THE KING'S PROGRESS THROUGH LONDON.
THERE are two sides even to such a question as whether it is expedient to interrupt the ordinary business of London by such a pageant as that of Satur- day last. For that a spectacle of this magnitude is an interruption, and a grave interruption, to business cannot be doubted. It is not merely that along the line of the procession every shop is closed,—that may be taken as made up for by the money received for seats. It is that in all parts Of London work is suspended or carried on by fewer hands because of the workmen who have gone to swell the crowd of spectators. Orders are left un- executed, goods are left undelivered, shops remain empty, because shop-people and customers are elsewhere. We may be sure that there was a good deal of this feeling in London last Saturday. The proclamation of a Bank Holiday was wisely limited to banks, most of which lie in the line of the procession, and must consequently have remained empty of customers if their doors had been kept open. But even where business was still done it was done in a perfunctory and half-hearted way which showed that the thoughts of the workers were elsewhere. It is true that the procession was but a postponement of one which was meant to have taken place on the morrow of the Coronation. But the Coronation was a kind of carnival, a period during which the ordinary transactions of life were suspended, a time when it mattered little whether a procession was provided to fill the popular eye or not, since even without one the general sense of holiday-making would have been strong enough to put business on one side. The procession of Saturday was different from this. It came in the midst of the regular routine of a London autumn, an interrup- tion to ordinary work rather than an occupation for an interval when work would anyhow have been foregone. The extent of the preparations made for the King's pro- gress helped the general sense that something exceptional was going on. When London was smaller a Royal pro- cession did not collect the same crowds nor entail the same provision for seating them. The windows of the houses along the line accommodated such of the spectators as did not venture to stand in the streets. There were none of those huge erections which alter London almost beyond recog- nition. In those days a Royal visit to the City was more like a modern Lord Mayor's Show. The crowds gathered and dispersed again, and except that the streets were fuller, they preserved their ordinary aspect. And the processions themselves were of a more businesslike and commonplace kind. The Sovereign wished to visit his citizens, and he went from his palace to the Guildhall by the shortest and most direct road. There was no question of mapping out the route so as to give the largest number of his subjects the opportunity of seeing him. All these elements of difference helped to mark the contrast between the days of George III. and those of Edward VII., between the London which hardly extended beyond the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen and the vaster London which knows only the County Council.
And yet when all the murmurs of discontented shop- keepers have been allowed for, there remains a residuum of advantage which amply compensates for the loss and incon- venience which these occasions undoubtedly cause. After all, a sightseer must be allowed to know his own business. He would not stand from early morning on the pavement, or if he has money in his purse, sit for hours on an un- comfortable bench, merely to see a procession pass, if he did it think the pleasure worth the pain. We are a little too apt to judge what people ought to like by what we happen to like ourselves, and we forget that, with the exception of the officials and the soldiers, those who made up the crowds of Saturday were there of their own free choice. They were not the victims of a cruel necessity which dragged them from their counters or their workshops and com- pelled them to watch their Sovereign drive through his capital. They saw him because they wanted to see him ; and the wish of a multitude to make holiday is as legiti- mate as the wish of their employers or their fellow-work- men to go on working. Put the inducement at the lowest, the crowd was there because it found a harmless pleasure in the brilliant spectacle unrolled before it. It was better than a play, because the magnificence was reality, not tinsel, and it was visible to numbers not a fraction of which could have found room if all the theatres it London had been made into one. Put the induce- ment at its highest, and it was a natural desire to express loyalty to the King and to welcome an Army which has borne hardship and danger in behalf of the commonwealth. It was no autocrat ignorant of his people's condition, how- ever vaguely anxious for their welfare, who traversed those miles of streets last week. It was a Constitutional King who, be his policy wise or foolish, at least takes that policy from the lips of his subjects. The Army which kept the line or marched along it was a force which exists only for public defence and public service In the desire to see a spectacle thus composed there may be no conscious place for these reflections, but they supply whatmay be called the serious background to which the actual motives correspond more or less closely. If the King were unpopular or the Army regarded as an instrument of oppression, the crowd on Saturday would have been absent or their demeanour would have been very different. Nor must it be forgotten that the procession could have given no enjoyment to the King and Queen except one that was purely unselfish. To spend some hours in driving at a foot-pace through the streets does not minister to personal comfort. The King and Queen went through it for the sake of their subjects, not for their own sakes. They were anxious not wholly to disappoint those who had looked to see them last June ; it may be, to save from complete loss those who had been at the cost of putting up seats. It was a simple, homely desire that their people should not lose a sight that they had counted on, and because it was thus simple and homely it bore witness to that domestic aspect of Royalty which has been the note of our recent Sovereigns. It is but the parents taking thought for their children's amuse- ment on a larger scale.
Another characteristic of this progress, as of those in the two Jubilees of Queen Victoria, was that Royalty went to seek its subjects. There was nothing to take the King across the river. South London is not interposed between Buckingham Palace and the Guildhall ; it is a vast out- lying district which has no connection with the City or with the fashionable quarter. Those who cared to see the procession had only to swell the crowds north of the Thames. If the outward journey had been made by the Strand, Fleet Street, and Cheapside, and the return jour- ney by Queen Victoria Street and the Embankment, all the spectators could have found room, and the time needed for the progress would have been materially shortened. But this choice would have argued a very different feeling on the King's part from that which suggested the route actually taken. The King, as Queen Victoria before him, wished to spare his subjects trouble, and to associate himself with the region in which their labour and their homes lie. It was this that marked off the procession of last week, as well as its two predecessors, from all the many Royal processions that have gone before. They were far more than a mere matter-of-course accompaniment of the Sovereign's visit to the City. They were designed to bring the Sovereign into the midst of the vast districts which, though they are in- cluded in the capital, are yet so remote from all that is om- monly associated with the capital. The processions through South London have been suggested by a genuine interest in the people, a genuine desire to assure them that the Royal conception of London takes in the whole of the thronged districts which surround the older City.
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