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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, England, by Frank Fox
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: England
+
+
+Author: Frank Fox
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 7, 2012  [eBook #38790]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLAND***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations in color.
+      See 38790-h.htm or 38790-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38790/38790-h/38790-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38790/38790-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S FROM THE RIVER THAMES]
+
+
+ENGLAND
+
+by
+
+FRANK FOX
+
+Author of "Ramparts of Empire" "Peeps at the British Empire," "Australia
+and Oceania"
+
+With 32 Full-Page Illustrations in Colour
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+Adam and Charles Black
+1914
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+To bring within the limits of one volume any detailed description of
+England--her history, people, landscapes, cities--would be impossible. I
+have sought in this book to give an impression of some of the most
+"English" features of the land, devoting a little space first to an attempt
+to explain the origins of the English people. Thus the English fields and
+flowers and trees, the English homes and schools are given far more
+attention than English cities, English manufactures; for they are more
+peculiar to the land and the people. More markedly than in any superiority
+of her material greatness England stands apart from the rest of the world
+as the land of green trees and meadows, the land of noble schools and of
+sweet homes:
+
+    Green fields of England! wheresoe'er
+    Across this watery waste we fare,
+    One image at our hearts we bear,
+    Green fields of England, everywhere.
+
+    Sweet eyes in England, I must flee
+    Past where the waves' last confines be,
+    Ere your loved smile I cease to see,
+    Sweet eyes in England, dear to me!
+
+    Dear home in England, safe and fast,
+    If but in thee my lot lie cast,
+    The past shall seem a nothing past
+    To thee, dear home, if won at last;
+    Dear Home in England, won at last.
+
+That is the cry of an Englishman (Arthur Hugh Clough). On the same
+note--the green fields, the dear homes--a sympathetic visitor to England
+would shape his impressions on going away.
+
+If, by chance, the reading of this book should whet the appetite for more
+about England, or some particular part of the kingdom, there are available
+in the same series very many volumes on different counties and different
+features of England. To these I would refer the lover or student of England
+wishing for closer details. My impression is necessarily a general one;
+and it is that of a visitor from one of the overseas Dominions--not the
+less interesting, I hope, certainly not the less sympathetic for that
+reason.
+
+FRANK FOX.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+                                                         PAGE
+
+THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE BRITONS AND THE ROMANS           1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE ANGLO-SAXONS AND THE NORMANS    16
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE AND THE ENGLISH LOVE OF IT           28
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE TRAINING OF YOUNG ENGLAND                              43
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ENGLAND AT WORK                                            64
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ENGLAND AT PLAY                                            81
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CITIES OF ENGLAND                                     101
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE RIVERS OF ENGLAND                                     114
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ENGLAND'S SHRINES                                         125
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE POORER POPULATION                                     137
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE ARTS IN ENGLAND                                       155
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+POLITICAL LIFE IN ENGLAND                                 171
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE DEFENCE OF ENGLAND                                    187
+
+INDEX                                                     203
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+1. St. Paul's from the River Thames                     _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                           FACING PAGE
+
+2. The Chalk Cliffs of England                                       1
+
+3. North Side, Canterbury Cathedral                                  8
+
+4. Richmond, Yorkshire                                              17
+
+5. Norman Staircase, King's School, Canterbury                      24
+
+6. A Kent Manor-House and Garden                                    33
+
+7. A Sussex Village                                                 40
+
+8. The Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College, Cambridge               49
+
+9. St. Magdalen Tower and College, Oxford                           56
+
+10. Broad Street, Oxford, looking West                              59
+
+11. Eton Upper School                                               62
+
+12. Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge, London             65
+
+13. Harvesting in Herefordshire                                     72
+
+14. Football at Rugby School                                        81
+
+15. Cricket at "Lord's"                                             88
+
+16. Trout-fishing on the Itchen, Hampshire                          97
+
+17. Dean's Yard, Westminster                                       104
+
+18. Sailing Boats on the Serpentine, Hyde Park, London             107
+
+19. Watergate Street, Chester                                      110
+
+20. The River Rother, Sussex                                       115
+
+21. Thames at Richmond, Surrey                                     118
+
+22. Spring by the Thames                                           121
+
+23. Windsor Castle from Fellows' Eyot: Early Spring                124
+
+24. Glastonbury Abbey, Somersetshire                               128
+
+25. Anne Hathaway's Cottage near Stratford-on-Avon                 137
+
+26. Gipsies on a Gloucestershire Common                            144
+
+27. The Tower from the Tower Bridge, looking West                  153
+
+28. Westminster Abbey from the end of the Embankment               160
+
+29. Westminster and the Houses of Parliament                       169
+
+30. Hyde Park, London                                              176
+
+31. Battleships Manoeuvring                                      193
+
+32. Changing the Guard                                             200
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CHALK CLIFFS OF ENGLAND--THE NEEDLES, ISLE OF WIGHT]
+
+
+
+
+ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE BRITONS AND THE ROMANS
+
+
+When Europe, as it shows on the map to-day, was in the making, some great
+force of Nature cut the British Islands off from the mainland. Perhaps it
+was the result of a convulsive spasm as Mother Earth took a new wrinkle on
+her face. Perhaps it was the steady biting of the Gulf Stream eating away
+at chalk cliffs and shingle beds. Whatever the cause, as far back as man
+knows the English Channel ran between the mainland of Europe and "a group
+of islands off the coast of France"; and the chalk cliffs of the greatest
+of these islands faced the newcomer to suggest to the Romans the name of
+_Terra Alba_: perhaps to prompt in some admirer of Horace among them a
+prophetic fancy that this white land was to make a "white mark" in the
+Calendar of History.
+
+Considered geographically, the British Islands, taking the sum of the whole
+five thousand or so of them (counting islets), are of slight importance.
+Yet a map of the world showing the possessions of Great Britain--the area
+over which the people of these islands have spread their sway--shows a
+whole continent, large areas of three other continents, and numberless
+islands to be British. And when the astonishing disproportion between the
+British Islands and the British Empire has been grasped, it can be made the
+more astonishing by reducing the British Islands down to England as the
+actual centre from which all this greatness has radiated. It is true that
+the British Empire is the work of the British people: as the Roman Empire
+was of the Italian people and not of Rome alone. But it was in England that
+it had its foundation; and the English people made a start with the British
+Empire by subduing or coaxing to their domain the Welsh, the Scottish, and
+the Irish. Not to England all the glory: but certainly to England the first
+glory.
+
+There is at this day a justified resentment shown by Scots and Irish, not
+to speak of Welshmen, when "England" is used as a term to embrace the whole
+of the British Isles. (Similarly Canadians resent the term "America" being
+arrogated by the United States.) A French wit has put very neatly the case
+for that resentment by stating that ordinarily an inhabitant of the British
+Isles is a British citizen until he does something disgraceful, when he is
+identified in the English newspapers as a "Scottish murderer" or an "Irish
+thief": but if he does something fine then he is "a gallant Englishman."
+That is neat satire, founded on a slight foundation of truth. Very often
+"England" is confounded with "Great Britain" when there is discussion of
+Imperial greatness. I do not want to come under suspicion of inexactness,
+which that confusion of terms shows. But writing of England, and England
+alone, it is just to claim at the outset that the actual first beginning of
+that great British power which has eclipsed all records of the world was in
+England: and it is worth the while to inquire into the causes which made
+for the growth of that power. It is necessary, indeed, to make that
+inquiry and get to know something of English history before attempting to
+look with an understanding eye upon English landscapes, English cities, and
+the English people of to-day. The classic painters of the greatest age of
+Art used landscape only as the background for portraiture. The human
+interest to them was always paramount. And, whether one may or may not go
+the whole way with these painters in the appraisement of the relative value
+of the human or the natural, clear it is that a human interest heightens
+the value of every scene; and there can be no full appreciation of a
+country without a knowledge of its history.
+
+"When a noble act is done--perchance in a scene of great natural beauty:
+when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and
+the sun and the moon come each and look upon them once in the steep defile
+of Thermopyl�: when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow
+of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break
+the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty
+of the scene to the beauty of the deed?" Assuredly "yes" to that question
+from Emerson, and assuredly, too, they pay back every day what they have
+borrowed, giving to a noble landscape the added charm of its human
+association with a noble deed. The white cliffs of England are beautiful
+and impressive as they show like gleaming ramparts defending green fields
+and fruitful valleys. But they become more beautiful and more impressive as
+one thinks of them confronting the Romans stepping from Gaul to a wider
+conquest; or facing William of Normandy as he set out to enforce a weak
+claim with a strong sword; or set like white defiant teeth at the great
+ships of the Spanish Armada as they passed up the English Channel with
+Drake in pursuit, the unwieldy Spanish galleons showing like bulls pursued
+by gadflies.
+
+Let us then look for a moment at England in the making before considering
+the England of to-day.
+
+When the British Isles were cut off from the mainland, England was, without
+doubt, inhabited by people akin to the Gauls. The people of the French
+province of Brittany are to-day very clearly cousins of the people of those
+districts of England, such as Cornwall, which preserve most of the old
+Briton blood. Separation from the mainland does not seem to have effected
+very much change in the national type by the time that history came on the
+scene to make her records. C�sar found the Britons very like the Gauls.
+They had not developed into a maritime people. Fisheries they had, for food
+and for pearls; but they had none of the piratical adventurousness of the
+Norsemen. That they were naked, woad-painted savages, those Britons of
+C�sar's time, has been held long as a popular belief. But that is hardly
+tenable in the light of the knowledge which recent arch�ological
+investigation has given, though, likely enough, they painted for battle, as
+soldiers of a later time used to wear plumes and glittering uniforms to
+impress and frighten the enemy.
+
+Excavations in more than one district of late have shown that the early
+Britons possessed a good share of civilisation before ever the Romans came
+to their land. Thus near Northampton there is a place which used to be a
+camp of the Britons prior to the Roman occupation. The camp has an area of
+about four acres, and was defended by a ditch fifteen feet deep, and about
+thirty feet wide, with a rampart on either side of the fosse.
+
+Here were discovered the bases of what are considered to have been the
+remains of the hut-dwellings of the occupiers of the camp. Of these some
+three hundred were found filled with black earth and mould, and from them
+many most interesting articles were obtained. There were many iron relics,
+such as swords, daggers, spear heads, knives, saws, sickles, adzes, an axe,
+plough-shares, nails, chisels, gouges, bridles (one with a bronze
+centre-bit), and a well-formed pot-hook made of twisted iron. In bronze
+there were remains of two sword scabbards, four brooches, some fragments
+belonging to horse harness, pins and rings, and a small spoon. There were
+also glass beads and rings, a fragment of jet, a number of spindle
+whorls for spinning, bone combs used in weaving, and about twenty
+triangular-shaped bricks pierced through each corner, considered to be loom
+weights to keep the warp taut; more than a hundred querns or millstones,
+some of the corn which was ground in them (this fortunately happened to be
+charred and so preserved), and remains of about four hundred pots, nearly
+all used for domestic purposes. One of the bronze scabbards bears on the
+top an engraved pattern of the decorative art of the period, showing the
+Triskele, a sun symbol often found on remains of the Bronze Age in Denmark
+as well as elsewhere.
+
+Similar pre-Roman relics have been obtained from the Marsh Village near
+Glastonbury, from Mount Coburn near Lewes, and from near Canterbury. The
+unmistakable evidence of these relics is that the pre-Roman Briton could
+spin and weave, knew how to plough and when to sow, was an excellent
+carpenter, and was an expert in metal work, both in iron and bronze, and
+possessed a decorative art. He was therefore not a "savage" as savages were
+understood in those days.
+
+We must consider the Britons, then, of C�sar's time as possessed of some
+degree of civilisation. They understood fabrics, pottery, metals,
+architecture. They had come into contact with the civilisation of the
+Mediterranean Sea long before his day. The Scilly Islands off the coast of
+Cornwall can reasonably be identified as the Casserterrides of the
+Phoenicians, where the merchants of Tyre and Sidon bought tin, giving
+cloth in exchange. It is said, indeed, that an ingot of tin with a
+Phoenician mark upon it was dredged up once from Falmouth Harbour.
+Probably the very earliest mention of Britain is by Hecat�us (B.C. 500,
+about the time when Marathon was fought). He described Britain then as an
+isle of the Hyperboreans, and alleged that the inhabitants "raised two
+crops in the year and worshipped the sun."
+
+[Illustration: NORTH SIDE, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL]
+
+That may be the first original sneer at the British climate, the sneer
+which now takes the form that whenever the sun appears in England it is
+photographed, lest the inhabitants of the island should forget what it is
+like. (There is an Australian "drought" story of the same order of humorous
+exaggeration, that in a certain district the rain from heaven had been
+withheld so long, and grass had so long disappeared, that when at last
+relief came and the grass grew the sheep would not eat it, as they did not
+recognise what it was!) But perhaps Hecat�us was serious. It is not at all
+unlikely that the gossip Hecat�us had of the Isle of the Hyperboreans came
+from Phoenician sources, and referred to that south-westerly extremity of
+Cornwall which gets the full benefit of the warm Gulf Stream, and has in
+consequence an astonishingly mild climate for its latitude, a climate quite
+capable of producing sometimes two crops a year.
+
+As for sun worship, there are many indications of the practice of its
+rites in prehistoric Britain. The "Round Towers" which are sprinkled over
+Ireland can best be explained by a theory of sun worship. Stonehenge, in
+the south of England, which dates back to about 1500 years B.C., was
+probably a temple of sun worship. There are the ruins of a temple, possibly
+of the sun, at Avebury (Wilts.) of even older date.
+
+It would be impossible to attempt even to hint at all the evidence in the
+matter. But what may be accepted quite safely as a fact is, that in
+prehistoric times the Briton was no laggard in the path of civilisation:
+that indeed he was among the early pilgrims on that path. Even as far north
+as the Yorkshire Wolds--it is clear from recent excavations--there was a
+thick local population of men in the Neolithic Age. The burial mounds of
+these Neolithic tribes have lately been excavated, and have given much
+valuable evidence as to the history of Man. The "Ipswich Man," too--the
+indubitable remains of a man who walked upright and who had skull
+accommodation for a human brain, discovered in strata of a most remote age
+of the earth--proves that in the little corner of the world which was to
+have such a wonderful history in the far future, there were early
+indications of promise.
+
+It is worth while to clear our British ancestors of the reproach of being
+woad-painted savages at a time of the world's history when every European,
+almost, had learned at least the use of skins. For those Britons were
+responsible for that "Celtic fringe" which to-day shows so largely in our
+poetry and our politics, and in other walks of life. The ancient Briton
+enters into the making of modern England through the strong traces of his
+ancestry left in Cornwall, Devon, the Marches of Wales, and elsewhere.
+
+But respectably clothed, arm-bearing, house-building personage as he was,
+the ancient Briton would never have made a very great mark in the world if
+he had been left to himself. He would never have overflowed to send out
+tidal waves of conquest like the Norsemen or the Goths. Possibly even in
+those early days he had his Celtic qualities of poetry and imagination and
+argumentativeness, and spent much of his energy in dreaming things instead
+of doing things. It was when the Romans came that England began to shape
+towards a big place in the world.
+
+The Romans do not seem to have had a very bloody campaign in subduing that
+part of Britain which is now England. The people were rather softer than
+the Gauls of the mainland. Their country was penetrated by several rivers
+such as the Thames, which gave easy highways to the Roman galleys. The
+gentle contours of the country made easy the building of the Roman roads,
+which were the chief agents of Roman civilisation. But the Roman dominion
+in the British Islands stopped with England. Scotland, Wales, Ireland
+remained unsubdued. That fact was to have an important bearing on the
+future of England. Step by step, Fate was working for the making of the
+people who were to cover the whole earth with their dominions.
+
+We have seen that in the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate
+and fertile peninsula which by right of latitude should have had the
+temperature of Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a
+climate singularly mild and promotive of fertility. When the separation
+from the mainland came because of the cutting of the English Channel, the
+Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their soft
+environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism and a
+comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once very
+proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its shores.
+
+With the Roman invasion the future English race won a benefit from both
+those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power freed
+the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness
+which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous
+winners and good colonists. Once their power was established firmly, they
+treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local
+pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to
+take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the
+singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before
+Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of
+Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some
+years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the
+time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the
+Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say,
+northern Africa or Spain. All the appurtenances of Roman civilisation had
+been brought to Britain. It was no mere barbarous province. It had its
+great watering-places such as Bath, and its fine cities and its vineyards,
+though the British climate nowadays is accused of not being able to grow
+grapes. British oysters, too, were famous among the gluttons of Rome, and
+one Roman emperor is said to have raised a British oyster to the rank of
+consul as a mark of his appreciation. (This jest of the table, if all
+stories can be credited, has since been repeated in England, and is
+responsible for the "Sir Loin" of beef and also the "Baron" of beef.)
+
+But side by side with the growth of a gracious civilisation in England,
+there was constant warfare on the borders. The wilder natives of the
+British islands refused the Roman sway, and threatened by their forays the
+security of the new cities. This made necessary a great military
+organisation, which has left its mark on the England of to-day in the Roman
+roads and the sites of Roman military camps dotted all over the country
+from the Thames to the Tweed. The remains of these camps are quite
+distinguishable in many places; and generally they are known as "C�sar's
+camps," whether Julius C�sar ever saw their neighbourhood or not. Probably
+Carausius was the "C�sar" of many of these camps.
+
+Despite the border wars the Romanised Britons got on fairly comfortably
+until the failing power of the Roman Empire made it necessary for the Roman
+legions to withdraw to Italy. This left Romanised Britain to be attacked by
+the wilder Britons of the north and the west. That these attacks should
+have been as successful as they were, hints that the south Briton of
+England was rather a soft fellow. Since, as we will find later, the
+Anglo-Saxon--once comfortably settled in England--showed a tendency also to
+become a soft fellow, and had to be pricked to greatness by the Dane and
+the Norman, it would almost seem that this gentle, green, cloudy England
+has ultimately a softening effect on its inhabitants. But fresh blood pours
+in to bring vigour. England invites adventurers by her beauty and then
+tames them. Because of her perpetual invitation the British nation has been
+made of a brew of Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman bloods,
+and all these people have left their mark on the landscape of the country.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE ANGLO-SAXONS AND THE NORMANS
+
+
+How the Romanised Briton of England would have fared ultimately in his
+contest with the more savage Britons of the north and the west, who came to
+rob him down to his toga, if they had been left to fight it out, it is hard
+to say. Probably the course of events would have been that the English
+natives would first have yielded to the northern invaders, and afterwards
+absorbed them and made them partakers in their civilisation.
+
+[Illustration: RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE
+
+A town of considerable importance at the time of the Norman Conquest]
+
+But the issue was never fought out. There had begun the most momentous
+swarming of a human race that history records. Along the Scandinavian and
+the Danish peninsulas, and the northern coast of Germany, there had been
+swelling up a vast population of fierce, strong, courageous and hungry men;
+Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen--they were all very much akin: big
+blue-eyed men of mighty daring mated with fair, chaste, fruitful women; and
+they swarmed out of their warrens to over-run the greater part of Europe.
+You may trace them to the interior of Russia, to Iceland, to
+Constantinople, some think to North America. But, whatever their path, the
+British Islands were athwart the track they took, and the British Islands
+received the most complete flood of Anglo-Saxon blood. Again it was England
+that made way most easily to the invader. The Anglo-Saxons came and cleared
+out the Romanised and Christian civilisation from Yorkshire to Kent. But
+the fiercer British natives who had held back the Romans, held back also
+these new invaders, helped thereto by the fact that their lands seemed to
+be hungry, and to offer but little booty. England, fat, fertile, like a
+beautiful park with its forests and meadows and rivers, was at once a
+richer and an easier prize.
+
+The Anglo-Saxon probably made his conquest more easy by treachery and by
+fomenting discord among the Britons. There is a ballad by Thomas Love
+Peacock, which treats of such an Anglo-Saxon victory--with at least a
+shadow of a shade of historical warrant:--
+
+    "Come to the feast of wine and meat,"
+    Spake the dark dweller of the sea.
+    "There shall the hours in mirth proceed;
+    There neither sword nor shield shall be."
+
+    None but the noblest of the land,
+    The flower of Britain's chiefs were there;
+    Unarmed, amid the Saxon band
+    They sate, the fatal feast to share.
+
+    Three hundred chiefs, three score and three
+    Went, where the festal torches burned
+    Before the dweller of the sea;
+    They went, and three alone returned.
+
+    Till dawn the pale sweet mead they quaffed,
+    The ocean chief unclosed his vest,
+    His hand was on his dagger's haft,
+    And daggers glared at every breast.
+
+Still it was an easy victory, that of Anglo-Saxon over Briton. But just as
+we must, in the light of recent knowledge, give up the idea that the Briton
+whom Julius C�sar encountered was a woad-painted savage, so we must refuse
+to accept the impression (which is implied more often than directly stated)
+that the Romanised Briton, after the departure of the Roman legions, was
+quite helpless. Between the Roman departure from Britain and the
+establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms there, room must be found,
+somehow, for whatever of historical truth there is as a foundation for the
+Arthurian legends. On that point let old Caxton speak:--
+
+     Now it is notoriously known through the universal world
+     that there be nine worthy and the best that ever were.
+     That is to wit three paynims, three Jews, and three
+     Christian men. As for the paynims they were tofore the
+     Incarnation of Christ, which were named, the first
+     Hector of Troy, of whom the history is come both in
+     ballad and in prose; the second Alexander the Great;
+     and the third Julius C�sar, Emperor of Rome, of whom
+     the histories be well-known and had.
+
+     And as for the three Jews which also were tofore the
+     Incarnation of our Lord, of whom the first was Duke
+     Joshua which brought the children of Israel into the
+     land of behest; the second David, King of Jerusalem;
+     and the third Judas Maccab�us; of these three the Bible
+     rehearseth all their noble histories and acts.
+
+     And sith the said Incarnation have been three noble
+     Christian men stalled and admitted through the
+     universal world into the number of the nine best and
+     worthy, of whom was first the noble Arthur, whose noble
+     acts I purpose to write in this present book here
+     following. The second was Charlemagne or Charles the
+     Great, of whom the history is had in many places both
+     in French and English; and the third and last was
+     Godfrey of Bouillon, of whose acts and life I made a
+     book unto the excellent prince and king of noble
+     memory, King Edward the Fourth. The said noble
+     gentleman instantly required me to imprint the history
+     of the said noble king and conqueror, King Arthur, and
+     of his knights, with the history of the Sangreal, and
+     of the death and ending of the said Arthur; affirming
+     that I ought rather to imprint his acts and noble
+     feats, than of Godfrey of Bouillon, or any of the other
+     eight, considering that he was a man born within this
+     realm, and king and emperor of the same; and that there
+     be in French divers and many noble volumes of his acts,
+     and also of his knights.
+
+     To whom I answered, that divers men hold opinion that
+     there was no such Arthur, and that all such books as be
+     made of him be but feigned and fables, by cause that
+     some chronicles make of him no mention nor remember him
+     no thing, nor of his knights. Whereunto they answered,
+     and one in special said, that in him that should say or
+     think that there was never such a king called Arthur,
+     might well be credited great folly and blindness; for
+     he said that there were many evidences of the contrary:
+     first ye may see his sepulture in the Monastery of
+     Glastonbury. And also in _Polichronicon_, in the fifth
+     book of the sixth chapter, and in the seventh book and
+     the twenty-third chapter, where his body was buried and
+     after found and translated into the said monastery. Ye
+     shall see also in the history of Bochas, in his book
+     _De Casu Principum_, part of his noble acts, and also
+     of his fall.
+
+     Also Galfridus in his British book recounteth his life;
+     and in divers places of England many remembrances be
+     yet of him and shall remain perpetually, and also of
+     his knights. First in the Abbey of Westminster, at
+     Saint Edward's shrine, remaineth the print of his seal
+     in red wax closed in beryl, in which is written
+     _Patricius Arthurus, Britann�, Gallie, Germanie, Dacie,
+     Imperator_. Item in the castle of Dover ye may see
+     Gawaine's skull and Craddock's mantle, at Winchester
+     the Round Table, in other places Launcelot's sword and
+     many other things. Then all these things considered,
+     there can no man reasonably gainsay but there was a
+     king of this land named Arthur. For in all places,
+     Christian and heathen, he is reputed and taken for one
+     of the nine worthy, and the first of the three
+     Christian men. And also he is more spoken of beyond the
+     sea, more books made of his noble acts than there be in
+     England, as well in Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Greek,
+     as in French. And yet of record remain in witness of
+     him in Wales, in the town of Camelot, the great stones
+     and marvellous works of iron, lying under the ground,
+     and royal vaults, which divers now living hath seen.
+
+I fear one cannot take Caxton's endorsement of Sir Thomas Malory as final
+evidence, and accept as historic a King Arthur who on one occasion invaded
+the European Continent and defeated in battle the troops of the Roman
+Emperor. But there were men to fight in England after the Romans left; and
+those beaten in the fight fell back on Scotland, on Wales, on Cornwall, and
+some of them wandered farther afield and colonised Brittany in France, a
+province which to-day reminds of Cornwall at a thousand points.
+
+The Anglo-Saxons, like other nations, found the air of England civilising.
+They aspired to settle down in quiet comfort when there came from the east
+a fresh cloud of freebooters, the Danes, to claim a share in this
+delectable island. Dane and Saxon fought it out--the Briton from "the
+Celtic fringe" occasionally interfering--with all the hearty ill-will of
+blood relations, and as they fought shaped out a very good people, partly
+English, partly Saxon, partly Danish, and in the mountains partly British.
+
+If you look over England with a seeing eye, you can notice the traces of
+each element in the nation's blood; and the landscape will partly explain
+why in one place there is a Celtic predominance, in another a Danish. Each
+national type sought and held the districts most suitable to its character.
+
+After the Danish, the last great element in the making of the British race
+was the Norman. The Normans were not so much aliens as might be supposed.
+The Anglo-Saxons of the day were descendants of sea-pirates who had settled
+in Britain and mingled their blood with the British. The Normans were
+descendants of kindred sea-pirates who had settled in Gaul, and mingled
+their blood with that of the Gauls and Franks. The two races, Anglo-Saxon
+and Normans, after a while merged amicably enough, the Anglo-Saxon blood
+predominating, and the present British type was evolved, in part Celtic, in
+part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman--a hard-fighting,
+stubborn, adventurous type, which in its making from such varied elements
+had learned the value of compromise, and of the common-sense principle of
+give-and-take.
