The orator next to him was speaking in a soft, sentimental tone, with gestures gently appropriate.  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.  Nobody jeered him down.

Had he been a foreigner and especially had he been an American I am inclined to think the situation might have been different.  I seem to recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from this side went over there and broke the British heart by licking the British champion; and again what happened when a Yankee boy won the Marathon at the Olympic games in London a few years ago.  But as this man was a Briton himself these other Britons harkened to his sputterings, for England, you know, grants the right of free speech to all Englishmen—­and denies it to all Englishwomen.