Perhaps the chief scandal about English feeding lies in the condition of the English hotels. On the Continent an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of travellers requiring food and rest. In England an hotel is an establishment for the accommodation of landlords and waiters. "High class cuisine," says the tariff card, also "wines and spirits of the best selected quality." Yet one's experience tells one that, though the bill will be heavy, neither the cuisine nor the wines will be more than passable, much less high class. A menu which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, bad cooking, careless service, and a general lack of finish, are the things one may expect at an English hotel with the tolerable certainty of not being disappointed. To complain is to draw forth the ill-disguised contempt of bibulous head-waiters and the stiff apologies of haughty proprietors. But beyond that mortal man will never get, because the English hotel is an immemorial and conservative institution, and as wise in its own conceit as the ancient sphinx. Of late and in London attempts have been made to organise hotels adapted to the best kind of requirement. So far as I am aware, only two of them have really succeeded, and the charges at both places are quite prohibitive. Closely identified, one might almost say affiliated, to the English hotel is the English railway-buffet, of which so much has been said in song and story. The sheer horribleness of the "refreshments" here provided has passed into a proverb. The English themselves admit that if you wish to know the worst about refreshments, you should drink the railway-buffet tea and partake of the railway-buffet sandwich. They also admit that for abominations in the way of aerated waters, milk, beer, and whisky, pastry, cakes, hard-boiled eggs, cold meats, boiled chicken and ham, and chops and steaks from the grill, the railway-buffet takes the palm; and they admit further that the Hebes who dispense these comestibles to the hungry and howling mob have the manners of duchesses. Yet the English without their railway-buffets would be an utterly woebegone and miserable people. Put an Englishman down at a strange railway-station with a half-hour wait before him. He has but one resort: he inquires right off for the buffet, and there he gorges and swizzles till the warning bell advises him of the departure of his train. If there is no buffet, he becomes a dejected, pallid man, and threatens to write to the newspapers. So long as the railway-buffets continue to exist, the English digestion can never aspire to perfection, even though English feeding and cooking outside railway-stations became ideal; for a single "meal" of railway-buffet viands would permanently disorganise the digestive capabilities of the most ostrichy ostrich that ever walked on two legs. CHAPTER XVII LAW AND ORDER