The Lord of the Sea | Page 8

a man who said to me that the cause of
all our evil days is the inability of England to feed these few million
Jews I'd answer: "I don't know how you can be so silly!" Why, the
whole human race, friends, can find room on the Isle of Wight--the
earth laughs at the insignificant drawings upon her made by the small
infantry called Man. Then, why do we suffer, friends? We do suffer, I
suppose? I was once at Paris, and at a place called 'the Morgue' I saw
exposed young men with wounded temples, and girls with dead mouths
twisted, and innocent old women drowned; and there must be a biggish
cry, you know, rising each night from the universal earth, accusing
some hoary fault in the way men live together! What is the fault? If you
ask me, I answer that I am only a common smith: _I_ don't know: but I
know this about the fault, that it is something simple, commonplace,
yet deep-seated, or we should all see it; but it is hidden from us by its
very
ordinariness, like the sun which men seldom look at. It must be
so. And shall we never find the time to think of it? Or will never some
grand man, mighty as a garrison, owning eyes that know the glances of

Truth, arise to see for us? Friends! but, lacking him, what shall we do
to be saved?--for truly this 'civilization' of ours is a blood-washed
civilization, friends, a reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels
cease not: so we should be prying into it, provided we be not now too
hide-bound: for that's the trouble--that our thoughts grow to revolve in
stodgy grooves of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond. Look at our
Parliament--a hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of
pigmy regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of
suicides, and for pibroch by a European bleating of little children. We
are still a million miles from civilization! For what is a civilized society?
It can only be one in which the people are proud and happy! The people
of Africa are happy, not proud; not civilized; the people of England
have a certain pride, not a millionth part as superb as it might be, but
are far from happy: far from civilized. The fact is, Man has never begun
to live, but still sleeps a deep sleep. Well! let us do our best, we here! I
have here a paper offering a prize to the man of us who will go to the
root of our troubles, and my idea in usurping the place of our friend, Mr.
Max, was to ask you to form an association with me to enter that
competition. There is no reason why our association should not be large
as the nation, nor why it should not spread to France and Turkey. For
the thing presses, and to-morrow more of the slaughtered dead will be
swarming in the mortuaries of London. Will you, then? The
understanding will be this: that each man who writes his name in a
note-book which will lie at Rose Cottage, Thring, or who sends his
name, will devote sixty minutes each day to the problem. I happen to
be in a position to use a chapel at Thring, and there I will hold a
meeting--"
At this point Frankl rose: Thring was his, his own, own, own; and now
his eyes had in them that catlike blaze which characterized his rages.
"Here, police! police!" he hissed low, "what's the use of police that
don't act!" And now he raised his voice to a scream: "Jews! Shew
yourselves! Don't let this man stay here...!"
About twenty Jews leapt at the challenge; at the same time Hogarth,
seeing two policemen running forward from the back, folded his arms,

and cried out: "Friends! I have not finished! Don't let me be removed..."
Whereupon practically every man in the pit was in motion, for or
against him, the galleries two oblongs of battle.
As up the two curving stairs stormed the mob, by a sudden rush like an
ocean-current he was borne off his feet toward the side, and was about
to bring down his sharp-pointed little knuckles, when his eye fell upon
the face of a lady who had fainted.
He had had no idea that she was there!--Rebekah Frankl.
She had quietly fainted, not at the rush--but before--during Hogarth's
speech.
Hogarth managed to fight his way to a door at the platform back with
her, entered a room where some chairs were, but, seeing a stair, could
not let her go from his embrace, but descended, passed along a passage
and out into a patch of green.
She, under the dark sky, whispered: "It is you", her