Today, all the newspapers are overflowing with assurances that the English nation has offered a remarkably warm and ardent welcome to the Italian leader and that the bonds which had formerly existed between the two countries have now supposedly, due to this, been cemented exceedingly.

But, first of all, what is the indicator of this warmth? The fact that a lot of people gathered to stare at the procession? But who doesn't know that the English are interested in this kind of thing exclusively as a spectator sport, and if it had been a motor race or a cock fight, the crowd would have been even larger? And secondly, where is the link between this spectating and the ‘bonds’? Clearly, there is none.

It is in vain that the papers go on about the cementing of bonds.

Entirely in vain. Never before – a fact acknowledged by all truthful observers of English life – have the English evinced such hostility towards foreigners as now. Even during the last war,2 which exacerbated jingoism and the nationalistic passions, nothing like it had been noted. Then, it was all based on the abstract grounds of ‘patriotic feeling’. Now, it rests on economics. And for the English bourgeoisie, economic grounds lie much closer to home than any other.

And that's how it has turned out that we foreigners find life impossible in London. You try to hire lodgings but your accent betrays you as a foreigner and you get a refusal. A French family I knew hired an English maid. She spent two days with them and then turned obstinate. With tears in her eyes, she repeated: ‘I don't want to serve foreigners, I’d rather throw myself off a bridge’.

And the French were offering her an easy job, much easier than the English would have done.