Our Private Lives

AMERICA AND BRITAIN OUR PRIVATE LIVES BY LELLA SECOR FLORENCE FOREWORD BY NORA WALN WITH 16 ISOTYPE CHARTS IN COLOUR AND 32 PHOTOGRAPHS GEORGE G. HARRAP COMPANY LTD. LONDON TORONTO BOMBAY SYDNEY FOREWORD The manuscript of Our Private Lives came to me in Yorkshire when I was a guest there. Sitting in my hostesss comfortable kitchen on a rocking-chair similar to the rockers I enjoy in my native Pennsylvania, I read aloud to her from these pages while she was expertly busy making apple-pies no different as to ingredients or arrange ment from the recipe my family all use at home across the Atlantic. Here, as at my home, apple-pie is eaten with cheese. These pies were baked for harvestersthe farmer, a young daughter, three younger nephews, and an American soldier from Wisconsin who gave his army leave to this family to help get their oats in. Im glad this book is written, commented my hostess as I read. We need to know each other intimately in our likenesses and our differences if we are to work together effectively for the betterment of the world. My thought echoes her words. In coming from our United States to visit in Europe I have found one constant reminder. It is that we of our country are a transplanted civilization. Our ancestors sought health in virgin soil for the growth of ideals which they took over with them from Europe. They went out of every part of Europe. We who are descended from those who went early have mixed in us an inheritance from all Europe due to the intermarriage of people guided in choice by love only. As well as ideals, those who went took customs and habits. Some of my ancestors went from Ribblesdale, in Yorkshire. Nearly three hundred years ago they left a farmhere to go out to the New World, as America was then called. They went under a religious conviction. They were Quakers. They belonged to the group of Yorkshire Quakers of Settle Monthly Meeting who felt stirred by God to give support to a holy experiment in practical living which the Quaker, William Penn, of Southern England, was moved to found. In the seventeenth-century language of an old letter I have read, the ideal they had in mind was to help to make a nation which would be a model to all nations, a place where peoples from all the war-troubled nations of Europe would live together in industrious and prosperous harmony. They took with them not only this idea but the habit of rocking-chairs and apple-pie with cheese. I would not urge on my United States just an alliance with England. We are kin to all Europe, and in a larger sense to all the other human inhabitants of this world. It is a world in which we are fast becoming close neighbours across distances which separated us before we had the keys to flying and radio. But if we are to clear away evil and cultivate the good we believe in then we need the strength of combined operations, the united abilities of all who realize the practical fact that peoples here on earth can live together in prosperous harmony. I feel that we shall not be good neighbours until we know each other in our private lives. In the summer of 1939 I came to England to help here through the ordeal I knew to be coming. In going to America with William Penn, my forbears from Yorkshire were humbly conscious that the little they could do would not be much and in coming back I was conscious of my inability to do very much. Yet I had come to give help in every waypossible. I had to do this out of gratitude for my inheritance. Mine was a rich inheritance. It was citizenship in the United States of America, a nation where peoples from all the war-troubled nations of Europe live together as one people. If we are to make the whole world one successful neighbourhood, as we must, then we need to know each other intimately. It is my hope that this series of books will widen its scope as conditions permit and that we shall have volumes of Our Private Lives from every other country as well as this one from England...