tete-a-tete_, or that such
incidents could occur as the genial congratulations extended by
Gladstone to Joseph Chamberlain over the fine promise of his son
Austin Chamberlain making his debut in Parliament; congratulations
extended when the two statesmen were at swords' points,--a friendly
talk as it were, through helmet bars when the slash was at the
sharpest.

As I went home that night, through the streets of London, my mind and
heart were full. My special studies at the moment were familiarising
me with what lay behind the scene which I had just beheld. In similar
fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of
England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House.
And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor
incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling
proceeded from which came at length the "Petition of Right."
Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern
equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament must have been very
similar. Speaker Lenthall no doubt shouted "Order! Order!" as did
his successor Speaker Peel, while Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane
passionately inveighed against Prelacy and the "Man of Blood," as
I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with
diatribe the obstructors of the popular will. Then, during the
subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through
mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform Bill
and its successors, like deeply penetrating plows, threw to the
surface much that was unsightly, yet full of potentialities for good,
the spot was the same. The conditions and the environment looking at
it in the large were not widely different, the ancient Anglo-Saxon
freedom struggling ever for its foothold as the centuries lapse, now
precariously uncertain as Privilege and Prerogative push hotly, now
fixed and strong in great moments of triumph; and the end is not yet.
In the earlier time the destinies of America were closely interlocked
with England and came up no less for decision in the great arena
at Westminster. The destinies of the two peoples are scarcely less
interlocked at the present moment. We are gravitating toward closer
brotherhood, and the thoughtful American sees reason to study with the
deepest interest each passage of arms in the ancient memorable arena.

* * * * *

I saw in Germany in 1870,