Letter from London

The dreaded day—October 27 —has come and gone. It has joined the annals of London’s two thousand years of history, and, except for the litter in the streets, London is none the worse for it. The event was bound to be an anticlimax; nothing short of a holocaust which reduced the city to a heap of smoking rubble could have matched the advance publicity. What in fact happened, though—or rather what didn’t happen—amounted to more than just an anticlimax. It was a triumph for the police, for the nonviolent use of civil power and, if I may say so, for the moderation and phlegmatic good-humor which are still part of the English character.

The build-up to Demonstration Day had really been quite extraordinary. The date itself appears to have been fixed early this year, in consultation with the North Vietnamese delegation, at a meeting of that all-purpose Communist-front organization, the World Federation of Trade Unions. The big anti-Vietnam demonstration last March, which culminated in a major battle round the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, set an ominous precedent. That, we were told, was a picnic compared with what was going to happen now.

AL

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Anthony Lejeune

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The dreaded day—October 27 —has come and gone. It has joined the annals of London’s two thousand years of history, and, except for the litter in the streets, London is none the worse for it. The event was bound to be an anticlimax; nothing short of a holocaust which reduced the city to a heap of smoking rubble could have matched the advance publicity. What in fact happened, though—or rather what didn’t happen—amounted to more than just an anticlimax. It was a triumph for the police, for the nonviolent use of civil power and, if I may say so, for the moderation and phlegmatic good-humor which are still part of the English character.

The build-up to Demonstration Day had really been quite extraordinary. The date itself appears to have been fixed early this year, in consultation with the North Vietnamese delegation, at a meeting of that all-purpose Communist-front organization, the World Federation of Trade Unions. The big anti-Vietnam demonstration last March, which culminated in a major battle round the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, set an ominous precedent. That, we were told, was a picnic compared with what was going to happen now.