The usual Sabbath gloom was creeping on the town and dinner-time approaching, when from a corner of the square appeared a man advancing rapidly. He glanced about inquiringly, and for a moment a look of disappointment crossed his face. Mounting the steps that lead up to the smoke-coated Areopagus, he stopped just for an instant, as if to draw his breath and gather his ideas. Decently dressed in shabby black, his trousers frayed a little above the heels of his elastic-sided boots, his soft felt hat that covered long but scanty hair just touched with grey, he had an air as of a plaster figure set in the middle of a pond, as he stood silhouetted against the background of the buildings, forlorn yet resolute.
The urchins, who had gathered round him, had a look upon their faces as of experienced critics at a play; that look of expectation and subconscious irony which characterises all their kind at public spectacles.
Their appearance, although calculated to appal a speaker broken to the platform business, did not influence the man who stood upon the steps. Taking off his battered hat, he placed it and his umbrella carefully upon the ground. A light, as of the interior fire that burned in the frail tenement of flesh so fiercely that it illuminated his whole being, shone in his mild blue eyes. Clearing his throat, and after running his nervous hands through his thin hair, he pitched his voice well forward, as if the deserted square had been packed full of people prepared to hang upon his words. His voice, a little hoarse and broken during his first sentences, gradually grew clearer, developing a strength quite incommensurate with the source from which it came.
“My friends,” he said, causing the boys to grin and waking up the dozing policeman, “I have a doctrine to proclaim. Love only rules the world. The Greek word caritas in the New Testament should have been rendered love. Love suffereth long. Love is not puffed up; love beareth all things. That is what the Apostle really meant to say. Often within this very square I have stood listening to the speeches, and have weighed them in my mind. It is not for me to criticise, only to advocate my own belief. Friends . . .”
As his voice had gathered strength, two or three working-men, attracted by the sight of a man speaking to the air, surrounded but by the street boys and the nodding policeman on his beat, had gathered round about. Dressed in their Sunday clothes; well washed, and with the look as of restraint that freedom from their accustomed toil often imparts to them on Sunday, they listened stolidly, with that toleration that accepts all doctrines, from that of highest Toryism down to Anarchy, and acts on none of them. The speaker, spurred on by the unwonted sight of listeners, for several draggled women had drawn near, and an ice-cream seller had brought his donkey-cart up to the nearest curb-stone, once more launched into his discourse.
“Friends, when I hear the acerbity of the address of some; when I hear doctrines setting forth the rights but leaving out the duties of the working class; when I hear men defend the sweater and run down the sweated, calling them thriftless, idle, and intemperate, when often they are but unfortunate, I ask myself, what has become of Love? Who sees more clearly than I do myself what the poor have to suffer? Do I not live amongst them and share their difficulties? Who can divine better than one who has imagination—and in that respect I thank my stars I have not been left quite unendowed—what are the difficulties of those high placed by fortune, who yet have got to strive to keep their place?
“Sweaters and sweated, the poor, the rich, men, women, children, all mankind, suffer from want of Love. I am not here to say that natural laws will ever cease to operate, or that there will not be great inequalities, if not of fortune, yet of endowments, to the end of Time. What the Great Power who sent us here intended, only He can tell. One thing He placed within the grasp of every one, capacity to love. Think, friends, what England might become under the reign of universal love. The murky fumes that now defile the landscape, the manufactories in which our thousands toil for others, the rivers vile with refuse, the knotted bodies and the faces scarcely human in their abject struggle for their daily bread, would disappear. Bradford and Halifax and Leeds would once again be fair and clean. The ferns would grow once more in Shipley Glen, and in the valleys about Sheffield the scissor-grinders would ply their trade upon streams bright and sparkling, as they were of yore. In Halifax, the Roman road, now black with coal-dust and with mud, would shine as well-defined as it does where now and then it crops out from the ling upon the moors, just as the Romans left it polished by their caligulæ. Why, do you ask me? Because all sordid motives would be gone, and of their superfluity the rich would give to those less blessed by Providence. The poor would grudge no one the gifts of fortune, and thus the need for grinding toil would disappear, as the struggle and the strain for daily bread would fade into the past.
“Picture to yourselves, my friends, an England once more green and merry, with the air fresh and not polluted by the smoke of foetid towns.
“’Tis pleasant, friends, on a spring morning to hear the village bells calling to church, even although they do not call you to attend. It heals the soul to see the honeysuckle and the eglantine and smell the new-mown hay. . . .
“Then comes a chill when on your vision rises the England of the manufacturing town, dark, dreary, and befouled with smoke. How different it might be in the perpetual May morning I have sketched for you.