A Journey of a Jayhawker

by W. Y. Morgan

The knights are dust;

Their souls are with the saints, we trust.”

Here in Warwick and at Kenilworth we take a long dream backward, and by working our imagination and our sentiment we see the England of Shakespeare, of Warwick, of Ivanhoe. It is a good dream, but it is a past that will never return, a past that is more nearly connected with the present in Warwick than at any other place. It is old England, which first learned to rule herself and then began to rule most of the rest of the world, and with the assistance of the American child will undoubtedly do the business in the future. We are going to London and Liverpool, the castles of commerce and industry which now command the trade of the globe. In the England of to-day the castles of the business man and the banker rule in the place of the castles of the baron and the earl, and old England has given place to a new England. But it will be this old England of Shakespeare, Warwick and Kenilworth that will live in the hearts of the English people, and will be the object of pilgrimage for Americans abroad.

THE GREATEST OF CITIES.

London, Aug. 11, 1905.

We are “out of season” in London. “Everybody is out of town.” I suppose there are only about 7,000,000 people left within the limits of the city as laid out for police purposes. With only 7,000,000 people in this district twenty miles square, one naturally feels lonesome. I suppose it will strike me that way after I get used to it. But if as many of the inhabitants of London as there are people in the State of Kansas should go away, it is probable that I would not notice it at first. It is curious what funny first impressions one gets of things. My first of London was that it looked like a great big ant-heap with the ants excited over something and swarming in every direction. The long processions or streams of people which wind in and out, up and down, make the individual feel mightily insignificant. In comparison my memory of Chicago is that it looks like a deserted country town on Sunday afternoon, and New York a fairly large and busy village.

The streets of London are laid out with no regard for plan or regularity. None of them are straight, and in the course of a few blocks they will be intersected at every angle and possible curve by other streets, which in turn are cut into by more streets. Every now and then there is a “square,” or a “circus,” either meaning a place where different streets meet head-on and usually stop. A “circus” is a curved square and not a show. A map of London looks like a chicken-yard in which the hens have been very busy scratching. The stranger loses all idea of direction. When the sun shines, which is not often, I have seen it in the north, south, east and west on the same day.

There are no “sky-scrapers.” The height of buildings is regulated, and I think the limit is usually six stories. This is a rule which our American cities ought to have but they won’t. The climate has the effect of making a new house soon look old, and London is neither bright nor shining in its appearance. But it is the greatest city in the world, and that fact is impressed on the traveler in every direction. There are more Irishmen in London than in Dublin, more Scotchmen than in Edinburgh, more Jews than in Palestine, and in its population are large colonies of people from every country on the earth. Name any article you want or have ever heard of, and it is in London. No business and no trade in any civilized land but has its representative in this city. No great work is done and no enterprise attempted but the fact is known to some one in London. In spite of the great growth and wealth of America, the industry and success of Germany, the thrift and saving of France, the financial center of the world is in London, and other bourses and boards of trade follow the lead or are in fact only branches of the English concern. Every active financial institution in the United States or elsewhere has its London connection through which it draws when it engages in international business or when it goes out of the local sphere of influence. London is the whirlpool to which all the world contributes and from which all the world gets something thrown out.