Chapter V (4)

This noble stove is at its very best when its front has a big square opening in it for a _visible_ wood fire. The real heating is done in the hidden regions of the great structure, of course--the open fire is merely to rejoice your eye and gladden your heart.

America could adopt this stove, but does America do it? No, she sticks placidly to her own fearful and wonderful inventions in the stove line. She has fifty kinds, and not a rational one in the lot. The American wood stove, of whatsoever breed, is a terror. There can be no tranquillity of mind where it is. It requires more attention than a baby. It has to be fed every little while, it has to be watched all the time; and for all reward you are roasted half your time and frozen the other half. It warms no part of the room but its own part; it breeds headaches and suffocation, and makes one’s skin feel dry and feverish; and when your wood bill comes in you think you have been supporting a volcano.

We have in America many and many a breed of coal stoves, also--fiendish things, everyone of them. The base-burner sort are handy and require but little attention; but none of them, of whatsoever kind, distributes its heat uniformly through the room, or keeps it at an unvarying temperature, or fails to take the life out of the atmosphere and leave it stuffy and smothery and stupefying.

It seems to me that the ideal of comfort would be a German stove to heat one’s room, and an open wood fire to make it cheerful; then have furnace-heat in the halls. We could easily find some way to make the German stove beautiful, and that is all it needs at present. Still, even as it is to-day, it is lovely, it is a darling, compared with any “radiator” that has yet been intruded upon the world. That odious gilded skeleton! It makes all places ugly that it inhabits--just by contagion.

It is certainly strange that useful customs and devices do not spread from country to country with more facility and promptness than they do. You step across the German border almost anywhere, and suddenly the German stove has disappeared. In Italy you find a foolish and ineffectual modification of it, in Paris you find an unprepossessing “adaptation” of our base-burner on a reduced pattern.

Fifteen years ago Paris had a cheap and cunning little fire kindler consisting of a pine shaving, curled as it came from the carpenter’s plane, and gummed over with an inflammable substance which would burn several minutes and set fire to the most obdurate wood. It was cheap and handy, but no stranger carried the idea home with him. Paris has another swift and victorious kindler, now, in the form of a small black cake made of I don’t know what; but you shove it under the wood and touch a match to it and your fire is made. No one will think to carry that device to America, or elsewhere. In America we prefer to kindle the fire with the kerosene can and chance the inquest. I have been in a multitude of places where pine cones were abundant, but only in the French Riviera and in one place in Italy have I seen them in the wood box to kindle the fires with.

For perfect adaptation to the service required, look at the American gum shoe and the American arctic. Their virtues ought to have carried them to all wet and snowy lands; but they haven’t done anything of the kind. There are few places on the continent of Europe where one can buy them.

And observe how slowly our typewriting machine makes its way. In the great city of Florence I was able to find only one place where I could get typewriting done; and then it was not done by a native, but by an American girl. In the great city of Munich I found one typewriting establishment, but the operator was sick and that suspended the business. I was told that there was no opposition house. In the prodigious city of Berlin I was not able to find a typewriter at all. There was not even one in our Embassy or its branches. Our representative there sent to London for the best one to be had in that capital, and got an incapable, who would have been tarred and feathered in Mud Springs, Arizona. Four years ago a typewritten page was a seldom sight in Europe, and when you saw it it made you heartsick, it was so inartistic, and so blurred and shabby and slovenly. It was because the Europeans made the machines themselves, and the making of nice machinery is not one of their gifts. England imports ours, now. This is wise; she will have her reward.

In all these years the American fountain pen has hardly got a start in Europe. There is no market for it. It is too handy, too inspiring, too capable, too much of a time saver. The dismal steel pen and the compass-jawed quill are preferred. And semi-liquid mud is preferred to ink, apparently, everywhere in Europe. This in face of the fact that there is ink to be had in America--and at club rates, too.

