is not even conscious of
the absence of them in other people. He assumes that they are there so
that he does not see that they are not there. The Englishman takes it
for granted that a Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he
goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for having dared to
complicate them by the French faults. The notion that the Frenchman has
the French faults and _not_ the English faults is a paradox too wild to
cross his mind.

He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Europeans for wearing
ludicrous top-hats and curling up their pig-tails inside them; because
obviously all men have pig-tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he is
like an old Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled shoes
of the West, considering them a needless addition to the sufficiently
tight and secure bandaging of the foot; for, of course, all women bind
up their feet, as all women bind up their hair. What these Celestial
thinkers would not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that
we do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or that our
ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, though they are silly
enough to have high-heeled shoes. Nor should we necessarily have come an
inch nearer to the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat
rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had evolved into a
sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the Englishman will not only curse
the French peasant as a miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar.
That is, he will first complain of the man having the surliness of an
independent man, and then accuse him of having the servility of a
dependent one. Just as the hypothetical Chinaman cannot believe that we
have top-hats but not pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that
peasants are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees that a
Paris paper is violent and sensational; and then supposes that some
millionaire owns twenty such papers and runs them as a newspaper trust.
Surely the Yellow Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow,
as the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to such a critic
that the French paper is violent because it is personal, and personal
because it belongs to a real and responsible person, and not to a ring
of nameless millionaires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous
pamphlet. In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illustrated;
the situation in which th