CHAPTER I

LONDON IN 1910

An Englishman returning to his native land after an absence of twenty-five years, might not at first discover much difference in the look of London. There stood the old familiar landmarks--Buckingham Palace, St James’s, the Marble Arch, Apsley House, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the National Gallery, the British Museum, St Paul’s, the Tower, the Monument, and many another well-remembered building. There were new hotels, new theatres, new buildings of all sorts, and at least one notable new thoroughfare. In the great arteries of business the old familiar thunder of the traffic rose louder than ever, with the modern addition of a new smell and a new noise--the smell and the whir of the motor-car. The mean streets were as mean as ever; the contrast between this and that locality more than ever noticeable.

And the people, save for the scarcely perceptible change in fashion of dress, at first looked pretty much the same. There were more loafers, more wastrels, more sprawling scarecrows of humanity in the parks, and along the Embankment. The richest city in the world still had thousands and more thousands of homeless, miserable creatures in its midst, thousands whom the State knew not how to save for their own sake, or for the service of England.

It would be obvious to the returned native that the old country must long since have ceased to be a “merry England.” The look on the faces of the people was enough to settle that. The intent gaze, the joyless expression, told a convincing tale. Here and there might be seen a flower of beauty in the gigantic garden of weeds--a stalwart, handsome man, a “perfect woman, nobly plann’d.” Eyes of youth, looking eagerly upon the page of life, still shone with the glow of hope and happiness; young girls and young children, in their freshness and charm, still reminded the wayfarer that in the great design human beings were meant to be even more beautiful than the flowers of the field. But the vast crowd--what had come to it, and what was coming? Was the English race, as a race, growing not only plain, but positively ugly?

When the home-comer found time to move about a little, he would discover that in many respects the changes wrought in twenty-five years were greater than he had supposed. There were, in outlying districts, certain new or enlarged buildings of formidable aspect. These were the lunatic asylums of the capital. The inquirer had to learn that insanity had been advancing by leaps and bounds. Five years ago the number of London lunatics was nearly 27,000, and now there were nearly 100,000 certified lunatics in London. The workhouses also were larger and fuller than ever; and in the City, the scene of the trial of Michael White in 1885, the old court-house, haunted with the horrors of centuries, had given place to a new and imposing building, with greater accommodation for criminals. Solid, handsome, stony, the New Bailey frowned down on the new generation of Londoners. The City Fathers were justly proud of their modern palace of justice, though the question of what motto should be inscribed over its portal gave rise to some difference of opinion. A very reverend dean suggested, “Defend the children of the poor, and punish the wrong-doer,” or words to that effect. In what way the New Bailey was going to fulfil the first part of the text did not seem to be quite obvious but certainly the massive sessions-house looked quite equal to punishing the evil-doer. It did not occur to any one to recommend a text from the Koran, which declares that to endure and forgive is the highest achievement for humanity. Probably the City Fathers did not read the Koran. Besides, though in the interval we had allied ourselves with worshippers of Buddha, England as yet had no treaty with the unspeakable Turk. A quotation from the sacred book of Islam might have been considered out of place in a nominally Christian country.

Such were some of the changes brought about in a quarter of a century. A person of cynical mind might well doubt whether they were changes for the better. For the rest, the people crowded hither and thither--underground, by tubes in all directions; above ground, on foot, and by vehicles of every description--mostly “motors.” By means of the latter insignificant persons tore through the streets, bound on errands of no importance. The private “motors,” of course, were owned by the pleasure-seekers of the age, who, for all their hurry, probably had nothing more urgent to do than to order luncheon at a fashionable restaurant, or purchase a box of cigarettes.

Postal deliveries had been multiplied; telephone facilities increased. Everything was essentially modern; the great thing was to be up to date. But all the new facilities for saving time and trouble seemed to have resulted in leaving very little time for anything. Certainly there was no time for studying the past of England and of the British race; and as to the future, a great many persons believed that, for individuals, it was as mythical as Mrs Harris.

The so-called educated classes, when not following the compulsory routine of their daily lives, were primarily engaged, as to the young men, in the frenzied pursuit of sport; and as to the young women, in the vital study of dress, varied by a steady perusal of their favourite authoresses in the domain of fiction.

Newspapers, of course, were scanned--by the male population, at any rate; but people were not equal to the intellectual exertion of reading an unbroken column. News and notes had to be administered on the homœopathic principle, in scraps and snippets. And as the Bible had not yet been abridged, it necessarily followed that that was the very last book that up-to-date people could find time or interest to study.

Lives of great men were still available to remind the moderns to make their lives sublime. But, then, the moderns could not find time or inclination to read the ancients. The sublime, in their view, was not only close to, but identical with, the ridiculous. Certainly they could not concern themselves with any nonsense about leaving footprints on the sands of time. Everybody, however, found time to read lengthy law reports arising from scandals in high life.

A considerate aristocracy had of late done more and more to gratify public taste in that respect. The “upper classes” quarrelled about their children, about their heirlooms, about the “other man,” or the “secret woman,” about anything and everything. But, in spite of all, the average Briton, with inborn snobbishness, dearly loved a lord. Kind hearts were at a discount; but coronets fetched heavy premiums, especially in the American market. Broadly speaking, “simple faith” was non-existent; but Norman blood, however vitiated, covered in a double sense the multitude of sins. The Divorce Court had virtually become a public laundry, in which judge, counsel, and witnesses were constantly engaged in washing the soiled linen of the British peerage, a task varied, however, by similar operations on behalf of the ladies and gentlemen of the stage.

The business classes, still solid, stolid, and worried, were mostly occupied in efforts to put money in the purse to an extent sufficient to meet the ever-growing expenses of modern life in England. By reason of this problem, there were fewer marriages than of yore; and, yet more significant, the birth-rate fell and fell. There was still great wealth in England, but it was in fewer hands. The Jew syndicates, the drink-sellers, the drapers, and the betting agents largely absorbed the nation’s gold. But the poor in pocket were by no means poor in spirit. Pampered and petted by political parties, the British working-man had realised the uses of the weapons placed at his disposal. He had a vote, and he used it, whereas the middle-class man did not. He had the weight of numbers behind him, and he meant to use that too. Yet, notwithstanding all these indications of decay, there was still in every rank a goodly leaven; the problem was, whether there was enough of it to leaven the whole lump, and resuscitate the nation. If, instead of the return of the native after only twenty-five years, the boy-poet, Keats, could have come back (from that bourn whence no traveller returns), after nearer a hundred years, it is to be feared he still would have found an “inhuman dearth of noble natures,” and still gloomier signs--

“Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways Made for our searching.”

It was a covetous age, but it did not covet earnestly the best of gifts:

“Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance, Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength.”

But Shelley, like Keats, was forgotten, or unknown. The age of mediocrity had no concern with intellectual giants; the period of small men, with parochial ideas, nothing in common with great conceptions of--

“Love from its awful throne of patient power,”

looking down upon humanity; or of humanity ready--

“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates.”

It was “Everyone for himself,” but not “devil take the hindmost”; because belief in the Prince of Darkness, like belief in many other things, had largely been discarded.

The signs and the sounds of the times were many and various; but, not in England only--perhaps less in England than abroad--the most arresting was the diapason note of a steady march. The rolling rhythm of a mighty organ; the tramp, tramp, tramp of the many millions, drawing nearer and nearer.