Foreigners

“ Let them pay up the arrears first Molly, before they think of establishing any claim of the kind on your humble servant. But the fact is, my dear, the longer you live abroad, the more you like it; and going back to the strict rules and habits of England, after it, is for all the world like putting on a strait-waistcoat. If you only heard foreigners the way they talk of us, and we all the while thinking ourselves the very pink of the creation! ”

“ But the salt of the native character remains undiluted in the blood of the people, and marks them as genuinely as ever, though they have learned to avoid some of the exuberance of language and look which made foreigners smile, and their sensitive countrymen blush when they met them in the picture galleries of Europe. ”

“ People will tell you, "Foreigners do this"; "Foreigners do that"; "Foreigners smoke so much"; "Foreigners always take coffee for breakfast." "Indeed," I love to answer; "I've never observed it myself in Central Asia." 'Tis Parson Adams and the Christian religion. Nine English people out of ten, when they talk of Abroad, mean what they call the Continent; and when they talk of the Continent, they mean France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy; in short, the places most visited by Englishmen when they consent now and again to go Abroad for a holiday. ”

“ Foreigners, in like manner, means Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Italians. In the country called Abroad, the most important parts are the parts nearest England; of the people called Foreigners, the most important are those who dress like Englishmen. The dim black lands that lie below the horizon are hardly worth noticing.
Would it surprise you to learn that most people live in Asia? ”

“ Distinguished foreigners without number have rested here and wondered at the habits of Englishmen. The foreigner, it is to be feared, never, with every advantage, really understands us; sometimes, too, he is so perverse that we find a difficulty in understanding him. ”

“ Is conduct of that kind right? What will foreigners say? Does any one care calmly to sit by and hear himself traduced? Why should you lead foreigners to suppose that all is not well with us, and that we are not patriotic? ”

“ But who is to remedy this unfornate susceptibility on the part of foreigners? The foreign employé has his work to do—diplomatic, professional, or commercial; the native is in no particular hurry to court the esteem of outsiders, being quite contented with his own high estimate of himself. Must it always be an officer "on short leave," or a journalist in a hurry, who undertakes to record superficial impressions of a passing spectacle? ”

“ We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descendants of immigrants. ”

“ Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours. Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,—but it lay there under all their culture. ”

“ A Foreigner therefore can form a solid Judgment of none but those with whom he is conversant; and if he has the good luck to pitch his Tent well, he entertains an advantageous Opinion of the Nation in general. Let Foreigners, when they return home, after having kept such various sorts of Company, sit down to draw the Characters of the Nations they have seen, I do but think what a strange difference would appear in their Descriptions! ”

“ Foreigners, by which English and Americans mean people of Continental Europe, know vastly more of the art of catering to the traveller than do Anglo-Saxons. This is the first, last, and intermediate verse of the litany of good cheer. ”

“ The English aversion to foreigners is in opposition to reason, judgment, and politeness. Because we are islanders, the happiest circumstances in some respects belonging to us; are our manners more refined, or are our customs nearer perfection, than the customs and manners of other people? I fear the contrary. Our separation from the Continent gives us peculiarities which other nations have not. It gives us that shyness, `that obstinate, silent, rude reserve, which we practise towards ourselves and all the rest of the world. ”

“ We find it often. You are traveling with escort—with another of your nation, your brother, we suppose. There are servants. You are rich. For some great freak you leave all in the town down there and ride on alone. Foreigners often act like madmen. ”

“ The great tides of immigration which have since made it the most cosmopolitan of countries, had not set in. Foreigners among us were so few that they were regarded with a great deal of curiosity, some contempt, and not a little pity. ”

“ I shall close this brief summary of national peculiarities, by an allusion to one more. Foreigners accuse the English of being capricious in their ordinary intercourse. They are allowed to be fast friends, but uncertain acquaintances. The man, or woman, who receives you to-day with a frank smile, and a familiar shake of the hand, may meet you to-morrow coldly, and with a chilling or repulsive formality. ”

“ This was all on account of their friendship for foreigners. Every one, down to the lowest interpreter, who has had anything to do with the introduction of foreigners, has disappeared or been disgraced. ”

“ The common people, who went up into the interior to trade, fell in with their customs with a degree of plasticity and an air of gaiety and full assent, which no other foreigners have, at least to the same extent, shown. ”

“ TO the majority of Englishmen foreigners are dirty foreigners, though, of course, to Americans, one concedes the name cousin. But when you travel about in the world you soon find that in other countries we also are foreigners, perhaps even “dirty foreigners.” ”

“ Nor do foreigners, especially Englishmen of the better class, thrive physically or morally, in the present state of society. They come out full of life and energy, ready to work hard, fond of riding, travelling, and field sports. ”

“ I am told that several new books, written by foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant Government, are now in the presses of those our frontier towns, and will soon be laid before the public as foreign productions. ”

“ So many foreigners come to our shores and talk about the beauty-spots of their own countries, and so few Americans have in the past seen much of their own land, that we accept the opinions of homesick foreigners as to the superiority of the beauties of their father-and-mother-lands. ”

“ On the continent, perhaps, you can keep better terms with them; they are usually, like yourself, foreigners in the country, and this gives them a cosmopolitan, independent air which tempers their subjection to the housekeeper or the beadle. ”

“ It is vain to assure foreigners that these people are not known nor received at home, neither held in credit nor estimation; their conclusive reply is, ‘How is it, then, that they are admitted to the tables of your ambassadors, and presented at our courts? ”

