To-day we came from Southampton to Brighton, fifty miles along the southern coast. The beach is fine, and is the summer resort of England. Years ago royalty and nobility made Brighton their favorite sea-shore place, but the great plain people have gotten into the habit of going there in numbers, so the aristocracy has gone farther, to the continent and to Wales. Nearly every one of these old English towns has a cathedral and a Roman wall. The Romans were town-builders as well as road-makers, and they never even camped for the night without fortifying. The cathedrals were mostly built in the Middle Ages, when the church was a wealthy business organization with lands and revenues. They look old and quaint and are generally in good taste. When you read about a cathedral or castle being a thousand years old you may depend on it that if it is still in use it has been “restored.” Some of these very old cathedrals remind me of the boy’s jackknife. The blades wore out and he got new blades. The handle wore out and he got a new handle. But he still had the old jackknife. A cathedral built in the year 1000 may have new walls, new roof, new interior and new spire, but it is still the old cathedral, “restored.”
In a little old English inn on the bank of the river Thames we ate our lunch and watched the endless procession of boats that passes up and down the stream. The ocean reaches up the river as far as London, so that it is really an inlet, with a tide that rises and falls, and a deep channel for ships. Ten miles above London the Thames is about the size of the Little Arkansas, and all the way past Windsor, Henley and Oxford, historic for the boat-races, it is very little wider than Cow creek. By a system of dams and locks the Thames above London is really only a canal. There is a path alongside, and we saw several young men taking their sisters, or somebody’s sisters, for a boat-ride, the man walking the bank, pulling the boat with a rope, and the lady sitting in the boat. In some countries I have been in this summer the woman would have been pulling on the rope and the man would have been reared back in the seat, comfortably smoking a long cigar. As a river the Thames above London is not much, but as a pretty winding stream, carrying little steamboats and row-boats, filled with gaily dressed people, it is a success.
The place we stopped for lunch was at Runnymede, just about the greatest spot on earth for English and Americans. It was here in 1215 that King John met the rebellious barons and signed the Magna Charta. Up to that time the king of England had done as he pleased, regardless of law. King John levied taxes so heavily that the people could not stand it, and the big nobles suffered worst of all. So the barons combined, and when the king started out to lick them, his supporters nearly all went over to the rebels. In order to save his neck and his kingdom, John met the barons at Runnymede and signed the agreement which is at the basis of the English and American constitutions. He agreed not to levy any further unusual taxes except by consent of the Great Council of the nobles (origin of the English parliament), nor to deny or sell justice, and confirmed the right of an accused person to a trial by jury.
It did not make any difference if King John repudiated the Magna Charta as soon as he could. The principle was established, and while some English rulers after that tried to evade and escape its provisions, the English people held to it as their rock of refuge. England has no written constitution like ours. The English constitution is a growth of custom, laws, grants and statutes, and the Magna Charta is the basis on which it rests.
When John met the barons at Runnymede the people had no rights that king or baron was bound to respect. But John put a provision in the Magna Charta that the barons must treat their tenants as fairly as the barons wanted to be treated by the king. I suppose John was trying to get even with his powerful nobles by thus recognizing the common people, and deserves no credit for the article. But in a few centuries the development of this idea and the discovery that a musket in the hands of an ordinary man could shoot a hole through a knight, broadened the Magna Charta so that it protects every Englishman.
One of the things that strike Americans as odd is the rule of the road, “turn to the left.” This rule is rigidly observed everywhere in England. But when your motor car, running at 30 or 40 miles an hour, meets another coming at a like speed, and your driver turns to the left, the American on the rear seat shuts his eyes so as not to see the collision, while a cold chill travels down his backbone. Of course there is no accident, for the other fellow also turns to the left, but it is hard on the nerves. However, a Kansas man in Europe takes plenty of nerve with him and he is all right so long as his money lasts.