“Me boy, there are thricks in every thrade. I’ll be there whin me vote is wanted.”
We came away finally through long, floreated passages and towering rooms, where I paused to admire the intricate woodwork, the splendid gilding, and the tier upon tier of carven kings and queens in their respective niches. There was for me a flavor of great romance over it all. I could not help thinking that, pointless as it all might be, such joys and glories as we have are thus compounded. Out of the dull blatherings of half-articulate members, the maunderings of dreamers and schemers, come such laws and such policies as best express the moods of the time—of the British or any other empire. I have no great faith in laws, anyhow. They are ill-fitting garments at best, traps and mental catch-poles for the unwary only. But I thought as I came out into the swirling city again, “It is a strange world. These clock-towers and halls will sometime fall into decay. The dome of our own capitol will be rent and broken, and through its ragged interstices will fall the pallor of the moon.” But life does not depend upon parliaments or men. It can get along with windless spaces and such forms and spirits as have not yet been dreamed of in the mind of man.
The Thames from Blackfriars Bridge to the Tower Bridge, along Upper and Lower Thames Street, which is on the right bank of the river going up-stream, was my first excursion, though, in making it, I saw little of the river. It is a street that runs parallel with it, and is intersected every fifty or a hundred feet by narrow lanes which lead down to docks at the water’s-edge. The Thames is a murky little stream above London Bridge, compared with such vast bodies as the Hudson and the Mississippi, but utterly delightful. I saw it on several occasions before and after, once in a driving rain off London Bridge, where twenty thousand vehicles were passing in the hour, it was said; once afterward at night when the boats below were faint, wind-driven lights and the crowd on the bridge black shadows. Once I walked along the Embankment from Blackfriars Bridge to Battersea Bridge and beyond to the giant plant of the General Electric Company, a very charming section of London.
But I was never more impressed than I was this day walking from Cleopatra’s Needle to the Tower. The section lying between Blackfriars Bridge and Tower Bridge is very interesting from a human, to say nothing of a river, point of view; I question whether from some points of view it is not the most interesting in London, though it gives only occasional glimpses of the river. London is curious. It is very modern in spots. It is too much like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston; but here between Blackfriars Bridge and the Tower, along Upper and Lower Thomas Street, I found something that delighted me. It smacked of Dickens, of Charles II, of Old England, and of a great many forgotten, far-off things which I felt, but could not readily call to mind. It was delicious, this narrow, winding street, with high walls,—high because the street was so narrow,—and alive with people bobbing along under umbrellas or walking stodgily in the rain. Lights were burning in all the stores and warehouses, dark recesses running back to the restless tide of the Thames, and they were full of an industrious commercial life.
It was interesting to me to think that I was in the center of so much that was old, but for the exact details I confess I cared little. Here the Thames was especially delightful. It presented such odd vistas. I watched the tumbling tide of water, whipped by gusty wind where moderate-sized tugs and tows were going by in the mist and rain. It was delicious, artistic, far more significant than quiescence and sunlight could have made it. I took note of the houses, the doorways, the quaint, winding passages, but for significance and charm they did not compare with the nebulous, indescribable mass of working boys and girls and men and women which moved before my gaze. The mouths of many of them were weak, their noses snub, their eyes squint, their chins undershot, their ears stub, their chests flat. Most of them had a waxy, meaty look, but for interest they were incomparable. American working crowds may be much more chipper, but not more interesting. I could not weary of looking at them.
I followed the Thames in the rain to the giant plant of the General Electric Company, and thought of Sir Thomas More, and Henry VIII, who married Anne Boleyn at the Old Church near Battersea Bridge, and wondered what they would think of this modern power-house. What a change from Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More to vast, whirling electric dynamos and a London subway system! A little below this, coming once more into a dreary neighborhood of the cheapest houses,—mud-colored brick,—I turned into a street called Lots Road, drab and gray, and, weary of rain and gloom, took a bus to my hotel. What I know of the Thames I have described. It is beautiful.
THE MONROE DOCTRINE IN THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE
HOW THAT CONTROVERSY PAVED THE WAY FOR THE PANAMA CANAL