a strange people . at this time of the year Americans from Kansas , Seattle , Scranton , Fresno , and another ten thousand pin-points ( you try telling a native of Kansas that his home-town is a pin-point ! ) all over the United States , arrive in our islands . the British travel association , which does excellent work in taking care of all foreigners who want to have a good time here and study what is pompously called the British way of life , have a hard time on their hands . from American sources I have just heard of two examples of the British host at work . one : a citizen of the U.S was last week walking down Oxford-street when he was seized by a total stranger who said somewhat incoherently : you &apos;re an American , eh ? he pleaded guilty . I hate you . I &apos;m an Englishman - see ? and I hate you Yanks - see ? our transatlantic friend mildly replied : that &apos;s just too bad . pause while the visitor correctly adjudicates that his accoster is well loaded - or drunk . the assailant then resumes : but if there &apos;s anything I can do for you , anywhere you want to go , or you feel that somebody is trying to put it across you , just you let me know and I &apos;ll be right here . nobody &apos;s going to shove ole Uncle Sam around ! he then took out a piece of paper , wrote his address on it and added : anybody mucking the Yanks about had better call on me first . I will n&apos;t stand for it . exit a puzzled American . the other incident occurred in the boat-train from Cherbourg to Paris . two Americans on a visit to Europe - it was at least their twentieth trip - fell into conversation with a shy , diffident Englishman who they had seen on the Queen Mary . they renewed mild pleasantries and , after some international chit-chat , they told him that they were going to end their explorations of the old world by touring England . they had in mind a kind of reviving postscript to the eccentricities of the continent to be concluded in the sage , philosophical calm of the Anglo-Saxon world . the Englishman in the train said : mind if I give you just one tiny point of advice ? all our chaps will be absolutely delighted to see you but if you are in a pub for God &apos;s sake do n&apos;t raise your voice ! the travellers from the new world who had been in Britain many times before , were slightly stunned . afterwards they said : we thought we knew it all , but you Britishers never run out of unturned stones . to the British travel association , doing their excellent darndest , I offer these sad complexities . the ant society . in the 1830&apos;s the Luddites took sledge-hammers to their looms and many a good trade unionist since then has , in the hope of improving the lot of his fellow workers , taken the theoretical Luddite hammer again . hence the hostility to automation and the stop-watch manufacturing methods that have led to restrictive practices . now a new threat to those who toil and spin has been developed by a firm specialising in electronics in Los Angeles . they have developed a new system whereby completely untrained workers can be taught their trade by means of tape recordings and television . what happens is that the unskilled worker is processed , by high-speed listening to recorded instructions on how to do the job coupled with explanatory TV pictures , into becoming a highly skilled , obedient craftsman in no time at all . not only can the raw human mind be technically equipped very quickly to do one set of skilled manufacturing processes in one trade but , by being given another of the new audio-TV training techniques , he can be switched to a different industry if he just gives in and listens and looks . from being an assembler in an aircraft factory to becoming a paint sprayer in a ceramic factory , he can be qualified for a completely new job in less time than it takes to say Tolpuddle martyrs ! a straight theodolite . cricket , says the Oxford dictionary , is an open air game played with ball , bats and wickets between two sides consisting of eleven players each . not so , dear Oxford dictionary . you are out of date . cricket in 1961 is played with a theodolite , six surveyors , a ball , bats and wickets between two sides . shades of the village stalwarts of Hambledon who are now the patron saints of the game ! what would they have thought of these civil engineers creeping about the pitch with their optical instruments ? the village green is the real home of cricket . a couple of bumps on a pitch have no terrors for a good batsman with a stout heart , a firm grip on the willow and a hefty contempt for batting averages and all the statistical blight that makes a mighty six these days as rare as frostbite in summer . they &apos;ll be clapping the man who plays a straight theodolite next . the Eichmann mind . Eichmann continues to reveal the extraordinary watertight divisions of the German mind . not content with arguing that he was only an efficient cog in the machine , he now claims that his part of the endless massacre that led to the death of six million Jews was decent , feasible and workable . he feels satisfaction from the fact that my personality had been tested and weighed and not found wanting . he feels like Pontius Pilate who washed his hands before the multitude saying : I am innocent of the blood of this just person . like Dr Globke , whom I interviewed the other day , Eichmann said : I drew a certain solace from the fact that I did what I could despite my low rank . Eichmann is on dangerous ground when he pleads that he was only a small unit on the base of the triangle that led to Hitler , Himmler , Hess and Goering at the apex . in examination he betrayed an expert and intimate knowledge of every link in the chain of command that led to the top . he