The settled Englishman declines always to be jostled out of his hereditary state of intense calm.  They tell of a man who dashed into the reading room of the Savage Club with the announcement that a lion was loose on the Strand—­a lion that had escaped from a traveling caravan and was rushing madly to and fro, scaring horses and frightening pedestrians.

“Great excitement!  Most terrific, old dears—­on my word!” he added, addressing the company.

Over the top of the Pink Un an elderly gentleman of a full habit of life regarded him sourly.

“Is that any reason,” he inquired, “why a person should rush into a gentleman’s club and kick up such a deuced hullabaloo?”

The first man—­he must have been a Colonial—­gazed at the other man in amazement.

“Well,” he asked, “what would you do if you met a savage lion loose on the Strand?”

“Sir, I should take a cab!”

And after meeting an Englishman or two of this type I am quite prepared to say the story might have been a true one.  If he met a lion on the Strand to-day he would take a cab; but if to-morrow, walking in the same place, he met two lions, he would write a letter to the Times complaining of the growing prevalence of lions in the public thoroughfares and placing the blame on the Suffragettes or Lloyd George or the Nonconformists or the increasing discontent of the working classes—­that is what he would do.

On the other hand, if he met a squirrel on a street in America it would be a most extraordinary thing.  Extraordinary would undoubtedly be the word he would use to describe it.  Lions on the Strand would be merely annoying, but chipmunks on Broadway would constitute a striking manifestation of the unsettled conditions existing in a wild and misgoverned land; for, you see, to every right-minded Englishman of the insular variety—­and that is the commonest variety there is in England—­whatever happens at home is but part of an orderly and an ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens beyond the British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and exceedingly disorganizing.  If so be it happens on English soil he can excuse it.  He always has an explanation or an extenuation handy.  But if it happens elsewhere—­well, there you are, you see!  What was it somebody once called England—­Perfidious Alibi-in’, wasn’t it?  Anyhow that was what he meant.  The party’s intentions were good but his spelling was faulty.

An Englishman’s newspapers help him to attain this frame of mind; for an English newspaper does not print sensational stories about Englishmen residing in England; it prints them about people resident in other lands.  There is a good reason for this and the reason is based on prudence.  In the first place the private life of a private individual is a most holy thing, with which the papers dare not meddle; besides, the paper that printed a faked-up tale about a private citizen in England would speedily be exposed and also extensively sued.  As for public men, they are protected by exceedingly stringent libel laws.  As nearly as I might judge, anything true you printed about an English politician would be libelous, and anything libelous you printed about him would be true.