SEATS FOR THE MIGHTY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10957, 23 December 1911, Page 1

SEATS FOR THE MIGHTY.

LONDON'S STANDING GRIEVANCE. (By Richard Whiteing.) The multitude are the mighty nowadays, yet" there arc no scats for them in the "outdoors" in which they pass so much of their time. The British may be defined as a people, that never sit down in the open air. There is the fact, and the sufficient reason may be that,there is nothing to sit upon. Our public thoroughfares, with the exception of the parks, are not adequately provided with benches, and • oven x= th.e parks are but poorly equipped. Go where you will abroad, you find ample provision: every street has its seat in the shade of the trees. We have,the trees; we are beginning- to have them in as great plenty as" the foreigner, but we make no use of them, for want, of a halting place. Talking age has to*be everlastingly on the go, and whispering lovers are equally of the peripatetic school. The usual answer is that we have no boulevards. Yet Golder's Green, to take one example, has -a. magnificent boulevard in its Promeade, but never a seat. And it is almost as bad throughout the settlement: there is barely a bench in all the Hampstead Way. Half a dozen might, perhaps, be counted if one had to speak by the card, but there ought to be as many bakers' dozens of them to do anything like-justice to the opportunities of air. and sunshine and green sward—all of the best. On the side nearest Hampstead there are playing fields galore, where youth disports itself under the approving eye of age.Age has a hard time of it, there as elsewhere. It must stand to its work—or stretch itself on the grass —a most inconvenient attitude for anyone but a savage or an ancient Roman. A hill with a gentle, slope dominates the settlement on the side of the wall. The view rivals Harrow, and, indeed, includes it; the church will dominate Harrow Church when it has finished its steeple. The wide sweep of landscape from church to church is one of the finest things of its kind in England. But, once more, you have to stand upright to take it in. There is one seat, certainly, but you must book early for your chance. Hampstead Heath sins in the same way, though not quite to the same extent. But the two or three benches near the Flagstaff—some of them without backs —make but a beggarly array. Yet the beauty of the scene beyond is a perpetual invitation to those contemplative delights that are only consistent with perfect physical repose. Will no lawyer draw up a handy "Bench Clause" for wills? It is the same, there and thereabouts, in all the garden cities that mark the now circumference of Greater London. That it is the same in the heart of the mother city is generally regarded as a thing past praying for. But is it? Portland-place would provide seating room for hundreds. There are opportunities in parts of Oxfordstreet, Tottenham - court - road, Water-loo-place, the lower levels of Trafalgarsquare, and generally in all the roads that radiate from Charing-cross, especially the splendid stretch of Whitehall. As for Parliament-square—well, really, if it were possible to draw an indictment against a nation, how should we fare? The round point, or whatever you like to call it, near St. Clement's Church is seatless. So are the Law Courts in their frontage, and St. Paul's Churchyard. It is the same at the railway stations: a most plentiful lack of benches in proportion to candidates for them, and particularly so in the tubes, though of late a, skimpy sort of contrivance-of this sort has been supplies in the lifts. Two objections may be foreseen. One. that there arc seats in some of these places already. The point is that no- " whore are there half enough of them, c The other, and the far more serious— « the Tramp. ]

The answer to' this last is that, if there were more scats, there would sooii be not enough tramps to go round for the misuse of them. It is because there are so few seats that the habitual j loiterer, as distinct from the harvester of the quiet eye, makes them all his own. Never forget that the tramp has' almost the same objection to our society as we have to his. The clean shirt puts him out of countenance, though it may be only the clean shirt under difficulties, of a brother Bohe-' mian. In other words, the more seats there are for the decent sort to (ill, the more of such persons will there be to fill them. It is so in many another country where they breed a tramp who can vie, with our native _ product, yet who gradually learns to live up to the life around him. What a confession to have to make "urbi et orbi" that we alone have to live down to the tastes of our most As a matter of fact, oven now the green sward of our parks is notoriously more dangerous than the benches, in the peculiar sense under consideration. And we have still to ask ourselves without panic how far the danger has any existence at all. Give a bench a bad name. The" seats as they stand are not wholly occupied to the exclusion of decent people, witness the rush wherever they are found. The destitute persons who sometimes put in a claim for a corner or an edge of them have generally more baths to their name in a week than some other classes in a twelvemonth.

In our public highways we are a. people of Wandering Jews, under a necessity as imperious as that of a Fate or a policeman which is ever urging us to move on. It is profitless to talk about what might have been during the.beautiful season through which we have recently passed. But there are other summers to come. We are making London better worth looking at every day. Why not give us all a chance-of taking'it sitting down? Hut why go on ? We may reason and even supplicate for ever, yet we shall probably never get what we want until we take stronger measures. There is excellent warrant here for another militant policy. What is needed is the courage to do and dare, to brave opinion, and at need to shock it —at the cost, no doubt, of much personal inconvenience, and of much violence to gentle nature, shrinking not so much from the pain as from the publicity of martyrdom. If a few corpulent persons of the first sociii! "r intellectual im-' portance—and hnppii - »nr country is now exceptionally w. li provided in both kinds —could be induced to sit on the pavement for a few hours every day, the thing would soon be done. In such a situation they would appeal to one section of the crowd "as fat men in difficulties, to another as celebrities of the day. Thr.v might hold matches or articles of merchandise to put themselves right with the law, but it could be well understood that they were there for a higher purpose. They would still, no doubt, be arrested for obstruction, for such a charge would be only too easily feigned arid formulated against persons of-their girth, but it would be all for the good of the cause. They might insist on sitting down in court, and on disturbing the repose of the police- van with sepulchral knocks with their knees in protest against the merciless tvra'nnv that compelled them to stand ' upright. Let the . Government beware.