+
+The Normans brought to England a higher knowledge of the arts than the
+Anglo-Saxons had. The Roman culture of Britain had been just as high as the
+Roman culture of Gaul. But in Britain its tradition had been lost to a
+great extent in the onrush of the rude, unlettered Anglo-Saxons. In Gaul
+the Norsemen had won only a district, not the whole country, and they had
+been surrounded by civilising influences and had reacted to them
+wonderfully. Practically all the fine buildings of England date from after
+the Norman Epoch. But it is a fact which will strike at once the student of
+those buildings, who afterwards compares them with contemporary Norman
+buildings in France, that Norman architecture was not transplanted to
+England. Whilst at Rouen, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, you see the churches
+usually in Flamboyant or Ogival Gothic; in England the churches of about
+the same date are in a more severe and straight-laced style. It is well
+worth the trouble to study somewhat closely the churches built by the
+Normans in France and by the Norman-English in England during the century
+after the Conquest. A clear indication will be found from the study that
+the Normans did not over-run and beat down the Anglo-Saxons; but that the
+Anglo-Saxon was the "predominant partner" almost from the first in the
+domestic economy of the nation, however badly he fared in the tented field
+against the Normans.
+
+The antiquities of England, the edifices of England, the very fields of
+England will be understood better if they are looked at in the light of
+English history--not that bare-bones caricature of history which is a mere
+record of battles and kings, but the living history which traces to their
+sources the streams of our race. The England of to-day is beginning to know
+the wisdom of a close sympathetic study of the past. One of the signs of
+this awakening of the historical sense is the popularity of the open-air
+pageant reviving scenes of old. I shall always remember, among many of
+those pageants, a particularly fine one at Chester, a city of great
+historic importance.
+
+[Illustration: NORMAN STAIRCASE, KING'S SCHOOL, CANTERBURY]
+
+Such brilliant sunshine as rarely glows over "green and cloudy England"
+greeted this Chester Pageant; and, with it, just enough of a gentle breeze
+as to set all the leaves to a morris dance and to give to banner and mantle
+a flowing line. The scene for the play was set by Nature, or by good
+gardeners of long ago working in close sympathy with her model for an
+English pleasaunce. It was a very dainty sward, perhaps of five acres in
+all, ringed around with trees and bushes in their native wildness, which
+invaded here and there the grass with an out-thrown clump or extended arm.
+On such a spot fairies would pitch for their revels, noticing how the
+curtains of the shrubberies would mask their troopings, and the extending
+wings of boscage give surprise to their exits and entrances. With perfect
+weather and a perfect stage, the Chester Pageant needed to claim a large
+excellence to prove itself worthy of its opportunity; and did make and
+fully establish the claim.
+
+It was bright, graced with fine music and much dainty dancing, engrossing
+in its story, and amusing in the little character sketches of life with
+which it embroidered history. Also it taught patriotism by impressing proud
+facts of history. Where, to serve the purpose of the picturesque, the
+probable rather than the certain was followed, due warning was given; and
+the wise plan was adopted of interspersing with the great incidents pages
+from the familiar life of the people. The Crusade was preached from Chester
+Cross; side by side with it was shown an excerpt from cottage life in the
+story of Dickon, an archer, and his betrothed, Alison, whom he would leave,
+and yet not leave, to take the badge of the Crusade. History was, in fact,
+made homely, as history should be if it is to claim interest outside the
+philosopher's study.
+
+Chester is very proud of its history and jealously preserves its
+antiquities. A city which was a great camp for the Romans, a naval
+headquarters for the Saxons, a centre for the fierce contests between
+Normans and Welsh, a much-disputed prize in the Civil War, has certainly
+much history to cherish, and Chester nobly indulges the pride. No other
+city of England, not even excepting London, shows so much reverence for a
+glorious past.
+
+But all through England there is an awakening of historical interest; and
+it marches on the right lines to make history not so much a record of dead
+people as an explanation of living people.
+
+After this short glance at the past let us look to the England of to-day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE AND THE ENGLISH LOVE OF IT
+
+
+There are as many types of natural scenery in England almost as there are
+counties. To attempt to describe all in this one volume would be absurd.
+Yet to generalise on English natural beauty is difficult, because of that
+great diversity. Who can suggest, for instance, a common denominator to
+suit the Devonshire Moors, the Norfolk Broads, the Surrey Downs, and the
+Thames Valley? But since one must generalise, it is safe to give as the
+predominant feature of England's natural beauty that which strikes most
+obviously the eye of the stranger used to other countries.
+
+Nine out of ten strangers coming to England for the first time, and asked
+to speak of its appearance, will say something equivalent to "park-like."
+England in truth looks like one great well-ordered park, under the charge
+of a skilful landscape gardener. The trees seem to grow with an eye to
+effect, the meadows to be designed for vistas, the hedges for reliefs. The
+land indeed does not seem ever to be doing anything--not at all a correct
+impression in fact, that, but it is the one conveyed irresistibly.
+
+One soon notices that the tree must in France work for its living. It
+cannot aspire to the luxurious and beautiful existence of its English
+brothers, who in their woods and copses have little to do but to "utter
+green leaves joyously" in the spring, glow with burnished glory in the
+autumn, and unrobe delicate traceries for admiration in the winter. In
+France a tree may live on the edge of a road or as one of a cluster
+sheltering a farmhouse, or keep many other trees company in a State pine
+forest which will help to make those execrable French matches; but its
+every twig is utilised, and a hard-working existence takes away much of its
+beauty. The �sthetic tree, the tree with nothing to do but just to be a
+tree and look pretty, is rare in most countries; but in England it is the
+commonplace. Other countries have useful trees which look pretty, forests
+which are impressive in spite of man. England seems to share with Japan the
+amiable thriftlessness of giving up much land to growth which is not
+intended to serve any base utilitarian purpose at all.
+
+The hedges, which take up a considerable fraction of English arable soil,
+help to the park-like appearance of the country. They are inexpressibly
+beautiful when spring wakes them up to pipe their roulades in tender green.
+In summer they are splendid in blazon of leaf and flower. In autumn they
+flaunt banners of gold and red and brown. In winter, too, they are still
+beautiful, especially in the early winter when there still survive a few
+scarlet berries to glow and crackle and almost burn in the frost. If
+England, in a mood of thrift, swept away her hedges and put in their places
+fences (or that nice sense of keeping boundaries which enables the French
+cultivator to do without either), the saving of land would be enormous. But
+much of the park-like beauty of the country-side would depart; and with it
+the predominant note of the English landscape, which is that of the estate
+of a rich, careful, orderly nobleman.
+
+The change will be slow in coming, if it comes at all; for though he would
+be the last man, probably, to suspect it, the Englishman is at heart
+�sthetic. Yes, in spite of horse-hair furniture, gilt-framed oleographs,
+wax-flower decorations, and Early Victorian wall-papers, and other sins of
+which many of him have been, and still are, guilty, the Englishman has
+planted in him an instinct for art. It shows in his love of nature, of the
+green of his England. Almost every one aspires to come into touch with a
+bit of plant life. In the East End of London the aspiration takes the form
+of a window garden. You may see workingmen's "flats" let at six shillings a
+week with their window gardens. In the West End, land which must be worth
+many thousands of pounds per acre is devoted to garden use. For want of
+better, a terrace of houses will have a little strip of plantation, at back
+or front, common to all of them. House and "flat" agents tell that tenants
+almost always demand that there shall be at least sight of a green tree
+from some window. In the small suburban villas a very considerable tax of
+money and labour is cheerfully paid in the effort to keep in good order a
+little pocket-handkerchief of lawn and a few shrubs. This love of the
+garden is holy and wholesome, and it proves, I think, that the Englishman
+is at heart a lover of the beautiful, an "�sthetic," though he is supposed
+to be such a dull, prosaic, practical person.
+
+Comparing the English with the French on this point, in my opinion it is in
+the practical application of �sthetic principles to life rather than in
+�sthetic sensibility that the French are superior to the English. What
+difference there is in �stheticism favours the English; there are deeper
+springs of art and poetry in the English people than in the French. But art
+has been far more carefully cherished and organised in France than in
+England. There is more general artistic education, if less true artistic
+feeling.
+
+Approach a typical French village of a modern type. The first impression
+given by the houses is of a vastly superior artistic consciousness. Both in
+colour and in form the houses are more beautiful than the same types in
+England, where domestic architecture of the villa type so often suggests
+either a penal establishment or the need of a penal establishment for the
+designer. But look a little closer, and one notices that, as compared with
+an English town, there is in France a conspicuous absence of gardens.
+Decorative trees, shrubberies, flowers are rare. Where there is garden
+space it is, as like as not, devoted to some shocking attempt at grandiose
+_rococo_ work. The interiors, too, are disappointing. Thrift suggests the
+hideous closed-in stove as a substitute for open fires; but the garish
+wall-papers, the coloured prints, the "decorations" of shell-work or china,
+and so on, are not necessary, and are far more ugly than those of the
+average poor home in England, even of the "Early Victorian type." I repeat,
+the natural artistic standard of the French does not seem to be so high as
+that of the English, but the standard of artistic education is very much
+higher.
+
+[Illustration: A KENT MANOR-HOUSE AND GARDEN]
+
+I have noticed among all classes in England the same natural love of
+beauty. It does not exist only in the rich (but as a class it exists among
+them to a very marked degree: there is nothing in the world more beautiful
+than an English manor house, with its park and garden); it permeates the
+whole people. I recall a farmer to whom I spoke of the waste caused by the
+gorgeous yellow-blossomed weeds which invaded his wheat. "Yes," he said,
+half content, half sorry, "but they do look so beautiful." It was not that
+he was a lazy farmer, but he did actually love the beautiful wild life
+which came to rob his wheat of its nourishment.
+
+At another time I remember meeting on a country road a draper's porter (one
+of those poor casual labourers who make an odd penny here and there by
+carrying parcels for small drapers). He had an enforced holiday and he was
+tramping out into the country from the town "to see the green fields." He
+did not say in so many words that he "loved" the green fields. It would not
+occur to him probably to attempt to phrase his feeling towards them. But it
+was clear that he did, most fondly; and he was fairly typical of the
+Englishman of his class.
+
+As an exile the Englishman carries away with him the ideal of the soft
+green English country-side, and tries to reconstruct England wherever he
+may settle overseas. English trees, English grass, English flowers he
+sedulously cultivates in Australia, in Canada, in South Africa, and wins
+some strange triumphs over Nature in many of his acclimatisations.
+
+Occasionally the transplanting succeeds too well. An Englishman with a
+touch of nostalgia--not enough of it to send him back to his Home
+country--introduced rabbits to Australia. It would be home-like, he
+thought, to see rabbits popping in and out of their burrows. That was the
+beginning. Now there are places in Australia where you can hardly put your
+foot down without treading on a rabbit, and sufficient of money to build a
+large navy has had to be spent in keeping the rabbit-pest in check. Another
+home-sick colonist, who came possibly, however, from north of the Tweed,
+introduced Scottish thistles into the same country with disastrous results.
+
+Yet another English acclimatisation was that of the field daisy to
+Tasmania. It flourished wonderfully in its new surroundings, and had such a
+bad effect on the pasturage that a war had to be waged against its spread.
+But, seeing an English meadow decked with daisies, as thick as stars in the
+Milky Way, one might almost argue that such beauty is good compensation for
+a little loss of grass, as my farmer thought with his invaded wheat patch.
+The wide grass walks of Kew Gardens in the daisy time are lovely enough to
+make one forget all material things. To give a thought to the niceties of a
+cow's appetite, or to the yield of butter, when remembering such daisies,
+would not be possible.
+
+All along the English country-side the gardens are delicious, from the
+winsome cottage plots to the nobly sweeping landscape surrounding a typical
+manor house, blending a hundred individual beauties of lawn, rosery, herb
+border, walled garden, wild garden into one enchanting mosaic. But, withal,
+it is the wonderful variety and perfection of the trees that is most
+remarkable. The affectionate regard for trees in England is a most pleasing
+thing to one who in his own country has had often to protest against a sort
+of rage against trees, as if they were enemies of the human race. (The
+pioneer who has to clear a forest for the sake of his crop and pasture gets
+into an unhappy habit afterwards of tree-murder out of sheer wantonness.)
+At Ampthill Park (an old Henry VIII. hunting seat) I have been shown oaks
+which in Cromwell's time were recorded as "too old to be cut down for the
+building of ships." They are still carefully preserved, some of them
+enjoying old-age pensions in the shape of props to keep up their venerable
+limbs.
+
+Were I advising a friend abroad who knew nothing of England and wished to
+make a pilgrimage to its chief shrines of beauty, I think I should urge him
+to come in the late winter to Plymouth and explore first Cornwall and
+Devon, seeing, in the first case, how England's "rocky shores beat back the
+envious siege of watery Neptune." The coming of the waves of an Atlantic
+storm to Land's End offers a grand spectacle. He should stay in the
+south-west to see the first breath of spring bring the trees to green, and
+the earliest of the daffodils to flower. He will very likely encounter some
+wet weather. The Dartmoor people themselves say:--
+
+    The south wind blows and brings wet weather,
+    The north gives wet and cold together,
+    The west wind comes brimful of rain,
+    The east wind drives it back again.
+    Then if the sun in red should set,
+    We know the morrow must be wet;
+    And if the eve is clad in grey
+    The next is sure a rainy day.
+
+But despite showers, spring on Dartmoor is a glowing pageant of green and
+gold. After feasting upon it a week or so, my imaginary pilgrim would make
+his way to the Thames valley to welcome yet another spring. The Gulf Stream
+gives the south-west corner of England a softer climate and an earlier
+spring than the east enjoys. By the time the daffodils are nodding their
+golden heads in Cornwall, the crocus will be just showing its flame along
+the borders of the Thames, and the pilgrim will understand Browning's
+rapture:--
+
+    Oh to be in England
+    Now that April's there,
+    And whoever wakes in England
+    Sees some morning, unaware,
+    That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
+    Round the elm tree hole are in tiny leaf;
+    While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
+    In England--now!
+
+When once the spring is in full tide towards summer, it is difficult to say
+where one should search for special beauty in England, for all is so
+beautiful, from the Yorkshire hills to the Sussex marshes beloved of
+Coventry Patmore--flat lands whose drowsy beauties glow under the broad
+sunshine and suggest a tranquil charm of quiet joy tinged with melancholy,
+too subtle to appeal to the casual "tripper," but of insistent call to all
+who understood the more intimate charms of Nature. It is spacious is
+Sussex. It shelters solitudes. Its quiet, slow-voiced people are
+sympathetic with their surroundings. When storms rage Sussex takes a new
+aspect. The screaming of the gulls, the sobbing of the sedges in the wind,
+the wide, flat expanse laid, as it were, bare to the rage of the storm,
+gives to the wind a sense of poignant desolation.
+
+In Sussex, when Henry VIII. was king, many "great cannones and shotters
+were caste for His Majestie's service"; and the county was notable for its
+iron mines and foundries. From Sussex earlier had come all of the 3000
+horseshoes on which an English king's army had galloped to ruin at
+Bannockburn. Owing to the iron in the soil the Sussex streams sometimes run
+red, so that "at times the grounde weepes bloud." Now there is an end of
+iron-working there. The foundry at Ashburnham, the last of the Sussex
+furnaces, was closed down in 1828. One reason given was that the workers
+were too drunken, helped as they were to unsober habits by the facilities
+for smuggling in Holland's gin.
+
+But more probably the Sussex ironworks closed down in the main for the same
+reason that other southern works did. The past two centuries have seen a
+gradual transference of the great industries and the great centres of
+population from the south to the north-west and the Midlands. The northern
+coal mines are the real magnets. So the Sussex iron-workers of the
+eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may not justly be accused of killing an
+industry with their dissolute love of Holland's gin. Their country is
+to-day the more picturesque without the iron foundries, though one may give
+a sigh to Sussex iron, which had the repute of being the toughest in all
+England.
+
+I have given this little space to Sussex, by way of proof that everywhere
+in England there is beauty, for Sussex is not a "scenery" county in the
+general sense. It will, indeed, prove puzzling to my imaginary pilgrim in
+search of the highest natural beauty of England to find time within one
+spring and summer to get an idea of its wide variety of charm. Fortunate he
+if he resists all temptation to rush (by motor car or otherwise) through a
+"comprehensive tour" mapped out by hours. I remember encountering--with
+deep pity on my part--a group of delegates to some great Imperial
+Conference, who were being "shown England" by some misguided and misguiding
+official. They were at Oxford for lunch, and were due to "do" Oxford and
+lunch--or rather lunch and Oxford--within three hours. Motoring up they had
+already "done" a great deal of country in a morning, including a visit to
+Banbury. After lunch--and Oxford--they were on their way to Worcester and
+yet farther that day. It was an unhappy experiment in quick-change scenery,
+proving conclusively the cleverness of motor cars and the stupidity of
+human beings.
+
+[Illustration: A SUSSEX VILLAGE]
+
+May and June in this fancied Pilgrimage of Beauty should be given up wholly
+to the Thames valley from Greenwich to Oxford, and past. An intelligent
+lover of the beautiful in Nature and Art will at least learn in those two
+months that a life-time is not sufficient for due faithful worship at all
+the shrines of Beauty he will encounter. My pilgrim has now seen wild coast
+scenery and river scenery. July should be given to the hills and the lakes,
+these enchanting lakes which have won new beauties from the poets and wise
+men who dwelt by them. Then August to the Yorkshire Wolds, with their
+sweeping outlines, clear in the amber air shining over white roads and
+blue-green fields.
+
+The attractions of the Yorkshire Wolds are proof against the wet sea-mists,
+the penetrating winds, and the merciless rain which sometimes sweep over
+them. The very severity of the weather appeals to nature lovers. The
+Yorkshire Wolds terminate on the east with the great Flamborough headland,
+the chalky cliffs of which have remarkable strength to resist ocean
+erosion. Owing to this fact Flamborough headland has been for centuries
+becoming more and more the outstanding feature of the east coast of
+England, because the sea continues to eat into the low shores of
+Holderness.
+
+With the end of August comes the end of the English summer (though at times
+it ends at a very much earlier date, and offers with its brief life poor
+reason for having appeared at all; "seeing that I was so soon to be done
+for, why ever was I begun for"). It is then time to go to Kent and see the
+burnishing of the woods by Autumn, the ripening of hop and apple. To the
+New Forest afterwards, and the sands of the south coast. At the end of the
+year our pilgrim will know how varied is the beauty of the English
+landscape, and how faithfully it is loved in its different forms by those
+who live near to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE TRAINING OF YOUNG ENGLAND
+
+
+All the world and his wife seem to be agreed that there is something in the
+English system of education which can work miracles. Boys from all over the
+world come to England, to school and university, to be trained. And
+further, the English tutor and the English governess are to be found
+sprinkled over the globe, teaching some of the young of all nations. There
+is a recent fashion for German training, "because it is so thorough," and
+the English system of training (which can certainly fail in a very large
+proportion of cases to show creditable results when tested by examination
+paper) comes in for some merciless criticism in its own home country.
+Nevertheless, it still holds its reputation as the best of systems to make
+"character."
+
+What exactly character signifies in this connection it would be hard to
+define in a phrase. But it is that something which makes the young pink
+English boy fresh from home step, as if by nature born to the job, into the
+work of administering things, governing inferiors amiably, obeying
+superiors cheerfully, and keeping up a high tradition of fair play and
+tolerance. It is that something which made a cute American, after planning
+out, in theory, the administrative staff of a gigantic enterprise, with
+experts of all nations in this and that department, to add, "Then I would
+have an Englishman to run the whole lot of them."
+
+It is an education which trains the character and exercises the mind rather
+than one which informs--the typical English education. It can turn out, and
+does turn out, shoals of careless youngsters who know little or nothing of
+science, mathematics, philosophy, of "the humanities" even, but who give
+always the impression of having been "well brought up," who have a wise way
+of doing practical things, and who somehow or other manage to play no mean
+part in the governance of the world. Observing them, many a foreign parent
+resolves that his children shall be trained in the same way. But often he
+is disappointed. The system is English, and it suits the English mind. Not
+always is it successful with the foreigner.
+
+All over England are spread the institutions--preparatory schools, public
+schools, and universities--which are given over to the making of character,
+and incidentally to the teaching of a few facts. In the ordinary course a
+boy goes to a preparatory school with a career already mapped out for him,
+the Navy, the Army, or the Church, or one of the learned professions. If he
+is destined for the Navy he has to specialise at a very early age; if for
+the Army, he betakes himself to a military college at a later time; if for
+the Church or the Bar, or the public service, he passes through the full
+course of preparatory school, public school, and university.
+
+A great educational institution in England will be found, almost
+invariably, built in a valley or on a marsh. Perhaps this sort of low
+living is thought to be conducive to high thinking. A more likely
+explanation is that most of the great educational institutions are ancient,
+and in the time of their building any great concourse of people had to
+settle close to the banks of a stream. The situation of the schools and
+universities has had its influence on the course of English education.
+Oxford and Cambridge, brooding in their low basins, alternately chill and
+steamy, are ideal places to dream in, and much more suitable for the
+encouragement of ethical arguments than of the inclination to "hustle."
+What will happen to the English character when a university comes to be
+founded on top of a Yorkshire hill I refuse to speculate; the prospect is
+too remote. But there are indications of the possible course of events in
+the results of the Scottish universities.
+
+The various schools and universities of England contribute largely to its
+list of historic and beautiful buildings. The first great educational
+centre was York. In Roman times York was a fine city. With the coming of
+the Saxons it reasserted its importance, and became the chief collegiate
+town of the kingdom. In the seventh and eighth centuries the chief of
+England's learned men hailed from Northumbria. It was in 657 A.D. that the
+School of York was founded by C�dmon, first of English poets, and with the
+York of the early days are linked the names of the venerable Bede, "father
+of English learning," John of Beverley, and Wilfrid of York; also of
+Alcuin, a great doctor of theology, who was one of the first to hold that
+"chair" at Cambridge. But York suffered many vicissitudes. Wars interfered
+with the pursuits of the scholars. At the dawn of the twelfth century Henry
+I. endeavoured to restore the prosperity of the city and its colleges, with
+some success.
+
+Meanwhile to the south-east, among the marshes and fens of East Anglia,
+scholarship had found a fitting place to dream and study. Great monastic
+houses at Ely and Peterborough--some of the most important in England--were
+the forerunners of Cambridge University. The earliest community at
+Cambridge was founded by Dame Hugolina in 1092, in gratitude for her
+recovery from a serious sickness. Cambridge has never forgotten that
+feminine foundation, and whilst Oxford was cold to the higher education of
+women movement, the other university gave the girl graduate a welcome, and
+pupils of two great Cambridge colleges, the "Girton Girl" and the "Newnham
+Girl," carried Cambridge culture wherever the English tongue was spoken.
+
+Dame Hugolina's little foundation of six canons soon extended, until the
+house held thirty. In 1135 another canons' house was established, which
+served not only as a retreat for scholars, but as a hospital and
+travellers' hospice. The third foundation came in the next century, and now
+Cambridge University began to take definite shape. A church of the
+Franciscan Friars was used first for university purposes. The older and
+more learned friars were the professors, the novices and younger friars the
+undergraduates. Later, the Franciscans were succeeded by the Dominicans,
+and still later by the Austin Friars in the control of the nascent
+University. Then there began a movement to make the University independent
+of any monastic order, and during the fourteenth century the contest was as
+bitter as one could wish for. Early in the fifteenth century the University
+had won ground to the extent that it could act in defiance of the Bishop of
+Ely, and could, moreover, secure a Papal Bull in its favour.
+
+[Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS, ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE]
+
+Simultaneously with this movement of the University towards independence of
+the monks, there had been the inevitable contests of all university towns
+between "gown's-men" and "town's-men." Cambridge had never been a city of
+any great commercial importance. But it had its "unlearned population"
+engaged in connection with the fisheries, farming, and the pastoral
+industry. Near by, the great Stourbridge Fair--one of the most important in
+England--brought every year a great concourse of people with little
+sympathy to spare for the University students, who, in turn, despised them
+(or affected to) right heartily, though probably among the younger students
+there was a lurking sympathy for the jollity of the fairs, a good
+impression of which one may get from a quaint old ballad of 1762:--
+
+    While gentlefolks strut in their silver and sattins,
+    We poor folks are tramping in straw hats and pattens;
+    Yet as merrily old English ballads can sing-o,
+    As they at their opperores outlandish ling-o;
+    Calling out, bravo, ankcoro, and caro,
+    Tho'f I will sing nothing but Bartlemew fair-o.
+
+    Here was, first of all, crowds against other crowds driving,
+    Like wind and tide meeting, each contrary striving;
+    Shrill fiddling, sharp fighting, and shouting and shrieking,
+    Fifes, trumpets, drums, bagpipes, and barrow girls squeaking,
+    Come my rare round and sound, here's choice of fine ware-o,
+    Though all was not sound sold at Bartlemew fair-o.
+
+    There was drolls, hornpipe dancing, and showing of postures,
+    With frying black-puddings; and op'ning of oysters;
+    With salt-boxes solos, and gallery folks squalling;
+    The tap-house guests roaring, and mouth-pieces bawling,
+    Pimps, pawn-brokers, strollers, fat landladies, sailors,
+    Bawds, bailiffs, jilts, jockies, thieves, tumblers, and taylors.
+
+    Here's Punch's whole play of the gun-powder plot, Sir,
+    With beasts all alive, and pease-porridge all hot, Sir;
+    Fine sausages fry'd, and the black on the wire,
+    The whole court of France, and nice pig at the fire.
+    Here's the up-and-downs; who'll take a seat in the chair-o?
+    Tho' there's more ups-and-downs than at Bartlemew fair-o.
+
+    Here's Whittington's cat, and the tall dromedary,
+    The chaise without horses, and queen of Hungary;
+    Here's the merry-go-rounds, come, who rides, come, who rides, Sir?
+    Wine, beer, ale, and cakes, fine eating besides, Sir;
+    The fam'd learned dog that can tell all his letters,
+    And some men, as scholars, are not much his betters.
