You have done all these things, and by so doing you have forced the poor to serve the rich, and to serve them on the terms of the rich.  They have still one weapon left against the extremes of insult and unfairness:  that weapon is their numbers and the necessity of those numbers to the working of that vast and slavish machine.  And because they still had this last retreat (which we call the Strike), because this retreat was also perceived, there was talk of this retreat being also cut off.  Whereupon the workmen became suddenly and violently angry; and struck at your Boards and Committees here, there, and wherever they could.  And you opened on them the eyes of owls, and said, “It must be the sunshine.”  You could only go on saying, “The sun, the sun.”  That was what the man in Ibsen said, when he had lost his wits.

THE WRONG INCENDIARY

I stood looking at the Coronation Procession—­I mean the one in Beaconsfield; not the rather elephantine imitation of it which, I believe, had some success in London—­and I was seriously impressed.  Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deathly surprise that I was quite right.  Never before have I realised how right I was in maintaining that the small area expresses the real patriotism:  the smaller the field the taller the tower.  There were things in our local procession that did not (one might even reverently say, could not) occur in the London procession.  One of the most prominent citizens in our procession (for instance) had his face blacked.  Another rode on a pony which wore pink and blue trousers.  I was not present at the Metropolitan affair, and therefore my assertion is subject to such correction as the eyewitness may always offer to the absentee.  But I believe with some firmness that no such features occurred in the London pageant.

But it is not of the local celebration that I would speak, but of something that occurred before it.  In the field beyond the end of my garden the materials for a bonfire had been heaped; a hill of every kind of rubbish and refuse and things that nobody wants; broken chairs, dead trees, rags, shavings, newspapers, new religions, in pamphlet form, reports of the Eugenic Congress, and so on.  All this refuse, material and mental, it was our purpose to purify and change to holy flame on the day when the King was crowned.  The following is an account of the rather strange thing that really happened.  I do not know whether it was any sort of symbol; but I narrate it just as it befell.

In the middle of the night I woke up slowly and listened to what I supposed to be the heavy crunching of a cart-wheel along a road of loose stones.  Then it grew louder, and I thought somebody was shooting out cartloads of stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big stones into pieces.  Then I realised that under this sound there was also a strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it every now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols.  Then I knew what it was.  I went to the window; and a great firelight flung across two meadows smote me where I stood.  “Oh, my holy aunt,” I thought, “they’ve mistaken the Coronation Day.”