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A Wholesome Relief.

his bones with words if you can.

349

But you

may not in France. Everybody is expected to be polite; the consequence is that many gather such a store of compressed ill-feeling as some day to burst them, and blow the windows of the constitution out. Let us care nothing for the words of a mob.

But didn't you hear what that great fellow with a hair cap and a stick said? Oh yes! and what do you think he did? He went home, gratified beyond measure at having said it, and melted his malice in a pot of beer. I confess that the extraordinary tameness of these Frenchmen left an impression on my mind of deep-rooted dangerousness, rather than of apparent simplicity. There were sores enough inside to have made people more demonstrative; but it is an ill sign when a blister will not "rise." There is mischief within which will show itself some day.

The freedom of a mob, moreover, is not only a wholesome relief to itself, but a suggestive lesson to its butt. You may be sure that those who are coarsely but truly criticised, don't forget the hints they get, even if they affect to despise them. The "voice" at elections generally hits a blot. A man will be shy of displaying offensive peculiarities who

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Compulsory Politeness.

knows he may have them shouted out under

his nose. It is something for him to feel that he must be civil perforce, though it be only for a day or two, to those whom he would always ride roughshod over, if he could. But he can't, and so he behaves himself. He takes off his hat and smiles.

There is some fallacy in the assertion that most people take an ell if you give them an inch. They don't. They accept the inch. It would be more true to say that the surrender of the less secures the greater. The tub thrown to the whale saves the ship. The bow disarms the man who meditated an insult. "A soft answer turneth away wrath."

There is a deal of truth in mob law, and those who are shocked at the mere mention of it are respectable outsiders. But suppose you belong to the mob yourself (and mobs are made of men, women, and children), how then? Is there no wholesome gratification in the thought that you, addressed in the riot act, dispersed, moved on, &c., &c., have yet after all a quick rough sense of justice? Yes, you don't want disorder, but only protest against some passing abuse or petty police encroachment.

The licence of our English mobs is most

Protective Nuisances.

351

useful in resisting this last. One charm of English freedom lies in the paucity or obsoleteness of our laws. You may do almost

anything so long as you don't break the ten commandments. But there always will be some fussy, sniffing officials or legislators who try to trim up the Constitution. They won't do anything to annoy the middle classes at first; they begin therefore with some act or regulation about pot-houses, street vagabonds, or some living nuisance. Straightway the nuisances protest with bellowings, menaces, perhaps with a breaking of windows, and indiscriminate pelting of suspected respectability. I a nuisance? says one of them. You are another. Don't you order me off your doorstep when you come home to your dinner, and give me into custody for asking an alms? Don't you pull up the window when I have called a cab for you, and touched my hat? Don't you walk safe and daintily over my crossings free of expense ? Don't you speak to me as if I were your slave? Don't you confound you ain't you a nusance, rather, yourself?

And so the vagabonds protest against any extra police regulations, or attempt to legislate away their special offences. And they are

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Hands off!-let us be.

right. They are right in striving against the multiplication of social and sumptuary laws. They are the useful house-dogs which indeed wake us sometimes by their barking, and will bite the master himself if provoked enough, but which certainly keep intruders off, and check the itching fingers which would meddle with our personal rights and possessions.

The mob may be disagreeable enough— rude, rank, unreasonable; but it will safely prevent any attempts to drill and trim us up by punctilious legislators or officials. Hands off!-let us be. I button my pocket, feel that my watch is safe, and am much obliged to Demos, who is kind enough to do the dirty work of my citizenship for me.

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SEA-SIDe life.

OME time ago I walked, with occasional lifts, along the western coast

of England, from Weymouth to Bristol, looking in, as I went, upon the watering-places which fringe the land. It was August when I made my tour, and every place I visited was filled with summer residents.

Surely, thought I to myself, as I reposed at home after my round, I have discovered the uniform invariable state, if not sentiment, which the old formula would fit. Sea-side life is led in the same way-" always, everywhere, and by all." Wherever I went, there were the same people and the same pursuits.

The scenery varied from the chalk upland to the rose-tinted rock, from the sandy beach and treeless downs of Dorset, to the wooded coombes of South Devon, and the Cornish black-slate cliff, up which the long Atlantic wave crept like a tide.

I saw the sea under a hundred forms,

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