The city sweltered in the August heat. No breath of air lifted the pall of haze that wrapped the streets, the houses, and the dark group of GrÆco-Roman buildings that stands up like a rock in the dull tide-way of the brick-built tenements that compose the town.

Bells pealed at intervals, summoning the fractioned faithful to their various centres of belief.

When they had ceased and all the congregations were assembled listening to the exhortations of their spiritual advisers, and were employed fumbling inside their purses, as they listened, for the destined “threepenny,” that obolus which gives respectability to alms, the silence was complete. Whitey-brown paper bags, dropped overnight, just stirred occasionally as the air swelled their bellies, making them seem alive, or as alive as is a jelly-fish left stranded by the tide.

Just as the faithful were assembled in their conventicles adoring the same Deity, all filled with rancour against one another because their methods of interpretation of the Creator’s will were different, so did the politicians and the cranks of every sort and sect turn out to push their methods of salvation for mankind. In groups they gathered round the various speakers who discoursed from chairs and carts and points of vantage on the streets.

Above the speakers’ heads, banners, held up between two poles, called on the audiences to vote for Liberal or for Tory, for Poor Law Reform, for Social Purity, and for Temperance. Orators, varying from well-dressed and glibly-educated hacks from party centres, to red-faced working-men, held forth perspiring, and occasionally bedewing those who listened to them with saliva, after an emphatic burst.

It seemed so easy after listening to them to redress all wrongs, smooth out all wrinkles, and instate each citizen in his own shop where he could sell his sweated goods, with the best advantage to himself and with the greatest modicum of disadvantage to his neighbour, that one was left amazed at the dense apathy of those who did not fall in with the nostrums they had heard. Again, at other platforms, sleek men in broadcloth, who had never seen a plough except at Agricultural Exhibitions, nor had got on closer terms of friendship with a horse than to be bitten by him as they passed along a street, discoursed upon the land.

“My friends, I say, the land is a fixed quantity, you can’t increase it, and without it, it’s impossible to live. ’Ow is it, then, that all the land of England is in so few hands?” He paused and mopped his face, and looking round, began again: “Friends—you’ll allow me to style you Friends, I know, Friends in the sycred cause of Liberty—the landed aristocracy is our enemy.

“I am not out for confiscation, why should I? I ’ave my ’ome purchased with the fruits of my own hhonest toil . . .”

Before he could conclude his sentence, a dock labourer, dressed in his Sunday suit of shoddy serge, check shirt, and black silk handkerchief knotted loosely round his neck, looked up, and interjected: “’Ard work, too, mate, that ’ere talkin’ in the sun is, that built your ’ome. Beats coal whippin’.”

Just for an instant the orator was disconcerted as a laugh ran through the audience; but habit, joined to a natural gift of public speaking, came to his aid, and he rejoined: “Brother working-men, I say ditto to what has fallen from our friend ’ere upon my right. We all are working-men. Some of us, like our friend, work with their ’ands, and others with their ’eds. In either case, the Land is what we ’ave to get at as an article of prime necessity.”

Rapidly he sketched a state of things in which a happy population, drawn from the slums, but all instinct with agricultural knowledge, would be settled on the land, each on his little farm, and all devoted to intensive culture in the most modern form. Trees would be all cut down, because they only “’arbour” birds that eat the corn. Hedges would all be extirpated, for it is known to every one that mice and rats and animals of every kind live under them, and that they only serve to shelter game. Each man would own a gun and be at liberty to kill a “rabbut” or a “’are”—“animals, as we say at college, feery naturrey, and placed by Providence upon the land.”

These noble sentiments evoked applause, which was a little mitigated by an interjection from a man in gaiters, with a sunburnt face, of: “Mister, if every one is to have a gun and shoot, ’ow long will these ’ere ’ares and rabbuts last?”

A little farther on, as thinly covered by his indecently transparent veil of reciprocity as a bare-footed dancer in her Grecian clothes, or a tall ostrich under an inch of sand, and yet as confident as either of them that the essential is concealed, a staunch Protectionist discoursed. With copious notes, to which he turned at intervals, when he appealed to those statistics which can be made in any question to fit every side, he talked of loss of trade. “Friends, we must tax the foreigner. It is this way, you see, our working classes have to compete with other nations, all of which enjoy protective duties. I ask you, is it reasonable that we should let a foreign article come into England?”

Here a dour-looking Scotsman almost spat out the words: “Man, can ye no juist say Great Britain?” and received a bow and “Certainly, my friend, I am not here to wound the sentiments of any man . . . as I was saying, is it reasonable that goods should come to England . . . I mean Great Britain, duty free, and yet articles we manufacture have to pay heavy duties in any foreign port?”

“’Ow about bread?” came from a voice upon the outskirts of the crowd.

