Read Ebook: The condition of England by Masterman Charles F G Charles Frederick Gurney

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 318 lines and 79027 words, and 7 pages

Of very special interest, however, is the testimony of those who have endeavoured to get behind the form of cottage or quality of food, to apprehension of the actual life of the people who dwell in the one and are nourished by the other. Such efforts have been made, and not unsuccessfully, by Lady Bell at Middlesborough, by Mr. Charles Booth in London, by Mr. Reynolds amongst his friends the Devon fishermen, by Mr. Reginald Bray from his block tenement in Camberwell. They all bear testimony concerning a life novel to humanity, whose development and future is still doubtful.

Lady Bell, in her study of such life in a prosperous northern centre, goes near to provide a bird's-eye view of the city "proletariat" in its present uncertain state. It is a town erected almost in two nights and a day by the demands of the new iron manufacture. Its hundred thousand population are practically all workers. It exists solely for the purpose of translating human energy into material values. Its inhabitants have been sucked in like the draught in its own blast furnaces: from the neighbouring countryside, from the neighbouring townships, from Scotland and Ireland, and places far afield. Round the furnaces there have rapidly heaped together mazes of little two-storeyed cottages. The furnaces, the grey streets, a few public buildings, all set in a background of greyness, in a devastated landscape, under a grey sky--that is the proletarian city. Lady Bell set herself to reveal what the Iron Trade, which people outside "know but by name, perhaps, as a huge measuring gauge of the national prosperity, is in reality, when translated into terms of human beings." She takes her readers through the great furnaces and down into the interiors of the little houses. She exhibits the habits, manners, pleasures, and pains of the people. She shows in one chapter the literature patronised by this population; in another the people at work; in another the people at play. Again, she will describe the lives of the children, the lives of the wife and mother, the influences of sickness, accident, or old age. The slave populations who built Babylon, or upon which the Athenian oligarchy which called itself a Democracy essayed philosophy and beauty, remain to-day more as a myth than as a memory. The poverty populations, upon which are built to-day England's unparalleled accumulation, will stand in the future, with at least a corner of their lives lifted. Such a corner will interpret to a less harassed age a life once peopling these waste places, which will then be but ruins and a memory.

Here is a population in many respects more fortunate than its fellows. Its wages are high; its hours of work are few. Its life, though exacting and laborious, demanding, perhaps, from human nature more than human nature can readily give, is more exhilarating than the long hours in the humid air of the cotton factory, or the perpetual scribbling in an underground office cellar. It is wrestling continually with the iron: tearing it out of the ironstone, directing rivers of molten metal into their proper channels, bending the intractable stone and the huge forces of heat and affinity to the will of man. And in life also it is wrestling with huge forces which it but dimly understands, poised on a perilous pathway from which one slip means utter destruction. "The path the iron worker daily treads at the edge of the sandy platform, that narrow path that lies between running streams of fire on the one hand and a sheer drop on the other, is but an emblem of the Road of Life along which he must walk. If he should stumble, either actually or metaphorically, as he goes, he has but a small margin in which to recover himself." There is a less defensible side of the people's life in the enormous disproportion of attendance at public-houses and at places of religious worship; the universal prevalence of betting and gambling; the thoughtlessness and wastefulness which often produces economic collapse; the ignorance of child-rearing and the laws of health; the darker side of the artificial restriction of families. But these become explained rather than condemned by the revelation of the contrast in the condition of child-bearing in one of these crowded, tiny homes with the condition in the surroundings of those who live in another universe. Boys and girls of fourteen or younger are turned loose to pick their way through the most difficult period of life, just at the season when the boys and girls of another class are most completely surrounded with careful and humane influences. The married woman of the working classes, "handicapped as she is by physical conditions and drawbacks, with but just bodily strength enough to encounter the life described," may be defended against the fluent criticism of "her more prosperous sisters--whose duties are divided among several people, and even then not always accomplished with success."

So is being heaped up the wealth of the world. Under darkened skies, and in an existence starved of beauty, these communities of men and women and children continue their unchanging toil. Is the price being paid too great for the result attained? The cities have sucked in the healthy, stored-up energies of rural England; with an overwhelming percentage to-day of country upbringing. Must they ever thus be parasitic on another life outside, and this nation divide into breeding-grounds for the creation of human energies and consuming centres where these energies are destroyed? The standard of longevity has pitifully fallen in such places from that prevalent amongst the agricultural labourers. Workers formerly too old at sixty are now too old ten years earlier. The men are scourged by specific diseases; the mortality of the children is appalling. One is apt to be surprised, says Lady Bell, of the iron workers of Middlesborough, to find how many of the workmen are more or less ailing in different ways. "But we cease to be surprised when we realise how apt the conditions are to tell upon the health even of the strongest, and how many of the men engaged in it are spent by the time they are fifty. To say that this happens to half of them is probably a favourable estimate." Of the women, Lady Bell brushes aside with a welcome contempt that newspaper and drawing-room cant which explains that a beneficent Providence has made the working classes insensible to pains and conditions which other classes would find intolerable. "It is not only bringing children into the world that affects the health of the working women. It is an entire delusion to believe that they are, as a rule, stronger, hardier, healthier, than the well-to-do. Their life is a continuous toil. They rarely go outside the doors of their houses, except for Saturday marketing and Sunday-evening exercise. Recreation, the stimulus of changed garments, rest during the day, or the other minor comforts which other classes find so necessary, are not for them. They are mostly convinced that it is wrong to sit down and read a book at any hour of the day. Their interests, not unnaturally, turn towards the stimulus of drinking, and of betting and gambling--two elements which at least can give colour in a life set in grey."

Every observer, in this and its hundred similar fellows, can see family affection, endurance, kindliness, and patience beyond all praise; a resistance to the triumphant powers of darkness. What is more difficult to show is any interpretation of the whole business, an ideal which can illuminate the present disability, or a vision in which to-day's efforts will appear intelligible in the light of an end. Lacking such vision, the verdict of a nineteenth-century prophet still sounds mournful over much of industrial England that abides unchanged. "The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life," wrote Ruskin, "are the south-eastern suburbs of Bradford, and the scene from Wakefield Bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp's nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay."

Yet all England has not yet been roofed over and become subservient to furnace and factory: and there are other observers who find amongst the labouring populations, especially amongst those who are compelled to face danger and to cultivate endurance, an excellence denied to classes sometimes deemed more fortunate. We may pass from the blackness and almost uncouth violence of Middlesborough to the jolly fishermen of the South Coast: to find not the iron trade, but the ocean harvest, "translated into terms of human beings." Mr. Reynolds, who has lived amongst such a fishermen's colony in a Devonshire watering-place, can give encouraging testimony to the happiness found there, the generosity, the standards of the poor; to a definite and remote civilisation, which gazes out upon the activities of the wealthier classes above it, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with a little envy, certainly with no hatred or predatory aim.

Sixty years ago, Disraeli described the rich and poor of England as two nations. To-day, even national distinctions seem less estranging than the fissure between the summit and basis of society. "Their civilisations are not two stages of the same civilisation, but two civilisations, two traditions which have grown up concurrently." And a similar testimony is expressed by many who have intimate and first-hand knowledge of the life of the hand worker. "The more one sees of the poor in their own homes," is the verdict of Miss Loane, a witness of varied and peculiar experience, "the more one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole, can be more justly described as different from those of the upper classes than as better or worse." Most present-day failures in legislation and social experiment are due to neglect of this fact. It has been assumed that the artisan is but a stunted or distorted specimen of the small tradesman; with the same ideals, the same aspirations, the same limitations: demanding the same moulding towards the fashioning of a completed product. We are gradually learning that "the people of England" are as different from, and as unknown to, the classes that investigate, observe, and record, as the people of China or Peru. Living amongst us and around us, never becoming articulate, finding even in their directly elected representatives types remote from their own, these people grow and flourish and die, with their own codes of honour, their special beliefs and moralities, their judgment and often their condemnation of the classes to whom has been given leisure and material advantage. The line is cut clean by both parties, neither desiring to occupy the territory of the other. "There is not one high wall, but two high walls, between the classes and the masses," declares this witness; "and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb."

The scene is laid in the huddled cottages of a fisher village of a South Coast watering-place. The observer penetrates behind the appearance--to the normal visitor--of a rather squalid fishing suburb, with swarms of untidy children, and the fishermen, deferential, seeking patronage of the brisk or bored holiday-maker. He has lived amongst them and loved them. He has convinced them that he has no desire to do them good. He comes to their life having "swallowed all the formulas" with a perhaps exaggerated contempt for the "intellectuals" and the upholders of the middle class moral code. He is enchanted by the life he finds there, despite all its discomforts. In the existence of the poor, in an experience fixed on the hard rind of life, tasting to the full its salt and bitter flavours, he finds a sincerity and an adventure denied to the more secure classes above. Always faced by elemental facts, and demanding a continuous courage for the maintenance of an unending struggle, these men and women exhibit clean-cut, simple qualities which vindicate their existence before any absolute standard of values.

