which are the daily dietary of many men here; mostly men, it is true, who spend much time out-of-doors, shooting, fishing, hunting, golfing and the like. Eggs and bacon and sole with tea or coffee for breakfast. A hot dish of meat and potatoes, vegetable marrow, cabbage, celery, all boiled, or cold meat salad and cheese with beer or whiskey and soda, and a glass of port to follow for luncheon. Soup generally very poor, fish, meat, an entrée often of meat, a sweet, cheese and fruit for dinner, with champagne, whiskey and soda or a light wine according to taste, again with port to follow, this bill-of-fare is a fair average diet. Added to by the rich, subtracted from by the poor, until it is the best of good living at the table of a Rothschild, because there is nothing so difficult in all the realm of cookery as plain cooking; or plain cooking; or the most awful unwholesome fodder at the table of the poor man, because these elements that lend themselves to the most wholesome diet, lend themselves also to the most unwholesome.

Look at the people who swarm the streets to see the Lord Mayor's Show, and where will you see a more pitiable sight? These beef-eating, port-drinking fellows in Piccadilly, exercised, scrubbed, groomed, they are well enough to be sure; but this other side of the shield is distressing to look at. Poor, stunted, bad-complexioned, shabbily dressed, ill-featured are these pork-eating, gin-drinking denizens of the East End. Crowds I have seen in America, in Mexico, and in most of the great cities of Europe-of India and China I know nothing. Nowhere is there such squalor, such pinching poverty, so many undersized, so many plainly and revoltingly diseased, so much human rottenness as here. This is what the climate, the food, and the drink, and man's rule of the weaker to the wall, accomplishes for the weak.

The good old rule, the ancient plan,
That he should take who has the power,
And he should keep who can.

But more of this at another time. It is one of England's ugly problems and deserves a chapter to itself.

What an orderly crowd it is! Call it by all the bad names you will, and there remains this characteristic of law-abidingness which has been to me for many years,

and is still, a ceaseless source of wonder. See them at the great race on the Epsom Downs on Derby Day. As you look from your coach top you see a black mass of people. No sign of a track, no sign of a race. A bell rings, two or three policemen on horseback, half a dozen more on foot, begin moving along the track, and this enormous crowd melts aside, makes a lane; the horses come out, dash away, the race is run, and back they swarm again. The same at the Lord Mayor's Show. A few policemen begin clearing the middle of Fleet Street-a narrow street at best. Then mounted police, four abreast, not a word said, scarcely a gesture; no clubs, no noise, a lane is made through these people packed together, without shoving, pushing, elbowing, cursing or angry words, and here comes the procession. I have walked these streets now, on and off, for many years and at all hours of the day and night, and I cannot remember being pushed, shoved, shouldered, or elbowed. It is marvellous. So, too, I have driven through these streets, one, two and four horses, many and many a time, and each time with renewed admiration, not only for the admirable driving but for the good humor, the give and take, the fair play, the intuitive and universal willingness to give every fellow his fair chance and his rights. If that crowd in the city is incomparably and uncompromisingly unpleasant to look at, it is none the less permeated with the national gift for law and order and fair play.

It is not a dull crowd. There are wags amongst them, and much appreciation of their humor. In this particular procession the various King Edwards appeared in appropriate costume, and with attendants in the trappings of their time. As Edward the Confessor appears some one says: "Ello Eddie, you don't seem to 'ave changed much!" and there is a roar of appreciation at this chaff, and Eddie looks embarrassed enough in spite of his big horse, and his magnificent followers. "Oh, oi soi, 'is beard and 'air don't match!" greets the appearance of another Edward, and again the crowd laughs good-naturedly. But for forty minutes, while the procession passes, and for hours before and hours after, this enormous crowd manages itself. Indeed, it is to be doubted, whether, were there no policemen in the streets, these people

and given the new Lord Mayor fair play and a clear passage.

There is one police patrolman to every 496 inhabitants of London; one to every 547 in New York; one to every 485 in Washington; one to every 509 in Boston; one to every 449 in Liverpool; one to every 330 in Dublin; one to every 340 in Berlin; one to every 184 in St. Petersburg; one to every 175 in Lisbon. When one considers the enormous area of London, and the universally acknowledged success of their daily dealings with crowds and with the traffic, and the comparative comfort and safety of people in this town, so large that it is almost a nation in itself, one is driven to the conclusion that the people themselves have the root of orderliness and fair play in them. How is it in quite another social sphere? At Newmarket in the members' stand, walking from the stand to the paddock, I see a short, heavily built man of sixty odd, with gray beard and moustache, a fine aquiline nose, clear eyes, a cigar in his mouth, dressed in a brown bowler hat and an amorphous brown overcoat. It is the King. The King of that crowd in Fleet Street. The King of that crowd at Epsom, the King of these quiet people here in the paddock at Newmarket. No one stares, points, whispers, no one even looks. He, too, is given fair play, a chance with other English gentlemen to enjoy himself. He does not meddle with them, they do not meddle with him. If it is necessary to have a row, as has happened when there was undue meddling on either side, it is fought out and settled. In the meantime, fair play and give every fellow a chance, from the King to the coster-monger. As an American I take off my hat. I should take off my hat to this King, anyway. He is the cheapest investment and the most valuable asset England has to-day. Whenever he has taken a part in National affairs it has been for the glory, the peace and prosperity of his country. When he meddles it is not to advertise himself, not for the humiliation and undoing of his country, but for her honor.

