H2 ENGLISH SAGA

this, partaking of the village from which it had so lately sprung,
the proletariat of urban England showed how little its heart
was in ideological abstraction. It was difficult to make it class
conscious. It just wanted to be comfortable and jolly and have
a good time. Its class anthem was not the Marseillaise but the
deathless song whose roaring refrain went:

"Damn their eyes
If ever they tries
To rob a poor man of his beer !"
*••*••»•

It was the teuton Prince Albert who demonstrated to the
world how harmless and pacific the British proletariat really
was. In 1849 he and a little group of serious and cultured persons
of like mind began to prepare plans for a Royal Commission to
organise a great Exhibition of industry in London, All the
world was to be invited to contribute exhibits and to view in
turn the triumphs of British art and manufacture. Nobody at
first took the idea very seriously, but the Prince was persistent,
and in the following winter, after five thousand guarantors had
been reluctantly enlisted, the Royal Commission was set up.
Sixteen acres of land on the southern side of Hyde Park, now
used for football, were secured and a design for a monster palace
of glass accepted from Joseph Paxton who had built the con-
servatories at Chatsworth.

For about a year the project was the joke of London. Punch
depicted royal Albert begging from door to door in the guise
of the industrious boy, crying "Pity the sorrows of a poor young
Prince,5* or pulling at Dame Britannia's elbow with an, "Oh,
Mum, here's a to-do! here's all the company come and the
streets full of carriages and brooms . . . and the candles isn't
lighted and the supper ready nor the man dressed who's to wait
nor the music nor anything!" At first nobody thought either
the money or the glass " ark as big as a warehouse" would ever
be raised, but, as the giant iron columns, some of them over a
hundred feet high, appeared in the Park, laughter changed to
apprehension. With the vast concourse of visitors whom it
would draw to the West End of London from abroad and from
the dangerous working-dass districts, almost anything might
happen* The park—favourite haunt of beauty and fashion-
would be filled with East End rowdies who with their tobacco