The San Francisco Examiner - Thursday, May 23, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
AN ANGLO-SAXON OUTCROP.
The Queensberry scrap on Piccadilly will help to redeem the damaged reputation of the British aristocracy. From the standpoint of absolute ethics it cannot be considered commendable for a young man to slug the author of his being in public, and for the parent to respond by polishing off his offspring, with the result of an involuntary visit to the police court for both, but the conduct of the British nobility is not to be judged by absolute standards. It is emphatically relative. And the recent career of the Douglas family has afforded ample cause for welcoming anything so manly as a slugging match, even between father and son.
It is probable that this incident could not have occured in any other than an Anglo-Saxon country. There have been fierce family feuds elsewhere, ending sometimes in the stiletto or the poison-vial, but it would not occur to a French or Italian society villain to settle the question whether he or his father was the better man by an exhibition of "la boxe" on a public street. We observe, too, that the Queensberry sporting blood is up. The Marquis offered in open court to fight his son at any place or time for £10,000. It is not stated whether he offered to deposit the money with the Judge or whether he wanted some responsible club to hang up a purse. No doubt the National Club of London, notwithstanding the contemptuous opinion entertained of its "jayness" by the critical Professor Corbett, could raise a fund for a Queensberry-Douglas fight to a finish at a day’s notice.
There is something peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, too, in the delicate wit that led the old gentleman to see "a good-natured joke" in sending his son's wife a picture of an extinct monster, labeled as a possible ancestor of Oscar Wilde. On the whole, it is evident that the sturdy old British blood of the Tom Jones era is not yet entirely decomposed. The honest, thick-headed, pugnacious race, whose hobnailed boots have tramped their way to empire, still preserves some of its old characteristics, in spite of the sapping of fashionable, fin de siecle depravity.