I moved along to him, being
minded to learn what particular brand of brotherly love he might
be expounding. In the same tone a good friend might employ in
telling you what to do for chapped lips or a fever blister he was
saying that clergymen and armaments were useless and expensive
burdens on the commonwealth; and, as a remedy, he was advocating
that all the priests and all the preachers in the kingdom should
be loaded on all the dreadnoughts, and then the dreadnoughts should
be steamed to the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean and there
cozily scuttled, with all aboard.
There was scattering applause and a voice: "Ow, don't do that!
Listen, 'ere! Hi've got a better plan." But the next speaker was
blaring away at the top of his voice, making threatening faces
and waving his clenched fists aloft and pounding with them on the
top of his rostrum.
"Now this," I said to myself, "is going to be something worth
while. Surely this person would not be content merely with drowning
all the parsons and sinking all the warships in the hole at the
bottom of the sea. Undoubtedly he will advocate something really
radical. I will invest five minutes with him."
I did; but I was sold. He was favoring the immediate adoption of
a universal tongue for all the peoples of the earth - that was all.
I did not catch the name of his universal language, but I judged
the one at which he would excel would be a language with few if
any h's in it. After this disappointment I lost heart and came
away.
Another phase, though a very different one, of the British spirit
of fair play and tolerance, was shown to me at the National Sporting
Club, which is the British shrine of boxing, where I saw a fight
for one of the championship belts that Lord Lonsdale is forever
bestowing on this or that worshipful fisticuffer. Instead of being
inside the ring prying the fighters apart by main force as he would
have been doing in America, the referee, dressed in evening clothes,
was outside the ropes. At a snapped word from him the fighters
broke apart from clinches on the instant. The audience - a very
mixed one, ranging in garb from broadcloths to shoddies - was as
quick to approve a telling blow by the less popular fighter as to
hiss any suggestion of trickiness or fouling on the part of the
favorite. When a contestant in one of the preliminary goes, having
been adjudged a loser on points, objected to the decision and
insisted on being heard in his own behalf, the crowd, though plainly
not in sympathy with his contention, listened to what he had to
say.
