The report of this novel and entertaining crusade soon spread from Peckham to its neighbours: what would appeal to Peckham would also appeal to them; and every evening an appreciable percentage of the four millions which lie around Peckham, and in whose streets Peckham is embedded, poured into the centre of disturbance. There they soon fell under the spell so sedulously prepared for them. They surged up and down the narrow ways, chaffing each other, cheering the candidates, keen, alert, glad each to find himself in the heart of a London Crowd. Any man or woman upon whom fell the itch of speech secured a box, mounted on it, held forth to those who would listen, on teetotalism, or vaccination, or the wickedness of the Government, or the variable price of beer. And the Crowd listened, as it may be seen listening to any distorted nonsense in the public parks on Sunday afternoons: with an aspect of intense seriousness, the respect which the inarticulate Englishman instinctively feels for the voluble. Party feeling was supposed to run high, the newspapers on each side called shrilly for the defeat of plunderers and miscreants: “‘Thou shalt not steal,’ there is no time limit to that,” in huge letters stretched across the street, challenged the cries from Liberal placards that unless the people strangled the drink monopoly they would be strangled by it. Yet it seemed that the great mass of this astonishing multitude--the good-tempered, short-sighted, happy-go-lucky London citizen--regarded all such fiery invective with fortitude, if not with indifference. He was out for fun: to hear a little politics, though not too much; speakers who attempted argument or quotation were speedily deserted; what he liked was noisy rhetoric and denunciation. “Give it ’em hot!” was his favourite advice to any orator of either colour. He delighted in quick repartee, the ready scoring off an interrupter, the good telling of some story with a very obvious point at the end. He liked to see the coal-carts wading through the crowded streets, with the big and little sacks of coal; and the so-called procession of the unemployed from Woolwich, actual, tangible figures, visible before his very eyes; and the huge painted donkey, half as high again as himself, bearing the legend, “My brother is going to vote for Gautrey” (the Government candidate); and the Suffragettes there in person, the very women (some of them agreeable to look at) who have been carried out of Parliament by the police, and done their “time” in Holloway Gaol. He sought, above all, a new sensation: cheering, now a man who, from the summit of a soap-box proclaimed the approaching end of the world; now “Mr. Hunnable,” as he surmised that in the coming University boat race both Oxford and Cambridge would be found among the first three; now a sad-faced woman, whose contribution to the discussion consisted in ringing a huge dinner-bell for half-an-hour without stopping; whose