And this, indeed, is only congruous with that changed estimate of moral values which prevails amongst the poor. Mr. Reynolds, amongst his Devon fishermen, finds the same general summing-up of moral guilt or excellence as Miss Loane has found in the mean streets of the great cities. "Generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation." It is the emotional, indeed, against the intellectual: to one point of view, life in an incomplete condition of development; to another, life lived nearer to its central heart. Certainly, in the combination of Christian and ethical dicta which make up the popular moral code of modern civilisation, the standard of the poor is nearer to the Christian standard. One can see how many of the New Testament assertions have been fashioned from the common democratic mind, as Socrates and Plato from the aristocratic. Yet religion counts for little in the scheme of human affairs. There is, indeed, nothing of a definite denial; the fishing village would be scandalised by any truculent disproof of Christianity. The children go regularly to Sunday school; their parents believe in God and in a better time coming. But the general spirit reveals that widespread and prevailing uncertainty, and conviction of uncertainty, which to-day is the most dominant attitude in face of ultimate problems. "Tony" the fisherman pronounces religion to be "the business of the clergy, who are paid for it, and of those who take it up as a hobby, including the impertinent persons who thrust hell-fire tracts upon the fisher-folk. 'Us can't 'spect to know nort about it,' says Tony. ''Tain't no business o' ours. May be as they says; may be not. It don't matter, that I sees. 'Twill be all the same in a hundred years' time, when we're a-grinning up at the daisy-roots.'"

This "daring and courage," however, is the prerogative of individuals; specially equipped, or selected by a life trained from the earliest years to confront hostile forces in the open air and sunshine; skilled and heartened by combats with the sea. How far can such characters be identified in the Crowd: the special product of modern industrial civilisation? Those who would attempt a diagnosis of the present must find themselves more and more turning their attention from the individual to the aggregation: upon the individuals which act in an aggregation in a manner different from their action as isolated units of humanity. We have to deal, in fact, not only with the Crowd casually collected in sudden movement by persons accustomed to live alone, but with whole peoples which in London and the larger cities are reared in a Crowd, labour in a Crowd, in a Crowd take their enjoyments, die in a Crowd, and in a Crowd are buried at the end.

"Has there been a row?" asked a journalist of a gathering at Westminster summoned by "Suffragettes" and unemployed leaders. "No," was the cheerful reply, "but we still 'ave 'opes." It is a crowd which "still 'as 'opes" that forms the matrix or solid body of these agglomerations of humanity whose doings to-day excite some interest and some perplexity amongst observers of social change. In the midst are the criminal and the enthusiast, those who are openly at war with Society, those who are battered by its complications and troublous demands, those, again, in whom devotion to some ideal cause burns like a flame at the heart. But these are all encompassed and embedded in the multitude of the unimportant: gathered from nowhere, journeying nowhither, swaying and eddying, swept into random groups and whirlpools, choking for a moment all the city ways, and in a moment leaving them all silent and deserted; the city Crowd which has seen little that is encouraging at the present, but "has hopes" of something wonderful yet to be revealed.

You may see it in the dim morning of every London day, struggling from the outskirts of the city into tramcars and trains which are dragging it to its centres of labour: numberless shabby figures hurrying over the bridges or pouring out of the exits of the central railway stations. You may discern in places the very pavements torn apart, and tunnels burrowed in the bowels of the earth, so that the astonished visitor from afar beholds a perpetual stream of people emerging from the middle of the street, seemingly manufactured in some laboratory below. It flows always along the high road of the huge town in the daytime, like a liquid unprecipitated, or a river in even stream carrying down dust to the sea. But at any moment an unexpected incident, tragic or trivial, may change the liquid from clear to cloudy, or reveal, like the river suddenly banked in obstruction, the debris and turgid elements which it has hitherto borne along so buoyantly. A motor omnibus stands still, a cab horse collapses, men's voices are raised in altercation, an itinerant agitator demands work for all, or announces the day of judgment. Immediately a knot appears in the texture of the wood, a whirlpool in the water. The multitude of the unimportant gather together, "having hopes." With incredible rapidity appear amongst them the criminal, the loafer, the enthusiast; the stream of busy persons has become transferred into the city Crowd.

There is a note of menace in it, in the mixed clamour which rises from its humours and angers, like the voice of the sea in gathering storm. There is the evidence of possibilities of violence in its waywardness, its caprice, its always incalculable mettle and temper, forming in the aggregate a personality differing altogether from the personalities of its component atoms. Satisfied, curious, eager only for laughter and emotion, it will cheer the police which is scattering it like chaff and spray, mock openly at those who have come with set purposes, idle and sprawl on a summer afternoon at Hyde Park or an autumn evening in Parliament Square. But one feels that the smile might turn suddenly into fierce snarl or savagery, and that panic and wild fury are concealed in its recesses, no less than happiness and foolish praise. But more than the menace, the overwhelming impression is one of ineptitude; a kind of life grotesque and meaningless. It is in the city Crowd, where the traits of individual distinction have become merged in the aggregate, and the impression is of little white blobs of faces borne upon little black twisted or misshapen bodies, that the scorn of the philosopher for the mob, the cynic for humanity, becomes for the first time intelligible. Separate the drops and particles of it, follow each man homeward through the various ways of the city labyrinth--at the end you will find Humanity in its unchangeable and abiding existence: a tiny suburban home with cottage and garden, a tenement in a cliff of workmen's dwellings, a "child's white face to kiss at night," a "woman's smile by candle light." In each individual is resistance, courage, aspiration; a persistence which carries through the daily task with some energy and some enjoyment, and not entire discredit at the end. But immediately the mass of separate persons has become welded into the aggregate, this note of distinction vanishes. Humanity has become the Mob, pitifully ineffective before the organised resistance of police and military, and almost indecently naked of discipline or volition in the comparison; gaping open-mouthed, jeering at devotions which it cannot understand, like some uncouth monster which can be cajoled and flattered into imprisonment or ignoble action; like the Crowd which in all ages has rejoiced, one day at the crowning, the next at the crucifixion, of its King.

Why is it that this writing down of values takes place when mankind is thus collected into aggregations: that the spirit of the mob is so much less reputable than the spirit of its separate components? In part, perhaps, because the trivial and vacant elements are uppermost amongst a city race whose aspirations and purposes are independent of organised collective energies and aims. They have gathered for recreation, to be amused; for curiosity, to be surprised; for companionship, in a region where night has its empire, not without its terrors, just beyond the boundaries of their limited experience. The tragedy of common life is apparent, a modern philosopher has declared, not where poverty is the heritage of all but the few, or because existence offers at best a struggle uncertain and austere; but whenever that life is closed within limited horizons, and moved by no ideal springs. The visionary who cherishes the hope of a renovated society in which all shall be satisfied, the woman who flings herself into prison in the expectation that through her sacrifice the freedom of women will be attained, is a figure to the outward eye, indistinguishable in its obscurity from the multitude around who jeer and wonder and applaud. But these visionaries and enthusiasts possess a secret denied to their fellows, which gives their little lives a significance absent from the encompassing multitude; in the sense of consecration to a purpose, a meaning, and a goal.

Meantime that spirit abides but in the few; and the Crowd remains, to-day as yesterday, an instrument which the strong man has always used and always despised in the using. The new features of it come from the change that has gathered men from the countryside and the tiny town and hurried them into the streets of an immense city; henceforth always to move in a company, each tied as with a chain to his fellows, never to stand alone. In such a transformation there would seem some danger of the normal life of man becoming the life of the Crowd, with features intensified and distorted when collected in tumult or demonstration. We seem to see in the experience of a generation an increasing tendency thus to merge the individual in the mass, more frequent and unfailing response to the demand for agitation, which, in fact, is an excuse for absurdity or violence. Man, always seeking to escape from himself, found various channels of egress; in drink, in religious emotion, in political energy. He has now found that he can escape from himself by merely linking up with others like himself to become units in a Crowd. The secret is perhaps most clearly apprehended in America, where the Crowd consciousness is excited as deliberately as the religious emotion of a revivalist meeting; and after due preparation an aggregate of human beings suddenly breaks into carefully fermented lunacy. So that selected delegates of the political parties--men, being selected, it would seem, for special calculation, intelligence, and prudence--will shout at Denver or Chicago meaningless cacophinations for an hour and a half on end, march round and round the hall playing instruments and singing discordant songs, or suddenly take off their coats, or stand on their heads, or beat each other with bits of board. It is the experience of the flagellants and pilgrims of medieval times, with hysteria no longer left to chance, but organised as a fine art. In our own "mafficking," in the tearing to pieces of the City Volunteers, in unemployed demonstrations, even in a spectacle so diverting and yet so foreboding as the "sieges of St. Stephen's" by the "Suffragettes," there are traces of similar if less exaggerated emotion: as man, communicating the infection of the Crowd consciousness to his fellow-men, suddenly abandons his individual volitions and restraints, and loses himself in the volition of the Crowd. A note of hysteria may seem to be an inevitable accompaniment of a city life so divorced from the earth's ancient tranquillity as never to appear entirely sane. And the future of the city populations, ever "speeded up" by more insistent bustles and noises and nervous explosions, takes upon itself, in its normal activities, something hitherto abnormal to humanity. We shall probably encounter more appeals to the multiplied power of assembly, more determination to find a short cut in lawlessness towards attainment, more passive and active resistance in attempts at government by violence rather than government by reason. Others, besides the unemployed or the women, will make this visible protest before all men by exhibition of their willingness to face ridicule, discomfort, physical injury, and even martyrdom in their ardour for the triumph of their cause. In a vision across the centuries, with time foreshortened, even material things take upon themselves the quality of motion: and the cities may be seen rising and falling, in growth, in triumph, and decay, like the fire that flares and in a moment fades. In similar vision the streets of those cities are always filled with this tumultuous and curious Crowd: restless, leaderless, astonished at itself and at the world, finding little intelligible either in the universe without or the universe within. Before which assembly in perpetual session there pass the phantom figures of those who appeal for its favour and its judgment: at first to a Crowd contemptuous, then to a Crowd acquiescent and astonished, ultimately to a Crowd applauding: themselves members of it, yet standing always separate and apart; because they alone are working towards an end.

The definite excitement, and the deflection of that excitement into certain prepared channels, seems likely to become one of the arts of the political game. It is only in the last few months that those who have been studying the latest methods of electioneering have elaborated a new system of appeal to a new race of men. The old discussion by argument, commonplace posters, and literature, even the cheery riotings of rival mobs, is already voted as a thing stale and outworn. Instead, we are to see an effort to capture, not individuals as individuals, but the Crowd as a Crowd. It is the first noteworthy recognition in politics that this creature has a personality--a personality altogether different from the personalities of its independent members. The first successful start was effected in the spring of 1908 in the Crowd, at its very centre and crown, in a bye-election in the heart of London. A particular segment of its grey streets, in no way different from its half-century of neighbours, had been chalked round with entirely artificial boundaries, and labelled the Parliamentary constituency of Peckham. And it was in this forbidding and desolate neighbourhood that the new electioneering set itself the high test of hypnotising, not each single Imperial citizen who happened to live in Peckham, but Peckham itself--the very heart of it--the Peckham Crowd.

The report of this novel and entertaining crusade soon spread from Peckham to its neighbours: what would appeal to Peckham would also appeal to them; and every evening an appreciable percentage of the four millions which lie around Peckham, and in whose streets Peckham is embedded, poured into the centre of disturbance. There they soon fell under the spell so sedulously prepared for them. They surged up and down the narrow ways, chaffing each other, cheering the candidates, keen, alert, glad each to find himself in the heart of a London Crowd. Any man or woman upon whom fell the itch of speech secured a box, mounted on it, held forth to those who would listen, on teetotalism, or vaccination, or the wickedness of the Government, or the variable price of beer. And the Crowd listened, as it may be seen listening to any distorted nonsense in the public parks on Sunday afternoons: with an aspect of intense seriousness, the respect which the inarticulate Englishman instinctively feels for the voluble. Party feeling was supposed to run high, the newspapers on each side called shrilly for the defeat of plunderers and miscreants: "'Thou shalt not steal,' there is no time limit to that," in huge letters stretched across the street, challenged the cries from Liberal placards that unless the people strangled the drink monopoly they would be strangled by it. Yet it seemed that the great mass of this astonishing multitude--the good-tempered, short-sighted, happy-go-lucky London citizen--regarded all such fiery invective with fortitude, if not with indifference. He was out for fun: to hear a little politics, though not too much; speakers who attempted argument or quotation were speedily deserted; what he liked was noisy rhetoric and denunciation. "Give it 'em hot!" was his favourite advice to any orator of either colour. He delighted in quick repartee, the ready scoring off an interrupter, the good telling of some story with a very obvious point at the end. He liked to see the coal-carts wading through the crowded streets, with the big and little sacks of coal; and the so-called procession of the unemployed from Woolwich, actual, tangible figures, visible before his very eyes; and the huge painted donkey, half as high again as himself, bearing the legend, "My brother is going to vote for Gautrey" ; and the Suffragettes there in person, the very women who have been carried out of Parliament by the police, and done their "time" in Holloway Gaol. He sought, above all, a new sensation: cheering, now a man who, from the summit of a soap-box proclaimed the approaching end of the world; now "Mr. Hunnable," as he surmised that in the coming University boat race both Oxford and Cambridge would be found among the first three; now a sad-faced woman, whose contribution to the discussion consisted in ringing a huge dinner-bell for half-an-hour without stopping; whose thoughts, like the thoughts of the Turk who followed Anacharsis Clootz in the French Convention, "remain conjectural to this hour."

Upon such material clever men set themselves to work with commendable zeal: knowing that the Crowd may be stampeded by constant repetition of the same thing, by pictorial illustration from which it cannot escape, and by the excitement of the appeal flashed upon it seemingly from a variety of different sources that it should advance along a particular road. So a "Coal Consumers' Defence League" asserted, with monotonous insistence, that coal would rise in price if the Government candidate were elected; and attained the hypnotic success which always recompenses a monotonous insistence sufficiently prolonged. And the "Brewery Debenture Shareholders' League" announced the approaching misery of the widow and the orphan. And long lines of street bookmakers, in tall white hats and genial, vacant, or bibulous faces, inquired of the passing mob why they should not be allowed to bet in the streets if they wished. And every public-house became a Tory committee room, with all its windows plastered with Tory bills and cartoons, and the evidence of a brisk trade and many conversions within its walls. Outside the Metropolitan Gasworks at the dinner-hour, and in Peckham High Street after nightfall, a cloud of mingled, confused oratory and invective rose to the unconscious stars; as six or seven meetings, each within easy earshot of each other, shouted in hoarse accents for women's votes or cheaper food or the rights of the publican. Wagon-loads of pictorial illustration wedged their way through the coagulated masses of South London, now lit with fierce glare of torches, now disguised as an illuminated fire-engine pumping truth upon the Liberal mendacities; now loaded with slum children, looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly happy and healthy, but dolorously labelled "Victims of the Public-house Monopoly." Hysteria, as in all such deliriums, was never far away; women shrieked aloud at meetings, and had to be removed; madness fell upon a boy of twelve, and he stood on the top of a barrel, talking Tariff Reform. The extraordinary good humour, the extraordinary stupidity, and the extraordinary latent forces, so concealed as to be unknown even to themselves, in these shabby, cheery, inefficient multitudes of bewildered and contented men and women, were the dominant impressions of this gigantic entertainment.

Do they care? Yes, undoubtedly, with, beneath all the love of fun and frolic, a really pathetic desire to know the truth: to understand what actually lies behind these fluent orations and facile statistics, and all the fury of illustration and argument which descended upon their inconspicuous abodes. Will they ever know? That is an unanswerable query. There are the knots and gatherings of convinced politicians, who will cheer for "Chamberlain" or denounce Protection, just as there are the knots and gatherings of convinced religious adherents, crystallised out of the huge aggregation of indifference, who worship in various forms a God who is unknown to the general. But the physical conditions of the city life are so novel to them, the bustle and violence of it all so insistent, the effect of the mechanical labour, the little leisure, mostly consumed in transit, the grey, similar streets of tiny houses so desolating, that it is hard to stimulate a high political, social, or religious aspiration. They will continue, for the most part, tacking from side to side in blind, uncertain fashion, firmly convinced at one moment that they have solved the secret, firmly convinced a few months afterwards that they have been mistaken. They will continue their hurried, uncertain lives with indomitable patience, courage, and hope always for "better times." They will be deluded, and after a time they will recognise their delusion, and after a further time be as readily deluded again. They will trust individuals with a fine generosity. They still believe that things are true because they see them in the newspapers. They exhibit an extraordinary absence of envy of those who are better off than themselves, an extraordinary patience in enduring unendurable things. The Crowd never revolts until the conditions have already become intolerable. It never complains unless its wrongs and disabilities have become themselves clamorous for redress; unless, if it ceased, the very stones would cry out. It is always being betrayed, cajoled, deceived, exploited: now stimulated to fury in warfares carefully engineered by the wealthier classes, in which it has no interest: now directed from those who are exploiting it into anger against "the foreigner," who is generally a crowd of similar persons being similarly inflamed against itself. It throws up occasional leaders who disappear from its horizon into other universes, from which come only rumours of justification or betrayal. It is being perpetually excited by words and phrases which mean little, which it repeats with an air of owlish wisdom: concerning the satisfactions of Imperial citizenship or the need for new ships, or the advantages of municipal reform. So it continues its patient subterranean life, staggering forward through time, bearing on its shoulders the vast edifice of modern industry: labouring, not without pride and pleasure, for advantage that other people shall enjoy.