+
+    This world's a wide fair, where we ramble 'mong gay things;
+    Our passions, like children, are tempted by play-things;
+    By sound and by show, by trash and by trumpery,
+    The fal-lals of fashion and Frenchify'd frumpery.
+    What is life but a droll, rather wretched than rare-o?
+    And thus ends the ballad of Bartlemew fair-o.
+
+It is on record that Edward I. in 1254 (whilst still Prince of Wales)
+visited the town of Cambridge, and acted as arbitrator in quarrels between
+the townsmen and the students. He decided that thirteen scholars and
+thirteen burgesses of the town should be chosen to represent both interests
+on a Board of Control. His son, Edward II., continued his father's
+interest in Cambridge, and maintained, at his own expense, a group of
+scholars there. In 1257 Hugh de Balsham, the tenth bishop of the diocese,
+placed and endowed at St. John's Hospital a group of secular students known
+as "Ely students." At this time also Walter de Merton, Chancellor of
+England, assigned his manor of Malden, Surrey, as endowment for "poor
+scholars in the schools of Cambridge, who were to live according to his
+directions." In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in this as at other
+universities, scholars lived each at his own charge. Sometimes three or
+four clubbed together, but each had his own "founder and benefactor." Some
+scholars elected their own principal, and paid a fixed rate for board and
+lodging, and this hostel system developed into the collegiate system which
+distinguishes English universities from all others. Now Cambridge has
+seventeen of these colleges.
+
+Among the architectural features of special interest at Cambridge is a
+chapel built by Matthew Wren, the uncle of Sir Christopher Wren. It is a
+fine specimen of seventeenth-century work. The various college buildings
+date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The dates are:
+Michaelhouse 1324, Clare 1338, Peterhouse 1284, King's Hall 1337, Pembroke
+1347, Gonville Hall 1348, Trinity Hall 1356, Corpus Christi 1382, King's
+College 1441, Queens' 1448, St. Catharine's 1473, Jesus 1495, Christ's
+1505, St. John's 1509, Magdalene 1542, Trinity 1546, Caius 1557, Emmanuel
+1584, Sidney Sussex 1595. Modern colleges are Downing College, Girton
+College, and Newnham College. Girton College occupies Girton Manor on the
+Huntingdon Road, an eleventh-century house built by Picot the Norman
+Sheriff of Cambridge. Earlier it had been the site of a Roman and
+Anglo-Saxon burial-ground. The college was founded by Madame Bodichon and
+Miss Emily Davies. Newnham College began in a hired house with five
+students in 1871. Miss Anne J. Clough was the founder. The present Newnham
+Hall is composed of several buildings acquired since.
+
+For the historical student a brief roll of some of Cambridge's great men
+would include: Green, Lyly, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Nash, Fletcher, Sterne,
+Thackeray, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Cranmer, the two great Cecils,
+Walsingham, Cromwell, Walpole, Chesterfield, Pitt, Wilberforce,
+Castlereagh, Palmerston, Herrick, Hutchinson, Marvell, Jeremy Taylor,
+Ascham, Erasmus, Spenser, Wren, Hook, Evelyn, More, Newton, and Darwin.
+
+Meanwhile Oxford waits us, with no impatience, secure in her calm sense of
+dignity. There is a story of an Irishman with a great idea of his own
+dignity. But he was careless, he professed, as to the place at table
+assigned to him. "Wherever I am seated," he said, "that is the head of the
+table." Oxford is sometimes credited with having a feeling of rivalry for
+Cambridge. A mimic war of wits has been waged over the fancied rivalry, of
+which one epigram that sticks in my memory is, that "Cambridge breeds
+philosophers and Oxford burns them" (I have not the exact words, perhaps,
+but that is the sentiment). In truth, though, Oxford has no sense of
+rivalry. She knows herself to be peerless, incomparable, the centre of the
+educational aspiration, not only of England but of the world. In her
+atmosphere of drowsy ritual she broods serene as Buddha. And she does not
+burn philosophers nowadays, however heretical may seem to be their ideas.
+Indeed the Oxford of to-day shelters beneath its imperturbable calm,
+behind its moss-grown walls, all the "latest fashions" in beliefs.
+
+As to the first beginnings of Oxford--the town not the University has just
+been celebrating its millenary--Anthony � Wood records this tale of its
+first origin: "When Fredeswyde had bin soe long absent from hence, she came
+to Binsey (triumphing with her virginity) into the city mounted on a
+milk-white ox betokening Innocency, and as she rode along the streets she
+would forsooth be still speaking to her ox, 'Ox, forth'--or (as it is
+related) 'bos perge,' that is 'Ox, goe on,' or 'Ox, go forth'--and hence
+they indiscreetly say that our city was from thence called Oxforth or
+Oxford." It is fairly certain that Didau and the daughter Fredeswide
+established a nunnery and built a church there in the eighth century. The
+town was rebuilt by Ethelred in the eleventh century.
+
+Before the Norman Conquest Oxford was a notable city, often visited by the
+reigning kings, sometimes the meeting-place of Parliaments. This prominence
+brought with it many troubles. It was often sacked and in part burned.
+These incidents despite, it grew to be a prosperous medieval walled city. A
+Benedictine scholastic house on the site of Worcester College was the
+beginning of the University.
+
+Early in the thirteenth century William of Durham, with a company of
+others, shook from off their English shoes the dust of Paris University
+after a "town and gown row" there, and settled at Oxford, and then the
+University began to take shape. He gave money to the University to found a
+"Hall" for students. Many other halls were founded (half of the Oxford Inns
+are, or were, perversion of old "Halls"). William of Wykeham gave a code of
+rubrics which became a legacy to the whole University. He built a college
+for the exclusive use of scholars of the foundation. He built also
+bell-tower, cloisters, kitchen, brewery, and bakehouse for "New" College.
+New College was the first home for scholars at Oxford. Lincoln College was
+next founded, after that All Souls, then Magdalen. Duke Humphrey of
+Gloucester gave the nucleus of the famous Bodleian library to the
+Benedictine monks. Christ Church was built with the revenues of a
+suppressed monastery.
+
+So every step in English history for ten centuries can be remembered by the
+stones of Oxford. That fine library building of All Souls, which holds as
+one of its treasures Wren's original plans for St. Paul's Cathedral, was
+built out of sugar money from the West Indies, being the gift of a great
+sugar planter in the early days of the making of the Empire.
+
+During the wars of Cavaliers and Roundheads Oxford suffered some shrewd
+blows. It was for the King always, and after the Restoration the Court
+recognised its loyalty. Charles II. with his Queen--and eke another lady or
+so as a rule--was often a visitor, and spent a great part of the Plague
+Year there, though "the Merry Monarch" showed no want of pluck or loyalty
+to his sore-stricken people during that time, and did not abandon London
+altogether. But all who could got out of London for a while to escape the
+horrors of which Pepys has given so clear a record in his diary and
+letters, as in the following to Lady Carteret:--
+
+[Illustration: ST. MAGDALEN, TOWER AND COLLEGE, OXFORD]
+
+     The absence of the Court and emptiness of the city
+     takes away all occasion of news, save only such
+     melancholy stories as would rather sadden than find
+     your Ladyship any divertisement in the hearing; I have
+     stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week,
+     and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise
+     heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could
+     walk Lumber-street, and not meet twenty persons from
+     one end to the other, and not 50 upon the Exchange;
+     till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been
+     swept away; till my very physician, Dr. Burnet, who
+     undertook to secure me against any infection, having
+     survived the month of his own house being shut up, died
+     himself of the plague; till the nights, though much
+     lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials
+     of those that died the day before, people being thereby
+     constrained to borrow daylight for that service:
+     lastly, till I could find neither meat nor drink safe,
+     the butcheries being everywhere visited, my brewer's
+     house shut up, and my baker, with his whole family,
+     dead of the plague.
+
+     Greenwich begins apace to be sickly; but we are, by the
+     command of the King, taking all the care we can to
+     prevent its growth; and meeting to that purpose
+     yesterday, after sermon, with the town officers, many
+     doleful informations were brought us, and, among
+     others, this, which I shall trouble your Ladyship with
+     the telling:--Complaint was brought us against one in
+     the town for receiving into his house a child newly
+     brought from an infected house in London. Upon inquiry,
+     we found that it was the child of a very able citizen
+     in Gracious Street, who, having lost already all the
+     rest of his children, and himself and wife being shut
+     up and in despair of escaping, implored only the
+     liberty of using the means for the saving of this only
+     babe, which with difficulty was allowed, and they
+     suffered to deliver it, stripped naked out at a window
+     into the arms of a friend, who, shifting into fresh
+     clothes, conveyed it thus to Greenwich, where, upon
+     this information from Alderman Hooker, we suffer it to
+     remain. This I tell your Ladyship as one instance of
+     the miserable straits our poor neighbours are reduced
+     to.
+
+Pepys himself had taken refuge then at Greenwich. All had left who could,
+even to dour old John Milton, whose plague retreat at Chalfont St. Giles
+(Bucks) is now preserved as an historical relic, and usually holds the
+attention of the rushing tourist, who is "doing" England within a month,
+for quite seven minutes. That is really space for a matured consideration
+to the tourist mind.
+
+"The motor has slowed down from seventy miles an hour to fifty miles an
+hour. We are passing a point of great historic interest." That is
+sight-seeing in Europe for the American tourist according to one of their
+own humorists. I have had many opportunities to observe the truth on which
+that sarcasm is based. Take Milton's Cottage for an instance. I had walked
+there from Chorley Wood one spring afternoon, and was enjoying idly the
+blooms in the little garden, when a motor rushed up, disgorged a party of
+hurried tourists, of which the man member had a guide-book. "Is this
+Milton's Cottage?" It was: so they entered. "Is this really Milton's chair?
+Sure?" It was. So they all sat on it solemnly in turn. Within five minutes
+their chariot of petrol had wrapped them up again, and they were rushing
+over the face of England to see some shrine of the Pilgrim Fathers.
+
+[Illustration: BROAD STREET, OXFORD, LOOKING WEST]
+
+But we have rambled from Oxford, which is, by the way, much cursed of the
+rushing tourist, who has a plan for "doing" it in an hour, and gallops from
+the Bodleian to Shelley's Tomb, and Addison's Walk, the Old Wall, the Tower
+of St. Michael's, and is away in a cloud of dust, without having gained the
+barest hint of the subtle persuasive charm of Oxford; without a thought of
+seeing St. Mary's Tower afloat in the moonlight; of hearing the choir of
+Magdalen; of drowsing an afternoon under the elms; or of seeking, with all
+due reverence and modesty, to gain an entrance to some of those august
+companies of Oxford--of undergraduates dreaming their exalted young dreams,
+of dons musing their deep thoughts.
+
+I own to it that I feel it difficult to write of Oxford, though, alas! I am
+able to write with facility of many places visited and things experienced.
+There is something of rebuke towards quick generalisations and easy
+judgments in the atmosphere of the place. I have been to Oxford many times.
+My very first dinner in England was with the Fellows of All Souls, a feast
+of solemn yet cheerful splendour in four rooms, one for the dinner itself,
+yet another for dessert, another for coffee, and finally, another for
+tobacco. Another time I was at Oxford to lecture to a gathering of dons and
+undergraduates on social problems in Australia; yet another time to prove
+that the young athletes of the University were conquerable at _ep�e_
+fencing. But never have I got over a first awe of the place. To attempt to
+probe to its soul seems an impertinence. Oxford has an atmosphere of the
+Round Table.
+
+Rather than attempt to give my own impressions, I prefer to quote others,
+and to state facts. That Herodotus of social life, Pepys, found Oxford "a
+very sweet place," spent two shillings and sixpence on a barber in its
+honour, and gave ten shillings "to him that showed us All Souls College and
+Chickley's picture." He concludes, "Oxford a mighty fine place.... Cheap
+entertainment." Pepys was not troubled evidently by any awe of the place.
+There is, by the way, astonishingly little in the poetic literature of
+England about Oxford, seeing that so many poets have lived and studied
+there.
+
+The University of Oxford, for all its devotion to the King, would not
+follow James II. on the path towards Rome. When on his accession he was
+welcomed to Oxford, "the fountains ran claret for the vulgar." But when he
+tried to force his Roman Catholic nominee into the presidentship of
+Magdalen, he could not even get a blacksmith to force a door for him.
+Oxford was for the Church and the Throne, but for the Church first.
+Nowadays Oxford is very much interested in social problems. It is
+Conservative still, but many of its young men have a flavour of socialism,
+generally of a "non-revolutionary" and Christian type.
+
+Material life at Oxford is exceedingly pleasant, not to say luxurious. The
+undergraduates "do themselves" very well. Kitchen and buttery maintain
+agreeably historic reputations, and the old college buildings have been
+modernised to the extent of admitting electric light and sanitary plumbing.
+But bath-rooms are rare: the good old English "tub" which a servant makes
+ready in the morning with a ewer of water is still a feature of the college
+bedroom.
+
+It is the social life and the college system, with its fine mixture of
+independence and wardship, which make Oxford sought for as a school for
+"character." But one may also gain much learning there if one wishes. Still
+it is hardly essential. You may emerge from Oxford with a degree, but with
+astonishingly little knowledge. To the "Babu" type of mind in
+particular--that easily memorising, non-comprehending type of mind--a
+degree at Oxford is particularly easy of attainment. (The University, by
+the way, attracts very many coloured students, from India, from Africa, and
+from other parts of the world.) The man, too, of real intelligence who is
+willing to seek a degree in the manner of the Babu can easily fritter away
+the most of his student hours at Oxford, and win through his examinations
+by cramming at the last moment.
+
+Since Oxford is so typical of the best of English life, it is fitting that
+it should be a place of very sweet and dignified gardens. There is the
+grandeur of elegant simplicity about Oxford gardens; and the Oxford
+trees--beeches, elms, limes, oaks--are surely the finest in all the world.
+Oxford history is curiously linked with trees. William of Waynflete
+commanded that Magdalen be built against an oak that fell a hundred years
+before, aged six hundred years. Sir Thomas Whiteway "learned in a dream" to
+build a college where there was a "triple elm tree," and that fixed the
+site of St. Thomas. To-day the green of the Spring in the precincts of
+Trinity and Magdalen is a green which speaks of all peace and wise
+comprehension.
+
+[Illustration: ETON UPPER SCHOOL AND LONG WALK, FROM COMMON LANE HOUSE]
+
+So much space has been given to Oxford and Cambridge, where young England
+receives the crowning garlands of the academies, that I can do no more than
+briefly mention the great public schools: Eton, under the shadow of the
+King's castle at Windsor; Harrow, on a hill a little apart from London;
+Winchester, nestling in the valley where, if tradition can be trusted, King
+Arthur once held a court; Rugby, in the Midlands, enjoying a sturdier
+climate and giving to the world that very manly exercise, Rugby football.
+These and others might each have a book to themselves with justice. But in
+this volume we must move on to see something of adult England.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ENGLAND AT WORK
+
+
+A good proportion of young English manhood after having passed through
+their course of education at home are claimed away from their country. The
+Indian Civil Service, the Services of the Crown Colonies, the Navy, the
+Army garrisons abroad, the immigration demand of the Overseas'
+Dominions--all these make a tax on the numbers of adult England; and
+unfortunately the tax is much more heavy upon the numbers of males than of
+females. Thus there is a great disproportion of sexes in England. The
+females far outnumber the males, especially in the cities. But after all
+the demands have been met, there are still some millions of Englishmen
+left. Let us see the work they do, the home life they lead.
+
+[Illustration: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT AND WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, LONDON]
+
+First of all, if a young Englishman is of the well-to-do order, and is
+ambitious, he will strive to take some part in politics. He may not be born
+to be a member of the House of Lords: and only six hundred or so of him can
+hope to become members of the House of Commons. But there are numerous
+other avenues of political activity, such as County Councils and Committees
+of all kinds. It is a wholesome aspiration of the best type of Englishmen
+to take some part, not necessarily a paid part, in the government and
+administration of their country. The supreme ambition, then, of the young
+Englishman may be said to be to work in the House of Commons; and that
+keeps "the Mother of Parliaments," in spite of all that pessimists may say,
+the leading legislative body of the world.
+
+In its vast membership the House of Commons includes experts on every
+subject under the sun. There is no topic of debate imaginable on which some
+member cannot speak as a past-master. And the House insists that if you
+wish to engage its attention you must have something to say. You may halt
+or stumble in your speech, but you must have something to say or you will
+fail to get a hearing, no matter how charmingly you may talk. That helps
+the debate to a high level, discouraging talk for mere talk's sake.
+
+"Mr. Speaker," who presides over the House of Commons, seems to be always a
+genius in the art of managing a deliberative assembly. At any rate, one
+never hears of a weak "Mr. Speaker." The present one takes it to be his
+duty to suppress all irrelevance and all tediousness in debate. He insists
+that a member shall say his say without circumlocution or repetition. With
+the vigilance of a ratting terrier he watches for discursiveness, and
+pounces upon the offender at once. I recollect a debate on the Indian
+question, arising out of the House of Lords' amendments in an Indian
+governing Councils Bill. All the speakers in the debate were experts with
+an inside knowledge of Indian affairs. They all spoke with terseness and
+directness. But there were, nevertheless, four interruptions from Mr.
+Speaker, that "the hon. member was not sticking to the point at issue." In
+each case you recognised that Mr. Speaker was right. In one case, and one
+case only, did the rebuked member attempt to argue the point. "I was only
+going to point out, Mr. Speaker," he started. The whole House rose against
+him. "'Vide, 'Vide," they called from front and cross and back benches. He
+attempted again, and again the cries of "'Vide" drowned his voice; and he
+had to submit without argument. The House clearly believed in its tyrant.
+It requires a curious sort of genius to be so able to "proof-read" a
+current debate and hit at once on the first divergence into redundancy.
+
+If a "Mr. Speaker" is to become a tradition as one of the greatest of the
+many great Mr. Speakers, then he must have a sense of humour as well as a
+gift of prompt decision. The present Mr. Speaker has that qualification. He
+does not say "funny" things. But in almost every ruling and reproof there
+is a slight flavour of fun. A rule of the House was made after the
+"Suffragettes" made trouble once or twice in the chamber, that the Women's
+Gallery, a curious gilded bird-cage perched up in the roof of the House,
+should be open only to "relatives of members." Mr. Speaker was asked to
+define what closeness of relation justified admission. "That," said Mr.
+Speaker, "I must leave to the individual consciences of hon. members." The
+House chuckled and understood that any respectable person could be counted
+as a feminine relative for purposes of admission to the gallery.
+
+For the student of the origins of the English-race it is interesting--and
+quite easy of accomplishment if you have an acquaintance who is a member of
+Parliament--to see the quaint ceremony in the Lords of the Royal Assent
+being given to Bills. On the occasion on which I attended, the Chancellor
+and two Peers, acting as Commissioners for the King, sat in solemn state,
+the Chancellor finding obvious difficulty in accommodating both a huge wig
+and a cocked hat on his head. To them entered as far as the Bar of the
+House, on summons, some of the Commons, heralded by Black Rod and led by
+the Speaker. The titles of the Bills were recited by a clerk, and, with
+much ritual of bowing, the Royal Assent was granted in Norman French: "Le
+Roy le veult." It was rather a pity that the Bills were painfully prosaic
+ones, dealing with tramways and the like. The elaborate medieval ceremony
+would have been more fitting to some great measure of statecraft. Still it
+did not seem incongruous. That is a characteristic of London. It is a
+medieval city modernised, but without the flavour of the medievalism being
+spoiled.
+
+Of course it is well known that the present are not the original Houses of
+Parliament; it may not be so familiar a fact that Westminster Hall covers
+the old site, and that tablets, let into its walls, mark the limits,
+curiously small, of the old House of Commons. The King is supposed by
+tradition to open Parliament in the Hall of Westminster on the old site of
+the Commons. But to do so he would have to stand exactly on the spot where
+King Charles I. rose to receive a death sentence from his revolted Commons;
+and I think that lately our monarchs have shown sentimental objections to
+this and have let tradition in the matter go.
+
+The House of Lords and the House of Commons are built in the one straight
+line, with the lobbies intervening. The King, when seated on the throne,
+can see right through (all the doors being open) to the Speaker on his
+chair some four hundred yards away. The Lords have the finer debating hall;
+but the Commons, it is complained, monopolise all the comfortable smoking
+and lounge rooms. Evidently they think that the noble lords have enough
+comfort in their own homes.
+
+Lately a committee of the Houses of Parliament have been discussing the
+question of redecorating the buildings, and have come practically to the
+conclusion to do nothing. In some of the halls mural paintings of a rather
+astonishing kind, betraying a time when artistic standards were a little
+lower than now, cover the panels. To fill the gaps with paintings of this
+epoch would make for incongruity. To imitate the old-fashioned and rather
+bad-fashioned existing panels does not seem advisable. So probably the
+difficulty will be solved by doing nothing, unless a daring wight suggests
+the painting out of some old work to make room for a complete set of modern
+frescoes. Probably, if there were just now an unquestionably pre-eminent
+British artist offering for the work, that would be done. As it is, the
+Mother of Parliaments remains with some of her halls a little patchy in
+decoration; some of them, indeed, a good deal ugly.
+
+But, of course, governing the country is the business of the few. Tempting
+though it is to linger on at Westminster, let us see other classes of
+England at work. The historic industry of England is agriculture, and it is
+to this day one of the most important, though a dwindling one lately.
+Still, however, the English are an agricultural people; though it is around
+the agriculture of a century ago that their affections are entwined.
+Modern agriculture, nevertheless, hardly exists in England, neither in the
+production of grain nor of fruit. The average orchard seems better designed
+to be an insectarium for the cultivation of pests than for the growth of
+good fruit. Straggling unkempt trees, growing for the most part their own
+wild way, naturally do not produce like the well-disciplined trees of the
+modern orchardist. But the soil is wondrous kind. That anything at all
+should come of such culture, or neglect of culture, is to be explained by a
+great graciousness of Nature.
+
+Fruit is the text I take, because fruit is at once the worst example, and
+the most obvious one. But in no branch of agriculture is there anything
+approaching to modern scientific farming. Wheat-farming represents the
+crown of agricultural achievement in England, and very good yields per acre
+are garnered, because the tillage is careful, the manuring generous, the
+climate favourable. But what gross waste of labour is involved in the
+cultivation of these tiny fields, laboriously ploughed, in many instances
+with a single furrow plough; sown by hand and often reaped, yes reaped,
+with scythe-men and picturesque but unthrifty gathering of haymakers!
+
+But there is this to be said for the old-fashioned English agriculture,
+that it is very, very picturesque. The tiny hedge-divided fields, the
+orchards in which the trees grow to forest dimensions, are far more
+pleasing to the eye than the great, bare, wire-fence-divided wheat-fields
+of Canada and Australia; or their orchards with close-clipped trees kept
+working with all their might for a living and not allowed the luxury of a
+single vagrant branch or the sight of any green carpet of grass beneath.
+And, withal, in England, farming is not a commercial speculation
+altogether. If it relied upon its commercial success, it would die out
+almost completely. But the old landholders love their estates: the newly
+rich, if they are of the English spirit, aspire to become landholders. Both
+are usually content if from their agricultural estates they are able to
+make the products pay a slight profit only.
+
+[Illustration: HARVESTING IN HEREFORDSHIRE]
+
+The area under tillage shows, therefore, a tendency to dwindle, though
+already it is very small, considering the thick population of the country.
+Love of sport and love of seeing the woods in their wild state have always
+set apart a great area of England for forest and for game preserve.
+Nowadays we do not make a deer forest as roughly as did William the
+Conqueror the New Forest for the sake of the deer "whom he loved as if he
+had been their father." But somehow land passes out of cultivation to
+become moorland or forest. These "waste lands" are far from being useless,
+however. They graze ponies and cows; they are deer forests, grouse moors,
+pheasant preserves, golf links. Land is more valuable for sport than for
+agriculture, and therefore it drifts to the use of sport, and peasants make
+way for pheasants.
+
+A fine track of oak forest has been left at the Forest of Dean near the
+borders of Wales--the finest forest tract probably in England. It is a wild
+tract of steep hills covered with oaks, used for the building of the Navy
+in the days before the wooden walls had given way to steel ramparts.
+
+The fen areas alone are in course of reclamation from the wild to the
+cultivated state. The work of bringing them back to usefulness was begun
+under Charles I. by Dutch engineers. Now a great part of the old fen lands
+are good productive meadows bounded by a network of dykes and drains, from
+which the surplus of water is pumped into the channels of the Ouse and
+other rivers, and so finds its way to the North Sea. Like the similar land
+of Holland, these reclaimed fens are excellent for the culture of bulbs,
+and Lincolnshire has made quite an industry of sending narcissi to the
+London market.
+
+Considering the Englishman at his work in other capacities, he is
+iron-founder, pottery-maker, textile-weaver, miner, and of course sailor
+and merchant. His work is characterised by a great solidness and honesty.
+There is not much "gimcrack" work turned out in England. The spirit of her
+workshops is to make things that will last, not short-life tools and
+machines, such as some other peoples love. Indeed they do say that the
+idols made at Birmingham--a large proportion of the idols for the heathens
+of the world are made at Birmingham--are made so solidly as to suggest that
+the manufacturers have grave doubts about Paganism being supplanted among
+their customers for some generations.
+
+Occasionally, indeed, one is tempted to believe that the Englishman loves
+work for work's own sake. I concluded this on first landing at Liverpool,
+when it took an hour's effort, on an average, for each passenger from the
+mail steamer to sort out his luggage. At Euston at least another half-hour
+was wasted in the same way. All that might have been avoided by a luggage
+check system such as prevails in Australia, America, and other countries.
+But evidently the English character for steady energy and stolid good
+humour is built up partly by following the sport of luggage-hunting.
+
+The English public and semi-public service, which gives to the visitor the
+first view of the Englishman at work, is simply beyond praise. In the
+railway service, the civility of the guards and porters, the neatness, the
+quiet energy of the drivers and firemen, are notable. In most countries
+railway engines seem always dirty and ill-kept. In England they are bright
+and clean. That shows a workman's pride in his work and its instruments. It
+is the man with the clean engines who is going to win through in the end.
