MARGINAL COMMENTS
By ROSE MACAULAY The Irish, those prime naggers, are still going on about Cromwell, 1798, and 1916. The various religious bodies are still raking up with rancour the deplorable things they did to one another in past ages. The past of no individual, no group, no nation, will bear a moment's inspection. Yet how much it gets 1 I am still reading allegations about what the police did in Thurloe Square on March 22nd of this year, —as that, prowling the environs of the Albert Hall in search of any stray meetings that might be proceeding in the forbidden zone, they came on one just outside it and beat it up, charging it with cavalry, batons and gusto. It was a nice, quiet, pious meeting, addressed at the moment by a clergyman, but the police decided that it was in the wrong place, was causing obstruction, was perhaps in addition Communist or Fascist or some such thing, or was, to use their favourite somewhat touchy and old-world expression, " insulting." Anyhow, they dispersed it, and must ever since have wished they hadn't, for they have never heard the last of it, and probably never will, from a public set on its rights of free assembly. Thurloe Square has become a Peterloo ; you have but to breathe its name to the constable who tries to take your name for speeding or parking, and he will hang his head and slink away abashed. The police would be wise to own at once. that they acted rashly and rudely in this square. But the white sheet has never been a popular wear.
It is, nevertheless, for most of us, the only wear that fits. Now that other uniforms are to be ruled out of order, I suggest that the de-uniformed should get them- selves measured for this simple and candid garb. I should like to see Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts thus clad, marching by, candles in hand, like acolytes pro- cessing up the aisle. And the poor Greenshirts, at whom passers-by give pitying glances as they endeavour to sell their economic doctrines at street corners, and who now seem so alarmed at the prospect of being de-shirted. The police, too (whose uniforms arc held by many people to be political and to come within the meaning of the Act), would look fine ; and, armed with candles instead of truncheons, into how much less trouble would they get 1 Red ties, primroses, white roses, all the badges of party, which incite such disorderly feelings and actions in those of other parties, can be replaced by this penitential wear, the sight of which would surely cause the most persistent naggers to relent. If generals, for instance, all admitted by their garb that they had retreated, advanced, stayed where they were, thrown out and abandoned salients, all at the wrong times and the wrong places, in short that they had acted like generals, would not their unkind and tedious hounding cease ? If policemen were per- ceived to be repenting of enlivening quiet squares by cavalry charges at meetings addressed by clergymen, perhaps we should cease to prosecute our enquiries into this regrettable impetuosity of theirs. Let me, then, offer this tentative amendment to the Public Order Bill,
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