understood the whole apparatus with an exact and meticulous comprehension that could only have come from a man who used the system - and used it with power and authority . the appalling thing about the Germans is that they can kid themselves and feel a sense of righteousness when their hands are red with blood . they really believed that the treaty of Versailles was an iniquitous injustice . when they burst into Czechoslovakia , Poland , Holland , Belgium and France they really believed Hitler when he screamed at them that they were being encircled . they really believed in the moral superiority of the new order which Himmler on October 4 , 1943 , expressed thus : whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur ; otherwise it is of no interest to me . dispatched &amp;hellip; . this concept of slavery included Britain . General Brauchitsch signed a directive ordering that after the successful invasion of our islands all the able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-five will , unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling , be interned and dispatched to the continent . the Baltic states were to have been our destination . in no other conquered country , not even Poland , had the Germans begun with such a drastic step . there is no doubt that the compatriots of Eichmann would have been as good as their evil word . officious efficiency . the inland revenue people have a thankless task . but they do not make themselves less disliked by their attitude to their customers - who incidentally pay their salaries . their demands are invariably couched in hectoring , out-of-date language , but in spite of all their bluster , they let many a big fish through the net while they are bullying the minnows . I have just heard a good example of their officious efficiency . a young chap I know got his first job last week . he is paid monthly in arrears and will not get a bean for the next twenty-one days . but the blood suckers have already been after him , demanding particulars in the usual minatory language including a blackmailing line which says : if you do not do this , you may have to pay more tax than you need . truly are the tax gatherers an unbeloved people . may his tribe increase . my favourite piece of rhymed writing , when I was young and in the catapult-and-conker stage of life , was a piece of sentimental verse by Leigh Hunt . it was called Abou Ben Adhem and the angel . I do n&apos;t know why I was so impressed with this poem but , on reflection , it might be that I took a guilty interest in the devilment business . I may well have felt that I was hell-bound under a strict Presbyterian upbringing and a possible reprieve might come through the sugary sentiments of Abou Ben Adhem . what happened in the jingly-jungly jingle was this : Abou Ben Adhem ( may his tribe increase ! ) awoke one night from a deep dream of peace and saw , within the moonlight in his room , making it rich , and like a lily in bloom , an angel writing in a book of gold . more - or less ? to cut a long story short the angel got on well with Abou and wrote his name at the top of the book of gold . however , I was only intrigued by the blessing may his tribe increase ! I did n&apos;t realise , in my world of swarming , suburban kids in which I was reared , that more of us might be considered a good thing . but they were - and still are . in Burma the government is urging the population to multiply because , says the Minister of national planning : if present trends continue and there is no increase , the Burmese will disappear one day . not far away , across the Bay of Bengal , India &apos;s government is urging the population to have themselves sterilised and paying them to have the operation . but neither of these pluses and minuses affects the main picture . the earth is crammed with teeming , multiplying humanity . the blessing may his tribe increase in 1961 sounds like a curse . in our own country there are nearly 53 million of us . we are more thickly populated than teeming , bursting Japan . only one country in the world has more people per square yard than we have - Holland . in 1850 there were 1,000 million people in the world . in 1900 the figure had swollen to - 1,500 million . half a century later , us chicks had increased by another 1,000 million to 2,500 million . by 1975 we can not , on present figures , be less than 3,800 million , and by the year anno domini 2000 ( bar nuclear accidents ) we will be about 6,300 million in all . there &apos;s going to be an awful lot of us around . unless &amp;hellip; . un-nuclear less &amp;hellip; . did they know ? I have cast doubt on the repeated claims of the Germans that they did not know of the appalling deeds that were inflicted on millions of human beings for the glory and honour of the third German Reich . yesterday I received a letter from an ex-SS man now living in England . he asks me not to publish his name and address as it might well cost me my job . he writes : your statement that the German people knew what happened to the Jews is wrong . from 1942-1944 I served as a volunteer in the German SS . during that time I served in various SS divisions and never heard the slightest rumour that Jews were murdered . on the contrary we believed just as sincerely as the allies that we were fighting for a just cause and humanity . we often fought against odds of twenty to one and got through . you do n&apos;t do that unless you have a deep conviction that your cause is right . our officers always told us never to degenerate to the level of our opponents . even when our patrol found two of our comrades murdered ( shot in the neck ) by Russian troops who had captured them the day before , we were told by our patrol leader : no reprisals . 