+
+I have a means of comparison of the public service in the United States and
+in England. In New York a letter addressed to me at a newspaper office went
+astray through a clerk refusing to take it in. I inquired for it at the New
+York Central Post Office: was--not very civilly--referred to the
+particular district post office which had attempted to deliver the letter.
+A clerk there could not see that anything could be done--"the letter would
+be opened, probably, and returned to the writer.... Perhaps if I applied at
+the Washington Dead Letter Office it would do some good." I applied by
+letter (unanswered), then personally, and was told in a tired way that the
+matter would be looked into and I should be communicated with in London.
+That is the last I ever heard of the matter.
+
+Now in London one morning I left a small despatch case in a motor omnibus.
+Reporting to Scotland Yard, I stated that the papers in the portfolio were
+important and their recovery urgent. The police officer at once volunteered
+to wire round to every police station in the metropolitan district (200 of
+them), reporting the loss and asking that word should be at once sent if
+the article were handed in. Before eleven that night a police officer
+called at my house with a despatch from Scotland Yard that the case had
+been found.
+
+"The public good" depends largely on the efficiency of the public service.
+It can never be real when the Government and the instruments of the
+Government are careless of the people's convenience. The efficiency of the
+Post Office, the police, and the park servants in England is great proof of
+a sound national spirit.
+
+When the Englishman is through with his work--whether it be the large and
+dignified work of administering his Empire, or the smaller task of driving
+a tram--he goes home; and he is not a really happy Englishman, whatever his
+class, if his home has not at least the sight of a green tree. He is
+willing, even if he is poor and condemned to work long hours, to travel
+long distances each day so that he may have at the end of his work a home
+to come to which will please his love of green England.
+
+Having noted that the Englishman's home is, whenever possible, adorned with
+a little bit of green garden, step over its threshold and consider its
+domestic economy; that is to say, see the Englishwoman at her special work.
+This must be done by classes.
+
+In the wealthiest class the house is perfectly managed. It seems to run
+like the fabled machine of perpetual motion. There is no sign of the
+driving-power, no racket, no effort. Breakfast is a meal of charming
+informality, which, I think, illustrates best the domestic ideals of the
+Englishman. Self-help from amply furnished sideboards and from tea and
+coffee urns is the rule. There is no fixed moment for coming to breakfast,
+and, since you help yourself, no servants need to be in attendance. How
+pleasantly thought-out is this idea! You have not the urging to an
+inconvenient punctuality of the thought that you are keeping servants
+waiting. Dinner is a ceremony of ritual. It is the social crown of the day.
+You are expected to treat it with the considerateness due to its
+importance. To be asked to dinner is the sign of the Englishman's complete
+acceptance of you as a desirable person. (He may ask you to lunch without
+admitting quite as much.) To be asked, casually, "to eat with us" at dinner
+time shows a degree of friendliness which is willing to allow some
+familiarity.
+
+It is because the luxury of upper-class life in England is so suave and so
+refined that it does not challenge antagonism as does the arrogant wealth
+of other lands. An English manor house, such as Stoke Court--once upon a
+time the house of the poet Grey--is, from its beautiful surroundings to the
+last detail of a curtain, as fine a product as civilisation can show. And
+the Englishman's home is for himself, his friends, and, in so far as it can
+claim to be of any public interest, for the enjoyment also of the mass of
+his fellow-countrymen.
+
+The casual traveller through London may, on several days of the year, see a
+great crowd of omnibuses and drags outside Buckingham Palace, and learn
+that the grounds of the King's palace had been that day thrown open to the
+public. To a large extent the royal palaces thus welcome the people as
+guests; and the great houses of the nobility, which have fine collections
+of paintings, are in very many cases treated as semi-public institutions.
+This shows a fine public spirit and feeling of common patriotism between
+classes.
+
+The middle class fashions itself, as closely as it can, on the upper class.
+Its home is often as admirably managed, though on a smaller scale. Its
+observance of etiquette is more rigid, especially in the "lower middle
+class." Smooth home-management is the Englishman's (or the Englishwoman's)
+gift. The domestic economy of the country cottager seems generally good,
+but the city worker often makes the mistake of trying to ape the standards
+of richer people, sacrificing a good deal of material comfort to have, for
+instance, his "drawing-room" or parlour.
+
+But on the whole the Englishman's home proves as high a standard of taste
+and good feeling as the twentieth century can offer. It is a fine reward
+for the work-doer, a fine fortress from which to issue forth to work. Let
+us now see England at play.
+
+[Illustration: FOOTBALL AT RUGBY SCHOOL]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+ENGLAND AT PLAY
+
+
+"These English take their pleasures sadly," said a French wit. It was a
+misunderstanding of the national expression. The Englishman takes his
+pleasures not sadly but resolutely. It is a holiday. He is out to enjoy
+himself. He _will_ enjoy himself whatever the obstacles. There is a grim
+resolve in his mind. But he is not sad: he is resolutely merry. That look
+on his face is not agony; it is stern determination.
+
+I have seen Hampstead Heath on the midsummer Bank Holiday. A frowning sky,
+a bleak wind, and occasional gusty showers of rain declared the day to be
+not of midsummer and not suitable to open-air holiday. But the East End was
+not to be deterred from merriment. "London's playground" was like a huge
+ant-hill with swarming holiday-makers, and all had made up their dogged
+English minds to rejoice and be merry. That was apparent from the first.
+
+In the "Tube" railways girls of from sixteen to sixty--all girly--giggled
+hilariously at everything and anything and nothing. "It's from the other
+side" announced one on the train platform; and this fact about the train's
+going was greeted with shouting laughter, and the "joke" went round a
+widening circle of rippling merriment. On the road, the coster's cart,
+loaded with Mr. and Mrs. Coster and a group of Costerlings--the
+numerousness of which said "no race suicide here"--scattered abroad song,
+vociferous if not tuneful. When a shower came the song grew louder, as
+though to smother the weather.
+
+Commerce helped the people's resolve to be gay. You could buy a bag of
+confetti for a halfpenny; for the same sum a stick adorned with bright
+paper streamers, or a tuft of gorgeously-dyed flax. A penny provided a
+tartan cap in paper, wearing which one might be quite ridiculously gay. The
+oceans had been dredged and the earth rifled for the people's holiday.
+Shellfish of all sorts, bananas from the West Indies, plums from Spain,
+roses from Kent and Surrey, pine-apple tinned at Singapore, bright nacre
+shells from Australian beaches, little love-birds from Papua trained as
+"fortune-tellers" to pick out a paper telling you of the happiness in store
+for you--all these were at your service; and the standard price was one
+penny. A few coppers opened up for the holiday Englishman the resources of
+a whole Empire.
+
+Over all lowered a grey sky. But what mattered that! The factory girls
+danced on the gravel paths to the music of barrel organs (sometimes,
+indeed, of the humble mouth organ), danced often with verve, and always
+with hilarity. The Australian larrikin and his "donah" dance at "down the
+harbor" picnics with a fixed solemnity of face, as if performing some weird
+corybantic rite. The London coster and his girl are determinedly merry. The
+merriment may be in some cases forced, but it is forced with grit. A dance
+on the road is broken up to allow a cart to slowly creep past. It is
+resumed with perfect good humour, and with the same gay whoops.
+
+Yet there is nothing orgiastic in the merriment. Among the many many
+thousands you may notice here and there a man and--far worse
+sight--occasionally a girl the worse for drink, prompting the thought that
+if public opinion won't keep women out of the bars the licensing law
+should; but the great mass of the crowd is quite sober: the merriment is
+not vinous.
+
+If dancing, shouting, or "spooning"--discouraged neither by the gaze of the
+public nor the dampness of the weather--did not amuse, there were more
+intellectual amusements. You might have your head read for a penny, your
+character diagnosed by your eye for the same sum; or you might see an old
+man making a fairly good pretence of hanging himself, and he left it to
+your honesty to subscribe the penny.
+
+The Englishman take his pleasures sadly? Not a bit of it. That roar from
+the Old Bull and Bush, the crackling laughter around all the booths and
+from all the crowded paths, tell that the Englishman can become very gay on
+quite slight encouragement.
+
+A day at Southend, another great "popular place of amusement," gives the
+same impression of resolute gaiety. A good-humoured crowd packs the
+cheap-trip trains. There are more passengers than seats; and young fellows
+take it amiably in turn to stand, leaving the elders and the womenfolk to
+sit throughout. At Southend there is no beach, as one understands the term
+elsewhere--a scimitar curve of gleaming sand on which blue waves break,
+showing their white teeth in smiles. The "beach" is just a flat, which at
+high tide the sea covers, to leave it at low tide a wide muddy expanse of
+marshy soil. But the seaside trippers make the best of it. The cliffs are
+thronged with happy picnickers. The beach is dotted with waders, who go out
+many hundreds of yards along the wet flat, and in some mysterious way enjoy
+themselves. Where at last the water starts there are bathers disporting
+from boats. A pier which stretches out its long straightness and suggests a
+task rather than a pleasure, is filled with happy promenaders, who sniff up
+the smell of the seaweed and recognise it as ozone. They mostly wear
+yachting caps, or some other costume sign of the seaside, and an air of
+nautical adventure.
+
+Yes, the Englishman has a great faculty of enjoying himself. I am indeed
+struck, in many aspects of life, at the Englishman's faculty of being
+cheerful under what one would consider depressing conditions. The
+Englishman does not hesitate to take his girl to the cemetery to court her.
+A London friend asked me, with real enthusiasm, to look at the "fine view"
+from his flat, and it looked out on an old Plague Cemetery, where the
+victims of the London plague nourish the green of the trees. The Englishman
+take his pleasures sadly? Rather he takes his sadnesses pleasurably.
+
+It is the Englishman of the industrial classes I have pictured amusing
+himself. As to the richer folk, is there anything fresh to be said? Does
+not every one at least think that he knows? Have not "society" novelists
+innumerable, from "Ouida" downwards, given us studies of English "society"
+people at play, making the home life of the duke open for inspection by the
+meanest intelligence? Are there not numberless penny and halfpenny papers
+carrying on the good work to this day?
+
+If one can contrive to put out of one's mind all that nonsense and observe
+with intelligence, one will find that the middle-class Englishman and the
+rich Englishman amuse themselves after very much the same manner as do the
+people of the poorer classes. They refine on the methods, but the spirit
+is the same. At heart, the Englishman of all classes loves feasting and
+boisterous jollity. Education and breeding may modify his tastes, but they
+are still there. _Au fond_, the typical Englishman likes best a joke that
+has a savour of the "practical" in it. Give him his natural rein, and
+duke's son, cook's son--if there are any English cooks left to have
+sons--will lightly incline his thoughts to horseplay when he wishes to be
+genuinely amused.
+
+Yet perhaps this, too, passes. I remember thinking so, Lord Mayor's Day
+1909, when the procession through the city proved to be not a "show," but a
+display of the defence guards of the nation. Perhaps this may be taken as a
+hint of a growing earnestness in English life, of a recognition of stern
+struggles to come and only to be met with resolved and steady vigour. It
+had, of a surety, some significance--the sudden casting off on the city's
+great festival day of an old habit of childish play and the putting in its
+place of a display of soldiers and sailors, and boys who will one day be
+soldiers and sailors. Of some significance, too, was the ready, popular
+acquiescence in the change. Crowds that had been for years regaled on such
+occasions with broad pantomime, all fun and levity, were faced of a sudden
+with serious drama--soldiers in glittering mail, still more impressive
+soldiers in uniforms of the colour of earth; Boy Scouts playing at being
+soldiers and enjoying the most wholesome game; war paraphernalia of wagons
+and field telegraphs and field hospitals, and guns of all kinds, from the
+great mastiff siege-guns drawn by eight horses, which the Navy taught the
+Army to make mobile, down to the vicious little terrier pom-poms. And the
+people cheered the change. There was no hint at a protest against the
+departure from the stage of the old vanities. After a quieter method than
+that which came of Savonarola's teaching, but none the less surely, they
+had gone to destruction, and in their place was a dutiful parade of
+citizens armed for the defence of their homes: and the people approved. The
+Balaclava veterans and the Boy Scouts shared the honours of the day. Gog
+and Magog were not; but the crowd would have its symbolism, and cheered the
+ideal of tried valour, the ideal of aspiring youth, as they saw them
+seriously personified.
+
+[Illustration: CRICKET AT LORD'S]
+
+In 1910 and 1911 there was the same "sober-minded" Lord Mayor's Day; and
+the old pantomime procession clearly will never be revived. Perhaps now the
+English nation is at last "growing up" to be too old for such elemental
+humours. If so, does the fact speak for good augury or evil augury? I
+wonder. A well-known Scottish artist of the day, who lives in Paris
+"because it is the place for all rebels and all ideas," and sells his
+pictures in London and America, told me once very solemnly, "When the
+English people get artistic and witty they are going to go down. It is the
+Philistinism of England that proves her national strength and sanity." I
+reassured him by telling him that most of the statues erected in England
+nowadays were those of men in trousers, and we were comforted to think that
+there was still enough of Philistinism in England to keep her safe and
+sound. But it does look as though the Englishman were losing his enjoyment
+of primitive humour when he vetoes Gog and Magog on Lord Mayor's Day. Also
+he begins to live in hotels and to dine at restaurants when he is not
+travelling. Yes, on the surface all peoples grow sadly alike, and that
+charm of travel which comes from the stimulating contact of the mind with
+the more obvious differences between lands and peoples threatens to vanish
+in a generation or two, through the fashion of admiring all countries but
+one's own spreading, and through each country learning to imitate some
+other. Still, the threat has been often made before without justifying
+itself. In Shakespeare's time it was Italy
+
+    Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
+    Limps after in base imitation.
+
+But we did not in the end become Italians. In spite of surface imitations
+the deeper differences which come from the tap-roots of nations remain.
+
+The Lord Mayor's Day of the old style of buffoonery is dead. But there is,
+on the other hand, a movement in England nowadays--a happy and wholesome
+movement--to revive the festivities of May Day, which once was the great
+festival of the country-side. The old chronicles in their descriptions of
+May Day rejoicings provide a very delectable picture. This from Bourne:--
+
+     On the calends or first of May, commonly called May
+     Day, the Juvenile part of both sexes were wont to rise
+     a little after midnight and walk to some neighbouring
+     wood accompanied with music and blowing of horns, where
+     they break down branches of trees and adorn them with
+     nosegays and crowns of flowers; when this is done they
+     return homewards about the rising of the sun and make
+     their doors and windows to triumph with their flowery
+     spoils and the after part of the day is chiefly spent
+     in dancing round a tall pole, called a May-pole and
+     being placed in a convenient part of the village stands
+     there, as it were consecrated to the Goddess of Flowers
+     without the least violation being offered to it in the
+     whole circle of the year.
+
+Stubbes, writing in 1595, describes closely the bringing home of the
+May-pole:--
+
+     Against May Day ... every parish, towne or village
+     assemble themselves, both men, women and children and
+     either all together or dividing themselves into
+     companies, they goe some to the woods and groves some
+     to the hills and mountains where they spend all the
+     night in pleasant pastime and in the morning return
+     bringing with them birch boughs and branches of trees
+     to deck their assemblies withal. But their chiefest
+     jewel they bring thence is the Maie pole which they
+     bring home with great veneration as thus--they have
+     twentie to fortie yoake of oxen, every oxe having a
+     sweet nosegaie of flowers tied to the top of his horns,
+     and these oxen draw home the Maypoale which they
+     covered all over with flowers and herbes bound round
+     with strings from the top to the bottome and sometimes
+     it was painted with colours, having two or three
+     hundred men, women and children following in great
+     devotion.... Then fall they to banquetting and
+     feasting, to leaping and dancing about it, as heathen
+     people did at the dedication of their idols.
+
+Hall, in his _Chronicle_ of the time of Henry VIII., tells how the feast of
+May Day was sometimes accompanied by a kind of historical pageant. This is
+from his description of a May Day in the seventh year of the reign of Henry
+VIII.:--
+
+     The King and Queen accompanied with many lordes and
+     ladies rode in the high ground of Shooter's Hill to
+     take the open air and as they passed by the way they
+     espied a company of tall yeomen clothed all in green
+     with green whodes and bows and arrowes to the number of
+     two hundred. Then one of them which called himself
+     Robin Hood came to the King, desiring him to see his
+     men shoot, and the King was content. Then he whistled
+     and all the two hundred archers shot and losed at once
+     and then he whistled again and they likewise shot
+     again, their arrows whistled by craft of the head, so
+     that the noise was strange and great and much pleased
+     the company. All these archers were of the King's guard
+     and had thus apparelled themselves to make solace to
+     the King. Then Robin Hood desired the King and Queen to
+     come into the green wood and to see how the outlaws
+     live. The King demanded of the Queen and her ladies if
+     they durst venture to go into the wood with so many
+     outlawes. Then the Queen said that if it pleased him
+     she was content, then the horns blew till they came to
+     the wood under Shooter's Hill, and there was an arbour
+     made of bows with a hall and a great chamber and an
+     inner chamber very well made and covered with flowers
+     and herbes which the King much praised. Then said Robin
+     Hood, Sir, outlaw's breakfast is venison and therefore
+     you must be content with such fare as we use. Then the
+     King and Queen sat down and were served with venison
+     and wine by Robin Hood and his men. Then the King
+     departed and his company and Robin Hood and his men
+     them conducted.
+
+I have spoken, so far, of "amusement" only. There are other forms of play.
+There is "sport." Now sport must not be considered an amusement merely in
+England. It is a vital absorbing affair of life, a "bemusement" rather.
+Some serious-minded folk in London still tell, with deprecation, of
+incidents of the time of the South African War, when the evening newspaper
+contents bills showed that there was a keener attraction for coppers in
+news of the cricket matches than in news of the campaign. But even these
+serious-minded people themselves probably have often bought a paper which
+recorded a century in a Test Match in preference to one which gave some
+news of national importance; and have murmured to themselves in excuse
+something that the dour old Duke of Wellington probably never said, about
+the Battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton.
+
+"Sport," indeed, is so much a part of English life that it could never be
+uprooted without making some vital change in the national character--and,
+perhaps, not a change for the better.
+
+One thing the passion for sport does give to the Englishman, and that is a
+passion for fair play. There is not in any other nation of the world such
+a nice sense of manly honour. "Give him a sporting chance" means that you
+must take no unfair advantage of an enemy. "Take it like a sport" means
+that you must not be merely a cheerful winner, but must be ready to face
+losses and set-backs with equanimity.
+
+When the small English boy goes to school the question is solemnly asked as
+to what sports he will take up. This is of at least equal importance with
+the other question as to what professional or business career he will
+follow in the future. Often it is counted of greater moment. Will the
+youngster be good at cricket, or football, or rowing? On that hinges the
+degree of his greatness in his world's estimation for quite a number of
+years. Cricket is, on the whole, the most important. To be a classic bat,
+to be a deadly slow bowler, or a still more deadly fast bowler--that is
+greatness for the young man. The cricket matches between the great public
+schools, the universities, the counties, are the chief pre-occupation of a
+large proportion of England during the summer months. Football grips more
+among the industrial classes, cricket more among the professional and
+administrative classes. Between them they keep a great part of England
+excited from one year's end to the other.
+
+There are, of course, other sports of the schools--running, jumping, lawn
+tennis, hockey and the like. But they usually are just allowed to fill in
+gaps between cricket and football. Manhood, however, adds to the list of
+sports largely. There is golf. "If you find that golf interferes with your
+business, give up your business," runs a popular gibe. It accentuates,
+without misrepresenting acutely, the attitude taken up by very many
+Englishmen and Englishwomen on the subject of golf. They live in a district
+because of its golf facilities, shape their holiday resorts by the golf
+they offer, reckon their days by the chances they offer for golf.
+
+Horse-racing is another great English sport, in which few take an active
+part, but in which a vast multitude has a share of interest either as
+spectators or as speculators. It claims such a huge share of English
+attention that one definition of the English is, "a horse-racing nation";
+and wherever an English town is built in any part of the world it will have
+a race-course almost as soon as it has a church and a school. The various
+race-meetings throughout the year in England vary in their social
+character. The Derby is a great popular event, to see which the East End of
+London pours itself out on the Surrey roads. Goodwood, on the other hand,
+is very much a "society" meeting.
+
+The tale is not yet complete. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
+Englishmen find it necessary to life to disport on water during the
+summer--yachting, skiff-rowing, punting, or canoeing. Hunting is mostly the
+sport of the well-to-do, though an otter-hunt calls a whole country-side to
+its excitement, demanding of no one either that he should be mounted or
+that he should be rich.
+
+Fox-hunting is of the very marrow of the English character. "The
+unspeakable pursuing the uneatable," said Wilde savagely of the English
+squire pursuing the fox; and thereby proved his utter un-Englishness. To
+sneer at fox-hunting! It is a step towards atheism. Once upon a time I
+remember going out into the yard of a little village public-house on the
+Monaro (Australia) and seeing chained up in the yard a fox. I stopped to
+ask why, and the groom told me of an English tourist who had also inquired
+as to the fox, and who had learned incidentally that poison was laid for
+foxes on the Monaro because they had become a pest; and, so learning, had
+set his face at once away from a land where such barbarities were possible.
+He did not reckon his own life safe, I suppose, in a country where foxes
+were poisoned.
+
+[Illustration: TROUT-FISHING ON THE ITCHEN, HAMPSHIRE]
+
+The pheasant _battues_, which are one of the autumn games of the rich in
+England, I would hardly dignify as "sport." They are the growth of the
+recent times of great fortunes, and scarcely a wholesome sign, I think.
+Grouse-shooting _en battue_ is more tolerable as a sport, for at least the
+birds are wild-bred.
+
+But one may not even catalogue all the sports of England in a chapter. I
+find that fishing--in all its phases: salmon, trout, deep-sea, and the
+rest--asks attention, and may not have it. One final note: the Englishman,
+for all his present sports, is hospitable to welcome others, and often
+takes them up to excel in them. In flying, for instance, the Englishman is
+beginning now to take a place after the French. And I can recollect, as
+late as the end of 1909, a Flying Meeting at Doncaster at which not a
+single Englishman took the air. Within a little more than two years what a
+change!
+
+That Doncaster Flying Meeting was the first ever held in England, and I was
+one of those who travelled up to see the strange fowl in the air, birds of
+the growth of the fabled roc winging steady flights around the field once
+sacred to the horse. Badly treated by the weather, the "First Flying
+Meeting in England" faced an outlook which was not too cheerful. Over a
+sodden ground a grey sky lowered threateningly, and gusty winds, blowing
+hither and thither, threatened storms. The great "birds" nestled within
+their sheds, and a nervous committee went round lifting questioning hands
+to the sky. If this day were a fiasco the meeting was ruined, and the
+horses of Doncaster would have the laugh over their strange rivals.
+
+Then the sun came out. The wind dropped to a zephyr's lightness. There
+seemed no reason why the men should not fly, and they could fly. Whispers
+went round hinting at delays which were condemnable because avoidable if
+they were real. An official suggested that aviators had all the tricks and
+uncertainties of the indispensable _prima donna assoluta_; that they had to
+be humoured to take the stage when the call-bell rang. Devout prayers were
+muttered for the day when aviation would be as common in England as
+trick-cycling and stout, bejewelled promoters of flying meetings would
+lounge haughtily in front of a long _queue_ of humble applicants for a
+chance to appear, and country hotel-keepers would, with most particular
+care, exact payment in advance from poor "artists" in flying who, in the
+event of a bad season, had such inconvenient facilities for escaping
+without footing the score. That time has almost come in England to-day. But
+then in 1909 public and managers had to wait patiently on the gentlemen who
+had improved on Prometheus and, harnessing the fire that he stole from
+above, dared the assault of the very heavens.
+
+Finally the flying did begin. But it was all by Frenchmen on French
+machines. There was the Bl�riot, aptly to be compared in shape to a
+dragon-fly; the Farman, a long box trailing a baby box in its wake. The
+Bl�riot suggests a successful wooing, the Farman a scientific conquest, of
+the air. The one soars and swoops and skims actually like a bird, the other
+progresses with scientific and mathematical precision. One might imagine a
+respectable barn-door fowl brood-mother, resting a while after the arduous
+labours of the pheasant season, speculating dismally on the prospects of
+being called upon to hatch out a brood of aeroplanes, and resolving to
+accept with resignation a clutch of Bl�riots but to draw the line firmly at
+Farmans. No respectable fowl could give even the kinship of adoption to a
+flying contrivance that suggests so strongly a collection of egg-boxes.
+
+Since then Englishmen have learned to fly, and aeroplaning is becoming one
+of the national sports. Also I see in some of the papers that because at
+the last Olympic Games England got more of the dust than of the laurels,
+the Englishman must set to work to learn to throw the javelin and the
+discus farther than any one else; and I believe that a section of him will
+accept the direction to do this and do it quite earnestly. So the
+Englishman who practises at football, cricket, hunting, sailing, rowing,
+fishing, running, walking, flying, shooting, must also learn to throw
+strange things great distances. Withal he has his work to do, and some time
+to give to the enjoyment of the beauty of his most beautiful England. A
+wonderful people of a wonderful country!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CITIES OF ENGLAND
+
+
+There are so many great cities and historic towns in England that a mere
+guide-book enumeration of the chief of them would fill many pages--in
+rather a dull fashion. I shall not attempt that, but will take the reader
+for a brief glance at some of the more notable centres of population.
+
+In the beginning there is, of course, London--the capital of the world, the
+centre from which has sprung most of the great movements of the Christian
+era for the betterment of humanity, the magnet which draws to-day the best
+of the world's thought and energy. To have the best introduction to London
+I should like to think of the visitor coming upon it, as I did for the
+first time, in the "small hours" of a clear May morning. A drive through
+its streets then was a sheer delight. Hushed they were and solemn, the
+torrents of trade stilled for a few hours. But the soul of London was
+awake, though its busy material life for a brief time was asleep. The great
+grey old city was peopled with ghosts. Through the empty streets paced
+London's great men since C�sar, some native and to the land born, others
+foreign, finding in England hospitality whether they came as poor refugees
+or as noble visitors. From the houses walked out memories and traditions in
+spectral hordes. The buildings themselves, mostly of the white freestone of
+Bath, which with London smoke becomes a dull black, and then with London
+showers learns to show here and there a patch of ghostly white, lent
+themselves to the fancy of a city of dreams. The architecture was
+disembodied, and floated in the air; the shadows of venerable churches and
+institutions were a background to shadows of great men and noble women.
