Part 17

She has seen the workman rise into political notice, then into political force, then (in some parts of the world) into the chief and commanding political force; she has seen the day’s labor of twelve, fourteen, and eighteen hours reduced to eight, a reform which has made labor a means of extending life instead of a means of committing salaried suicide.

But it is useless to continue the list--it has no end.

There will be complexions in the procession to-day which will suggest the vast distances to which the British dominion has extended itself around the fat rotundity of the globe since Britain was a remote unknown back settlement of savages with tin for sale, two or three thousand years ago; and also how great a part of this extension is comparatively recent; also, how surprisingly speakers of the English tongue have increased within the Queen’s time.

When the Queen was born there were not more than 25,000,000 English-speaking people in the world; there are about 120,000,000 now. The other long-reign queen, Elizabeth, ruled over a short 100,000 square miles of territory and perhaps 5,000,000 subjects; Victoria reigns over more territory than any other sovereign in the world’s history ever reigned over; her estate covers a fourth part of the habitable area of the globe, and her subjects number about 400,000,000.

It is indeed a mighty estate, and I perceive now that the English are mentioned in the Bible:

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

The Long-Reign Pageant will be a memorable thing to see, for it stands for the grandeur of England, and is full of suggestion as to how it had its beginning and what have been the forces that have built it up.

I got to my seat in the Strand just in time--five minutes past ten--for a glance around before the show began. The houses opposite, as far as the eye could reach in both directions, suggested boxes in a theater snugly packed. The gentleman next to me likened the groups to beds of flowers, and said he had never seen such a massed and multitudinous array of bright colors and fine clothes.

These displays rose up and up, story by story, all balconies and windows being packed, and also the battlements stretching along the roofs. The sidewalks were filled with standing people, but were not uncomfortably crowded. They were fenced from the roadway by red-coated soldiers, a double stripe of vivid color which extended throughout the six miles which the procession would traverse.

Five minutes later the head of the column came into view and was presently filing by, led by Captain Ames, the tallest man in the British army. And then the cheering began. It took me but a little while to determine that this procession could not be described. There was going to be too much of it, and too much variety in it, so I gave up the idea. It was to be a spectacle for the kodak, not the pen.

Presently the procession was without visible beginning or end, but stretched to the limit of sight in both directions--bodies of soldiery in blue, followed by a block of soldiers in buff, then a block of red, a block of buff, a block of yellow, and so on, an interminable drift of swaying and swinging splotches of strong color sparkling and flashing with shifty light reflected from bayonets, lance heads, brazen helmets, and burnished breastplates. For varied and beautiful uniforms and unceasing surprises in the way of new and unexpected splendors, it much surpassed any pageant that I have ever seen.

I was not dreaming of so stunning a show. All the nations seemed to be filing by. They all seemed to be represented. It was a sort of allegorical suggestion of the Last Day, and some who live to see that day will probably recall this one if they are not too much disturbed in mind at the time.

There were five bodies of Oriental soldiers of five different nationalities, with complexions differentiated by five distinct shades of yellow. There were about a dozen bodies of black soldiers from various parts of Africa, whose complexions covered as many shades of black, and some of these were the very blackest people I have ever seen yet.

Then there was an exhaustive exhibition of the hundred separate brown races of India, the most beautiful and satisfying of all the complexions that have been vouchsafed to man, and the one which best sets off colored clothes and best harmonizes with all tints.

The Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Africans, the Indians, the Pacific Islanders--they were all there, and with them samples of all the whites that inhabit the wide reach of the Queen’s dominions.

The procession was the human race on exhibition, a spectacle curious and interesting and worth traveling far to see. The most splendid of the costumes were those worn by the Indian princes, and they were also the most beautiful and richest. They were men of stately build and princely carriage, and wherever they passed the applause burst forth.

Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, and still more and more soldiers and cannon and muskets and lances--there seemed to be no end to this feature. There are 50,000 soldiers in London, and they all seemed to be on hand. I have not seen so many except in the theater, when thirty-five privates and a general march across the stage and behind the scenes and across the front again and keep it up till they have represented 300,000.

In the early part of the procession the colonial premiers drove by, and by and by after a long time there was a grand output of foreign princes, thirty-one in the invoice.

