The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream

by L. P. Gratacap

Amid these fluctuating thoughts and feelings, the hansom swung with vehement oscillations along the streets, in the more deserted parts of London, and brought its occupant in sight of the Bethnal Green Museum, from which a diversion along Old Ford Road and Approach Road, flung him into Victoria Park, the huge playground of the poorer eastern section of the city. He was driven to the eastern part of the immense reservation, and was gratified to find a public meeting in progress, the exact thing he most wished to be present at, and to estimate.

In a broad and treeless area of the park, with the grass showing hesitatingly after the long winter, but vivid also in spots, in the strong light of the afternoon, with an atmosphere strangely variant from the traditional, and, to Leacraft, much loved velvety softness and mellowed obscuration of former days, were gathered a multitude of people. They surrounded a speaker, who, on some sort of improvised platform, with a knot of associated leaders, with a swaying body and occasionally outstretched hands, was engaged in a harangue which was received with attention unattended by the slightest demonstration of assent or disapproval. It looked from a short distance almost like a devotional assembly, it seemed so reverently silent, and as Leacraft approached, this impression was partially at least verified, for the speaker’s hands ceased their agitated appeal, the occasional higher cries proceeding from his lips died away, and a song or hymn burst suddenly from the still motionless multitude. It lasted for an instant, perhaps a single verse, and as Leacraft drew near, another man from the platform group stood up, and stepped to the front of the small stand. At that precise moment the cannonading, agreed upon as a signal, announced the starting of the royal cortege, and the sad beginning of the imperial evacuation of England. It was heard with far away reverberations, as it was repeated from other nearer points, and this vagueness, by a congruity of effect with the dull misery weighing on Leacraft’s heart, seemed to give to it a deeper poignancy of grievous import. It produced the impression of an irrevocable doom. As the sounds were heard by the assembled crowds, the speaker lifted his hand and raised his face skyward, as if in supplication, the heads were all uncovered by one spontaneous impulse, and, caught in the same wave of feeling, Leacraft sought the invocation of his own blessing on the King and all he stood for.

The interrupted speaker began his address. The man was a strong type. His face was somewhat leisurely framed in short whiskers, confined to his cheeks; his eyes were large, blue and unblinking, with a resolute look in them that had the merit of extorting, at least, a respectful recognition; his complexion met all the requirements of the English reputation for color, but it left no impression of having attained its superior brilliancy through less innocent means than exercise and personal care. His broad, high forehead—a little heightened in its expansive effect through the faltering recession of the iron grey hair that stood a little stiffly above it—rose above the admirably firm nose, whose size and contour formed to the reader of physiognomies another compelling admonition to give its wearer the rational allegiance of attention. The man’s voice was musical, with a single intonation that imparted to it much carrying power, and it yielded to certain tendencies of relaxation in speaking that gave it almost a feminine sweetness. Leacraft put him down for a labor leader of a sort, character and design belonging to the best elements of the current labor thought and organization; a man of that impressive stamp in modern adjustments of self-assertion, of which John Burns was so extraordinary an example.

He had begun his speech as Leacraft, with insistent zeal, pushed his way deeply toward the centre and margins nearer the stage, of the attentive throng.

“My friends, we must think for ourselves. We are not likely to have our thinking done for us to the best advantage. Now there are some plain, undeniable facts. They are the kind of facts which cannot be hid under a bushel basket, nor, for that matter, under a king’s crown. One of the most intelligible of these facts—and it is fundamental—is that the number of individual heads apportioned to the same number of paired legs make up the population, and units of population make nations, and nothing else can. An aggregate of gentlemen dressed in wigs, or holding truncheons sticking out of purple and gold-braided shawls never has, and, from sheer destitution, never could make a nation. By all the signs around us, and I am willing to accept them without any question, this country of ours is going to move; is about to begin housekeeping somewhere else, and I think it is an imperative necessity for the success of such a change that everyone living now on this island and calling himself an Englishman, must move also, and move to the same place (Hear, Hear,). But that moving is conditioned. It is indispensably necessary that we proclaim that condition, and insist upon its acceptance. We hold the situation in our own hands. We control the key to the future, to make or mar, or destroy the continuity of the English name. Why? Because if to-morrow the English workingman refused to follow the English flag to Australia, and took his wisdom, his tools and his savings somewhere else, that flag would lose twenty millions of subjects, and would wave over a remnant that could not ensure its protection or its support. (Hear, Hear). But the condition?”

The speaker paused, sweeping his eyes over the sea of upturned faces, as if he was hunting through the chaotic assemblage for the disclosure of some particular visage which, either as an ally or an opponent, might receive the shock of his omnipotent secret. Whether he discovered the facial invitation or not, was not revealed in his subsequent action. He wheeled sideways to the stiffened line of men behind him—doubtless expectant and impatient numbers in the afternoon’s programme—and bringing his clenched right hand into the hollowed palm of his left hand, shouted, and not discordantly: “The condition is the abolition forever of the Law of Entail that to-day makes us a servile race.”

Again he paused, as if so ponderous a statement, so fiercely declared, would elicit a demonstration—but to Leacraft’s abounding wonder, not a sound arose from the vast audience. Whether it was appalled, or thrilled, interested, or pleased, or dumbfounded, it gave no sign. Its immutable decree for the speaker to go on was its very silence. No public orator could conveniently, with respect to his own sensitive needs for public encouragement, stop there. But he had become cautious. He felt that perchance his auditors yet held mental reservations in favor of things as they were, as they wished them to continue.

“I say, with all my heart and soul,” he went on, “stay with the Flag, stay with the King, stay with our lords and ladies, but on one condition as freemen, to whose keeping now in this hour of peril they are wholly given. Into your hands the God of Nations entrusts their fate, but that fate can only be propitious as you are true to yourselves, your children, and your children’s children.”

Then came the long delayed approval. A wave of excited pleasure brushed across the crowds, and the hand-clapping, begun in many separate centres, ran together, and with shouts of acquiescence, with cheers, with central and periphera, agitation, the huge aggregate expressed its tumultuous adhesion. Leacraft felt that the loyalty of these people was not impaired, and that the logic of events would still hold them united in a consentaneous allegiance at least, to the idea of the English nation, though it was pretty evident that the democratic claims of a wider opportunity for personal, for family promotion, leavened all their feelings, and that in the new regime it might be expected, that a great deal of the present relation of the classes would be swept away, and that the old time idolatry of degree, the mere flunkeyism of homage to name and geneological prestige, among the masses, had shrunken into nothingness.

The stage was again occupied by a speaker, who was interested in very practical and urgent questions, the how and where and when, the disposition of the emigrants to the new country, and he revelled in plans, provisions, details of occupancy, and employment. He showed conclusively the power and effectiveness of organization, and the surprising accommodations that can be extracted from the most forlorn prospects by a shrewd use of forethought and combination. Funds had been scraped together, settlements, as yet in the dream stage of realization created, and a practical socialism consummated in the confederation of a large numbers in one common venture. This aspect of the emigration was dwelt upon by the speaker with some rigor. It was a surprise to Leacraft, and lent a strange expression to the still irreconcilable spectacle of Englishmen looking for a new home.