+
+In time I came in front of the Houses of Parliament, the shrine of
+representative government. Yonder, looming high in the pale early morning
+light, was the Nelson Monument, and stretching from it the Strand, leading
+to Fleet Street, whence issued the first newspapers of European
+civilisation. Near by Westminster Abbey lifted its grey fane in praise and
+prayer. This indeed seemed the very centre and capital of the world.
+
+If you cannot so enter London for the first time, when its busy traffic is
+hushed, and the first pale glow of a spring dawn is in the sky, be heedful
+that some night you will give up thoughts of your couch to taste that joy.
+Wander then down Pall Mall, home of magnificent clubs, after the last late
+reveller has been taken to his cab, past the National Gallery, the Church
+of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (a wondrous beautiful church by moonlight or
+first-dawn light), through Trafalgar Square, and along the Strand to
+Wellington Street. Cross the Thames by Waterloo Bridge, turning a blind eye
+to the electric signs that are now allowed to disfigure the south river
+front, and see the great sweep, right and left, of the Thames Embankment,
+and then look up in the sky to see the dome of St. Paul's afloat there.
+Recrossing the bridge, go to the left until Westminster Bridge is reached,
+and look there for the Houses of Parliament and, a little away from the
+river, the Abbey of Westminster. Then turn into Bird-Cage Walk by the side
+of St. James's Park and cross that park by the only path open at night,
+which will take you across the lake by a little footbridge. From the middle
+of that footbridge, looking towards the Horse Guards, there is, by night, a
+view as poetic as any that Venice can show: of the still lake fringed with
+woods, and--apparently rising up from its very marge--the Horse Guards, and
+the palaces which shelter the officials of the great public departments.
+
+[Illustration: DEAN'S YARD, WESTMINSTER]
+
+Most of London is beautiful at any hour. All of it, even to the most sordid
+parts, is beautiful at the fall of evening or the first glance of the
+morning. And there is always intruding into the commonplace of the
+twentieth century some touch of ancientry, some hint of romance. I can
+recall once finding a note of beauty in that least likely of all places,
+London Dock. It was an autumn dawn so grey and chill that the pungent smell
+of a cargo of pepper from one of the wharves brought a welcome sense of
+warmth. I was wandering about aimlessly when, in a dirty little basin of
+muddy water in the Wapping corner of the docks, I suddenly came upon a
+white swan swimming with placid disregard of its utter incongruousness
+there. In the grey morning, in that grey water, surrounded by the murk of
+industrialism at its ugliest, the white swan was as startling as a ghost.
+When, as I looked upon it, the air was suddenly pierced by the crisp,
+urgent note of a bugle calling the _r�veill�_, I felt sure for a moment
+that this was an uneasy dream bringing into the sordid grey of life a
+thread of white and silver from the days of jousts and pageantry. But no,
+the swan was real enough; the mystery of the bugle-call was that the docks
+were under the shadow of the Tower of London, which relieves with its
+splendidly preserved Norman keep a busy quarter of London from
+architectural dullness.
+
+But the chief charm of London is, without a doubt, its parks and open
+places, of which there are some three hundred. Indeed, of the total area of
+London a full tenth is park land, and the civic authorities are adding to
+the park area, not lessening it.
+
+Nothing that one could say would exaggerate the beauty of these parks in
+spring and summer. The grass lawns--delicately smooth, of a glowing green
+that seems to be suffused with light and starred with little white daisies,
+suggest a bright firmament, the emerald sky of a fairy tale with daisies
+to make its Milky Way. The trees are full of their own rustling song and of
+the clear soprano notes of crowding birds. The flower-beds flaunt a
+constantly changing bravery of colour. All the plants are bedded out in
+full bloom. The cost must be enormous, but the Londoner pays it cheerfully,
+and these city parks provide the people with gayer gardens than have any of
+the great nobles.
+
+For the gardens are the people's. On the dainty grass the children of the
+poor sprawl and play contentedly. In the ponds and streamlets, beside
+which, in the old days, kings sauntered, the youngsters of the slums fish
+with bent pins or scoop with small nets for small fish. The rangers are the
+friends of the people, and will help a little kiddie to a patch where
+daisies may be picked for daisy-chains. The trees are all a-twitter with
+songsters. In the ponds and streams a gorgeous variety of water-fowl
+display themselves--giant white pelicans, filled with a smug and
+hypocritical satisfaction at the mistaken reputation they have won for
+benevolence; black swans from Australia and white swans of this country;
+all manner of ducks and geese and teal. Children bring crumbs and feed
+these birds, and also the pigeons, which in consequence reach a bloated
+size and can hardly waddle out of the way of the horsemen who canter along
+the soft tracks laid out for cavaliers in Hyde Park.
+
+[Illustration: SAILING BOATS ON THE SERPENTINE, HYDE PARK, LONDON]
+
+The aloofness from the city's turmoil of the London parks is wonderful.
+Matthew Arnold noted it in Kensington Gardens:--
+
+    In this lone, open glade I lie,
+    Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
+    And at its end, to stay the eye,
+    Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-trees stand!
+
+    Birds here make song, each bird has his,
+    Across the girdling city's hum.
+    How green under the boughs it is!
+    How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!
+
+    Sometimes a child will cross the glade
+    To take his nurse his broken toy;
+    Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
+    Deep in her unknown day's employ.
+
+    Here at my feet what wonders pass,
+    What endless, active life is here!
+    What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
+    An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.
+
+The art of designing city parks of this kind seems to be exclusively
+English. In other parts of the world there are magnificent parks, but
+nowhere the little bit of woodland planted in the heart of a city.
+
+Though London is the greatest industrial city of the world, it does not
+succeed in being sordid-looking or mean. But the Midlands--where are the
+new great manufacturing cities--are frankly horrible, grimy city following
+grimy city, the pavements seeming never to end, the suburbs of one town
+stretching out lank arms to greet those of another.
+
+When rain sets in, the sordidness of these towns is complete. Thickly
+growing chimneys take the place of trees, and from the tops of their great
+harsh trunks float thin wisps of black foliage. The streets are of a
+miserable muddiness which bemires without softening the hardness of the
+pavements. Through the smoky, dirty, wet air pallid faces loom. The very
+meat in the shops has no red wholesomeness, but looks pallid and an�mic;
+that, I suppose, is really due to the fact that the Midlands so largely eat
+pork, but it pleases me to imagine that the inanimate stuff also feels the
+depression of this smoke-palled district and knows not the red of life.
+
+But much of the evil is curable. Sheffield is a brighter, more sunny town
+than most in the Midlands because its authorities insist on something being
+done to mitigate the smoke nuisance. In most of the other towns factory and
+workshop can pour out unchecked their defiling streams, poisoning the air
+and darkening the sky so that the birds leave the district in despair, and
+no green thing flourishes and men grow pale and unwholesome. Now that is
+being changed, and the Midland cities are beginning to claim their share of
+the heritage of English beauty.
+
+Away from the actual new manufacturing towns there are none without some
+beauty. Durham in the north perches grandly on its river, and the
+river-front shows off well the impressive Cathedral. York, with its famous
+Minster, has been already noted in another chapter. To Stratford-on-Avon,
+the birthplace of Shakespeare, all visitors to England go, but some English
+people are beginning to resent the commercial spirit which makes it purely
+a "show" town, with fees payable for this and that at every turn.
+
+A town not too "hackneyed" but full of historical interest is St. Albans,
+the Verulam of the Romans, with its fine Abbey Church overlooking hill and
+field. The path past that church was a wide-paved Roman road once, and by
+the vicarage foundations of Roman chambers and mosaics are found. Some two
+thousand years ago St. Albans was a stronghold of the Britons, protected
+naturally on two sides by marsh and river; adding to those natural defences
+an artificial ditch, earthworks, and a palisade. It had to stand an
+onslaught of the Roman invaders, and, of course, fell. Before that
+Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, had laid the town waste--Boadicea of whom
+Cowper sang:--
+
+    When the British warrior Queen,
+      Bleeding from the Roman rods,
+    Sought, with an indignant mien,
+      Counsel of her country's gods.
+
+Poor Boadicea: if she suffered all that is said, "an indignant mien" would
+seem to be a weak description of her state of mind; but a rhyme was
+necessary. This more or less historical Amazon of early Britain has now a
+statue to her memory on Westminster Bridge. (And, by the way, London has
+yet to learn--and might learn from Paris--how to utilise the artistic
+possibilities of bridges.)
+
+[Illustration: WATERGATE STREET, CHESTER]
+
+But to return to St. Albans. The Watling Street of the Romans from London
+to Chester ran through this town. After the departure of the Roman legions,
+St. Albans suffered a long siege at the hands of the Anglo-Saxon invaders.
+Sacked and left in ruins it became a stronghold for outlaws. Then the
+Church came with holy balm, and the foundation of a monastery gave St.
+Albans peace.
+
+Chester, where the Watling Street of the Romans ended, is to-day one of the
+most picturesque of English cities. Its old timbered houses and arcaded
+streets give it a medi�val air, which is jealously preserved in all
+restoration work. Bath is another city of Roman antiquity. Portions of the
+Roman baths still exist there, and the existence of a great modern spa
+shows that the doctors of to-day endorse the opinion of their colleagues of
+the days of C�sar. Apart from its medicinal waters, Bath is a very
+beautiful town, the architectural treatment of its hill-sides being most
+effective. In an earlier century it was a great resort of fashion, and
+there reigned Beau Nash, the Exquisite. To-day Bath is less popular, but
+not less deserving of favour, and an effort is being made to restore its
+old glories. Winchester, another Roman town, an old capital of the
+kingdom, and the reputed capital of King Arthur, where the "curfew bell"
+still rings, should be among the first three of the cities of England
+visited. From there it would be well to go west to ramble through Plymouth,
+a naval port full of memories of Francis Drake and other gallants of the
+glorious Elizabethan days. Bristol then claims a day; also Rochester, which
+has the second oldest cathedral in England, and which has a new source of
+interest in that it is emphatically, after London, the Dickens city.
+Canterbury should have more than a day, for it is a link between Briton
+England and Roman England, and then between Briton England and Saxon
+England. (Between Dover and Canterbury was the first line of resistance to
+the Roman invaders, and again to the Saxon invaders.) There Bertha, the
+first Christian Queen of Kent, worshipped in the little Church of St.
+Michael. There St. Augustine christened Ethelbert of Kent, founded a
+monastery, ordained a bishop (1300 years ago), and set the foundations of
+the first Christian cathedral in England. There, too, � Becket shed his
+blood; and there is the shrine of the Black Prince.
+
+Salisbury, with its cathedral, must not be missed. It was a great fortified
+town once, and Pepys records in his Diary:--
+
+     So over the plain by sight of the steeple to Salisbury
+     by night; but before I came to the town, I saw a great
+     fortification, and alighted, and to it, and in it, and
+     find it so prodigious so as to fright me to be in it
+     all alone at that time of night, it being dark. I
+     understand since it to be that that is called Old
+     Sarum.
+
+The remains of Old Sarum are the fragments of a great feudal castle and
+keep. It was these ruined walls and yawning ditches which sent two members
+to Parliament until the Reform Act of 1832. To the present day Salisbury is
+a central point in the military defences of England, the chief
+training-grounds for troops being at Salisbury Plain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE RIVERS OF ENGLAND
+
+
+There is no spot in England more than sixty miles away from the sea as the
+crow flies. So the land gives no room for great river systems. But the
+larger rivers are navigable to a more than ordinary degree, because they
+run their courses gently. Reinforcing the rivers are hundreds of charming
+streams. By the side of these rivers and streams is to be found the most
+charming scenery of the English country-side.
+
+[Illustration: THE RIVER ROTHER. SUSSEX]
+
+A typical English stream takes its course--shallow at the outset, deepening
+its bed as it nears the sea--through meadows which bring their green to the
+very edge of its sparkling water, past trees which take the caress of the
+water with their roots and give it back in kisses from their leafy
+branches. Rarely does the English stream have a ravine to pass through:
+generally the ravine has been softened to a gentle valley, with a wooded
+hill rising steeply on one side, a marshy meadow stretching away on the
+other. These marshes are flecked in proper season with most beautiful
+golden and blue and purple flowers, and fringed with handsome sedges. When
+it is meadow-land that meets the river there are buttercups and daisies and
+daffodils, and, at the very edge, forget-me-nots, as if to be remembrancers
+from the land to the water stealing away to the sea, to come back again on
+the chariots of the clouds. When a hill-side is passed, its woods will
+throw their cool shadows into the river; or perhaps a rough stony hill will
+reflect in summer the colour of the heather, purple like spilt wine on the
+ground; and, at almost all seasons, a touch of gold shows from the gorse,
+which is of such a glad nature that it must blossom a little almost all the
+year round, so that they say: "When the gorse is not in flower girls do not
+like to be kissed."
+
+I have found joy by the side of many English rivers, from the wilder--and
+yet only a little wild, though they seem torrents by the side of most of
+their quiet, silent brothers of the south--streams of Yorkshire to the
+gently-stealing rivulets of Kent, and it would be a puzzle to say which
+English river is the most charming until one remembers the Thames, in which
+can be found an epitome of all river delight, from its estuary all along
+its winding course past London, Richmond, Hampton, Windsor, Maidenhead,
+Henley, Goring, Didcot, Oxford, and beyond Oxford until it turns south and
+south-west to find its source under the hills which bound the valley of the
+Avon. There is no joy of forest, or park, or lawn, or garden, or meadow
+that may not be had by the banks of the Thames; and those banks are
+decorated with more noble mansions and sweet homes than are the banks of
+any river in the world.
+
+To watch in the valley of the Thames the oncoming of Spring is a pageant of
+dear delights. Dobell thus gives his impression of the Spring march of the
+flowers:--
+
+    First came the primrose
+    On the bank high,
+    Like a maiden looking forth
+    From the window of a tower
+    When the battle rolls below:
+    So looked she,
+    And saw the storms go by.
+
+    Then came the wind-flower,
+    In the valley left behind
+    As a wounded maiden, pale
+    With purple streaks of woe,
+    When the battle has roll'd by,
+    Wanders to and fro:
+    So totter'd she
+    Dishevell'd in the wind.
+
+    Then came the daisies
+    On the first of May,
+    Like a banner'd show's advance,
+    While the crowd runs by the way,
+    With ten thousand flowers about them they came trooping through the fields,
+    As a happy people come,
+    When the war has roll'd away,
+    With dance and tabor, pipe and drum,
+    And all make holiday.
+
+On a Spring day let us go out from London to do honour to the Thames,
+seeking its nearer delights. Because it is Spring the day is delightful.
+The English seasons are often disappointing. The summer is not as good,
+winter not as bad as one has had reason to anticipate. One often at the end
+of the year has neither revelled in a fine summer nor felt the happiness of
+heroism in enduring a rigorous winter; for there has been no spell of
+really fine weather and no rigours. Always the climate has been soft and
+apologetic. But Spring in England is ever delicious. The first awakening
+of the year is brimful of stirring delights. Perhaps the summer has been
+"unsatisfactory," one of these cold, damp summers which drift unaware into
+autumn; and autumn, though providing a few perfect days, has been generally
+overcast, and every day has threatened the winter. But the winter has never
+come at all in any real earnest. No snow, no big freeze for skating, just
+dull half-cold days with occasional hours as warm as though stolen from
+autumn. Nature goes to sleep grudgingly, but goes to sleep; taking off all
+her draperies of green and brown and gold.
+
+Then suddenly one morning you may see the crocus running like a trail of
+fire through the grass; and around all the shrubs and bushes steals a
+luminous mist of verdancy which, the more nearly approached, resolves into
+a starry way of little budding leaves of pale angelic green, so pale and
+pure that they were surely sprinkled from heaven in the night, and had not
+been drawn from the gross soil beneath. Yes, Spring is beautiful, and there
+is the stimulating note in its beauty which is so often lacking in the
+English landscape. Much of bright serene content, much of reverend grace,
+much of misty and soft charm with a note of wistfulness, almost of
+melancholy, England may show through the summer, the autumn, and the
+winter. On an odd day she will deck herself almost in gaiety, but there is
+ever a Puritan note of reserve, a hint of grey hairs. In early Spring,
+however, the country is all young in spirit. One might almost forget
+decorum and be rash, and whoop out one's joy aloud, coming thus under
+suspicion of being an uncontrollable Latin sort of person.
+
+[Illustration: THE THAMES AT RICHMOND, SURREY]
+
+It is probably in part what has gone before that makes the Spring so
+glorious. It is a resurrection. With the chill breath of November most of
+the trees in England prepare to hibernate, shedding their leaves and
+withdrawing their life within their grim-looking trunks. In the quiet
+stillness everything snuggles down to rest, and week after week, month
+after month, you become accustomed to seeing Nature asleep. Then of a
+sudden a south wind comes bearing the notes of the _r�veill�_, and
+everything is deliciously athrill, and it is Spring; and as you look upon
+the _feu de joie_ of the crocuses in the grass, you understand the
+exultation in Horace's lines about his Spring on the Tiber:--
+
+    _Solvitur acris hiemps grata vice veris et Favoni,
+      Trahuntque siccas machinae carinas,
+    Ac neque iam stabulis gaudet pecus aut arator igni,
+      Nec prata canis albicant pruinis._
+
+And if you are wise you too prepare to drag down a dry keel to the waters
+of the Thames. Not at the first note of the crocuses must you do so, unless
+you are greatly daring, for the Spring sends out her heralds to walk some
+distance before her steps; and there may be biting winds and nipping frosts
+yet. But the message is sure. Soon the daffodils will be dancing, demure
+and stately in the grass; the trees will be alive with their intensely
+young green; daisies and cowslips will be waking to deck the meadows.
+
+Take the rapture of the river little by little. Richmond and Kew--Kew
+Gardens at daffodil time are exquisite--should give you new joys for many
+days. The gentle march of the crocus, of the daffodil, and the narcissus,
+and the rhododendron, and the azalea at Kew, the gradual filling up of the
+great valley which stretches below Richmond Hill, with colour and light and
+warmth,--these are not to be seen in an hour or a day, but call for many
+visits. If an occasional day of fog and mist obtrudes from out of winter,
+and you are resolved, nevertheless, to worship at the shrines of Father
+Thames, explore the reach from Chelsea to Greenwich, and learn what magic
+the mist can lend to drape all that is harsh, to bring out all that is
+fine, in the works of man.
+
+[Illustration: SPRING BY THE THAMES]
+
+As the Spring ripens, carrying your exploration of the Thames farther, go
+to Hampton Court, built by the great Cardinal who was too great to be
+pleasing to the arrogant temper of King Henry VIII. They tell that it was
+Wolsey's love of good Latin that first set the jealous temper of the King
+aflame. "Ego et rex meus," the Cardinal had written to a correspondent. To
+be correct in his Latin he could have done nothing else. The poorest beggar
+in Rome would say, and would write--if he knew how to write--"Ego et Julius
+C�sar," for the Romans were not hypocrites enough to pretend that any man
+does not think himself as of the first importance to himself. Our modern
+way of pretending to be humble and "putting oneself second," the Romans
+knew nothing of; and their language made no provision for it. Wolsey wrote
+good Latin; and in time he came to lose the favour of the King, and with it
+this fine palace of Hampton Court, set like a great pink flower in the
+midst of its gardens by the Thames side. Hampton Court was a royal palace
+for some generations after, then it was given up to the people for their
+common enjoyment, and is now a show-place open to all. Its gardens are kept
+with the old care and generosity. In Spring the parterres of tulips and
+hyacinths and wallflowers and other blossoms suggest the dreams of all the
+great pottery decorators of every age come to life in flowers.
+
+Not only the gardens of Hampton Court but also the state rooms of the
+palace are open to the public, including the great hall which ought to be
+called Blue Beard's Hall, because of its series of stained-glass windows
+picturing Henry VIII. and all his wives. Do they of nights climb down from
+their windows and trip a measure together?
+
+After Hampton Court the Thames winds past Staines to Eton and Windsor. The
+great castle, which is the chief residence of the British Court, has no
+longer in these days of widely-ranging artillery any purpose of
+guardianship. But one can see that at the time of its building it was well
+designed to stand siege and assault, and to hold the passage of the Thames.
+From Windsor spreads one of the royal forests, and the valley of the Thames
+is now for a long stretch well wooded. At Bourne End begins definitely the
+long series of little pleasure houses--afloat or ashore--which mark the
+Thames with a gay note for some miles up and down from Henley. In the
+summer these house-boats and bungalows, painted always in glowing colours,
+decked out with bright flowers, sheltering brightly-dressed people, are as
+gay as gay can be. The Englishman is a little serious in his pleasures some
+think; "on the river" he is usually hilarious. On Sundays and holidays in
+summer the dwellers by the river are reinforced by thousands of trippers
+from London. There are musical comedy stars and their swains who have
+motored down, and will dawdle in a punt or a skiff--also sometimes in a
+motor launch or a steam-boat--mainly as an exercise before and after a
+massive lunch. There are visitors from the theatres who are not stars, and
+shop girls, and typewriting girls, and sporty girls--all, or nearly all,
+with men to match. Also there is a slight flavour of plain 'Arriett with
+her 'Arry, though she favours more the reaches of the river near to London.
+
+Between them all they make the Thames very very gay. Some sing or play
+banjos. Many bring phonographs and gramophones, which will give canned
+music at the call of the merest fraction of skill and effort. All are
+dressed in bright colours, and not too much dressed at that. It is the very
+lightest side of London life, that "on the river" of a summer Sunday; and
+over it all great quiet woods brood, and some of the sweetest church bells
+in Christendom send out their silver summons; and past all Father Thames
+glides quietly, making his way from the Western Hills to the sea, tolerant
+of all, with a smile of sweetness for all.
+
+But who may tell of the full delights of the Thames? We must be content
+here with the mere glimpse at the life of this one river of England, and
+leave out any description of other streams, whose very names are sweet and
+cool, or cheerful and exhilarating, or gentle and peaceful. What poetic
+syllables these rivers have won for their names--the Severn, the Darenth,
+the Avon, the Wye, the Dove, the Eden, the Dart, the Tamar, the Lynn, the
+Arun, the Ouse, the Rother, the Medway, the Trent, the Erme! And how
+sweetly English all the names are! No hotch-potch here of dog Latin and
+Levantine Greek, but plain straight English, cool and fresh in the mouth.
+
+[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE FROM FELLOWS' EYOT: EARLY SPRING]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ENGLAND'S SHRINES
+
+
+Those places in England which are notable by their association with some
+great event of human history are very many in number. Knowledge of them is
+more complete with visitors to the land than with residents. The
+Englishman, for all his reverent love of the medieval life and customs of
+his country, has not the habit of cataloguing historic places, nor of
+visiting them of set purpose. Of late, because of the new interest in
+history given by the pageant movement, because of the work of various
+historical and arch�ological societies, because also of the care which some
+public bodies are giving to the identification and plain marking of famous
+birthplaces and residences, the Englishman has become something of a
+tourist in his own country. He even shows a disposition to add to his
+treasures of history--as in the tentative movement now afoot to ask from
+France the ashes of the Plantagenet kings buried there (a movement, by the
+way, accompanied by an honest give-and-take spirit; a famous Russian bell
+taken from a Baltic monastery during the Crimean War has just been
+restored). But still the famous places of England are mostly for the
+visitor, and that visitor can often take the Englishman to many places of
+note, before unknown to him, in his own land.
+
+But not the most business-like and industrious of visitors could hope to
+compass within a life-time a pilgrimage to all the shrines of England. He
+would be wise, therefore, to determine at the outset what is the side of
+human activity which most appeals to him--the struggle for religious
+liberty and tolerance, the fight for the freedom of the Press, the upgrowth
+of the greatest literature in any modern tongue, the development of the
+parliamentary and representative system of government, the shaping of the
+material power of a great Imperial race. Of any one of these he will find
+countless monuments in England. The whole country is a sepulchre of great
+men and a memorial of great deeds.
+
+If that most strange, and in some of its aspects rather sordid, miracle of
+modern civilisation, the Newspaper Press, interests the pilgrim to England,
+let him betake himself to London, where in Fleet Street practically all the
+history of the beginnings of journalism has centred. All the world has
+newspapers nowadays--one of my own earliest memories of adult life was an
+invitation to edit a paper at Bangkok in Siam. There are mighty organs of
+public opinion at Fiji, Honolulu; and, though I have not yet heard of a
+paper published in Thibet, there must surely be one in print by now. But
+England saw the birth of journalism in its modern sense, saw the first
+beginnings of that eager hound which dogs the footsteps of civilisation day
+by day and night by night, rending aside every veil, "making" news for
+itself when the supply of murders and wars and scandals runs short,
+devouring whole forests day by day in its appetite for paper. Those old
+Pressmen of Fleet Street had probably no prophetic vision of the
+present-day newspaper when they were seized with the idea that the gossipy
+news-letters with which town mice amused country mice should be combined
+with the thundering pamphlets which used the printing-press to campaign
+against tyrants of State, of Church, of privilege. If they had had, would
+they have fought their hard fight for the freedom of the Press? I often
+wonder, holding as I do that there is a good deal of truth in what Balzac
+wrote of the modern Press in _Un Grand Homme de Province � Paris_:--
+
+     Journalism comes first to be a party weapon, and then a
+     commercial speculation, carried on without conscience
+     or scruple, like other commercial speculations.... A
+     newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but
+     to supply them with congenial opinions.... Napoleon's
+     sublime aphorism, suggested by his study of the
+     Convention, "No one individual is responsible for a
+     crime committed collectively," sums up the whole
+     significance of a phenomenon, moral or immoral,
+     whichever you please. However shamefully a newspaper
+     may behave, the disgrace attaches to no one person....
+     We shall see newspapers, started in the first instance
+     by men of honour, falling sooner or later into the
+     hands of men of abilities even lower than the average,
+     but endowed with the resistance and flexibility of
+     indiarubber, qualities denied to noble genius; nay,
+     perhaps the future newspaper proprietor will be the
+     tradesman with the capital sufficient to buy venal
+     pens.
+
+[Illustration: GLASTONBURY ABBEY, SOMERSETSHIRE]
+
+But that is away from the question. In itself the fight for the freedom of
+the Press was a good fight, and London was its campaign ground, and within
+the precincts of Fleet Street are all its memorials.