The feature of high romance was not wanting, for among them rode Prince Rupert of Bavaria, who would be Prince of Wales now and future king of England and emperor of India if his Stuart ancestors had conducted their royal affairs more wisely than they did. He came as a peaceful guest to represent his mother, Princess Ludwig, heiress of the house of Stuart, to whom English Jacobites still pay unavailing homage as the rightful queen of England.

The house of Stuart was formally and officially shelved nearly two centuries ago, but the microbe of Jacobite loyalty is a thing which is not exterminable by time, force, or argument.

At last, when the procession had been on view an hour and a half, carriages began to appear. In the first came a detachment of two-horse ones containing ambassadors extraordinary, in one of them Whitelaw Reid, representing the United States; then six containing minor foreign and domestic princes and princesses; then five four-horse carriages freighted with offshoots of the family.

The excitement was growing now; interest was rising toward the boiling point. Finally a landau driven by eight cream-colored horses, most lavishly upholstered in gold stuffs, with postilions and no drivers, and preceded by Lord Wolseley, came bowling along, followed by the Prince of Wales, and all the world rose to its feet and uncovered.

The Queen Empress was come. She was received with great enthusiasm. It was realizable that she was the procession herself; that all the rest of it was mere embroidery; that in her the public saw the British Empire itself. She was a symbol, an allegory of England’s grandeur and the might of the British name.

It is over now; the British Empire has marched past under review and inspection. The procession stood for sixty years of progress and accumulation, moral, material, and political. It was made up rather of the beneficiaries of these prosperities than of the creators of them.

As far as mere glory goes, the foreign trade of Great Britain has grown in a wonderful way since the Queen ascended the throne. Last year it reached the enormous figure of £620,000,000, but the capitalist, the manufacturer, the merchant, and the workingmen were not officially in the procession to get their large share of the resulting glory.

Great Britain has added to her real estate an average of 165 miles of territory per day for the past sixty years, which is to say she has added more than the bulk of an England proper per year, or an aggregate of seventy Englands in the sixty years.

But Cecil Rhodes was not in the procession; the Chartered Company was absent from it. Nobody was there to collect his share of the glory due for his formidable contributions to the imperial estate. Even Doctor Jameson was out, and yet he had tried so hard to accumulate territory.

Eleven colonial premiers were in the procession, but the dean of the order, the imperial Premier, was not, nor the Lord Chief Justice of England, nor the Speaker of the House. The bulk of the religious strength of England dissent was not officially represented in the religious ceremonials. At the Cathedral that immense new industry, speculative expansion, was not represented unless the pathetic shade of Barnato rode invisible in the pageant.

It was a memorable display and must live in history. It suggested the material glories of the reign finely and adequately. The absence of the chief creators of them was perhaps not a serious disadvantage. One could supply the vacancies by imagination, and thus fill out the procession very effectively. One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.

LETTERS TO SATAN (1897)

SWISS GLIMPSES

I

If Your Grace would prepay your postage it would be a pleasant change. I am not meaning to speak harshly, but only sorrowfully. My remark applies to all my outland correspondents, and to everybody’s. None of them puts on the full postage, and that is just the same as putting on none at all: the foreign governments ignore the half postage, and we who are abroad have to pay full postage on those half-paid letters. And as for writing on thin paper, none of my friends ever think of it; they all use pasteboard, or sole leather, or things like that. But enough of that subject; it is painful.

I believe you have set me a hard task; for if it is true that you have not been in the world for three hundred years, and have not received into your establishment an educated person in all that time, I shall be obliged to talk to you as if you had just been born and knew nothing at all about the things I speak of. However, I will do the best I can, and will faithfully try to put in all the particulars, trivial ones as well as the other sorts. If my report shall induce Your Grace to come out of your age-long seclusion and make a pleasure tour through the world in person, instead of doing it by proxy through me, I shall feel that I have labored to good purpose. You have many friends in the world; more than you think. You would have a vast welcome in Paris, London, New York, Chicago, Washington, and the other capitals of the world; if you would go on the lecture platform you could charge what you pleased. You would be the most formidable attraction on the planet. The curiosity to see you would be so great that no place of amusement would contain the multitude that would come. In London many devoted people who have seen the Prince of Wales only fifteen hundred or two thousand times would be willing to miss one chance of seeing him again for the sake of seeing you. In Paris, even with the Tsar on view, you could do a fairly good business; and in Chicago--Oh, but you ought to go to Chicago, you know. But further of this anon. I will to my report, now, and tell you about Lucerne, and how I journeyed hither; for doubtless you will travel by the same route when you come.

I kept house a few months in London, with my family, while I arranged the matters which you were good enough to intrust me with. There were no adventures, except that we saw the Jubilee. Afterward I was invited to one of the Queen’s functions, which was a royal garden party. A garden is a green and bloomy countrified stretch of land which--But you remember the Garden of Eden; well, it is like that. The invitation prescribed the costume that must be worn: “Morning dress with trousers.” I was intending to wear mine, for I always wear something at garden parties where ladies are to be present; but I was hurt by this arbitrary note of compulsion, and did not go. All the European courts are particular about dress, and you are not allowed to choose for yourself in any case; you are always told exactly what you must wear; and whether it is going to become you or not, you are not allowed to make any changes. Yet the court taste is often bad, and sometimes even indelicate. I was once invited to dine with an emperor when I was living awhile in Germany, and the invitation card named the dress I must wear: “Frock coat and black cravat.” To put it in English, that meant swallow-tail and black cravat. It was cold weather, too, the middle of winter; and not only that, but ladies were to be present. That was five years ago. By this time the coat has gone out, I suppose, and you would feel at home there if you still remember the old Eden styles.

As soon as the Jubilee was fairly over we broke up housekeeping and went for a few days to what is called in England “an hotel.” If we could have afforded an horse and an hackney cab we could have had an heavenly good time flitting around on our preparation errands, and could have finished them up briskly; but the buses are slow and they wasted many precious hours for us. A bus is a sort of great cage on four wheels, and is six times as strong and eleven times as heavy as the service required of it demands--but that is the English of it. The bus aptly symbolizes the national character. The Englishman requires that everything about him shall be stable, strong, and permanent, except the house which he builds to rent. His own private house is as strong as a fort. The rod which holds up the lace curtains could hold up an hippopotamus. The three-foot flagstaff on his bus, which supports a Union Jack the size of a handkerchief, would still support it if it were one of the gates of Gaza. Everything he constructs is a deal heavier and stronger than it needs to be. He built ten miles of terraced benches to view the Jubilee procession from, and put timber enough in them to make them a permanent contribution to the solidities of the world--yet they were intended for only two days’ service.

When they were being removed an American said, “Don’t do it--save them for the Resurrection.” If anything gets in the way of the Englishman’s bus it must get out of it or be bowled down--and that is English. It is the serene self-sufficient spirit which has carried his flag so far. He ought to put his aggressive bus in his coat of arms, and take the gentle unicorn out.

We made our preparations for Switzerland as fast as we could; then bought the tickets. Bought them of Thomas Cook & Sons, of course--nowadays shortened to “Cook’s,” to save time and words. Things have changed in thirty years. I can remember when to be a “Cook’s tourist” was a thing to be ashamed of, and when everybody felt privileged to make fun of Cook’s “personally conducted” gangs of economical provincials. But that has all gone by, now. All sorts and conditions of men fly to Cook in our days. In the bygone times travel in Europe was made hateful and humiliating by the wanton difficulties, hindrances, annoyances, and vexations put upon it by ignorant, stupid, and disobliging transportation officials, and one had to travel with a courier or risk going mad. You could not buy a railway ticket on one day which you purposed to use next day--it was not permitted. You could not buy a ticket for _any_ train until fifteen minutes before that train was due to leave. Though you had twenty trunks, you must manage somehow to get them weighed and the extra weight paid for within that fifteen minutes; if the time was not sufficient you would have to leave behind such trunks as failed to pass the scales. If you missed your train, your ticket was no longer good. As a rule, you could make neither head nor tail of the railway guide, and if your intended journey was a long one you would find that the officials could tell you little about which way to go; consequently you often bought the wrong ticket and got yourself lost. But Cook has remedied all these things and made travel simple, easy, and a pleasure. He will sell you a ticket to any place on the globe, or all the places, and give you all the time you need, and as much more besides; and it is good for all trains of its class, and its baggage is weighable at all hours. It provides hotels for you everywhere, if you so desire; and you cannot be overcharged, for the coupons show just how much you must pay. Cook’s servants at the great stations will attend to your baggage, get you a cab, tell you how much to pay cabmen and porters, procure guides for you, or horses, donkeys, camels, bicycles, or anything else you want, and make life a comfort and a satisfaction to you. And if you get tired of traveling and want to stop, Cook will take back the remains of your ticket, with 10 per cent off. Cook is your banker everywhere, and his establishment your shelter when you get caught out in the rain. His clerks will answer all the questions you ask, and do it courteously. I recommend Your Grace to travel on Cook’s tickets when you come; and I do this without embarrassment, for I get no commission. I do not know Cook. (But if you would rather travel with a courier, let me recommend Joseph Very. I employed him twenty years ago, and spoke of him very highly in a book, for he was an excellent courier--then. I employed him again, six or seven years ago--for a while. Try him. And when you go home, take him with you.)

That London hotel was a disappointment. It was up a back alley, and we supposed it would be cheap. But, no, it was built for the moneyed races. It was all costliness and show. It had a brass band for dinner--and little else--and it even had a telephone and a lift. A telephone is a wire stretched on poles or underground, and has a thing at each end of it. These things are to speak into and to listen at. The wire carries the words; it can carry them several hundred miles. It is a time-saving, profanity-breeding, useful invention, and in America is to be found in all houses except parsonages. It is dear in America, but cheap in England; yet in England telephones are as rare as are icebergs in your place. I know of no way to account for this; I only know that it is extraordinary. The English take kindly to the other modern conveniences, but for some puzzling reason or other they will not use the telephone. There are 44,000,000 people there who have never even seen one.

The lift is an elevator. Like the telephone, it also is an American invention. Its office is to hoist people to the upper stories and save them the fatigue and delay of climbing. That London hotel could accommodate several hundred people, and it had just one lift--a lift which would hold four persons. In America such an hotel would have from two to six lifts. When I was last in Paris, three years ago, they were using there what they thought was a lift. It held two persons, and traveled at such a slow gait that a spectator could not tell which way it was going. If the passengers were going to the sixth floor, they took along something to eat; and at night, bedding. Old people did not use it; except such as were on their way to the good place, anyhow. Often people that had been lost for days were found in those lifts, jogging along, jogging along, frequently still alive. The French took great pride in their ostensible lift, and called it by a grand name--_ascenseur_. An hotel that had a lift did not keep it secret, but advertised it in immense letters, _“Il y a une ascenseur,”_ with three exclamation points after it.

In that London hotel--But never mind that hotel; it was a cruelly expensive and tawdry and ill-conditioned place, and I wish I could do it a damage. I will think up a way some time. We went to Queenboro by the railroad. A railroad is a--well, a railroad is a railroad. I will describe it more explicitly another time.

Then we went by steamer to Flushing--eight hours. If you sit at home you can make the trip in less time, because then you can travel by the steamer company’s advertisement, and that will take you across the Channel five hours quicker than their boats can do it. Almost everywhere in Europe the advertisements can give the facts several hours’ odd in the twenty-four and get in first.

II

We tarried overnight at a summer hotel on the seashore near Flushing--the Grand Hôtel des Bains. The word Grand means nothing in this connection; it has no descriptive value. On the Continent, all hotels, inns, taverns, hash houses and slop troughs employ it. It is tiresome. This one was a good-enough hotel, and comfortable, but there was nothing grand about it but the bill, and even that was not extravagant enough to make the title entirely justifiable. Except in the case of one item--Scotch whisky. I ordered a sup of that, for I always take it at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it. They charged me a dollar and a half for it. A dollar and a half for half a pint; a dollar and a half for that wee little mite--really hardly enough to break a pledge with. It will be a kindness to me if Your Grace will show the landlord some special attentions when he arrives. Not merely on account of that piece of extortion, but because he got us back to town and the station next day, more than an hour before train time.

There were no books or newspapers for sale there, and nothing to look at but a map. Fortunately it was an interesting one. It was a railway map of the Low Countries, and was of a new sort to me, for it was made of tiles--the ground white, the lines black. It could be washed if it got soiled, and if no accident happens to it it will last ten thousand years and still be as bright and fine and new and beautiful then as it is to-day. It occupied a great area of the wall, and one could study it in comfort halfway across the house. It would be a valuable thing if our own railway companies would adorn their waiting rooms with maps like that.