Rodney Stone | Page 5

there was ever a smile upon his lips and a greeting
in his eyes. There was not a beggar upon the country side who did not
know that his heart was as soft as his muscles were hard.

There was nothing that he liked to talk of more than his old battles, but
he would stop if he saw his little wife coming, for the one great shadow
in her life was the ever-present fear that some day he would throw
down sledge and rasp and be off to the ring once more. And you must
be reminded here once for all that that former calling of his was by no
means at that time in the debased condition to which it afterwards fell.
Public opinion has gradually become opposed to it, for the reason that
it came largely into the hands of rogues, and because it fostered
ringside ruffianism. Even the honest and brave pugilist was found to
draw villainy round him, just as the pure and noble racehorse does. For
this reason the Ring is dying in England, and we may hope that when
Caunt and Bendigo have passed away, they may have none to succeed
them. But it was different in the days of which I speak. Public opinion
was then largely in its favour, and there were good reasons why it
should be so. It was a time of war, when England with an army and
navy composed only of those who volunteered to fight because they
had fighting blood in them, had to encounter, as they would now have
to encounter, a power which could by despotic law turn every citizen
into a soldier. If the people had not been full of this lust for combat, it
is certain that England must have been overborne. And it was thought,
and is, on the face of it, reasonable, that a struggle between two
indomitable men, with thirty thousand to view it and three million to
discuss it, did help to set a standard of hardihood and endurance. Brutal
it was, no doubt, and its brutality is the end of it; but it is not so brutal
as war, which will survive it. Whether it is logical now to teach the
people to be peaceful in an age when their very existence may come to
depend upon their being warlike, is a question for wiser heads than
mine. But that was what we thought of it in the days of your
grandfathers, and that is why you might find statesmen and
philanthropists like Windham, Fox, and Althorp at the side of the Ring.
The mere fact that solid men should patronize it was enough in itself to
prevent the villainy which afterwards crept in. For over twenty years, in
the days of Jackson, Brain, Cribb, the Belchers, Pearce, Gully, and the
rest, the leaders of the Ring were men whose honesty was above
suspicion; and those were just the twenty years when the Ring may, as I
have said, have served a national purpose. You have heard how Pearce
saved the Bristol girl from the burning house, how Jackson won the

respect and friendship of the best men of his age, and how Gully rose to
a seat in the first Reformed Parliament. These were the men who set the
standard, and their trade carried with it this obvious recommendation,
that it is one in which no drunken or foul-living man could long
succeed. There were exceptions among them, no doubt--bullies like
Hickman and brutes like Berks; in the main, I say again that they were
honest men, brave and enduring to an incredible degree, and a credit to
the country which produced them. It was, as you will see, my fate to
see something of them, and I speak of what I know.
In our own village, I can assure you that we were very proud of the
presence of such a man as Champion Harrison, and if folks stayed at
the inn, they would walk down as far as the smithy just to have the
sight of him. And he was worth seeing, too, especially on a winter's
night when the red glare of the forge would beat upon his great muscles
and upon the proud, hawk-face of Boy Jim as they heaved and swayed
over some glowing plough coulter, framing themselves in sparks with
every blow. He would strike once with his thirty-pound swing sledge,
and Jim twice with his hand hammer; and the "Clunk--clink, clink!
clunk--clink, clink!" would bring me flying down the village street, on
the chance that, since they were both at the anvil, there might be a place
for me at the bellows.
Only once during those village years can I remember Champion
Harrison showing me for an instant the sort of