+
+If religious progress and development is of special interest to him the
+student of England will first visit Canterbury, because of its association
+with St. Augustine, Lanfranc, and Saint Thomas � Becket. It is still the
+seat of the Primate of the Church of England. From Canterbury he might well
+follow the old "Pilgrims' Way," which runs through Kent, Surrey, and
+Hampshire towards Southampton, a much-favoured ancient port of
+communication with the Continent. At Southampton landed many a company of
+holy palmers from Europe to walk their devout way to the tomb of � Becket.
+On the way from Canterbury, through Kent, near Shoreham (the inland
+village, not the seaside Shoreham), will be found the ruins of two castles
+connected with the story of his sad murder. Then a student of Church
+history might go to Worcester, the scene of the first Church Congress in
+England, that which attempted to settle the differences between the Church
+in England and the Church in Wales. At Worcester, too, died Prince Arthur,
+a death of great moment in Church history. If he had lived (a pious young
+man he was, and much beloved of the monks), then a certain Henry, who
+afterwards became Henry VIII., would never have been King of England, never
+have married his deceased brother's widow, never have had an uneasy
+conscience as that lady's charms were supplanted in his impressionable
+heart by a younger damosel, never have had his quarrel with the Pope; and
+the whole course of history would have been, perhaps, different. But Prince
+Arthur died at Worcester, and events moved to their appointed end.
+
+Then a visit to Glastonbury in Somersetshire must be made, site of the
+famous old abbey now being excavated and in a measure restored. There lived
+St. Dunstan of august memory. So much is certain; but legend would bring to
+Glastonbury even greater claims to reverence if legend had its way. There,
+tradition says, King Arthur was buried. To probe the truth of this
+tradition excavations were made in the reign of Henry II., and beneath the
+old foundations and seven feet beneath the surface, according to Giraldus
+Cambrensis, was found a broad stone bearing the name of Arthur; yet nine
+feet lower was found the body of Arthur, enclosed in the trunk of a tree,
+and beside him the body of Guinevere, The King's skeleton, says the
+chronicler, was of extraordinary size, and the skull was covered with
+wounds; the body of Guinevere was well preserved, and the colour of her
+hair was of that burnished gold which ensnared more than one devout knight
+to be her lover.
+
+Yet with all that honour Glastonbury is not content, and will have it that
+on its soil was erected the oldest Christian Church in England, by no less
+renowned a man than St. Joseph of Arimathea, who brought to his Glastonbury
+Church the Holy Grail, the cup from which the Divine Redeemer drank at the
+Last Supper.
+
+Canterbury, Worcester, Glastonbury and York (of which something was said in
+a previous chapter) visited, the lover of Church history will then turn to
+London to do reverence to Westminster Abbey, one of the most sacred fanes
+of Christendom. There is a legend of the Abbey having been consecrated by
+St. Peter himself, a legend which Matthew Arnold incorporates in one of his
+poems. Some Thames fishermen are making for home on a winter's eve; one
+lags behind--
+
+            His mates are gone, and he
+            For mist can scarcely see
+    A strange wayfarer coming to his side--
+        Who bade him loose his boat, and fix his oar,
+        And row him straightway to the further shore,
+    And wait while he did there a space abide.
+            The fisher awed obeys,
+    That voice had note so clear of sweet command;
+        Through pouring tide he pulls, and drizzling haze,
+    And sets his freight ashore on Thorney strand.
+
+            The Minster's outlined mass
+            Rose dim from the morass,
+    And thitherward the stranger took his way.
+        Lo, on a sudden all the pile is bright!
+        Nave, choir, and transept glorified with light,
+    While tongues of fire on coign and carving play!
+            And heavenly odours fair
+    Come streaming with the floods of glory in,
+        And carols float along the happy air,
+    As if the reign of joy did now begin.
+
+            Then all again is dark;
+            And by the fisher's bark
+    The unknown passenger returning stands.
+        "O Saxon fisher! thou hast had with thee
+        The fisher from the lake of Galilee--"
+    So saith he, blessing him with outspread hands;
+            Then fades, but speaks the while;
+    "At dawn thou to King Serbert shalt relate
+        How his St. Peter's Church in Thorney Isle
+        Peter, his friend, with light did consecrate."
+
+That is legend. Keeping strictly within the limits of ascertained history,
+the story of Westminster Abbey and its monuments is a brief epitome of the
+records of England and of the British Empire. It is the burial-place of the
+mighty dead of the nation, and has been associated in some particular way
+with almost every great event since the Norman invasion. I shall not
+attempt here any description of the Abbey or any detailed discussion of its
+monuments. Many books have been written about this building, and the
+subject does not seem yet to have been exhausted. One monument, and one
+alone, I shall mention. In the summer of 1296 King Edward seized the
+regalia of Scotland, and offered them the following year to the shrine of
+St. Edward at Westminster. The objects which are known to have been offered
+by him are the golden sceptre, the golden crown with the apple or orb of
+silver gilt, and the golden rose, all of which were affixed to the shrine,
+and a "pallium" (probably the royal mantle of the King of Scotland), which
+was hung somewhere in the Abbey.
+
+At or near the same time the "Coronation Stone," which also had been
+ravished from Scotland, found a home in the Abbey, and is still cherished
+as indispensable for the coronation of monarchs of the United Kingdom. In
+Celtic days a stone seemed essential for a king's coronation (the
+"Coronation Stone" at Kingston-on-Thames is supposed to mark the site of an
+old place of investiture of British kings). This coronation stone taken
+from Scotland is said to carry with it the governance of that country; and
+legend has invested it with a mythical sanctity. According to some tales
+the stone was the pillow on which the patriarch Jacob rested his head at
+Bethel. Gathelus, who married Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh, brought it to
+Spain, where it became the stone on which the kings of Spain "of Scottish
+race" were wont to sit. Simon Breck, a descendant of Gathelus, brought it
+from Spain to Ireland, and was crowned upon it as king of that country at
+Tara, where it became known as the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny.
+Afterwards the stone was removed to Dunstaffnage, where twenty-eight of the
+"forty kings" of Scotland were crowned. From Dunstaffnage it was taken to
+Scone. There it remained, and on it every Scottish monarch was inaugurated
+till the year 1296. Then it came to England to be used at the coronation of
+British monarchs to the latest, George V.
+
+It is not necessary to invest the stone with the reverence that a belief in
+all these wonders would call for; but it is undoubtedly a monument of
+Celtic faiths and ceremonies, even if its biblical origin must be granted
+the Scottish verdict of "not proven."
+
+To pass from Westminster Abbey to St. Paul's would be to enter upon a path
+leading away from the purpose of this chapter, which cannot attempt to be
+comprehensive. Let us suppose the Churchman pilgrim satisfied with
+pilgrimages to Glastonbury, Canterbury, Worcester, and Westminster. The
+political pilgrim has next to be considered. He will find hardly a part of
+England without its close association with the struggles for parliamentary
+freedom. But Buckinghamshire, which seemed always to be a county with a
+sturdy "no" in its composition, will give enough monuments of the great
+"Parliamentarians" of the Revolution--Hampden, Cromwell, Milton and the
+rest. It has also a modern association with a prominent man of modern
+times, who was very much on "the other side" in politics, Disraeli, the
+apostle of the new Conservatism. From Buckinghamshire the man who would
+wish to follow in memory the great contest between King and Parliament
+which made the British Constitution would probably best go on to
+Worcestershire, which put up some stout battles for the King. And, of
+course, London cannot be neglected. Indeed, in all great English movements
+London had a leading part, for it was always in a very true sense the
+capital of the kingdom; and not a narrow and exclusive capital at that, but
+regularly sending out its "cits" to spy out the joys of the country, and
+just as regularly attracting to itself in season the rustics to taste the
+life of the town.
+
+For literary monuments and associations London, of course, is the one great
+centre, though there should be reverent excursions to Oxford and Cambridge,
+and Bath, and then to Worcester, where the first of Anglo-Saxon poets
+wrote, and to the Lakes, which had their school of poets. But the student
+of England's monuments and shrines who has but a little time to give up to
+the study had best content himself with London. Within a full year he
+cannot exhaust its treasures.
+
+[Illustration: WARWICKSHIRE COTTAGES AND GARDEN]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE POORER POPULATION
+
+
+A dominant note of the English character is kindliness. Animals are treated
+in England better than anywhere else in the world; the ordinary sleekness
+of the English horse and the serene confidence in human nature of the
+London cat are two outward and visible signs of the absence of cruelty in
+the national character. This kindliness makes more tolerable, and softens
+considerably what would be otherwise the intolerable gulf between rich and
+poor. England, taking into consideration population and area, is the
+richest country in the world, I suppose; yet it has a proportion of its
+population sunk in poverty--"the submerged tenth" one social observer
+(making a rather pessimistic calculation) called them. English
+statesmanship has so far failed to grapple successfully with the pauper
+population, and the even more pitiful class which struggles grimly on the
+edge of pauperism; but the English kindliness attempts to mollify the
+situation with vast organised charities, private and public, and makes it
+just tolerable. But even so it is painful: yet has to be faced to get to a
+true picture of England.
+
+I spent the late months of autumn one year in looking into the case of the
+unemployed and the casual workers; tramping the north country with them and
+following them then on their pilgrimage to London. With the first hint of
+winter the unemployed or the casual worker who knows the rules of the game
+heads for London. In the summer and the autumn he has wandered the
+country-side, working more or less regularly as he tramped, in potato
+fields, turnip fields, hop gardens, cornfields.
+
+It is a steadily narrowing opportunity, this casual agricultural work. With
+each year more and more of England's fruit, hops, vegetables, roots, and
+corn are grown abroad. To some extent, also, labour-saving machinery is
+displacing the manual worker where the tillage of the soil still survives.
+But there is surprisingly little machinery used in British agriculture as
+compared with that of Canada, the United States, and Australia. The very
+small farms do not allow of the economical use of machines. Some crops are
+still cut by scythes; a reaper and binder is less common than the simple
+reaper which cuts the corn and leaves it to be gathered and tied by a
+harvest hand.
+
+It is astonishing how close the agricultural land comes to London. One may
+see, within half a mile of Hampstead "tube," odd hayfields, and after
+leaving the Midlands, approaching London from the north, the pall of smoke
+lifts and the heavens appear as a broad belt of agricultural land
+intervenes. It would seem as if the traveller were passing away from, not
+approaching, the great industrial centre. Leaving Luton and coming through
+to St. Albans the country smiles in green pleasantness within sight and
+sound, almost, of London. Birds see the sky and rejoice. Hayricks warm the
+landscape with their golden yellow, and over the stubble fields sturdy
+plough-horses pass and repass, painting the fields with broad brush strokes
+a rich chocolate brown. The hedges in the autumn are glowing with
+berries--blackberries and the scarlet spots of the hawthorn berry. With
+close search even hazel-nuts can be found, and this within the area tapped
+by London motor-buses and trams.
+
+Sometimes the nuts and the berries give some sort of temporary relief to
+the casual worker. I remember one typical man of the "submerged tenth" who
+was making a harvest of the berries. He was a poor old tramp, hobbling
+along quickly in spite of the stiffness of rheumatism. He had a can to fill
+with what he gleaned from the hedges. He hoped, he told me, to get a
+shilling for the berries at the next town. His age was sixty-six, and he
+had been in his young prime a navvy and road labourer. Now he was past all
+hope of further employment as a labourer, and navvying work was impossible.
+Proudly he boasted that he had never been "in trouble," and had never
+actually begged, though in the main he lived on charity. His winters, it
+seems, were spent in the workhouses. With the coming of the spring he
+turned his face towards the green fields, and lived somehow through the
+summer on what he could pick up as the reward of doing odd jobs or as the
+dole of charity. He was one of a class I found common enough on the roads,
+past all steady and useful work, going with crippled gait steadily to the
+end.
+
+The same day I encountered, among other wayfarers, a man who suggested this
+old and desolate tramp in the making. He was a young, vigorous, and capable
+fellow, civil, intelligent, and eager for work. He had walked from
+Manchester, having been on the road since the previous Sunday (the day was
+Saturday), and the golden goal at the end of his journey was a week's work
+at the Islington Agricultural Show, which had been promised to him. For the
+week he would get 30s. After the Islington Show he had the chance, perhaps,
+of getting another job in the same line. He followed agricultural shows
+around the country, for he understood cattle and horses.
+
+Another type of the poor I met outside of Durham, plodding patiently along
+two miles out of the old cathedral city. He was something a little higher
+than a casual labourer, and had a "trade," if one might call it so: that of
+a porter. He was making out from Durham, where "things were very bad," to a
+country place, unspecified, where there was work.
+
+A brave and cheerful soul he was. At the age of four his leg had been
+broken and badly set, and he had grown up a little lame. That was over
+forty years ago, when the poor had less chance of good medical attention
+than now. The accident had frustrated the wish in him for an outdoor life.
+He confessed that all his thoughts turned to the soil, and while he was
+working in Durham as a casual porter he would in slack times always try to
+get out to the fields. He had never married; there was no hope of married
+life in his calling. He had tried to get a more steady sort of job as a
+painter, as an ironmonger's assistant; but his leg was against him. He had
+not a grumble in his whole composition, and talked cheerfully of the green
+grass and confided that he was forty-six. "But I don't look it a bit, do
+I?" I lied manfully that he did not seem more than thirty-five, though,
+poor, wizened little chap, I would have put him down at ten years above his
+age.
+
+He was a patient little fighter, and had, with his lame leg, kept up
+somehow with the ranks of the workers, and had never begged a meal or a
+shilling in his life, and was, in a way, happy for all his frustrated
+longing for the open life of the country.
+
+Out from Newcastle-on-Tyne another day of my tramp I picked up with a
+worker in the building trade. He was not a tramp, for he had a house of
+his own and a wife of whose house-wifery he was very proud. But he was
+unemployed, and had been for some months. That morning he had got up at
+five o'clock to tramp eight miles to a suburb of Newcastle in the hope of
+getting a place on a little church-repairing job employing three masons. He
+had not succeeded, and was tramping the eight miles back again. A penny
+fare on the tram would have saved him some two miles, but pennies were not
+to be spent lightly.
+
+A homely, domestic man, typically English in his virtues and in the
+limitations of his virtues, was my mason friend. In the good times of the
+past he used to make 35s., 37s. 6d., and �2:1:6 a week at his trade,
+"steady work and constant." As a bachelor he found that all his money went
+as fast as he made it. After one long spell on �2:1:6 a week he had nothing
+at all left to tide over a week without work. That set his thoughts to
+matrimony and he "settled down." Since then his finances had been much more
+steady and prosperous. While he was in work he always paid his wife 30s. a
+week out of his wages, no more and no less. "He didn't come asking her for
+some of it back in the middle of the week like some men did. Thirty
+shillings she had, regular, when he was in work, and she saved some of it."
+Whatever the balance was, 5s. or 7s. 6d. or 11s. 8d., was for himself. That
+was his pocket-money, and he spent it in a moderate and sensible
+roystering, and on other comforts of the manly life.
+
+The virtues of his wife as a housekeeper he talked of sturdily. Such a
+thing as baker's bread--"nasty, unwholesome stuff"--was never seen in his
+house: it was all home-baked bread. Part of the secret of the housekeeping
+in unemployed times was perhaps the fact that they had two lodgers, who
+paid 3s. 6d. a week each for their quarters and paid for the "raw material"
+of their meals, having the food cooked free. I was interested to learn that
+11-1/2d. a week was charged to each of the lodgers for the flour used in
+his bread--not an extravagant weekly expenditure on that item of food.
+
+[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF AMBERLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE]
+
+A good average man this, not at all heroic, common-sensible, and strictly
+moderate in his virtues, keeping a very good margin of his wages for
+himself, but not poaching on the remainder. Probably the wife has much the
+harder life of the two, with her 30s. a week steady when the good man is in
+work, and nothing at all but the lodgers' money at other times; probably,
+too, she is happy enough. May a change of fortune soon bring steady work!
+
+Studied from the English country-side the life of the lowly appeared to me
+often pitiful but rarely abject. It was relieved from squalor by much
+heroic courage; and by evidences of that beautiful love of the green fields
+which the English seem to have by nature. In London the position is more
+depressing, for there one encounters a vast army in which are mingled
+inextricably poor victims worthy of the fullest compassion, and cunning
+"wasters" who, finding it easy to live without work, are resolved not to
+work.
+
+To the "professional unemployed," I believe, the autumn entry into London
+is a blessed relief. He knows all the charities which can be worked for
+food and shelter. He has put in his penitential period in the country to
+give a reasonable air to the tale that he has been in work, and prepares
+with zest to tap the old springs of alms. London promises him winter
+comfort, human companionship; warm nights in shelters, when politics can be
+discussed and the state of the nation learnedly argued; amusing tests of
+his skill in bamboozling charitable societies. To the genuine seeker for
+work a first impression of London must be terrifying. The place is so vast,
+so inchoate. It seems to suggest a great organised mass into which no
+newcomer can hope to penetrate.
+
+The day I tramped in--on my mission of investigation--a thin rain filled
+the air with a blurring mist and made a horrible mud underfoot. My too
+realistic boots gave this mud entrance to my feet. The soft, suggy sound
+and feel of this mud making its way in and out was at once depressing and
+enraging. I cursed the weather, and London, and the resolution which had
+brought me on the enterprise. It seemed as if it would be just heaven to
+have clean feet, and stout soles between them and the loathsome dirt. I was
+wet through as regards clothes. That did not matter. The rain from above
+was clean except for a little soot. But this stuff beneath--faugh! If other
+men think and feel as I do, when you wish to "lift" a man out of the mire
+of hopelessness give him first a stout pair of boots.
+
+The Spitalfields "doss" to which I had been directed looked too much like
+the mud beneath felt. It was stale and dirty, from its ceiling to its
+floor; and all the air between was stale and dirty. The men steaming and
+smoking in the thick atmosphere were sympathetic to the place. I passed on.
+That dossery could be investigated another time, on some night when the
+streets were dry. At a "Rowton House" in Whitechapel I found a clean and
+endurable lodging, paying ninepence for a night's lodging. There were good
+facilities to wash and to eat and to cook one's food, and a reading-room
+even. One could be, clearly, comfortable enough here--if one had the
+ninepence.
+
+There are much cheaper lodging-houses, and one absolutely free one, Medland
+Hall, on the Ratcliff Highway near Stepney Station. I visited it one
+November evening at five o'clock. Under a railway arch there was drawn up a
+tattered regiment of men some 300 strong. Now and again a late-comer
+arrived and took his place in the rear rank. Two police officers attended
+to keep order, but in the men there seemed not enough energy left for
+disorder. Like a cluster of bats they hung, dark, inert, to that wall of
+the arch which gave some little shelter from the driving rain. There was
+not one touch of colour in all the dark ranks. Each man seemed to be
+dressed like his fellows, in something that was black, either originally or
+made so from the struggle in the mud of life. It was a patient crowd. Now
+and again a harsh cough sounded from some man, and always he seemed to be
+trying to smother it, as if unwilling to break into the silence of the
+common misery; or a lame man shuffled uneasily on his feet, and he also
+seemed ashamed a little of the noise.
+
+At six, when the great bulk of the crowd had been waiting an hour (some of
+them probably much longer), the order was given to march, and the men filed
+into Medland Hall, each one getting as he entered a half-pound of bread
+with a little butter. That was his meal for the night, and, like his bed,
+it was absolutely free. The bed was a box on the floor, with a seaweed
+mattress and an oilskin covering.
+
+Most of the men were young. Few of them had gone past the labouring age.
+Some were obviously tuberculous, others crippled with rheumatism. The
+gathering, too, had its castes. A man who had been once a chief clerk, and
+who still wore a "boxer" hat in place of the usual cap of the unemployed,
+was the aristocrat of the doss.
+
+This winter (1912) the London authorities, at last awake to the scandal of
+homeless men wandering or sleeping in the streets, have instituted a system
+by which the police will find shelter for all who are found without homes.
+But even that will not remove all the scandal.
+
+For many years the charitable provision for the homeless in London has been
+ample, and I could not at first find an explanation for the Thames
+Embankment miserables who huddled on the seats throughout the nights and
+had their shivering sleep disturbed again and again by the police, or for
+the unfortunates who haunted "the Dark Arches" of the Strand and other
+places giving shelter from the rain. With the use of any intelligence at
+all, it seemed, a man could get shelter of a sort and food of a sort. Yet
+people, I know, did in rare cases actually perish from exposure and from
+hunger in London. Inquiring among the Embankment men, the unhappiest of all
+the miserable army, there seemed to be always one of two explanations for
+haunting the Embankment--either the desperate sense of shame of the man who
+has come down from a position of some comfort and decency and shuns a
+shelter because it means a display of his misery; or the dull lethargy that
+comes from extreme hardship and kills every suggestion of self-help.
+
+One unemployed with whom I conversed, or tried to converse, at midnight
+just near the Temple Pier was sunk in such apathy that he, I verily
+believe, would not have walked 400 yards to get the most comfortable bed in
+London. At any rate, when I gave him a shilling he made no move away from
+his seat, showed, indeed, very little interest in the dole. His was an
+extreme case, but many seemed to be almost as dead to any idea of effort.
+"With the use of any intelligence" a man can get shelter--yes. But the man
+who is down often loses his intelligence as he sinks. The "cunning"
+unemployed, on the other hand, flourishes.
+
+In China they have a term "rice Christians" for heathen who pretend
+conversion to Christianity in order to secure food from the missionaries.
+The cunning unemployed is usually a "rice" Anglican, or Roman Catholic or
+Wesleyan of the most fervent type. His religious views are strong to the
+point of bigotry. But should he have a wife and household to maintain by
+the sweat of his brain it will often happen that, while he is a rice
+Anglican of the most uncompromising type, she is a rice Wesleyan or
+professor of some other type of Nonconformity.
+
+For the man who has made a study of the art of living without work London
+offers a vast field. There are so many charities that by going the round it
+is possible to avoid all danger of becoming too familiar at any one of
+them, and since there is no effective safeguard against overlapping it is
+easy to be getting help from two or even more sources simultaneously.
+
+This state of affairs, of course, does not help the genuine unemployed, the
+man who wants work and not charity. But it is a constant temptation to him
+to drop his self-respect and sink to the level of the men who, he finds,
+live just as comfortably without labour as he is able to do by steady
+industry.
+
+The life of "toiling for leave to live," using up to-day for just as much
+reward as will allow you to be fit for work to-morrow--and that is the life
+of thousands--has, after all, not much attraction, considered
+dispassionately. The tramp in Mr. Wells's story who explained that it was
+followed only by people who had been "pithed"--_i.e._ had had their brains
+extracted while at school--had some grim reasonableness in his
+fancifulness. When honest work offers a hope of progressive betterment the
+enthusiasm for it is natural. When, as for too many, honest work offers
+nothing but a subsistence fractionally better than that of the dishonest
+loafer it is surprising not that there are so many but so few of the
+"cunning unemployed." Only a very strong innate sense of duty and
+self-respect can account for the fact that millions keep pressing
+desperately on in the ranks of the workers with no more real reward for
+their efforts than the pride that they have never been to the "workhouse"
+or taken alms from any one.
+
+[Illustration: THE TOWER FROM THE TOWER BRIDGE, LOOKING WEST]
+
+Recognising that, it is possible to come away from a study even of the
+"submerged tenth" in England with some cheerfulness. The mistakes of the
+past which have allowed that inundation of misery can be rectified, and,
+serious as those mistakes have been, they have left the character of the
+English people in the main sturdy and self-respecting. Of the "submerged
+tenth" I think only a tenth, _i.e._ one per cent of the total population,
+is actually hopeless and helpless. The others will respond to a wiser
+organisation of the national life offering more opportunity and less
+charity. On this point I have sought the views of several clergymen working
+in the East End, the poor quarter of London. They were all proud, and
+justifiably so, of the various efforts made to salve the lot of the
+poor--the university settlements, the hospitals, infirmaries, nursing
+associations, charitable and semi-charitable dormitories, the associations
+for the supply of food, clothing, coal, and the like. But not one,
+challenged to it, could truthfully claim that the sum of all this work was
+remedial in any real sense of the word. Not one of them could deny that
+most of it directly attacked the principle of self-reliance. The wretched
+were kept alive, and that was all. No future was opened out for the great
+majority of them, and very very rarely did any future mean useful
+citizenship of Great Britain, but rather the export of the young citizen to
+some other land in the hope that it would give him a chance.
+
+Yet all agreed that as a matter of reasonable probability most of the men
+who are down could be saved and are worth saving. The proportion that is
+absolutely hopeless was variously stated. It may be averaged, in their
+opinion, at 5 per cent. The other 95 per cent could be brought to useful
+lives, these clergymen who are close students of the matter agreed.
+
+That leaves, in the opinion of the men who have made a life study of the
+subject, not my one per cent, but only one-half per cent of the total
+English population as hopelessly "down." It is a bad wastage when one
+thinks that every human creature is a temple of the Divine, but it is not
+so gloomy a position as most imagine. And it can, and it will be stopped.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE ARTS IN ENGLAND
+
+
+That the English are an "inartistic" people, without true appreciation of
+pictures, music, the drama, is a statement commonly made and commonly
+accepted without any very serious examination of the evidence for and
+against. A just judge giving the benefit of a close and impartial inquiry
+to the case of Madam England, indicted for that she is a Philistine without
+any true taste in, or proper love of, the arts, would be able to go no
+further than the Scottish verdict of "not proven." But few of those people
+who find England guilty without leaving the box have attempted to make any
+sound examination of the evidence available. They have heard of a
+Hanoverian monarch of past days, who despised "boetry und bainting," and
+have come to a settled conviction that that represented the English mind
+then and represents it now.
+
+Elsewhere I have maintained that a nation which has such a noble taste in
+parks and gardens as have the English must be "�sthetic" at heart; and
+"�sthetic" and "inartistic" are not compatible. But apart from Nature love
+and delight in gardening, there is a great deal of evidence to be cited in
+the Englishman's favour as a lover of the arts.
