ngs in one day," you
represent to him. "One set of people goes to church and keeps Sunday
strictly, and another set goes to public-houses and is drunk and
disorderly. You should try to get out of your head your idea that we
are all exactly alike."

"But you are--exactly alike. Everyone of you goes to church with a
solemn face, sings psalms, and comes back to his roast beef and
apple-pie. All the afternoon you are asleep; and at night the streets
and parks are not fit for respectable people."

"At night," you explain, "all the respectable people are at home
eating cold beef and cold pie. The others...."

"The others you drive to drink and fight and kill by your pharisaical
methods. You shut the doors of your theatres and your art galleries,
and you set wide the doors of your drinking hells. How you can call
yourself a religious people--it is Satanic...."

"But, my dear man," you say, taking a long breath, "the people who go
to public-houses don't want theatres and art galleries. They are on
too low a level."

"It is the business of the State to raise them--not to push them down.
Besides, there is drinking--much drinking--in England on the higher
levels too, as you well know...."

"Of course I know," you say impatiently. "All I am saying is that we
do not bring it about by shutting the British Museum on Sundays."

But next time the subject comes up for discussion your German will say
again, as he has said ever since he could speak, that the English
Sunday is anathema, and a standing witness to British _Heuchelei_,
because people sing psalms in the morning and get drunk and beat their
wives at night. You can easily imagine the Hypocrite's Progress
painted by a German Hogarth, and it would begin with a gentleman in a
black coat and tall hat on his way to church, and would end with the
same gentleman in the last stage of delirium tremens surrounded by his
slaughtered family. For in Germany one of the curious deep rooted
notions about us, who as people go are surely indifferent honest, is
that we are _ein falsches Volk_. With the want of logic that makes
human nature everywhere so entertaining, a German will nearly always
cash a cheque offered by an English stranger when he would refuse to
do so for a countryman. As far as one can get at it, what Germans
really mean by our _Heuchelei_ when they speak without malice is our
regard for the unwritten social law. This is so strong in us from old
habit and tradition that m