Americans -- England -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- England -- Fiction
'Concerning Cambridge--I spent a weekend there recently with Doug
Watson of Boston, who is taking Engineering. Cambridge is quite a
little community, as separate from the rest of England as the Channel
Islands. On the Saturday evening I was there Watson took a punt, and
with considerable dexterity piloted me along the Cam, with its green
velvet banks and overhanging trees. The river is an exquisite thing,
and there was a sensuous drowsiness in the beauty of the hour before
dark.
'The lawns from the backs of the colleges slope down to the river, and
as we passed along we noticed group after group of students drinking
coffee made in percolators in their possession. There was something
almost pastoral in the sight of those young Britishers in such complete
repose. Perhaps I should have enjoyed it all without question if it
had not been that, a week before, I had visited a poor little
Nonconformist preacher who labours on an empty stomach to a little
congregation in a chain-making district. Edge, the sights I saw there
were not good for any man to see and remain quiet. Women work at the
fires when pregnant, and fuddle themselves with beer at night; the men
are a shiftless lot, who spend their lives hand-in-hand with poverty
and think only of beer, "baccy," and loafing. You know I'm no
prohibitionist, but I hate to see beer the goal of men's ambitions. In
one school there was a class with forty "backward" children. That's
the kinder word, Edge, but the real one is "imbecile." Think of
it--forty human destinies that must be lived out to a finish! They
tell me that conditions are improving there. I hope so, in Heaven's
name.
'It was that visit I had in mind when punting along the Cam. A man is
a fool to pit his little mind against so vast and wonderful an edifice
as a great university like Cambridge, but one thought which occurred
more than once to me was whether or not a man can be considered
educated if he be ignorant of human misery existing beyond the college
gates. In the Scottish universities the Professor of Latin is called
Professor of Humanity. I wonder, Edge, if the time is not ripe for a
chair of Humanity in a wider sense in all universities.
'On Sunday we went to one of the churches, and, with eleven others,
managed to present a formidable congregation of thirteen. The
preacher's prayer, which he read, was a superb piece of work. He
started off with the King and the Royal Family, passed on to titled and
landed gentry, after them the higher orders of the clergy, leaders of
the navy, the army, and all those in more or less authority, then the
lower orders of the clergy, and after several categories I have
forgotten, he reached the commoners, and (in an appropriate tone of
voice) hoped we should live in peace, one with another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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