LONDON.
Entering London—The Great City Crowded—Six Million Five Hundred Thousand People Together—Lost in London—A Human Niagara—A Policeman and a Lockup—The Jubilee and the Golden Wedding—”God Save the Queen.” and God Save the People—Amid England’s Shouts and Ireland’s Groans Heard.
I ENTER London for the first time on Saturday at 8 p.m. It is with the greatest difficulty that I obtain lodging. I am turned away from several hotels, boarding-houses, and private homes. I can not get even a cot, or blankets, to make a pallet on the floor. I continue to press my suit, however, and finally secure good accommodations with a private family.
Why all this difficulty? It arises from the fact that this is the week set apart for London and the surrounding country to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee, this being the fiftieth year of her reign. For some days the streets have been absolutely crowded with visitors. It is said that there are more people here now than ever before. It is a difficult matter, I am sure, for one who has never been here to realize what this means.
London occupies a good part of four counties, covering an area of one hundred and twenty-five square miles. This area is traversed by 7,400 streets which, if laid end to end, would form a great thoroughfare, eighty feet wide, reaching from London to New York. And yet these streets are far too few, too narrow, and too short, to accommodate the six and a half millions of people who are now crowded into the city to attend the Jubilee. There are, in London, more Scotchmen than in Edinburgh; more Irish than in Dublin; more Jews than in Palestine; more Catholics than in Rome. There are more people in London to-day than live in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, Louisville, New Orleans, St. Louis, Kansas City and San Francisco all combined. There are more than half as many people here as live in Mexico, and more than one-tenth as many as inhabit the whole of the United States of America.
Monday morning, at ten o’clock, I started out, like Bayard Taylor, with the determination to lose myself in this great city, and I hope that it will not be considered egotistic in me to say that I was eminently successful. Indeed, I have never been more successful in any of my undertakings than in the effort to lose myself in London. I wandered through the streets for hours and hours, going up and down, to the right and left, across, zigzag, and every other way, paying no attention whatever to the direction in which I was going, or to the distance that I had traveled. Johnson and I were soon separated from each other. I was alone, all alone! Who can describe that lonely and woe-begone feeling which comes over one as he, for the first time, winds his way through the great crowd that constantly throngs the streets of the world’s metropolis! A lonely, desolate, miserable, and depressing feeling takes hold of your spirit. You cannot shake it off. After walking until your weary limbs can scarcely support you, you sit down upon some curb-stone, or door-step, to rest, to meditate, to dream. Your head turns dizzy as you sit there and watch that human Niagara dashing by you! In vain, you scan the care-worn faces of the passers-by for a familiar countenance. You can only comfort yourself with this consoling thought: “I know as many of them as they do of me.” Ah! who knows—who can know—that mixed multitude? Who can tell whether courage or cowardice, whether hope or fear, whether virtue or vice, whether joy or sorrow, whether peace or strife, most rules the heart? One man in the crowd continually thinks of the low, the mean, the vile, and is himself corrupt and vicious. Another has pure thoughts and lofty aspirations; he has an eye for the beautiful; he loves the true, and longs to be good.
Here is a demon of darkness, whose heart is black with the crimes of last night—yea, with the accumulated crimes of a life-time. His conscience is dead. He would now like to stifle the courage, to throttle the hope, and stab the virtue of others. There is a good Samaritan whose acts are acts of kindness, and whose deeds are deeds of charity. He is in the world, but not of the world. He is a stranger. He is a pilgrim. His citizenship is in Heaven!
For several hours I watched the passing throng, and read their thoughts as best I could. At length I came to myself. I felt as if I had been dreaming. I found that it was seven o’clock in the evening. I discovered that I was lost! I did not know where I was. I scarcely knew who I was, or whence I came. I had forgotten the name and place of my room. I walked on, going I knew not where. The sun set in the east. Water ran up stream. I found that I had not been wise, but otherwise. My pockets had been searched. My money-purse was gone; fortunately, however, it was almost empty. I had very little small change, and nothing to make it out of. Eight o’clock came, then eight thirty—things were getting desperate! I sought a policeman, and asked him to help me find myself. Without any reluctance whatever, he took charge of me. He told me to follow him. I did so; and, just as the clock struck ten, the key turned, I heard the bolt slam, and found myself locked for the night within—my own room. This ended my first day on the streets of London.
Tuesday is the Jubilee Day, the day of the Golden Wedding, the day when Queen Victoria and her people are to be married a second time, after having lived together for fifty years as sovereign and subjects. God favors us with what the people here call “Queen’s weather,” a perfect day. The morning is bright, the sky cloudless; the air is pure, and the breeze refreshing. Johnson and I leave home early, and reach Trafalgar square before seven o’clock in order to secure a good position from which to see what promises to be one of the greatest royal processions ever witnessed. Although we are on the scene early, thousands and tens of thousands of people have preceded us. Some came at two o’clock in the morning that they might secure favorable positions. Many paid from ten to one hundred dollars for seats. Fortune smiles on Johnson and me. We obtain good vantage-ground, the only charge being “long standing.”