CORONATION IMPRESSIONS.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20260, 31 July 1937, Page 15 (Supplement)

CORONATION IMPRESSIONS.

American Journalist Sums Up :: Unique Britain.

MR. HOWARD VINCENT O’BRIEN, whose outspoken daily column in the Chicago Daily News is famous in America, was in London for the Coronation. He sums up his experiences in an interesting letter to the New Statesman, in which he says: I wa3 up at dawn the day of the Coronation, mingling with the crowd. Some were in toppers and spats, some in thin shabbiness, looking as if a square meal was what they needed most. All were cheerful and resigned to their ten houis’ wait. They read their newspapers or stood in line at the tea dispensaries, or chatted in low tones. There was no noise, no shouting, no horse-play. . . . When, at last, the procession hove in sight, the rain came with it. Umbi*ellas went up. But when someone called “ Down umbrellas! ” the umbrellas promptly went down. It was amazing! . . . There was Not a Sour Note in the whole of it, so far as I could tell. This, of course, might be explained by the presence of so many soldiers and policemen. My impression, however, is that there was no jeering for the simple reason that there was nobody who felt like jeering. It corroborated the impression I have had everywhere in England—that nowhere on the globe to-day is there a nation so completely unified. Everywhere else there is Left and Right, with a chasm between them. Everywhere else the bitterness between the haves and the have nots is great. Everywhere else there is a ferment of conviction that the world must be radically altered. Here in England the conviction seems all but universal that while whatever is may not be wholly right, but a few minor changes will fix it.

I sat saucer-eyed as I listened to the ritual of the Coronation. It came over me suddenly and w'ith something of a shock that Britain was not a democracy in the sense of a government of, by, and for the people.

It was something quite different—a theocracy in partnership with the military oligarchy. King George was cast for the leading role, but His Grace of Canterbury had all the lines. In the Abbey the priest was top-man. On the street the men-at-arms took over. The people sat or stood by the wayside and approved. A Communist friend of mine says that the next focus of revolution will be in the United States; and certain it is that there are Ominous Creakings and Rumblings in the social structure of the American republic. Wealth and privilege are definitely on the defensive, with the common man demanding not so much a share in the loot as a place in the driver’s seat. This, I suspect, will mean new political alignments. Whether the struggle will result in some form of Fascism, or in a tyranny of the masses, or in an extension of economic democracy, I do not know. All I know is that to one coming from revolutionary Mexico by way of the turbulent United States, the unity and decorum of the British is overpowering. If I were an “agitator” I think I should waste no time planting seed in English soil. And if I were a cardboard Caesar, I think I should rattle my sabre a trifle less. England, with her Oxford oath, her Hyde Park rabble-rousers, her pacifist philosophers, her dawdling in the Mediterranean and the antics of her madcap Prince, has given the world a Wholly False Impression. As I sloshed through the rain after the Coronation, my ears cocked to catch what I could of the talk in the streets, it came over me that the lords of Britain have what the lords of no other land have—a people who will obey orders, and obey them because they want to obey them. There is talk everywhere about the “ United Front.” England is the only place I have seen it.