and sword-belted, a pace or two behind him; and then, in turn, the justices; and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them, knight escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs of the great machine.  What struck into me deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges.  Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament—­men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff.  So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship —­the Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period.

Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts.  I said to myself that if I wanted justice—­exact justice, heaping high in time scales—­I should come to this shop and give my trade to the old-established firm; but if I were looking for a little mercy I should take my custom elsewhere.

I cannot tell why I associate it in my mind with this grouped spectacle of the lords of the law, but somehow the scene to be witnessed in Hyde Park just inside the Marble Arch of a Sunday evening seems bound up somehow with the other institution.  They call this place London’s safety valve.  It’s all of that.  Long ago the ruling powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines.  So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes to the same thing, into speechlessness.

When I went to Hyde Park on a certain Sunday rain was falling and the crowds were not so large as usual, a bored policeman on duty in this outdoor forum told me; still, at that, there must have been two or three thousand listeners in sight and not less than twelve speakers.  These latter balanced themselves on small portable platforms placed in rows, with such short spaces between them that their voices intermingled confusingly.  In front of each orator stood his audience; sometimes they applauded what he said in a sluggish British way, and sometimes they asked him questions designed to baffle or perplex him—­heckling, I believe this is called—­but there was never any suggestion of disorder and never any violent demonstration for or against a statement made by him.

At the end of the line nearest the Arch, under a flary light, stood an old bearded man having the look on his face of a kindly but somewhat irritated moo-cow.  At the moment I drew near he was having a long and involved argument with another controversialist touching on the sense of the word tabernacle as employed Scripturally, one holding it to mean the fleshly tenement of the soul and the other an actual place of worship.  The old man had two favorite words—­behoove and emit—­but behoove was evidently his choice.  As an emitter he was only fair, but he was the best behoover I ever saw anywhere.