33

Barmaids

This is an excerpt from

The American Scholar in Professional Life

by George Gluyas

Mercer, 1877 graduate of Haverford College. The paper was presented at the thirty-

third annual meeting of the Alumni Association on June 24, 1889.

‖

American newspapers are beginning to claim

attention abroad. A New York Daily unsurpassed for

its lavishness of expenditure for news

—

a paper

which many a man will purchase because of its

excellence in that respect although its editorials and

sensational articles are a daily disgust to him

—

has

lately begun the publication of a London and also a

Paris edition. A few weeks ago I happened to

purchase a copy of the Paris edition of the

New York

Herald.

It was a single sheet paper containing

twenty-four columns. One-third of it consisted of

advertisements. There was one editorial covering half a column. Two columns were

devoted to personal intelligence, and two more to a comic woodcut taken from a New

York illustrated paper. The piece-de-resistance covered nearly two and one-half

columns and occupied a prominent place on the editorial page. It was a scholarly (?)

article on '

London Barmaids

' and was illustrated by seven woodcut pictures of those

bewitching creatures showing their varying styles of beauty, from that of 'Jummy who

hangs out at the Bay Tree Tavern and fascinates the financiers of Lombard Street,' to

that of 'Home Rule Bridget

‘

who doles out liquid refreshment every evening

—

Sundays

excepted

—

to visitors at the Royal Aquarium, Irish M. P.'s having the preference.'

'A

barmaid,' said the article, 'is a decorative female cork extractor, capable of standing

on its feet for twelve hours a day, and smiling automatically upon the youth and

manhood of Great Britain.'

'News for the servant's hall,' Matthew Arnold would indignantly exclaim, but therein

he would wrong the servants, for they do not, although some of their American masters

may, take an interest in the barmaids of London, and the paper from which I have

quoted is not the

Police Gazette

. On the contrary, it is 'the only paper in London that

publishes an edition seven days a week,' and it is the first thing distinctively American

that is 'delivered on board every passenger steamship arriving at a foreign port from

America;'' it is the paper which Andrew Carnegie said the other day he had been

reading 'with admiration,' and it is the paper which this summer will be in the hands of

the American scholar and the American millionaire and their sons and daughters as

they view with delight the wonders of the Paris Exposition. There can be but one

opinion as to the reproach it casts upon the nation, and we must feel the infamy.

‖