Europe Revised — 36 - Ch. XVII: Britain in Twenty Minutes, pt. 2

Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts.

I said to myself that if I wanted justice--exact justice, heaping high in time scales--I should come to this shop and give my trade to the old-established firm; but if I were looking for a little mercy I should take my custom elsewhere.

I cannot tell why I associate it in my mind with this grouped spectacle of the lords of the law, but somehow the scene to be witnessed in Hyde Park just inside the Marble Arch of a Sunday evening seems bound up somehow with the other institution.

They call this place London's safety valve.

It's all of that.

Long ago the ruling powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines.

So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes to the same thing, into speechlessness.

When I went to Hyde Park on a certain Sunday rain was falling and the crowds were not so large as usual, a bored policeman on duty in this outdoor forum told me; still, at that, there must have been two or three thousand listeners in sight and not less than twelve speakers.

These latter balanced themselves on small portable platforms placed in rows, with such short spaces between them that their voices intermingled confusingly.

In front of each orator stood his audience; sometimes they applauded what he said in a sluggish British way, and sometimes they asked him questions designed to baffle or perplex him--heckling, I believe this is called--but there was never any suggestion of disorder and never any violent demonstration for or against a statement made by him.

At the end of the line nearest the Arch, under a flary light, stood an old bearded man having the look on his face of a kindly but somewhat irritated moo-cow.

At the moment I drew near he was having a long and involved argument with another controversialist touching on the sense of the word tabernacle as employed Scripturally, one holding it to mean the fleshly tenement of the soul and the other an actual place of worship.

The old man had two favorite words--behoove and emit--but behoove was evidently his choice.

As an emitter he was only fair, but he was the best behoover I ever saw anywhere.

The orator next to him was speaking in a soft, sentimental tone, with gestures gently appropriate.

I moved along to him, being minded to learn what particular brand of brotherly love he might be expounding.

In the same tone a good friend might employ in telling you what to do for chapped lips or a fever blister he was saying that clergymen and armaments were useless and expensive burdens on the commonwealth;

and, as a remedy, he was advocating that all the priests and all the preachers in the kingdom should be loaded on all the dreadnoughts, and then the dreadnoughts should be steamed to the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean and there cozily scuttled, with all aboard.

There was scattering applause and a voice: "Ow, don't do that!

Listen, 'ere!

Hi've got a better plan."

But the next speaker was blaring away at the top of his voice, making threatening faces and waving his clenched fists aloft and pounding with them on the top of his rostrum.

"Now this," I said to myself, "is going to be something worth while.

Surely this person would not be content merely with drowning all the parsons and sinking all the warships in the hole at the bottom of the sea.

Undoubtedly he will advocate something really radical.

I will invest five minutes with him."

I did; but I was sold.

He was favoring the immediate adoption of a universal tongue for all the peoples of the earth--that was all.

I did not catch the name of his universal language, but I judged the one at which he would excel would be a language with few if any h's in it.

After this disappointment I lost heart and came away.

Another phase, though a very different one, of the British spirit of fair play and tolerance, was shown to me at the National Sporting Club, which is the British shrine of boxing, where I saw a fight for one of the championship belts that Lord Lonsdale is forever bestowing on this or that worshipful fisticuffer.

Instead of being inside the ring prying the fighters apart by main force as he would have been doing in America, the referee, dressed in evening clothes, was outside the ropes.

At a snapped word from him the fighters broke apart from clinches on the instant.

The audience--a very mixed one, ranging in garb from broadcloths to shoddies--was as quick to approve a telling blow by the less popular fighter as to hiss any suggestion of trickiness or fouling on the part of the favorite.

When a contestant in one of the preliminary goes, having been adjudged a loser on points, objected to the decision and insisted on being heard in his own behalf, the crowd, though plainly not in sympathy with his contention, listened to what he had to say.

Nobody jeered him down.

Had he been a foreigner and especially had he been an American I am inclined to think the situation might have been different.

I seem to recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from this side went over there and broke the British heart by licking the British champion; and again what happened when a Yankee boy won the Marathon at the Olympic games in London a few years ago.

But as this man was a Briton himself these other Britons harkened to his sputterings, for England, you know, grants the right of free speech to all Englishmen--and denies it to all Englishwomen.

The settled Englishman declines always to be jostled out of his hereditary state of intense calm.

They tell of a man who dashed into the reading room of the Savage Club with the announcement that a lion was loose on the Strand--a lion that had escaped from a traveling caravan and was rushing madly to and fro, scaring horses and frightening pedestrians.

"Great excitement!

Most terrific, old dears--on my word!"

he added, addressing the company.

Over the top of the Pink Un an elderly gentleman of a full habit of life regarded him sourly.

"Is that any reason," he inquired, "why a person should rush into a gentleman's club and kick up such a deuced hullabaloo?"

The first man--he must have been a Colonial--gazed at the other man in amazement.

"Well," he asked, "what would you do if you met a savage lion loose on the Strand?"

"Sir, I should take a cab!"

And after meeting an Englishman or two of this type I am quite prepared to say the story might have been a true one.

If he met a lion on the Strand to-day he would take a cab; but if to-morrow, walking in the same place, he met two lions, he would write a letter to the Times complaining of the growing prevalence of lions in the public thoroughfares and placing the blame on the Suffragettes or Lloyd George or the Nonconformists or the increasing discontent of the working classes--that is what he would do.

On the other hand, if he met a squirrel on a street in America it would be a most extraordinary thing.

Extraordinary would undoubtedly be the word he would use to describe it.

Lions on the Strand would be merely annoying, but chipmunks on Broadway would constitute a striking manifestation of the unsettled conditions existing in a wild and misgoverned land; for, you see, to every right-minded Englishman of the insular variety--and that is the commonest variety there is in England--whatever happens at home is but part of an orderly and an ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens beyond the British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and exceedingly disorganizing.

If so be it happens on English soil he can excuse it.

He always has an explanation or an extenuation handy.

But if it happens elsewhere--well, there you are, you see!

What was it somebody once called England--Perfidious Alibi-in', wasn't it?

Anyhow that was what he meant.

The party's intentions were good but his spelling was faulty.

An Englishman's newspapers help him to attain this frame of mind; for an English newspaper does not print sensational stories about Englishmen residing in England; it prints them about people resident in other lands.

There is a good reason for this and the reason is based on prudence.

In the first place the private life of a private individual is a most holy thing, with which the papers dare not meddle; besides, the paper that printed a faked-up tale about a private citizen in England would speedily be exposed and also extensively sued.

As for public men, they are protected by exceedingly stringent libel laws.

As nearly as I might judge, anything true you printed about an English politician would be libelous, and anything libelous you printed about him would be true.