Said in effect that, though he was obliged for the shilling, I
must not feel that I had to give him anything - that it was part
of his duty to aid the public in these small matters. I shut my
eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing as much for
an unknown alien; but the effort gave me a severe headache. It
gave me darting pains across the top of the skull - at about the
spot where he would probably have belted me with his club had I
even dared to ask him to bear a hand with my baggage.
I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London
bobby is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel
of the common law - a police court. I understood then what gave
the policeman in the street his authority and his dignity - and his
humility - when I saw how carefully the magistrate on the bench
weighed each trifling cause and each petty case; how surely he
winnowed out the small grain of truth from the gross and tare of
surmise and fiction; how particular he was to give of the abundant
store of his patience to any whining ragpicker or street beggar
who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar, or accuser, or
witness.
It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after
this when by invitation we witnessed the procession at the opening
of the high courts. Considered from the stand-points of picturesqueness
and impressiveness it made one's pulses tingle when those thirty
or forty men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double
file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in
wig and robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched
and sword-belted, a pace or two behind him; and then, in turn, the
justices; and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them,
knight escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs
of the great machine. 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. 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.