Then there is the elevator, lift, _ascenseur_. America has had the benefit of this invaluable contrivance for a generation and a half, and it is now used in all our cities and villages, in all hotels, in all lofty business buildings and factories, and in many private dwellings. But we can’t spread it, we can’t beguile Europe with it. In Europe an elevator is even to this day a rarity and a curiosity. Especially a curiosity. As a rule it seats but three or four persons--often only two--and it travels so slowly and cautiously and timorously and piously and solemnly that it makes a person feel creepy and crawly and scary and dismal and repentant. Anybody with sound legs can give the continental elevator two flights the start and beat it to the sixth floor. Every time these nations merely import an American idea, instead of importing the concreted thing itself, the result is a failure. They tried to make the sewing machine, and couldn’t; they are trying to make fountain pens and typewriters and can’t; they are making these dreary elevators, now--and patenting them! Satire can no further go.

I think that as a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and that Europe develops a borrowed American idea backward. We borrowed gas lighting and the railroad from England, and the arc light from France, and these things have improved under our culture. We have lent Europe our tramway, telegraph, sewing machine, phonograph, telephone, and kodak, and while we may not claim that in these particular instances she has developed them backward, we are justified in claiming that she has added no notable improvements to them. We have added the improvements ourselves and she has accepted them. Why she has not accepted and universally adopted the improved elevator is a surprising and puzzling thing. Its rightful place is among the great ideas of our great age. It is an epoch maker. It is a concentrator of population, and economizer of room. It is going to build our cities skyward instead of out toward the horizons.[6] It is going to enable five millions of people to live comfortably on the same ground space that one million uncomfortably lives on now. It is going to make cheap quarters for Tom, Dick, and Harry near their work, in place of three miles from it, as is the rule to-day. It is going to save them the necessity of adding a six-flight climb to the already sufficient fatigue of their day’s labor.

We imitate some of the good things which we find in Europe, and we ought to imitate more of them. At the same time Europe ought to imitate us somewhat more than she does. The crusty, ill-mannered and in every way detestable Parisian cabman ought to imitate our courteous and friendly Boston cabman--and stop there. He can’t learn anything from the guild in New York. And it would morally help the Parisian shopkeeper if he would imitate the fair dealing of his American cousin. With us it is not necessary to ask the price of small articles before we buy them, but in Paris the person who fails to take that precaution will get scorched. In business we are prompt, fair, and trustworthy in all our small trade matters. It is the rule. In the friendliest spirit I would recommend France to imitate these humble virtues. Particularly in the kodak business. Pray get no kodak pictures developed in France--and especially in Nice. They will send you your bill to Rome or Jericho, or whithersoever you have gone, but that is all you will get. You will never see your negatives again, or the developed pictures, either. And by and by the head house in Paris will demand payment once more, and constructively threaten you with “proceedings.” If you inquire if they mailed your package across the frontier without registering it, they are coldly silent. If you inquire how they expected to trace and recover a lost package without a post-office receipt, they are dumb again. A little intelligence inserted into the kodak business in those regions would be helpful, if it could be done without shock.

But the worst of all is, that Europe cannot be persuaded to imitate our railway methods. Two or three years ago I liked the European methods, but experience has dislodged that superstition. All over the Continent the system--to call it by an extravagant term--is sufficiently poor and slow and clumsy, or unintelligent; but in these regards Italy and France are entitled to the chromo. In Italy it takes more than half an hour to buy a through ticket to Paris at Cook & Sons’ offices, there is such a formidable amount of red tape and recording connected with the vast transaction. Every little detail of the matter must be written down in a set of books--your name, condition, nationality, religion, date, hour, number of the train, and all that; and at last you get your ticket and think you are done, but you are not; it must be carried to the station and stamped; and even that is not the end, for if you stop over at any point it must be stamped again or it is forfeited. And yet you save time and trouble by going to Cook instead of to the station. Buying your ticket does not finish your job. Your trunks must be weighed, and paid for at about human-being rates. This takes another quarter of an hour of your time--perhaps half an hour if you are at the tail of the procession. You get paper checks, which are twice as easy to lose as brass ones. You cannot secure a seat beforehand, but must take your chances with the general rush to the train. If you have your family with you, you may have to distribute them among several cars. There is one annoying feature which is common all over the Continent, and that is, that if you want to make a short journey you cannot buy your ticket whenever you find the ticket office open, but must wait until it is doing business for your particular train; and that only begins, as a rule, a quarter of an hour before the train’s time of starting. The cars are most ingeniously inconvenient, cramped, and uncomfortable, and in Italy they are phenomenally dirty. The European “system” was devised either by a maniac or by a person whose idea was to hamper, bother, and exasperate the traveler in all conceivable ways and sedulously and painstakingly discourage custom. In Italy, as far as my experience goes, it is the custom to use the sleeping cars on the day trains and take them off when the sun goes down. One thing is sure, anyway: if that is not the case, it will be, presently, when they think of it. They can be depended upon to snap up as darling an idea as that with joy.