+
+It could certainly have been said with truth a few years ago, and probably
+could be said now, in spite of the recent rush of American buyers into the
+picture market, that the finest collection of Italian Masters of painting
+outside of Italy could be made from English galleries and English houses,
+and also the finest collection of Spanish Masters outside of Spain, of
+Flemish Masters outside the Low Countries, of French Masters outside of
+France. In short, one might get the finest and most complete collection
+representative of all the painting schools of the world from English
+collections.
+
+One ungracious explanation is easy: that the English have been the rich
+people and have been able to buy. But a rich nation does not buy pictures
+without some national love and appreciation of pictures. I hesitate to
+write that in these days when one hears of a _nouveau riche_ commissioning
+a friend "to buy him �10,000 worth of pictures by those old jossers"; and
+in any well-regulated fashionable furniture shop you may buy with the pots
+and the pans and the indubitably old worm-eaten antique furniture, pictures
+of the right age; and even books in the proper tone of binding for your old
+oak book-shelves. Still, taking a view by centuries and disregarding the
+crazes of a season or a generation, it is fair to conclude that a nation
+which consistently buys pictures, and good pictures at that, has some love
+of and taste in painting.
+
+The lordly young Englishmen of past generations who, "doing the grand
+tour," came home with examples of the great continental Masters of painting
+for their halls, had not the motive of a blind and vulgar obedience to a
+passing craze. They must have known good pictures and liked good pictures.
+Year by year, generation by generation, they carried on their work until
+English collections came to have representative examples of all the great
+schools of the world. The while, there was no lack of English painters of
+distinction, and though the English schools of painting may not claim the
+same degree of achievement as English schools of prose and verse, they have
+done enough to rescue their country from the reproach of being careless as
+a nation of the art of painting. There are, let it be agreed, "Philistine"
+classes in England; and these "Philistines" have had more authority and
+opportunities of rule in England than in most European countries, a fact
+which has carried with it artistic disadvantages to weigh something in the
+balance against advantages in other directions. But it is absurd to attempt
+to represent England as a lost country artistically. The visitor who is
+interested chiefly in art will find in the various public galleries (not
+alone in London, but also in the provincial cities) many great examples of
+painting. If he chooses to carry his curiosity further he will find most of
+the private collections open to the inspection of any one who will take the
+trouble to ask courteously for permission to visit them.
+
+In regard to music, it is probably just as easy to clear England of the
+charge of ignorance and want of sympathy. But I cannot undertake the task
+with any skill, for I know little of the musical world, not enough even to
+distinguish surely in Simonetti, the famous Italian conductor of the
+Athanasian orchestra (the names are laboriously fictitious), the excellent
+Simpson of Brixton, S.W. But the evidence (I plead always for a judgment on
+evidence, not on the hasty impression founded on a prejudice) would seem to
+show that England at one time was musical enough in a sweet wholesome way,
+producing a music of the open-air and the green fields. Then there came the
+great industrial epoch, and the people turned from the fields to the
+factories, and dug under the soil instead of tilling its surface; and that
+stream of thrush-melody was choked, and there came nothing notable to take
+its place, with no prompting to madrigal and pastoral, with not enough of
+neurasthenia to produce anything notable in the music of morbidity.
+
+But the charge against musical England is carried further. Not only does
+she produce nothing, but she appreciates nothing. Dumb herself, she is
+resolutely deaf also to the song of others. I find it difficult to believe
+this in view of the fact that the hall-mark of London is still sought
+eagerly by the singers of the world, and is regarded as the final stamp of
+approval. If England were such a barbarian of the musical world as some
+would have us believe, why this eagerness for an English verdict of
+approval, an eagerness which is to be met with all over Europe, America,
+and Australia?
+
+To record concrete facts, there is a great deal that is of musical interest
+to be explored in England. The capital has many excellent concert halls,
+where all the world's music from the classics to the latest frenzies of
+neo-Impressionism can be heard. In the provinces, too, there are many fine
+musical organisations, and when the "Celtic fringe" comes to be
+encountered, as in Wales, there is a musical fervour to match that of the
+most ardent of the Latin races. So--even though opera in London is of
+social rather than of musical importance--the English cannot be condemned
+at the present day as musically careless and ignorant; and in past times
+they have produced some worthy music and show signs in the present time of
+a revival of native music.
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY FROM THE END OF THE EMBANKMENT]
+
+As to the art of the theatre, England, proud in a magnificent past, which
+is still the only rival in Christian times of the days of the ancient Greek
+drama, can with more good content than most nations submit to the present
+phase which makes production and scenery and not the play "the thing." But
+in dramatic as in musical art it is the fashion to represent England as
+sunk in a Slough of Despond, whilst other nations march gloriously forward
+on the upper heights. I take leave to dispute the truth of that picture. It
+is not a Golden Age anywhere for the drama. Our time seems to be capable of
+very little else than going over the tailing-heaps of past workers,
+searching for a little grain of gold here and there, and, after finding it,
+beating it out thin with infinite labour to make it appear as impressive as
+possible. There are no great nuggets being turned up; no one is pouring out
+a golden stream. But of what little pottering work there is being done,
+England is responsible for a fair share.
+
+Perhaps her surviving instinct of Puritanism stands in the way of slightly
+increasing a small success. There are only two stories, says some one:
+there is the story of one man and two women, and there is the story of one
+woman and two men. English custom has insisted for a century or so upon a
+certain reserve in the treatment of any one of the infinite variations on
+these two themes; and there is a Censor to enforce some unwritten and
+poorly-understood Rules of the Game. Censors of the Censor say that his
+main rule is that you may not be "sexey" and serious, though you may go far
+on the path of being "sexey" and frivolous. A fairly faithful study of the
+London theatres has suggested to me that whatever primness there was about
+the censorship is rapidly breaking down, and there is not an undue amount
+of it nowadays.
+
+The present (1912-13) fashion in London is for spectacle plays--in which
+the mounting is of at least equal importance to the play--and "atmosphere
+plays," the scene of which must be pitched in some unfamiliar, preferably
+some slightly uncouth phase of life, which is reproduced with meticulous
+accuracy. I suppose that Sir Herbert Tree may be accepted as the leader of
+theatrical London of the day: and when I sought to get an impression of
+theatrical London "behind the scenes," I obtained permission to watch him
+at work in the shaping of a big "production," _False Gods_, from the
+French, a philosophical treatise in the form of a play, which was to be
+launched upon London with the adventitious aid of impressive "production."
+
+"No! No!! No!!! You must go mad, go mad! Think of a French Revolution--be
+just that! Dance, leap, shriek. Go mad!"
+
+That was what I heard at the first dress rehearsal of _False Gods_, Sir
+Herbert Beerbohm Tree speaking with gesture to match his speaking. He had
+been watching the rehearsal with obvious satisfaction up to that. All had
+gone well and smoothly. In the first stage-setting his certain eye took in
+the fact that there was one false god too many on the terrace of the great
+Egyptian house. The bulk of that god spoiled the sky and the beautiful
+vista of the Nile. With a brief iconoclastic phrase that god was abolished.
+
+Then the races of Egypt took Sir Herbert Tree's attention. "Too pale, too
+pale! Something more of the Nile mud in your faces!" The crowd of "supers"
+were prompt with grease-paint to make their colour more Egyptian. But the
+producer was not quite satisfied, and mounting the stage took himself a
+stick of paint and, working on their faces like an artist at a canvas,
+tinted two "supers" to the proper shade of Egyptian darkness.
+
+Having so arranged the gods and the faces of men, Sir Herbert Tree turned
+to the firmament. The sky must have more light here, less light there. "It
+must get the burnished effect." In time, after many experiments in
+limelight, it does.
+
+But those are only details, which the chief of the theatre attends to
+between snatches of conversation, never dropping for a moment his air, a
+little that of a philosopher, a little that of a Beau Nash. When, however,
+in the great scene where the images of the false gods are torn down, the
+mob on the stage tears with but little noise and no rage, Sir Herbert Tree
+is moved out of himself. In a moment he is on the stage with the command,
+"You must go mad!" and giving a workmanlike imitation of what he wants. The
+"supers" accordingly go mad and all is peace again, and there is assurance
+that the big scene will "go" as it should.
+
+A curious study it was--the finishing touches being put on to a great
+London production. The final result must be such art as imitates Nature and
+yet creates illusion. Every detail has to be most carefully considered and
+revised again and again to fit harmoniously in with the whole scheme. The
+colour of a dress, the tint of a face, the shape of an eye, the placing of
+a flower or an ornament is changed and changed again until there is the
+harmony which apes perfection. Above all, the lights must be schemed--a
+little more purple, or green, or grey, or rose-red, or yellow; a softening
+here, a heightening there. A thousand-and-one combinations of light are
+tested until the right one is hit upon to suggest mystery, joy, sorrow,
+dawn, evening, superstition, cruelty, as the case may be. Much of the story
+the audience will read so clearly on the stage on the first night is
+written by the lights. The greatest trouble of the producer has been to get
+those lights right, not only for each scene, but for each minute of the
+scene, for with every phase of the play the lights must change.
+
+It seems a monstrous task to the uninitiated. But during it all the
+producer at work is, as a rule (there are exceptional moments when the
+"supers" must go mad), quiet, chatty, willing and able to show the other
+side of his personality as a philosophical critic of the drama, its aims,
+its ethics.
+
+"Yes, I work in a large frame.... Problem plays would not suit my canvas.
+(More purple now in that evening sky.) The object of the drama? Of course,
+to be amusing and to make people happy. That does not exclude tragedy.
+There is pleasure in tragedy, if it is lofty and not repulsive. We arrive
+at the same physical result through weeping and through laughing. (Those
+hands _must_ all be held in the same way in the invocation. Remember it is
+a ritual!) Torture scenes on the stage? No, not if they are repulsive. But
+there are ways and ways. You can put blood trickling down the steps of a
+scene to suggest tragedy, and you can put blood trickling down the steps so
+as to suggest nausea. That second thing must not be. There must be nothing
+repulsive. (Give more of a pause there. And don't go near her. She must
+hold the stage for fifteen seconds.)
+
+"Yes, I think the drama is growing in influence in England. We have a
+stronger drama than a decade ago. To-day the theatre is stronger in England
+than in any other part of the world. I say it deliberately. Stronger than
+in France, stronger than in America. And its influence grows. It is partly
+due, I think, to the decline of dogma. (Please, please, that music a little
+softer; but quicker too, brighter!) The stage's influence grows
+as dogma declines. What do I mean by dogma? Well, faith of the
+open-your-mouth-and-shut-your-eyes brand. But the stage must not have a
+pose nor a preach. We must be unconsciously ethical and proud of our craft.
+There's not enough pride in craftsmanship these days, not enough of the
+artist's spirit either in the artisan or in the artiste.
+
+"Above all, if we are to be artistes we must be tolerant."
+
+Then the time had come for Sir Herbert Tree to dress as the High Priest of
+Egypt. The two concluding acts of _False Gods_ are coming, and in those two
+acts Sir Herbert Tree has to take part. The rehearsal afterwards misses the
+stimulus of his running comment and his suave sagacities. But it is still
+absorbingly interesting. Five minutes of high, emotional tragedy are
+sandwiched between discussions of lights, of dresses, of positions. When
+anything is not quite right the play is stopped, and voices fall from
+intensity to commonplace. Midnight approaches. Here and there a super, who
+has not quite enough of the artist's spirit to be able to take a pride and
+joy in doing his super's service of standing by and waiting, yawns. But the
+producer hammers and hammers away like a metal-worker fashioning a
+beautiful gate. With infinite multiplication of touches the production
+begins to take its shape.
+
+At 1 A.M. the rehearsal is over. "Things are fairly satisfactory." It has
+lasted since 5 P.M. For three more days and nights the same task will be
+gone through, so that the "first night" may be perfect and the first-night
+audience may have no hint of the labour that perfection has cost.
+
+It is all very fine; in a good producer's hands very artistic. But is it
+"dramatic art" in the full sense of the word? The question arises more
+insistently when the "production" is not that of a philosophical treatise
+in the form of a drama, which must be freely and splendidly illustrated if
+it is to "sell" at all, but of a Shakespeare play. Sir Herbert Tree is a
+great producer of Shakespeare; and he illustrates dramas of noble passion
+and lofty thought with the same elaborate care as he lavishes on a play
+like _False Gods_, or some "patriotic spectacle" of snippets and fustian.
+
+There is another school of "producers" in London, aiming at strangeness,
+perhaps a little more than at simplicity. It is, in a sense, a school of
+revolt against elaborate production. I do not think that either school is
+destined to save or to condemn dramatic art.
+
+[Illustration: WESTMINSTER AND THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT]
+
+Meanwhile, the theatres in London (and in the provinces which reproduce
+London successes, and also bring, with the aid of their Repertory Theatres,
+a valuable addition to the current of dramatic life) can be always trusted
+to offer something amusing to all tastes, from the serious to the gay and
+the raffish. A very well-defined type of London theatrical entertainment is
+the "musical comedy," a taste for which has spread to America, and is now
+invading France. It grew out of French _opera-bouffe_ by way of burlesque,
+and of the "comic opera" type which Gilbert and Sullivan made famous.
+"Musical comedy" has to be bright, tuneful, inconsequential, and
+illustrated by charming women in charming costumes. Its aid to the happy
+digestion of dinner is one of its chief claims to popularity, and it
+strives to amuse without making undue demands on the intelligence.
+
+The explorer in the theatrical life of England must not miss the music
+halls--the smaller ones usually owing part of their attraction to the fact
+that they are the resort of people whose chief business in life it is to
+be gay, the larger ones much more regardful of British Puritanism.
+
+Yes, perhaps in reviewing the whole situation in painting, music, drama,
+Art is not so kind to England as Nature; or rather the Englishman does not
+give so much loving care to the arts as he does to his gardens and parks.
+Nevertheless, England is not a land altogether of Philistines.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+POLITICAL LIFE IN ENGLAND
+
+
+After cataloguing carefully the industries which occupy the working hours
+of the Englishman and the sports which amuse his leisure, there would still
+be left to be considered a great field of activity which can come strictly
+under the heading neither of work nor of amusement, though it affords much
+of both. That is the field of politics.
+
+Huge amounts of time, energy, money, are expended yearly by the Englishman
+on politics. To some of the wealthy and leisured, political activity in
+some direction or another is the chief interest of life. To some of the
+poor and discontented, politics seems to offer a way to better things. To
+the middle classes a degree of political activity is dictated if not by
+personal predilection then by the dictates of fashion or by the ambition
+to "get on" socially. There is no better way of social advancement than the
+way of politics. It is not only that knighthoods, orders, peerages even,
+reward the political worker, but that entry into social circles otherwise
+closed becomes possible when some mutual political interest smooths the
+way. Thus the ranks of those genuinely interested in political issues are
+recruited by a great crowd of social aspirants, sincere enough probably,
+but with, as their main object, the desire to parade their excellent
+political principles as a reason for advancement into "good society."
+
+This aspect of political life is not peculiar to England. Wherever
+representative institutions exist it may be found in some degree. But in
+England it has gone to an extreme length. The existence of a very numerous
+leisured class is partly responsible, no doubt. Another explanation is that
+in England with political issues are inextricably involved personal and
+clan rivalries. The Montagues and Capulets do not brawl in the streets of
+London or Manchester. They fight out their rivalries on the hustings and in
+the field of politics. Where there are no ready-made leaders of political
+faction in a town or district they soon develop; or there may grow up a
+joint-stock rivalry between the political clubs, in which the personal
+leadership becomes of minor importance but the corporate struggle for
+supremacy is tremendous. Then the position resembles the fierce but on the
+whole good-natured contests between football clubs and their supporters.
+
+The rival political organisations, under these circumstances, seek always
+eagerly the man who can win or hold the seat, and their chief interest is
+that the party platform shall be so framed that it will be most likely to
+attract the "wobblers," who are not definitely and permanently bound to
+either party. Victory carries with it intense satisfaction. With defeat
+there is rarely any enduring bitterness. In politics, as in other games,
+the Englishman is a "good sport," and if he loses to-day hopes to win next
+time, or consoles himself, when he is permanently and hopelessly
+outnumbered, that at least he has won a "moral victory." A "moral victory"
+is won when you are decisively beaten, but would certainly have won on
+account of the excellence of your cause but that Providence was on the side
+of the bigger battalions.
+
+Aside from the main party issue:
+
+    Every little boy or girl that is born alive
+    Is born either a little Liberal or a little Conservative.
+
+English political activity finds expression in numberless leagues,
+societies, organisations, and unions to promote some special idea in
+politics. These usually have a nucleus of enthusiasts and a great body of
+followers with no very precise idea of what they want, but an impression
+that the league is a good thing because it has this or that personality
+among its office-bearers. I tried once to make a census of the political
+organisations of England, and gave up the task when the number passed into
+the hundreds without the end being in sight. Each party has several
+organisations to meet the needs of different types of supporters. Then each
+idea claims its league to advocate, and often also its league to oppose.
+Further, there are all sorts of leagues which aim at the abolition of
+something, and again there are some leagues pseudo-political, which really
+have no more serious purpose than afternoon tea.
+
+But usually the purpose is serious and sincere. Else why the street
+meeting, which in the English climate is usually a harsh tax on the comfort
+of speakers and audience? My first impression in London of one of these
+street meetings at first inspired in me ridicule, then a reluctant
+admiration. At a street corner--brilliantly lighted from a public-house on
+one side and a grocery store on the other--a little pulpit set up in the
+road: from it a man speaking vigorously, almost passionately, apparently to
+the idle wind, for no one is there to listen, unless indeed that horse
+drowsing in the shafts of a cart at the grocery store is listening, and
+what looks like sleepiness on its part is really quiet and intelligent
+appreciation. This was strange enough to arrest attention. I forgot a
+purpose to see from Primrose Hill the young moon rise over London on a
+clear night, and stopped to listen. That was the first of the audience. The
+speaker had announced, "We are met here to-night to----"; but that was, it
+seemed at first, an unjustifiable optimism, for nobody had met; nobody
+seemed inclined to meet.
+
+But the speaker, after all, knew. There was to be, later on, a meeting, and
+he, with a stolid courage that evoked an admiration strong enough to
+smother the first sense of ludicrousness, was making that meeting. To speak
+to a meeting which isn't, to pour out eloquence to an empty waste of
+street for half an hour or so until the curious are attracted and an odd
+bystander swells to a group, and a group to a crowd--that surely calls for
+courage of the highest; it calls, too, for that stolid self-confidence and
+imperviousness to ridicule which seems characteristic of the Englishman
+when he feels that he is in the right.
+
+But very depressing is the beginning of this street meeting. The speaker
+has put up his little barricade, a street pulpit of deal, which bears a
+placard urging "the electors to insist on a candidate who will support
+British work for British hands"; but at first there is neither friend to
+help nor enemy to fight. In a little while two supporting speakers appear
+with bundles of pamphlets. Three small boys, attracted by curiosity, are
+enlisted to distribute these among the audience (as yet non-existent). The
+man in the pulpit talks energetically and sensibly. There are all the
+essentials of a good meeting, except an audience. The horse at the street
+corner still drowses. With irritating persistency a street beggar--a sturdy
+young chap apparently, perhaps one of the victims of the political evils
+that the speaker is talking of--plays a dismal tune again and again on a
+concertina. The air is eager and nipping, and it seems hopeless to expect
+that any number will give up their Saturday night to stand listening at
+this cold street corner.
+
+[Illustration: HYDE PARK, LONDON]
+
+But gradually the crowd swells. There are at least 150 people listening by
+the time that the first speaker has concluded and makes way for another. I
+seek from him an explanation of this strange form of political propaganda.
+Is this a casual incident or is it a habit? It seems that it is a habit,
+the expression of the faith that is in them by a small group of enthusiasts
+who think they see England in danger and wish to send to the people a
+warning word. The meeting grows with every minute and livens up
+considerably. A bystander, on whom Fate has evidently not inflicted a
+drought, interrupts persistently, and finally accosts the speaker and puts
+an affectionate and unsober hand on his shoulder and wishes to help him to
+run the meeting; but the police interfere, and the speaker goes on pouring
+out facts in vigorous phrases. Now and again a wife comes into the crowd
+and draws away her unwilling husband; for there are Saturday night
+marketing duties to be done, and on them political education must wait.
+But such losses in the audience are made up by gains, and the meeting goes
+forward to a cheerful, even an enthusiastic conclusion. It has dealt with
+one of the big questions of the day. But--so strong is the political habit
+of the English--it might have attracted almost as much attention if its
+object had been the advocacy of the setting up of a Jewish Republic in
+Jerusalem, or some amendment of the law to protect hansom cabs from
+motor-cab competition.
+
+But political life is not all street-speaking. Indeed, that is generally
+left to the stark enthusiasts and to the faddists. When the big actors on
+the stage of politics take the platform, it is in a theatre or a great hall
+of amusement, and there is an orchestra; sometimes, too, eminent vocalists;
+and even occasionally also a cinematograph entertainment, to make the
+evening "go off well." I recall a nicely-balanced evening at which there
+was a duke in the chair--a true nobleman this particular duke, but not at
+all an orator, and he did not attempt to speak. Then a breezy speaker
+filled in an hour with advocacy of "the cause"; after that music and moving
+pictures for an hour. For the audience the winter evening had been filled
+very comfortably. There was something of an atmosphere of "high society,"
+some earnest and not very dull explanation of a political issue, and some
+entertainment.
+
+To make the pursuit of politics still more comfortable there are very many
+political clubs. Almost every electorate has its Conservative Club and its
+Liberal Club, to which the only qualification for membership is a sound
+political faith. At these clubs there are newspapers, magazines, games of
+all sorts, refreshments (at club prices), and occasional political
+discussions and lectures. Then in the capital and the big provincial towns
+there are clubs of a more "exclusive" type, membership of which is more or
+less reserved. The two biggest political clubs are the National
+Liberal--with a magnificent house fronting the Thames--and the
+Constitutional (Conservative) in Northumberland Avenue. These are the great
+popular headquarters for the young fighters of the two big parties. It is
+almost necessary to be a member of the National Liberal Club if you wish to
+show as an earnest Liberal. There is a popular gibe "from the other side"
+which gives the definition of the "complete Liberal": "I have always
+refrained from intoxicating liquors; I have married my deceased wife's
+sister; none of our children have been vaccinated; and I am a member of the
+National Liberal Club." The "other side," galled a little at this, has not
+so far responded with anything better than this definition of the "complete
+Tory": "I am incurably stupid; and a member of the Constitutional Club."
+
+The party chiefs have their club citadels in Pall Mall, London--the Carlton
+on the Unionist side, the Reform on the Liberal side. Here one gets sound
+politics of one's own particular brand, with sound port, good dinners, and
+comfortable chairs. (The English "club chair," by the way, is the standard
+of manly comfort the wide world over. You find the English "club chair"
+proudly announced as a luxury in all Europe, Asia, America, Australia, and
+Africa; and "club" is a word found in every civilised language.) Membership
+of these clubs is difficult to win, and it carries with it some claim to be
+considered one of the managing committee of the party. (The Reform,
+however, is not quite so rigidly a "party" organisation as the Carlton,
+which will force you to resign if your politics do not remain sound from a
+Unionist point of view.)
+
+But apart from the great well-defined political clubs there are scores of
+minor examples of these social-political organisations. Whenever a
+political "group" is formed, it finds the need of a club where it may talk
+over its enthusiasms at dinner. Thus when recently Lord Halsbury led a
+schism against the main body of opinion among the Unionist peers, a
+"Halsbury Club" was formed to band together in social as well as political
+unity those who agreed with him. Not all these clubs acquire club-houses.
+Sometimes they seek the hospitality of other clubs, sometimes are content
+to engage a private room at an hotel for their periodical dinners and
+discussions.
+
+A very interesting political club in England is that secret organisation
+known as "the Confederacy," a very advanced and extreme Unionist body,
+which has a marked influence on political life, and which is proud of that
+testimonial of its usefulness based on the declaration of one of its
+opponents that it is an association of "political Jack-the-Rippers."
+
+Who are the Confederates? The names, of course, cannot be disclosed. It is
+allowed for any member to declare himself to be a Confederate if he so
+chooses. But few care to do so. The strictest secrecy must be maintained as
+to his fellow-members, and no report or record is allowed to be taken of
+any proceedings of the Confederacy; not even a balance-sheet is ever
+disclosed. There is a small inner circle of them--known as "the
+Allies"--who manage the finances and administer the affairs of the
+Confederacy generally, taking their instructions from the mass of the
+members, who meet monthly in a strictly-guarded room of a private club, or
+at the house of one of their number, from which all servants are excluded
+as soon as the dinner (which ushers in all meetings) is over. The aim is
+that no one shall be indictable in the camp of the enemy as a "Confederate"
+except on his own confession.
+
+"Who are the Confederates?" cannot therefore be answered with any list of
+names. As a class, they represent the young bloods of the Tariff Reform
+Party, the forward spirits who believe that in politics one should be
+strenuous as well as politic. They have raised among themselves a big
+fighting fund. They have at their command a list of speakers (who,
+however, are not always allowed to know under what prompting they are sent
+out into the political firing line), and they command by various means a
+great newspaper influence.
+
+The professed object of secrecy is to secure the greatest possible
+efficiency. It is the Unknown that is terrible. A "Jack-the-Ripper" who
+openly declared himself would have nothing like the power of one working in
+the dark. These political "Jack-the-Rippers" recognise that fact, and do
+not in the least object to the savage epithet which they earn by their
+secrecy.
+
+A meeting of the Confederacy is always preluded by a dinner. Thus, to the
+outer world, and to the servants of the club or of the private house which
+is chosen as a meeting-place, it is just a gathering of men to dine
+together. After dinner, with the port and the coffee and the cigars, the
+doors being barred against the intrusion of servants, business begins.
+Every member is entrusted with the duty of observing some phase of the
+political fight and reporting thereon. The chances in various electorates
+are discussed. Funds are voted, when that is necessary, to assist
+candidates "on the right side." Flights of orators are despatched to
+points where they are needed. The newspaper side of the campaign is
+canvassed. Executive action on all the points raised is left to the three
+"Allies."
+
+There is no Liberal analogue--so far as I know--to the Confederacy. But one
+might exist without any one knowing of it except the actual members.
+Certainly there are secret groups in all the political parties. Sometimes
+the secrecy is dictated by real motives of expediency. Sometimes it is just
+a device to give zest to a jaded political palate, and is comparable with
+the elaborate make-believe of children.
