Ir might have been thought that in these days of newspapers, education, wireless telephony and cheap flying, people in one country would have had, at least a working idea of people in other countries. Yet! the old ignorances: and preconceptions stick as tightly ever. Thus Australian papers, recently received, comment upon America mor ance of Australia. Tt seems that a well known Australian was asked in America whether the citizens of still had much trouble wi aborigines; and there was a general idea that, to travel from Amer to Australia, one must)
by tramp steamers. Most people in Br 1, too, have very vague ideas of life in the Antipodes. The bushranger and the desert still occupy a large place in their mental pictures of the land of the "cornstalks." The facts are that Sydney is now the second largest city in the Empire, with a population of over a million; that there are most as many motors per head in Australia as in the United States; that large numbers.of the Australians have never seen} en aboriginal; and that even remote country towns have electric light, gas and a' water supply.
The world's ideas about the United States certainly need correcting. All Americans are not millionaires, and the) Percentage of "crooks" is really' veral miles without meeting a gunman or a cowboy, and: cowboys are generally prosaic people, wholly concerned in valsing cattle and earning their wages. With most of them the. rounding up of desperadoes and rescuing of heroines is not even a ide-line. "The" Chinese ate often "regarded in an entirely wrong light abroad. They are not a nation of conspirators, for ever plotting heinous crimes against their fellows, Highfalutin speeches about the spirits of their ancestors are not the bulk of their conversation and they are not all called Ah Sing. The great majority are farmers who live the simple, the very simple life, ard whose main concern is with crops and weather. It is quite a mistake to think that the average educated Briton speaks in a high-pitched "Oxford" (another misconception there) drawl and that the British aristocracy! invariably wear monocles. The Frenchman does not spend his days shrugging his shoulders and dancing. He is in fact much the same as the rest of us, except that he is perhaps more thrifty. The Spaniard does not devote all his evenings to serenading his lady love, nor is the Italian wholly occupied with schemes for knifing the members of a rival secret society.
The origin of these delusions; is lost in the mists of antiquity, But the cinema helps bravely to keep them alive. For the bizarre and criminal things of life are meat and drink to the "pictures" and eccentricities in foreign peoples are featured as their] normal characteristics. The average geography book and geography teacher are also incorrigible, the latter worse than the former, Some of the "fac about China which are taught in schools would make even a hardened Shanghai man blush, and the same holds true more or less, in lessons on other lands. How can we expect children when they grow up and are invited to Yote, to use their dangerous rights in an intelligent manner where other nations a concerned? The worst of it is that there is no practical remedy, "A dead dog in Fleet Street ix worth a revolution in Eh said the late George Augustus Sala, when it comes to "news. value." The world will probably go on believing that Frenchmen subsist. mainly on frogs, that) Englishmen sell their wives in Smithfield, that all Americans, wear goatees and that the of industry of the Scilly Isles taking in each other's washing) and lending each other two. shillings, till the crack of doom. One can only be thankful that on, the whole the world is no worse, off than it is.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.