When one remembers that there is no written Constitution here, no infallible or inviolable body of law, but that each emergency is met by common-sense and solved by the application of a kind of

more the calm way in which each, from the highest to the lowest, submits, is satisfied, and goes his way. The House of Lords is the highest Court of Appeal, and though nowadays law lords are created who do the legal work of the House of Lords, this was not always the case. These hereditary rulers were supposed by instinct, or divine grace, or what not, to be capable of passing upon the most intricate cases of law. One sees how they have been trained for centuries to meet and settle disputes, big and little, between themselves as Englishmen, and between themselves as a nation, and other nations, along these same lines.

Sitting on the Bench at Bow Street with the Magistrate, I listened all one morning to his disposal of the cases that came before him. It seemed to me when I left that I had known beforehand what would happen. Quarrelsome women and men, mostly through drink; men and children accused of begging; a few cases of assault or resistance to the constable; all of them, hour after hour, dealt with in a good-tempered paternal sort of way, with appeals to their own sense of what was right. Only the cases where there had been resistance to the constable, the constable who represents British law and order, then hard labor and wholesome punishment. Always the same from the King to Bow Street. How can we live together amicably, with the utmost freedom for each one, that is the problem. The practical result is, you see it if you have eyes everywhere you go, a success. The machinery that brings it about seems from a theoretical point of view ill adapted to its purpose, but somehow there is a quality in the people themselves that permits a working basis.

I have never forgotten an almost grotesque example of this method of depending upon the people themselves to take care of themselves and to play fair. It was at a cricket match. My daughter and I walked round to the entrance to the reserved seats stand. I asked for two seats. "Where would you like them, sir?" asked the attendant. He saw that I hesitated, and said, "Go in and see where you would like to sit, come back and tell me the numbers of the seats you have chosen, and I will give them to you! I accordingly went in and chose

my seats and walked back and received and paid for my tickets. This was an important cricket match. There were some thirty or forty people behind me waiting to buy tickets, there were perhaps half a dozen inside choosing their seats, and the attendant was calmly running over his book of tickets, pulling out the numbers called for by those, myself among the number, who had found the numbers of the seats they wanted. There was no excitement nor haste on the part of anybody; nobody grumbled, nobody seemed dissatisfied with this ridiculously slow and cumbersome machinery. On the contrary, because it did work with these law-abiding people, everybody was the better off. This incident remains fixed in my memory as unique. Imagine a crowd at a race-course in France treated in this way. Picture the preposterousness of treating an American crowd at a base-ball game in this way. In either case there would be pushing and crowding, bad language and appeals to Heaven or to other lower powers to blast and destroy a management which sanctioned such methods. There is much talk and writing these days of the danger to this Empire from Germany and other powers. Much is written of their decadence along certain lines. I hope to show in other pages that there are legitimate reasons for such statements, but if I were their enemy I should always be afraid of the English for that one reason, if for no other. They know how to take care of themselves as do no other people; and they seem to muddle along with the old stagecoach methods about as fast as do others with the latest thing in locomotive engines. I have watched for hours at a time the crowds which come by the hundred thousand to support or to protest against the Licensing Bill. The imperturbable policeman, the docility of the people, the coming and going through the streets, the assembling in Hyde Park, all with a smoothness and lack of trouble of a trained army. Coming from Mars-or from Paris, the spectator would say: these people have been trained for months to march in procession, to assemble, to disperse, to re-assemble and depart. But they have not been so trained. It is the outstanding peculiar ity of the race. No wonder the average Englishman cannot be terrified, or even aroused to take decent precautions against

invasion. They do not need the training of other peoples. They are already trained. When I see this quality of the race I smile to think what would become of a hundred or two hundred thousand Germans landed on these shores, with their machine-like methods, their lack of initiative, and their dependence upon a bureaucracy. They would be swallowed up, or dispersed like chaff. These Saxons would dispose of them as they disposed of the Danes. The old street song of the Jingo days was not mere bluster. It had the heart of the philosophy of the race in it. "We don't want to fight But, by Jingo, if we do!"

etc., etc. This is true. They are not quarrelsome, not oversensitive, not inclined to carry chips on their shoulders, or to call attention to the length of their coat tails as offering an opportunity to any who dare to tread upon them, but they are a nasty lot to deal with once the row is on. Perhaps it is because they realize, as Hobbes has said, that the people do not flourish in a monarchy because one man has a right to rule them, but because they obey him; or perhaps it is because they are not a mixed race, but of that at another time.