The speaker reddened, and resumed: “My friend, man doth not live by bread alone; still, I understand the point. A little dooty upon corn, say five shillings in the quarter, would not hurt any one. We’ve got to do it. The foreigner is the enemy. I am a Christian; but yet, readin’ as I often do the Sermon on the Mount, I never saw we had to lie down in the dust and let ourselves be trampled on.

“Who are to be the inheritors of the earth? Our Lord says, ‘Blessed are the meek; they shall inherit it.’”

He paused, and was about to clinch his argument, when a tall Irishman, after expectorating judiciously upon a vacant space between two listeners, shot in: “Shure, then, the English are the meekest of the lot, for they have got the greater part of it.”

At other gatherings Socialists held forth under the red flag. “That banner, comrades, which ’as braved a ’undred fights, and the mere sight of which makes the Capitalistic bloodsucker tremble as he feels the time approach when Lybor shall come into its inheritance and the Proletariat shyke off its chaine and join ’ands all the world over, despizin’ ryce and creed and all the artificial obstructions that a designin’ Priest-’ood and a blood-stained Plutocracy ’ave placed between them to distract their attention from the great cause of Socialism, the great cause that mykes us comrades . . . ’ere, keep off my ’oof, you blighter, with your ammunition wagons. . . .”

Religionists of various sects, all with long hair and dressed in shabby black, the Book either before them on a campaigning lectern or tucked beneath one arm, called upon Christian men to dip their hands into the precious blood and drink from the eternal fountain of pure water that is to be found in the Apocalypse. “Come to ’Im, come to ’Im, I say, my friends, come straight; oh, it is joyful to belong to Jesus. Don’t stop for anything, come to ’Im now like little children. . . . Let us sing a ’ymn. You know it, most of you; but brother ’ere,” and as he spoke he turned towards a pale-faced youth who held a bag to take the offertory, that sacrament that makes the whole world kin, “will lead it for you.”

The acolyte cleared his throat raucously, and to a popular air struck up the refrain of “Let us jump joyful on the road.” Flat-breasted girls and pale-faced boys took up the strain, and as it floated through the heavy air, reverberating from the pile of public buildings, gradually all the crowd joined in; shyly at first and then whole-heartedly, and by degrees the vulgar tune and doggerel verses took on an air of power and dignity, and when the hymn was finished, the tears stood in the eyes of grimy-looking women and of red-faced men. Then, with his bag, the pale-faced hymn-leader went through the crowd, reaping a plenteous harvest, all in copper, from those whose hearts had felt, but for a moment, the full force of sympathy.

Suffragist ladies discussed upon “the Question,” shocking their hearers as they touched on prostitution and divorce, and making even stolid policemen, who stood sweating in their thick blue uniforms, turn their eyes upon the ground.

After them, Suffragette girls bounded upon the cart, consigning fathers, brothers, and the whole male section of mankind straight to perdition as they held forth upon the Vote, that all-heal of the female politician, who thinks by means of it to wipe out all those disabilities imposed upon her by an unreasonable Nature and a male Deity, who must have worked alone up in the Empyrean without the humanising influence of a wife.

Little by little the various groups dissolved, the speakers and their friends forcing their “literatoor” upon the passers-by, who generally appeared to look into the air a foot or two above their heads, as they went homewards through the streets.

The Anarchists were the last to leave, a faithful few still congregating around a youth in a red necktie who denounced the other speakers with impartiality, averring that they were “humbugs every one of them,” and, for his part, he believed only in dynamite, by means of which he hoped some day to be able to devote “all the blood-suckers to destruction, and thus to bring about the reign of brotherhood.”

The little knot of the elect applauded loudly, and the youth, catching the policeman’s eye fixed on him, descended hurriedly from off the chair on which he had been perorating, remarking that “it was time to be going home to have a bit of dinner, as he was due to speak at Salford in the evening.”

Slowly the square was emptied, the last group or two of people disappearing into the mouths of the incoming streets just as a Roman crowd must have been swallowed up in the vomitoria of an amphitheatre, after a show of gladiators.

Torn newspapers and ends of cigarettes were the sole result of all the rhetoric that had been poured out so liberally upon the assembled thousands in the square.

Two or three street boys in their shirt-sleeves, bare-footed and bare-headed, their trousers held up by a piece of string, played about listlessly, after the fashion of their kind on Sunday in a manufacturing town, when the life of the streets is dead, and when men’s minds are fixed either upon the mysteries of the faith or upon beer, things in which children have but little share.

