alace can stand revealed. And after
long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the long shadows
inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may come a new noise like
thunder; of D'Artagnan knocking at the door.

_A Meditation in Broadway_

When I had looked at the lights of Broadway by night, I made to my
American friends an innocent remark that seemed for some reason to amuse
them. I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of
coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks,
advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the
two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. I
said to them, in my simplicity, 'What a glorious garden of wonders this
would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.'

Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But let us suppose that
there does walk down this flaming avenue a peasant, of the sort called
scornfully an illiterate peasant; by those who think that insisting on
people reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies who
read in all languages and the forgers who write in all hands. On this
principle indeed, a peasant merely acquainted with things of little
practical use to mankind, such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing
vegetables, would very probably be excluded; and it is not for us to
criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who would keep out
the farmer and let in the forger. But let us suppose, if only for the
sake of argument, that the peasant is walking under the artificial suns
and stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has escaped to the
land of liberty upon some general rumour and romance of the story of
its liberation, but without being yet able to understand the arbitrary
signs of its alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar higher
than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood broader than Broadway.
Realising that he had arrived on an evening of exceptional festivity,
worthy to be blazoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please
himself by guessing what great proclamation or principle of the Republic
hung in the sky like a constellation or rippled across the street like a
comet. He would be shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons
fringed with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for
'Government of the People, For the People, By the People'; for it must
obviously be that, unless it were 'Lib