“ With respect to our national character, it is obvious, that will be found more carefully studied, and more frequently attended to, in the travels of foreigners in Britain, than in native travels, though necessarily in the former there must be much mistake and misapprehension, and there is often much prejudice and misrepresentation. ”

“ If the lower sort have sometimes taken advantage of our inexperience, it is no more than we have suffered at home; for, who are more imposing, particularly to foreigners, than the publicans, waiters, and all that class of people, in England? ”

“ Foreigners coming here think in their own language, even though they may be able to speak in ours; gradually they come to think in English, but still they dream in their mother-tongue; at last they dream, think, and speak in the language of the land, and become homogeneous with the nation. ”

“ Foreigners of many nations accompany their speech with action; but why should their example have more influence upon us than ours upon them? Customs are not to be changed but for better. Let those who desire to reform us show the benefits of the change proposed. ”

“ Foreigners told exactly the same tale, adding details about the shameless lives led by officials, and the insolence of the soldiery and imported coolies, who, peasants for the most part at home, there got brevet rank as representatives of the conquering race. ”

“ Accounts of foreign countries, even when you have not seen them personally, nearly always awaken a lively interest, especially if you are able to give your hearers detailed descriptions of the life led by foreigners who occupy positions corresponding to their own. ”

“ Germans frequently attain to similar excellence; and some Englishmen have the gift also. In the same way it would not be difficult to produce many foreigners well acquainted with all the governmental details of the countries they have visited—the policy, foreign and domestic ”

“ There is no doubt that to-day the confidence of the natives towards foreigners has been very much shaken, and excepting a few men whom they well know, trust and respect, they regard most Europeans as adventurers or thieves. ”

“ When I call them fanciers of other nations, I feel it only fair to add that some of those other nations express the same truth in different language. I have often heard the complaint made that Englishmen cannot speak of foreigners without an air of patronage. ”

“ I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose. ”

“ Thus once more I found confirmed on all sides the simple, clear, important, and practical meaning of the words of Jesus. Once more, in place of an obscure sentence, I had found a clear, precise, important, and practical rule: To make no distinction between compatriots and foreigners, and to abstain from all the results of such distinction,—from hostility towards foreigners, from wars, from all participation in war, from all preparations for war; to establish with all men, of whatever nationality, the same relations granted to compatriots. ”

“ Days even in the middle of winter, and sometimes weeks, descend as it were from heaven to fill the soul with delight; and a lovely day in Rome is lovelier than under any other sky on earth. But just when foreigners go away in crowds, the weather is settling into the perfection of spring, and then it is that Rome is most charming. The rains are over, the sun is a daily blessing, all Nature is bursting into leaf and flower, and one may spend days on the Campagna without fear of colds and fever. Stay in Rome during May, if you wish to feel its beauty. ”

“ Having seen some parts of the Continent, having enjoyed the spectacle of those wonderful things of nature and of art which a tour abroad would display, and having acquired that facility in languages which comes so rapidly by their daily use, I should like to go home again, adding to the pleasures my own country supplies, stores of knowledge and resources from other lands. I neither want to think that Frenchmen and Germans are better bred than my own countrymen, nor that the rigid decorum of English manners is only a flimsy veil of hypocrisy thrown over the coarse vices of a coarse people. ”

“ The rational traveller who visits a foreign country, not simply for the sake of saying he has been there, but to become acquainted with the life and customs of its inhabitants, and who finds one of its chief charms in the open-hearted, unsophisticated nature of its common people, views with dismay and sorrow its invasion by large conducted parties, whose members rush through the country like a flock of sheep, all crowding close to the leader. ”

“ We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign—foreign from top to bottom—foreign from centre to circumference—foreign inside and outside and all around—nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness—nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. ”

“ Immigration.—If you should turn back from this land to Europe the foreign ministers of the Gospel, and the foreign attorneys, and the foreign merchants, and the foreign philanthropists, what a robbery of our pulpits, our court rooms, our storehouses, and our beneficent institutions, and what a putting back of every monetary, merciful, moral, and religious interest of the land! This commingling here of all nationalities under the blessing of God will produce in seventy-five or one hundred years the most magnificent style of man and woman the world ever saw. ”

“ But to many of us it is infinitely more amusing to live in exactly such a place, where we meet Italians and Spaniards, French, Germans, Swiss, Dutch, Russians, people from South America and islands in the far seas,—in fact, from every land and nation,—than to establish a little English or American corner somewhere, wrap ourselves in our national prejudices, and neither for love nor money abandon one or the other. ”

“ One of the most undesirable features of travel abroad is to be forced to depend upon the half-incorrect interpretations of guides for one's comfort and pleasure. How much better it is to be able to talk to the natives of the country themselves, and to understand them and their ways! A little preliminary preparation before the trip, or while one is on the way, serves as an excellent foundation upon which to build one's knowledge of the language and customs of a foreign country. ”

“ Once make up your mind abroad to live with the people of the country, French, German, and Italian,—and there is no class of these above the reach of well-bred English,—and you need neither shine in equipage nor excel in a cook. ”

“ The coolies who wilfully jostle Europeans in Queen's and Des Vœux Roads, and snatch watches and purses from ladies and children, the house-servants who are impertinent to their European mistresses in their masters' absence, and the shopkeepers who blink rudely at their foreign customers and remain seated, sleepily fanning their paunches, when according to their own canons of good manners they should be on their feet murmuring polite salutations—all these are persons to whom a glimpse of Western civilisation seems to have done nothing but harm. ”