THE GREAT REFORM DEMON. STRATION. Procession of One Hundred Thousand Workmen. London, July 24th.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 69, 27 September 1884, Page 4

THE GREAT REFORM DEMON. STRATION. Procession of One Hundred Thousand Workmen. London, July 24th.

TiiE Great "Reform Demonstration, to protest against the House of Lords throwing out Mr Gladstone's Franchise Bill, took x^lace on Monday afternoon last, and proved to be one of those extraordinary sights which you only sec two or three times in a lifetime. Forgetting what was doing, I left home about 4 p.m., and took the Underground Hallway to Westminster, with the intention of paying a call at the Agent-General's offices. No sooner, however, did I step outside the Westminster Biidge Station archway, than I found myself in the midst of a surging, .shouting, seething, and perspiring crowd stretching every way as far as the eye could reach. Down the middle of thi.s mass ot humanity meandcied the great procession, a determined regiment of metropolitan hoiking men owe hundred thousand strong. They all a\oic blue libbons, marched with military piccision in file six deep, and carried either banners insciibed m itli the political warcries of the day, or the insignia of their respective trades. Knowing the unguarded playfulness of the London street arab on occasions of this sort, and the rooted aversion A\ith A\hich he and his redoubtable elder brother 'Any view any person respectably dressed, I began (after ten minutes' severe jostling) to look about for a temporary asylum indoors. The shops "were all closed, but a glimpse at the crowded windows of St. Stephen's Club reminded me that the National Liberal would be available if I took the Underground Railway on to Charing Cross. To shove my w ay back through the crowd and reach the station archway once more was by no means easy ; but, thanks to the assistance of a stalwart policeman, I at length managed it, and a few minutes later was ensconsed in a first-floor window of the great club-house in Trafalgar Square. The view from here was superb. The procession marched up Whitehall and crowed the Square, making for Pall Mall. Just as 1 arrived the leaders, the mounted farrier s, a powerful body of men, came in sight, agricultural labourers, with their liubon-decked hop-poles, following, and behind them a seemingly endless succession of the handicrafts and trades : the zincwoikers and tinplaters, the carpenters and biicklaycr.s, the pi inters "with the pi ess in then biake and the compositors at work, the buteheis Avith their marrowbones and clea\er=, the shipwrights with their leaders sitting in a full-rigged ship drawn by a team of horses', the hatters with their tall headgear, the railway servants with their models of George Stephenson's "Rocket" and of the modern locomotive. Then followed the cabinetmakers, goldbeaters, basketmakers, organ-buildeis, French-polishers, pianoforte- | makers, and upholdsterers, the millers, the cig.u makers, the sugai bakers, the coopers, the tobacco-strippers, the bakers, the glassblow ci a, the tobacco-pipe makers, and the cabdvivers. It doesn't take long to a\ rite this down, but it took ix\»tfour hoin'-s for the procession to pas-, us. The meetings in the Hyde Paik had been held and the fiont ranks w ere dispersing, whilst the tail-end of the .seemingly ne\ er-cndingline of blue ribboned woikmen .still streamed slowly along the Thames Embankment a mile and a-half away. I did not (it is needless to say) wait to see the whole affair through. That v\ ould have been too tedious. When the cio-ud began to thin a bit, we some of us ciept out into the Square, and, slipping across to the Underground, jogged comfortably home, far away from the crowd. The follow ing extracts culled from various London papers may give some idea of the splendid proportions of the Demonstration and scenes en route :—: —

The Scene in Piccadilly. In evolving a mental picture of Piccadilly from the upper end of St. James's-street to Hyde Park Corner, as it appeared on this occasion, the reader must imagine that pleasant and fashionable thoroughfare transformed beyond recognition. Not that there were to be seen decorations of triumphal arches, illuminations, trophies of arms, Venetian masts, flags, or banners. There ■were no such ornaments anywhere along the route, and therefore not in Piccadilly. All the change was made by stoppage of the ordinary trtffic, by people looking out of windows, and by a serried mass ot human being, so large, so vast, so seemingly innumerable, as to be deeply impressive. Possibly not one half, not one quarter, of this populace may have been Radicals, or enthusiastic for the extension of the franchise to the counties. But there they were in their hundreds of thousands, standing aside to let the processionists pass between their midst. That fact is undeniable. The procession may have numbered 100,000 men and women, more or less — horse and foot. Holding aloft its heavy silken banners, painted and embroidered with all kinds of devices and mottoes — with emblems of trades, with hop-poles of Kentish and Sussex labourers, with halberds and armour, and loaves of bread on top of staves, and green boughs of trees — it swept along, sometimes seeming stern and gloomy, sometimes full of merriment — a very real and earnest assembly of poor men, come out to assert a claim, or, as the men themselves declare, to claim a right, Waggons and carriages laden with reformers break up the glittering monotony of the endless perspective of oblong banners, keeping on and on towards the goal of the seven platforms in the park, right and left of where the Reformer's tree— a gigantic ancient elm — formerly stood. In spite of their good humour, some part of the crowd, and it is to be feared a section of the processionists, did not hesitate to stop at the corner of Arlington-street and hiss loudly and viciously, pointing the finger of scorn in the direction of Lord Salisbury's house — protected from possible fury by a body of constables drawn up across the end of the street. At Devonshire House Lord Edward Cavendish was recognised ; at the corner of Stratton-street a cheer was raised for the Baroness Burdett-Coutts ; and when Mr J ohn Bright was seen at a window of his house, the right hon. gentleman was called by name and loudly applauded with long-continued, approving shouts. Passing the closed blinds of Apsley House, in view of the crowded roof of St. George's Hospital, the procession, or rather some part of it, entered Hyde Park, and the speakers made the best of their way to the appointed trysts. A considerable portion of the procession either never entered the park, or at least not until all the speaking was over and done. The tail was still marching, with banners waving and bands playing, when the head, with task accomplished, was on its homeward route.

There has been published in Paris the " Anti-Poicrboire," a journal devoted to the destruction of the system of universal "tipping" that prevails in that city. An unfortunate newsvendor, offering the journal for sale outside the cafe* on the Boulevard dcs Capucines, was set upon by the waiters and kicked and cuffed in a merciless fashion. He talks of bringing an action for damages against the proprietor.