Watching the young men and maidens crowding to a lecture in the Hearst
Amphitheatre at Berkeley, under that glorious Californian sky, I was
struck by the sensible, frank intimacy of them all, and envied them the
advantages that must be theirs over the English methods of segregation
at the same age, which, by creating shyness and destroying familiarity,
tends to retard if not destroy the natural understanding which ought to
subsist between them and if it did would often make life afterwards so
much simpler.
I asked one of the professors to what extent marriages were made in
Berkeley, but he had no statistics. All he could say was that Cupid
was very little trouble to the authorities and that Mr. Hoover and Mrs.
Hoover first met each other as students at Stanford. And then I asked an
ex-member of one of the Sororities and she said that at college one
was a good deal in love and a good deal out of it. The romance rarely
persisted into later life.
She pronounced romance with the accent on the first syllable, whereas
somewhere half-way across the Atlantic the accent passes to the second;
and why such illogical things should be is a mystery. The differences
can be very disconcerting, especially if one refuses to give way. I had
an experience to the point when talking with some one in Chicago and
wishing to answer carefully his question as to the conditions under
which the poor of our great cities live. These are, in my observation,
infinitely worse in England than in America. Indeed I hardly saw any
poor in America at all--not poverty as we understand it. But I could not
frame my reply because "squalor" (which we pronounce as though it rhymed
with "mollor") was the only fitting epithet and he had just used it
himself, pronouncing it in the American way--or at any rate in his
American way--with a long "a." So I turned the subject.
Neither nation has any monopoly of reasonableness in pronunciation. The
American way of saying "advertisement" is more sensible than ours of
saying "adver´tisment," since we say "advertise" too. But then, although
the Americans say "inquire," just as we do, they illogically put the
stress on the first syllable when they talk about an "in´quiry." The
Tower of Babel is thus carried up one storey higher. The original idea
was merely to confuse languages; it cannot ever have been wished that
two friendly peoples should speak the same language differently.
But I have wandered far from Berkeley and Stanford. I am not sure as to
my course of conduct if I had a daughter of seventeen, but I am quite
convinced that if I had a son of that age I should send him to an
American university for two or three years after his English school. He
should then become a citizen of the Anglo-Saxon world indeed.