No one can question the revolution which has overtaken the industrial centres in the last two generations of their growth. Reading the records of the "hungry forties" in the life of the Northern cities is like passing through a series of evil dreams. Cellars have vanished into homes, wages have risen, hours of labour diminished, temperance and thrift increased, manners improved. The new civilisation of the Crowd has become possible, with some capacity of endurance, instead of an offence which was rank and smelling to heaven. But this life having been created and fixed in its development, the curious observer is immediately confronted with the inquiry: what of its future? Are the main lines set us at the present, and later development confined to variations in length and direction along these lines? In such a case progress will mean a further repetition of the type: two cotton factories where there is now one; five thousand small, grey-capped men where there are now three; perhaps, in some remote millennium, fourteen days of boisterous delight at Blackpool where now are only seven. A race can thus be discerned in the future, small, wiry, incredibly nimble and agile in splicing thread or adjusting machinery, earning high wages in the factories, slowly advancing in intelligence and sobriety, and the qualities which go to make the good citizen. These may at the last limit their hours of labour everywhere to the ideal of an eight hours day; everywhere raise their remuneration to a satisfactory minimum wage; everywhere find provision for insecurity, unemployment, old age. The "Crowd" is then complete. The City civilisation is established. Progress pauses--exhausted, satisfied. Man is made.

John Stuart Mill in early manhood was troubled with an inquiry that nearly compelled him to abandon the effort of reform. Suppose all the old wrongs righted, and the whole work of liberation accomplished, what then? He saw a vision of mankind in a kind of infinite boredom, an everlasting end of the world. The desolation of such a vision was only removed by study of the poems of Wordsworth. He found fresh inspiration for the work of progress in the vision of mankind, at last tranquil and satisfied, occupying its leisure in reading Wordsworth's poetry. The modern city crowd would allow scant tolerance to such visions as these. They demand excitement, adventure: the vision of that physical activity and control which is denied to themselves. To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before is the ideal of the lower, physical energies. To establish two football contests where only one existed is the translation of it into terms of the soul. A young workman from Sheffield, confronted with the prospect of certain and speedy death, journeys to London by the midnight train to see the final Cup Tie. On his return he takes to his bed. "In his last moments he asked his mother to so place the Wednesday colours that he might see them, exclaiming, 'I am glad I have lived to see good old Wednesday win the Cup.'" And so he died.

This reaching out of the crowd from its own drab life into the adventurous and coloured world of "make-believe" is not peculiar to these islands. Pallid young men collect outside the hotels in Madrid or Seville, where the bull-fighters are established before the contests, feeling a kind of satisfaction in the physical proximity to the heroes of their devotion; just as pallid young men collect outside the hotels in the English cities, happy in the conviction that only a thin wall of brick and stone separates them from those whom they contemplate with a kind of worship. In America, always more determined and fearless in pushing the new development to a logical conclusion, we find the actual schools of training for the baseball player, similar to the schools of the gladiators, whose ruins still survive in Pompeii and old Roman cities. Is this, after all, an artificial product of a time of tranquillity? Is its nature ephemeral? And will mankind ever again in these countries find physical exhaustion in the life of the fields, and mental excitement in the business of war and conquest? No one can answer. Certainly even that political activity in England, which is largely a great game, played with good humour and the element of uncertainty which gives spice to all adventure, for the majority does not count at all in comparison with these more obvious satisfactions. And of any other competitive attraction there is no trace at all. The intellectual profess contempt or despair. The "sporting" element exult in enthusiasm. The wisest at least will accept the fact, without too great exaggeration of praise or blame. For this is Democracy; victorious; unashamed.

Southey, seeing their variable beginnings, proclaimed that cities were the "graveyards of modern civilisation." Wordsworth found there the "soul of beauty and enduring life," amid the press "of self-destroying transitory things" diffused but "through meagre lines and colours." A long tradition, from Rousseau to Tolstoy, has denounced the growing multiplication of the town. Mr. Bray endeavours to see the town through the mind of the growing child: the child, not of the city splendour, but of the city squalor; pent up within the elements there provided for the perceptive material of the developing mind. He finds the keynote of it all in its self-destruction and its transitoriness. The new forms of sickness from which the body suffers are due "to the more malignant because more concentrated contagion of man." But it is mind sickness which he most dreads; in an environment where little makes for silence, permanence, or repose; where "all things, whether animate or inanimate, change and change ceaselessly; they seem to emerge from the nowhere without rhyme or reason, for a brief space form a portion of the child's universe, and then, without rhyme or reason, pass out into the nowhere again." Excitement, noise, and a kind of forlorn and desperate ugliness are the spirits watching round the cradle of too many children of the town; whose work, when fully accomplished, has created the less reputable characteristics of the city crowd. "The human element, a very incarnation of the spirit of unrest, encourages a temperament, shallow and without reserve, which passes in rapid alternation from moods of torpor to moods of effervescent vivacity, and nurtures a people eager for change and yet discontented with all that change brings; impatient of the old, but none the less intolerant of the new." "Isn't the noise of the machines awful?" was the question put to a young factory worker. "Yes," he replied, "not so much when they are going on as when they stop." The City-bred Race are going to find the noise "awful" when it "stops." Already in America one can detect a kind of disease of activity, in a people to whom "business" has become a necessary part of life. The general effect is of children of overstrung nerves, restless and aimless, now taking up a book, now a plaything, now roaming round the room in uncertain uneasiness. The city-bred people, we are confidently informed, will never go "back to the land." In part this may mean that they will never return to long hours of hopeless drudgery for shameful wage. In part it may point to a certain condition of "nerves" excited by city upbringing: a real disease of the soul. Silence, solitariness, open spaces under a wide sky, appear thus intolerable to a people never quite content but in the shouts, the leagues of lights, and the roaring of the wheels. And the scattering and separation of man from man in a region still untamed and given to large mysterious forces, the wind and weather under huge spaces of the night, produces in a race thus reared something of the impression of children left alone in the dark.

Life thus developing, in lack of "the elements of permanence, of significance, of idealistic imaginings," demands some special conscious and deliberate effort to supply those elements. The main interest of the State is to preserve its own existence. This preservation is impossible unless it can guarantee to the next generation a healthy start; physical and mental efficiency, with the best moral training at its disposal, to those who will be the citizens of the future. Changes which might guarantee such preservation are denounced to-day as involving a weakening or destruction of the family. To many observers it is just the absence of such changes which are ensuring the weaknesses and destruction of the family. In the present confusion, on the other hand, infantile mortality shows no decrease in half a century, and the birth-rate steadily declines; on the other hand, where the mere pressure of animal and physical necessity has become too burdensome, the family is breaking to pieces under the strain.

"Few people," rightly says Mr. Bray, "seem to realise how nearly the lives of the poor reach the limits of human endurance." He believes that "the affections of the parents would increase, and the home duties be performed with greater success and animation," if "with a vigour less impaired by intolerable toil." He draws an arresting contrast between the long mechanical drudgery of the life of wife and mother in a poor family, and the life of a mother in those decent middle class homes where perhaps the family tie is strongest to-day; not the rich and extravagant, but those who can afford some space and some leisure and the luxury of a servant. "The ties of family are stronger among the servant-keeping class than among the poorer class," is his conclusion, "and they are stronger because the stress of physical toil is weaker, and the pains of parenthood less insistent."