The newspapers, being the eyes and ears of the nation, are apparently unduly impressed by disorderliness in other countries, particularly in America. Each morning and evening the American news consists largely of the chronicling of murders, railway disasters, divorces, fires, strikes, suicides, trials in the law courts, and the like. No doubt there are still people in provincial English towns who look upon the American as half horse, half alligator, with a dash of earthquake. But in the last two weeks in England, I note a bad railway accident, eighteen killed and injured; a disaster in a mine, seven men killed; two women kidnapped right here in London; three murders in broad daylight; a noble lord killed in the hunting field; a noble lord throws himself out of a window and kills himself; another noble lord appears as co-respondent in the divorce court, and is found guilty; fog so dense one evening that there are several accidents to the traffic; a distinguished naval officer signals a humorous but none the less discourteous message to one of his ships which brings down upon him a se

vere reprimand from the admiral of the fleet, and so on, and so on. I note these merely to reassure myself. Evidently things go wrong here sometimes as elsewhere in the world, but less is made of them. The newspapers pass over these incidents lightly, and with little comment. They are not even a nine days' wonder as with us. The profound sense of personal freedom, and the jealousy with which it is guarded and protected, does not permit the interference of newspaper reporters in private affairs. Hence these matters cannot be exploited, and dramatized, in epigrammatic paragraphs. There are fewer journals dedicated to the putrid of the upper circles, wherein, as Meredith says: "initials raise sewer lamps, and Asmodeus lifts a roof, leering hideously." There would be too much horse-whipping here to make blackmail journalism profitable. There is, too, among the best people, an almost morbid dislike of publicity. This is due to the fact that for centuries, only mountebanks, quacks, people with something to sell, public mummers, and the like, advertised themselves, or for that matter, do so now. Much of our advertising of people, putting their photographs in the papers and the like, is bought and paid for in more or less roundabout ways, by the people themselves. We deem it necessary to be known, to keep ourselves before the public; the men think it good business and pay for it as for any other advertising; the women from Eve-old vanity think the same, and we are only just beginning to realize that this is letting Asmodeus in at the front door.

But this ample protection of each one in his personal liberty of action and speech has its dark side. Where a sense of propriety on the one hand; and the punishment, ready to hand, of social ostracism on the other, prevail, things go well enough. There are, however, millions who care nothing for propriety, and who already have no social status, and consequently the traffic in women and drink goes on in London in an unblushing, embarrassing, and revolting manner. Only here in London does one see, or rather is it held under your nose, the most shameless parading of harlotry. The streets of the West End after dusk, and some of the restaurants at supper time, are simply overrun with hawkers of their own daubed but tarnished

charms. New York, Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, City of Mexico, I know them all. In them all vice is more or less secluded, abashed, kept to one side by the police. Not so here. It may parade itself, walk the streets, flaunt itself, to receive the same protection as any other pedestrian. So, too, may one drink-men, women, and even children-at almost every corner. What the rich man does, the poor man may do as well; what the virtuous woman does, the strumpet may do too, so long as the law is not violated. Protection for all alike, liberty for all alike, and, be it said, punishment and the cold neutrality of impartial justice, for all alike.

In this damp, chill climate, in these gloomy streets, the poor and the vicious, seem more sodden and more brutal, and vice more unappetizing than elsewhere. The gloom and ponderousness of this huge grimy city of London are reflected in the faces and the manners of the submerged and semi-submerged part of the population. One gets here, more than elsewhere, an early and indelible impression of the fearful struggle to survive. It would seem that one must be more fit here to keep out the damp and the cold, to eat the heavy food, to struggle against, and to keep oneself against, the huge mass of people centred here. The very bulk of the place looms the larger, and is the more terrifying because it is so much of the time in semidarkness; and to the weak and unarmed it must appeal as a great crushing, dark, amorphous monster.

Nor am I altogether wrong in supposing that these people merely look weak and uncared for. They are, as a matter of fact, of anything but a robust type. During the twelvemonth ended September 30, 1907, the following table gives us a commentary upon the physical condition of the men offering themselves as recruits for the regular army: