Ufte limEbitsw. SATURDAY, JULY 9, 1010. A LONDON SIEGE,

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 864, 9 July 1910, Page 4

Ufte limEbitsw. SATURDAY, JULY 9, 1010. A LONDON SIEGE,

i ! When tho Government's plan'for the consolidation of the grounds of the old and new Houses of Parliament was made public the other day there was a prompt protest against the closing-up of a section of Sydney Street, We took no part in the dis-. cussion, preferring to believe that the Government was not likely to prove unreasonable in the matter of a right-of-way through the new grounds.. The incident showed, however, that time and distance have by' no means weakened the fiery insistence of men of British origin upon the preservation of any. established right-of-way. The English mail brings us particulars of a remarkable affair in London arising out of this excellent British characteristic. Although the episode was not mentioned in tho cable messages it caused a great stir in London, as it well deserved to do, since it was extremely entertaining and unmistakably heroic and significant. In that very staid portion of the metropolis known as the Royal Borough of Kensington, there is a row of houses called Earl's Terrace, running parallel to Kensington Road and divided from it by a long narrow garden and a carriage-drive the two ends of which run into the main thoroughfare and are provided with gates, which, however, no man remembers ever to have seen closed. Behind the Terrace, and separated from it by a road, is the Edwardes Square Garden. The Terrace and the Square t formerly the property of Lord Kensington, was bought some years ago by a.company which, now that the leases have run out, intends to demolish tho Terracc and build upon its site and upon the Square nehind it. The company's first stej; was to close the gates of the carriage-drive, and in a twinkling the blood of the neighbourhood and the Kensington Borough Council was up and the drama began, its successive stages being witnessed by enormous crowds of citizens. The Borough Coiincil held that the drive, which is .maintained and lighted by it, is become a public thoroughfare by use. It accordingly ordered its employees to destroy the chains and locks- on the gates and saw through the timber. The r company's workmen re-erected the barricade, and this was again destroyed by the Council, which placed the beadle in possession. The barricades were reerected and again destroyed. The public excitement grew from day to day, and' the residents 'made many attacks, some successful, upon the gates of the garden square. On the third day of the war, two journalists were inside the area at a moment when the company succeeded with its second barricade. On endeavouring to leave, they were stopped by the company's employees, who asked the police to arrest the reporters as trespassers. This the police, declined to do, and the reporters remained prisoners front noon until 9 p.m. An appeal to the Town Clerk was resultless, and at 8.30 p.m. a reporter outside the rails set off for Judge Phillimore, who happens to bp Mayor of Kensington. His Lordship had, however, left town, and the reporter, who, in common with all the respectable people of that part of Kensington, had sloughed his modernity and become an original old Englishman, routed out the Chief Justice of England, informing him that "two of his Majesty's lawful subjects were held prisoners on the King's highway. Lord Alverstone's blood responded gamely to 'this fine appeal, and he gave orders for the police to bring to him the people concerned. Before 1 the police could act, however, the company's representative, alarmed at the appeal to his Lordship, set the two men at liberty. In the meantime the beadle and his dog remained inflexibly at their posts., and some of the inhabitants succeeded in entering the garden, where, having taken ample provisions of food and drink with them, they determined to remain. At latest advices hostilities had been suspended and the matter was to bo settled in the trumpery modern way by the Courts. The incredible outstanding feature of the affair, as the Daily News pointed out, was that neither the householders nor the company seem to have been afraid of attracting 'attention .to themselves by 1 doing something unusual. The News naturally regarded it as a new fact for Kensington, a new fact for England, "a landmark in'our social history that gentlemen of mature age, who pay rates and go to town ir the morning, have, apparently without a pang, decided to do things' which in other people they would be inclined to .regard as queer." Readers of Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Napoleon■ of Nottinrj Hill will be delighted with the strange similarity Between this episode and the groat Pump Street war, which originated in just the same way and out of the same British spirit of civic freedom. Mr. Chesterton was interviewed, of course, and he was exuberantly metaphysical and Radical, seeing in the affair a proof of the conservatism of the Radical mob and tho destructive Radicalism of capital. "Notice," he exclaimed, "how complicated the question of ownership has become ! In Ireland to own and to occupy mean much the same; a man owns the land he works as he owns the clothes lie wears, but here the real owners of Edwardes Square, the people -vho love Edwardes Square and are determined to keep it in being though blood should flow, arc only there on sufferance, and the nominal owner cares so little about it that he hands it over, with not so much as a tear for one of its brass knockers, to the executioner, to a soulless corporation without a face." This is -excellent humanity and poetry, but dreadfully bad politics, and yet we cannot help thinking that the most old-fashioned of Conservatives would be the first and the most emphatic in proclaiming that, something precious will have been lost nvlien the civic spirit of Britain is purged of this romantic ingredient—when staid stockbrokers no longer batter down gates in detencc of a. traditional public right,