No, we are bad enough about not importing valuable European ideas, but Europe is still slower about introducing ours. Europe has always--from away back--been neglectful in this regard. Take our admirable postal and express system, for instance. We had it perfectly developed and running smoothly and beautifully more than three hundred years ago; and Europe came over and admired it and eloquently praised it--but didn’t adopt it. We Americans.... But let Prescott tell about it. I quote from the _Conquest of Peru_, chapter 2, vol. 1:

As the distance each courier had to perform was small, they ran over
the ground with great swiftness, and messages were carried through the
whole extent of the long routes at the rate of a hundred and fifty
miles a day. Their office was not limited to carrying dispatches. They
brought various articles. Fish from the distant ocean, fruits, game,
and different commodities from the hot regions of the coast were taken
to the capital in good condition. It is remarkable that this important
institution should have been found among two barbarian nations of the
New World long before it was introduced among the civilized nations of
Europe. By these wise contrivances of the Incas, the most distant
parts of the long-extended empire of Peru were brought into intimate
relations with each other. And while the capitals of Christendom, but
a few hundred miles apart, remained as far asunder as if seas had
rolled between them, the great capitals Cuzco and Quito were placed in
immediate correspondence. Intelligence from the numerous provinces was
transmitted on the wings of the wind to the Peruvian metropolis, the
great focus to which all the lines of communication converged.

There--that is what we had, three hundred and twenty-five years before Europe had anything that could be called a businesslike and effective postal and express service. We are a great people. We have always been a great people, from the start: always alive, alert, up early in the morning, and ready to teach. But Europe has been a slow and discouraging pupil from the start; always, from the very start. It seems to me that something ought to be done about this.

-----

Footnote 5:

Compare with his remarks on the same subject, in “Marienbad--A Health
Factory,” written about a year earlier.

Footnote 6:

This was good prophecy. There were no skyscrapers in New York City
when it was written.

THE CHOLERA EPIDEMIC IN HAMBURG
(1892)

I believe I have never been so badly situated before as I have been during these last four weeks. To begin with, the time-hallowed and business-worn thunderbolt out of the clear sky fell about the 18th of August--people in Hamburg dying like flies of something resembling cholera! A normal death rate of forty a day suddenly transformed into a terrific daily slaughter without notice to anybody to prepare for such a surprise! Certainly that was recognizable as that kind of a thunderbolt.

It was at this point that the oddity of the situation above referred to began. For you will grant that it is odd to live four weeks a twelve-hour journey from a devastating plague nest and remain baffled and defeated all that time in all your efforts to get at the state of the case there. Naturally one flies to the newspapers when a pestilence breaks out in his neighborhood. He feels sure of one thing, at any rate: that the paper will cast all other interests into the background and devote itself to the one supreme interest of the day; that it will throw wide its columns and cram them with information, valuable and otherwise, concerning that great event; and that it will even leave out the idle jaunts of little dukes and kinglets to make room for the latest plague item. I sought the newspapers, and was disappointed. I know now that nothing that can happen in this world can stir the German daily journal out of its eternal lethargy. When the Last Day comes it will note the destruction of the world in a three-line paragraph and turn over and go to sleep again.

This sort of journalism furnishes plenty of wonders. I have seen ostensible telegrams from Hamburg four days old, gravely put forth as news, and no apology offered. I have tracked a news item from one paper to another day after day until it died of old age and fatigue--and yet everybody treated it with respect, nobody laughed. Is it believable that these antiquities are forwarded by telegraph? It would be more rational to send them by slow freight, because less expensive and more speedy.

