A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
WHEN foreigners commit acts of—as it seems to us— folly or intransigence, we are often able, and sometimes willing. to find among the national charac- teristics of the country concerned an off-the-peg excuse for its behaviour. Most of these excuses are threadbare and slightly banal, like the odds and ends of fancy dress kept in a chest outside the nursery for charades; but we were brought up with them, and we find them a reassuring though rather perfunctory disguise for our ignorance of the world. You must remember (we remind each - other in a sort of Pooterish-Olympian manner) that the Americans are a very young nation, that the Chinese are a very old civilisation: that the French have their memories and the Swedes their long neutrality : that the Greeks are, mercurial, the Germans are easily led and the Irish are the Irish. Generally these cow-pocked bromides, like picadors' horses, are soon eviscerated by the bull of our own or somebody else's indigna- tion; all the same, we feel the better for having trotted them out into the arena.
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