DOWNING STREET, the street of of the vanity of human ambitions, a per power in London, is certainly not imposing to look upon. Any casual foreign visitor who finds his way to this famous spot must experience a somewhat rude shock. Gazing at this little group of smoke-stained, brown-brick dwellinghouses, he must imagine that he has strayed from his quest into some backwater of London life; for the street looks like a piece of an older world still clinging to existence among the great modern palaces of Whitehall. Amid these stately structures, the glories of our new Babylon, this little Downing Street is squeezed and dwarfed, a dead little island of brick from the seventeenth century. A Roman emperor boasted that he had found Rome of brick and had left it of marble. But even he must have sometimes felt that there was a dignity about the brick lacking to the marble, a Spartan sternness speaking of earlier virtues. So it is with our Downing Street to-day; it seems to survive as a reminder petual suggestion that only in simple duty and plain living lies our strength. There are three houses left of the old street, No. 10, No. 11, and No. 12. No. 10 is the official residence of the prime minister, No. 11 is occupied by the chancellor of the exchequer, and No. 12 has become the office of the government whips of the day. The rest of the street was cleared away in the early nineties, when the increasing burden of the growing empire forced Englishmen to build new public offices for their great departments of state. The two principal surviving houses, Nos. 10 and 11, have been little touched outside by the hand of the restorer. They remain to-day almost precisely what they were three hundred years ago, little threestoried dwelling-houses of the type that was then spreading round the central core of London. One sees houses of the same kind to-day in Bloomsbury; or notes the same type of brick in Buckingham Street, Copyright, 1918, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved. 771 the Strand, where Pepys lived; or in St. James's Square, the home of many great Restoration peers. Such houses were the town mansions of statesmen like Clarendon and Clifford; they were the admired homes of the wigged and ribboned courtiers who preened themselves in the wake of Charles II, by the side of the lake in St. James's Park. For the luxury of today is the simplicity of to-morrow, and the palace of yesterday is the cottage of today. To the outside observer, No. 10 might have been preserved in a museum. The brick front has doubtless been repointed from time to time, and the roof reslated; but the old-time fretted railings still top the area, and the old brass knocker is still on the door, above the plate that bears the simple legend, "The First Lord of the Treasury." The lamp-bracket in front of the door is just one of those enforced on But it was once No. 5. To the east of it stood several houses once owned by that bright and gifted soul, Horatio Walpole. its own face still looks on the world with rather less change than the British Constitution itself, which it seems in some way to typify, with its homely plainness of aspect and its matured old-worldliness. It has the well-worn familiarity of some seasoned old pipe. It is our British way to hate display in our highest. It is a sign of weakness when an Englishman has to dress smartly. It is so with our houses. There is a Roman majesty in simplicity. If our foreign visitors should demur, we can to-day still echo the reply of the British minister during the Napoleonic Wars: "You must measure our strength not by the pomp of our palaces, but by the size of our subsidies." But step within the door of No. 10, if EXTERIOR OF NUMBER TEN DOWNING STREET, LORD RHONDDA IN FRONT all London householders in the days before public lighting, when it was laid on every citizen to light his own doorstep. The house has been several times renumbered; privilege or business permit you, and you will soon find that the plain front conceals a rich interior. Like the king's daughter, No. 10 is "all glorious within"; not with gorgeous hangings of woven tapestry or golden brocade, not with the splendor of Versailles or Hampton Court, but with the riches of storied association and memory. It can fearlessly be said that within all the breadth of Great Britain, or even of Europe, there is no house more vitally interesting in every turn and twist of its old passages or every corner of its old rooms. How could it be otherwise? For here, since Sir Robert. Walpole first took possession, fifty British prime ministers have toiled and spent their little day of power. Here, for nearly three centuries, every great crisis in our island story has found its storm-center: mighty secular passions have spent their force; great victories have been devised; great defeats have been endured. Here have lived England's greatest. What talks must have passed within these walls, what eager debates and striv ings, what agonizing doubts, what long suspense, what weary patience! For not without much agony of travail does a nation come to the birth of empire. The front door of No. 10 closes behind you, and you find yourself in a small THE NELSON ROOM square hall adorned on all its walls with Photograph by Olive Edis, F.R.P.S. At the end of the passage is another hall, larger and well-warmed. On the left is a partition curtained off as a waitingroom for visitors; on a mantelpiece within that partition is a bust of Wellington as a young man, also splendidly heroic, instinct with a kind of spotless integrity. It is England at her best and noblest. Then you pass through a smaller room -the "study" of many prime ministers and find yourself in the council chamber inally as Downing's dining-room, it has echoed with some of the most critical debates of British rulers. Here, for instance, Pitt's cabinets sat all through the Napoleonic Wars, and reached all those critical decisions which decided the fate of Europe. What moments have passed in this room! We look back at that story now from the summit of its victorious close; we forget that here in this chamber ministers had too often to look straight into the Gorgon faces of defeat and disaster and remain undismayed. Such memories may sustain us now. It is a room not unworthy of its history. It is long and well windowed. The eastern end is framed in four columns with Corinthian capitals. The book-shelves lining the room are now entirely covered with war maps and war charts, which surround the war cabinet as they sit at |
