LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

him. And nearly everything Gibbs openly loves is loved, I should say,
more or less by most human beings. I say THINGS cause when he gits
to PERSONS I differ. And I haven’t yet wept pink tears at a coronation. I
have observed certain dates, such as that on which W.S. Landor departed
from England. I have observed that Landor wrote a poem to Andy
Jackson, which puzzled me no end when I first read it. I have observed
that Byron, Shelley, and Keats lived partly in Italy, NOT with the idea of
being hauled up by a pair of counter jumpers like Percy Loraine and the
late Lord Lloyd as national advertisements.
I have heard of an Earl of Oxford, I think it was, already farmin’ out his
rents in the time of Elizabeth. Subversion was not invented in the days
of Disraeli. I have told young Englishmen to read Cobbett. I have heard
of Tories and WHIGS, and been told that Whigs were the fathers of
Liberals. I got out of London slums, that is to say in 1908 I passed thru
Islington; I spent seven days in Islington, and that was ENOUGH. I got
into Kensington Church Yard, and during 12 years I took occasional bus
rides, but I did NOT go slumming. And the term “distressed area” was
not widely current till I had moved over to Paris. So I can’t wring
anyone’s heart.
You got your own native born statisticians to tell you who is not fed. You
got your own writers to tell you dole rots the morale of a nation.
My second picture is one Gibbs ought to like. Before my British demise,
or whatever it’s listed as, it was my privilege to go up a tower. That is, I
went up stairs in a manor, where there are some I believe 14 century or
thereabouts cloisters. And I crawled over the roof beams of an attic, and
thence into the top of a tower, where they conserve a Charter, not Magna
Charter, but I think it is Henry II’s guarantee or confirmation of what
John had pledged to the barons. And I believe her late Majesty Queen
Mary, or one or the other, went over the same set of rafters about six
weeks later.