Then, the meagerness of the news meal is another marvel. That department of the paper is not headed “Poverty Column,” nobody knows why. We know that multitudes of people are being swept away daily in Hamburg, yet the daily telegrams from there could be copied on a half page of note paper, as a rule. If any newspaper has sent a special reporter thither he has not arrived yet.

The final miracle of all is the character of this daily dribble of so-called news. The wisest man in the world can get no information out of it. It is an Irish stew made up of unrelated odds and ends, a mere chaotic confusion and worthless. What can one make out of statistics like these:

Up to noon, 655 cases, 333 deaths. Of these 189 were previously reported.

The report that 650 bodies are lying unburied is not true. There are only 340, and the most of these will be buried to-night.

There are 2,062 cases in the hospitals, 215 deaths.

The figures are never given in such a way as to afford one an opportunity to compare the death list of one day with that of another; consequently there is no way of finding out whether the pest abates or increases. Sometimes a report uses the expression “to-day” and does not say when the day began or ended; sometimes the deaths for several days are bunched together in a divisionless lump; sometimes the figures make you think the deaths are five or six hundred a day, while other figures in the same paragraph seem to indicate that the rate is below two hundred.

A day or two ago the word cholera was not discoverable at all in that day’s issue of one of our principal dailies; in to-day’s issue of the same paper there is no cholera report from Hamburg. Yet a private letter from there says the raging pestilence is actually increasing.

One might imagine that the papers are forbidden to publish cholera news. I had that impression myself. It seemed the only explanation of the absence of special Hamburg correspondence. But it appears now, that the Hamburg papers are crammed with matter pertaining to the cholera, therefore that idea was an error. How does one find this out? In this amazing way: that a daily newspaper located ten or twelve hours from Hamburg describes with owl-eyed wonder the stirring contents of a Hamburg daily journal _six days old_, and yet gets from it the only informing matter, the only matter worth reading, which it has yet published from that smitten city concerning the pestilence.

You see, it did not even occur to that petrified editor to bail his columns dry of their customary chloroform and copy that Hamburg journal entire. He is so used to shoveling gravel that he doesn’t know a diamond when he sees it. I would trust that man with untold bushels of precious news, and nobody to watch him. Among other things which he notes in the Hamburg paper is the fact that its supplements contained one hundred of the customary elaborate and formal German death notices. That means--what nobody has had reason to suppose before--that the slaughter is not confined to the poor and friendless. I think so, because that sort of death notice occupies a formidable amount of space in an advertising page, and must cost a good deal of money.

I wander from my proper subject to observe that one hundred of these notices in a single journal must make that journal a sorrow to the eye and a shock to the taste, even among the Germans themselves, who are bred to endure and perhaps enjoy a style of “display ads” which far surpasses even the vilest American attempts, for insane and outrageous ugliness. Sometimes a death notice is as large as a foolscap page, has big black display lines, and is bordered all around with a coarse mourning border as thick as your finger. The notices are of all sizes from foolscap down to a humble two-inch square, and they suggest lamentation of all degrees, from the hundred-dollar hurricane of grief to the two-shilling sigh of a composed and modest regret. A newspaper page blocked out with mourning compartments of fifty different sizes flung together without regard to order or system or size must be a spectacle to see.

+--------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Todes-Anzeige. |
| ------------- |
| |
| Theilnehmenden Freunden und Bekannten hierdurch |
| die schmerzliche Nachricht, daß mein lieber Freund |
| und langjähriger, treuer Mitarbeiter |
| |
| Rudolf Beck |
| |
|gestern Abend an einem Herzschlag plötzlich verschieden |
|ist. |
| |
| =Langen=, den 5. September 1892. |
| |
| Otto Steingoetter |
| |
| Firma =Beck & Steingoetter=. |
| |
| Die Beerdigung findet Dienstag, den 6. Sept., |
| Nachmittags 3½ Uhr, statt. |
| 25958 |
+--------------------------------------------------------+

The notice copied above is modest and straightforward. The advertiser informs sympathizing friends and acquaintances that his dear friend and old and faithful fellow laborer has been suddenly smitten with death; then signs his name and adds “of the firm of Beck & Steingoetter,” which is perhaps another way of saying that the business will be continued as usual at the old stand. The average notice is often refreshed with a whiff of business at the end.