The usual Sabbath gloom was creeping on the town and dinner-time approaching, when from a corner of the square appeared a man advancing rapidly. He glanced about inquiringly, and for a moment a look of disappointment crossed his face. Mounting the steps that lead up to the smoke-coated Areopagus, he stopped just for an instant, as if to draw his breath and gather his ideas. Decently dressed in shabby black, his trousers frayed a little above the heels of his elastic-sided boots, his soft felt hat that covered long but scanty hair just touched with grey, he had an air as of a plaster figure set in the middle of a pond, as he stood silhouetted against the background of the buildings, forlorn yet resolute.

The urchins, who had gathered round him, had a look upon their faces as of experienced critics at a play; that look of expectation and subconscious irony which characterises all their kind at public spectacles.Their appearance, although calculated to appal a speaker broken to the platform business, did not influence the man who stood upon the steps. Taking off his battered hat, he placed it and his umbrella carefully upon the ground. A light, as of the interior fire that burned in the frail tenement of flesh so fiercely that it illuminated his whole being, shone in his mild blue eyes. Clearing his throat, and after running his nervous hands through his thin hair, he pitched his voice well forward, as if the deserted square had been packed full of people prepared to hang upon his words. His voice, a little hoarse and broken during his first sentences, gradually grew clearer, developing a strength quite incommensurate with the source from which it came.

“My friends,” he said, causing the boys to grin and waking up the dozing policeman, “I have a doctrine to proclaim. Love only rules the world. The Greek word caritas in the New Testament should have been rendered love. Love suffereth long. Love is not puffed up; love beareth all things. That is what the Apostle really meant to say. Often within this very square I have stood listening to the speeches, and have weighed them in my mind. It is not for me to criticise, only to advocate my own belief. Friends . . .”

As his voice had gathered strength, two or three working-men, attracted by the sight of a man speaking to the air, surrounded but by the street boys and the nodding policeman on his beat, had gathered round about. Dressed in their Sunday clothes; well washed, and with the look as of restraint that freedom from their accustomed toil often imparts to them on Sunday, they listened stolidly, with that toleration that accepts all doctrines, from that of highest Toryism down to Anarchy, and acts on none of them. The speaker, spurred on by the unwonted sight of listeners, for several draggled women had drawn near, and an ice-cream seller had brought his donkey-cart up to the nearest curb-stone, once more launched into his discourse.

“Friends, when I hear the acerbity of the address of some; when I hear doctrines setting forth the rights but leaving out the duties of the working class; when I hear men defend the sweater and run down the sweated, calling them thriftless, idle, and intemperate, when often they are but unfortunate, I ask myself, what has become of Love? Who sees more clearly than I do myself what the poor have to suffer? Do I not live amongst them and share their difficulties? Who can divine better than one who has imagination—and in that respect I thank my stars I have not been left quite unendowed—what are the difficulties of those high placed by fortune, who yet have got to strive to keep their place?

“Sweaters and sweated, the poor, the rich, men, women, children, all mankind, suffer from want of Love. I am not here to say that natural laws will ever cease to operate, or that there will not be great inequalities, if not of fortune, yet of endowments, to the end of Time. What the Great Power who sent us here intended, only He can tell. One thing He placed within the grasp of every one, capacity to love. Think, friends, what England might become under the reign of universal love. The murky fumes that now defile the landscape, the manufactories in which our thousands toil for others, the rivers vile with refuse, the knotted bodies and the faces scarcely human in their abject struggle for their daily bread, would disappear. Bradford and Halifax and Leeds would once again be fair and clean. The ferns would grow once more in Shipley Glen, and in the valleys about Sheffield the scissor-grinders would ply their trade upon streams bright and sparkling, as they were of yore. In Halifax, the Roman road, now black with coal-dust and with mud, would shine as well-defined as it does where now and then it crops out from the ling upon the moors, just as the Romans left it polished by their caligulÆ. Why, do you ask me? Because all sordid motives would be gone, and of their superfluity the rich would give to those less blessed by Providence. The poor would grudge no one the gifts of fortune, and thus the need for grinding toil would disappear, as the struggle and the strain for daily bread would fade into the past.

“Picture to yourselves, my friends, an England once more green and merry, with the air fresh and not polluted by the smoke of foetid towns.

“’Tis pleasant, friends, on a spring morning to hear the village bells calling to church, even although they do not call you to attend. It heals the soul to see the honeysuckle and the eglantine and smell the new-mown hay. . . .

“Then comes a chill when on your vision rises the England of the manufacturing town, dark, dreary, and befouled with smoke. How different it might be in the perpetual May morning I have sketched for you.

“Love suffereth all things, endureth all things, createth all things. . . .”

He paused, and, looking round, saw he was all alone. The boys had stolen away, and the last workman’s sturdy back could be just seen as it was vanishing towards the public-house.

The speaker sighed, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a soiled handkerchief.

Then, picking up his hat and his umbrella, a far-off look came into his blue eyes as he walked homewards almost jauntily, conscious that the inner fire had got the better of the fleshly tenement, and that his work was done.