He utters grave warning to those well-meaning philanthropists who, in the name of Family Sanctity, are opposing the reforms which Social Reformers most ardently desire. "If it be a question of providing work for the unemployed, meals for the children, pensions for the old; if it be a matter of municipal trams, municipal wash-houses, municipal dwellings, in every instance," he protests, "they raise the cry that the independence of the family is threatened, and exhort their friends to fight the measure to the death. Is it surprising that the word 'Family' has come to stink in the nostrils of those who are striving to improve the conditions of the poor? Is it any cause for wonder if they begin to attack the Family, and inquire what manner of monster that is which can only be preserved by bringing as offerings to its den hungry children and suffering mothers?" "The sanctity of the family," he boldly affirms, "is menaced at the present time by the austerity of the thoughtful rather than by the sentimentality of the thoughtless."

However this may be, the Crowd consciousness and the city upbringing must of necessity act as a disintegrating force, tearing the family into pieces. If the Crowd condition, which, in part, is to supplement it, may be made a dignified and noble thing, there need be less regret over a change which, desirable or otherwise, would appear to be inevitable. The communal midday meal, for example, which the school children of the cities are coming to partake of altogether, should be something better than a squalid scramble for physical sustenance in soup or suet. The communal recreation, one would hope, may develop in something more desirable than the aimless activities of the Hampstead Heath bank holiday. The communal politics should be something more restrained than the stampeded "Swing of the Pendulum," first against one party in power, then against the other. The communal intellect might be directed towards other and more reputable ends than the devising of the last lines of "Limericks," or the search for true "tips" of horses, in the effort after unearned monetary gain. And the spirit of a collective mind, "the spirit of the hive," residing in the various industrial cities, may find expression and a conscious revelation of itself, in something more beautiful and also more intelligible than the chaotic squalor of uniformly mean streets and buildings which make up the centres of industrial England.

Certainly, unless the life of the Crowd can be redeemed, all other redemption is vain. Here is the battle-ground for the future of a race and national character. "Democracy," says Canon Barnett, the wisest of all living social reformers, "is now established. The working classes have the largest share in the government of the nation, and on them its progress depends." They possess, in his verdict, "the strenuousness and modesty which comes by contact with hardship, and the sympathy which comes by daily contact with suffering. They, as a class, are more unaffected, more generous, more capable of sacrifice, than members of other classes. They have solid sense and are good men of business, but they cannot be said to have the wide outlook which takes in a unity in which all classes are included. They are indifferent to knowledge and to beauty, so they do not recognise proportion in things, and their field of pleasure is very restricted between sentiment and comfort." "They suffer, as the great German socialist said, from 'wantlessness.' They prefer honest mediocrity to honest intellect, and would still vote for W. H. Smith rather than John Stuart Mill. Their actions are generous, but their philosophy of life is often of that shallow sort which says, 'Does Job serve God for naught?' and they are often, therefore, to be captured by 'a policy of blood and iron': they are easily taken by popular cries; they are fickle and easily made 'the puppets of Banks and Stock Exchanges.' They are sympathetic, but for want of knowledge their suspicions are soon roused, and they soon distrust their leaders." Yet his final conclusion is that "the working class is the hope of the nation, and their moral qualities justify the hope."

Or, again, we may attempt to understand a particular class of society from knowledge of a typical member of it: from one life, to judge all. The difficulty in the case of the multitude is due to the fact that any person who has arisen into public fame possesses, from the very fact of such attainment, qualities which to the many are denied. The new Labour members in the House of Commons are often supposed to reveal the "working man" at last arrived: to be able to furnish a kind of selected sample of the English industrial populations. They may perhaps stand for the working man in opinion. The majority of them are certainly remote from him in characteristic. Many are Scotsmen; and there is no deeper gulf than that which yawns between the Scotch and the English proletariat. They are mostly men of laborious habits, teetotalers, of intellectual interests, with a belief in the reasonableness of mankind. The English working man is not a teetotaler, has little respect for intellectual interests, and does not in the least degree trouble himself about the reasonableness of mankind. He is much more allied in temperament and disposition to some of the occupants of the Conservative back benches, whose life, in its bodily exercises, enjoyment of eating and drinking, and excitement of "sport," he would himself undoubtedly pursue with extreme relish if similar opportunities were offered him. Figures like Mr. Snowden, with his passionate hunger for reform, like Mr. Henderson, with his preaching of religious and ethical ideals in Wesleyan Chapels, like Mr. George Barnes or Mr. Jowett, with their almost pathetic appeals to rational argument in the belief that reason directs the affairs of the world, are figures in whose disinterested service and devotion to the work of improvement any class might be proud. But in their excellences as in their defects they stand sharply distinct from the excellences and defects of the average English artisan. They care for things he cares nothing for: he cares for things which seem to them trivial and childish. In Mr. Grayson, again, a certain type has become articulate; the "Clarionette" with red tie, flannel shirt, and bicycle, who has been moved to continuous anger by the vision of trampled women and starving children in the cities of poverty. Such men see the world transfigured in the light of a great crusade. They are convinced that by demonstration and violence to-day, or to-morrow, "the people" will rise in their millions and their might, pluck down the oppressors who are "sucking their blood," and inaugurate the golden age of the Socialistic millennium. But meantime the "people" are thinking of almost everything but the Socialistic millennium. They are thinking how to get steady work; of the iniquities of the "foreigner"; of the possibility or desirability of war, now with the Transvaal, now with Germany. They are thinking which horse is going to win in some particular race, or which football eleven will attain supremacy in some particular league. They are thinking that wife or child is ill or happy, of entertainment, of the pleasure in reminiscence of one past holiday or the pleasure in anticipation of another. They are thinking of all the variegated and complex joys and sorrows which make up the common lot of humanity.

One figure, however, in this interesting and excellent party does directly exhibit the character of a particular class. In Mr. "Will Crooks"--a kind of East End superman--the proletariat of London has found voice. He is the East End with all its qualities--with all its qualities intensified, but with the same proportion kept between them. It is true Mr. Crooks is a teetotaler, and never puts a penny on a horse: and that, in part, distinguishes him from an industrial population which finds the necessary relief from a grey existence in the excitement of the possibility of gain, or in the convivial glass of an evening. He would probably affirm that in the excitement and conviviality of Parliament and a political career he finds sufficient substitute for such milder intoxicants. But reading him you are reading the East End working man, and learning much that was before inexplicable: why the East End exists, and why it continues to exist: why no sudden flame of violence consumes these crowded streets and tenements: of its cheerfulness, its energy, its humour, its unquenchable patience. You are learning also some of its weaknesses: its willingness to think well of others, its readiness to make allowances and to forgive--so fatal to the austere work of Government; its reckless, whole-hearted charity, which is the despair of the Provident Visitor and the Charity Organisation Society; its perpetual search for short cuts, and the summary severing of the knot of old problems.

I have seen "Will Crooks" addressing an open-air meeting outside the Arsenal Gates at Woolwich, in a wonderful bye-election which startled many political pundits with a vision of new things. It was the working man of London for a moment self-conscious: hearing itself for the first time speak. Picture an enormous sea of drab persons, a multitude of cloth caps and shapeless clothing, and little white faces. On a kind of rock, standing out of the sea--a humble carrier's cart--a short man with a black beard and long arm is addressing this great crowd. To many observers the vision is a vision of foreboding; the proletariat rising at last in the mere might of its incalculable numbers, to demand its share of life's good things, and brutally trample down all opposition. What is he saying to them? He is playing on this vast gathering as on an instrument of music, and he is making it discourse most excellent harmonies. At one moment he is stringing together the stories it delights in, and you can see the ripple of laughter running amongst the listeners like the wind through the cornfields. He is recounting the difficulties of the Imperialist Missionary down in Poplar: to the first woman: "Don't you know you belong to an Empire on which the sun never sets?" And the reply: "Wot's the good of talkin' like that? Why, the sun never rises on our court." To the second: "You've got to learn to make sacrifices for the Empire."--"Wot's the good of talkin' about sacrifices when we can't make both ends meet as it is? Both ends meet! We think we're lucky if we get one end meat and the other end bread." To a third: "If you don't agree, you're Little Englanders."--"If I'm to pay another twopence a pound for meat, my children will soon be Little Englanders!"

Then in a moment he will change the note, and now he is telling them of a day in the life of the unemployed: the monotonous search for work, the kindness or insult at each application, the alternation of revolt and wretchedness, fury and apathy, the unwillingness to face the wife again in the evening with nothing with bad news. They all know it, they have mostly been through it; it is a shadow which hangs over them all. And a strange, impressive hush falls over the vast assembly, and men cough or rub their eyes, or turn away from each other's faces. "Give 'em a chance," he will suddenly cry, with uplifted arm, and the tension thus released finds relief in thunderous volleys of applause.

Such is "Will Crooks" in his own home, addressing his own people, a natural orator commanding to the full the humour and pathos of work-a-day life, whose influence is directed towards wholesome things, with never an unworthy appeal. And such, in its essential soundness, in its perplexity before complicated issues, in its acceptance of all established things, even in its distrust of itself, its almost exaggerated willingness to receive guidance from others, is the million-peopled constituency who through this man has found voice--the Multitude which forms the people of England.

The spread of "Socialism" amongst these, the voters who can decide elections, has been causing anxiety to many observers, especially to those who find a difficulty in discovering what function they would be called upon to fulfil in the Socialistic State. "Socialism," however, up to the present, has been mainly a movement amongst the intellectuals and the Middle Classes: almost the male members of a type whose female representatives find the cause necessary to their energies and devotions in the agitation for women's vote. The "Socialists" who assail each other so fiercely in queer, violent little newspapers, the writers of tracts, pamphlets, and appeals, the young men and women at the Universities who a generation ago would all have called themselves "Radicals," and now all call themselves "Socialists," are principally drawn from that "intellectual proletariat" which to-day is finding a growing gulf between possibility and desire. The stiff pictures of reconstructed worlds--a Bellamy's "Utopia," a Morris's "Nowhere"--offer little attraction to the ordinary working man; whose idea of a Utopia is something far removed from these scenes of severe toil and voluntary or compulsory virtue. Mr. Wells has described, in brilliant, bitter sentences, the kind of Socialism thus propagated, and the classes to which it appeals. Academic, uncompromising Marxian Socialism appears as "the dusky largeness of a great meeting at the Queen's Hall," with the back of Mr. Hyndman's head moving quickly, and the place "thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people," and in the chair "Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict, a blonde lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about which the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken." The impression was of "the gathering of village trades-people about the lady patroness. And at the end of the proceedings, after the red flag had been waved, after the 'Red Flag' had been sung by the choir and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to the Countess, in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion." And the Fabian Society, the laboratory in which intellectual Socialism is matured, with whose policy Mr. Wells is, on the whole, in agreement, appears to him incarnate in a "small, active, unpretending figure with the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip, the glasses, the slightly lisping, insinuating voice"; with a following of "Webbites to caricature Webb" with excessive bureaucratic notions, and a belief that everything can be done without any one wishing to do it; the disciple "who dreams of the most foxy and wonderful digging by means of box-lids, table-spoons, dish-covers--anything but spades designed and made for the jobs in hand--just as he dreams of an extensive expropriation of landlords by a Legislature that includes the present unreformed House of Lords."

In face of such realities as these--the few with their enthusiasm for a new gospel or with ingenious devices for effecting the millennium by back-door entrances, the many with their occasional gusts of interest, their normal lassitude and contempt for those who disprove God or attack Society--the observer is often discouraged in the work of reform. "Socialists," says one of their most brilliant younger writers, "cannot look with full confidence upon the English electorate. It is hardly disputable that millions of electors in the greater cities have reached a point of personal decadence--physical, mental, and moral--to which no continental country furnishes a parallel on any comparable scale. Time is steadily multiplying these millions; and for English Socialism there is therefore a race against Time which it is very likely not to win." Mr. Ensor's testimony is in part endorsed by the very remarkable evidence of various popular elections; that "Socialism" amongst the working peoples propagates and triumphs in times of plenty, withers up and vanishes in times of depression. This is exactly the reverse of the accepted belief, which thought that the poor are stung into Socialism by suffering, as poets are stung into poetry by wrong.

Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, the assertion is probably true that "bad times"--especially in connection with unemployment--are enemies rather than friends of the Socialist cause. It is quite a mistake to suppose that Socialism gains its firmest grip first upon the poorest; that its chief allies are hunger and cold. In England the poorest are often impervious to a direct political or social appeal; they are sunk below the level of consciousness which can respond to any hope of change. The skilled artisans of Colne Valley and Jarrow vote Socialist when trade is good and all the factories are working overtime. The slums of Southwark or Ancoats fail to respond to the vision of a new good time coming, although their present state is beyond measure deplorable. What they are looking for is a relief of the immediate necessities of the moment, for food and drink for the day. Given these, they are content until the next scarcity arrives. More especially is this true of unemployment. When the artisan or labourer is in work, he will find leisure to interest himself in various social gospels, study the exhortation of the street corners, inquire the meaning of capital value and class war and the exploitation of the working man. When he is out of work, he is naturally filled with but one impulse, which passes quickly from a terror into an obsession--an impulse to obtain work again. That impulse operates even amongst the men who remain in the factory. They see their companions turned away, tramping the streets in search of a job, undergoing all the privations which they themselves have experienced in similar vicissitudes in the past. They know that they have no security but one week's notice: that any Saturday the announcement will be made to them that their services will no longer be required. Under such circumstances the whole social problem narrows itself down to the one problem of maintenance; or rather, the problem of maintenance enlarges itself to fill the whole horizon. Yesterday or to-morrow men may cherish the dream of a transformed society. To-day the question is merely the continuance of such work as will provide for immediate food and shelter. That is why Socialism has grown in times of prosperity, and withered in times of decline. It is the "Tariff Reformer," and not the Socialist, who seems likely to gain in days of trade depression. In those days "work for all" is a more persuasive appeal than "Justice to the worker," or "State ownership of all the means of production." Man, fallen to bedrock and fighting for his life, has little inclination to turn to visions of universal justice in a redeemed Society.

To expect men and women to become "Socialists" in times of trade depression, is to expect the survivors of Messina, stricken by earthquake and famine, to meditate with enthusiasm upon the future of the race. Socialism, founded on Poverty and Social Discontent, and finding there its argument for change, does not flourish in the heart of that poverty and hungry wretchedness. The Socialist uses the sweated women and starving children as material for inflaming to pity and anger. But he rarely obtains adherents from the husbands of the women or the fathers of the children thus broken at the basis of society. The unemployed leaders are a different class and type from the unemployed whom they shepherd and control. And the average citizen has not yet come entirely to trust the new gospel; is not yet convinced that its adherents will make a better job of it than the "boodlers" and "blood suckers" whom they denounce so fervently. No Socialist councillor has ever been convicted of municipal corruption: and Socialists are sometimes surprised that a party so pure in aim and disinterested in service should be so often rejected by the electorate. But purity of purpose and incorruptibility of standard are not yet regarded by the average citizen as being the most essential qualifications for local or national government. The "man in the street," here and in America, would seem to be content--except in sudden hurricanes of revolt against too flagrant corruption--with a not too ostentatious standard of civic purity, if the men who are running the machine are men of substance, energy, and position. Miss Addams, from Hull House, has described the failure of the reform party to carry an election even against the most offensive "boodlers." The people acknowledged the corruption, but were convinced that all the aldermen do it, and that the alderman of their particular ward was unique in being so generous to his clients. "To their simple minds he gets it from the rich, and so long as he gives some of it out to the poor, and, as a true Robin Hood, with open hand, they have no objection to offer." The people are found to be ashamed to be represented by a bricklayer--the intelligent, clean-handed nominee of the reforming party. The "boodler" is elected "because he is a good friend and neighbour. He exemplifies and exaggerates the popular type of a good man. He has attained what his constituents secretly long for." They become generally convinced that "the lecturers who were talking against corruption were only the cranks, not the solid business men who had discovered and built up Chicago." The same difficulty faces all those reformers to-day, who, in a settled, orderly, and on the whole comfortable, society, exhibit a too violent agitation for reform. The "comrades" propagate the cause with a splendid devotion, arguing at street corners, descending like locusts at bye-elections, organising themselves cheerily into missionary bands with particular buttons and badges and neckties. Men listen to their eloquence; but the citizen with a stake in the community shrinks from entrusting to them control of the ratepayers' money, and the rank and file of the working people turn away from a type so different to their own boisterous, happy-go-lucky, acquiescent existence. An appeal for "Labour representation" can fill the working man with enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of Mr. Crooks's first sensational victory at Woolwich. An appeal for "Socialism" attracts him when his own position is secure: when that is precarious he is fearful, unless his trouble is prolonged until it threatens a revolution. And an England with permanently declining trade, with the cream of its artisan population permanently out of employment, is an England which this generation has never known: something which, if it occurs in the future, will tear to pieces all our accepted standards, and render all prophecy vain.

The increasing apprehension of this contrast, and the increasing consequential effort at readjustment, will furnish the guiding thread to the various political and social changes of the twentieth century. It will influence and control the rise and fall of political parties, each doing the work all unconsciously of forces which it does not understand. It will lead in various ways, and through all oppositions and reactions, towards an organised society profoundly differing from our own.

PRISONERS

The surface view of society is always satisfactory. You may walk to-day through the streets of a Russian city, and watch the people at their business and their pleasure, with no revelation of the unseen hunger for change which is tearing at the heart of it. You may traverse England from north to south and east to west, admiring the beauty of its garden landscape, the refined kindly life of its country houses, the opulence and contentment of its middle class, the evidence everywhere of security and repose. Only at intervals, and through challenges which are easily forgotten, is there thrust before the attention of the observer some manifestation of the life of the underworld. The sea shines and sparkles in the sunshine beneath an unclouded sky. Why excite disquietude concerning the twisted, distorted life which lives and grows and dies in the darkness of the unplumbed deep?

To investigate the life there, it is no longer necessary to follow the romantic novelist or even the private statistician. All these may be under the charge of sensationalism, of writing to a purpose. They excite impatience amongst outside critics, who are convinced that the poor could all be prosperous if they would only work industriously, exercise thought, and avoid alcoholic refreshment. It would be well, therefore, to keep to the safe sobriety of official publications, to all those series of Commissions, Committees, Reports, and Inquiries which, outwardly forbidding, are found on examination to be filled with a rich human interest. Any one familiar with the reports of the Government Inspectors appointed to control the forces of greed and of degeneration in the obscurer regions of modern life, need never be accused of hysteria if he finds the thing henceforth a perpetual companion.

In the annual Reports of the Factory Inspectors, for example, he can see the result of occasional complaints, of sporadic surprise visits; with imagination he can extend these revelations over widening areas of submerged life. These summaries appear as the letting down of dredges into the depth and the bringing to light of the things which exist far below the surface. They are records of the daily and hourly warfare of the embodied conscience of the community against human fear and human greed. That conscience, working through a great machinery of protected law, is endeavouring to guard the men and women and children of the nation against the more outrageous forms of destruction: against the readiness with which the Fear of Destitution is pressing them into all forms of distorted, intolerable, poisonous pursuits. The laws are passed, the inspectors appointed, then the nation turns to other interests in confidence that all is well. Such confidence is based upon an altogether inadequate estimate of the two strongest impulses in the life of man. Avarice can usually overcome terror. Fear acting against greed is occasionally triumphant. But when the two are operating in unison, the result is as the letting out of water. In every trade there are those who will supplant their neighbours by the cheapening of the cost, the lengthening of hours, the avoidance of appliances. In every city there is the unlimited supply of disorganised women's and children's labour, which sees before it no alternative but of a quick or of a prolonged decay. The will to live still resists all efforts to render human desire impossible. The apathy of the East, accumulated through centuries of oppression, has not yet infected the industrial life of the West. So the unequal strife continues, between the attempt to raise these broken people into some semblance of rational and humane existence, and the pressure which drives them to choke themselves with dust, and poison themselves with noxious vapour, and ravage into collapse and ruin the bodies and souls of women and children.

They die like flies directly they are born. The tender-hearted may perhaps rejoice in this extravagant mortality. To some the waste of it will appear most apparent. In the Pottery Towns, for example, the infantile mortality is well up to 200 in the 1000: due, says the report, "to the employment of married women in the earthenware and china works." A regular slaughter of innocents every year in Longton, says the Medical Officer of Health, "is due to this and premature births." But the waste of death is the least element in this extravagance. "The damage done," says another Medical Officer, "cannot entirely be measured by mortality figures, for these take no account of the impaired vitality of the infants who manage to survive to swell the ranks of the degenerate." Stunted, inefficient, overworked, underfed, they struggle towards maturity. Quaint and grotesque occupations are found for them; as for the "forty little girls, twenty-one of whom were half-timers," who are found licking adhesive labels by the mouth at the rate of thirty gross a day, "whose tongues had the polished tip characteristic of label lickers, and the rest of the tongue coated with brown gum." Or there are the girls who carry heavy wedges of clay and boxes of scrap ; as in the "complaint awaiting investigation" from a mother of her daughter who has outgrown her strength, and is now ill with what she believes is consumption; "who when working complained much of pain in the shoulder on which she carried the clay and scrap, and of pain in the collar bone on the same side." Or the children in the Nottingham lace trade, whose eyesight is impaired or destroyed by the double work of school and employment; and the half-time school at Dundee, where "narrow-chested children sit on backless benches"; or the half-timers at Belfast, "undersized, round-shouldered, delicate in appearance," where the head teacher testifies, "these children seem always tired; during the recreation period they prefer sitting down in the playground to running about, and in this matter they are especially noticeable in comparison with the children who do not work." They struggle towards maturity, unorganised, unprotected; fined in one dressmaking workshop in West London in fines which were supposed to be sent to the Fresh Air Fund--a statement which, says the inspector, "had no foundation in fact"; or "verbally promised 2s. 6d." for making a sample silk blouse, for which "when Saturday came, the occupier, instead of giving the agreed price, refused to pay more 1s. 3d." Most of them will die under thirty, is the testimony of the teacher concerning her half-time pupils; but if they live it out, in old age they will be once more dragged in by fear and bewilderment to compete against the coming generations, and make the life of those coming generations more difficult to endure.

Such well-known employers like Mr. Debenham and Mr. Derry in London, who have changed from the living-in to the natural system, brush all this cant and vapour away with a healthy breath of fresh air. "The character of some employers," says the latter, "I would not trust from their own housekeepers. I do not think that drapers are worse than any other commercial men, but all commercial men are the same." He sees "no difficulty in finding proper apartments outside," with people "in whom we should have every confidence to put our own children." "I am quite out of touch with excuses which have been made by employers at conferences I have been at, with regard to the moral side of the question. I think it is sheer nonsense."

The system is sometimes enforced by a system of "fines": the substitute, in a humanitarian age, for more drastic disciplinary measures of the older servitudes. Fines for smoking or reading in bedrooms, fines for sleeping out without permission or for arriving after locking-up time, fines for taking supper away, for burning candles after the gas is turned out, for heating water on the gas, exhibit the method by which adjustment has to be effected and the smoothness of the communal existence maintained. "The system," says Miss Bonfield, "robs the assistant, whether men or women, of the sense of personal responsibility which is developed by ordering and controlling one's own life. The herding together of large numbers of either sex, restricted as to the most ordinary intercourse with the opposite sex, creates an unnatural and vicious atmosphere which is morally dangerous to both men and women." She repudiates the idea that there is "any kind of home life, any kind of home consideration"--at least in her personal experience. The dinner-hour she found "the most disagreeable interval of the day." "In a long business experience I have never yet had a properly made cup of tea." "The sitting-room of a business house is usually a most dreary place, very much like the waiting-room of a railway station." In many shops the hours worked are seventy per week: the atmosphere in one experience "particularly vitiated, and the assistants chronically overtired." The work is peculiarly stimulating to nervous strain: fretful customers, sometimes friendly, sometimes bullying, often merely tiresome--for hour after hour of the day. Even when the catering is excellent, is another experience, the girls "have no appetite for food." "What they need is fresh air and more outdoor exercise. The factory girl who eats her unscientific meal in the street, does so with a greater relish and with more profit to health than does her sister of the shop extract from the choice meals eaten in the atmosphere of the shop dining-room." "I have frequently gone to my dinner feeling faint for want of food, and on entering the dining-room have been nauseated to such an extent as to be unable to eat anything except dry bread." Compensations appear, however, in some cases to exist. In the report of one establishment--only men living-in--after "washing accommodation inadequate, food badly cooked, table service not clean, men's sitting-room, three chairs and broken table for the use of twenty men," it is encouraging to read that "every apprentice is required to attend a place of worship at least once on a Sunday." So is fostered the traditional religion of the people. There is a suggestion that the feverish competition in retail trade, and the general willingness to obtain a maximum of profit, has even here produced a change in spirit and temper. "I have been able to watch the change," says Miss Bonfield, "since first I went into the distributing trade. The old system of trying to build up an establishment on the value of your goods, and on giving real work for money, has been steadily changing, and the assistant now who is considered the smartest assistant is the one who can sell to customers worthless goods, goods that yield a very large profit, goods that look fairly showy on the surface but are not really wearable, and are not satisfactory in other ways." From both sides--men and women--comes personal testimony to an "immorality of the mind" which is "worse than immorality of the body"--an "over-sexed" condition due to the herding together of young men or young women of a certain age in an atmosphere of nerve stimulation and little physical exercise and limited external interests. One male assistant protests against "the daily rush from counter to dining-room and back to counter without even a breath of fresh air. Often the food provided is unappetising, cooked and served very roughly, served in dining-rooms situated in the basement, artificially lighted and without proper ventilation." "The sameness of the menu becomes positively wearying." "In a large number of cases the food provided is insufficient for the physical need of the employee." Mr. Tilley, once a shop assistant in the town, now a draper on his own account in a small way in the country, roundly asserts that "the good conditions are the exception, bad conditions the rule." "Celibacy is a condition of employment. Here we are faced by the greatest of the many evils which arise from this," as he calls it, "pernicious system." "It is absolutely essential," is his summary, "for the physical and moral welfare of the assistants that 'living-in' should be abolished." The old order of things has changed. The personal element between employer and employee is steadily vanishing. And the assistant of to-day finds himself bound and fettered with this legacy of feudal days which his employer is often using for all it is worth to exploit the labour of the employees in this and kindred trades. The emancipation of the shop workers of this country can never come until they are rid of this "living-in" system, is the announcement which is robbing them of freedom of action, individuality of character, and the "political and social rights of an Englishman."