The 100 formal notices in the Hamburg paper did not mean merely 100 deaths; each told of one death, but many of them told of more--in some cases they told of four and five. In the same issue there were 132 one-line death notices. If the dates of these deaths were all stated, the 232 notices together could be made the basis of a better guess at the current mortality in Hamburg than the “official” reports furnished, perhaps. You would know that a certain number died on a certain day who left behind them people able to publish the fact and pay for it. Then you could correctly assume that the vast bulk of that day’s harvest were people who were penniless and left penniless friends behind. You could add your facts to your assumption and get _some_ sort of idea of the death rate, and this would be strikingly better than the official reports, since they give you no idea at all.

To-day a physician was speaking of a private letter received here yesterday from a physician in Hamburg which stated that every day numbers of poor people are snatched from their homes to the pest houses, and that that is the last that is heard of a good many of them. No intelligible record is kept; they die unknown and are buried so. That no intelligible record is kept seems proven by the fact that the public cannot get hold of a burial list for one day that is not made impossible by the record of the day preceding and the one following it.

What I am trying to make the reader understand is, the strangeness of the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that is close to us, and yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should be if the stage were in China. We sit “in front,” and the audience is in fact the world; but the curtain is down and from behind it we hear only an inarticulate murmur. The Hamburg disaster must go into history as the disaster without a history. And yet a well-trained newspaper staff would find a way to secure an accurate list of the new hospital cases and the burials daily, and would do it, and not take it out in complaining of the foolishness and futility of the official reports. Every day we know exactly what is going on in the two cholera-stricken ships in the harbor of New York. That is all the cholera news we get that is worth printing or believing.

All along we have heard rumors that the force of workers at Hamburg was too small to cope with the pestilence; that more help was impossible to get; and we have seen statements which confirmed these sorrowful facts; statements which furnished the pitiful spectacle of brave workers dying at their posts from exhaustion; of corpses lying in the halls of the hospitals, waiting there because there was no worker idle; and now comes another confirmatory item; it is in the physician’s letter above referred to--an item which shows you how hard pressed the authorities are by their colossal burden--an item which gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there; for in a line it flashes before you this ghastly picture, a thing seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick people in it, and with them four corpses!

QUEEN VICTORIA’S JUBILEE
(1897)

So far as I can see, a procession has value in but two ways--as a show and as a symbol; its minor function being to delight the eye, its major one to compel thought, exalt the spirit, stir the heart, and inflame the imagination. As a mere show, and meaningless--like a Mardi-Gras march--a magnificent procession is a sight worth a long journey to see; as a symbol, the most colorless and unpicturesque procession, if it have a moving history back of it, is worth a thousand of it.

After the Civil War ten regiments of bronzed New York veterans marched up Broadway in faded uniforms and bearing faded battle flags that were mere shot-riddled rags--and in each battalion as it swung by, one noted a great gap, an eloquent vacancy where had marched the comrades who had fallen and would march no more! Always, as this procession advanced between the massed multitudes, its approach was welcomed by each block of people with a burst of proud and grateful enthusiasm--then the head of it passed, and suddenly revealed those pathetic gaps, and silence fell upon that block; for every man in it had choked up, and could not get command of his voice and add it to the storm again for many minutes. That was the most moving and tremendous effect that I have ever witnessed--those affecting silences falling between those hurricanes of worshiping enthusiasm.

There was no costumery in that procession, no color, no tinsel, no brilliancy, yet it was the greatest spectacle and the most gracious and exalting and beautiful that has come within my experience. It was because it had history back of it, and because it was a symbol, and stood for something, and because one viewed it with the spiritual vision, not the physical. There was not much for the physical eye to see, but it revealed continental areas, limitless horizons, to the eye of the imagination and the spirit.

A procession, to be valuable, must do one thing or the other--clothe itself in splendors and charm the eye, or symbolize something sublime and uplifting, and so appeal to the imagination. As a mere spectacle to look at, I suppose that the Queen’s procession will not be as showy as the Tsar’s late pageant; it will probably fall much short of the one in Tannhäuser in the matter of rich and adorable costumery; in the number of renowned personages on view in it, it will probably fall short of some that have been seen in England before this. And yet in its major function, its symbolic function, I think that if all the people in it wore their everyday clothes and marched without flags or music, it would still be incomparably the most memorable and most important procession that ever moved through the streets of London.

For it will stand for English history, English growth, English achievement, the accumulated power and renown and dignity of twenty centuries of strenuous effort. Many things about it will set one to reflecting upon what a large feature of this world England is to-day, and this will in turn move one, even the least imaginative, to cast a glance down her long perspective and note the steps of her progress and the insignificance of her first estate. In this matter London is itself a suggestive object lesson.

I suppose that London has always existed. One cannot easily imagine an England that had no London. No doubt there was a village here 5,000 years ago. It was on the river somewhere west of where the Tower is now; it was built of thatched mud huts close to a couple of limpid brooks, and on every hand for miles and miles stretched rolling plains of fresh green grass, and here and there were groups and groves of trees. The tribes wore skins--sometimes merely their own, sometimes those of other animals. The chief was monarch, and helped out his complexion with blue paint. His industry was the chase; his relaxation was war. Some of the Englishmen who will view the procession to-day are carrying his ancient blood in their veins.

It may be that that village remained about as it began, away down to the Roman occupation, a couple of thousand years ago. It was still not much of a town when Alfred burned the cakes. Even when the Conqueror first saw it, it did not amount to much. I think it must have been short of distinguished architecture or he would not have traveled down into the country to the village of Westminster to get crowned. If you skip down 350 years further you will find a London of some little consequence, but I believe that that is as much as you can say for it. Still, I am interested in that London, for it saw the first two processions which will live longer than any other in English history, I think; the date of the one is 1415, that of the other is 1897.

The compactly built part of the London of 1415 was a narrow strip not a mile long, which stretched east and west through the middle of what is now called “the City.” The houses were densest in the region of Cheapside. South of the strip were scattering residences which stood in turfy lawns which sloped to the river. North of the strip, fields and country homes extended to the walls. Let us represent that London by three checker-board squares placed in a row; then open out a New York newspaper like a book, and the space which it covers will properly represent the London of to-day by comparison. It is the difference between your hand and a blanket. It is possible that that ancient London had 100,000 inhabitants, and that 100,000 outsiders came to town to see the procession. The present London contains five or six million inhabitants, and it has been calculated that the population has jumped to 10,000,000 to-day.

The pageant of 1415 was to celebrate the gigantic victory of Agincourt, then and still the most colossal in England’s history.

From that day to this there has been nothing that even approached it but Plassey. It was the third and greatest in the series of monster victories won by the English over the French in the Hundred Years’ War--Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt. At Agincourt, according to history, 15,000 English, under Henry V, defeated and routed an army of 100,000 French. Sometimes history makes it 8,000 English and 60,000 French; but no matter, in both cases the proportions are preserved. Eight thousand of the French nobility were slain and the rest of the order taken prisoners--1,500 in number--among them the Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and Marshal Boucicaut; and the victory left the whole northern half of France an English possession. This wholesale depletion of the aristocracy made such a stringent scarcity in its ranks that when the young peasant girl, Joan of Arc, came to undo Henry’s mighty work fourteen years later she could hardly gather together nobles enough to man her staff.

The battle of Agincourt was fought on the 25th of October, and a few days later the tremendous news was percolating through England. Presently it was sweeping the country like a tidal wave, like a cyclone, like a conflagration. Choose your own figure, there is no metaphor known to the language that can exaggerate the tempest of joy and pride and exultation that burst everywhere along the progress of that great news.

The king came home and brought his soldiers with him--he and they the idols of the nation, now. He brought his 1,500 captive knights and nobles, too--we shall not see any such output of blue blood as that to-day, bond or free. The king rested three weeks in his palace, the Tower of London, while the people made preparations and prepared the welcome due him. On the 22d of December all was ready.

There were no cables, no correspondents, no newspapers then--a regrettable defect, but not irremediable. A young man who would have been a correspondent if he had been born 500 years later was in London at the time, and he remembers the details. He has communicated them to me through a competent spirit medium, phrased in a troublesome mixture of obsolete English and moldy French, and I have thoroughly modernized his story and put it into straight English, and will here record it. I will explain that his Sir John Oldcastle is a person whom we do not know very well by that name, nor much care for; but we know him well and adore him, too, under his other name--Sir John Falstaff. Also, I will remark that two miles of the Queen’s progress to-day will be over ground traversed by the procession of Henry V; all solid bricks and mortar, now, but open country in Henry’s day, and clothed in that unapproachable beauty which has been the monopoly of sylvan England since the creation. Ah, where now are those long-vanished forms, those unreturning feet! Let us not inquire too closely. Translated, this is the narrative of the spirit-correspondent, who is looking down upon me at this moment from his high home, and admiring to see how the art and mystery of spelling has improved since his time!

NARRATIVE OF THE SPIRIT CORRESPONDENT

I was commanded by my lord the Lord Mayor to make a report for the archives, and was furnished with a fleet horse, and with a paper permitting me to go anywhere at my will, without let or hindrance, even up and down the processional route, though no other person not of the procession itself was allowed this unique privilege during the whole of the 21st and the 22d.

On the morning of the 22d, toward noon, I rode from the Tower into the city, and through it as far as St. Paul’s. All the way, on both sides, all the windows, balconies, and roofs were crowded with people, and wherever there was a vacancy it had been built up in high tiers of seats covered with red cloth, and these seats were also filled with people--in all cases in bright holiday attire--the woman of fashion barring the view from all in the rear with those tiresome extinguisher hats, which of late have grown to be a cloth-yard high. From every balcony depended silken stuffs of splendid and various colors, and figured and pictured rich tapestries. It was brisk, sharp weather, but a rare one for sun, and when one looked down this swinging double wall of beautiful fabrics, glowing and flashing and changing color like prisms in the flooding light, it was a most fair sight to see. And there were frequent May poles, garlanded to their tops, and from the tops swung sheaves of silken long ribbons of all bright colors, which in the light breeze writhed and twisted and prettily mingled themselves together.

I rode solitary--in state, as it might be--and was envied, as I could see, and did not escape comment, but had a plenty of it; for the conduits were running gratis wine, and the results were accumulating. I got many ribald compliments on my riding, on my clothes, on my office. Everybody was happy, so it was best to seem so myself, which I did--for those people’s aim was better than their eggs.

A place had been reserved for me on a fine and fanciful erection in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and there I waited for the procession. It seemed a long time, but at last a dull booming sound arose in the distance, and after a while we saw the banners and the head of the procession come into view, and heard the muffled roar of voices that welcomed it. The roar moved continuously toward us, growing steadily louder and louder, and stronger and stronger, and with it the bray and crash of music; and presently it was right with us, and seemed to roll over us and submerge us, and stun us, and deafen us--and behold, there was the hero of Agincourt passing by!

All the multitude was standing up, red-faced, frantic, bellowing, shouting, the tears running down their faces; and through the storm of waving hats and handkerchiefs one glimpsed the battle banners and the drifting host of marching men as through a dimming flurry of snow.

The king, tall, slender, handsome, rode with his visor up, that all might see his face. He was clad in his silver armor from head to heel, and had his great two-handed sword at his side, his battle-ax at his pommel, his shield upon his arm, and about his helmet waved and tossed a white mass of fluffy plumes. On either side of him rode the captive dukes, plumed like himself, but wearing long crimson satin gowns over their armor; after these came the French marshal similarly habited; after him followed the fifteen hundred French knights, with robes of various colors over their armor, and with each two rode two English knights, sometimes robed in various colors, sometimes in white with a red cross on the shoulder, these white-clad ones being Knights Templars. Every man of the three thousand bore his shield upon his left arm, newly polished and burnished, and on it was his device.

As the king passed the church he bowed his head and lifted his shield, and by one impulse all the knights did the same; and so as far down the line as the eye could reach one saw the lifted shields simultaneously catch the sun, and it was like a sudden mile-long shaft of flashing light; and, Lord! it lit up that dappled sea of color with a glory like “the golden vortex in the west over the foundered sun”! (The introduction of this quotation is very interesting, for it shows that our literature of to-day has a circulation in heaven--pirated editions, no doubt.--M.T.)

The knights were a long time in passing; then came 5,000 Agincourt men-at-arms, and they were a long time; and at the very end, last of all, came that intolerable old tun of sack and godless ruffler, Sir John Oldcastle (now risen from the dead for the third time), fat-faced, purple with the spirit of bygone and lamented drink, smiling his hospitable, wide smile upon all the world, leering at the women, wallowing about in his saddle, proclaiming his valorous deeds as fast as he could lie, taking the whole glory of Agincourt to his single self, measuring off the miles of his slain and then multiplying them by 5, 7, 10, 15, as inspiration after inspiration came to his help--the most inhuman spectacle in England, a living, breathing outrage, a slander upon the human race; and after him came, mumming and blethering, his infamous lieutenants; and after them his “paladins,” as he calls them, the mangiest lot of starvelings and cowards that was ever littered, the disgrace of the noblest pageant that England has ever seen. God rest their souls in the place appointed for all such!

There was a moment of prayer at the Temple, the procession moved down the country road, its way walled on both sides by welcoming multitudes, and so, by Charing Cross, and at last to the Abbey for the great ceremonies. It was a grand day, and will remain in men’s memories.

That was as much of it as the spirit correspondent could let me have; he was obliged to stop there because he had an engagement to sing in the choir, and was already late.

The contrast between that old England and the present England is one of the things which will make the pageant of the present day impressive and thought-breeding. The contrast between the England of the Queen’s reign and the England of any previous British reign is also an impressive thing. British history is two thousand years old, and yet in a good many ways the world has moved further ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together. A large part of this progress has been moral, but naturally the material part of it is the most striking and the easiest to measure. Since the Queen first saw the light she has seen invented and brought into use (with the exception of the cotton gin, the spinning frames, and the steamboat) every one of the myriad of strictly modern inventions which, by their united powers, have created the bulk of the modern civilization and made life under it easy and difficult, convenient and awkward, happy and horrible, soothing and irritating, grand and trivial, an indispensable blessing and an unimaginable curse--she has seen all these miracles, these wonders, these marvels piled up in her time, and yet she is but seventy-eight years old. That is to say, she has seen more things invented than any other monarch that ever lived; and more than the oldest old-time English commoner that ever lived, including Old Parr; and more than Methuselah himself--five times over.

Some of the details of the moral advancement which she has seen are also very striking and easily graspable.

She has seen the English criminal laws prodigiously modified, and 200 capital crimes swept from the statute book.

She has seen English liberty greatly broadened--the governing and lawmaking powers, formerly the possession of the few, extended to the body of the people, and purchase in the army abolished.

She has seen the public educator--the newspaper--created, and its teachings placed within the reach of the leanest purse. There was nothing properly describable as a newspaper until long after she was born.

She has seen the world’s literature set free, through the institution of international copyright.

She has seen America invent arbitration, the eventual substitute for that enslaver of nations, the standing army; and she has seen England pay the first bill under it, and America shirk the second--but only temporarily; of this we may be sure.

She has seen a Hartford American (Doctor Wells) apply anæsthetics in surgery for the first time in history, and for all time banish the terrors of the surgeon’s knife; and she has seen the rest of the world ignore the discoverer and a Boston doctor steal the credit of his work.

She has seen medical science and scientific sanitation cut down the death rate of civilized cities by more than half, and she has seen these agencies set bounds to the European march of the cholera and imprison the Black Death in its own home.

She has seen woman freed from the oppression of many burdensome and unjust laws; colleges established for her; privileged to earn degrees in men’s colleges--but not get them; in some regions rights accorded to her which lifted her near to political equality with man, and a hundred bread-winning occupations found for her where hardly one existed before--among them medicine, the law, and professional nursing. The Queen has herself recognized merit in her sex; of the 501 lordships which she has conferred in sixty years, one was upon a woman.

The Queen has seen the right to organize trade unions extended to the workman, after that right had been the monopoly of guilds of masters for six hundred years.

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.