So many
eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped,
long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we
are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship
- the Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period.
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.
