the Dutch, and our tourists were to be found in every clime, making themselves at home under every star. We had borrowed from every country, but our sensibility to external influences had never been pushed so far as to affect the central core of our Nordic tradition. The fundamentals of our character were not Latin but Teutonic. We prided ourselves on the wide acceptance of the common law of England, which now ruled North America and Australasia.

Mr. Fisher quoted the saying, “The secret of England’s success is that the Englishman always disputes his hotel bill,” and he said we were a quarrelsome and litigious people. We were also unwilling that the common law of England should be changed.

Hypocrisy Charge

“Foreigners,” he said, “regard us as a nation of hypocrites, and attribute such successes as we have attained to the successful camouflage with which we conceal our multitudinous perfidies. There are, of course, some very horrid people in this country, and our history reveals a record which cannot be considered free from serious blemish. The Rev. Mr. Stiggins and Mr. Pecksniff are thoroughly English types, but we have not got a monopoly of hypocrisy. Molière, it must be remembered, wrote “Tartuffe.”

He added that we did try to bring a moral sense into our public life. We prided ourselves on our spirit of liberty, but we obeyed our laws and regulations. He told how the librarian of the Bodleian Library had refused to allow Charles I to borrow a book from the library, since that was against the rules, which Cromwell in his turn had to obey. Those instances were characteristic of our attitude to our laws.

“England has never acquiesced in the restriction of liberty, except in moments of public danger,” he said. “Restriction on liberty in other countries fills us with horror and affects the popular attitude towards those nations. We instinctively react against Governments which rightly or wrongly, are understood to practise repressive measures in their own countries.”

Referring to the general belief that this love of liberty was built on firm foundations, Mr. Fisher said there were blots on our past record, and we had had our religious persecutions. He said it was not inconceivable that in the areas talented by Irish migration the spirit of religious tolerance might give way to intolerance. But political liberty was the greatest contribution England had made to Western civilisation.

Britannia and John Bull walk their bulldogs, 1934. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images

Period of Transition

He was most interesting in his comments on the democratisation of our governments, which has for centuries been carried on by the well-to-do families and which for the first time shows signs of passing into the control of another social class. “The generalisations we have been accustomed to make about parliamentary government in this country,” he said, may not be equally valid for the new period that is opening up. There is, nevertheless, so marked an improvement in the seriousness with which national affairs are dealt with in Parliament that it is not likely the change will lead to any violent revolution.”

Mr. Fisher had high praise for the Civil Service. “There is no institution,” he said, “of which we have more reason to be proud, yet, unlike Parliament, it is extremely new. Those great blocks of buildings between Westminster and Trafalgar Square did riot exist in the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the Crimean War the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for War, administered affairs from a little room in Downing Street with one secretary.

“The Civil Service is now exercising a restraining and informative influence through all the changes,” Mr. Fisher said. “The experiment of transferring power to new and inexperienced classes is divested of many of its dangers because the Civil Service can supply to new Ministers the best it has of counsel and experience.

“The men who stand first in the estimate of the Englishman are the political leaders. No other men have such influence, for the people as a whole are all more or less interested in public affairs. The more ambitious a young man is the more his thoughts turn to a political career. Among Englishmen a sense of public responsibility is more common than an eye for a fine picture or an ear for delicate sound.”

Mr. Fisher went on to enumerate among our characteristics a lack of rancour, envy, or desire for revenge and our good nature, sense of fair play, and a gift for blunt helpfulness. The English could view without resentment the prospect that America might become the greatest naval power, he added. As for our helpfulness, he quoted a story told him by a distinguished Welshman, who said it had given him his first conscious liking for England. The Welshman was walking along a London pavement when he saw a lost child crying bitterly. A cabman standing on the rank very gruffly asked the child what it was howling for and where it lived. “Op in ‘ere,” he said gruffly, “and I’ll take you ‘ome,” and off he went with the youngster, regardless of the fact that he probably lost a fare. “That cabman’s reproof, gruffness, promptitude, and helpfulness,” said the lecturer “were all characteristic of the Englishman.”