Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1885 — A Curious Characteristic. [ARTICLE]

A Curious Characteristic.

One of the most curious characteristics of contemporary England is the concealed dislike or contempt which the average Englishman has for the United State?. On the surface all ia friendliness, but beneath is a feeling almost akin to hate. During my frequent sojourns in England I have given special attention to this subject, and I have found that almost invariably on being introduced to an Englishman or Englishwoman you must either defend your country or overlook, little slurs cast on it. And the most exasperating part of it is that these disagreeable criticisms are evidently not intended to be such. In other words, yonr interlocutor is quite unconscious of the fact that he is impolite. Nor is this lack of international amenity confined to any class, although it is stronger the higher you go up the social ladder. The first time I saw John Bright, for example, half of my visit was spent in listening to a severe arraignment of America because of its adherence to protection. If, when you are presented to an Englishman, the conversation turns on the United States—and as a rule he introduces the topic—you are asked nine times in ten, ail or some of the following questions: “Is political corruption on*the increase or decrease in the states at the present moment?” “Doesh’t it paralyze public business tv-lien all the officeholders are turned >nt every four years?” You try to clear this up hy informing yonr questioner that this calamity occurs only \vheu a new party comes into poiver, which does Hot happen at every moon, as he seems to imagine. The third interrogation is generally this: “Aren’t your frequent elections a great nuisances?” By this time if you have not turned I yonr back on-the man, you lead yonr persecutor to a discussion of the Weather, the crops, or the immortality of thft eoal, and inwardly swear that

the next lime you are introduced to ai. Engl shman you will get.ahead of bin* by bombarding him with: “How much longer do jrou intend to support the heavy Burden of ah idle roya ‘family ?*r “Aren’t yon sick and tired of that useless House of Lords?” “Aren't you ashamed of the low moral character of the Prince of Wales?” “Don’t you consider the House of Commons very narrow-minded and bigoted in refusing Bradlaugb his seat?” If any of your readers ever chance to meet Ladv Verney, they had better salute her wiitn some such question, for otherwise she will force you to swallow the usual dose of anti-American comment which all Englishmen have ready ns.— Theodore Stanton's London Leutr. Cannibalism. , There is a certain weird attractiveness about the subject of cannibalism, a grim fascination in its grisly horrors, that is not easily to be explained, but which, although few of us will admit it, most of us have experienced. Perhaps it is in subjective cannibalism alone that this uncanny attraction exists: objective cannibalism may not possess the same eerie charm. But the very fact that cannibalism either exists now, or ever existed, is, however, denied by some skeptical persons—mostly strict and rigid vegetarians, one would think—who argue that wild and natnral races of men cannot and do not lust for flesh. The fact remains the same. It seems that this time-honored practice—crime, many unthinking and unjudicial people would call it, whose opinions have been formed without consideration of the relation of crime to custom—has, at different times, existed in almost every part of the earth. It seems to have lingered longest in the most beautiful regions of it—in Polynesia, namely, where the writer of this, but for a fortunate and timely warning, would himself have fallen a victim to the custom for which he has a feeling of respect, if not exactly of affection. Our remote, possible .forefathers themselves, the prehistoric cave-men of Europe, in the Quarternary period, were addicted to this habit, which a pious feeling of respect for our ancestor should alone prevent Ua from characterizing as a crime. Evidences of their occasional little anthropophagistic failings, iu the shape of scraped apd chipped human bones, which, besides being cooked, are broken in a manner too scientific and skillful to be the work of animals, i are not infrequent, though it is believed by poleontologists that the custom was more of an exception than a rule. Animal food being plentiful at the time in these cold northern latitudes, the greatest incentive to cannibalism was wanting, and the very practice of it shows a tendency to epicurean indulgence and luxury that already (from a very long way off') pointed to the future extinction of their race. The ancient Irish, too, in more recent than Quaternary time, ate their own dead; and our own Saxon forefathers must have possessed a knowledge of the custom if they did not in times actually practice it, as is shown by the Saxon word manoeta, which occurs not infrequently in their literature.— A. St Johnston, in Popular Science Monthly.