What Struck Into Me Deepest, However, Was
The Look Of Nearly Every One Of The Judges.
Had they been dressed
as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of
the judicial temperament - men born to hold the balances and fitted
and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff.
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.
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