"What becomes of the good shop assistant when he grows old?" is a question almost as difficult to answer as the question, "What becomes of good Americans when they die?" The Government Committee could obtain no certain evidence. "I cannot say what does become of them. Some start in business on their own account; but now that the conditions are so changed, that is very difficult. They leave the drapery trade. Some get inferior situations. You may find old drapers' assistants driving cabs to-day." In South Wales, says one, "amongst the miners, I myself have come across an enormous number of old shop assistants." The majority, like the majority of assistant masters in a slightly more exalted station of life, seem to slide out into all sorts of bypaths--in the one Empire building, tomato growing, or running preparatory schools whose competition and fate seems generally similar to that of the small retail drapery stores; in the other, "insurance agents, booksellers, and things of that kind." But the work is genteel; sharply distinguished from that of the artisan: it is supposed to be especially suitable to boys and girls of delicate physique: and there are many who, from the beginning, would wish no otherwise than to be shepherded, tended, taken in and provided for, without the pains and risks of outside adventure. "We're in a blessed drainpipe," says Mr. Minton to Kipps cheerfully, "and we've got to crawl along it till we die." Only to a percentage, at first, and then in effort, which every year diminishes, does the conviction come, as to "Kipps" in the night watches, when "all others in the dormitory are asleep and snoring," that "the great stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape." "Night after night he would resolve to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse, or drown himself, and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in fear of a sixpenny fine."

And the alternatives--especially for the women--are not all so promising that they can afford lightly to forego the advantage here offered of assured food and shelter. Far below is a vision of pitiful poverty, into which, at any time, any unfortunate worker may be precipitated; rarely, henceforth, ever to rise into the clear air of intelligible life. Somewhere festering at the basis, round the foundations of the great mansion of England's economic supremacy, are to be discovered the workers of the "Sweated Trades." At intervals of ten, fifteen, or twenty years the dredger is let down, to scrape up samples of the material of the ocean floor: in Royal Commissions, Committees of the House of Commons, or the House of Lords. It is always the same there, whatever tides and tempests trouble the surface far above: a settled mass of congested poverty shivering through life upon the margin below which life ceases to endure. The sensational novelist utters his study in fiction, the cause and the remedy; the public conscience is stirred by the exhibitions of "sweated" goods and "sweated" women: after a time distraction intervenes, a war, a colonial football or cricket tour, ecclesiastical dispute over posture of praying, or colour of garment. The sweated workers, for one moment indecently revealed in the sunshine, return again to the welcome obscurity of their twilight world. A recent House of Commons Committee has once more raked over the bottom; examined, with blinking eyes, the strange things found there; reported in favour of Government action. The evidence is of the monotonous simplicity familiar to all similar investigations. "My attention," says Mr. Holmes, the police court missionary, "was drawn to the home workers first about ten years ago. I met two or three widows at the police court, charged with attempted suicide, and I naturally took interest in them. I visited their homes, and became aware of the conditions under which they lived; the prices paid for their work, the hours they generally worked, the amount of rent they paid, the kind of food they ate, and everything of that description. On one occasion I took three widows for a holiday. Each of them had attempted suicide, and was broken down in health of mind and body through hard work and poor food. The story of their lives, their manner, their appearance, and their broken spirit was a revelation." The broken spirit, indeed, so characteristic of those who, from the beginning, have enlisted in the service of fourteen hours' work a day, does not appear entirely to have brought the felicity which--in orthodox views--accompanies a docile and grateful working-class population. Nor does the complete absence of Trades Unions--those "cruel organisations"--appear to have effected that "economic liberty" which the supporters of "Free Labour" endeavour to obtain by the smashing of these instruments of tyranny. "My experience of ten years is this," says Mr. Holmes, "that I have found them to be the most industrious, sober, and honest class of the community that it has been my lot ever to meet with; in fact, their goodness appals me." Here, indeed, are the examples, at length realised in the flesh, of the workings of the "laws" of the older political economy: the "iron law of wages" driving, through the frantic competition for employment by the workers against each other, those wages down to the minimum of existence. "I know one widow," is the testimony, "who is working, and has done nothing else than work, at these little things at her own home in Bethnal Green for forty years, and her payment for that work now is practically the same as it was at the beginning of that period. Her fingers have got stiffer, and she cannot earn quite so much now." "It is the apathy of the people"--after forty years of it--one witness complains, "engaged in all these things, and their helplessness which forms the greatest obstacle to their advancement." These apathetic classes, indeed, appear largely as those for whom petitions are presented in the Christian Church for special and peculiar mercies--"women labouring with child; sick persons; young children." And the reply to the petition is this Home work, falling as the gentle dew from heaven upon the place beneath, and blessing him that gives and him that takes: obtained "by sending boy or girl to the city for the stuff with a more or less dilapidated, cast-off perambulator, which they push home full up with shirts or mantles or skirts, which are taken back to the warehouse when finished." The actual workers appear before the Committee in kindly anonymity, having little violence of protest against Providence, the employers, or themselves. The tendency of payments, they are compelled to confess on examination, have steadily gone down; that is because "women are always applying for work, and they have no work to give them; and therefore they cut the prices down, because the women go and beg for work." The "expenses" of each of two workers sharing a room, "without the rent," are one shilling and threepence a week. "Do you have a fire in this room?" is asked. "No," is the reply; "we light a lamp to warm ourselves." The difficulty of the Committee, in examination of wages budgets, was to find any margin at all for food and firing; a difficulty which the witnesses were unable to remove. Prices, confesses one, "have come down ever so much; they have come down in the last four years so that I cannot keep myself now." "It is almost a mystery," is the challenge to another, "how you manage to live at all." Yet others do well, earning ten shillings a week--for work between "fifteen and sixteen hours a day"--sometimes up at six o'clock, and "I work till ten at night." These, however, are the limited hours of a "very quick" worker. "Can you suggest anything," is the forlorn inquiry to one of them, "that anybody could do for you which would induce your master, or perhaps compel your master, to give you a fairer or a larger wage?" "If he would only time an article," is the doubtful reply; "state how long the article would take to make, and give you a certain wage of so much an hour, it would be fair, if it was only a living wage; we only want to live."

So, while the white hotels rise on all the shores of England, and the apparatus of pleasure is developing into ever new and ingenious forms of entertainment, continues through the nights and days the grey struggle of the Abyss. It is the indomitable will to live, resisting always that press of circumstance which would squeeze out the life of the disinherited, and leave a solitude where once was industry and action. The question how long such will survive, in the depths, the absence of all that life should mean, is as unanswerable as the question how long the will to live will survive the satiety at the summit which comes from superfluity of pleasure. For a society fissured into an unnatural plentitude on the one hand finds as its inevitable consummation a society fissured into an unnatural privation on the other. Here is the "price of prosperity" as interpreted at the dim foundations of the social order; a menace to the future, less in the fury of its revolt than through the infection of its despair.

So appears--at the base--the regular hive of industry: the life of those who, uncomplaining, maintain the work of the world. This fixity of tenure in a house which may be termed a home is the ideal of the Social Reformer. To such a goal of human endeavour he would always direct the errant impulses of those who fail to appreciate its full satisfactions: who shirk with indifference, who revolt in open rebellion against the accepted standards of civilisation. These latter form no negligible company. They include women who, uncheered by the remuneration of the factory girl or the domestic servant, have embraced unrecognised careers and professions offering more immediate monetary returns, if less guaranteed security of livelihood. They include a prison population of habitual thieves and outcasts who have definitely declared war against their neighbours, and whose life consists of adventure varied by long periods of compulsory silence. They include the "unemployable," the vagrants, the people born tired and the people who have grown tired; the army of broken persons, weak in body or in mind, which choke up the workhouses and asylums: an aggregation of human failure which represents a "bye-product" of the industrial organisation whose worth in the market has not yet been adequately demonstrated.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet