Chapter 7-

Tell Me the Weather and I'll Tell The Man

THOMAS HARDY Wrote, This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I;

I also would say, "So do I.' I was in England in April, and there- fore the B.B.C. gave to my first talk, which was about the English scene, the title, 'Now that April's there.' I did not, however, find the season quite as Browning had described it, although I stayed on till the beginning of May. That year spring was late, the leaves less forward, and the birds less busy. Nevertheless I liked it immensely.

This would seem unnatural to Englishmen and to my country- men, both of whom are in their different ways confirmed grumblers about the English weath. Indian parents who send their children to England are as worried about it as English parents who had sons in India used to be about our sna!'es and tigers. So, when in my first letter to my family from England, which was seven pages. long and described the journey and the arrival in detail, there was no mention even of the weather, one of my sons wrote, 'We were expecting something about the weather; J hope you will let us know whether it is too cold or not'

But I hardly gave any thought to it, taking it for granted. In fact, I did not feel the cold at all. On the third day after my arrival I was waiting for the bus at a stop opposite Hyde Park, at about nine in the morning. A cutting wind was blowing, and I had not taken my overcoat. An English lady who was there with her little daughter looked at me and cried out shivering, 'Oh, how bitterly cold it is!' Perhaps the topic being the weather, she did not mind addressing a stranger and foreigner. 'Is it?' I asked quietly. "You don't feel it?' she asked in her turn, and then she added, 'But you have brought so much sunshine with you.' That may have been the reason behind my insensitiveness, for it was not bravado. But my nonchalance did not outlast the day. By the afternoon I was nearly frozen and thought I should have to buy a bottle of cognac, of which I had seen some attractive brands in the windows. In my panic I actually bought a bottle of cod-liver oil, which of course I never took. In the end I recuperated on coffee, and by the time I went out again in the evening I had got back my aplomb and warmth, although at the time I did not know that I was going to dine on boar, peacock, and sillabub, and drink mead and flagons of mulled claret.

That was my only and shortlived quarrel with the English weather. Afterwards even continual rain, such as I had one day going about in Wiltshire, did not depress me. Another time I was caught in a spell of really squally weather. That was at Winchester. It spoilt my sightseeing, and also made me anxious about being able to catch the return train. But I thought I was compensated when I looked out, and again looked in, sitting near one of the great doors of the west front of the Cathedral and waiting for the storm to cease. All of it was so very English. There was driving rain, almost like sleet, and whistling wind; the trees were swaying violently; within a service was going on for the boys of the school after the main service, in which I had joined, was over. England was in a grave mood for me that morning, and what a place it was to watch that grave face from-the grand nave, soaring up even higher than it does on a sunny day, the stained glass shining dimly, the boys' choir, and the chanted words!

I do not deny, however, that the English weather can be very provoking, especially if one is intent on going about one's business. The distrust of the weather has been instilled into the English breast for all time. Whenever I spoke about my sightseeing, I was asked in anxious tones, 'Was the weather good?' I found this distrust embedded in a characteristic turn of speech. When in the Long Gallery of Hatfield House I was looking at the hat, gloves, and stockings of Queen Elizabeth I-those she had left behind in her hurry to become queen-I suddenly asked, "under the impression that she also had an umbrella with her, 'But where is the um- brella?' The elderly lady who was taking us round replied, 'She trusted to her luck. However, she puckered her brows and said more to herself than to me, 'But when was the umbrella...?' 'Of course, in the eighteenth century,' I hastened to reply. The fact that the word luck is used in connection with the weather as with gambling appears to me to be significant. Yet it was this capriciousness that I enjoyed most. Englishmen who complain about the unpredictability of their weather can have no conception how excruciating its predictability can be. Living in Delhi, for two months and more I cannot escape the certainty that the sky will be tawny, a heat haze will lie like a pall on the landscape, daylight will have a hard glare but no brightness, and the farth will look like dying of heat-stroke, as Kipling wrote.

My family came to Delhi at the beginning of a hot scason, and after going through their first summer in northern India, became half-hysterical. So when, one evening towards the end of June, storm-clouds suddenly appeared i the sky, my servant whom I had brought over from Calcutta burst into the room, crying in a. voice choked with emotion, 'Clouds, the clouds!' We left our dinner, and rushed out into the verandali. There were indeed clouds, piled up in black masses against the usual grey of the evening, with welcome flashes of lighting. It was as if we had gone through the siege of Lucknow,, and heard the pipes of the Campbells.

My, son, walking in the Mendip Hills in his first summer in England, remembered all this and wrote to us, "I shall never forget

it-the cows, the smell of hay, and farmyard; the grassy path with tall white flowers, red poppies, nettles, and honeysuckle- the English countryside we dream about. Have you read Rudyard Kipling's "At the End of the Passage"? All the time I was thinking about a conversation in it, which I still remember very well.

"Summer evenings in the country,-stained-glass window, -light going out, and you and she jamming your heads together over one hymn-book," said Mottram.

"Yes, and a fat old cockchafer hitting you in the eye when you walked home. Smell of hay, and a moon as big as a bandbox sitting on the top of a haycock; bats, roses, milk and midges," said Lowndes.

'Must have been terrible for those men to think about it all in une in India."

It was this uniformity of our weather that made its changeful- ness in England so pleasant to me, and if you are once reconciled to it you really enjoy its mischief-making, and even its downright misbehaviour. I do not know why W. H. Davies in his poem on 'Leisure' did not include the weather among those things for which a man must have time, and did not say that it would be a poor life if he had not.

I think I have at last got a better understanding of the English- man's grievance against his weather than even he has. To complain about it is a national pastime which has misled the world and led outsiders to give credit to the Englishman for attributes which he really owes to his weather. But before I speak about this I should like to observe that I think he really loves it, and that is why he is always quarrelling with it. Was it not La Rochefoucauld who said that if one were to judge love by the greater part of its effects it would seem to be more like hatred than friendship?

Now that there are so many means of protecting oneself effectively against bad weather, even children in England do not seem to be put out by it. On that rainy day in Wiltshire I saw a surprisingly large number of them out in the fields and walks. There were even babies in their prams, and toddlers swaggering along in their bright jerseys, caps and mackintoshes, unmindful of the fine drizzle. There were also a number of gipsy families resting by the wayside, the men and women sitting by the earavan, the children tumbling close by, and the horse grazing at a little distance, looking the most composed of the group:

Now to come to the main point. I think the weather has very largely entered into the formation of the Englishman's mind, and the training of his sensibilities. It has made him, responsive to changes in the environment, capable of meeting surprises of all kinds, both pleasant and unpleasant, and of taking contretemps with good humour; above all, it has made him observant of and susceptible to concrete details.

I was very much intrigued by his absorption in small things. A boss, a knocker, a hinge, a paw foot to a chair, not to speak of a whole piece of furniture or a wrought iron gate, seemed to have an irresistible fascination for hin. John Clare may have been a highly developed Englishman in his sensibility to small crea- tures, but unless he had been typically English he could never have written about the frog half-fearful jumping across the path, the little mouse leaving its hole in the evening and nimbling with timid dread beneath the swath. or the jetty snail creeping from mosty thorn with carnest heed and tremulous intent. I saw some of this interest in little things, and it seemed to lend an extraordinary zest to an Englishman's life.

In Wells cathedral I was buying some picture postcards, and my English companion picked up and tossed over one which showed a small figure in relief of The Virgin of the Annunciation, saying. "You might take that, Mr Chaudhuri. My own choice on the contrary was for the views of the whole building. At Cambridge, again, a very famous English writer asked me, when he heard that I had just been to the Fitzwilliam Museum, whether I had seen a little picture from a predella piece by Domenico Veneziano. As it happened, I had noticed The Annunciation, and even bought a picture postcard of it, but he was referring to another picture. So I went again and found it to be one which was quite familiar to me from a reproduction I had at home, but which I had quite un- accountably overlooked. It was the picture of The Miracle of St Zanobius.

The same characteristic is illustrated by the extraordinary sensi- tiveness that the English people show to the inherent attributes of wood, stone, metal or glass. They seem to be drawn by them as cats are by the texture of velvet and satin. We in the tropics would never have dreamt of leaving the beams exposed in a stately room like the Solar at Penshurst Place, or of putting a bronze bushel measure in it, even though it might have been cast from the guns of the Spanish Armada. An adzed beam would be resented by us as a symbol of racial discrimination if it could be seen in a room in which we had been put by an Englishman. We should not have noticed the slight waviness in the seats of the benches in the Marble Hall of Hatfield House, and we would not have affectionately held up and contemplated a piece in blue Bristol glass.

The interiors of the English houses, especially the great ones, also give evidence of the love of concrete details. They are in a way possible only in that climate and weather. They were made by and meant for a people who had to spend long evenings in- doors, sometimes day after day, when the mind would be benumbed by its own emptiness unless it could crawl from one object to another along a continuous chain of interest-furniture, china, glass, plate, pictures, ornaments, fireplaces, and other fix- tures. I was surprised to find how in the big private libraries of the houses, the books bound uniformly in leather and standing side by side were able to fix the attention individually, even before one had read the titles. These interiors were stocked on the same principle as squirrels' nests are in winter. Thus it happens that although most lavishly decorated they do not become oppressive or give an impression of overloading. 

Such rooms would be unendurable in the tropics, where the light and wind have unhampered access to the interiors, and give to the mind an ineradicable outdoor or even nomadic cast. In weather like ours even the sculpture of Chartres would merge in an indeterminate mass of ornament, and St Theodore and Sainte Modeste become mere decoration instead of being the radiant individuals that they are. That may have been the teason why our sculptors, when they wanted to compel us to notice their handi- work, provided strongly accented erotic focal points of interest.

There can be no doubt that the English weather has fostered a pronounced degree of sensitiveness to nuances and made both men and things more mellow. It lays a sort of patina on them. But the qualities it has generated last only so long as the range of variability in the weather does not exceed the range of tolerance of these peoples of the temperate lands. If they go into hot countries their refinements wear out, and they tend to exhibit the hard core of their personality, turning sou: and narrow. It was not for nothing that the Ten Commandinents were supposed to be non-existent cast of Suez.

After experiencing the English weather I had no difficulty in understanding why Englishmen became so offensive in India, losing their usual kindliness and equability in human relations. Their sense of proportion broke down, the habit of understate- ment disappeared, and they became extremists with an incredible stridency in their opinions, which became raw and crude. In many cases they degenerated into outright cads, and the more sensitive or specialized the English organism, the more warped it became. I have constructed a scale of the former offensiveness of the English in India by categories. In it I have placed the mem-sahib first for unpleasantness to us, with the Anglican clergyman as a close second. This was natural, because the mem-sahib was far more. delicate than the sahib, and the Anglican clergyman was certainly the most specialized Englishman who came to India. The ill- natured peevishness of the women and the uncharitable arrogance of the priests were inconceivable in anyone brought up in the English tradition.

But what could the poor creatures do? If the pride of power and race made them so, the climate and weather of a tropical country did not have a less powerful hand in the transformation. Many of those Englishmen who came to serve in India as officers, civil servants, or clergymen would have been successful and even lov- able Wodehouse or Saki heroes at home. But whatever they might have been capable of standing up to there, including dreadful aunts, they could not be expected to stand up to 110° F. without harm. Seven years in India made Kipling incandescent, seventeen would have calcined him. Even as it was, the Indian sojourn made him incapable of loving any Indian with a mind, and led him to reserve all his affection for what could be called the human fauna of the country.

If a moral is to be drawn from all this, it is a simple one. Never demand more from the spirit than the flesh has the power to give, and never, never in any circumstances seek to put asunder those whom God or Nature has joined together, for instance, the Englishman and his weather. 

Money and the Englishman INTERESTED as I was in everything English from childhood, I could not possibly have failed to read and hear about their economic conditions and problems. But I gave ng attention to them, because I knew I should not be able to understand them. In an age of economics I am not only ignorant of the subject but even contemptuous of it. But economics in its everyday and human form cannot be avoided by anyone, and it happens that in this aspect it has been the concern as much of the moralists as of the economists. Whatever little I shall have to say about the English man's relations with money will be said from the moral stand point. Now, in the West, or to be more precise in Great Britain and Western Europe, there is nothing more difficult to estimate than a man's exact degree of attachment to money. He will confess to even the most depraved of passions, but not to his love of the thing which makes life in the world possible, a love which within its limits is both reasonable and decent. Here at all events, the moralist has fully succeeded in making hypocrisy a homage paid by vice to virtue. Therefore, if anyone wishes to get an insight into a man's attitude towards money in the West, he has to resort to an indirect line of investigation, to look for symptoms and watch behaviour. But even in the symptoms and Jchaviour a man will be as wary over money as wild animals are about their young.

So I never asked an Englishman now much love of money he had in his heart, but looked out for symptoms. Naturally, I looked for those which were the easiest to come upon in Hindu society, that is to say, the religious symptoms of the love of money. If I visited the house of an English family I tried quietly to find outi f in any part of it there was a private shrine for a god or goddess of money, or for an economic form of their own God. Those Englishmen who would consider this to have been a fantastic thing to do should remember that such a shrine is precisely the thing I cannot escape noticing in every normal Hindu home, even though it may be Westernized up to a certain point. In all these homes there is a little sanctum, unfortunately most tawdrily fur- nished and decorated in these days, which is devoted to the goddess Lakshmi, who confers prosperity. Of course it goes without saying that I did not find any such shrine in any English home, though in a number of great houses I saw private chapels, which were, however, devoted to normal Christian worship.

In the shops, too, I missed the image of any god who was likely to be a counterpart of our elephant-headed god of success, Ganesa, who presides over all our enterprises, particularly financial ones. Our religiosity covers every aspect of money-making, including the dishonest and violent. There were no more devoted worship- pers of the goddess Kali than the Thugs. Christianity does not seem to have been directly involved in financial transactions, and so far as I have read the Anglican liturgy I do not find in it any reference to money-making though there are prayers for pro- tection against natural calamities.

It might be thought that I am drawing a more or less fictitious comparison, and making too much of a state of affairs which was prevalent in the past and, is now disappearing in Hindu society. That is not so. Among us the religious approach to economic affairs is as common today as it ever was, though perhaps it should be admitted that in one sense we have become ultra-modem. There is no other country in the world today in which the tribe of pundits called economists are held in greater honour. Perhaps they are the only pundits who are at all honoured by us now. So India has become an El Dorado for every kind of economist from every part of the world. We are engaged in creating a gigantic syncretistic economic cult, in which are to be combined American, English, German, French, Soviet, and Japanese economics, and we are ready, for fear of giving offence to any economic theory about which we have not heard as yet, to erect an altar to the Unknown Economist.

But this has not involved, and on account of its very catholicity could not involve, any repudiation of the most ancient of our economic cults. Ever since the Rigvedic age we have had econo- mic gods, and we shall continue to have them. Just as we do not even now leave medical treatment solely to the doctor or the surgeon, but requisition the priest and the astrologer, so also we call upon the gods to help us in our economic and technological ventures even in what is described in current economic jargon as the public sector. For instance, when the great dam at Bhakra was formally opened there were Vedic rites to ensure its success. In the personal sphere the economist has no place at all. There, in so far as our own efforts are inadequate, we rely upon the occult powers.

This should be enough to show that I was not setting up a forced contrast between our outlook and that of the English people when I failed to get any clue to their devotion to money from their religious observances. But since I did fail, I tried another approach, and watched their secular schaviour. Here, too, I came up against a barrier of reticence which baffled me. In our society money- making is an open conspiracy, if it a conspiracy at all. We do not, however, regard it as such. In our eyes it is an occupation which can be avowed with pride by every honest and, honourable man. Indeed, as long as we remain in the world we are expected to put money above everything else. The notios of sordidness simply does not exist among us. As a consequence, the process of money- making can be observed as easily in our country as love-making. about which I shall have to say something presently, can be in the West. But in English society there is a good deal of prudery over this. I could not help thinking that it was curious for a people who were described as shopkeepers, and are admitted to be acquisitive and capitalistic, not to discuss the problems and methods of acquisition openly, and to refrain from true shop-talk.

The only thing in their behaviour which seemed to throw an indirect light on the subject was the smoothness with which monetary transactions could be put through. England appeared to be a country of easy money, in the moralist's sense of the term. That is to say, everybody there was not only expected to pay his dues promptly and regularly, but also, generally speaking, did so. In our society, the willingness to pay decreases as the capacity to pay increases. What struck me even more forcibly was the readiness of public bodies to part with money, and trust indi- viduals.

I have already said that every nations gets the cats it deserves; so it is with banks, and that was an important discovery. I made it as soon as I presented my first cheque in England. The clerk looked at it, pulled out a drawer, and handed me the money across the counter. I was so astounded by this that I could not help asking, 'But do you not send cheques to the ledger for verifying the signature and balance?" The clerk only smiled in reply, but a lady who was standing by my side said, 'We don't do any such thing in this country.

Other public bodies seemed to have the same pattern of behaviour. As soon as I arrived in London my friend from the B.B.C. took out some money from his pocket, gave it to me, and said that it was for the expenses of my first few days. Two things in this transaction surprised me: first, that the Accounts Depart- ment of the B.B.C. had trusted him with cash, and, secondly, that I was paid the money without any formality. What followed was even more exceptional in my experience of dealing with public departments. I had agreed to write some talks for the B.B.C., and it paid me half the fee, a large sum of money by my standards, in advance. I was also permitted to leave England without any guarantee as to the fulfilment of the contract. I am ashamed to say that I did not reciprocate this treatment by even delivering the scripts within the stipulated time, but took nearly a year to finish them.

In the shops, too, I found a general attitude of unsuspiciousness. At Stratford-upon-Avon I was buying some silver, and finding that I had not enough ready money with me I gave a cheque to the owner of the shop, and requested her to send the articles to my London address when it had been cashed. She gave me the goods then and there. Elsewhere, too, I found no difficulty in paying by cheque, though I have been told that many shops do not accept cheques from unknown customers.

These incidents, small as they were, could not but influence my opinion of the English people. Personally, I was put in a very happy mood to find banks and shops so trustful, and as regards a formal moral judgement I shall say that even if no very high virtues could be attributed to the English people on the strength of these indications, they at least revealed the existence of commercial honesty on a more or less wide scale. The English people seemed to have extended the principle they had put forward in regard to personal and political liberty to their monetary transactions, to say that love of money in order to be enjoyed must be restricted.

But even this belongs to the negative side of the English char- acter, about which I have written, and does not reveal any positive approach to money. My search for this was virtually futile on the earning front, and I could only assume a priori that, like all other peoples, they also liked to have money, and as much of it as possible. "But as soon as I moved over to the spending front the whole aspect of the search changed. On this side there was as much assertiveness as there was secrecy on the other. Indeed, here they gave their position away.

What I had read about the English people had given me the idea that they had a two-party system in their spending, as they had in their politics. There was the party of the savers, and there was the party of the spenders. Since in English politics the party names originated as terms of abuse and were boastfully taken over by the abused party, I shall follow the precedent and call these two partics the Misers and the Spendthrifts. Like the political parties, or like ritualism and anti-ritualism and High Church and Low Church doctrines, they have alternated in English life from age to age. On the whole, I believe, it is the Spendthrifts who have been longer in power. Here, too, the political analogy holds. I have made a rough calculation that between December 1783, when William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister, and the Conservatives or Conservative equivalents have been in power for one hundred and thirteen years, while the Liberals or Liberal equivalents have held it for sixty-two years, giving a ratio of nearly 3 to 2. The periods in which spending has been fashionable and highly regarded in England must bear about the same proportion to the periods in which thrift has been equally respectable.

It is natural to infer from this that spending is the positive urge of the English people, and saving the corrective. Or to put it in slightly different words, spending is the ideal, and frugality the practical correlative of that ideal. With us, on the contrary, hoarding is a pleasure as well as a virtue (a formidable combination), and spending at best a stern duty, but normally a pain. An associated difference between us and the English people is that we cannot, like them, spend money in a planned and deliberate manner, but stand in need of some external pressure or stimulus.

For people of moderate means among us, who are of course the majority, this force is the compulsion of living. But for those who have wealth, it is temptation, passion, or panic.

But to come back to what I saw in England. When I was there the Spendthrifts seemed to be in power as decisively as the so- called Tories. If nothing else had indicated that to me, the shops did, in their numbers and splendour-continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way. If anybody had told me about them before I saw them myself I should have had difficulty in believing him. Not that I had not read about the shops in Lon 

don and Paris, but actually to go into them was like falling in love after having only read novels.

There was an incredible variety and abundance of goods, and at all prices. For instance, I was specially advised to buy a pair of shoes. In India if I want to buy them I have a choice of only two makes and about four styles acceptable to me. In London and four other towns of England I contemplated hundreds of them, till I lost my faculty for making a selection. So, if in the end I did buy a pair, it was through the help of an obliging shop-assistant in Bond Street. I think I should have gone mad if I had had to decide about clothes, or furniture, or glass, or china.

What really astonished me was the amount of wholly super- fluous merchandise on sale even in small towns. Among these I shall only mention two, the flowers and the silver. Flowers, which today are and tomorrow are not and which therefore do not con- stitute investment, could be bought in cartloads in every part of London. I was told that they were expensive, and expensive they were, but unless there had been people who were willing to pay for them they would not have been stocked. As regards silver, I am fully aware of the connection that exists between the second- hand silver in the shop-windows and taxation, but in similar circumstances the metal would have been melted down in my country, and not been allowed to retain its useless art forms: 1 made two token purchases of both just to show my loyalty to the cult of superfluous expenditure.

Now about food. What silly things had I not been told about its being both scarce and monotonous! After seeing things for myself I wrote to my family, and that too very soon after my arrival, not to have any fears on that score. If for nothing else I should have been grateful for the simple fact that I was having good cows' milk for the first time in about twenty years, in London of all places, after coming from a cow-worshipping country. But I was not wholly a baby in matters of food, so I had other things as well.

Indeed, I could lunch or dine on anything I liked. The very first thing that I had in London was a Camembert, which I had been wanting to taste for years. I related my gastronomical adventures in detail to my family, and here is an extract from one of my letters:

'One of the highlights of the day [on which I also met Bertrand Russell] was the lunch. The restaurant cooks sole in thirty-two different ways, and I had one kind which was cooked in white wine, with shrimps, oysters, mussels and mushrooms. For hors-d'œuvres we had smoked salmon, which was amazingly good, and as dessert I had such pineapple as I had not eaten since I left East Bengal nearly thirty years ago, and we washed it all down with a fine bottle of Chablis, which cost more than my Château-Yquem at home." (I hope the sordid reference will be forgiven, it was a pri- vate letter in which I wanted to show my gratitude to my hosts.)

People in my country tell me that this was exceptional. Of course it was. When one speaks of French gastronomy one does not have the everyday food of the French in mind. The question was whether anyone wanting it could have good living in Eng- land. I found that I could. All this must sound absurd to English good-livers, but I have to convince my people who have come to believe from what they have heard from those who have lived in England that the English eat only potato chips and cabbage.

"There were not only a large number of shops, there also seemed to be a hierarchy and even caste system among them, which in its own way threw some light on the English people's philosophy of spending. When I told a young lady at Cambridge that I had seen some good shops in a certain street in London she observed that there were some frightfully cheap ones at the upper end. Cam- bridge, she explained, was different from London in this respect. In London there were very expensive as well as very cheap shops, but Cambridge was not extreme in either direction, and yet was very good in the middle ranges, with, however, sufficient elbow room within that range.

I think it is this kind of attitude to shops which has led the Bond Street Association to adopt and display a rather attractive slogan in their windows: "It costs you no more to buy, but it means so much more to you.' I have, however, been told recently that middle-class people in England feel shy of going into Bond Street shops on account of their clothes, which they fear are not smart enough for the shop-assistants, who will therefore look down their noses at them. I had no idea that in order to shop in Bond Street one had to be tailored in Savile Row, and so I walked into the shops in the most nondescript of clothes. I suppose the fact of my being a dark-skinned foreigner condoned my inadequacy.

But if what I have heard is true, I would say that the owners of the Bond Street shops should do something about it. They should not allow the effect of their nice slogan as an invitation to spend in Bond Street to be whittled down by the manners of their assistants. should certainly hesitate in the future to enter a Bond Street shop.

I I can hardly say how it gladdened the heart of a spendthrift in both principle and, so far as my means have permitted, in practice, to find myself in a country in which spending was respectable. I liked the English people for their devotion to spending - "That's the way the money goes."

Of course, I also know that their Government and economists have black looks for them on account of this, and are doing their best to wean them from the habit. It is quite possible that the Government and the economists are right in their way, they know their business; but I am sure that they do not know the psychology of their people. They are also inconsistent. They cannot go on boasting about the so-called Welfare State in the way they do, and yet do things which deprive this Welfare State of all meaning. Does the Welfare State stand for meanness for the sake of main- taining the balance of payments, or does it constitute an oppor- tunity for realizing one of the most deep-seated ambitions of the

English people? I do not call it the desire for a high standard of living, which is a shabby economists' catchword. The English people have always  desired a much more generous thing-style in living. To live in style and be careless about money has in the past been the privilege of the English upper classes. So even those who could not afford to be careless have pretended to be so. At last, with the coming of the Welfare State the opportunity for living like their betters has come to the English people at large. If they are going to be prevented from doing so, they are bound to feel sore. I will say that in that event their victory over poverty will be too much like their victory in two World Wars. I hope the English people will resist the insidious degradation. In any case, they have taught me that the best use for money is to spend it on the good things of life.