+
+Women are not banished from the political life of England. Almost every
+party organisation has a separate branch for women, and the influence of
+these women's organisations is very great. Indeed, some believe that the
+drawing-room is more powerful than the platform in English public life. But
+women do not confine their efforts to the drawing-room. They invade the
+platform also and are sometimes very effective speakers indeed. Lately the
+agitation for giving women the Parliamentary vote has brought a fresh
+incursion of feminine workers into the political field, and some of them
+have shown a remarkable originality in educational work. To raise false
+alarms of fire so that the Fire Brigades may have useless trouble, to
+destroy letters in postal pillar-boxes with corrosives, to break windows,
+and to inflict mild assaults on public men--these are some of the recent
+methods of political life in England introduced by the agitators for the
+enfranchisement of women.
+
+It is curious to note with what relative patience such political methods
+are received. If any one attacked the people's letters for some motive not
+political, the public indignation would know no bounds, and the sternest
+punishment would be insisted upon. But "politics" explains most things,
+condones most things. The English have a phrase, "politically speaking,"
+which in effect means "not really." They have two great games, cricket and
+politics. In cricket you must observe all the rules of fair play with most
+scrupulous nicety. In politics there is practically but one rule--to stick
+to your side. To say that something is "not cricket" is to signify that it
+is within the law, but transgresses some delicate tradition of justice, and
+therefore is reprehensible. To say that something is "politics" means that
+it must be condoned, unfair though it may seem, because it has a political
+motive.
+
+In this chat about the political life of England I have sought to be
+impartial and "non-party"; and that is, by the way, the one really serious
+political misdeed. Every one must have a label of some sort, or otherwise
+be accounted somewhat in the category of an unregistered dog.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE DEFENCE OF ENGLAND
+
+
+To keep this England secure, what are the means? A glance at that question
+at once makes it necessary to tell of Britain rather than of England. There
+is no English Army, no English Navy. In each case it is a British force,
+and in the case of the Navy it is being rapidly developed into an Imperial
+force representing the strength not merely of England and of Britain, but
+also of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the other Dominions. Yet no
+picture of England could pass without some reference to the Navy, which is
+the supreme maritime force of the world, and the Army, which, though it is
+a very thin line these days compared with the great continental masses, is
+probably prepared to uphold in the future the great traditions of the past.
+And Navy and Army, though not wholly English, are in the main
+representative of the senior partner in the British firm.
+
+The problem of the defence of England is a great deal complicated by the
+fact that the British power has spread itself so much over the globe.
+Outside of Europe it possesses nearly one half of North America, a great
+share of the East Indies, the West Indies, and the islands of the Pacific,
+the whole of Australia and New Zealand, the best parts of Africa and of
+Asia. In past days there have been some astonishing cases of a wide range
+of power from a small focus: the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the
+Portuguese Empire, the Mohammedan Empire, for examples. But in no case was
+the comparison between the mother-country and the actual stretch of real
+dominion so astonishing as in the case of Britain and her Empire. In most
+of those cases, too, the Empire was short-lived, and soon broke up into its
+constituent parts. But the British Empire remains incredibly vast, and
+seemingly permanent.
+
+The position is that the parent country of that Empire has to face a far
+greater task than the securing of her own safety. History shows that part
+of the price of Empire to be paid by Britain is a mutual jealousy and
+hostility between her and the next greatest Power in Europe. British
+foreign policy, more or less consciously, has had to be always founded on
+that basis. She has in the past fought down Spain, Holland, France. After
+the Napoleonic Era, when Russia seemed to be the paramount power of Europe,
+she inevitably set herself to thwarting and checking Russia. When Russian
+power lessened and Germany became the first Power of Europe, she likewise
+stepped into the place of the Power which is doomed to be in antagonism to
+Great Britain. Were German might to fade away, the nation that took
+Germany's place as the most powerful in Europe would also take her place as
+the feared rival. The British Empire has taken up so much of the limited
+room "in the sun" that it must tempt to attack an aspiring Power; and it
+must face with a nervous dread the growing strength of the paramount Power
+for the time being in Europe.
+
+In the old struggles to maintain the British Empire, we relied successfully
+on a policy of "splendid isolation." Without making permanent alliances we
+held aloof and when a struggle came threw in our weight with one set of
+Powers or the other and usually secured thus a victory. For many reasons
+that policy is not the "official" policy of England to-day, though it still
+has many warm advocates. But, as under that policy for a century a supreme
+Navy was considered to be necessary for Britain, so to-day that need still
+survives, and the Navy is the senior defence force of the country. The
+reliance on naval strength is so complete that the Army is kept to very
+small dimensions, comparatively speaking, and none of the great cities are
+fortified. The naval ports have fortifications, but one looks in vain for
+fortresses around London, Birmingham, and Manchester. England is committed
+to float or sink on the Navy. As Campbell proudly put it:
+
+    Britannia needs no bulwarks,
+    No towers along the steep;
+    Her march is o'er the mountain waves,
+    Her home is on the deep.
+    With thunders from her native oak
+    She quells the floods below,
+    As they roar on the shore
+    When the stormy winds do blow;
+    When the battle rages loud and long,
+    And the stormy winds do blow.
+
+    The meteor flag of England
+    Shall yet terrific burn,
+    Till danger's troubled night depart,
+    And the star of peace return.
+
+This Navy, which has such a great responsibility, has its present
+headquarters at Portsmouth and Plymouth on the south coast--great naval
+ports since the days of the Armada and the Napoleonic wars, and very handy
+in case of war with Spain or France, and in case of expeditions to the
+Mediterranean, the West Indies, or the Pacific. But its striking force is
+now rapidly being based on new headquarters facing the North Sea, such as
+Rosyth in Scotland.
+
+My first view of the British Fleet in the mass was at the great review held
+for the Imperial Press Conference delegates in June 1909. It singled that
+day out from life as great events of pride or of dread mark days. Out from
+grey and reverend London, settling to the tasks and pleasures of day with
+quiet confidence, past the villages and fields of the beautiful English
+country-side smiling in sweet security, we journeyed to Portsmouth to see
+the ramparts of the Empire. The very train, gliding with unruffled speed,
+seemed to have a sense of sure stability as it ate up the miles between the
+chief citadel of our race and its guardian walls.
+
+The sea was dull and leaden, reflecting a dull and leaden sky, as we
+steamed out past the old _Victory_--significant reminder of great danger
+of the past greatly overcome--to the Solent, lined like a busy street with
+great dull, leaden-hued ships. It seemed fitting so, more fitting to the
+spectacle than a bright heaven and dancing water; for the Fleet had little
+suggestion of gaiety as it stretched line upon line out to the horizon
+where sea and sky met. It told rather of a grim resolve to meet menace with
+menace. So dominant was the note of sternness that the colours of the
+bright bunting flaunted by the ships faded out of the eye, and one only saw
+the vast bulk of brooding power.
+
+There was an Armada of one hundred, and again almost half a hundred
+vessels, ranging from the great fortress of the _Dreadnought_ type to the
+viperish destroyers, bringing danger with their speed, and the uncanny
+submarines, stealing under the water, invisible to the ships they threaten
+except for a little staff, slender as the antenna of an insect, serving as
+an eye to the brain below, for offence or defence. Yet practically all
+those 144 vessels were the fruit of the previous ten years' work; and there
+was melancholy proof in the row of big ships sulking in the far
+background--apparently stern, vigorous, and great in strength, but excluded
+from this parade as useless--of how quickly Time, bringing new inventions,
+destroys the usefulness of the sea-fighting machine. How vast the task of
+maintaining a power so hard to bring to life, so quick to decline! The
+monstrous strength of the elephant comes only of slow growth; once
+attained, it is slow to decay and fall. But the unit of sea-power seems
+almost shorter of life than of gestation.
+
+[Illustration: BATTLESHIPS MANOEUVRING]
+
+Past the serried lines of destroyers, we were carried to cross the stern of
+the _Dreadnought_, noting best thus its wide bulk, and turned down a long
+lane of water lined with battleships. With happy symbolism, the right edge
+of sea-guardians represented the nations of the Empire--_Africa_, the
+_Commonwealth_, _New Zealand_, the _Dominion_, _Hindustan_, _Hibernia_,
+_Britannia_, with _King Edward VII._ at their head. It was good to be
+represented, if only by a name, in such a Fleet. Then to the submarines,
+swimming like a school of killer-whales on the surface of the sea; then
+again to the big cruisers to see the _Invincible_, the _Inflexible_, the
+_Indomitable_, proudly flaunting their justly insolent names; then to note,
+with a throb of grateful memory, a new _Temeraire_ of deadliest might
+riding beside a ship bearing Nelson's name; and, finally, to be received in
+welcome on the giant deck of the _Dreadnought_, noting the linked lines of
+bluejackets, the oldest element of British naval supremacy, and the
+spider-webs of the wireless telegraphs, the newest sign of British resolve
+to keep that supremacy.
+
+Before the _Dreadnought_ there paraded then the submarines, some showing
+their decks awash, others betraying their route only by their periscopes,
+yet others diving to disappear completely. Next, a herd of black destroyers
+rushed by with vindictive speed, discharging unloaded torpedoes at the
+_Dreadnought_, whose sides were protected by nets. Each torpedo found the
+mark; many, their driving force far from expended, searched and spluttered
+at the nets, foaming up the water, spitting out fire and smoke. It was
+significant of the perfect confidence in the Navy that no one of the
+onlookers crowding the sides of the _Dreadnought_, within a few feet of the
+nets, flinched. Yet had one of those torpedoes by mistake been loaded, it
+would have sprinkled death far around. But no one thought of danger. It was
+"the Navy," which does not often make mistakes.
+
+That was my first view of the British Navy. I had many opportunities
+afterwards of studying its ships, its men, its system. I saw, on a day of
+grey fog blurring the features of England and hiding its defending sea,
+such a day as might make this island fortress open to attack, the _Neptune_
+(an improvement even on the _Dreadnought_) take the water. This, the latest
+addition to the ramparts of Empire, seemed as if eager to get into her
+element, anxious to hurry to the fighting line. The first steps towards
+letting her to the sea were taken some while before the appointed time, and
+the _Neptune_ glided so swiftly down the ways that she was afloat before
+the moment announced for her naming. The water fled back from the onrush of
+her vast bulk, then, returning, took the _Neptune_ to its bosom, and she
+floated easily and confidently. The launching could not have testified
+better to that perfection of calculation and arrangement which Britain
+expects of her naval men. One moment the ship pushed a monstrous form high
+up on to the land, the flowers bedecking her prow accentuating rather than
+relieving the impression of uncouthness; the next moment she was swimming
+bravely on the water, a mere hulk of a ship as yet, but in all her lines
+telling clearly of vast power and swiftness in defence or in attack.
+
+The simple religious service with which the launching was prefaced came
+harmoniously into the spirit of the occasion. There was no bluster of
+threat, no echo of the fierce war hymns of the Old Testament; but a humble,
+and yet confident invocation to the Supreme Power for guardianship and
+safety. It might have been taken as a declaration that this handiwork of
+man, terrible engine of battle as it was, had for its aim and end no desire
+of rapine or aggression, but that of peace and conservation.
+
+Since the _Neptune_ I have seen many other warships launched, including the
+Australian vessels, which are to help the Empire to hold the Pacific
+marches; and the Armada seems ever to grow, and yet ever to be thought
+insufficient for its grave responsibility.
+
+The influence of the Navy is very great on English public life. It draws
+away for its service a considerable proportion of the best young manhood of
+the country, and subjects them to a special training and discipline. The
+habit of thought and of action that they acquire thus gives a tinge to the
+whole life of England, for, after naval training, these men come back to
+civil life. In all ranks of life ex-naval men may be found doing good
+service, from governors down to grooms. An unfortunate fact is that there
+is a pronounced leakage of British naval men to foreign service, attracted
+by the pay and the chances of promotion.
+
+Linked up with the Navy is the British Mercantile Marine, the best of the
+_personnel_ of which is organised into a naval reserve. At the back of both
+are the fishing fleets of England, which were the first nurseries of the
+Navy, and are still a valuable school for sea-craft. Calculating together
+the Navy, the Mercantile Marine, and the fishing fleets, a large percentage
+of England has its home, more or less constantly, on the sea; that sea
+which serves England "in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a
+house," and which established thus its claim on her blood.
+
+The Army of Britain has had for a century all its work to do abroad, and it
+might without exaggeration be said that its chief station now is in India.
+But, setting on one side for the moment the garrisons of India, Egypt, and
+other parts of the Empire which are peopled by subject races (the free
+Dominions are not garrisoned, but defend their own territories with their
+own troops; there is one temporary exception, South Africa, but the British
+garrison will leave that station shortly), the Regular Army in England has
+its chief camp at Aldershot on the road between London and Portsmouth. It
+is organised on an expeditionary basis, and is always spoken of as an
+expeditionary force. The idea is that, in case of war, it should go abroad
+to India or Egypt if an attack were threatened there, to the European
+continent if that were the theatre of operations. Meanwhile the supremacy
+of the Navy would ensure that no enemy should be able to land a large army
+in England. The defence of English territory against such a raiding force
+as might elude the Navy is entrusted to the "Territorial troops "--enlisted
+on a volunteer basis.
+
+Perhaps the English Army system will be best made clear by tracing it from
+its beginnings with the schoolboy age. In the first place, it has to be
+noted that there is no compulsory military service in England. Until quite
+recently it was possible to recruit for the militia (though not for the
+Regular Army) by a ballot, _i.e._ by the drawing of a lot to determine a
+certain number of recruits who were forced to join whether they liked it or
+not (this system is still in force in the Channel Islands). Now there is
+absolutely no compulsion in England to undertake any form of military
+service. It is not even compulsory that schoolboys should undertake cadet
+drill. The English boy can altogether neglect any training for the defence
+of his country if that is his wish and the wish of his parents. In the
+majority of cases he takes full advantage of that freedom. If, however, he
+has some stirring of a desire to equip himself for defence, he may join the
+Boy Scouts--a non-military, but a disciplined organisation recently set
+afoot by General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who was a very prominent figure
+during the last big war that Britain had. If the English boy is of a more
+marked martial inclination he can, whilst at school, usually join a cadet
+organisation or the Officer's Training Corps,--a body of cadets recruited
+from the higher schools. If it is intended that he should seek a career in
+the army as an officer, he will, as a very young boy, be sent to a
+preparatory school, and go from that to a military college, and from there,
+on passing his examinations, go into the commissioned ranks of the Army.
+
+So much for the boys. The adults may join the Territorial Force, a civilian
+army which makes slight demands on their leisure and does not interfere
+with them following civilian associations; or they may join the Regular
+Army. In every other great country of the world (except the United States)
+a certain proportion of adult men have to join the Regular Army for a term
+whether they wish to or not; in some countries almost every able-bodied man
+is thus passed through the military organisation. But in England the Army
+is recruited on a voluntary basis. It is sought to get men by offers of
+good pay and good conditions of service. Naturally this makes the British
+Army a far more expensive affair, regiment for regiment, than any other
+army of the world (again except the United States). Its friends claim,
+however, that this extra cost is compensated for by extra quality, and that
+the willing recruit will be a more "willing" fighter than any conscript
+soldier.
+
+[Illustration: CHANGING THE GUARD, ST. JAMES'S PALACE]
+
+Though the English are a naval rather than a military nation, their
+battlefield record is a particularly proud one. The English character in
+battle shows the stubborn, dogged traits of the people from whom the
+soldiers are drawn; and since in any British army there is always a great
+admixture of Irish and Scottish soldiers to give dash and _elan_, the net
+result usually proves to be an ideal fighting force.
+
+To turn to less serious things, the British Regular is a very decorative
+personage. It has cost a good deal of money to turn him out, and the
+military authorities insist that he should show that money's worth. This is
+partly from pride in the force, partly from a desire to encourage
+recruiting for the Army by the parading in the streets of these
+well-set-up, gorgeously uniformed men. The regiments kept in London
+barracks are "show" regiments, and a very fine note of pageantry they bring
+to the old grey city. The ceremony of changing the guard at the palaces
+draws a crowd of spectators daily; and he is an unlucky wight indeed who
+does not find often his glimpse of London park or road brightened suddenly
+by the passage of a troop of cavalry, plumes nodding, cuirasses gleaming,
+spirited horses pannading.
+
+The populace love the soldiers. Yet there is no abatement of the old
+English jealousy against encroachments by standing armies. The military
+power is kept strictly subservient to the civil power, as a hundred and one
+regulations and customs constantly remind. The civilian people are resolved
+that their defenders shall never become aggressors against their liberties.
+To the visitor from the European continent, where the soldier is supreme,
+the position of the military force in England seems strange, even
+undignified. But it is a jealously guarded survival of the days of old
+strifes, when there was real danger of a king using the army to destroy the
+liberties of the common people. There is little or no reason for the
+survival now; but the sentiment of it is good.
+
+With that I may well conclude these notes on England; for, after the green
+fields and the dear homes of England, the strongest trait of the country's
+character is the tender guardianship of old forms and symbols and customs.
+England does not lag behind in the work of present-day modern civilisation.
+But as she goes forward she takes the Past affectionately along with her.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Alcuin, 47
+
+Aldershot, 198
+
+Ampthill Park, 36
+
+Angles, 17
+
+Anglo-Saxon, the, 15, 24
+
+Anglo-Saxon victory, 18
+
+Army, the, 187
+
+Arnold, Matthew, 107, 131
+
+Arthur, Prince, 129, 130
+
+Arthurian legend, 19
+
+Arts in England, the, 155
+
+Avebury temple, 10
+
+
+Balsham, Hugh de, 51
+
+Bank Holiday, 80
+
+Bath, 102, 110, 111, 136
+
+Beau Nash, 111
+
+Becket, Thomas �, 112, 129
+
+Beverley, John of, 47
+
+Bird-Cage Walk, 104
+
+Boadicea, 110
+
+Bodichon, Madame, 52
+
+Bodleian Library, 55
+
+Bourne End, 123
+
+Boy Scouts, 88, 199
+
+Bristol, 112
+
+British climate, 9
+
+British Empire, the, 2, 188, 189
+
+British Mercantile Marine, 197
+
+British oysters, 14
+
+Briton, ancient, 6, 11
+
+Brittany, 5
+
+Browning, 38
+
+Buckingham Palace, 79
+
+Buckinghamshire, 135
+
+
+C�dmon, 46
+
+C�sar, Julius, 6, 18, 102, 111, 121
+
+"C�sar's camps," 14
+
+Cambridge, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 136
+
+Cambridge University, 48
+
+Campbell, 190
+
+Canterbury, 112, 129, 131, 135
+
+Carausius, 13, 15
+
+Casserterrides, the, 8
+
+Caxton, 19
+
+"Celtic fringe," 11, 160
+
+Changing the guard, 201
+
+Charles I., 69, 73
+
+Charles II., 56
+
+Chelsea, 121
+
+Chester, 25, 111
+
+Cities of England, the, 101
+
+Clough, Miss Anne J., 52
+
+Cornwall, 5, 9, 11, 21, 37
+
+"Coronation" stone, the, 133
+
+Coventry Patmore, 38
+
+Cricket, 94, 185
+
+Cromwell, 135
+
+
+Dane, the, 15, 17
+
+Davies, Miss Emily, 52
+
+Defence of England, the, 187
+
+Devon, 11, 37
+
+Devonshire Moors, 28
+
+Disraeli, 135
+
+Dobell, 116
+
+Dover, 112
+
+Drake, Sir Francis, 5, 112
+
+_Dreadnought_, the, 193, 194, 195
+
+Durham, 109, 141
+
+Durham, William of, 55
+
+
+East End, the, 153
+
+Education, English system of, 43
+
+Educational Institutions in England, 45
+
+Edward I., 50
+
+Edward II., 51
+
+Ely, 47
+
+England at play, 81
+
+English agriculture, 70, 72
+
+English Channel, 1
+
+English kindliness, 137
+
+English manor house, an, 33, 78
+
+English public service, 75
+
+English spring, 117
+
+English work, solidness and honesty of, 74
+
+Englishman, �sthetic, 31
+
+Englishman, the, as an exile, 34
+
+Englishman's love of nature, 31
+
+Ethelred, 54
+
+Eton, 63, 122
+
+
+Fen lands, 73
+
+Flamborough Head, 42
+
+Fleet Street, 103, 127
+
+Flying Meetings, 98
+
+Football, 94
+
+Forest of Dean, 73
+
+Fox-hunting, 96
+
+Fredeswide, 54
+
+
+Gauls, the, 5, 6
+
+Giraldus Cambrensis, 130
+
+Girton College, 52
+
+"Girton Girl," the, 47
+
+Glastonbury, 7, 130, 131, 135
+
+"Grand tour," the, 157
+
+Greenwich, 41, 58, 121
+
+Grey, the poet, 78
+
+Guinevere, 131
+
+Gulf Stream, the, 1, 9, 12, 37
+
+
+Hampden, 135
+
+Hampstead, 139
+
+Hampstead Heath, 81
+
+Hampton Court, 121, 122
+
+Harrow, 63
+
+Hecat�us, 9
+
+Hedges, the, 30
+
+Henry I., 47
+
+Henry VIII., 121, 130
+
+Home-management, 79
+
+Horse Guards, the, 104
+
+Horse-racing, 95
+
+House of Commons, 65, 69
+
+House of Lords, 65, 69
+
+Houses of Parliament, 69, 102
+
+Hugolina, Dame, 47
+
+Hyde Park, 107
+
+Hyperboreans, Isle of the, 9
+
+
+"Ipswich Man," the, 10
+
+
+Jutes, 17
+
+
+Kensington Gardens, 107
+
+Kent, 17, 42, 116
+
+Kew Gardens, 35, 120
+
+King Arthur, 21, 112, 130
+
+
+Land's End, 37
+
+Landscape, human interest in, 4
+
+Leonidas, 4
+
+Life of the lowly, the, 145
+
+London, 101, 102, 116, 136
+
+London coster, the, 83
+
+London parks, 105
+
+"Lord Mayor's Day," 87, 88, 89, 90
+
+
+Malory, Sir Thomas, 21
+
+Marches of Wales, 11
+
+Marsh village, the, 7
+
+May Day, 90, 91, 92
+
+May-pole, the, 91
+
+Medland Hall, 147, 148
+
+Merton, Walter de, 51
+
+Midlands, the, 109, 139
+
+Milton, John, 58, 135
+
+"Mr. Speaker," 65
+
+Music, English, 158
+
+Music halls, the, 169
+
+"Musical Comedy," 169
+
+
+Navy, influence of the, 196
+
+Navy, the, 187, 198
+
+Nelson's Monument, 102
+
+Neolithic Age, 10
+
+New Forest, the, 42, 73
+
+Newnham College, 52
+
+"Newnham Girl," the, 47
+
+Norfolk Broads, 28
+
+Norman, the, 15, 22
+
+Norman architecture, 22
+
+Norman Conquest, 54
+
+Norsemen, 17
+
+Northampton Camp, 6
+
+
+Olympic Games, 100
+
+Oxford, 41, 46, 53, 55, 59, 60, 62, 116, 136
+
+
+Pageants, 24
+
+Pall Mall, 103
+
+"Park-like" England, 29
+
+Peacock, Thomas Love, 17
+
+Pepys, 56, 60, 113
+
+Peterborough, 47
+
+"Philistinism" in England, 89
+
+Pictures, English collections of, 156
+
+Plague Year, the, 56
+
+Plymouth, 37, 112, 191
+
+Political activity, English, 174
+
+Political Clubs, 179, 181
+
+Political life in England, 171
+
+Political organisations, 173
+
+Population, the poorer, 137
+
+Portsmouth, 191
+
+"Predominant partner," 24
+
+Pre-Roman Briton, 7
+
+Pre-Roman relics, 8
+
+
+Richmond, 120
+
+Richmond Hill, 120
+
+Rivers of England, the, 114
+
+Rochester, 112
+
+Roman culture, 23
+
+Roman invasion, 13
+
+Roman military camps, 14
+
+Roman roads, 14
+
+"Rowton House," a, 147
+
+Rugby, 63
+
+
+St. Albans, 109, 110, 139
+
+St. Augustine, 112, 129
+
+St. Joseph of Arimathea, 131
+
+St. Paul's, 103, 135
+
+Salisbury, 113
+
+Saxons, 17
+
+School of York, 46
+
+Scotland, regalia of, 133
+
+Scotland Yard, 76
+
+Shakespeare, 90, 109, 168
+
+Southampton, 129
+
+Southend, 84
+
+Spanish Armada, 5
+
+"Sport," 93
+
+Stoke Court, 78
+
+Stonehenge, 10
+
+Stourbridge Fair, 49
+
+Strand, the, 102
+
+Stratford-on-Avon, 109
+
+Street meetings, 174
+
+"Suffragettes," 67
+
+Sun worship, 9
+
+Surrey Downs, the, 28
+
+Sussex Marshes, 38
+
+
+Terra Alba, 1
+
+Territorial Force, the, 200
+
+Thames, the, 12, 103, 117, 120, 123
+
+Thames Embankment, 149
+
+Thames Valley, the, 28, 37, 41, 116, 122
+
+Tower of London, 105
+
+Tree, Sir Herbert, 162
+
+Trees, regard for in England, 36
+
+Triskele, the, 7
+
+
+Venerable Bede, the, 46
+
+
+Watling Street, 111
+
+Westminster, 70, 135
+
+Westminster Abbey, 103, 131, 132, 135
+
+Westminster Hall, 69
+
+White Cliffs, 5
+
+Whiteway, Sir Thomas, 63
+
+Wilfrid of York, 47
+
+William of Durham, 55
+
+William of Normandy, 5
+
+William the Conqueror, 73
+
+Winchester, 63, 111
+
+Windsor, 122
+
+Winkelried, Arnold, 4
+
+Wolsey, Lord, 121
+
+Worcester, 129, 131, 135
+
+Worcestershire, 135
+
+Wren, Matthew, 51
+
+Wren, Sir Christopher, 51, 56
+
+Wykeham, William of, 55
+
+
+York, 46, 131
+
+Yorkshire, 17, 116
+
+Yorkshire Hills, the, 38
+
+Yorkshire Wolds, the, 41
+
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF ENGLAND]
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLAND***
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