Politically, London was dead that autumn. No parliament, and every one weary of politics. The bitter Dublin strike dragged along with its reverberations through the English labor situation, which showed unrest and dissatisfaction with its leaders and much more of “syndicalist” leaning than any one would admit. A debate, heard later in Paris, hit the English labor situation off beautifully,--Longuet, arguing that there was no syndicalism in England because all the leaders had written him there wasn’t; Joyaux, arguing that there was, because the unions were using forms of “direct action” and acting exactly “as if” syndicalist ideas were spreading. The Lloyd George land campaign for the bettering of rural labor conditions was beginning, but was arousing so little enthusiasm that, with the intense dissatisfaction over the Insurance Acts that rose from every class, one wondered if the energy of the Liberal social program had about spent itself. The London press, solidly Tory--extraordinary situation for a Liberal country--was finding, besides its social grievances, the Ulster theme to play upon. Indefatigable industry, worthy of a better cause, was apparently being exercised to drum up reluctant English sentiment against Home Rule. All that autumn we lived ostensibly on the brink of a civil war, whose first mutterings did not even occur till the next July. The suffragettes were quiescent, but their big meetings at Knightsbridge gave one a new insight into the psychology of the movement. As one watched this fusion of the grotesque and the tragic, these pale martyrs carried in amidst the reverent hush of a throng as mystically religious as ever stood around the death-bed of a saint; or as one heard the terrific roars of “Shame!” that went up at the mention of wrongs done to women, one realized that one was in the presence of English emotion, long starved and dried from its proper channels of expression, and now breaking out irrepressibly into these new and wild ways. It was the reverse side of the idolized English “reticence.” It was a pleasant little commentary on the Victorian era. Suffragettism is what you get when you turn your whole national psychic energy into divorcing emotion from expression and from intellect. A hysterical Larkin meeting in Albert Hall; meetings of the Lansbury people in the East End, with swarms of capped, cheerful, dirty, stodgy British workmen; a big Churchill meeting at Alexandra Palace, from which seventeen hecklers were thrown out, dully, one after the other, on their heads, after terrific scrimmages in the audience; quieter lectures at the Sociological Society, etc.; churches and law-courts, and tutorial classes, and settlements, and garden cities, and talks with many undistinguished people, rounded out my London impression, and in December I moved my stage to Paris.