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Title: The condition of England

Author: C. F. G. Masterman

Release Date: March 12, 2023 [eBook #70267]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONDITION OF
ENGLAND ***





THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND




BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS TEACHER
  IN PERIL OF CHANGE




  THE CONDITION
  OF ENGLAND

  BY

  C. F. G. MASTERMAN

  “WHETHER IN GENERAL WE ARE GETTING ON, AND IF SO
  WHERE WE ARE GOING TO.”
                                            RUSKIN

  METHUEN & CO.
  36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
  LONDON




_First Published in 1909_




  TO
  MY WIFE




PREFACE


“I’ve got to a time of life,” says the hero of a modern novel,
“when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about
realities.” There are many contemporary observers who do not require
advancing years and a wider experience of life to concentrate them
upon so serious a study. It is not that they deliberately turn towards
consideration of the meaning and progress of the actual life around
them. It is that they cannot--with the best desire in the world--escape
from such an encompassing problem. To those the only question before
them is the present: the past but furnishing material through which
that present can rightly be interpreted, the future appearing as a
present which is hurrying towards them--impatient to be born. They ask
for fact; not make-believe. With Thoreau, “Be it life or death,” they
will cry, “We crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear
the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are
alive, let us go about our business.”

The following pages offer an attempt to estimate some of these
“realities” in the life of contemporary England. The effort
might appear presumptuous, demanding not one volume but ten, the
observation, not of a decade, but of a lifetime. I would plead,
however, that any contribution may help in some degree the work of
others in a more far-reaching and detailed survey. The right judgment
of such an attempt should be directed not at its completeness, but
its sincerity. In my former work as a critic and reviewer it was this
test alone that I sought to apply to similar estimates of to-day and
to-morrow. It is to this test alone that I now venture to appeal.

“Things are what they are. Their consequences will be what they will
be. Why then should we seek to be deceived?” The custom of mankind to
live in a world of illusion endows Butler’s magnificent platitude with
something of the novelty of a paradox. For many generations--perhaps
since man first was--we have succeeded in believing what we wished
to believe. The process has gone so far as to have excited a kind of
reverse wave. We are supposed to wish to believe what we believe. We
identify diagnosis with desire, and think that the prophet of evil
is secretly rejoicing over the impending calamity. We are convinced
that no man would assert that certain events are going to happen if
he did not wish them to happen. If an observer anticipates a victory
for Tariff Reform he is supposed to be weakening on Free Trade. If he
proclaims a decline in religion he is deemed to be little better than
an atheist.

I have no doubt wrongly estimated and anticipated events of the present
and future, and gladly acknowledge the personal and tentative character
of each particular assertion. I should like, however, to think myself
free from the charge of disguising polemic as observation. I should
like, in a word, to think that no one would be able to ascertain,
merely from the following pages, whether their author was advocate
of Free Trade or Protection, Socialist or Individualist, Pagan or
Christian.

Portions of some of these chapters have already appeared--in
substance--in the pages of _The Nation_, and I am indebted to the
proprietors of that journal for permission to reproduce them. The book
has been completed under circumstances of haste and pressure, for which
I must ask indulgence. I would have delayed its publication until
further leisure was possible, did I see any opportunity of that leisure
being attained. But any one who has chosen to embark upon the storm
and tumult of public affairs, must henceforth reconcile himself to the
limitation of other interests to odd corners of time and short holidays
avariciously husbanded. If I had delayed a study of modern England to a
less hurried and more tranquil future, I might have found that it would
be a very different England which I should then be compelled to examine.

                                                      C. F. G. MASTERMAN
  _Easter, 1909_




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                              PAGE

     I. THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE        1

    II. THE CONQUERORS                 19

   III. THE SUBURBANS                  68

    IV. THE MULTITUDE                  96

     V. PRISONERS                     157

    VI. THE COUNTRYSIDE               190

   VII. SCIENCE AND PROGRESS          209

  VIII. LITERATURE AND PROGRESS       230

    IX. RELIGION AND PROGRESS         261

     X. THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY      277

    XI. POSTSCRIPT                    304

        INDEX                         307




THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND




CHAPTER I

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE


What will the future make of the present? That is a question which
opens a wide field for speculation, but secures no certain reply.
There is difficulty from two causes. The one is the imperfection of
contemporary record, with its distortions or exaggerations of the life
of to-day. The other is the inability of the life of to-day to picture
its own appearance, even if accurately delineated, when set in historic
background. So much of the future becomes then read into the present
that (for example) altogether divergent elements in national life
will be emphasised if that life be on the highway toward success, or
hovering on the brink of calamity, or a cross section only of progress
towards a national decay. The reconstruction of the past has been
largely effected from the testimony of contemporary documents, each
author setting out to write of his own personal experience. Yet with
all the material at our disposal, the vision of it is still fluctuating
and changing; varying in the estimate of individuals, and from decade
to decade. To some the days of declining Rome represent a period of
tranquillity and human enjoyment; to others they appear as a tremendous
warning of the triumph of the deadly sins. The Middle Age stands for
one set of historians as a period of gold and innocence; with stately
purposes, solemn processions, and widely diffused, if frugal, comfort;
the whole illuminated by great dreams of adventure and aspiration.
To another it presents itself as a prolonged delirium in which men
wrestled in the darkness with fear and torment. To-day, perhaps too
complacently, we assume that history will sharply distinguish our
particular period of security from such troublous upheavals of Birth
or of Death. We see ourselves painted as a civilisation in the vigour
of early manhood, possessing contentment still charged with ambition;
a race in England and Europe full of energy and of purpose, in which
life, for the general, has become more tolerable than ever before.
We would confess that we had not been able to “still the old sob of
the sea,” or compel Time to stand still in his courses, or abolish
altogether those “two black birds of night,” sighing and sorrow. But
we would exhibit a people labouring and enjoying, more secure from
plague, pestilence, and famine than in former ages, so accustomed to
carry out unimpeded the labours of the day as almost to have forgotten
the experience of a time when life itself was precarious and hazardous,
and every morning an adventure into the unknown. We would defend our
Literature, our Art, our Architecture, as, if not indubitably inspired,
yet respectable if judged by any but the highest standard; with an
intelligence ever more widely diffused, much reading, some thought,
even an original, or, at least, a courageous outlook towards the bigger
problems of human existence and human destiny. Condemn our poverty, we
confront it with our charity. Reveal the ravages of disease, cancer,
appendicitis, complaints of the brain, nerves, and stomach, we retort
with the revelation of our warfare against disease, maintained with a
devotion and a determination unparalleled in all the past. If we have
Atheisms, here are all our Churches; if Social Maladies, our Social
Reformers. That any future estimate should associate us even in thought
with the dying days of Rome or the delirium of the medieval twilight
seems to us a proposition obviously incredible.

We have to remember, however, in such an estimate, that each generation
stands in the roll-book of the centuries, not as it appears to itself,
but as it appears to observers gazing, as from a distance, over a gulf
of time. What records will survive, what evidence of existence, when
all the pleasantness and amenity of little, comfortable, satisfied
people have vanished over the limits of the world? Imagine, for
example, the twentieth century interpreted to the twenty-fifth by its
popular newspapers: to-day, more certainly than its popular drama, the
abstract and chronicle of the time. England seen through the medium of
its Sunday Press--the Press which to seven out of ten of its present
inhabitants represents the sole picture they possess of the world
outside their local lives--takes upon itself an appearance of violence
and madness. Men and women knife each other in the dark. Children
are foully butchered by unknown assailants. Suicides sprinkle every
page:--now that a girl may die with another woman’s husband; now that a
family may escape the hell of unemployment; now simply for weariness,
because the whole effort of life has lost significance and crumbled
into dust and ashes. The most insistent noise which reverberates
through their pages is the clicking of the huge machine of English
justice, as couples once married in affection are torn apart, or a long
procession of murderers, thieves, absconding solicitors, fraudulent
company promoters, are swept away into the cold silence of the penal
prison. The supply seems never to run short. The various Courts are
in continuous sitting, and yet never overtake the work so bountifully
provided. Itinerant justices are even compelled to journey round
the countryside, arresting their courses at the principal towns, in
order more speedily to deal with the continuous parade of brutality,
outrage, and unnatural crime. Is it possible, one can imagine the
future historian demanding, that any one could have been in those
days altogether sane? as he pictures the decent wayfarer stealing
furtively through labyrinthine ways lest ruffians should spring upon
him in the dark, clutching his difficult savings for fear that they
should be snatched from him; with the terror of poverty yawning before
him, against which no prudence can guard, in cities visibly given up
to the dominion of lust and greed. All this is in England: with a
Sunday Press, if liberally providing the salt and flavour which so many
colourless lives demand, yet on the whole committed to some standard
of accuracy, some reflection of the fact in the record. In America,
where such limitations are voted tiresome, the vision becomes gigantic,
monstrous, like the Gargantuan architecture of its distorted cities.
The observer who, in any future civilisation which may arise there,
should attempt reconstruction of the barbaric past from a file of the
New York Sunday editions, would find himself plunged into a region
grotesque and hideous, like evil dreams.

But the survival of this peculiar literature is too impossible--perhaps
too dreadful--an assumption. Let us believe that the great works will
endure--the poetry, the fiction, the social studies and declamations
of the representative people of the age. Are we in any better plight?
Select ten, say, of the greatest writers of the Victorian era, and
attempt from the picture which they present to effect a reconstruction
of the Victorian age. The product is a human society so remote from all
benignant ways as to demand nothing less than the advent of a kindly
comet which will sweep the whole affair into nothingness. Our fathers
led their decent, austere lives in that Victorian age which now seems
so remote from us, making their money, carrying out their business and
boisterous pleasure, inspired by their vigorous, if limited, creeds.
They wrangled about politics and theology; they feasted at Christmas,
and in the summer visited the seaside; they gave alms to the poor,
and rejoiced that they lived in nineteenth-century England. But to
the prophets of their age they were unclean from crown of head to
sole of foot, a people who had visibly exhausted the patience of God.
You may choose your verdict where you please--in Carlyle’s “torpid,
gluttonous, sooty, swollen, and squalid England,” given up to the
“deaf stupidities and to the fatalities that follow, likewise deaf”;
or, in Ruskin’s interpretation of the “storm cloud” as “a symbol of
the moral darkness of a nation that has blasphemed the name of God
deliberately and openly, and has done iniquity by proclamation, every
man doing as much injustice to his brother as it was in his power to
do.” You may accept the condemnation kindly, as in Meredith’s “folly
perpetually sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth
and leisure, with many whims, many strange ailments, and strange
fancies”; the condemnation plaintive, as in Arnold’s “brazen prison,”
in which most men, with “heads bent o’er their toil,” languidly “their
lives to some unmeaning task-work give”; the condemnation defiant and
rejoicing, as in Morris: “Civilisation which I _know_ now is destined
to perish; what a joy to think of.” You may find it rising to a rather
shrill shriek in the later Tennyson, with his protest against the city
children--who “soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime”--with
his calling upon vastness and silence to swallow up the noises of his
clamorous, intolerable day. You may hear it sinking to a deep note of
strong repudiation, in that vision of a city, “perchance of Death but
certainly of Night,” from the heart of which, in the pulpit of a great
cathedral, a strange preacher proclaims the triumph of night and its
despairs. One observer looking to the future will see “the whole life
of the immense majority of its inhabitants, from infancy to the grave,
a dreary routine of soulless, mechanical labor.” Another will call for
a cosmic cataclysm to quickly make an end. Another in a more chilling
indifference will turn away from the unlovely sight as from a spectacle
irrelevant, impossible. Literature has no tolerance for the existence
of comfort and security which to so many people seems the last word
of human welfare. And no reconstruction, from the works of genius,
the great novelists, artists, critics, of the vanishing present,
can provide any judgment much more satisfying to our pride than the
judgment of summarised theft and fraud and violence which is the weekly
enjoyment of many million readers.

We know--at once--that this is a one-sided verdict. Of ten thousand
citizens, all but three or four will pass their lives unchronicled;
and these three or four--a murderer, an adulterer, an adventurer, a
saint--will come to stand alone as lives whose existence is recorded.
The remainder pursue their brave and patient labours, not too exacting
in ideal, not too clamorous in pleasure, not at the end having very
much to complain of, or being very eager to complain. So--in every
civilisation, in every century, have passed the lives of the multitude
of mankind. Yet it is change--obscure change in economic conditions,
in aspirations, in faiths, in energies or lassitudes--which is
responsible for the rise and fall of nations, for the variegated
panorama of an ever-changing world. We have enjoyed in England
security and settled society since the period of the great Civil War.
For two hundred and fifty years ten generations have flourished and
faded in a universe where regular government and an ordered apparatus
of justice have guaranteed that life shall be reasonably safe, and
that foresight shall attain reward. We are coming to believe that no
circumstance will ever arise in which an insurance policy will not be
honoured on presentation, and contracts entered into by the parents be
fulfilled by the children. Yet during the whole of this period there
have been cataclysms of change in the intimate life and convictions
of the people which are more instinctive than opinions. So that the
nineteenth-century civilisation is far removed from the eighteenth,
and the twentieth from the nineteenth, in the estimate of the kingdom
of the Soul. A study of those changes--a revelation and diagnosis
of the hidden life of England--would be a study exceedingly worth
attempting to-day. It would be a study which, passing from the external
organisation, the condition of trade, the variation in fortune, would
endeavour to tear out the inner secret of the life of this people:
to exhibit the temper, mettle, response, character of an island race
at a particular period of its supremacy. Changes in such temper and
character are usually only revealed in times of national crisis: just
as an individual only comes to “know himself” when confronted with
the challenge of some overwhelming choice or anxiety. And as at that
moment he reaps the fruit of the long obscure processes of sowing and
ripening, so a nation in social upheavals, foreign perils, or some
similar intrusion of reality, discovers in a moment also that it no
longer possesses adequate forces of resistance, or that its religion,
its boast of power, its patriotism, have been meaningless phrases.

“Contemporary England”--its origin, its varying elements of good
and evil, its purposes, its future drift--is a study demanding a
lifetime’s investigation by a man of genius. But every tiny effort,
if sincerely undertaken, may stimulate discussion of a problem which
cannot be discussed too widely. It will study the most sincere of
the popular writers of fiction, especially those who from a direct
experience of some particular class of society--the industrial
peoples, the tramp, the village life, the shop assistant, the country
house--can provide under the form of fiction something in the nature
of a personal testimony. It is assisted by those who to-day see
instinctively the first tentative effort towards the construction of a
sociology--investigation into the lives and wages, social character,
beliefs and prejudices of various selected classes and localities.
Biography is not without its contribution, especially the biography
of typical men--a labour-leader who reveals himself as a conspicuous
member of a labouring class at the base, or a politician who voices
the scepticisms, manners, fascinations, and prejudices of a cultured,
leisured society at the summit of the social order. The satirist
and the moralist, if the grimace in the case of the one be not too
obviously forced and bitter, and the revolt in the case of the other
not too exacting and scornful, may also exhibit the tendencies of
an age. And there is always much to be learned from those alien
observers, each of whom, entering into our midst a stranger, has set
down his impression of the life of our own people with something of the
freshness and curiosity of a child on a first visit to Wonderland.

And here indeed it is largely upon foreign criticism that we have
to depend. We are familiar with the “composite photograph” in which
thousands of superimposed likenesses result in the elimination of
personal variants, the production of a norm or type. We seek a kind of
mental or moral “composite photograph” showing the average sentiment,
the average emotion, the average religion. And this is a method of
investigation far more familiar to Europe, where introspection is
regarded as a duty, than to England, where introspection is regarded
as a disease. Most modern attempts at the analysis of the English
character have come from the European resident or visitor. In books
translated from the French, like that of M. Boutmy, or from the German,
like that of Dr. Karl Peters, the Englishman learns with amazement
that he presents this aspect to one observer, that to another. His
sentiments are like that of the savage who is suddenly confronted
with the looking-glass; or, rather (since he is convinced that all
these impressions are distorted or prejudiced), like the crowd which
constantly gathers before the shop windows which present convex or
concave mirrors--for the pleasure of seeing their natural faces weirdly
elongated or foreshortened. Yet we are compelled to read such books.
We are compelled to read all such books. Even as a result of such
unfair description we acknowledge the stimulus and challenge which such
description affords. We cannot help being interested in ourselves.
Sometimes, indeed, these impartial minds are able to sting us into
anxiety by their agitation over things which we generally accept as
normal. Again and again the foreigner and the colonial, entering this
rich land with too exuberant ideals of its wealth and comfort, have
broken into cries of pain and wonder at the revelation of the life
of poverty festering round the pillars which support the material
greatness of England. A picture to which we have become accustomed,
which we endure as best we may, seems to them a picture of horror and
desolation. Again and again we have found our material splendours and
extravagances which have developed by almost inconspicuous gradations
year by year and generation by generation, set out for surprise or
condemnation, by those who had maintained a tradition of simplicity,
even of austerity, in England’s social life. Again and again a revisit,
after prolonged absence, has exhibited some transformation of things of
which those who have been living in the current are hardly themselves
conscious--a transformation effected by no man’s definite desires.

All such observations, however, are faced with some fundamental
difficulties. One of these is the difficulty of ascertaining where the
essential nation resides: what spirit and temper, in what particular
class or locality, will stand to the future for twentieth-century
England. A few generations ago that difficulty did not exist. England
was the population of the English countryside: the “rich man in his
castle,” the “poor man at his gate”; the feudal society of country
house, country village, and little country town, in a land whose
immense wealth still slept undisturbed. But no one to-day would seek
in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the
spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded
into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer
in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the
old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of
a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in
the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast
welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? Amongst the new Plutocracy?
The middle classes? The artisan populations? The broken poor? All
contribute their quota to the stream of the national life. All have
replies to give the interrogator of their customs and beliefs and
varying ideals. All together make up a picture of a “roaring reach of
death and life” in a world where the one single system of a traditional
hierarchy has fissured into a thousand diversified channels, with
eddies and breakwaters, whirlpools and sullen marshes, and every
variety of vigour, somnolence, and decay.

Again, no living observer has ever seen England in adversity: beaten
to the knees, to the ground. No one can foresee what spirit--either of
resistance or acquiescence--latent in this kindly, lazy, good-natured
people might be evoked by so elemental a challenge. England is often
sharply contrasted with Ireland, and the Irish with the English
people. What spirit would be manifest amongst the English people
to-day if they had been subjugated by an alien conqueror, with their
lands dispossessed, their religion penalised, their national ideals
everywhere faced with opposition and disdain? Such an experience might
have been stamped upon history if the Armada had reached these shores;
it might have “staggered humanity” with unforgettable memories. Would
an invaded England offer the resistance of an invaded Germany, or of an
invaded Spain, in the Napoleonic Wars? How would we actually treat our
“Communists” if they seized London after a time of national disaster
and established a “Social” Republic? No one can tell what a man will do
in such a shock as the Messina earthquake, or when the shells of the
invader, without warning, crash through the ruins of his home. And no
one can foresee what a nation will do in adversity which has never seen
itself compelled to face the end of its customary world.

Again, we know little or nothing to-day of the great multitude of the
people who inhabit these islands. They produce no authors. They edit
no newspapers. They find no vocal expression for their sentiments and
desires. Their leaders are either chosen from another class, or, from
the very fact of leadership, sharply distinguished from the members of
their own. They are never articulate except in times of exceptional
excitement; in depression, when trade is bad; in exuberance, when, as
on the “Mafeking” nights, they suddenly appear from nowhere to take
possession of the city. England, for the nation or foreign observer,
is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the
middle class have stamped upon the vision of an astonished Europe. It
is the middle class which stands for England in most modern analyses.
It is the middle class which is losing its religion; which is slowly
or suddenly discovering that it no longer believes in the existence of
the God of its fathers, or a life beyond the grave. It is the middle
class whose inexhaustible patience fills the observer with admiration
and amazement as he beholds it waiting in the fog at a London terminus
for three hours beyond the advertised time, and then raising a cheer,
half joyful, half ironical, when the melancholy train at last emerges
from the darkness. And it is the middle class which has preserved under
all its security and prosperity that elemental unrest which this same
observer has identified as an inheritance from an ancestry of criminals
and adventurers: which drives it out from many a quiet vicarage and
rose garden into a journey far beyond the skyline, to become the
“frontiersmen of all the world.”[1]

But below this large kingdom, which for more than half a century has
stood for “England,” stretches a huge and unexplored region which
seems destined in the next half-century to progress towards articulate
voice, and to demand an increasing power. It is the class of which
Matthew Arnold, with the agreeable insolence of his habitual attitude,
declared himself to be the discoverer, and to which he gave the name of
the “Populace.” “That vast portion of the working class,” he defined
it, nearly forty years ago, “which, raw and half-developed, has long
been half hidden amid its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from
its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of
doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it
likes, meeting where it likes, bending what it likes, breaking what it
likes.” “To this vast residuum,” he adds, “we may with great propriety
give the name of Populace.” To most observers from the classes above,
this is the Deluge; and its attainment of power--if such attainment
ever were realised--the coming of the twilight of the gods. They see
our civilisation as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness;
preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another. They behold the
influx, as the rush of a bank-holiday crowd upon some tranquil garden:
tearing up the flowers by the roots, reeling in drunken merriment on
the grass plots, strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and
broken bottles. This class--in the cities--cannot be accused of losing
its religion. It is not losing its religion, because it had never
gained a religion. In the industrial centres of England, since the city
first was, the old inherited faiths have never been anything but the
carefully preserved treasure of a tiny minority. It is a class full
of sentiment which the foreigner is apt to condemn as sentimentality.
Amusing examples are familiar of its uncalculating kindliness. An
immense traffic is held up for considerable time because a sheep--on
its way to immediate slaughter--is entangled between two tramcars.
The whole populace cheerfully submit to this inconvenience, sooner
than consummate the decease of the unfortunate animal. In a certain
pottery manufactory, the apparatus has been arranged for the baking
process, and the fires are about to be lighted, when the mewing of
a cat is heard from inside the kiln. The men refuse to proceed with
the work. A whole day is spent in an endeavour to entice the cat out
again; and, on this proving fruitless, in the unloading of the kiln, in
order to rescue the creature. When it is liberated, it is immediately
hurled--with objurgations--into the river. The men were exasperated
with the trouble which had been caused and the time wasted; but they
could not allow the cat to be roasted alive.

Next to this “sentimentality,” so astonishing to Europe--because so
irrational--comes the invincible patience of the English workman. He
will endure almost anything--in silence--until it becomes unendurable.
When he is vocal, it is pretty certain that things _have_ become
unendurable. I once had occasion to visit a family whose two sons were
working on the railway when the dispute between directors and the
union leaders threatened a universal disturbance. I inquired about the
strike. There was an awkward pause in the conversation. “Jim won’t have
to come out,” said the mother, “because he isn’t on the regular staff.”
“Of course Jim will come out,” said the father firmly, “if the others
come out.” “The fact is,” they explained, after further silence, “we
don’t talk about the strike here; we try to forget that there ever
may be one.” It was the experience of a thousand homes. There was no
recognised or felt grievance. There was no clear understanding of the
purpose and meaning of it all. But there were firmly planted in the
mind two bedrock facts: the one, the tragedy that the strike would mean
in this particular household; the other, the complete impossibility of
any other choice but of the boys standing with their comrades in the
day of decision. And this is England; an England which has learnt more
than all other peoples the secret of acquiescence, of toleration, of
settling down and making the best of things in a world on the whole
desirable; but an England also of a determination unshaken by the
vicissitudes of purpose and time, with a certain ruthlessness about
the means when it has accepted the end, and with a patience which is
perhaps more terrible in its silence than the violence of a conspicuous
despair.

These and other qualities form an absorbing subject of study. A figure
emerges from it all. It is the figure of an average from which all
its great men are definitely variants. No body of men have ever been
so “un-English” as the great Englishmen, Nelson, Shelley, Gladstone:
supreme in war, in literature, in practical affairs; yet with no single
evidence in the characteristics of their energy that they possess
any of the qualities of the English blood. But in submitting to the
leadership of such perplexing variations from the common stock, the
Englishman is merely exhibiting his general capacity for accepting the
universe, rather than for rebelling against it. His idea of its origin
or of its goal has become vague and cloudy; definite statements of the
average belief, set out in black and white by the average congregation,
would astonish the average preacher. But he drives ahead along the
day’s work: in pursuing his own business, conquering great empires:
gaining them by his power of energy and honesty, jeopardising them
by his stiffness and lack of sympathy and inability to learn. So he
will continue to the end; occupying, not in Mr. Pinero’s bitter gibe
the “suburb of the Universe”; but rather that locality whose jolly,
stupid, brave denizens may be utilised for every kind of hazardous and
unimaginable enterprise; fulfilling the work of another, content to
know nothing of the reason of it all; journeying always, like Columbus,
“to new Americas, or whither God wills.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It may be helpful to break up this composite figure of an “Englishman”
into the various economic divisions of the present time, to examine
what changes are fermenting amongst the rich, the middle stratum of
comfort, the multitudinous ranks of the toilers, the dim hordes of the
disinherited. A summary of science, art, literature, and religion in
their influence upon the common life will indicate the changes most
manifest, less in material conveniences than in the spirit of man.
At the end arises the question of the future of a society, evidently
moving in a direction which no one can foresee, towards experience of
far-reaching change.




CHAPTER II

THE CONQUERORS


I

“England is a sieve” is the cry of the astonished audience in Mr.
Belloc’s brochure on the fiscal question. “Poor old England is
a sieve.” They were filled with horror at the Tariff Reformer’s
revelation of the surplusage of imports over exports, and his vision
of the golden sovereigns being drained from this country to pay for
these undesirable incursionists. They already contemplated the time
when the last piece of gold would have been transported to meet the
demands of the insatiable “foreigner,” and the whole country would
suddenly realise that its pockets were empty--that it had spent all
that it had. Undoubtedly similar if less pleasant arguments of a
vigorous fiscal campaign have succeeded in shaking belief in England’s
prosperity. It is still possible in train or street, or places where
men assemble, to find observers, with an air of sagacity, declaiming
upon England’s headlong rush towards poverty and the abyss. I remember
listening for many hours, on the journey over the St. Gothard to Milan,
to a fluent English traveller explaining to some astonished Italians
that England was steadily growing poorer year by year; less money
accumulated, less money spent. Such are the follies of untrained minds,
who are unable to read experience or to interpret figures. They cannot
apprehend the astonishing facts of “super-wealth” as accumulated in
this country; as accumulated in the past thirty years. That rate of
accumulation has never been before paralleled: just as the expenditure
which accompanies accumulation--for we are not a thrifty race--offers
something new in a standard of whole classes. A serious study of the
superfluous wastage of the nation might bring reassurance to all who
are afraid of an enforced austerity of manners; even if it provides
little gratification to those who would see expenditure devoted to
desirable ends. Statistics present to the reader incredible arrays of
increase: so much leaping forward of income-tax returns, unchecked by
wars, borrowings, or trade depressions; nearly two hundred millions of
the National Income divided amongst people whose individual incomes
exceed five thousand a year. Where does it go to? How is it consumed?
What asset of permanent value will be left behind as evidence of the
super-wealth of the twentieth century? The answers to these questions
are not entirely satisfactory. “Waste” is written large over a very
substantial proportion of the national expenditure, and that far more
in the private than in the public consumption. A Conservative leader
once informed a meeting in Scotland that if all the rich men were
abolished there would be no one left to give work to the poor people.
That, however, was rather a popular method of combating Socialism,
than a serious contribution to political economy. “To a retailer of
news,” says Mr. George Russell, “who informed him that Lord Omnium,
recently deceased, had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr.
Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis, ‘Thank him for nothing.
He was obliged to leave it. He couldn’t carry it with him.’” And what
the rich man is to do with his money except to find employment, and how
he is to escape the burden of death duties or graduated income tax in a
world where every civilised nation has an eye upon his “super-wealth,”
are queries whose answer is conjectural.

The most obvious increase of this waste comes from the “speeding up”
of living which has taken place in all classes in so marked a fashion
within a generation. The whole standard of life has been sensibly
raised, not so much in comfort as in ostentation. And the result is
something similar to that in the insane competition of armaments which
takes place amongst the terrified nations of the world. One year ten
huge ironclads confront twenty. A decade after, fifteen huge ironclads
of another type have replaced the first: to be confronted again with
thirty of the new floating castles. So many millions have been thrown
to the scrap heap. The proportion of power has remained unaffected. It
is the same in the more determined private competition for supremacy
in a social standard. Where one house sufficed, now two are demanded;
where a dinner of a certain quality, now a dinner of a superior
quality; where clothes or dresses or flowers, now more clothes, more
dresses, more flowers. It is waste, not because fine clothes and
rare flowers and pleasant food are in themselves undesirable, but
because by a kind of parallel of the law of diminishing returns in
agriculture, additional expenditure in such directions fails to result
in correspondent additions of happiness. In many respects, indeed,
the effect is not only negatively worthless, but even positively
harmful. Modern civilisation in its most highly organised forms has
elaborated a system to which the delicate fibre of body and mind is
unable to respond. And the result is the appearance (whimsical enough
to Carlyle’s spectators “beyond the region of the fixed stars”) of
a society expending half its income in heaping up the material of
disease, to which the other half of its income is being laboriously
applied for remedy.

But the general effect (to the above-mentioned dispassionate
spectators) is of an extravagance of wealth and waste which is only
not insolent because it is for the most part unconscious, the sport
of blind forces rather than the deliberate defiance of the limits of
human endeavour. It is not insolence or--as it might have appeared in
the olden days--a determination to rival the fabled immortals, which
has charged all our high roads with wandering machines racing with
incredible velocity and no apparent aim. Many (such as W. E. Henley)
demand “Speed in the face of the Lord.” Others are inflamed with the
desire for “driving abroad in furious guise,” as an escape from the
_ennui_ of a life which has lost its savour; as in the tortured and
bored procession in old Rome, for the “easier and quicker” passing of
the “impracticable hours.” But a large proportion of those who have
employed motor cars in habitual violation of the speed limit, and
in destruction of the amenities of the rural life of England, have
done so either because their neighbours have employed motor cars, or
because their neighbours have not employed motor cars; in an effort
towards equality with the one, or superiority over the other. When
every man of a certain income has purchased a motor car, when life has
become “speeded up” to the motor-car level, that definite increase of
expenditure will be accepted as normal. But life will be no happier
and no richer for such an acceptance; it will merely have become more
impossible for those who (for whatever reason) are unequal to the
demands of such a standard. And the same is true of the multiplication
of meals; of the rise in the price of rent in certain districts
of London, for example, because every one wants to live there; of
numberless exactions and extortions which have grown up in a society
whose members are “like wealthy men who care not how they give.”

And mournfully enough this rather dull and drab extravagance of private
living is accompanied by a severe scrutiny of any kind of public
expenditure, and a resentful criticism of all efforts to stamp the
memory of this age upon enduring brick and stone. The London County
Council, housed in a few scattered hovels and warrens, proposed a
year or two back to devote a few hundred thousand pounds to an “Hôtel
de Ville,” situate on the banks of the river opposite Westminster.
And the opponents of the particular party in power had no difficulty
in stirring up the wealthier classes into the fiercest protest
against this attempt to leave the future with a permanent memorial of
twentieth-century London. The one dignified and conspicuous building
of the Victorian age--the Palace at Westminster--remains to-day
scamped, truncated, and unfinished, because the nation, in a cold
fit of retrenchment, was alarmed at the amount which it had already
lavished upon it. Dr. Dill has shown in the Roman Peace, during the
age of the Antonines and after, the people of the Empire turning with
enthusiasm to great communal building; and every city setting itself
to such achievements as remain to-day the wonder of the world. There
is something of brutality, indeed, as well as something of large
achievement, in the inadequacy of ends to means: as in the gigantic
Pont du Gard, marching in its grandeur over a deep valley in order
to conduct a tiny rivulet of water to a second-rate provincial city;
or the enormous stone arenas which in every ruined Roman town mark
the place of the communal games. But the brutality is charged with
strength; there is purpose in it, carried through with relentless
tenacity; the purpose of the bending of Nature’s stubborn resistance
to the designs of man. What kind of building will represent for the
astonishment of future eyes the harvest of the super-wealth of the
British Peace? The signs are not propitious. A Byzantine Cathedral
at Westminster, a Gothic Cathedral at Liverpool, a few town halls
and libraries of sober solidity, the white buildings which to-day
line Whitehall, and fill the passing stranger with bewilderment at
a race “that thus could build,” will be the chief legacies of this
present generation. The thirteenth century gave us the Cathedrals; the
sixteenth gave us the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and the noblest
of English country houses. These tiny Englands, with populations, in
the aggregate, less than that of London to-day, and wealth incomparably
smaller, have left us possessions which we can admire but cannot equal.
“The work which we collective children of God do,” complained Matthew
Arnold, “our grand centre of life, our city for us to dwell in, is
London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its
internal canker of _publice egestas, privatim opulentia_, unequalled
in the world.” It was this contrast which gave point to a question
which otherwise the plain man would put by as absurd: “If England were
swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years
hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind,
the England of the last twenty years or the England of Elizabeth?”

Public penury, private ostentation--that, perhaps, is the heart of the
complaint. A nation with the wealth of England can afford to spend,
and spend royally. Only the end should be itself desirable, and the
choice deliberate. The spectacle of a huge urban poverty confronts
all this waste energy. That spectacle should not, indeed, forbid all
luxuries and splendours: but it should condemn the less rewarding of
them as things tawdry and mean. “Money! money!” cries the hero--a
second-grade Government clerk--of a recent novel--“the good that can
be done with it in the world! Only a little more: a little more!” It
is the passionate cry of unnumbered thousands. Expenditure multiplies
its return in human happiness as it is scattered amongst widening areas
of population. And the only justification for the present unnatural
heaping up of great possessions in the control of the very few would
be some return in leisure, and the cultivation of the arts, and the
more reputable magnificence of the luxurious life. We have called into
existence a whole new industry in motor cars and quick travelling, and
established populous cities to minister to our increasing demands for
speed. We have converted half the Highlands into deer forests for our
sport; and the amount annually spent on shooting, racing, golf--on
apparatus, and train journeys and service--exceeds the total revenue of
many a European principality. We fling away in ugly white hotels, in
uninspired dramatic entertainments, and in elaborate banquets of which
every one is weary, the price of many poor men’s yearly income. Yet we
cannot build a new Cathedral. We cannot even preserve the Cathedrals
bequeathed to us, and the finest of them are tumbling to pieces for
lack of response to the demands for aid. We grumble freely at halfpenny
increases in the rates for baths or libraries or pleasure-grounds. We
assert--there are many of us who honestly believe it--that we cannot
afford to set aside the necessary millions from our amazing revenues
for the decent maintenance of our worn-out “veterans of industry.”

To the poor, any increase of income may mean a day’s excursion, a
summer holiday for the children; often the bare necessities of food
and clothes and shelter. To the classes just above the industrial
populations, who with an expanding standard of comfort are most
obviously fretting against the limitations of their income, it may mean
the gift of some of life’s lesser goods which is now denied; music,
the theatre, books, flowers. Its absence may mean also a deprivation
of life’s greater goods: scamped sick-nursing, absence of leisure,
abandonment of the hope of wife or child. All these deprivations may
be endured by a nation--have been endured by nations--for the sake
of definite ends: in wars at which existence is at stake, under the
stress of national calamity, or as in the condition universal to
Europe a few hundred years ago, when wealth and security were the
heritage of the very few. But to-day that wealth is piling up into
ever-increasing aggregation: is being scrutinized, as never before, by
those who inquire with increasing insistence, where is the justice of
these monstrous inequalities of fortune? Is the super-wealth of England
expended in any adequate degree upon national service? Is the return
to-day or to posterity a justification for this deflection of men and
women’s labour into ministering to the demands of a pleasure-loving
society? Is it erecting works of permanent value, as the wealth
of Florence in the fifteenth century? Is it, as in the England of
Elizabeth, breeding men?

No honest inquirer could give a dogmatic reply. The present
extravagance of England is associated with a strange mediocrity, a
strange sterility of characters of supreme power in Church and State.
It is accompanied, as all ages of security and luxury are accompanied,
by a waning of the power of inspiration, a multiplying of the power
of criticism. The more comfortable and opulent society becomes, the
more cynicism proclaims the futility of it all, and the mind turns
in despair from a vision of vanities. It gives little leadership to
the classes below it: no visible and intelligent feudal concentration
which, taught in the traditions of Government and inheriting strength
and responsibility, can reveal an aristocratic order adequate to the
immense political and economic necessities of the people. Never,
especially during the reaction of the past twenty years, were fairer
opportunities offered to the children of wealthy families for the
elaboration of a new aristocratic Government of a new England; and
never were those opportunities more completely flung away. Its chosen
leaders can offer nothing but a dialectic, a perpetual criticism of
other men’s schemes, clever, futile, barren as the east wind. The
political creed which it embraces--the Protectionist system which
is going to consolidate the Empire and make every wife’s husband
richer--is almost entirely dependent for its propagation upon aliens
from outside; politicians, economists, journalists, bred in an
austerer life amongst the professional classes, and now employed by
a society which seems without capacity to breed leaders of its own.
It can compete for the pictures of great masters, but it leaves the
men of genius of its own day to starve. It continues, now as always,
garnishing the sepulchres of the prophets which its predecessors
have stoned. It maintains large country houses which offer a lavish
hospitality; but it sees rural England crumbling into ruin just
outside their boundaries, and has either no power or no inclination
to arrest so tragic a decay. It fills vast hotels scattered round the
coasts of England and ever multiplying in the capital, which exhibit a
combination of maximum expenditure and display with a minimum return
in enjoyment. It has annexed whole regions abroad, Biarritz and the
Riviera coast, Austrian and German watering-places, whither it journeys
for the recovery of its lost health, and for distractions which will
forbid the pain of thinking. It plunges into gambles for fresh wealth,
finding the demands of its standards continually pressing against
its resources; seeking now in South Africa, now in West Australia,
now in other Imperial expansions, the reward which accompanies the
conversion of the one pound into the ten. At best it is an existence
with some boredom in it; even when accompanied by actual intellectual
labour: the management of an estate and its agents, directorships, or
the overlooking of public and private philanthropies. At worst, more
perhaps in America than in England, where the standard has not so much
been overthrown as never securely established, it becomes a nightmare
and a delirium.

Delirium would seem to be the fate of all societies which become
content in secured wealth and gradually forget the conditions of labour
and service upon which alone that security can be maintained. “They
describe,” says Bagehot of the French memoirs, “a life unsuitable to
such a being as man in such a world as the present one: in which there
are no high aims, no severe duties, where some precept of morals seems
not so much to be sometimes broken as to be generally suspended and
forgotten--such a life, in short, as God has never suffered men to
lead on the earth long, which He has always crushed out by calamity or
revolution.” Those who are familiar with the methods of dissipation
of much of the new wealth of America--methods creeping across the
Atlantic--are familiar also with a life “unsuitable to such a being
as man.” This society is only distinguished from that which was
consumed in the French Revolution, by absence of the wit and grace
and polished human intercourse which in part redeemed so selfish and
profitless a company. The pictures given from time to time possess a
note of exaggeration. They flare a fierce white light upon a certain
group of rich people, with no toleration of shadows or half tones.
The thing stands ugly, in its pitiless glare, a vision not good to
look upon. Yet the essential facts remain. The picture is only not a
caricature, because the life it describes is itself a caricature. The
forces which have moulded it have driven it inevitably along certain
paths: resistance is useless. For in America enormous wealth--not only
beyond “the dreams of avarice,” but in such aggregations of millions
as make it inconceivable even to its possessors--has descended upon a
tiny group of persons who have exploited the resources of a continent.
The first generation accumulated these great possessions, in a fierce
hand-to-hand conflict in which strength and cunning triumphed, and
polish and pleasantness of manner and kindliness counted for nothing
at all. To the second generation is given the spending of it. There
are few traditions of social service. There are no feudal or communal
responsibilities of social obligation. Charity is resented by the
recipient and tiresome to the giver. The founding of Universities
becomes too commonplace to attract. Settlements are voted drab and
unsatisfying. Religion has become a plaything. All other avenues being
thus closed, there remain but a self-indulgence which in itself breeds
satiety, and a competition of luxurious display, which, in its more
advanced stages, passes into an actual insanity. The second generation
here is often weaker than its fathers. The fierce will-power which
ensured financial success in the most terrific financial struggle that
the world has ever seen, has exhausted the capacities of the family
lineage. It has been raised on the principle of “doing as one likes.”
It pursues its existence through an unreal, fantastic world, in a
luxurious expenditure as fantastic as a veritable “Dance of Death.”

Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Frank Norris, Mrs. Wharton, and other
American novelists have presented pictures of the luxurious waste and
extravagance of a plutocracy which have been scornfully repudiated by
its members. Yet almost every individual incident or place in “the
Metropolis”--“Castle Havens,” Newport, the queer palaces of New York,
the crude scattering of fortunes easily won in scratching the earth
or wrecking a railway--could be paralleled in the actual society of
America. Many could even be paralleled in England, where millionaire
company promoters, on their hectic path between poverty through
prosperity to prison or suicide, will purchase so many miles of good
English land, build round it a great wall ten feet high, construct
billiard rooms under a lake, remove a hill which offends the view. “He
was kind to the poor,” they wrote on the grave of one of them, who had
devastated the middle classes with the promise of high interest for
investment, guaranteed on his prospectuses by the names of Proconsuls
and Ambassadors of world-wide fame. The disease may not have attained
its full consummation in this country; that is in part because of a
standard which, though crumbling, still struggles to survive; in part
because the wealth accumulation is less sudden and overwhelming: in
part also because we are satisfied with less bizarre manifestations
of the always unsatisfied demand for pleasure. Yet we have parallels,
even in this country to “Castle Havens.” “It had cost three or four
millions of dollars, and within the twelve-foot wall which surrounded
its grounds lived two world-weary people who dreaded nothing so much
as to be left alone.” The house had many gables, in the Queen Anne
style: from the midst of them shot a Norman tower decorated with
Christmas tree wreaths in white stucco: overlapping this was the dome
of a Turkish mosque rising out of this something like a dove-cot: out
of that, the slender white steeple of a Methodist country church: on
top a statue of Diana. “Has there ever been any insanity in the Havens
family?” is the natural query of the visitor, as he gazed at this
astonishing erection.

All round are the “second generation”: young men, of whom it was said
that “if only they had had a little more brains, they would have been
half-witted”: women “who boast of never appearing twice in the same
gown”; one dreadful personage in Boston who wears each costume once,
and then has it solemnly cremated by her butler: women who artificially
make themselves barren, because of the inconvenience incidental to
motherhood, and lavish their affections upon cats and dogs. “It was
the instinct of decoration, perverted by the money-lust.” The men are
busy making money in order that their idle women may attain supremacy
in this mad race for display. The “second generation” are so bored
that ever more fantastic amusements are sought to stimulate jaded
interest. The one thing they all dread is “to be left alone.” “There
was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who
was driving a pair of zebras. One heard of monkey dinners and pyjama
dinners at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New
York.” “One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy
through the nose: one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and
another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard: one
had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class
for the weekly study of Plato.” People’s health broke down quickly in
face of this furious pursuit of pleasure; then they ate nothing but
spinach, or lived on grass, or chewed a mouthful of soup thirty-two
times before swallowing it. “There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’
‘new thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science.’”
The young men were filled with the same delusion as the older women.
“Some were killing themselves and other people in automobile races at a
hundred and twenty miles an hour.” “There was another young millionaire
who sat and patiently taught Sunday School, in the presence of a host
of reporters: there was another who set up a chain of newspapers all
over the country, and made war against his class.” Behind this second
generation there was even the vision of a third, growing up in the
heart of such a nightmare: a third generation in which there would no
longer remain even the memories of the early struggles of the pioneers
of great fortunes to connect them with reality.

That reality it is impossible for such a society ever to apprehend.
Newspaper criticisms leave them entirely unmoved. The more unblushing
the record of scandals and viciousness and foolish, distorted
luxury in any “fashionable” paper, the more secure its circulation
amongst the very people who are assailed. They are indifferent to
the onslaughts upon their lives by persons “outside.” They know that
these people are not, as a matter of fact, condemning their lives.
They are only expressing their discontent at not being “inside.” The
pauper wants fresh meat instead of canned. The business man wants
his thousand a year to become two thousand a year. The anarchist who
demands revolution can be bought with a secure guarantee of a steady
income. In Mr. Hueffer’s entertaining novel of New York, a rich
man’s son, scandalised at the method by which his father obtained his
super-wealth, attempts restitution to the victims. They one and all
indignantly repudiate his “charity.” One and all they ask to “come in”
on the ground floor in any future flotations and manipulations which he
may be designing. They reject the return of the proceeds of piracy. All
they desire is a partnership in future piratical raids against a person
or persons unknown.

It is a society organised from top to bottom on a “money” basis, a
business basis, with everything else as a side show. The men listen to
President Roosevelt’s fierce words about the Trusts and Corporations.
They have no resentment. It is “only Teddy’s way.” It cheers up the
people with the hope that something will be done, while they themselves
are secure in the knowledge that everything which can be done is
in the control of the money power. When they find a reformer whom
they can silence by force, they crush him. If they cannot crush him,
they purchase him. If he can neither be crushed nor purchased, they
ignore him. Religion is easily woven into the scheme of things, and
pleasantly harmonised with the accepted way of living. The Bishop of
London preaches in Wall Street, eloquently urging the business men to
regard their wealth as a stewardship from God. Far from resentment,
the business men abandon the Stock Exchange gamble for a quarter of an
hour, press round the bishop to shake his hand. “Bishop,” they say,
“that discourse of yours made us feel real good.” Then they return
to the Stock Exchange gamble. A prominent preacher is lured over at
an immense salary from England to preach to a church of the wealthy.
He braces himself for a great effort, and denounces their riches,
their works, and their ways. He expects an outbreak of indignation. He
discovers instead a universal congratulation. The wealthy and their
wives flock to his church, hoping to hear some more. The receipts of
the pew rents double. They talk of raising his salary. The more he
denounces, the more they applaud. The experience indeed is common to
all similar societies: since the day when the prophet complained that
his listeners crowded to hear him as he denounced their vices, “and
so,” he reproaches himself, “thou art unto them as a very lovely song,
of one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument.”

Only some realities cannot be altogether excluded. Change and Death
knock with gaunt hands, and refuse all proffered monetary bribes.
Here a frantic millionaire, going blind, offers two million dollars
to any one that can cure him. The high gods remain indifferent to the
challenge. Teeth drop out, hair drops off; old age creeps on apace:
the wealthiest are trembling at the approach of the end. The visitor
to “The Metropolis” from the south beholds “a golf course, a little
miniature Alps, upon which the richest man in the world pursued his
lost health, with armed guards and detectives patrolling the place
all day, and a tower with a search-light whereby at night he could
flood the grounds with light by pressing a button.” A motor accident,
an occasional sensational divorce case, the death of a child, tear
down suddenly all the blinds and cushions, revealing the richest as
unprotected as the poorest in a universe altogether indifferent to
such slight things as man’s profit and gain. Outside, an occasional
crisis, the panic fear of people to whom wealth means attainment,
that their wealth is vanishing, brings the accumulation of vast
fortune toppling to the ground. There follows a crop of suicides:
then the machine recovers and swings forward again on its blind,
staggering progress nowhither. The secret places of the world are
ravaged, the wise men subpœnaed, all cunning invention subsidised,
that some alchemy may be found which will resist the ravages of time,
preserve a beauty that is departing, stay the inexorable chariots of
the hours. There are even attempts to turn the flank of the enemy: by
“Christian Science” liberally supported, to abolish, if not disease,
at least its sufferings; by “Psychical Research,” to communicate with
a company pursuing a similar ineffectual existence beyond the grave.
“What is it all worth?” is the question which lurks in the background,
refusing to be stifled; which drives occasional revolters, wearied of
the repetition of these pleasures, into efforts after philanthropies,
or to shoot wild beasts in remote places, or even into political and
religious adventure. So they come and after a little while they go,
none knowing whence or whither: a company of tired children, flushed
and uncomfortable from the too violent pursuit of pleasure: who
thought, in the snatching of what things seemed desirable in a life
given over to enjoyment, to effect an attainment which has ever been
jealously denied to the family of mankind.

       *       *       *       *       *

But here, after all, in England or America, is only the life of the
few. If their existence is conspicuous it is because in distortion
and dangerous cases there can be most clearly realised the ravages
of disease. In England for the most part wealth is encased and
preserved in a wall of social tradition; and the majority of men,
however opulent, have some interests and occupations which redeem
them from the mere blind pursuit of pleasure. Yet in England it is
becoming increasingly questioned how far this wealth is providing
permanent benefit to the community. It is expended in the maintenance
of a life--a life and a standard--bringing leisure, ease and grace,
some effort towards charities and public service, an interest, real
or assumed, in literature, music, art, social amenity, and a local
or national welfare. But it offers little substantial advantage, in
endowment, building, or even direct economic or scientific experiment.
The percentages of legacy bequeathed to charity or to education are
lamentably low; and of these percentages most are deflected into
charity or religion in its least remunerative forms. Philanthropy is
large and liberal, but the aggregate of poverty remains unaffected by
it, or even, to the minds of the intimate observer, deepened. Much of
it appears less as the effort of intelligence and compassion than as
the random and often harmful attempt to satisfy a conscience disturbed
by penury adjacent to plenty. Social experiments involving thought
as well as money--a Bournville, a Toynbee Hall, a Limpsfield colony
for epileptics, a hospital for the new cure of consumption--are still
sufficiently rare as to attract attention. A few thousands bequeathed
to miscellaneous institutions out of a fortune of many hundred
thousands is still so unusual as to evoke considerable newspaper
adulation. The fact is, that the necessary expenditure upon an accepted
standard of living is so exacting and so continually increasing with
the increase of new demands, that little superfluity remains for
adventure in social or charitable effort. Some of the wealthiest
landlords have been reducing their pensions on their estates, now that
the State provides five shillings a week; in part, perhaps, in order
that the recipients should not be demoralised by this enormous access
of fortune; but in part because they can see other channels into which
this expenditure may at once be deflected. Families with incomes of
many thousands a year--caught in the cog-wheels of this vast machine,
this swollen definition of essential things--find a real difficulty in
making “both ends meet.” Most--in a calm hour--will deplore it. The
old look back with regret to an austerer day, to the time when central
London had no Sunday restaurant, and it was only necessary for the
few to know the few. The young--or the more thoughtful of them--look
forward with foreboding, wondering how long the artisan, the shop
assistant, the labourer, the unemployed, will content to acquiesce in a
system which expends upon a few weeks of random entertainment an amount
that would support in modest comfort a decent family for a lifetime.

“The most unpremeditated, successful, aimless Plutocracy”--so it
appears to one shrewd observer--“that ever encumbered the destinies of
mankind.” He sees it continually being recruited from below. Companies
rise like bubbles, expand, burst, carrying with them into the upper
air their promoters and the parasites which follow in their train.
Now it is the gold mines of South Africa which offer a particular
crop of amiable, ignorant, generously spending persons to swell the
general extravagance. Now from America comes the importation of
millions which are scattered in the home country in various forms of
elaborate expenditure. Now old-established businesses are renovated,
purchased, floated on the market inordinately “boomed”; with subsequent
collapse to the shareholders, with substantial margin of profit to
the “undertakers.” Those who retain the wealth thus cleverly won,
settle down in the English countryside to make the money circulate,
and generally to have a good time. Now, again, the more feverish
industry and energy of the new cities pile up a monopoly value of
millions upon the land which is “owned” by private persons: who find
themselves, as they rise and sleep, suddenly inundated with a steady
flow of money which is exacted as tribute from the working peoples.
So, in various ways, the enrichment of a new wealthy class which is
compensating for its newness by liberal hospitalities, and the effort
of some old-established rich families not to be pushed under in display
by these alien intruders, has “set a pace” which is driving the
whole of modern life into a huge apparatus of waste. Numbers go down
in the competition: then the country estates are sold and pass into
the hands of South African millionaires or the children of the big
traders, or the vendors of patent medicines. Others find themselves
continually in debt, adventuring into the City as directors of
companies, or attempting to obtain unearned increase by following in
the train of the great adventurers. Sometimes, as in the South African
promotions of 1895, the whole of a society flings itself into a furious
gambling mania, from which the few astute suck no small advantage, and
ultimately attain the honour which is the reward of great possessions.
There are many who endeavour to keep their heads in this confused
tumultuous world, who still cherish an ideal of simplicity, and upon
exiguous income will maintain a standard of manners and intelligence.
More and more, it would appear, these are destined to capitulate: to
be compelled to “give in” and accept the new expenditure, or to be
pushed aside as outside the main current of successful life. The vision
of this new “Plutocracy” appears to be drifting steadily away from
the vision which, at any historic time, has been held to justify the
endowment of leisure and comfort, and the control of great fortunes, as
a trust for the service of mankind.

For this “Plutocracy,” though accepting distinction in art, in
literature, in the governance of Empire, as a matter of evidence
to-day itself contributes but little to these desirable ends. Mr.
Mallock can laboriously demonstrate--in counter reply to the demands
of Socialism--that the wealth of the world is in the main increased
by the inventor, the individual, the ingenious multiplier of energy
and discoverer of scientific appliances. Many of the richer classes
accept such a demonstration as an infallible proof of the justice of
present wealth distribution. Other writers can justify an opulent
and leisured class above, for the provision of clever and energetic
persons who will cultivate the tradition of statesmanship, or encourage
disinterested experiment in advancement of knowledge or the service
of humanity. But the actual rulers of Empire, the men of science,
the great soldiers, the great artists and writers, as a matter of
fact very rarely appear as the children of, or are rewarded by the
qualifications for entrance into, the governing classes. The wills
and legacies presented day by day in the newspapers are themselves a
judgment and refutation of any attempt to demonstrate parallel between
achievement and material acquisition. At the summit are usually names
of obscure unknown persons, who bequeath, with sundry small diversions
into charity or hospitals, the bulk of their hundreds of thousands
to their relatives. Here a successful brewer, there a speculator in
land, again a “financier” in the city, or a landlord who has not even
had the enterprise to speculate, but merely placidly drawn his rents
from the developing town or half a countryside; or again, the owners
of large trade organisations now run by skilled and alert managers as
limited liability companies: these form the staple material of the huge
accumulations which make up the bulk of those hundreds of millions
which regularly pass every year from some few hundred persons to some
few other hundreds. Quite low down in this list of obscure wealthy,
conspicuous if they attain six figures, and often falling below five,
are the men who have created and have served; authors of European
distinction, generals with ten campaigns to their name, politicians
who have devoted their lives to public affairs, men of science who
have effected discoveries for which all humanity is richer. Under no
kind of analysis does examination of these names and figures provide
any co-ordination of wealth and capacity, or wealth and national or
imperial or humanitarian service. The observer has not only to lament
the paucity of talent amongst the children of families with high past
record of spacious and splendid renown. He is not compelled to turn
his attention in perhaps unfair emphasis to that section of society
which regards its possessions as a trinket or plaything, and, amid an
atmosphere of frivolity, is engaged in squandering its brief existence
through every variety of passionless pleasure. It is enough for him, in
analysing the ordinary undistinguished accumulation of great wealth,
to note the balance of social service on the one hand, of remuneration
on the other; and to wonder how long the obscure multitudes who labour
with so scanty a return, in order that these may enjoy, will continue
to be satisfied with what (to them) appears so improvident a bargain.
And if this detached observer, inspired neither by hate nor envy, were
asked to summarise the social advantage of all this heaped-up wealth
expended by the few who have attained, he would be compelled to find it
in a social convenience and amenity; in the provision of opportunity,
embedded in pleasant surroundings and with bodily discomforts as far as
possible removed, for entertaining conversation.

So, concentrating themselves especially in London, for an annual
campaign of association, there gather every year the companies
of the successful. They have expended some half their days in
tranquillity and quiet places--in rural England, in high Swiss mountain
valleys--anywhere in which the too exasperated material of the human
mind can be nursed back into some semblance of sanity. They gather,
from the four winds, into the tumult of the capital, to occupy the
remaining half of the year in deliberate tearing the fabric of that
mind to pieces in an orgy of human intercourse. It is effort directed
at the highest pressure, with no interspaces of silence in which to
learn, to suffer, or to enjoy. It is the effort of those few who
have attained success in a race where the majority are content with
existence and endurance, to exhibit the magnitude of that success in
a transitory experience of too violently accelerated life. For these
months nobody is ever alone; nobody ever pauses to think; no one ever
attempts to understand. All quick and novel sensations are pressed
into the service of an ever more insistent demand for new things.
Parliament pays its tribute, in a labyrinth of dining-rooms and a
famous terrace, which is an annexe--as the Empire is an annexe--to the
activities of this restless energy. What passes for British Art in
a Royal Academy and other exhibitions; the Opera, dragging European
singers to stimulate an audience numbed by the whirl of circumstance;
any unexpected appeal, a decadent French play, actors from an earlier,
simpler, passionate South, an audacious novel or two, a passing
scandal, serve to infuse the concoction with some lambent vitality.
But, for the most part, it is talk--talk--talk; talk at luncheon and
tea and dinner; talk at huge, undignified crowded receptions, where
each talker is disturbed by the consciousness that his neighbour is
desirous of talking to others; talk at dances and at gatherings,
far into the night; with the morning devoted to preparation for
further talking in the day to come. It is talk usually commonplace,
sometimes clever, occasionally sincere; of a society desirous of being
interested, more often finding itself bored, filled with a resolute
conviction that it must “play the game”; that this is the game to be
played, that it must be played resolutely to the end. Elemental things
occasionally intrude, marriages, and those unexpected deaths which
refuse to postpone themselves to a more convenient out-of-season. What
does it all mean? No one knows. What does it all come to? Again, no one
knows. To many it stands for the inevitable, as the factory life is
inevitable to some, the field drudgery to others. A few it stimulates
with a consciousness of power in human intercourse and the subtle
sensation of rejoicing in a crowd. To a tiny remnant alone it presents
the appearance of a complicated machine, which has escaped the control
of all human volition, and is progressing towards no intelligible
goal; of some black windmill, with gigantic wings, rotating untended
under the huge spaces of night.

It is not illuminated by high ardours. It is not disfigured by
great crimes. The criticism of its “smartness,” its vulgarity, its
selfishness, advanced largely by women novelists and unfamiliar
critics, is based upon a biassed reading of values. There are those
who are pushing to get in, as there are those who are pushing to get
out. There are egoisms here as in all human energies; revolts which
drive their victims outside the accepted standards; reactions which
find expression in a petulance or a despair. Neither to-day nor
to-morrow will this strange turmoil stand for anything conformable to
the record of various pleasure-loving societies, which from time to
time have lived and flourished and died. But if its viciousness be
but the palest reflection of similar past efforts, its activities and
devotions are also set in grey. It has none of the fury of passionate
pleasure which accompanied the decline and fall of Rome; but it has
little of the large utterance, and magnificence of artistic display,
and consciousness of occupying a great arena in the world’s affairs,
which speaks from every day’s record of that long autumn of decay. It
has few of those feverish and almost unintelligible lusts and cruelties
which make the story of the Early Renaissance in Italy like the memory
of evil dreams. But, on the other hand, it will neither stamp upon the
stone and marble of its dwelling-places, nor store up upon the walls of
its cities and opulent houses, nor write in the life history of its men
and women, that harvest of an artistic beginning and a rich individual
experience which makes the Renaissance appear as one of the wonder-ages
of the world. To-day, here, in England, it plays and trifles with large
forces which, if it once understood, it might flee from in terror and
dismay. Its social and philanthropic enterprises are fairly ample; it
bestows considerable sums on public and private charities, shepherding
its friends into drawing-room meetings to listen to some attractive
speaker--an actor, a Labour Member, a professional humorist--pleading
for pity to the poor. It discusses the possibility of social upheavals
in that dim, silent, encompassing life in which all its activities
are embedded--the incalculable populations, which set the society
that matters in the midst of a rude and multitudinous society that
does not count. It plays in good humour with light schemes of Social
Reform; wondering, like the pleasant salons of Paris in the new age of
gold before the Revolution, whither events are tending; convinced, as
these salons also were convinced, that nothing can alter the effectual
standards of its world. It plays with religion; listening to the
agreeable discourses of one popular preacher, urging kindliness and
charity and toleration to all men; amused at the violence of another,
denouncing all its works and ways; a little disturbed by a third,
feeling the sudden intrusion of the cold hand of a universe in which
all its standards are unknown. “Sydney Smith talking,” wrote Carlyle
in his diary, “other persons prating, jargoning. To me, through these
thin cobwebs, Death and Eternity sat glaring.” Only in an occasional
solitary hour, in that magic twilight of a London summer evening, or
in the flare of a dim dawn over the sleeping city, do such disturbing
visitants tear the silence as with a sudden cry.

It is an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often lovable people, whose
material wants are satisfied by the labour of unknown workers in all
the world, trying with a desperate seriousness to make something of a
life spared the effort of wage-earning. It is built up and maintained
in an artificial, and probably a transitory, security--security which
has never been extended in the world’s history to more than a few
generations. It will continue with each until each drops out, if
uncomplaining, a little fatigued, and the fresh recruits take the place
of the deserters and the dead.

No study is more disheartening, none more disturbing, than the study
of those companies of human beings, which in various periods of social
security have attempted in similar fashion to play with the purposes of
life. “Some set their hearts on building and gardening,” wrote Tavannes
of the Court of the Valois, “on painting or reading or the chase. They
run after an animal all day and get their faces torn in the woods; or
they trot from morning till evening after a ball of wool; or they spend
the day and the night in games of hazard, from which they rise without
any great reluctance; or they buy arms and horses, and never use them.”
“Sadness and melancholy without a legitimate cause,” he declares, “are
their own just punishment; a failure to recognise the grace of God
which has made us immortal.” More than an age of Adventure, more even
than an age of reckless Wickedness, does time judge and condemn an age
of ineffectual Pleasure.

  Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed? The plumes, the
  armours--friend and foe? The cloth of gold, the rare brocade? The
  mantles glittering to and fro? The pomp, the pride, the royal show?
  The cries of war and festival? The youth, the grace, the charm, the
  glow? Into the night go one and all.

_Mane floreat, et transeat: vespere decidat. Et custodia in
nocte_--“As a watch in the night.”


II

“Conquerors” they appear to the critic abroad: “the Island Pharisees”
to the critic at home. Many attempts have been made in recent times to
describe in fiction this new leisured life of England: the particular
contemporary aspect of that Fair “wherein it was contrived should
be sold all sorts of Vanity, and that it should last all the year
long.” There is something of it in the _Egoist_, something also in
the extraordinary analysis by Mr. Henry James of the meaning of
situation in various companies of rich, idle persons whose utility or
significance in any rational universe it is difficult to apprehend.
Some of the younger novelists, with less detachment and with less
acceptance, have attempted interpretation, not of the moods of the
moment, but of the meaning of a whole society. Mr. Galsworthy, for
example, in a rather fierce indictment--gazing at the struggle for
continuance amongst the successful, like a spectator gazing at a
struggle of ants or bees--has drawn up an impeachment of the country
house and conventional life of successful England. His hero enters
this society from abroad, examining it, as if for the first time, with
curious eyes, without any background of the fortifying curriculum
of the accepted English education. He is excited to questioning and
resentment by the ironical smiles and comments of a foreigner, a
chance acquaintance in a third-class carriage, who, having rejected
everything, swallowed “all the formulas,” has no attitude but that of
irony towards the folly of human things. He attempts to allay that
resentment by personal examination of the various phases of the life
of the “Conquerors.” He wanders desolately from the oppression of the
club to the oppression of an artistic and literary gathering; and
thence to the futility of the philanthropic attempt to elevate the
lower classes by chess and coffee and bagatelle. He notes the well-fed,
bullet-headed, jovial crowds in the streets, the wives and husbands who
have settled down to a routine of affection, the wives and husbands
who have settled down to a routine of dull hatred and acceptance. The
complacency of it all, its satisfaction, its docility, its absence
of high purpose and adventure, haunt him like a nightmare. He essays
the countryside with no better result. He stays a night with a lonely
vicar. He beholds a warder guarding the huge convict prison--symbol of
the unsuitability of Christianity to practical affairs. He walks the
English roads with an energetic Indian civilian, who is very content
to run the machine, without caring to inquire whether the machine is
worth running at all. Finally, in the atmosphere of the English country
house, serene and dominant, and triumphantly content, he realises that
he is not of this company. Some disturbing madness has come upon him,
which compels him to inquire, where other men are content to enjoy.
And that way lies madness--or the struggle up a hill path, difficult
and extended, towards some new form of sanity. So he brands them with
some contempt and some anger as “Pharisees”--the island Pharisees, who
have mistaken the accident of their own favoured circumstances for the
reward of merit, and now present an invincible complacency to all the
arrows of outrageous fortune. In such a condemnation he is something
less than just to a race which has been considerably misjudged and
misunderstood. The men and women which fall under the lash of Mr.
Galsworthy’s satire have none of the historic characteristics of
the Pharisee. Their ancestors may have thanked God that they were
not as other men are. These are but astonished that the distinction
was noticeable or important. The “other men” have vanished from the
picture. They would be acknowledged to be of common blood, common
faith, common nationality. But they so readily pass unnoticed that it
would seem a work of supererogation to drag them on to the stage at
all. The standard of life which is only maintained by the labour of
obscure persons becomes accepted as normal; to be received without
questioning. It is less easy, indeed, to excite questions than to
propound answers. In the study of the psychology of “Space” and “Time”
the student is familiar with the difficulty, not of explanation but of
inquiry: “here is space, here is time--What is all the pother about?”
is the attitude of the plain man. And “here is human life, as we know
it,” is the attitude of the “plain man” in the class where is accepted
as fixed and unalterable, that the services of many shall minister to
the comfort of the few. The “Conquerors” have got far beyond the stage
of the Pharisee. They are the children’s children of those rather
crude exponents of complacency and pride. They reveal no ostentatious
complacency and pride. Their attitude is rather one of acceptance.
It is not that they thank God that they are not as other men are. It
is that they can imagine no conceivable readjustment of the universe
which could make other men as themselves; or themselves different They
are enterprising, but they shun adventure. They are kind, with no real
possibility of sympathy. Enormous shut doors separate them from the
real world: and they bend the world to their desires. “Doubts don’t
help you,” says one of Mr. Galsworthy’s characters. “How can you get
any good from doubts? The thing is to win victories.” “Victories?” is
the reply. “I’d rather understand than conquer.” But the “Island Race”
has preferred to conquer rather than to understand. And wisdom is
justified of all her children.

Once or twice, indeed, the critic is willing to suggest that perhaps
the choice is not so mad a one after all. The ironical foreigner who
prefers to resist, beg, cringe, and criticise, presents a figure not
wholly heroic. He has fallen back on facts. He has sucked the salt
and rind of life. He has deliberately contracted himself out of the
universe of make-believe which he sees encompassing the people amongst
whom his lot is cast. He enjoys his weakness and his laughter: the
machine moves on; doing the work of the world. And these people, as
he sees them--with their blindness to real issues, their carefully
tended gardens, and the gates so severely padlocked which guard the
pathways to waste spaces outside--may perhaps after all have learned
the lesson of compromise in a world of frantic possibilities. The
garden must be cultivated: cultivated, even if the sun which so
pleasantly encourages its flowers to pass into kindly fruit is in
reality a furnace of incredible fury; and the earth, of which this
garden is a tiny segment, running along an illimitable inane towards
no intelligible goal. “Spirit ruins you,” declares the little foreign
barber, condemned always to shave paupers in the cellars of a Rowton
lodging-house. “In this world what you want is to have no spirit.”
The _drôle_ Irish actor dies drunk in squalor, all because he has
something in him “which will not accept things as they are, believing
always that they should be better.” “When he was no longer capable
of active revolution he made it by getting drunk. At the last this
was his only way of protesting against society.” And occasionally,
from the heart of the mechanical routine, there comes evidence that
understanding is there--that understanding is possible: that not
grossness or obtuseness or selfishness, as in the first hasty verdict,
but the deliberate determination _not_ to face the realities is the
real motive power which keeps the system from falling into decay. For
if the realities be faced, the bottom falls out of the world; and man,
naked, shivering, and alone, is suddenly left defenceless, confronting
the fire and the darkness. The hero of one of Mr. Galsworthy’s novels
finds his uncle, a shrewd, insensitive man of business, criticising the
modern uncensored drama. “‘What’s right for the French and Russians,
Dick,’ he said, ‘is wrong for us. When we begin to be _real_ we only
really begin to be false.’ ‘Isn’t life bad enough already?’ he asks.
It suddenly struck Shelton that, for all his smile, his uncle’s face
had a look of crucifixion. He stood there very straight, his eyes
haunting his nephew’s face; there seemed to Shelton a touching muddle
in his optimism--a muddle of tenderness and of intolerance, of truth
and second-handedness. Like the lion above him, he seemed to be defying
Life to make him look at her.”[2]

“Defying Life to make him look at her” has been the effort of all
societies which have been removed for a time from the immediate
necessities of labour, hunger, and cold. That defiance of life is not
so mad a thing as it at first appears. It attempts, and to a certain
extent with success, to create a possible existence for an average
which can never be far removed from the conventional. It works: that
is its justification; this gospel of the Second Best, which substitutes
a placid friendliness for love’s high ardour, and prettiness for
beauty, and a compromise of cruelty and kindliness for social justice,
and a standard of convention for the demands of a compelling religion.
It is assailed in scornfulness and bitterness and passion, by the
advocates of these various flaming emotions; by the religious prophets
who demand sincerity; by the social prophets who cry for equality
and compassion; by the artists who wish to challenge the unveiled
Truth; by the great lovers who are outraged by this ignoble treatment
of the “Lord of Life of terrible aspect.” But the thing swings
forward, indifferent or but politely tolerant of the clamour; because
its inhabitants know that the secure second best is a wiser choice
(for them) than the hazards of an effort towards a doubtful larger
attainment. Most of those who have demanded less limited horizons,
and pressed forward to sail on uncharted seas, and adventured “beyond
the sunset,” have vanished and been heard of no more. There is surely
justification for any who in the face of such disasters confine their
voyages to the familiar creeks and havens, and never willingly forsake
the shelter of the shore.

And still to other nations--less successful in the economic struggle,
less immovably confident in attainment--these people appear as “the
Conquerors”: dominating the world with a certain serene confidence
in the justice of their supremacy which is at once enviable and
exasperating to the critic from outside. The Englishman abroad is
inclined to gush a little at the fascination of the foreign freedom,
especially at the charm and beauty of the South. He finds here manners,
and an immemorial tradition of courtesy, and a less slavish devotion
to material ends. But the South itself is under no such illusion. To
these it is the English who are the people that have attained. Italy,
Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, are all desirous of unravelling the secret
and accepting the standard of the dominant race. Even the writers
of literature, although they may mingle a delicate irony with their
praise, yet are content to emphasise the deficiences of their own
people; in the contrast presented to them by the immigrant English
who settle in their coasts, and maintain their own life and manners
unconscious of the life and manners of their neighbours.

It is as a conquering race, secure, imperturbable, profoundly careless
of opinion outside, that the astonished foreigner encounters the
Englishman abroad. “I see them at work,” writes M. Marcel Prévost,
from Biarritz, “and never perhaps have I better known and understood
their Anglo-Saxon energy than here, on the French soil, in a French
hotel, kept not by Germans or Swiss, but by the French of the Midi.”
He applauds even while he criticises. He mingles his irony with
admiration. He sees the Conquerors, not triumphant over the conquered,
not consciously brutal to the conquered, but simply brushing them
aside as irrelevant; never, indeed, seeing them at all. He sees, in
fact, this English colony contemplating certain cities of France, not
as a land with centuries of history beaten into its soil, but as a
place where the amenities of climate enable them to transplant into
a Southern air a portion of England. The French--even in the towns
of the stranger, where the French colony is numerous, in London or in
Barcelona, for example--never give the impression of a civic garrison
engaged by the Mother Country. Whilst a few hundreds of English
people in a French town, “obstinately speaking nothing but English,
inhabiting only English lodgings, dressing only in the English fashion,
practising their religion, their sports, and their games, with an easy
ostentation, end by persuading us,” he ironically complains, “that
we are the strangers--or at least the conquered nation.” It is this
mingling of security and indifference that fills him with despair. In
Biarritz, Pau, Dinard--he might have said in the whole _côte d’azur_ of
the Riviera--“the English have conquered us,” he declares. _Excellent
milieu pour étudier leurs procédés de conquête._

In the attempt to analyse the secret of this supremacy, he fixes
attention especially upon three points. First, the English are at
home abroad. When we go to foreign lands, says M. Prévost, it is the
stranger who interests us, his manners and habits, his peculiarities,
the ways in which he differs from us. When the Englishman goes abroad,
the customs of the country, the opinion of the people amongst whom he
lives, count for nothing. He comes to Biarritz to live his life, the
traditional English life, made up of bounteous feeding, of violent
physical exercise, of clubs, and of bridge. He describes the types
which he found at the Hotel Victoria, all entirely complacent, all
self-sufficient, all just blandly tolerant of the occasional presence
of the native inhabitant in this frontier post of Empire. “Yes; all
those people are entirely at home there. It is I who am the stranger,
the profane, since I look upon them with curiosity, since I wish to
learn something from them.” This accusation is an old one: accepted
since the famous definition of the Continent in the verdict of the
British tourist, as “ruins, inhabited by imbeciles”: since the
refusal of the English lady to speak French in Paris, because, as she
protested, “it only encourages them.” Here at least, amid much that
has changed, the type is unchangeable. The conquering race cannot
understand the conquered. No conquering race ever has understood the
conquered: except when, understanding, its Imperial rule has begun
its decline. If the English in India, it has been said, commenced to
understand India, the episode of English rule in India would be nearing
its close. The second “instrument of invasion,” this acute observer
finds in a “Discipline of Life, unanimously accepted.” Their plan of
conquest is traced in advance. They stamp their life upon the life of
the invaded cities: demanding, and in consequence readily obtaining,
those things which they judge indispensable to the discipline of their
existence. These include especially _l’installation hygiénique_ and
_l’installation sportive_. At Biarritz to-day, the villas which are
not entirely sanitary do not let. This is a more effective pressure
than any bye-law of a local authority. They create--through their
demands--hot air and vapour baths, certain conditions of ventilation,
electric light, _le seul qui ne “mange pas d’oxygène” disent-ils_.
They insist also upon their sports: golf, tennis, polo, hunting,
shooting. They even patronise automobilism, whilst declaring, says
M. Prévost slyly, “that it is not a true sport; they accuse it of not
being an English sport.” To this they join their religion, or at least
the outward manifestation of their religion. (One thinks of English
“chaplains abroad.”) Given also to this an imperious complacency of
costume, and all the materials are offered to provide the Anglican
colony abroad with the impression of _un corps d’occupation ayant son
uniforme, ses titres, ses chefs. Ces sont bien des conquérants._

But beyond these superficial truculencies the observer may find
a deeper interpretation of the cause of these triumphs. He sees
the English, in these new Englands that they have made abroad,
less intelligent, less generally cultivated than the French; less
cultivated, less scientific, artistic, and laborious than the Germans.
Yet it is these “barbarians,” not the French or the Germans, who have
attained, almost without effort, the overlordship of the world. He
ascribes this attainment to the fact that to-day the English are the
only people who have truly national manners and characteristics. In a
different order of things, but in equal measure, they exercise upon the
manners of the world the Authority which the French exercised in the
eighteenth century; when even those who hated them were compelled to
copy them. “Manners and Customs in France,” he asks dejectedly, “what
is it that can be developed to-day under this title? We have no longer
‘Manners and Customs.’ But the English retain their manners and customs
with a stubborn placidity.” “You can love--more or less--certain
qualities of this conquering people,” he concludes, “but how is it
possible not to admire its strong national discipline?” “That is what
ought to be learnt from it,” he exhorts his fellow-countrymen, “rather
than ways of smoking or rules of play.”

There is much sound common sense under this quiet irony and badinage.
The qualities which have produced an English domination of Biarritz
or Cannes are the qualities which have given to the race an Empire
dominant over four hundred millions of variegated peoples. The
qualities which have made them respected rather than loved at the
continental watering-places are the qualities which would cause their
subject peoples for the most part to contemplate the abandonment of
their rule without regret. Strength, energy, and a certain crudity
make up the blend of all Imperial races. It was so with the Romans: a
conspicuous efficiency, a justice equally impartial and indifferent;
aloofness with a certain disdain in it; an exercise of power almost
startling in the disproportion of end to means. It is the vigour
of a clumsy giant; sometimes exercising his strength in beneficent
enterprise, in effecting desirable acts which no weaker agent can
perform; sometimes--and generally unwittingly--crushing with heavy hoof
things of whose value he has no conception. No Conquering Race can
possess much power of introspection, of self-examination. “They do not
fret and whine about their condition,” says Whitman of the animals. He
could equally have said it about the English. No Conquering Race can
possess patience: else it passes into the acquiescence of the South,
whose favourite word is “to-morrow,” or the acquiescence of the East,
which is content to let the thundering legions pass, and to plunge
in thought again. No Conquering Race can possess irony: else it will
uncomfortably suspect that its conquered peoples are secretly laughing
at it, and this suspicion will excite it to resentment and reprisal.
No Conquering Race can possess humour: for then one day it will find
itself laughing at itself; and that day its power of conquest is gone.
Those who would help mankind must not expect much from them, is the
half sad, half cynical verdict of worldly wisdom. Those who would rule
mankind must not expect much from themselves beyond rulership, is the
lesson of history upon all Imperialisms. Above all, those who would do
the work of the world must not trouble themselves very greatly with
the inquiry whether the work of the world is worth the doing. If there
are signs of menace in the present outlook they arise from just this
fact: that a race which has conquered is now passing, it would seem,
into a race that is comfortable; that the frivolous pursuit of pleasure
rather than of wickedness, and the maintenance of a too exacting
standard of material welfare is threatening to replace an older
salutary simplicity; and that the reproach of Juvenal to Rome is not
without justification in twentieth-century London, when he accused its
successful peoples of having eaten of the herb of Sardinia. _Moritur et
ridet_;--it laughs and dies.

For its efforts at conquest, however annoying to those who resent its
domination, are enterprises of no mean or timid order. No nation
need be ashamed of Empire on a large scale, or apologise for the
overlordship of a Continent. To-day’s criticism deplores the weakening
or vanishing of the qualities by which such conquest was attained: in
an aristocratic caste which is merging itself in a wealthy class, and
undergoing weakening in the process. It is not from the “Conquerors”
but from a rather harassed and limited Middle Class that the “Empire
builders” are now drawn: a Lord Macdonnell from the home of a peasant
farmer in Ireland, a Cecil Rhodes from an English country parsonage.
The men who are administering with varying success British East Africa
and Northern Nigeria, and the huge machine of government in India,
are mainly the children of the professional families, drawn abroad by
love of adventure or absence of opportunity at home. There is little
danger in England of any general popular uprising against aristocratic
privilege, or even against a system which has concentrated in few
hands so disproportionate a percentage of the national accumulation.
But there may be danger of a kind of internal collapse and decay,
in the deflection of vigour and intellectual energy to irrelevant
standards and pleasures; in the inadequacy of that vigour and energy
before nations ever becoming better equipped in the world struggle,
and determined to make desperate efforts for the supreme position.
The invocation to “wake up” is supposed to be addressed mainly to the
working peoples, whose extravagant thirst for alcoholic refreshment,
and whose Trade Unions, encouraging an enforced idleness, are creating,
in this theory, a falling-off in commercial and industrial efficiency.
But far more than among the “rude mechanicals,” a facing of realities
is needed among the classes who have conquered and attained; who now,
absorbed in the difficult art of living under elaborate standards, find
little superfluous energy or wealth remaining for the setting of the
house in order. A variable and random philanthropy is the substitute
for Social Reform. A buying-off of the more energetic from below by
honours and titles liberally bestowed, prevents the attack upon a
whole class by the resentment of energy and intellect excluded from
privilege. Free patronage and a liberal entertainment of authors,
critics, playwrights, musicians, and ambitious politicians, removes
the menace of an intellectual proletariat exciting anger and envy
amongst the dim millions of the industrial populace. It has the sense
also to know the limits of its interferences; to know that its power,
inadequate to constructive effort, rests on inhibitions rather than
activities. The rather ignoble rôle played by the House of Lords during
the past decade reveals its weaknesses. It will allow changes which it
profoundly dislikes, when compelled by fear. It will resist changes in
action when that fear is controlled. It will altogether abandon the
effort to initiate changes where change is essential. It can do little
but modify, check, or destroy other men’s handiwork. It has no single
constructive suggestion of its own to offer to a people confronting
difficult problems, and harassed by the obligations of necessary
reorganisations. It can neither breed leaders nor ideas. And because of
this ultimate sterility--though it has all the cards in its hands and
every material force in its favour--its power may gradually pass and be
destroyed; to appear in history as one more aristocracy declining, not
through the batterings of external enemies, but from the fretting and
crumbling of an internal decay.

Its fear to-day is Socialism: Socialism which it does not understand,
but which presents itself as an uprising of the uneducated, suddenly
breaking into its houses; their clumsy feet on the mantelpiece,
their clumsy hands seizing and destroying all beautiful and pleasant
things. So it lies awake at night, listening fearfully to the tramp
of the rising host: the revolt of the slave against his master. From
Socialism--as a code of economic organisation, ordering life on a
military, disciplinary, and rational basis--it has perhaps less to
fear than it sometimes imagines. For this “Socialism” is farther away
in time than many ardent Socialists suppose. And if “Socialism” were
consummated, there might be found under its rigorous régime more
tenderness to an aristocratic caste and tradition than is anticipated
by those who are terrified at the promise of its advent. These
people, indeed, have less to fear from a demand for equality, than
from a demand for efficiency: from the enforced necessity, either in
a hazardous national crisis abroad, or in some stress of economic
adversity at home, for the rule of energy and intelligence. The
demand of the Napoleonic system--“the declared principle,” to “seek
talent wherever it may be found”--might make havoc of the supremacy
of the children of the “Conquerors”; might drastically determine
that some less ruinous proportion of the national wealth was expended
on aimless conventions and enjoyments. It may be desirable that the
land of England, for example, shall be held in the hands of private
owners, instead of being owned by the whole community. It seems to be
increasingly questioned whether the land of England shall continue to
be held by its present private owners: whether the landed classes of
this country, in any ultimate standard of profit and loss, can justify
the trust and high calling which has placed the welfare of the rural
population in their keeping, and now sees little return but a decaying,
deserted countryside. There is much, again, to be said for a Second
Chamber in Government. There is little to be said for the present
Second Chamber, except that in practice it appears to have disproved
all its theoretical advantages: abstaining where in theory it ought to
have struck, and striking where in theory it ought to have abstained.
Aristocracy in England has been kindly and generous. Even as in part
transformed into a plutocracy, it provides little of that attitude of
insolence to the less fortunate which is the surest provocation of
revolution. The action of a section of the motoring classes, indeed, in
their annexation of the highways and their indifference to the common
traditions, stands almost alone as an example of wealth’s intolerable
arrogances, and has certainly excited more resentment amongst the
common people than any extravagance of pleasure or political reaction.
It is only in such manifestations as those of enjoyment deliberately
associated with careless injury to the general convenience, that
there is revealed the remotest possibility of a deliberate “class
war” between the rich and the poor. Feudal England is dying, and
the attempt to transform a caste basis of land and breeding into a
caste basis of material possession seems doomed to failure. But it
will fail less from external assault than from the inability of the
inheritors of great fortune to maintain the energies and devotions
through which that fortune has been made. “The Conquerors” will leave
little bitterness behind them. There may even remain, in the memory
of a more exacting age to come, a pleasant recollection of those
who upheld, in time of tranquillity, a standard of manners and a
tradition of kindliness, duty, and courage before life’s lesser ills.
From public schools, which profess to teach “character” rather than
to stimulate intelligence, through universities encouraging large
expenditure on comfort, limitless bodily exercise, and an exiguous
standard of intellectual effort, they pass to the “truly national
manners and characteristics” which M. Prévost so much admires. In
country residence, in solid aggregation in the metropolis, in lesser
imitative effort amongst the provincial cities, they have cherished a
code of hospitality, courtesy, criticism, mild and generous interest in
public and private affairs. If that code is in part vanishing before
the influx of the new “Super-wealth,” it yet exhibits, in the present
generation, a still active power of assimilation. Not for conspicuous
crimes, for selfishness, for class exclusiveness, or for insolence
will this society be judged and condemned by the progress of time. It
will pass--if it passes--because it is mistaking abnormal and insecure
experience for the normal and secure; because an unwillingness to
face reality is gradually developing a confusion between reality and
illusion; because in its prosperity it may be stricken with blindness
to the signs of the time.




CHAPTER III

THE SUBURBANS


They are easily forgotten: for they do not strive or cry; and for
the most part only ask to be left alone. They have none of those
channels of communication in their possession by which the rich and
the poor are able to express their hostility to any political or
social change. The Landed Classes or the brewing interests, on the
one hand, find newspapers energetic in fighting their cause; on the
other, see themselves securely entrenched in a “Second Chamber,” which
offers them a permanent majority. The Working Classes can organise
into unions, subsidise members of Parliament and a Labour Party, make
themselves both respected and feared. No one fears the Middle Classes,
the suburbans; and perhaps for that reason, no one respects them.
They only appear articulate in comedy, to be made the butt of a more
nimble-witted company outside: like “Mr. Hopkinson,” who is aspiring
to transfer his residence from Upper Tooting to Belgravia, or the
queer people who dispute--in another recent London play--concerning
the respective social advantages of Clapham and Herne Hill. Strong
in numbers, and in possession of a vigorous and even tyrannical
convention of manners, they lack organisation, energy, and ideas. And
in consequence they have been finding themselves crushed between the
demands of the industrial peoples on the one hand, and the resistance
of the “Conquerors” on the other. They act only when their grievances
have become a burden impossible to be borne. They act without
preparation, without leadership, without preliminary negotiation. They
rise suddenly, impervious to argument, unreasoning and resolute. And
the result is often a cataclysm which would be almost ludicrous if it
were not both random and pitiful.

Such action, for example, was revealed in the complete overturn of
London’s system of government which took place in the spring of 1908,
after a continuous rule of nearly twenty years of administration by
one party. Lord Randolph Churchill ended his political career because
he had “forgotten Goschen.” The Progressive Party ended its political
career in the Metropolis because it had forgotten the Middle Classes.
It recognised, indeed, and estimated not unfairly, the strength of the
rich, the artisans, the unskilled labourers. These three classes are
prominent factors in the modern European polity. But it had forgotten
the dimensions and latent power of those enormous suburban peoples
which are practically the product of the past half-century, and have
so greatly increased, even within the last decade. They are the
creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business
activities of London. They form a homogeneous civilisation,--detached,
self-centred, unostentatious,--covering the hills along the northern
and southern boundaries of the city, and spreading their conquests
over the quiet fields beyond. They are the peculiar product of England
and America; of the nations which have pre-eminently added commerce,
business, and finance to the work of manufacture and agriculture.
It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of
Respectability; and these three qualities give the key to its special
characteristics. Its male population is engaged in all its working
hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense
sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters. It
is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness
falls. It finds itself towards evening in its own territory in the
miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets, in
number defying imagination. Each boasts its pleasant drawing-room, its
bow-window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title--“Acacia
Villa,” or “Camperdown Lodge”--attesting unconquered human aspiration.
There are many interests beyond the working hours: here a greenhouse
filled with chrysanthemums, there a tiny grass patch with bordering
flowers; a chicken-house, a bicycle shed, a tennis lawn. The women,
with their single domestic servants, now so difficult to get, and so
exacting when found, find time hang rather heavy on their hands. But
there are excursions to shopping centres in the West End, and pious
sociabilities, and occasional theatre visits, and the interests of
home. The children are jolly, well-fed, intelligent English boys and
girls; full of curiosity, at least in the earlier years. Some of them
have real gifts of intellect and artistic skill, receiving in the
suburban secondary schools the best education which England is giving
to-day. You may see the whole suburbs in August transported to the more
genteel of the southern watering-places; the father, perhaps, a little
bored; the mother perplexed with the difficulty of cramped lodgings and
extortionate prices. But the children are in a magic world, crowding
the seashore, full of the elements of delight and happy laughter.

The rich despise the Working People; the Middle Classes fear them.
Fear, stimulated by every artifice of clever political campaigners, is
the motive power behind each successive uprising. In feverish hordes,
the suburbs swarm to the polling booth to vote against a truculent
Proletariat. The Middle Class elector is becoming irritated and
indignant against working-class legislation. He is growing tired of
the plaint of the unemployed and the insistent crying of the poor. The
spectacle of a Labour Party triumphant in the House of Commons, with a
majority of members of Parliament apparently obedient to the demands
of its leaders, and even a House of Lords afraid of it, fills him with
profound disgust. The vision of a “Keir Hardie” in caricature--with red
tie and defiant beard and cloth cap, and fierce, unquenchable thirst
for Middle Class property--has become an image of Labour Triumphant
which haunts his waking hours. He has difficulty with the plumber
in jerry-built houses needing continuous patching and mending. His
wife is harassed by the indifference or insolence of the domestic
servant. From a blend of these two he has constructed in imagination
the image of Democracy--a loud-voiced, independent, arrogant figure,
with a thirst for drink, and imperfect standards of decency, and a
determination to be supported at some one else’s expense. Every day,
swung high upon embankments or buried deep in tubes underground, he
hurries through the region where the creature lives. He gazes darkly
from his pleasant hill villa upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled
tenements which stretches at his feet. He is dimly distrustful of the
forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every hour he anticipates
the boiling over of the cauldron. He would never be surprised to find
the crowd behind the red flag, surging up his little pleasant pathways,
tearing down the railings, trampling the little garden; the “letting in
of the jungle” upon the patch of fertile ground which has been redeemed
from the wilderness. And whatever may be the future, the present he
finds sufficiently intolerable. The people of the hill are heavily
taxed (as he thinks) in order that the people of the plain may enjoy
good education, cheap trams, parks, and playgrounds; even (as in the
frantic vision of some newspapers) that they may be taught Socialism
in Sunday schools, with parodies of remembered hymns. And the taxes
thus extorted--this, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint--are all
going to make his own life harder, to make life more difficult for
his children. The man of forty has already sounding in his ears the
noise of the clamour of the coming generations. And these coming
generations, who are going to push him roughly out of his occupation,
and bring his little castle in ruins to the ground, are being provided
with an equipment for the struggle out of the funds which he himself
is compelled to supply. He is paying for his own children’s start in
life, and he is having extorted from him the price of providing other
people’s children with as good a start in life, or a better. He has to
lay by for his old age in painful accumulation of pence and shillings,
every one of which he can ill spare. And he now finds the old age of
the loafer and the spendthrift--so he interprets recent legislation
on the subject--bountifully provided for. He wonders where it is
all going to stop. He is becoming every day more impatient with the
complaining of the poor. He refuses to mourn over the sufferings of
the factory girl when he is offering a desirable position as general
“help” and can find no applicant. He believes that the “unemployed”
consist exclusively of those who are determined to go softly all their
days at the public expense--the expense of himself and his class. He is
labouring at his dismal sedentary occupation so many incredible hours
a day, while these men are parading their woes in exuberant rhetoric
at the street corner. And as he labours there enters into his soul a
resentment which becomes at times almost an obsession; in which all the
disability of his devitalised life is concentrated into revolt against
the truculent demands of “the British working man.”

He has had enough of it. He is turning in desperation to any kind of
protection held out to him. His ideals are all towards the top of the
scale. He is proud when he is identifying his interests with those of
Kensington, and indignant when his interests are identified with those
of Poplar. He possesses in full those progressive desires which are
said to be the secret of advance. He wants a little more than he can
afford, and is almost always living beyond his income. He has been
harassed with debts and monetary complications; and the demands of rent
and the rate-collector excite in him a kind of impotent fury. In that
fury he turns round and suddenly strikes down the party in possession,
glad to vote against the working man, whom he fears; and for a change,
which he hopes may lighten his present burden; and against a Socialism
which he cannot understand. So in an unexpected whirlwind of ferocity,
a Progressive Party, hitherto unconquerable, finds itself almost
annihilated. The general effect is that of being suddenly butted by a
sheep.

It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban
London. Family affection is there, cheerfulness, an almost unlimited
patience. Its full meaning to-day and the courses of its future still
remain obscure. Is this to be the type of all civilisations, when the
whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress
finds its grave in a universal suburb? Or is the old shaggy and untamed
earth going to shake itself suddenly once again and bring the whole
edifice tumbling to the ground? It has no clear recognition of its own
worth, or its own universe, or the scheme of the life of the world.
It is losing its old religions. It still builds churches and chapels
of a twentieth-century Gothic architecture: St. Aloysius, reputed to
be dangerously “High,” because its curates wear coloured scarves; the
Baptist Chapel, where the minister maintains the old doctrines of
hell and heaven, and wrestles with the sinner for his immortal soul;
the Congregational Church, where the minister is abreast with modern
culture, and proclaims a less exacting gospel, and faintly trusts the
larger hope. But the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and
unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground
beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its elemental fires.
There are possibilities of havoc in this ordered and comfortable
society which cannot easily be put by. The old lights have fallen
from the sky, existence has become too complex and crowded for the
influences of wide spaces reaching to a far horizon. Summer and winter
pass over these little lamplit streets, to-day the lilac and syringa,
to-morrow the scattered autumn leaves, in an experience of tranquillity
and repose. But with the ear to the ground there is audible the noise
of stranger echoes in the labyrinthine ways which stretch beyond
the boundaries of these pleasant places; full of restlessness and
disappointment, and longing, with a note of menace in it; not without
foreboding to any who would desire, in the security of the suburbs, an
unending end of the world.

Why does the picture of this suburban life, presented by however kindly
a critic, leave the reader at the end with a sense of dissatisfaction?
The query is aroused by examination of its actual condition. It is
excited not only by works written in revolt, such as those of Mr. Wells
or George Gissing, but also by the writings of Mr. Keble Howard and
Mr. Shan Bullock and Mr. Pett Ridge and others, who have attempted,
with greater or less success, to exhibit a kindly picture of suburban
society. At first this society appeared in literature as depicted by
cleverness, delighting in satire at the expense of bourgeois ideals.
Its historians were always in protest against its limitations, its
complacencies, its standards of social success and intellectual
attainment. But in later time this somewhat crude attitude of scornful
superiority has passed. Many writers with an intimate knowledge of
suburban and English Middle Class provincial life have attempted a
sympathetic and truthful description: the sincere representation of
a civilisation. But in all their efforts the general effect is of
something lacking; not so much in individual happiness, or even in
bodily and mental development, as of a certain communal poverty of
interest and ideal. The infinite boredom of the horrible women of “The
Year of Jubilee”--with its vision of Camberwell villadom as idle and
desolate as Flaubert’s vision of French provincial bourgeois life in
“Madame Bovary”--has been replaced by a scene of busy activity, with
interest in cricket and football results, “book talk,” love-making,
croquet and tennis parties for young men and women. And yet at the end,
and with the best will in the world, one closes the narrative with a
feeling of desolation; a revolt against a life which, with all its
energies and satisfactions, has somehow lost from it that zest and
sparkle and inner glow of accepted adventure which alone would seem to
give human life significance. Civilise the poor, one complains, expand
their tiny rubbish yards into green gardens, introduce bow-windows
before and verandahs behind; remove them from the actual experience of
privation, convert all England into a suburban city--will the completed
product be pronounced to be “very good”?

It is not the simplicity of suburban life which is at fault. Simplicity
in writing, or in character, is as difficult of attainment as it is
worth the attaining. And in so far as simplicity here exists--character
cut on elemental lines, or occupied with elemental things--it provides
an antidote to the complexities or cynicisms of other classes. No one,
except the vulgar, despises a Middle Class existence because it has
substituted a high tea for an elaborate dinner, because it uses speech
to reveal rather than to conceal thought, or because it refuses to
torture itself with analysis and emotion which are the products of mind
divorced from the ancient sanities of existence. Nor, again, is the
narrow separation from poverty and the abyss a cause for any legitimate
contempt, which makes the business of life for so many of them in their
tiny two-storeyed villas an enterprise hazardous and insecure. Rather
is the observer conscious, where this struggle exists, that there
has entered into the atmosphere the breath of salt wind, bracing if
austere, which can provide a more heroic sustenance than the atmosphere
in which such tests and challenges are denied. We may compare, for
example, two of Mr. Bullock’s stories of suburban life; the one, in
which he traces the attempt of a “twopenny clerk” to provide for the
needs of a family on an exiguous and precarious income; the other, in
which a prosperous family who have attained security set themselves
to the business of living under such favourable conditions. There is
humour in the struggles of Robert Thorne, as of all similar millions of
Robert Thornes, in his attempt to maintain his hardly-won standard of
decencies and modest comfort. There is resistance to hard circumstance
which the most critical onlooker will applaud--in the little boxes
for the division of income, labelled “Necessities,” “Outings,”
“Savings”--the first so rarely permitting any overflow into the second
and third; in the revolt against the shabby clothes and difficulties
created by unexpected illness; in the necessities of a clerk, who is
also a man, wheeling the perambulator on Peckham Rye, or scrubbing the
front doorsteps furtively after nightfall. But the humour is of the
ancient, not of the modern, significance; a humour not without tears in
it, with admiration also at the courage and determination which could
yet be content, and under such conditions, with “the glory of going
on and still to be.” For here is the sense of battles; and battle,
whether against deliberate foes, against the inimical force of Nature,
or the indifference of the crowd to the individual survival, is always
stimulating and bracing. And it is the battle depicted by Mr. Davidson
in his “thirty bob a week”; the “naked child against a hungry wolf,”
“the playing bowls upon a splitting wreck,” “daily done by many and
many a one” in a tenacious struggle, against the enemies of human
welfare, which illuminates and glorifies the monotonous streets of
suburban England.

But where this “struggle to live” has passed into a “struggle to
attain,” the verdict is less enthusiastic. For that struggle to attain
too often means absorption in ignoble standards, and an existence
coming more and more to occupy a world of “make-believe.” When the
family is in a position of assured comfort or of affluence, the houses
ample stuccoed or pseudo-Georgian edifices, and the breadwinners in
posts of established security in the commercial or financial houses
of the city, the atmosphere often becomes stifling and difficult. It
may be that such a condition is in itself unsuitable to mankind in
the life of so uncertain and transitory a world: that existence which
is occupied with sedentary labour in an artificially constructed
aggregation of human beings herded in the same narrow grooves, is an
existence of necessity carrying with it the seeds of futility and
decay. Certainly the two chief accusations against the product of such
an existence would be of an imperfect standard of value about the
things which exist, and of a lack of demand for the existence of things
at present unattained. It is a wrong estimate of the significance--of
rank, of birth, of wealth, of various material accumulations--which
produces the more desolating ingredients of suburban life. Listen to
the conversation in the second-class carriages of a suburban railway
train, or examine the literature and journalism specially constructed
for the suburban mind; you will often find endless chatter about the
King, the Court, and the doings of a designated “Society”; personal
paragraphs, descriptions of clothes, smile, or manner; a vision of
life in which the trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but
in which there is no adequate test or judgment, which are the heroic,
which the trivial. Liberated from the devils of poverty, the soul is
still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants. This is
the explanation of the so-called “snobbery” of the suburbs. Here is
curiosity, but curiosity about lesser occupations; energies,--for the
suburbs in their healthy human life, the swarms of happy, physically
efficient children, are a storehouse of the nation’s energy,--but
energies which tend to scatter and degrade themselves in aimless
activities; “random and meaningless sociabilities” which neither
hearten, stimulate, nor inspire. So into a feud with a neighbour over
a disputed garden fence, or a bustling and breezy church or chapel’s
mundane entertainment, or a criticism of manners and fashion, dress and
deportment, will be thrown force and determination which might have
been directed to effort of permanent worth, in devotion to one of the
great causes of the world.

Beyond these incorrect standards of value there is a noticeable
absence of vision. Suburban life has often little conception of social
services, no tradition of disinterested public duty, but a limited
outlook beyond a personal ambition. Here the individualism of the
national character exercises its full influence: unchecked by the
horizontal links of the industrial peoples, organising themselves
into unions, or by the vertical links of the older aristocracy with a
conception of family service which once passed from parent to child.
Religion--if that were vital and compelling--would provide in part a
vista of larger horizons. When and where religion existed--even in its
rigid conception of heaven and hell and a straight way of salvation--it
offered some universes for contemplation beyond the orderly suburban
road and the well-trimmed suburban garden. It is to be feared, however,
that in the prevailing cloudiness about ultimate things which is
developing in the modern world, religion has been tending more and
more to resolve itself into social institutions, “Pleasant Sunday
Afternoons,” or exercise of the less adventurous forces of suburban
philanthropy. What remains? A public spirit in local affairs which is
deplorably low, which sends a minute percentage of voters to Council or
Guardian Elections, and accompanies a perpetual contempt for present
municipal mismanagement with a refusal of the personal effort required
to make that management clean and efficient. An outlook upon Imperial
affairs which is less a conception of politics than the acceptance of
a social tradition: which leaves suburban seats securely Conservative
not because the Conservative creed is there definitely embraced, but
because Conservatism is supposed to be the party favoured by Court,
society, and the wealthy and fashionable classes. And too often an
essential ignorance supplemented by an arrogance which refuses advice
and despises opposition. The result is a not too reputable product of
modern civilisation: that dense and complacent “Imperial citizen” who
despises “the foreigner,” and could set right or improve upon generals
in the field or admirals on the ocean, and is satisfied with its
universe and its limitations because it has resolutely closed all doors
and windows through which there might appear the vision of larger other
worlds. It is this particular suburban figure--with custom dominant,
accepted and inherited students of judgment, contempt for the classes
below it, envy of the classes above, and no desire for adventure or
devotion to a cause or an ideal--which has become too representative a
figure of a laborious and praiseworthy race of men. Against this type
of “honest man” have warred the anarchists, the artists, the advocates
of new moralities, the opponents of the accepted way. In revolt against
the dominion of so questionable a citizen, we are perhaps inclined to
forget the mitigating features: the good nature and ready generosity,
the cleanliness of life, the still unbroken family tradition; all
animated by that resolution, not so much deliberate as unconscious, to
“make the best of it,” in a world of incalculable purposes; in which,
indeed, some cloudiness of vision or some unusual courage would seem to
be necessary if the struggle is to be continued at all.

Yet in the crumbling and decay of English rural life, and the vanishing
of that “yeoman” class which in Scotland provides a continuous breeding
ground of great men, it would seem that it is from the suburban and
professional people we must more and more demand a supply of men
and women of capacity and energy adequate to the work of the world.
Sufficiently vulnerable to criticism as they appear to-day, finding no
one who will be proud of them because they are not proud of themselves,
they yet offer a storehouse of accumulated physical health and clean
simplicities of living. Embedded in them are whole new societies
created by legislation and a national demand, whose present development
is full of interest, whose future is full of promise. Here is, for
example, the new type of elementary teacher--a figure practically
unknown forty years ago--drawn in part from the tradesmen and the more
ambitious artisan population, and now, lately, in a second generation,
from its own homes. It is exhibiting a continuous rise of standard,
keen ambitions, a respect for intellectual things which is often
absent in the population amongst which it resides. Its members are
not only doing their own work efficiently, but are everywhere taking
the lead in public and _quasi_-public activities. They appear as the
mainstay of the political machine in suburban districts, serving upon
the municipal bodies, in work, clear-headed and efficient; the leaders
in the churches and chapels, and their various social organisations.
They are taking up the position in the urban districts which for many
generations was occupied by the country clergy in the rural districts;
providing centres with other standards than those of monetary success,
and raising families who exhibit sometimes vigour of character,
sometimes unusual intellectual talent. A quite remarkable proportion
of the children of elementary schoolmasters is now knocking at the
doors of the older Universities, clamouring for admittance; and those
who effect entrance are often carrying off the highest honours. This
process is only in its beginning; every year the standard improves;
these “servants of the State” have assured to them a noteworthy and
honourable future. Again, there is no doubt that the conception of
social service is making progress against the resistance of whatever is
solid in the suburban tradition of individualism and indifference. Even
the Socialist no longer turns from the Middle Classes in disgust. He is
coming to regard them as the most fruitful field for his propaganda.
The women--or a remnant of them--are finding outlet for suppressed
energy and proffered devotion in an agitation for the vote. Sixpenny
reprints of proof or disproof of religion, the world’s classics in neat
shilling volumes, sevenpenny novels, and a variety of printed matter
are irrigating the suburbs with a fresh flood of literature. It is not
impossible to conceive of a time when a Middle Class will definitely
build up a standard of its own: no longer turning to a wealthy and
leisured company above it for effective imitation of a life to which it
is unsuited. Becoming conscious, for the first time, that it possesses
elements to contribute to the stream of national life which can be
provided neither by the rich nor the poor, it may gain that collective
respect and pride in itself which it has not yet achieved. Abandoning
its panic fear of the industrial peoples, it may find itself treating
with them as an equal, exacting terms in return for its alliance. At
best it may even resist the stampedes of those who find the support of
the “Middle Classes” always easily obtainable for an agitation against
the Income Tax or in favour of municipal reaction, or for any system
which will “broaden the basis of taxation” by shifting it from the
shoulders of the rich to the shoulders of the poor.

This fissure in the alliance between the Middle Class and the
wealthy--the most absurd and irrational of all alliances, in which
the advantage is all sucked by the one, and the burden borne by the
other--would long ago have been demanded by the suburbans themselves
but for one remarkable element in their present condition. Revolution,
or at least vigorous progress, may always be predicted when in the case
of any particular class the standard of comfort is permanently beating
against a limitation of income, and permanently in revolt against
such limitation. Such a conflict seemed inevitable a few years ago in
the case of the Middle Classes. The “intellectual proletariat” was
evidently being created, which could never obtain full satisfaction
for its desires. It would fret always at its limitations. Its fretting
would become vocal in a clamorous demand for economic change. And
the “intellectual proletariat” has been the historic leader of all
political and social revolutions. The process of its creation, however,
seems likely to be checked, and in a curious fashion. The pressure is
being reduced, not by any lowering of the standard of comfort demanded
by the individual, for that is steadily rising in suburban England,
but by the limitation of the family, pursued as a deliberate method
of adjusting expenditure to income. The headlong collapse in the
birth-rate of this country during the past twenty years--a fall greater
than that in any other nation in Europe--is a collapse to which all
classes save the very poorest are probably contributors. There are
no exact figures available, of allocation to one section rather than
to another. But there is much to indicate that this decline has gone
far amongst those suburban populations in which a few years ago the
discrepancy between the standard of comfort and the means available for
its satisfaction was most conspicuous. The endurance of a continual
indebtedness and frustration of desire, the indignation which will
convert that endurance into a hunger for reform, the anger and envy
against more prosperous people which is excited by the contrast of
human inequalities under such conditions of torment, is being assuaged,
not by reform itself, nor by any accepted reduction of the individual
demands, nor by any falling back upon supernatural consolations. It is
being averted by the repudiation of marriage, or its postponement, or
its acceptance without the accompaniment of children. Here is a kind
of ingenious method of turning the position, of climbing through the
window when the door is closed. Judgment may vary between approval
or regret, in accordance with the point of view of the critic. The
nation must inevitably suffer from an artificial restriction of
children amongst those very classes and families who should be most
encouraged to produce them; who offer the best chances of raising,
from a healthy stock and in simple homes, the men and women who will be
the most desirable citizens of the future. And a nation is in a serious
condition if its better stocks are producing smaller families or no
families at all, and its least capable are still raising an abundant
progeny. An appreciable amount of human discontent, on the other hand,
is doubtless arrested by this method of eluding Nature’s blind struggle
for existence; and those who have vested interests in contentment--who
see changes bringing them less opportunity of life’s good things--will,
no doubt, hail with approval so satisfactory a method of averting the
operation of “natural” law. By such limitation of family the standard
of comfort is reduced to the level of the income, and the clerk and
professional classes can be identified with the prevailing order,
instead of becoming centres of social upheaval.

But this limitation involves deliberate and artificial repudiation of
paternity and motherhood, and as such is condemned by most ethical
systems and by the Christian Church. Its widespread operation, now
guaranteed by figures which may be deplored, but which cannot be
denied, in itself reveals the considerable undermining process which
suburban religion has undergone. Once again, therefore, it is necessary
to notice this element of weakening supernatural sanctions: to inquire
how far this process has gone, and whither it is tending. There will
be no immediate catastrophe; for custom and convention will carry on
the apparatus of organised belief long after the driving power of
definite conviction has vanished, like a machine still running down
after the motive power has ceased. There are renewed rallies in each
generation, especially at the time of adolescence; revivals under the
inspiration of American evangelists, or advocates of new theologies, or
vigorous teachers who blend theology with politics, humour, or social
entertainment. It may still be confidently affirmed to-day that, of
all the various sections of English society, the suburban and Middle
Class retains most resolutely its ancient religious convictions. These
convictions are here more vigorously preserved than in the class below
them, to whom, as a whole, religion has not yet come, or in the class
above them, whose attitude towards Christianity has always been one
of kindly patronage rather than of accepted allegiance. Yet it would
be idle to overlook the ravages which have even here been made. These
ravages must not be sought merely amongst the small bodies in open
opposition, ethical societies and the like, or the much larger bodies
in open indifference, such as the multitude of Sunday cyclists or
the patrons of Sunday music. They will be found also amongst those
who still own outward allegiance to the faith of their fathers, and
still think themselves to be orthodox believers. “Some thirty years
ago,” writes the Bishop of Birmingham, “there was a sort of Protestant
religion, with a doctrine of the Trinity, of Heaven and Hell, of
Atonement and Judgment, of Resurrection and Eternal Life, which for
good or evil could be more or less assumed. Such a standard has gone. I
seriously doubt whether nearly half the grown men of the country could
seriously say that they believed that Christ is God, or that He really
rose on the third day from the dead. It is not that they have become
Unitarians. It is that their religious opinions are in complete chaos.”

The drift of this “chaos” in modern thought is, indeed, as noticeable
amongst those who still cling to religious exercises and sing the hymns
of childhood as amongst the larger populations who regretfully or
defiantly, or more often in sheer apathy, have abandoned these ancient
traditions and ceremonies. And just as, in Denison’s famous verdict,
our large organised charities are less a sign of our compassion than
of our indifference, so it may be that the noise of fierce fighting
amongst rival religions, the queer competition which Mr. Charles Booth
discovered even in the remotest slums of London for the bodies and
souls of their denizens, may be less an evidence of religious fervour
than a manifestation of an ebbing vitality.

Yet the edifice collapses slowly, and in silence. No one can tell,
at any definite moment, how far the disintegrating process has gone.
Few records would be more illuminating than candid confessions, such
as the confession recently made by Mr. Wells in his _First and Last
Things_, honestly set down by quite ordinary people, in a casual street
of a suburban terrace, of what they believed. If the industrious
householders of “Homelea,” “Belle View,” “Buona Vista,” “Sunnyhurst,”
and “The Laurels,” contiguous dwellings in Beaconsfield Road, Upper
Norwood, were thus deliberately to face their convictions, the result
might be surprising to the clergy of St. Aloysius and St. Clotilde,
and the ministers of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Baptist
Chapel, beneath whose discourses, attired in long black coats, they
sit in decorous silence Sunday after Sunday, seemingly as docile and
acquiescent as their fathers before them.

The loss of religion would not, indeed, be so serious a matter if it
were being replaced by any other altruistic and impersonal ideal. Such
have been found in a conception of patriotism, in efforts towards
a social redemption, even in a vision of duty, sometimes hard and
rarefied, which occupies its mind with the difficulties of the day.
It is to be feared that these are not universal amongst the suburban
peoples. Their lives are laborious and often disappointing. The rise
in the price of the material things which they regard as essential
is steady and continuous. House rent, and the rates laid upon house
rent, clothes, food, the demands for small enjoyments, with the debt
which often accompanies a too radiant conception of the possibilities
of fixed income, leave little margin for superfluous expenditure. And
as with the body, so with the soul. Considerable hours spent in not
too exacting but conspicuously cheerless occupations, the natural
harassments of Middle Class poverty, and the misfortune of loss or
sickness, which is always unexpected and generally unprovided for,
leave little surplusage of mental energy to be devoted to larger
issues. Those who are intimate with the modern phases of suburban
life think that they can detect a slackening of energy and fibre
in a generation which is much occupied with its pleasures. It is a
common complaint with the fathers that none of their children seem
prepared to work in the manner in which they worked in the older days.
It is a common complaint with the whole of a passing generation--the
big manufacturers who built up England’s commercial supremacy, the
veterans who remember the strenuous middle class existence of Victorian
England--that the whole newer time thinks that it has little to do but
to settle down and enjoy the heritage which has been won. The young
men of the suburban society, especially, are being accused of a mere
childish absorption in vicarious sport and trivial amusements.

It is curious to find this accusation driven home by just that variety
of newspapers which has most completely exploited the nascent hunger
of the sedentary boyhood of these classes for the excitements of
gambling and adventure. The cheap and sensational Press found here a
field ripe for its energies. It attained an immense commercial success
from the provision of the stuff which this population demanded. Now
the cleverest of its promoters are beginning to be a little alarmed
at the results of its handiwork, and to eye with foreboding or with
disgust the youth that has been moulded by its ideals. Under the
circumstances, resentment at such scolding would appear not unnatural.
In a popular play, designed to encourage or to ridicule Volunteering,
the creature of this “Yellow Press” was recently revealed in all his
vacuous vulgarity; and the “Yellow Press” itself turned in anger to
assail its own darling and docile offspring. The retort, indeed, could
be final and complete. “We have been nourished,” these could say,
“in this unreal world of impudence, nonsense, vicarious sport and
gambling. We began with our boys’ papers and guessing competitions.
We were insensibly led on to efforts after a pound a week for life
by estimating the money in the Bank of England on a certain day, or
amassing gain in hundreds of pounds for guessing missing words or the
last line of ‘Limericks.’ On the Sabbath, committed by our parents to
some such literature as the Sunday Syndicated Press, we found there the
same cheery game, smeared with a grease of piety; rewards and prizes
here for guessing anagrams on Bible cities, or acrostics representing
Kings and Queens of Israel. We were led on to talk and read and chatter
about ‘sport,’ in biography of various football heroes, in descriptive
reports of football matches, ever deepening in imbecility, until they
rivalled the language of the lunatic asylum; stuff that uses its own
phraseology, about ‘netting the muddied orange’ and ‘the ubiquitous
spheroid,’ and ‘impelling the pill between the uprights.’ Our thoughts
and growing interest were sedulously directed away from consideration
of any rational or serious universe. We were exhorted to demonstrate
patriotism by ‘mafficking,’ and informed that when we fell into the
fountain at Trafalgar Square and subsequently embraced a policeman, we
were performing a virtuous action. Then we are denounced because this
universe of foolishness and frivolity has rendered us utterly unfit to
face real things. Our slight world crumbles before such a challenge,
as the daylight judges and condemns the scene of a night’s orgie.”
“This short, slender, pale man,” says M. Hanotaux of Taine in 1870,
“munching his throat lozenges, with squinting grey eyes behind his
thick glasses, had at last seen things which astonished him--dying men,
flowing blood, burning cities.” Dying men, flowing blood, and burning
cities intruded suddenly into a world which is fashioned out of such
emptiness and vanity exhibit but the same judgment as is revealed to
the discerning mind through every passing hour.

And no one can seriously diagnose the condition of the “Suburbans”
to-day without seriously considering also the influences of this
chosen literature. There is nothing obscene about it, and little that
is morally reprehensible. But it is mean and tawdry and debased,
representing a tawdry and dusty world. You can see it in illustration.
Photographs of the _Englishman’s Home_, showing the products of
spectacular sport and silly gambling, falling amid their falling
houses, face the picture of a negro on a raised platform pummelling an
American, with tier upon tier of white, vacant faces--the Australian
spectators--gazing with fierce approval. The reader passes--in such
publications--from one frivolity to another. Now it is a woman
adventurer on the music-hall stage, now the principal characters in
some “sensational” divorce case, now a serial story in which the
“bounder” expands himself, and is triumphant in an unreal universe.
In the midst of all comes an appeal which, if it were to excite even
a limited response, would sweep all this nonsense away, and land
in bankruptcy the vast apparatus of newspapers which exploit and
encourage the hunger of the suburban crowd. The work of corruption--the
word is not too violent--in the matter of frivolous gambling
competitions, is a systematic whole, beginning with the papers designed
for boys and children. From absorption in these, with occasional
rewards of five or ten shillings, a box of paints, or a bicycle, the
growing youth passes to the “Limerick,” the picture puzzle, and the
missing-word competition. At the end this newspaper world becomes--to
its victims--an epitome and mirror of the whole world. Divorced from
the ancient sanities of manual or skilful labour, of exercise in the
open air, absorbed for the bulk of his day in crowded offices adding
sums or writing letters, each a unit in a crowd which has drifted away
from the realities of life in a complex, artificial city civilisation,
he comes to see no other universe than this--the rejoicing over hired
sportsmen who play before him, the ingenuities of sedentary guessing
competitions, the huge frivolity and ignorance of the world of the
music hall and the Yellow newspaper. Having attained so dolorous a
consummation, perhaps the best that can be hoped for him is the advent
of that friendly bullet which will terminate his inglorious life. Were
this accomplished, the next day his own newspapers, the high priests of
his religion, will rejoice over his death, and shamelessly gird at him
for being what he is--the faithfullest of worshippers at their shrine.

This is the less desirable side of suburban life: a set-off against
its many excellences. It probably represents but a passing phase
in a progress towards intelligence and a sense of real values. That
progress would be aided by any loosening of the city texture by which,
and through improved means of transit, something of the large sanities
of rural existence could be mingled with the quickness and agility of
the town. At least the most hostile critics will acknowledge in these
regions a clean and virile life: forming, when criticism has done its
worst, in conjunction with the artisan class below, from which it is so
sharply cut off in interest and ideas, the healthiest and most hopeful
promise for the future of modern England.




CHAPTER IV

THE MULTITUDE


I

The Multitude is the People of England: that eighty per cent. (say)
of the present inhabitants of these islands who never express their
own grievances, who rarely become articulate, who can only be observed
from outside and very far away. It is a people which, all unnoticed
and without clamour or protest, has passed through the largest secular
change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life
of the city. Nine out of ten families have migrated within three
generations: they are still only, as it were, commencing to settle down
in their new quarters, with the paint scarcely dry on them, and the
little garden still untilled. How has the migration affected them? How
will they expand or degenerate in the new town existence, each in the
perpetual presence of all? That is a question of as profound interest
in answering as it is difficult to answer. The nineteenth century--in
the life of the wage-earning multitudes--was a century of disturbance.
The twentieth promises to be a century of consolidation. What completed
product will emerge from its city aggregation, the children of the
crowd? You must learn of them to-day, as I have said, from outside:
from the few observers who have lived amongst them and recorded their
experience; from the very few representative men, with articulate
utterance, which they have flung up from amongst themselves. You must
examine masses of documents and statistics embodied in Government
publications, or tentative efforts towards a sociology: recording how
they live, and eat and drink, and obtain shelter, and marry and are
given in marriage; the particulars of their upbringing, how they seek
or elude religions and charity, and escape from the laws which are
passed for their protection, and enjoy and suffer, and live and die.
The mass of this chaotic and undigested evidence waits for the observer
who will create from it some general picture of the life of the English
people. And when all these statistics and cold facts are assimilated,
there yet remains the further inquiry of the temper and spirit of a
race subjected to such forces; hampered and limited by the narrow walls
between which they labour and endure.

The tangible things come first, in some such evidence as that provided
by Government investigation, in the Blue Book bearing a forbidding
title, the “Cost of Living of the Working Classes.” It shows them,
gathered into astonishing cities, working for variable wage. It reveals
the dwellings which they seek to transform into homes. It follows their
wages from production to distribution, in the cost of their daily
economy, the manner in which they divide up their exiguous incomes, the
amounts they think it worth while to allot to shelter, to food, and
to pleasure. It analyses over a thousand “family budgets,” each giving
details of how much is spent weekly on butter, tapioca, or treacle. It
shows the rate of birth and the rate of death: varying from city to
city, both materially changing. It gives, in fact, in outline only,
that blurred image of a huge and industrial population whose complete
apprehension would furnish the key to many of the pressing problems of
to-day.

Here are the houses in which for a season they abide; in part the
product of their own volition, in part the creation of external changes
which they can but little control. They have had no choice in these
constructions. Their demands and desires have scarcely counted in the
provision made for them. Their impetuous need was shelter: shelter
“on the spot,” around the sites of the new factories which had sucked
them up from the deserted countryside. And they were thankful to take
what was offered them by those men who foresaw the changes which
were coming, and could accumulate fortunes in the rapid provision
of immediate necessities. Swept into aggregations by the demand of
the newest industries, the clay and stone has been hastily fashioned
into place for human habitation. And now these stand to-day, made by,
and yet making, the temper and characteristic of the people. Here
the normal standard is a four-roomed cottage; there, “back to back”
houses ravage the health of their inhabitants; here again huge piles
of tenements encompass the bewildered occupants in a kind of human
ant-heap; there the ancient dwelling of the wealthy or comfortable
classes have been “swarmed out” by the busy people. Carlyle pictured
mankind flowing, as it were, through the visible arena of material
things. A wave of humanity beats through these solid constructions;
it vanishes, another succeeds. “Orpheus built the walls of Thebes by
the mere sound of his lyre. Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo,
summoning out all the sandstone rocks to dance and shape themselves
into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble
streets?” All cities are thus built “to music.” What discordant melody
to-day is responsible for the creation of Jarrow, or Salford, or
Canning Town?

England at once, under such an analysis, separates itself into
divergent parts. There is rural England, still largely unaffected by
modern science and invention, except by the loss of population, drained
away; the agricultural labourers, the fishermen, and the artisans
of the sleeping provincial towns. There is urban England in hastily
created industrial centres, vocal with the clanging of furnaces and
the noise of the factories; but still a population in manageable
aggregation, set in open spaces, never far from green fields under
a wide sky. And there is London: a population, a nation in itself;
breeding, as it seems, a special race of men; which only is also
produced, and that in less intensive cultivation, in the few other
larger cities--Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool--where the conditions
of coagulation offer some parallel to this monster clot of humanity.
Everywhere, indeed, this million-peopled, exaggerated London sets at
defiance the generalisations drawn from the normal town areas. House
rent is immensely higher. The mean weekly price for two rooms in London
is six shillings, in the provinces a little more than one half; for
four rooms the variation is between nine shillings in the one, five
shillings in the other. A portion of this surplus is the booty of more
highly-paid labour. The greater part vanishes in the increased value
of the land, heaped up by the mere fact of aggregation, and flowing
away into the pockets of many affluent and fortunate persons. London
has been normally Tory; defiant of “Socialism,” defiant of change.
The cause of this cannot be found entirely in the existence of a
metropolis and capital of the Empire living a parasitic existence on
tribute levied upon the boundaries of the world. For in most of the
great capitals of Europe the advocates of revolutionary programmes
find to-day their most fruitful fields of propaganda. It may perhaps
best be understood in the apprehension of an actual picture of visible
things. The answer is hidden in these strings and congestions of little
comfortable two-storeyed red and grey cottages, which multiplied with
such amazing rapidity in the preceding generation; pushing their
tentacles from factory or industrial centre out over the neighbouring
fields, and proclaiming with their cleanliness and tiny gardens and
modest air of comfort, a working population prosperous and content. One
type of dwelling, indeed, is found to be more or less prevalent through
all the urban aggregation. That is the small four or five-roomed
cottage, containing on the ground floor a front parlour, a kitchen, and
a scullery built as an addition to the main part of the house; and
on the upper floor the bedrooms, the third bedroom in the five-roomed
house being built over the scullery. And in such dwelling-places,
if anywhere, is concealed the secret of the future of the people of
England. Abroad, the self-contained “flat,” the gigantic tenement, in
which the single family is embedded in a cliff of bricks and mortar, is
more and more coming to be the staple dwelling of the working classes.
Broad, tree-planted avenues, with fast electric locomotion, cut through
carefully planned cities of storey piled on storey. The whole effect
is grandiose and spacious, if it lacks the picturesqueness of that
enormous acreage of chimney-pots and tiny tumbled cottages which is
revealed in a kind of smoky grandeur from the railway embankments of
South and East London--the desperate efforts made by a race reared in
village communities to maintain in the urban aggregation some semblance
of a home. Such is the shelter; what of the food? The price of bread
varies. Family budgets of the weekly incomes are extraordinarily
suggestive of the struggle which takes place in the industrial areas
of the city. Classified according to amount of net receipts, they
reveal an ever-growing proportion devoted to the essentials of bodily
nutriment; until, at the bottom, where the income appears permanently
below the “living wage,” there is practically no margin left when the
food demand is satisfied. “For the incomes below thirty shillings,
two-thirds of the total income is spent on food, ‘declares a Board
of Trade investigator,’ while in the case of the incomes of forty
shillings and above, about fifty-seven per cent. is spent on food.”
Amongst the poorest, actually one-fifth of the total food expenditure
is spent on bread and flour: a conclusive statistic condemning those
who lightly justify a tax on imported corn on the ground that so
much stale bread is committed to the pigsty. Tea, in these lowest
incomes, demands ninepence farthing a week, and sugar eightpence. It
is expenditure on the margin, counted in farthings, a life exceedingly
difficult to realise amongst those to whom a few coppers more or less
means no appreciable difference.

Variations--from town to town--in a civilisation which is in all
essentials homogeneous, and a life of easy flow from one labour
centre to another, tend to lessen or to vanish. Yet there still are
apparent local variations in wages which appear to be independent of
variations in wealth or in prices. Again there are most remarkable
differences in habits, customs, productivity, and statistics of birth
and death. Why (for example) should Middlesborough have the highest
birth-rate of England? Why indeed, the cynical might ask, should any
children be born in Middlesborough at all, considering the more than
dismal picture which investigation discloses of existence in that
feverish industrial centre? There is appalling wastage of life force
in these percentages of infant mortality, especially in the factory
centres--soiled, useless child lives, whose existence stands for no
intelligible significance in any rational scheme of human affairs.
There are statistics of mortality which reveal so many years knocked
off human life in the transition from the life of the field to the
life of the factory. And there is the evidence also, amongst the
industrial peoples as amongst the classes above them, of perhaps the
most remarkable change which is operating to-day in modern England:
in the tumbling down of the birth-rate with ominous rapidity, until
nothing but a similar reduction of the death-rate, with the increase of
sanitation and the limitation of disease, seems to stand between the
two meeting in a henceforth stationary population. Is the vitality of
the race being burnt up in mine and furnace, in the huddled mazes of
the city? And is the future of a colonising people to be jeopardised,
not by difficulties of overlordship at the extremities of its dominion,
but by obscure changes in the opinion, the religion, and the energies
at the heart of the Empire? These and other subjects confront even a
superficial examination of the material condition of England. Karl
Marx was wrong in his defiant assertion that economic causes were the
sole factors in the transformations of history. He would have been
right had he asserted that many startling overturnings of opinion, in
political and social, and even religious change, can ultimately be
traced back to the economic condition of obscure masses of the common
people. The majority are in regular labour in summer and winter,
tearing from coal and furnace and factory the vast industrial wealth
of England. Their disabilities are imperfect houses set often in quite
needlessly squalid surroundings: the possibility of finding, through no
fault of their own, their labour no longer required; specific diseases
and risks of specific accidents which are associated with various
specific occupations. Their advantages are a rate of payment higher for
shorter hours of work than is at present prevailing (in the majority
of trades) in any other country of Europe. The artisan is far better
fed than the agricultural labourer, is more intelligent, quicker and
more active, with greater pleasures available in popular entertainment,
or a Saturday half-holiday, or a week at the seaside. Yet his span
of life is shorter and his work more precarious. He possesses little
opportunity for the accumulation of property. He has no “stake in the
country,” and has no permanent possession, lacking even a tiny plot of
land which he can bequeath from father to child. His effects--on his
decease--are generally negligible. The Multitude, with a substantial
although inadequate share of the income of the country, possesses but
an infinitesimal proportion of its capital.

In such surroundings and despite such drawbacks, there labours a hardy
race of men, whose efforts, in skill, perseverance, and indefatigable
industry, have earned them supremacy in the markets of the world. It
is an industrial order in transition, evidently being swept forward
by forces beyond individual control, to a condition in the future
which would be almost inconceivable to the present. It is a population
of weekly wage-earners which has struggled out of servitude into
independence, but which still remains goaded into activity by fear--not
of the lash of the overseer, but of the grim and implacable forces of
hunger and cold. Slavery, Serfdom, Poverty: these, says the author of
the _Nemesis of Nations_, form three stages in the changing condition
of the social basis of civilisation. “Poverty” is the foundation
of the present industrial order. It is a poverty which is removed,
for the most part, from actual lack of physical necessities, though
it is always never far distant from such a privation. It is rather
“industrialism”--the “proletariat”--a state of human affairs for which
we have in English no defining title. In working it provides others
with leisure, and the complex and refining influences which leisure can
bring. It works in the city aggregations, always twisting threads, or
clanging machinery, or stoking effectual fires. Its products post o’er
land and ocean without rest--swinging steel bridges over the rivers of
East Africa, furnishing Nicaragua with carpets, or encasing the women
of Upper Burmah in Lancashire cotton fabrics. What is the meaning of it
all? What is the end of it all? We cannot tell the meaning outside; the
future of a world when the “iron age” has become triumphant, and man,
a midget, controlling by his intelligence huge and ponderable forces,
will be lost in the labyrinths of his enormous machines. Certain
forms of American activity on the shores of Lake Michigan, or in the
devastated North-East of Pennsylvania, provide sufficient forecast of
such a future. Nor can we tell the meaning (as it were) inside: in the
lives of those two differentiated classes which the modern industrial
life is daily creating; the life of those who enjoy, on the one hand,
in Pleasure Cities, in all branches of eager and sometimes morbid
amusement; and the life of the new race which will be evolved out of
these strenuous gnomes who labour in the heart of the city congestions.

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 (in her own happy phrase) 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.”[3]

Every observer, in this and its hundred similar fellows, can see family
affection, endurance, kindliness, and patience beyond all praise;
a resistance (even in the last extremity) 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.

The poor are inclined to suspect and dislike the classes just above
them, the tradesmen. Nowhere is the moral standard more divergent
than between the frugal, laborious, and rather timid assiduities
of the lower middle class on the one hand, and on the other the
reckless, generous, improvident life of the working peoples. To the
“gentleman,” the attitude of the sea-folk is different. He is despised
for his ignorance. He is sometimes regarded as fair game for deceit
or extortion, outside the moral standard of the home community, just
as the coloured peoples are regarded as outside the recognised codes
of civilisation to-day. Yet there is little envy of his riches and
enjoyments, and even a certain admiration, so long as he conforms to
certain accepted laws of kindliness. “‘An ’orrible lie!’ between two
poor people is fair play from a poor man to a wealthier, just as, for
instance, the wealthy man considers himself at liberty to make speeches
full of hypocritical untruth when he is seeking the suffrage of the
free and independent electors, or is trying to teach the poor man how
to make himself more profitable to his employer.” The “gentlemen” are
permitted idleness, luxuriousness, and the freest self-indulgence
without criticism; but anything from them in the nature of meanness
is resented. Haggling, for example, over the hire of a boat, is an
unpardonable offence. The fishermen, on their occasional holidays,
spend their savings lavishly and without question; why should not the
“gentlemen” do the same? “When Tony goes away himself, he pays what is
asked; regrets it afterwards, if at all; and comes home when his money
is done. ‘If a gen’leman,’ he says, ‘can’t afford to pay the rate, what
du ’ee come on the beach to hire a boat for--an’ try to beat a fellow
down? I reckon ’tis only a _sort o’ gen’leman_ as does that!’”

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.’”[4]

It was thought, says Mr. Charles Booth, of a certain experiment in East
London, that as the poor were not going to the churches, they would
attend the Hall of Science. When the Hall of Science was opened, it
was as deserted as the churches. The people wanted neither religion
nor its antidote. All they wanted was to be left alone. All that
the poor want, runs the popular Socialist declaration, is that the
rich shall get off their backs. All that the poor want, would be a
truer aphorism, is to be left alone. They don’t want to be cleaned,
enlightened, inspected, drained. They don’t want regulations of the
hours of their drinking. They assiduously avoid the hospitals and
parish rooms. They don’t want compulsory thrift, elevation to remote
standards of virtue and comfort, irritation into intellectual or moral
progress. In that diverting novel, the _Lord of Latimer Street_, the
peer who owns the neighbourhood, disguised as a lodger in a block of
scandalous tenements in Bermondsey, announces with pride that the
philanthropic landlord is going to pull them down and convert the site
into a recreation-ground for the people. The result is an awakening of
universal fury amongst the residents in these deplorable abodes. Why
can’t he leave them alone? They pay their rents without complaining.
They are not jealous of his enjoyments. They are not endeavouring to
seize his money or despoil his goods. Why can’t he go and spend the
money at Monte Carlo or Newmarket “as the other lords do,” as indeed
they would like to do, if they were lords? Many who are conscious that
the poor want to be left alone are not convinced that they ought to
be left alone. Yet it is doubtful if much personal interference can
be of any practical service. The effect of our meddling is similar to
the effect of the preaching of Western morals in the East. The old
faiths are destroyed. The new faiths are not assimilated. Mr. Reynolds,
certainly, has no doubt on the matter. He is scornful concerning the
boom of Elementary Education. He dislikes the preaching of thrift.
Amongst the poor, “extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often
a singular dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries,
just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men
flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the
spiritual squalor of the lower middle class.” He is willing to make
almost any sacrifice for his friends, if only they can retain their
chief vindicating quality--that insouciance or contempt for life’s
ills and dangers which enables them ever to take the thunder and the
sunshine with a frolic welcome. He finds this greatly characteristic
of his fishermen: he probably would find less manifestation of it in
the difficult darkness of the cities, where Fear, rather than Courage,
is the driving force of common humanity. But, however much Churches
may talk about sin and virtue, “we know well in our hearts,” says this
observer, “that pluck and courage are the great twin virtues, and that
cowardice is the fundamental sin.” He finds amongst the poor not only
the “will to live,” but the “courage to live”; not only endurance of
existence, but exultation in it. They are not afraid of life. They
keep something of the adventure which takes all risks: the resolute
action which cannot even see the risks it is taking. With Stevenson,
they will have nothing to do with the negative virtues. With the
original Christian axiom--as Renan saw it--they reveal that “the heart
of the common people is the great reservoir of the self-devotion and
resignation by which alone the world can be saved.”


II

This “daring and courage,” however, is the prerogative of individuals;
specially equipped, or selected (as it seems) 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 (from a distance) 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” (the
Government candidate); and the Suffragettes there in person, the very
women (some of them agreeable to look at) 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.

And it possesses its own enjoyments also, and these not only those of
which the moralist would disapprove: a too exuberant thirst for drink,
or a passionate desire to obtain reward without labour. Charles Lamb
would “often shed tears in the Strand for fulness of joy at so much
life.” His joy might be more keenly excited to-day, upon the days when
the City crowd is out for a real holiday: something more agreeable than
the Election carnival, and with no smudge of moral improvement on it.
You may see it in the Saturday football crowds in all the manufacturing
cities: see it in concentrated form when a selection of all the
Saturday football crowds has poured into London for the “final contest”
at the Crystal Palace for the “Cup,” which is the goal of all earthly
ambition. All the long night overcrowded trains have been hurrying
southward along the great trunk lines, and discharging unlimited
cargoes of Lancashire and Yorkshire artisans in the grey hours of early
morning. They sweep through the streets of the Metropolis, boisterous,
triumphant. They blink round historic monuments, Westminster Abbey, St.
Paul’s Cathedral. They all wear grey cloth caps, they are all decorated
with coloured favours; they are all small men, with good-natured
undistinguished faces. To an Oriental visitor they would probably all
appear exactly alike, an endless reproduction of the same essential
type. In the afternoon the bulk of them gather at the Crystal Palace,
to see their carefully labelled representatives compete for the highest
prize in the contest between various professional teams for the
football championship. They encourage these hired persons with shrill
cries. They follow the various fortunes of the game with approval
or discontent. At the end one half is kindled to elation, the other
sunk in disappointment. A crowd of adult English citizens assembles
round that arena, in number some five times as great as the total Boer
commandoes which surrendered after the Peace of Vereeniging, which
had defended a country half the size of Europe against all the armies
of the British Empire. And the irresistible query is suggested by
the sight of that congestion of grey, small people with their facile
excitements and their little white faces inflamed by this artificial
interest, whether, in a day of trial, similar resources could be drawn
from them, of tenacity, courage, and an unwearying devotion to an
impersonal ideal. “_If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have
wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the
land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt
thou do in the swelling of Jordan?_”

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 (as before) 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 (one
may justly hope) 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.

The country has furnished these citizens, or their immediate ancestors.
But now the country has been bled “white as veal.” The cities will be
compelled in the future to trust to inbreeding; to rear, as best they
may, in their own labyrinths children who will mate with children of
a similar upbringing. What will be the effect of such inbreeding, in
five generations, or in ten? There can be no certain reply. Perhaps the
cities themselves will not last long enough to ever furnish a certain
reply. But the carefullest observers can already note some lines of
definite change. Mr. Bray in his _Town Child_ has indicated some of
them. He is inclined to take a gloomy vision of the future.

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 (immortal and conservative) 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.”[5]

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.”[6]


III

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 (at latest) 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 (in a word) 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.

He stands to-day born of these people and part of them--the very child
of the crowd. Most of his life has been spent there. He has plumbed
the height and depth of human experience in this smoky and bewildering
universe. As a child he has known hunger and the unsatisfied demand for
bread. He has been an inmate of the workhouse, and the ruler of it; a
forlorn waif in a Barrack School with unforgettable memories of its
polished impersonal cruelty; and again the great man who comes down as
visitor to the Barrack School of a later generation. He has tramped its
streets in the vain search for work, and been glad to accept twopence
from a friend. He has travelled on the upper half of a boot, tied on to
the foot with string; and he has organised schemes for the unemployed
which have been stimulated by that adventure into hell. He has
obtained education as so many quick and intelligent East End boys are
still obtaining it: from the riotous revel of the “penny dreadful,”
through the _British Workman_, and the _Sunday at Home_, and similar
literature which good people scatter gratuitously amongst the working
classes; to the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and Shakespeare “Recitations,”
and those social appeals of John Ruskin which have become the sacred
writings of the new Labour revival. He hates charity organisation,
the adventurous slum chronicler, officialdom, and institutions, just
as the poor hate them to-day. He loves a joke, born of extravagance
and a kind of boisterous humour, the salt which keeps this starved
life from putrefaction. He understands his own people, amongst whom he
has lived all his days. He is a living example--one of the few living
examples--which offer hope that Democracy may still become a real thing.

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.”[7]

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.”[8] 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.

Yet there is danger perhaps in exaggerating this complacency,
acquiescence, and absorption in such passing pleasures as are
possible upon a limited weekly wage, which at present keep so many of
the working people in this country aloof from political and social
discontent. Those who in similar situation have counted upon a
boundless patience have often found that patience rudely exhausted,
and all their calculations brought to nought. No one can pretend that
a condition of stable equilibrium exists, in which as to-day, with
the removal of supernatural sanctions and promises of future redress,
the working people find a political freedom accompanying an economic
servitude. We have carried out to the full on the one side, says M.
Viviani, in France--and the same is true, though in less universal
degree, in England--the promise of the Revolution. We have advanced
from the affirmation of Equality of Citizenship to universal suffrage,
and from universal suffrage to universal education. There has vanished
the hope that once kept the labourer docile--hope of the attainment of
better times beyond the grave. “_Ensemble, et d’un geste magnifique,
nous avons eteint dans le ciel des lumières qu’on ne rallumera plus._”
Are we able to believe, he inquires, that the work has ended? No, is
the reply, it is only beginning. Political liberation has to find
expression for itself in the economic sphere: must inevitably work
itself out there, with the use of that instrument--the Democratic
instrument of Government--which gives to the people full control over
its own fortunes. To-day each citizen of the crowd “compares with
sadness his political power with his economic dependence: humiliated
every day with the contrast between his divided personality--on one
side a _misérable_, on the other a sovereign: on one an animal, on the
other a god.”

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.




CHAPTER V

PRISONERS


I

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 (after all) 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 never complain until things have become intolerable. The anonymous
complaints show the same percentage of justification as the signed.
They work in unventilated workrooms. They are stinted of holidays. They
are compelled to work overtime. They endure accident and disease. They
are fined and cheated in innumerable ways. Their life is often confined
to a mere routine of work and sleep. Yet they endure; and even at the
heart of foul and impossible conditions retain always some rags of
decency and honour. Some break loose from the accepted drudgery for a
brief period of pleasure and idleness; to be found afterwards in the
silent, stern discipline of the Rescue Home; where, says a Report, “the
extreme youth of many of the inmates is a very distressing feature
of many of the homes, and it is grievous that the sins of others
should be so heavily visited upon these poor children, to whom the
simple natural joys of home life are now denied.” Here austere virtue
encourages “in some of the Scotch institutions,” where the hours of
work are from eight to seven, “a poor dietary,” although “many of the
inmates were young undeveloped girls.” But most are still resisting;
as in the non-penitential laundries where “as a rule complaints are
amply justified,” although “the workers still find it very difficult
to summon up courage enough to speak the truth as to irregularities,
from fear of the loss of employment, and consequent shortage of the
necessities of life”; or in the “millinery workshop, with a large
shop attached, in North London,” which ingeniously evades the factory
law by combining operations of millinery apprentice with that of shop
assistant, and “on my visiting one of the mothers of the girls she
told me her young daughter still arrived home worn-out and crying
with exhaustion”; or in the outworker’s home in the City of London,
where a “young girl” is “making and elaborately trimming babies’ white
silk bonnets beneath a ceiling black as ink, and walls with black
and different coloured patches, looking as if some madman had found
a pastime in scratching them,” and the girl spares “½d. for potash,
and to the best of her ability washed and scraped the vermin from the
walls.” Noting how clean and tidy she is in her own person, says the
inspector, “I am not surprised to see the shudder with which she speaks
of the struggle with dirt and filth.”

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 (forbidden to such labour by the French Factory Laws of
fourteen years ago); 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.

“God help the poor!” concludes one half-unintelligible complaint of
swindling deductions, where, on investigation, “the workers were at
first terrified to give me information,” says the inspector, “and
I was met with entirely false statements.” “God help the poor!” is
written over all this haunting and dolorous record. It is the record of
prisoners: _sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis_.[9]

Gentility, again, is desirable. So is the supervision of the morals of
young men and women. Both are enjoyed--in abundance it would seem--by
the shop assistants, half a million of whom “live-in,” or are affected
by the living-in system. Some twenty thousand of them, organised in a
Trades Union, are endeavouring to climb into citizenship: with less
moral supervision it may be, but with the individual development
that comes from self-ordered life and some suggestion of freedom.
The necessity for the receipt of wages of something like a pound a
week, if these people are to choose their own lodgings and dwell at
ease, is a necessity which offers a considerable barrier to reform.
And with the prospect of financial disability laid upon them if the
present system is abolished, there is small wonder that a number of
employers are enthusiastic over its advantages. The “discontented”
Unionists--discontented in the opinion of many of their employers,
like the dog who went mad in Goldsmith’s elegy in order “to gain some
private ends”--keep up the agitation bravely. On occasional bank
holidays, when their less vigorous brethren are enjoying their four
days a year of statutory idleness in the open air, they suddenly
appear like fish attaining sunshine from deep waters: hold their
“conferences,” pass their resolutions, then vanish again into the
neat, obsequious serviceable men and women who attend to the whims
of customers and encourage their tentative efforts towards purchase.
Meetings of shop assistants are held in the big cities after darkness
has fallen. A crowded company of unknown persons assembles to pass
resolutions against “living-in” or in favour of short hours, then
vanishes again, into the barracks or pleasant commercial “hotels”
in which they reside. Evidence is obtained with difficulty even
when a Government consents to interfere, and appoints a Commission
to investigate. “Miss X----” does not wish to give her name. “If my
name is published I get the swap,” she says, “and I have to go at a
minute’s notice; and my employer would not mind spoiling my reference.
He does not know that I have come here to-day.” “I was summoned to
come yesterday,” says Mr. Y----wearily, “and I asked for a day off;
but I suppose I shall be dismissed when I go back for taking two days,
so that I do not suppose it will matter a great deal whether my name
appears or not.” There are plenty of specific cases of ill-treatment
and niggardly treatment against which no inspection can guard: of
poor food and monotonous food, overcrowding in bedroom, squalor of
accommodation, lack of suitable sanitary and washing arrangements,
and the like. But the emphasis of those who resist is not upon
specific complaints. It is directed against a general system which
herds men and women together, all of one class and one occupation, in
unnatural contiguity, and leave them there, under regulations rather
humiliating to adult persons, to make the best of life seen through
distorted glasses, and from the inside of a regulated home. There
are testimonies, indeed, of the excellence of the best, in perpetual
care for the welfare of the employees. It is perhaps a misfortune
that the comfort and kindliness of these best should throw an ægis
of justification over a system which is the worst, and even in the
average, stands on so many counts condemned.

“Living-in,” declares the Report, in certain retail trades, is
generally made a condition of employment, either express or implied.
The board and lodging accommodation is often inferior and inadequate.
Sleeping and other accommodation is frequently bad. On the moral side
the system has often not only no advantage, but is actually harmful.
The daily rush from counter to dining-room and back, the unappetising
food, the wearying sameness of the menu, the insufficiency of the
food, often supplemented by “extras” sold by the firm, like the “tuck
shop” system of the English public school, are all described by actual
sufferers, in experience which seems to have stepped clean out of
the pages of _Kipps_ or _Vivian_. Five beds “invested with bugs in
one room,” an attic in which three men sleep “that in the heat of
summer smelt like a fowl-house,” beds with four clean sheets in six
months, rooms with rats plentiful, bedrooms which open into corridors,
the light being obtainable through a pane of glass in the wooden
partitions--these and other similar experiences testify to the price
which often has to be paid for the “moral supervision” which the young
shopman or shop girl enjoys. The Report declares that in a number of
cases at least this claim of moral supervision is cant--the old cant
of cheapness; the cant in its revived form of the “moral supervision”
of the workhouse children which were bought up in batches for the
factories eighty years ago. An employer “would place no obstacle in
the way of his male assistants marrying,” is the confession of one,
“though,” he adds, “he certainly does not like his assistants to marry
on an inadequate wage.” “Male and female created He them,” says Mr.
Lewisham’s friend in a well-known novel, “which was d--d rough luck
on assistant masters.” It would seem to be rough luck also on shop
assistants who have the bad taste to prefer matrimony to moral guidance.

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.”[10]

“The political and social rights of an Englishman.” We are fortunate in
the possession of a man of genius who has also had personal experience
of this particular life, and has left in literature a sharp-cut
picture of the “political and social rights” interpreted into terms
of daily experience. “‘By Jove,’ said Buggins, ‘it won’t do to give
these here Blacks votes.’ ‘No fear,’ said Kipps. ‘They’re different
altogether,’ said Buggins. ‘They ’aven’t the sound sense of Englishmen,
and they ’aven’t the character. There’s a sort of tricky dishonesty
about ’em.... They’re too timid to be honest. Too slavish. They aren’t
used to being free, like we are; and if you gave ’em freedom, they
wouldn’t make a proper use of it. Now _we_--Oh, _damn_!’ For the gas
had suddenly gone out, and Buggins had the whole column of Society Club
Chat still to read.”

“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.”[11]

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
(in one case) 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.”

This “want to live” is the endurance, not of the “unemployables,” but
of those who are engaged night and day in an insect-like activity:
uncomplaining, with an Eastern endurance, in the dark. Investigation
amongst the “sample” witnesses who appeared before the Committee
exhibited no contradiction of their veracity. “I wanted to say about
the girl C----,” says the investigator, “whose father is out of work,
that her home was visited, and that practically everything in it has
been pawned: they are owing money, of course, and are expecting the
bailiffs in, so that she is at a crisis in her affairs. The girl C----
has hardly any clothes, and when we found her she was almost starving.
She is really in a very bad position. She has her old father, who hawks
her goods sometimes in the evening, and that is how she makes some
extra money.” Of another G----. “I cannot find out myself,” is the
testimony, “how she can subsist at all.” “How she manages to support
herself and her child is an ‘absolute mystery.’” “She looks rather
starved herself at present.” Even where some kind of organisation
exists, it is found almost impossible to arouse these industrious
persons to any visions or hopes of permanent betterment. “In going
about among them,” says one witness, concerning the Nottingham lace
makers, “I have found that the first difficulty you had to overcome
was the abject apathy that existed among them. You see they are most
of them, very many of them, working for the next meal, and nothing you
say about the meal for to-morrow affects them: they are not concerned
about that. After you have aroused some interest in them, you have also
to arouse some sort of courage.”[12]

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.


II

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.

The Tramp Life, the underside of the world, generally appears in
writing in exaggerated sunshine or gloom. Some who have lived through
it--notably Mr. Bart Kennedy and Mr. W. H. Davies--have written sincere
and truthful reminiscences of adventure in England and America. They
set themselves, in union with a great company, to “cheat Admetus”: to
live on the industrial populations, just as the idle rich live on the
industrial populations, without giving back adequate return. They
perform this feat, partly by begging, partly by stealing, partly by
grudging spells of special and not unenjoyable labour highly paid at
certain seasons of the year--such as fruit-picking, cotton-gathering,
clam-fishing, and the like. When they grow tired of the open road, they
take to the railway, accepting free passage hidden in the goods van
or riding upon the front of the engine. They have their experiences,
also, of society’s reprisals, in occasional spells of imprisonment,
not altogether disagreeable in the more humane cities of America. The
general impression conveyed is of a life of adventure and considerable
physical satisfactions, of health in the open air, of a variegated
and coloured experience along the great ways of the world which is
denied to the assiduous and driven labourer of machine and factory.
That is one side of the picture. The other is given by Government
reports and personal investigations by such observers as Miss Higgs
and Mr. Ensor, of the casual ward, the common lodging-house, and all
the race who have eluded or been squeezed out of the meshes of regular
toil. And here there is impression of degradation and permanent
discomfort, dirt, squalor, and misery, a shambling, discouraged rabble
of creatures that once were men and women. Those who have scrutinised
the wreckage of humanity which collects in the so-called “able-bodied”
workhouses, or can be seen drawn up on cold nights in ragged regiments
on the Embankment waiting for the midnight dole of soup, will be
more inclined to believe in the degradation than in the adventure.
Yet the few persons who have gone forth without prejudice to know
these despised and broken persons--tramps, criminals, prostitutes,
unemployed, unemployable--who wander through the darkened ways of the
City, have no such experience of universal collapse to record. Those
who come as learners rather than teachers--with a sense of humour, of
friendliness, an ultimate reverence for anything human, above all, with
acceptance rather than with criticism--are perpetually astonished at
the resistance which humanity is able to present to the most calamitous
of outward circumstance.

The revelation of the authentic witnesses--those in whom this queer
universe has become articulate--is of a complete overturning of the
accepted standards. In _Slavery_, Mr. Kennedy has traced the whole
process of escape: from upbringing in a cellar dwelling at Manchester,
through revolt against the tyranny of monotonous toil, to an enlisting
in a kind of buccaneering expedition against all the world. It is the
normal civilised universe seen (as it were) from the reverse side in
which the grey has become blue and the blue grey. The inhabitants
are at war upon the working world; using its charity and its clumsy
legislation in order to suck from that world no small advantage. They
have eluded, like the inheriting wealthy, the obligations of labour;
like the inheriting wealthy they possess their own exacting moral
codes, differing from the moral codes of working humanity, which
supports them, if not with equanimity, at least with fortitude. Mr. W.
H. Davies, in his _Autobiography of a Super-tramp_, offers a similar
and more amazing life history. “I was born thirty-five years ago,
in a public-house called the Church House, in the town of N----,”
is the commencement of a story not altogether unworthy of Defoe’s
_Robinson Crusoe_. Without his sincere, if somewhat intrusive, moral
determinations, this voyager is also living amongst the aborigines on
the desert island of this “floating, transitory world.” In the final
chapter he sums up the philosophical advice which he would bequeath to
similar sojourners. The most important dogma of it is “contained in
the simple words: ‘Never live in a house next door to your landlord or
landlady’; which,” he declares, “deserves to become a proverb.” “Many
people might not consider this warning necessary,” he concludes, “but
the hint may be useful to poor travellers like myself, who, sick of
wandering, would settle down to the peace and quiet of after days.”

It is the normal world, in England and America, turned inside out,
seen from the other side of Looking Glass country. From this side are
examined the benevolence of the rich and the benevolence of the poor,
the Salvation Army shelter, the common gaol, the Charity Organisation
Society, the various efforts of Society to protect itself against
the locust and the caterpillar. The locust, it must be confessed,
especially in new countries, generally has the best of it. The artless
and somewhat clumsy organisations of State and city and private persons
spread their simple traps of cheese or delicacies for the mouse. The
mouse annexes the cheese and leaves the trap scatheless. Especially
is this true in America, where wealth, easily and carelessly heaped
together, is as easily and carelessly scattered. Many of Mr. Davies’
confessions of American begging experiences are almost incredible in
their suggestion of opulence. An hour or two in streets of modest
comfort will yield, to the experienced workman, a profusion of good
things--money, clothes, rich and pleasant food. Free rides by “beating”
the various trains, transformation with changing climate of summer
and winter from the north to the south, occasional interludes in
local gaols, where the officials, being paid by the number of their
captives, offer increasing attractions to those who will condescend to
accept such hospitalities, yield a healthful and variable existence of
adventure and repose. The companions of the road offer no despicable
advantages. There is, indeed, no “honour among thieves”; they rob each
other with effrontery, and make no assertion of chivalry or fine and
decent living. But they are generous in their sharing of the booty
with their companions, and possess a ready sociability which leads
them to partnerships and associations of some enduring value. The two
unforgivable crimes are work and thrift. Effort and Accumulation--the
gods of the working world--have become idols to be trampled on. Yet,
in the underworld, the appeal to compassion is still irresistible. The
cattlemen who bring the living food of England across the Atlantic
to Liverpool “are recognised as the scum of America, a wild, lawless
class of people, on whom,” says Mr. Davies, “the scum of Europe
unscrupulously impose.” Mr. Davies had frequently made the journey,
and tells horrible tales of the indifferent cruelty to the beasts.
Habitually the cattlemen arrive, fresh from such degrading experience,
upon a city of poverty. Habitually they part with their scanty earnings
in gifts to that poverty when they arrive. “Having kind hearts, they
are soon rendered penniless by the importunities of beggars.” “These
wild but kind-hearted men,” is the testimony, “grown exceedingly proud
by a comparison of the comfortable homes of America with these scenes
of extreme poverty in Liverpool and other large seaports, give and give
of their few shillings, until they are themselves reduced to the utmost
want.”

In America, under the expert advice of “Brum,” the young novice learnt
the valuable secrets of the trade. On entering any town, look out
for a church steeple with a cross, which denotes a Catholic church
and therefore a Catholic community. “If I fail in that portion of
the town I shall certainly not succeed elsewhere.” Fat women are
the best to beg from. “How can you expect these skinny creatures to
sympathise with another,” is the unanswerable argument, “when they
half-starve their own bodies?” In begging in England, avoid every town
that has not either a mill, a factory, or a brewery. But in America
the gold mines are the watering-places and haunts of the idle rich:
perhaps because they recognise natural allies in the other class of
Anarchist, perhaps because they satisfy a slumbering responsibility and
compassion in a careless scattering of uncalculated charity. Amongst
the New York watering-places “the people catered for us as though we
were the only tramps in the whole world, and as if they considered it
providential that we should call at their houses for assistance.” In
such providential plenty the standards are well maintained: otherwise
this inverted world might right itself and become normal once again.
The travellers are received with disfavour by a stranger, who later
is smitten with remorse. “Excuse me, boys, for not giving you a more
hearty welcome,” is the apology; “but really, I thought you were
working men, but I see you are true beggars.” In a cottage an aged
labourer, who had amassed a modest fortune after a life of toil, hangs
on the wall the shovel which he had used in early days. To these
wanderers the vision is as distasteful as an image of a saint to a
Covenanting assembly: a symbol of false gods.

Here is the voice of the Tramp as he appears to himself: full of
complacency as he looks back upon his past successes: naked before his
audience, and entirely unashamed. In the revelation of the submerged as
they appear to others--to those friends of theirs who possess sympathy
and humour and a wide acceptance--this subterranean existence appears
also full of excellent things: comradeship, kindliness, laughter,
and tears. Such vivid and truthful writing as that of Mr. Neil Lyons
in _Arthurs_ throws no unfriendly light upon the waste places of the
city. He has taken for the scene of his inquiry a London coffee-stall
“somewhere between Brixton and the obelisk in South London.” “This
is an ambiguous direction,” he declares. “But then we night-seekers
are jealous of our ill-fame, and the fear of the Oxford movement is
strong upon us.” Round this coffee-stall, attracted like moths to a
candle, gather in the heart of the sleeping city those to whom sleep is
denied. Night-workers seeking refreshment mingled here with women of
the streets; an occasional drunken sailor, a thief making a rendezvous
with a thief, tramps and wastrels, foregather for a moment within the
circle of light before drifting out into the darkness again. There are
some who are regular customers, who develop a kind of comradeship,
exchanging tales of misfortune; and from these the author weaves
a tragic or pitiful or romantic story of human lives. For all the
permanent elements of romance are in this underworld, only with the
values distorted and modified. Here, also, are sudden vicissitudes of
fortune, passionate human affections, love of woman and of child, fear
of violence and of death. It is life lived close to the margin, in
perpetual familiarity with the reality of common things; darkness and
cold, hunger and despair. It is life lived, that is to say, as perhaps
the majority of mankind are living it to-day; never so far removed from
the possibility of privation and of danger as to be able to settle down
tranquil in a universe of security. The common impression, amongst
those who do not dwell in such a universe, is that existence under
such conditions must reel back into savagery or apathy--into a kind
of numbness before all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or into the fierce fight for existence upon the sinking ship or in
the crumbling earthquake city. But experience is quite otherwise.
Comradeship, desire, human affection, kindliness, and pity, all here
survive amongst men so shabby and twisted as to appear scarcely human,
and women with painted faces not pleasant to look upon. Nay more, a
certain attitude of cheeriness and enjoyment seems to be bred out
of the very extremity of fortune. There is a rich humour in all Mr.
Lyons’s sketches, for much of which, indeed, the onlooker and recorder
may be responsible, but some of which is native to the original
character. Sometimes it assumes the form of verbal exaggeration and
comments in which all working-class London is so ready, the most
reputable product of the industrial metropolis. Sometimes it finds
satisfaction in the jollity excited by drink, as in the experience
of the drunken sailor who uplifts his voice in bloodthirsty ballads.
Sometimes it has the peculiar reckless insolence of the defiance, out
of extremity, of all time’s revenges; the reckless insolence of the
“seven men out of hell” in the story of the “Bolivar” who have “euchred
God’s almighty storm” and “bluffed the eternal sea.”

There is here, however, none of the idealisation, the roseate visions
of sordid and ugly things suddenly seen through a mist of make-believe,
which fills with an intolerable sentimentality the works of many
popular writers of fiction. “Arthur’s” clients, having plumbed the
bedrock of life, are suffering no illusions concerning it. They are
emphatically convinced that dust is dust and mud is mud, and that a
spade may justly be called a spade. Outside the coffee-stall itself,
in the small hours of the morning, there is continual necessity for
the suppression of rowdies and marauders and those who exhibit anarchic
tendencies in a civilisation remote from our own, but with very
definite standards. In that civilisation kindliness and good fellowship
stand at the summit of the hierarchy of virtues, and a large tolerance
replaces the negative prohibitions of the accepted commandments. And in
all that company of children, bewildered and confused in a world which
they have never learned to understand, the acceptance of a certain
level of honour and of order is more clearly recognised than amongst
those who, reaching towards the enforcement of austerer limitations,
are, perhaps, less successful in attainment. “Sometimes,” says Mr.
Lyons, “a sailorman in the throes of a fever may form our circle.
Arthur will then arise in his might, peer over his spectacles, and
lifting a withered forefinger say, ‘George, I’m surprised at you.
Be’ave yeself.’ And George, if he be not very drunk, will subside
instantly, saying, ‘Righto, Guv’nor,’ or he will ask respectfully for
another cup of coffee and a thick ’un, at the same time challenging the
company to deny that Arthur is a gentleman, or he himself a Briton.”

So that amongst incidents seemingly trivial--a crying baby, a meeting
of a tramp and his pal, the attempt of Arthur’s soldier son to choose
between two rival candidates for his affection--there is revealed a
whole depth of human helpfulness, and of human sympathy which is not
helpful but is exceedingly desirous to be so. In one of Mr. Lyons’s
exuberant evenings a man with a baby in his arms wearily drifts to
the coffee-stall, waiting for the belated all-night tram. And at once
this company of nightbirds and homeless populace become absorbed
in one overwhelming problem--how to stop the baby crying. “Arthur”
himself starts the enterprise. “I ain’t no amatoor at this business,”
he cheerily remarks. “Soothin’ down babies is one of my specialities.”
So he makes grimaces, shouts “Oy! oy! oy!” at the unfortunate infant,
emits shrieks to imitate a locomotive in “a performance very unusual
and distressing,” bays like a bloodhound (“trying the dawg on him,”
he calls it), imitates various other animals--with disastrous effect.
Arthur’s “man” then steps into the breach, “I know a dodge about
babies,” he remarks. “First of all,” explained the specialist, “you
turn ’im over on ’is chest. Then you say, ‘Hups a daisy! _There’s_ a
little man!’ and thumps him on his back. Then you give ’im a fork or
sich like to play with. Then you say, ‘Did ’e ’ave a dirty blackguard
of a father then?’ (no offence to _you_, sir, only it’s the custom),
and then you jerk ’im up an’ down, and ’old your breath till ’e falls
asleep.” This also fails. The owner of the infant meanwhile imparts
reminiscences of his life, his sister and the baby, full of intimate
detail, to the friendly company. A “certain old drab,” half-starved,
is stuffed with coffee and sardines and promised “tuppence” to stop
the child’s “’ollering.” She immediately succeeds. The tram arrives;
the father and child vanish in the night. It is twenty minutes past
one o’clock--in a submerged, undistinguished corner of six millions
of sleeping people. But all modern life is in it--the stupidity, the
gravity, the generosity, the ready companionship and sympathy under
misfortune which may be common to all, of half-lost, undistinguished
people who normally travel through mean streets to no profitable end.

They quote poetry--sentimental maunderings, the humorous ditties of
the lower-class music halls, or bloodthirsty, recounting how “Joe
Golightly” “stabbed ’im in the spine.” They crack their little jokes,
and score off each other and off themselves, when in the lowest depth
of poverty--with nothing between them and ultimate destitution. When
prosperity comes they share with each other, standing “treat” in
“cawfee” and sardines and hard-boiled eggs. There fall down to them
occasionally visitants from another world. Now it is a “gentleman”
killing himself as speedily as possible with drink and sordid
adventure, on the way between prosperity and death. Now it is a
“benevolent idiot” desiring to see the “darker side of London life,”
whose comments are received with marked disfavour by the normal members
of the street. Now it is a revivalist or philanthropist seeking
passionately to persuade them to return to the accepted ways of men.
His efforts are useless. They have chosen their portion, and in that
portion they will abide: drifting with all surrounding human lives,
through their narrow space of being, towards whatever fate or fortune
may offer them in that day when all days will have become as one day,
and to-morrow joined with yesterday’s seven thousand years.




CHAPTER VI

THE COUNTRYSIDE


Outside this exuberant life of the cities, standing aloof from it, and
with but little share in its prosperity, stands the countryside. Rural
England, beyond the radius of certain favoured neighbourhoods, and
apart from the specialised population which serves the necessities of
the country house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there
who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with
energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life
of the fields for the life of the town. A peasantry, unique in Europe
in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or
tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless
toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages. In scattered
feudal districts a liberal distribution of alms and of charity
masquerading as employment may serve to retain a subservient population
in a “model village.” When these hierarchies and generosities are
absent the cottages crumble to pieces and are never repaired; no
new cottages are constructed: the labourer loses not only intimacy
with the land, but even all desire for the land; that longing for a
particular position of his own which is the strongest animating force
in the peasantry of every other country in the world. The villages are
left to old men and to children, to the inert, unenterprising, and
intellectually feeble. Whole ancient skilled occupations--hedging and
ditching, the traditional treatment of beasts and growing things--are
becoming lost arts in rural England. Behind the appearance of a
feverish prosperity and adventure--motors along all the main roads,
golf-courses, gamekeepers, gardeners, armies of industrious servants,
excursionists, hospitable entertainment of country house-parties--we
can discern the passing of a race of men.

From every region of southern England comes the same testimony. “There
is no social life at all,” writes a Somerset clergyman. “A village
which once fed, clothed, policed, and regulated itself cannot now dig
its own wells or build its own barns. Still less can it act its own
dramas, build its own church, or organise its own work and play. It
is pathetically helpless in everything.” He sees no forces in being
adequate to arrest this prolonged secular decline. “As things go on
now,” is his forecast, “we shall have empty fields, except for a few
shepherds and herdsmen, in all the green of England. Nomadic herds will
sweep over the country, sowing, shearing, grass-cutting, reaping and
binding with machines: a system which does not make for health, peace,
discipline, nobleness of life.” “England is bleeding at the arteries,
and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.”[13]

In rural Essex another observer finds the land becoming “one vast
wilderness,” “a retreat for foxes and a shelter for conies”: with the
houses tumbling into decay, no new houses built, apathy settling down
like a grey cloud over all. “The sturdy sons of the village have fled;
they have left behind the old men, the lame, the mentally deficient,
the vicious, the born tired.” Farm buildings and cottages are rapidly
going to pieces. He notes the steady increase in the agricultural
returns of “Land laid down to grass.” “It would be better described,”
he declares, “as land which has laid itself down to twitch and
thistle.” He heaps scorn upon “those glowing patriots who, in their
anxiety to build up an Empire, have been grabbing at continents and
lost their own land.”[14]

And in Wiltshire, again, another observer can show the two great wants
of the labourer still unsatisfied--Hope and a Home. He laments the
passing of the old village gentry, who still had some sympathy and
channels of communication with the labourer; and the substitution for
them of the large farmer, who utterly hates and despises the class
beneath him. “‘As long as a man stays on the land, he can’t call
his soul his own,’ is an expression often heard among the poor.” He
exhibits the striking contrast between the brother and sister: the
sister who has “gone into service,” and found a demand for her work,
and acquired under such conditions hope, independence, and a vigour
of mind; the brother left on the fields, with the prospect before him
of unchanging manual labour, at unchanging, scanty wages, until the
workhouse absorbs him at the end. He shows the tragedy of the mere
material collapse in the material conditions; village after village, in
which no new cottages have been built for a hundred years; crumbling
walls, falling into decay; crowded families, with all the starved life
and degradation inevitably associated with such overcrowding; the whole
presenting an aspect of fatigue and of decline. “To outsiders, who live
in country villages, the wonder is not why many leave, but why any
stay.” He will not agree that this is merely the normal condition of
the rural population, as seen through jaundiced eyes. Once there was
life in rural England. That life is vanishing like a dream. “‘Still as
a slave before his lord,’ represents the attitude of the farm hand in
the presence of his employer. No sheep before her shearers was ever
more dumb than the milkers and carters and ploughmen at the village
meetings to which their masters choose to summon them. They are cowed.
It is to this that the race has come whom Froissart has described as
‘_le plus périlleux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux et
orgueilleux_.’ Pride is dead in their souls.”[15]

This writer does not despair of revival as a result of large and
drastic changes. “The monopoly of great farmers must be broken up,” he
boldly declares, “before the dawn of hope can rise upon the English
peasant.” He has discovered deep in the heart of the country labourer
that “Love of the Land” which has survived through all the generations
of hopeless drudgery. He recognises it as “a survival from the days
when an able-bodied Englishman, bred on and to the land, might cherish
the hope of one day calling a corner of it his own, at least as the
tenant of a landlord without personal interest in the degradation of
his dependants.” Here is the sole asset we possess in the work of
rural revival. Parliament has been attempting by legislation to give
to some select persons in the villages direct access to the land. The
labourer to-day is slowly and doubtfully realising that a law has been
passed which is designed to work for his benefit. The whole conception
is new to him. “Law” he has hitherto regarded as something remote or
inimical, symbolised by the village policeman, or the magistrates
who penalise poaching and petty larceny. Those who made themselves
missionaries of the new Act in the villages found everywhere this first
incredulity. They announced the decree of Government that henceforth
the first charge on the land should be the allotment or small holding;
that nothing was to stand in the way of the provision of such holding
when it was desired; that, if necessary by compulsion, the claims
of sport, the claims of pleasure, the ambitions of the large farmer
adding field to field, the prejudice or caprice of those who dislike
the creation of these small plots and gardens, were to be made to
yield to the primary necessity of finding land for the landless. The
labourer was silent, astonished, doubtful, wondering if this was a new
trick designed for his disadvantage. There were meetings at night, to
which men came furtively; suggestions that one is a “spy,” and dogged
silence until he has departed; doubt as to what Mr. A. (the landlord)
would think of it, or whether Mr. B. (the farmer) would dispossess all
those who apply for land, or if Mr. C. (the vicar) would be inclined
to look favourably on the affair. The stirring and the movement for
a time seemed real; far more real than many had ventured to hope for
when the Act was passing through Parliament. But the rather cumbrous
machinery is difficult to put into operation, and the future is still
uncertain. If the Parish Councils and County Councils and Central
Commissioners prove adequate to the situation, they may yet reveal life
where there now is little but death, and a transformation of England’s
deserted countryside. If the difficulties are insuperable or action
too long delayed, with Councils embarking upon one experiment chosen
from ten applications, postponing for months or years any energetic
action; there will be no vocal protest, and few who cannot look beneath
the surface will realise what has happened. The serene life of rural
England, viewed from the country house or city observatory, will
continue undisturbed. There will be no revolution, red flags, open
riots, rick-burning. But the people will quietly melt away, into the
cities, beyond the sea. The last of the Sibylline Books will have been
flung into the flames.

What this vanishing life signifies, in its strength and in its
weaknesses, can only be revealed to those who through months and years
have made it the subject of sympathetic study. The landlord, the
farmer, the clergyman, the newspaper correspondent primed with casual
conversation in the village inn, think that they know the labourer.
They probably know nothing whatever about him. With his limited
vocabulary, with his racial distrust of the stranger, and all of
another class, with a mind which maintains such reticence except in
moments of overpowering emotion, that labourer stands, a perplexing
enigmatic figure alone in a voluble, self-analysing world. In certain
sympathetic studies he is revealed in his strength and his weakness,
by those who are able to get behind much that is superficially
unattractive to the solid endurance and courage and helpfulness beneath
it all.

In his _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, Mr. “George Bourne” has
presented an illuminating picture of an old man who himself stands for
the last relic of a vanishing race. He has collected and treasured the
sayings of “Bettesworth” as he passes slowly downward in the day’s
decline; remarks trivial or commonplace, worldly wisdom, strange
superstitions, acceptance of the sunshine, bewilderment before the
hostile forces of the world. There are years passed in almost daily
intercourse before his master discovers that Bettesworth had once
fought through the Crimean war. That experience had made no permanent
impression of horror or of pride. The events of the day, which
influence men’s passions in some mobile, distant universe, filter down
into this quiet country like the noise of something far away. And the
South African War, and the death of the Queen, and a General Election
scarcely do more than ripple the surface of these deep waters. Of
more importance is the untimely summer rain which ruins the harvest,
dispossession from a cottage, the illness of a wife, the calamity of
advancing age. The heroic patience and endurance of the labourer is
here revealed, in face of accepted and inevitable change. He resists
the embraces of the workhouse with that dogged despair with which
the English rural poor have resisted the “Bastilles” since their
foundation. He clings to life and its possible activities, continuing
his work, suffering and half blind, meeting death when it comes as
the poor have usually met it, without hope and without fear; his
mind at the end with the past rather than with the future. The Pagan
remains, and refuses to be silenced by the long centuries of Christian
tradition. There is scepticism concerning “these here places nobody
ever bin to an’ come back again to tell we.” “Nobody don’t know nothin’
about it. ’Tain’t as if they come back to tell ye. There’s my father
what bin dead this forty year, what a crool man he must be not to’ve
come back in all that time, if he was able, an’ tell me about it.
That’s what I said to Colonel Sadler. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you had better
talk to the Vicar.’ ‘Vicar?’ I says; ‘he won’t talk to me. Besides,
what do he know about it more’n anybody else?’”

He is seen moving into his squalid cottage, and refusing to be
dislodged from his lair: resisting, to the death, the services of the
efficient poor law infirmary or the suggestion of Hospital kindliness.
He had a theory that “bread never ought to be no less than a shillin’
a gallon” if farmers were to prosper: but on hearing of the new
“fiscal reform,” “Oh dear!” is his comment, “we don’t want no taxes
on food.” In war-time he is on the side of “our country,” and has
a subtle explanation of the report of “missing” in the newspapers.
“Prisoners--or else burnt.” “They burns ’em, some says.” He enjoys
his life to the end; despising, so long as is possible, the forces of
ill-health, advancing old age, weariness; exhibiting in circumstances
of bereavement and squalid misery the astonishing endurance and
clinging to life which is found amongst the rural poor of England.
“During the last year or two of his life he was seldom without pain.
He could joke about his passing indispositions as he could defy his
landlord. A neighbour looking in upon him, and seeing his serious
condition, said genially, ‘You ben’t goin’ to die, be ye, Freddy?’
And he answered, ‘I dunno. Shouldn’t care if I do. ’Tis a poor feller
as can’t make up his mind to die once. If we had to die two or three
times, then there might be something to fret about.’” Later, he adds
more seriously, “But nobody dunno _when_, that’s the best of it.”

The author recounts, with a poignant simplicity, the incidents of the
old man’s death: in hot July weather, with the year at the summit of
riotous life, and every element in nature taunting the impotence of
humanity before the triumphant forces of destruction. “He is dying,”
was the thought at the end, “without any suspicion that any one could
think of him with admiration and reverence.” His race is perishing in
similar ignorance, unhonoured and unsung: without a suspicion that “any
one could think of it with admiration and reverence.” The agricultural
labourer survived the intolerable conditions of the early century when
his life was one impossible struggle against penury and starvation.
He stands to-day for a moment, an old man in a crumbling home, the
last of a long line of high tradition and heritage. He stands to-day
without successors: occupying the region of his ancestors, which they
had peopled since England first was: which they had maintained, with no
ignoble life, through the transitory centuries.

He is vanishing from the world, and there are few that regret his
departure. “Progress” has effected a destruction where penury and
starvation had failed. He endured through all the lean years, somehow
obtaining nourishment and rearing his children, clinging tenaciously to
the earth, within the earth-bound horizon. At length appears the end;
a rather squalid and mournful end--to a life which had once stood for
the bedrock life of England. The peasant’s resources, the peasant’s
vigour and resistance, the peasant’s slow-moving, deliberate mind, had
borne the burden of war and change. From his villages came the old
folk-songs of the nation; he built the village churches, which are the
treasures of rural England, and once took a pride in them. His secret
wisdom, his fragments of half-heathen, half-Christian philosophy, his
standards of bitterness and enjoyment, once made up the temper and
mettle of the common people of England. The period of his greatest
degradation coincided with the period of a sudden offer of escape. As
the common land passed from his occupation, and he sank steadily to
the landless depth of day labour, the cities, with their unlimited
demands for the peasant energy and vigour, open to him welcoming arms.
The few that remain are coming more and more to present the appearance
of a declining race: a race which has lost the secrets of the arts
which once flourished in the region in which it dwells. The English
countryside to-day, still a thing of beauty, with its thatched cottages
and old high-timbered roofs and glory of village churches, presents a
picture similar to those in which races of dulled intelligence blink
and creep within cities of magnificent architecture once raised by
their ancestors, the secrets of whose construction they have neither
energy nor intelligence to regain. “The evidence is abundant and
positive,” writes Dr. Jessop, as a result of most careful examination
of first-hand authority, “that the work done upon the fabrics of our
churches and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of
our churches, such as the wood carving of our screens, the painting of
the lovely figures in the panels of those screens, the embroidery of
the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving
of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the windows, and all
that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which existed in immense
profusion in our village churches till the frightful spoliation of
those who in the sixteenth century stripped them bare--all this was
executed by local artists.” He will not listen to the tradition of
indebtedness to monk and squire. “In the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries,” he declares, “there were no squires--that is the naked
truth.” The property belonged to the parish: it was always growing. It
was of a richness and variety almost incredible to those who to-day
see but the last guttering flame of parochial life, the attempt by
parish councils, guilds of village players, and all the enterprise
of occasional vigorous resistance, to combat the spreading atrophy
of decay. Here are “ornaments and church furniture, bells and
candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and banners: vestments
which were miracles of splendour in their colours and materials and
incomparable artistic finish of needlework: not to speak of the fine
linen and the veils, the carpets and the hangings.”[16] It is a
treasury of wealth, not so much in its direct suggestion of opulence,
of services and bequests freely given, as in its indication of a
life which can take pride in itself and its labour: a life, however
difficult and limited, yet finding occasion for a handicraft in which
men and women may delight, and some interests other than that of
concentration upon dull and trivial things.

Such were the beginnings of this long sorrowful progress: in villages
which could create these things and take a pride in them. The end
reveals an England vulgarised by the clamour and vigour of the newer
wealthy, racing each other down on motor cars from the noise of the
town, into the heart of a great silence: the silence that broods
over a doomed and passing race. There remains at the summit a joyful
absorption in physical exercises and pleasures: in the midst of which,
almost unnoticed amid the new gaiety, “Bettesworth” is shambling to a
pauper grave, and his children vanishing from the life of open sky into
the mazes of the lamplit city.

“In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are
imprisoned between hedges, and driven along rights of way.” The beauty
of continental landscape--of the Touraine and the Midi, the little
Norman orchards, the extraordinarily fruitful fields of Southern
Germany, the rude plenty of the Balkan principalities--is the beauty
of “peasants’ country”: the beauty that is provided by security and
close cultivation, excited wherever the peasant is assured that he
will reap what he has sown. The beauty of English landscape is the
beauty of “landlords’ country”--the open woods, the large grass fields
and wide hedges, the ample demesnes, which signify a country given
up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease. The one is
a park: the other, a source of food supply and the breeding-place of
men. The typical English countryside is that of great avenues leading
to residences which lack no comfort, broad parks, stretches of private
land, sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting, shooting, and a
kind of stately splendour. The typical continental countryside is that
of tiny white-washed or wooden broad-eaved cottages, freely scattered
over a region of fruit and flowers and close-tilled coveted land,
which, in fact, is one large garden. The record of the great landowners
of this country is of vast accumulations of acres: aggregations of
whole counties, or estates dotted over many counties, each organised
on the same plan of inherited feudal tradition. Where the money can
still be obtained from external sources--the new wealth of the towns,
or tribute from new nations abroad--some semblance of that feudal
tradition still remain. Cottages are let at less than their market
prices, old men and women on the estate are comfortably pensioned,
there are almshouses and model villages and “Church” schools, a
deferential and grateful population, and all the apparatus of the
model village, guided and controlled by the occupant of the great
house. Yet even from these well-favoured regions the census returns
reveal the population fleeing from the neighbourhood as if from
some raging pestilence: making what haste they can to be gone. The
smaller “landed gentry” have been most hardly hit by agricultural
depressions, the general fall in prices, and the obligations of a
growing standard of luxury, confronting a falling income. Here the
estates are encumbered or falling into decay. The physical aspect of
comfort and pleasant non-economic industry is far less apparent. There
is evidence, even in the outward scene, of the malady within. In the
case of some of the larger estates, and a great number of the smaller,
the land is being transferred to those who, having made fortunes in
trade, business, or financial speculation, have desire of settling down
into the life of the country gentleman. In many of the home counties,
for example, the bulk of the older estates have passed into the hands
of the owners of the “new wealth,” the Plutocracy which looks for its
consummation in ownership of a portion of the land of England. Many
of them are assiduous in rural welfare: some have taken over what
remain of the feudal tradition as a “going concern,” and delight in
the fresh air, the opportunities for “sport” and exercise, the ample
bestowal of patronage, and all the manifold energies and charities
which flow from the great house into the surrounding countryside. There
are some also who introduce a breath of fresh air--even an unashamed
Democratic spirit--into the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the remoter
regions of rural England. To others, however, all this is frankly a
toy and a plaything. They have purchased an estate, as they would
purchase food or raiment, for the purposes of enjoyment. They convert
the house into a tiny piece of the city, transplanted to the healthier
air of the fields. They entertain themselves and their friends in the
heart of an England, for whose vanishing traditions and enthusiasms
they care not at all. In that England, indeed, everything seems to
arrive too late. Men only awaken to the necessity of doing something
after the opportunity for that particular something has already gone.
The rural Labourers’ Union succeeded and collapsed just before the
great fall in prices: instead of effecting its objects at the time
when wages could easily have been raised out of the natural profits
of the land. To-day land is being slowly and laboriously offered to
the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that
offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea. In
another period of years, progress may have compelled the breaking
up of the big estates; once again, after the population who would
avail themselves to-day of such offers, to-morrow will have passed
from the scene. In exercise and enjoyment, in parties and pleasant
gardens, amid a playing at the ancient rural traditions, and through
the newer mechanisms of locomotion, the decay passes almost unnoticed.
The few who lift up their voices in warning are openly despised as
agitators, or condemned as political pessimists. The rural reformer
finds himself not so much opposed as ridiculed. What remains of the
system, fortified by the city wealth, is so evidently unassailable by
what remains of any resistent forces, that it can afford to contemplate
all efforts towards revolt with a good-tempered disdain. Occasionally a
village learns of some legislation designed for its benefit, of “Small
Holdings” which a benignant Government designs for the advantage of
the adventurous, of the apparatus of rural Self-Government, which can
give to the poorest some right of control of the village commercial
activities. It cautiously or boldly essays the paths of progress. The
inhabitants apply for land to the great landowners who constitute the
County Council, or organise themselves into a tiny village caucus
for the capture of the Parish Meeting. Then, in quiet and effectual
action, the movement of revolt is scattered and suppressed. It is
explained to the applicants how unsuitable they are for the position
of independent agricultural industry: or the leaders of the democratic
upheaval are informed that it is not in the least convenient to their
owners that they should concern themselves with the intricacies of
local self-government. In a few months, or, at most, a few years, order
reigns--at Auburn, as at Warsaw. And those who had been galvanised into
some semblance of life have, for the most part, disappeared: to London,
to the nearest city, to the British dominions beyond the sea. Such
pitiful uprising, with its consequent disasters, evokes no resentment
against the dominant power. It rather evokes resentment against those
who had stirred up the forces of disturbance. In a certain village in
Oxfordshire an unwary Liberal member of Parliament recently stimulated
resistance to the enclosure by the landlord of a right-of-way. The
resistance was sustained, and the village preserved in its ancient
privilege. But all six witnesses who had testified to the ancient
customs were dismissed from their occupations, and driven from the
district. And indignation fell, not on the landlord who thus revealed
his power, but on the member of Parliament who revealed his impotence.
It was the Liberal, not the Conservative organisation, which henceforth
found a united opposition to its energies: as the population,
worshipping always only the strongest, discovered its leaders deported
over so unsatisfying a controversy as the vindication of a public
right. There was a general village uprising in the Election of 1885,
when the newly enfranchised labourers turned eagerly to the promise
of independence upon the land. There was another village uprising in
1906, when the labourers turned sullenly away from the proposal to tax
their food. But the one was an uprising of Hope: the other, of Fear. In
the intervening period there had vanished, from large areas of rural
England, the possibility of the reconstruction of a rural civilisation.

“The human wealth of a populous countryside, in which all classes
lived, and could live, at peace for centuries--that,” says Mr. Ensor,
“is our achievement as a nation, the source and condition of our other
greatnesses, the bark on whose fragments, ‘majestic though in ruin,’
we can still found, if not our loudest, at least our most legitimate
fame.”[17] All that is over. It would appear to be over for ever. A
few old men, gathered round the hearthstone of the village inn, testify
in the nights of winter to the passing of a whole people. Already the
manifestations of resistance and of aspiration, associated with the
democratic victories of the last election, are sinking back into the
older acquiescence: as the rulers of the countryside exhibit, by a
combination of kindliness and austerity, how undesirable is such an
overthrow of the accepted ways. Villas and country houses establish
themselves in the heart of this departing race: in it, but not of it,
as alien from its ancient ways as if dropped from the clouds into
another world. Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate
of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You
can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside
the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within.
You can see the evidence of their activity in the dust-laden hedges of
the south country roads, a grey mud colour, with no evidence of green;
in the ruined cottage gardens of the south country villages. From those
villages themselves not only the evidence of activity has departed, but
the very memories of it. They cannot, to-day, make the folklore popular
songs. They cannot even cherish the folklore songs which were made by
their fathers. And “few sadder or more thought-begetting experiences
can be undergone,” is the testimony of a lover of this land, “than
to sit in an inn in a remote country village, and hear rustics troll
tin-kettle ditties about Seven Dials or the Old Kent Road.”

Over all which vision of a secular decay Nature still flings the
splendour of her dawns and sunsets upon a land of radiant beauty. Here
are deep rivers flowing beneath old mills and churches; high-roofed
red barns and large thatched houses; with still unsullied expanses of
cornland and wind-swept moor and heather, and pine woods looking down
valleys upon green gardens; and long stretches of quiet down standing
white and clean from the blue surrounding sea. Never, perhaps, in the
memorable and spacious story of this island’s history has the land
beyond the city offered so fair an inheritance to the children of its
people, as to-day, under the visible shadow of the end.




CHAPTER VII

SCIENCE AND PROGRESS


Such appear some, at least, of the characteristics of the various
classes of Society to-day in England. In general material condition
there is little to excite foreboding. A proportion of the population
is raised well above the privations of poverty larger than ever before
in history. Extravagance and a longing for pleasure and excitement are
common to all classes. The aggregation of plenty is such as the Old
World has never before seen. The vision, as a whole, is of a laborious
energetic race, deserting the countryside for the cities, and there
heaping up wealth, which is shared, in some degree, by all but the
poorest. If anything is wrong in material conditions it is in the
apparatus, not of accumulation, but of distribution. An altogether
inadequate proportion of this accumulation is the absolute possession
of a tiny class which sits secure upon the summit. In heavy tolls
levied upon labour in the form of royalties and the monopoly rents of
land, in inherited fortune which reaps its interest from remote regions
and foreign kingdoms, in unusual profit of industrial investment
through times of trade “boom,” in financial speculation and all the
various special advantage of business, commerce, and manufacture in
this free market of England, there is being concentrated in few hands
vast and ever-increasing fortune. Security accepted as normal, comfort
more widely spread than ever before, and a standard of extravagance and
display which would have astonished all previous ages, characterise the
heart of the Empire at the height of its material greatness. “Situate
at the entering of the sea,” with a population exceeding Scotland or
Ireland, and the revenues of many European States, the greatest city of
that Empire is taking toll from the industry of all the world. In the
midst of which outward evidence of attainment sounds almost unnoticed
the complaining of a poverty more degraded and intolerable than in many
less successful lands: whose misery is intensified by its conjunction
in adjacent cities with a people evidently given up to the arts of
enjoyment, and finding an ever-increasing plenty inadequate to its
ever-increasing demand.

And always the hope is latent that “something will turn up” which will
solve all the unfortunate social problems, and make every one happy and
content. Sometimes it is to be the advance of mechanical discovery,
sometimes a new spirit of kindliness and patience: sometimes fuller
conquests of trade or commerce or Imperial dominion; but always the
bringing in from outside of a _Deus ex machina_ which will supplement
nobody’s loss with everybody’s gain. The advance in acquisition
during a century of invention has been so astonishing, the progress
of whole classes from a low-grade, comfortless, ignorant life into
a highly-paid, skilled, intelligent working people so remarkable,
that to many the continuance of such a process seems inevitable.
Amelioration is to come as a legitimate child of the forces of change,
and without effort or sacrifice is to reveal a continuous process
of uplifting. Certainly by all material and tangible tests--income,
prices, security, comfort, addition to leisure and wages--the bulk
of the people of this country have advanced so incredibly since the
“Hungry Forties” that the reality of those days would appear to the
present generation but as bad dreams. They cannot believe that these
things were actually enacted upon these islands less than eighty
years ago. The Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Labour in
the Factories,--the most sensational blue book of the century,--for
example, would seem rather to refer to the Spaniards in the West Indies
or the administration of King Leopold in the Congo than to the solid
ground and pleasant airs of England. And in every kind of material
test--fall of pauperism, fall of the death-rate, decline of infectious
and poverty diseases--or increase of wages, shortening of hours of
labour, fall in prices; or, again, spread of education and of means of
recreation, improvement in houses and in the sanitation of cities, the
offering of opportunities of advancement: in all these the advance has
been so amazing that there would seem to be no place for the pessimist
who would prophesy coming disaster.

It is rather in the region of the spirit that the doubts are still
disturbing. Fulness of bread in the past has been accompanied with
leanness of soul. And the modern prophet is still undecided whether
this enormous increase of life’s comforts and material satisfactions
has revealed an equal and parallel advance in courage and compassion
and kindly understandings. The nations, equipped with ever more
complicated instruments of warfare, face each other as armed camps
across frontiers mined and tortured with the apparatus of destruction.
A scared wealthy and middle class confronts a cosmopolitan uprising
of the “proletariat,” whose discontent it can neither appease nor
forget. The industrious populations which have been swept into masses
and congestions by the new industry has not yet found an existence
serene, and intelligible, and human. No one, to-day, looking out upon
a disturbed and sullen Europe, a disturbed and confident America,
but is conscious of a world in motion: whither, no man knows. “The
people of our Christian world,” so runs the cry of the first of living
prophets--“the people of our Christian world live like animals, guided
in their lives merely by personal interests and by their struggle with
one another: differing from animals only in that the animals, from
time immemorial, have kept the same stomachs, claws, and fangs, while
people move with ever-increasing rapidity from roads to railroads,
from horses to steam, from spoken sermons and letters to printing, to
telegraphs and telephones, and from sailing boats to ocean steamers,
from swords to gunpowder, cannons, quick-firing guns, bombs, and
war aeroplanes. And life, with telegraphs, telephones, electricity,
bombs, and aeroplanes, and with hatred of all for all: directed, not
by some uniting spiritual principle, but, on the contrary, by animal
instincts which divide, and which employ mental powers for their own
satisfaction, becomes even more and more insane and wretched.”[18]

What mechanical invention, what mechanical skill, have any promise to
offer of immediate and large improvement? Will the cunning ingenuity
of men, which embarked on the path of scientific exploration with such
large hopes of service to humanity as well as attainment of truth, be
able, even at this last, through the multiplication of machinery to
eliminate poverty, through the development of the arts of healing to
eliminate pain? Or if this be unattainable and delusive, can we find
through these and other progressive agencies a permanent healing for
the sick soul of humanity? Is the twentieth century to advocate a
scheme of life which will itself provide a consolation in the loss of
the older faiths, and redeem mankind from a mere animal struggle for
the apparatus of material pleasure?

The “Bankruptcy of Science” is a term which has become common to
European literature since M. Brunetiere first scandalised the naive
ingenuous persons who accepted empiricism as a new religion. And, in
a large movement of popular opinion, mankind has turned with some
indignation and some regret from a method which has proved altogether
inadequate to the immense hopes that it once excited amongst its
first admirers. The greatness of the disappointment is proportioned
to the greatness of the promise. The accusation--in its popular
form--is an unfair one. Natural science, as such, makes no claim to
remedy human ills; makes no claim, indeed, to exercise any kind of
influence upon human life at all. It does not reveal, and it does not
profess to reveal, the secret and meaning of the Universe. That is
the function of a metaphysic. It does not labour in aid of religion,
art, economic equality, or social comfort. It does not labour against
them. It leaves them alone. These are outside its province. There is
no possibility through investigations in the higher mathematics, of
solving the problem of the injustices of human fortune. There is no
prospect through examination of the brains of dead animals to discover
or disprove the existence of the human soul. There is no promise, by
however subtle elaboration of mechanical invention, permanently to
better the lot of those poor who in every variation of human society
are always living near the margin of what is humanly endurable. Such
disabilities are no charge against human reason, concentrated upon
investigation of the nature of the material Universe. They are a
charge, if charge at all, against the somewhat too sanguine dreamers
who asserted that through human reason, in investigation of the nature
of the material Universe, mankind would finally achieve secrets
which would make them rivals of the older gods. The large hopes and
dreams of the Early Victorian time have vanished: never, at least in
the immediate future, to return. The science which was to allay all
diseases, the commerce which was to abolish war, and weave all nations
into one human family, the research which was to establish ethics and
religion on a secure and positive foundation, the invention which was
to enable all humanity, with a few hours of not disagreeable work every
day, to live for the remainder of their time in ease and sunshine--all
these have become recognised as remote and fairy visions. One man now
produces--by the aid of machinery--what a thousand could but hardly
produce a century ago. “Argosies of commerce” post over land and ocean
without rest. Not two but two hundred blades of grass grow where one
blade grew before. Factories and furnaces, in never-ceasing activity,
vomit forth ever more elaborate products, clothing, furniture, houses,
implements of brass and steel, by methods which would have excited
wonder and worship in earlier, simpler ages. Yet ten millions,
disinherited, out of a doubtful forty, shiver through their lives on
the verge of hunger: to the bulk of the remainder existence presents no
certain joys, either in a guaranteed prosperity or in any serviceable
and illuminating purpose of being. Civilisation, in the early twentieth
century in England, suffers no illusions as to the control of natural
forces, or the exploration of natural secrets furnishing a cure either
for the diseases from which it suffers in the body, or the more
deep-seated maladies of the soul.

It is making life noisier: is it making life--to the general--a richer,
a better thing: existence more worth the living? Once more, here is no
charge against invention, against the persistent labours of select and
powerful minds to ascertain what knowledge is obtainable by the method
of experiment and observation. They might justly reply that it is not
in their province to make life a richer and better thing: existence
more worth the living. Their function--in so far as it touches human
life at all--is to increase the aggregate control of “mind over
matter”; to release man from the mere impotent cowering before the
brute forces of Chance and Necessity, which can deal with him as a
plaything, or overwhelm him, casually and indifferently, without praise
and without blame. They have no function to determine what distribution
of this increase in human wealth and control will most make for the
happiness and development of the human family, or to adjust whatever
affirmations they may be able to advance with some certitude to
historical religions, moralities, or customary courses of conduct.
“The changing conditions of history,” says a great modern philosopher,
“touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
redistributions only diversify our opportunities, and open chances to
us for new ideals. But with each new ideal that comes into life, the
chance for a life based on the old ideal will vanish: and he would
needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
the total sum of significance is positively and absolutely greater at
any one epoch than at any other of the world.”

As the mechanical discoveries swing forward there will always be
those buoyant persons to whom the newer inventions are most welcome,
contrasted with the more conservative elements who ask for quiet,
and some position secure from the cyclic disturbances of change. In
the next generation, any particular change has become the normal,
and excites neither satisfaction nor disgust. So it has been with
improved locomotion, with telegraphs and telephones, with all the
outward apparatus which has set the unchanged human spirit in a world
of marvel and miracle. The most obvious scientific advance which is
already visible upon the horizon, is the invention of flying: which
may be accepted, almost before these words are in print, as something
no longer so astonishing as to excite enthusiasm or foreboding. It may
exercise the profoundest influence upon the possibilities of war, of
land frontiers, of divisions between contending nations. It has no real
power either of infecting with disease a civilisation that is healthy,
or of healing a civilisation that is sick and tired. For many years,
perhaps, aerial navigation may be the sport and plaything of rich and
adventurous spirits, like the first motor cars; creating occasional
sensations by circling round St Paul’s Cathedral, or descending
unexpectedly in other people’s back gardens. That is the stage when
mankind will rejoice in the ingenuity of its inventors, heedless of the
tremendous changes which such inventors must ultimately originate. Then
the airship will find itself utilised for military purposes, perhaps
with startling result. Then for locomotion and the transfer of people
and merchandise from place to place above the recognised boundaries of
ocean or territory. Finally, it will appear as a normal factor of man’s
life, transfiguring the world as much as the steamship or the railway;
occupied in the service of the poor as well as of the rich, under
private as well as public control. It may eliminate natural boundaries
which have exercised a dominant influence upon human life since human
life first was. The “precious stone set in a silver sea,” with its
moat defensive “against the envy of less happier lands,” may find
itself suddenly helpless and vulnerable before armies dropping from
the skies. War itself may become impossible or utterly destructive.
Protective barriers disappear, and the ingenuities of the construction
of a scientific tariff melt into thin air. Man, whether he will or
no, is drawn inevitably nearer to man. He must federate, or perish in
homicidal mania and blind impulse of hatred and revenge.

On the other hand, quite apart from the question of national rivalries
or the old impelling causes of the madness of war, there is the
further consideration of the influence of such achievements upon the
delicate fabric of the body and soul of mankind. At best, any large
accomplishment of flying must mean an increased hustling and speeding
up of human life; more hurry, more bustle, more breathlessness,
more triumphant supremacy of material things. In all our mechanical
ingenuities we have constructed masters for us, rather than servants;
being compelled, immediately such ingenuities have found fruit in
invention, to adjust our lives to the new conditions which these, and
not we ourselves, henceforth dictate and impose. We are compelled, for
example, to avail ourselves of the telegraph and the telephone; we are
driven to the express train, the motor omnibus, the various expedients
which are adapted to acceleration, rather than to happiness. If we
do not adjust our lives to such accelerations, we are swept aside or
trodden under by the crowds which press behind; like those who fail in
the daily leap for the Brooklyn cars at New York, and are swept aside
or trodden under almost unheeded. Has all this violence and tumult
made life richer, fairer, more desirable for the children of men? Or
is man losing in the mere blind effort of acceleration some of those
experiences which once transfigured and glorified his little span
of days? “Can you really turn a ray of light by magnetism?” shouted
Carlyle scornfully. “And if you can, what should I care?” Matthew
Arnold complained that the modern Englishman “thinks it the highest
pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried
twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell and from Camberwell
to Islington, and when railway trains run between them every quarter
of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from
an illiberal dismal life at Camberwell to an illiberal dismal life
at Islington, and the letters only tell him that such is the life
there.” Airships journeying daily from Paris to Pekin might excite
exultation in a humanity which has emulated the exploits of Icarus,
without exciting, like Icarus, the wrath of the jealous gods. Of what
profit if they be found merely to transfer to Paris an existence which
has become intolerable at Pekin, and to Pekin an existence which has
become intolerable at Paris? It is a remarkable fact in the history
of European development, that all the recent success of scientific
and mechanical invention has been accompanied by an ever profounder
questioning of the advantage of it all; so that to-day, when we seem
on the verge of such discoveries as would have made our ancestors
shout for joy in the mere triumph of creative energy, great writers
are inquiring, with more bitterness and uncertainty than ever before,
whether a verdict of bankruptcy has not been passed upon the whole of
this complicated and baffled society. Mr. Wells has exhibited the old
potato digger, “a greengrocer by trade, a gardener by disposition,”
confronting with a deepening disgust the restlessness of being. “Heaven
had planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately, Heaven had not
planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and
incessant change.” He is revealed in his little garden; gas-works and
electric power stations rising up to heaven beside him, mono-rails
running across his head, flocks of balloons and aeroplanes clouding
the horizon; everywhere on earth and sky the impression of a hustling,
distorted, dissatisfied energy, writhing into fresh forms of grotesque
invention. “This here Progress,” is his dull conviction; “it keeps
on. You’d hardly think it _could_ keep on.” It is not only Mr. Tom
Smallways who is bothered with doubts of an uncertain future. The
vision of all poverty and sweat of labour vanishing by the occasional
pressing of a button, while mankind lies at ease on the hillside like
the Olympian gods, has joined the vision of all disease abolished by
scientific ingenuity in the kingdom of the shades. Flying will bring
men together, abolish boundaries, multiply the facilities of exchange,
increase the wealth of a few. Can it offer satisfaction for one of the
necessities of the soul? There will always be those who find a bracing
and tonic in the roar and exultation of riotous life, the mingling of
the machine with the inspiration of the crowd. There will always be
others who will seek satisfaction in quietness and common things--the
untroubled horizon, the secure possession of the heart of humanity.
Between which two extremes the mass of mankind will go forward,
sometimes indifferent, not without courage and patience, towards a life
increasing in complexity, and making ever more difficult demands on
body and soul.

And as with flying, so with all similar advances in mechanical
discovery. Man creates and man consumes; no happier for a provision
which merely feeds a restless, hungry impulse towards change. So many
houses, so many clothes, so many elaborate meals, so many holidays
to-day. The number is doubled to-morrow. The many acquiesce: the
few, on the one extreme, accept and rejoice; the few, on the other,
push aside the banquet untasted, or spurn the feast with bitter gibe
at the futility of it all. “The barrenness and ignobleness of the
labourer’s life,” says a modern philosopher, “consists in the fact
that it is moved by no ideal inner springs.” But the labourer has no
monopoly in such a loss and deficiency. The whole of modern life has
the accusation resting upon it, that it is moved by no ideal inner
springs. Some find satisfaction in political energies, others in
religious ardours; others, again,--in the mere play and triviality of
wealth accumulation,--card games, or ingenious children’s diversions
carried into the larger universe of human affairs. Pursuit of knowledge
claims a tiny “remnant,” with a high intellectual hunger; or enthusiasm
for the future of the race, as they see always, luminous and clear
on the horizon, the shining of the star of a new dawn. But to the
general these “ideal inner springs” are wanting. They feel confused
in a world of confusion. Social unrest affects large masses of them
whose restlessness finds no clear fruit in action. Literature proclaims
a disenchantment. Man wanders unsatisfied in the spacious palaces of
his new material splendour. Many, after a rebellion at the time of
adolescence, settle down into acceptance; into making the “best of
it” in a world hard to understand, but, on the whole, easy to endure.
Others still refuse to relinquish the past for the intangible, elusive
promises of the future. “Enlightened persons,” wrote Châteaubriand,
“cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can persist in sitting in
the shadow of what they call ruins. Tell me, for pity’s sake, in the
individual and philosophical society which you offer me, where shall I
find a family and a God?”

       *       *       *       *       *

In the abolition of poverty by mechanical appliance, in the provision
of ethical and moral satisfactions for the human spirit which desires
richer gifts than material supremacy, this empirical method would
seem hitherto to have failed. They would appear, however, to be on
surer ground who prophesy its success in the war against disease.
Here at least discovery can have none but beneficial results; and the
competition is one of absolute human advantage. Yet the progress of
the modern campaign against diseases, distinguished as it has been
by triumphs which appear almost miraculous, still suffers resistance
which baffle and frustrate its purpose. There appears a kind of
unseen antagonist, who will rally in one region forces which have
been beaten elsewhere, and is determined never to allow mankind the
full fruits of victory. That all diseases will be slain by science,
and all slain speedily, was one of the accepted anticipations of the
earlier nineteenth century. In the great outburst of a triumphant
optimism which inspired the Early Victorian literature, the present,
whose discontents were clearly diagnosed, was sharply contrasted with
a future where such discontents would be no more. Here, on the solid
ground, a new race should arise, whose life, if limited, should be at
least secure. On one side, it may be confessed, there are evidences
of an almost exultant advance. The surest ground for optimism, for
faith in the “beneficent processes of the unseen time,” is provided by
examination of how many human scourges have been rendered innocuous
within living memory. We have eliminated from Europe the menace of
those sweeping cyclones of pestilence, whose terrors brood like a
grey cloud over all the brightness of the Middle Ages. One-third of
Christendom perished in the few months’ agony of the Black Death.
The sound of its lamentation, the madness caused by its apparently
irresistible destruction, still remains revealed in those “Dances of
Death” which absorbed the later medieval time, and in the literature
of protest and despair of a similar age. The Plague still ravages
the East, but science has succeeded, and apparently will succeed, in
protecting Europe against it. Other malignant fevers we seem on a
fair road to stamp out altogether. Smallpox has almost disappeared,
under the combined effects of sanitation and vaccination. Diphtheria
has lost its terrors since the arrival of the antitoxin treatment.
Hydrophobia has become merely a dread memory of the past. Even
tuberculosis, the special and terrible scourge of the northern races,
is likely to become in the future but as an evil memory of old years.
Science again, through the devotion and intelligence of a long roll of
volunteers, has boldly sallied out from the limited abodes of men into
the wild and shaggy regions of Nature, in the determination to strike
its enemy boldly at the centre of its empire. It is not content with
mere preventives and prophylactics, dosing men with drugs or covering
them with veils and protections. It is setting itself to extirpate the
very instruments of the propagation of the disease. Its enemy is the
insect. That extraordinary populous and intelligent kingdom might have
once attained the supremacy of the world, but for some inexplicable
limitations in size which has prevented any of its denizens from
challenging the forces of mankind. Michelet has described the kind of
horror with which the head of an ant inspired him, as first seen under
the microscope; with its vast and complicated eyes, its evidence of
incalculable brain power, but with the utter absence of any of those
human qualities which are revealed even in the vertebrate animals.
Yet those ants can exhibit inexplicable powers of communication, and
a social organisation which has been the envy of many a philosopher,
as he contrasts it with the chaos of human life. Ants charged with
“Boom food,” ant communities of many thousands, all six feet high,
might provide a considerable obstacle to the accepted supremacy of
mankind. But the insect, however tiny, is becoming more and more to
be recognised as one of the enemies of the human race. There is here
no possibility of compromise. We can be sentimental over the horse,
the cat, the dog. If we are sentimental over the insect, we are lost.
“Why should I harm thee, little fly?” was Uncle Toby’s famous inquiry.
“Is there not room enough in the world for me and thee?” Science is
unhesitatingly pronouncing a grim negative to the question. There is
not sufficient room in the world for “me and thee.” This is probably
true of the common house-fly, who more and more is coming to be branded
as a propagator of disease. It is already accepted of his cousin, the
mosquito, against whom the whole of the world is turning with a set
purpose of extermination. The alleged unhealthiness of marshes and
tropical regions, formerly ascribed to heat and noxious vapours, is
now declared to be entirely explicable by the spread of a definite
bacterium through the bites of insects. Where the insects are destroyed
the white man flourishes. Panama, in the early days of the Canal
building, was converted into a visible hell, in which a population
rioted and rotted and died, as they rioted and rotted and died in the
days of the plague. The Americans to-day have descended there with all
scientific resources. They burn the insect, they choke its offspring
with oil, they drain the stagnant pools where it can breed, they
consume it in clouds of evil-smelling smoke. They are rapidly making
Panama a healthier place than New York or Chicago. All down the coast
of South America, yellow fever has decimated mankind for centuries.
To-day it is well on its way to becoming a thing of the past. Six years
ago an international campaign was inaugurated against the _Stegomya
fasciata_, the “white-ribbed mosquito,” which spreads the disease. At
Rio Janeiro, Dr. Cruz, “Cruz the mosquito killer,” has practically
removed its menace. Repairing choked-up gutters, draining stagnant
marshes, fumigating and isolating, scattering oil on the still waters,
he is speedily and relentlessly exterminating this enemy of mankind.
Yellow fever and malarias will become shortly things of the past, as
the warfare, at present of necessity limited to the neighbourhood of
the cities, is extended through all the waste places of the world.

And if the discussion passes from the prevention to the cure, here
also the sanguine dream of our fathers might seem in process of
realisation. We can treat the tortured human body as Brutus wished to
treat the condemned Cæsar--“Carve it as a dish fit for the gods,” and
still preserve life and ensure recovery. First in antiseptic, then
in aseptic surgery, we have discovered a method of safe operation,
under which death would have been inevitable a few years ago. Gambetta
perished in early manhood, because the doctors were afraid of an
operation from which to-day over ninety per cent. of the patients
recover. Opiates and anæsthetics, combined with the agile use of the
knife, have eliminated on the one hand an almost inconceivable burden
of pain, on the other have rendered possible a tearing and lacerating
of the frail physical human body which would have seemed incredible
to our predecessors. Nor can any one imagine that we are anywhere but
in infancy in this particular progress. If, as eminent physiologists
assert, the nerves of pain are distinct from the nerves of sensation
or volition, it may be found possible to compound some subtle drug
which will blockade these particular channels of communication, and
render mankind henceforth completely immune from the pangs of physical
suffering.

But then thought turns to the other side of the picture, and is
immediately faced with a challenge to its optimism. As soon as one
disease is eliminated, another steps into its place to continue the old
tragic function of scourging mankind with pity and terror. Science is
always discovering new maladies, which baffle its exultant energies.
Medical, as distinct from surgical effort, is still largely in the
condition of alchemy: stretching blind hands in the darkness towards a
secret not yet revealed. A great man of science recently asserted that
there were only two medicines whose beneficial effect--in application
to specific disorders--could be guaranteed--quinine and mercury; and
that the operations of both of them were completely mysterious. We
drain our cities, we use our knives and our medicines, we maintain
armies of doctors, huge hospitals, and halls of research. And the
result is that in the factory centres one-fifth of the children born
perish within the year. Consumption, plague, malaria disappear. Their
places are readily assumed by cancer, which is steadily increasing;
by appendicitis, which had not even a name twenty years ago; by
meningitis, which is excited by the ordinary harmless cold in the
head. One woman in every twelve dies of cancer, and the cure still
remains altogether unknown. The human body in increase of prevention,
seems also to lose the power of resistance. Carefully shielded from
the rough forces of the world, it falls a prey to injuries born out of
the very conditions of safety which it has so laboriously constructed.
“He who has ordained all things in measure, number, and weight,” said
Mansel, “has also given to the reason of man, as to his life, its
boundaries, which it cannot pass.” Some unknown Power seems with these
“boundaries” still to defy man’s determination to push them back or
fling them down. In ten thousand years mankind has not added a cubit
to his stature. The Greek vision of bodily perfection has shown no
advance in succeeding time. In the Middle Age, with its outward squalor
and frequent pestilences--so operative in men’s minds that to some
observers the whole appears as a kind of physical delirium--there are
figures of Popes and Emperors taking the field at eighty years of age,
and an ineffaceable impression of an enormous physical vitality. It
would appear that, at least as far as one can look ahead, uncertainty,
sorrow, pain, and longing are to be accepted as companions of the life
of men. From these, indeed, have been born men’s highest achievements.
Metchnikoff still proclaims unfaltering faith in the triumph of human
intelligence, and sees a vision of humanity sustained on a diet of
soured milk, to well beyond a normally secure centenarianism. The cry
of such might still be the cry of Tithonus--“Release me, and restore
me to the ground,” in a desire for the return to the fate of “happy
men that have the power to die.” For, however successful we may find
ourselves in curing the maladies of the body, such efforts are of
little use if there remains unhealed the deeper malady of the soul.




CHAPTER VIII

LITERATURE AND PROGRESS


I

Let us turn, then, from science to literature: to the attempt made by
this age, or a certain section of it, to find self-conscious expression
for its praise or blame. I spoke at the beginning of the impeachment
of the nineteenth-century civilisation by its greater writers: their
conviction of a mortal disease. We have few great writers and far
less violence in denunciation. The change is becoming manifest as
comfort increases and wealth accumulates, which has been manifest
in all similar transformations. Literature loses its ardour and its
inspiration. It becomes critical rather than invigorating: sceptical,
questioning, sometimes with an appearance of frivolity, sometimes
torturing itself with angers and despairs. The note to-day is that of
a time of disenchantment. Here is reaction after the fashion of high
hopes: indignation at the bankruptcy of things which promised much and
accomplished so little; a conviction that the zest and sparkle has gone
from a society which suddenly feels itself growing old.

“The great evil of our age,” is the summary of one clear-sighted
critic, “is that we are constantly and terribly aware of evil.”
With wealth accumulated to the astonishment of mankind, tribute
sucked from all subject races, opulence which makes poorer nations
envious, literature reveals no content, no deliberate acceptances,
no high inspiration. “Our science, philosophies, and inventions and
manufactures and infinite complexities have conspired to make us more
discontented, even if we have not actually more cause for misery.”[19]
The verdict of the sceptic from the heart of a civilisation advancing
in material triumph and more comfortable in the world than ever before,
is a verdict of weariness and vanity.

The “ache of modernism” and the turmoil of Whitman’s “growing arrogance
of realism” confront the demands of the human spirit for adventure and
of the human heart for triumph over time and change. Science in its
buoyant beginnings had provided great inspiration, of wonderful gifts
for man’s enjoyment, of wonderful knowledge of the universal secret.
Sixty years ago it seemed to be offering humanity not only control of
material forces and cunning invention, but also the interpretation of
the secret of life and destiny. But science to-day--in the critic’s
examination--protests in literature the affirmation of a bankrupt
creed. The revelation of the secret has become the assertion of
Haeckel, that “consciousness, thought, and speculation are functions of
the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain.” And the inspiration
of the discovery sinks back into the declaration that “Democracy is an
expression of the constant desire for change, due to a hope that change
will bring some remedy for the really incurable ills of human nature.”
In such a critic as Mr. Hardy, reaction against this failure, the
bankruptcy of the creed of science, passes into an almost savage revolt
against the blind purposes of life; its clumsy cruelties, its lack of
guidance or intelligible meaning. “Hardy goes so far as to suggest that
God is either a defeated God or that He is indifferent, if not actually
hostile, to men.” “Human beings are for him worthy of praise and pity
because they have been laden with sorrows which they did not deserve,
and are kinder to one another than God is kind to them.”[20] This great
writer sees in vision the tragedy of “the modern vice of unrest,” of
“the view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest
for existence which was so intense in early civilisation.” “It is the
beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”

In face of such disillusionment the men who attempt literature
attempt escape in various ways. And “escape” is the prominent aspect
of to-day’s art, in a deliberate turning away from the realities
of the present, which only a few accept as substance for artistic
interpretation. Some fling themselves out of the main stream of life
like the “Decadents,” finding satisfaction in sense-given impression,
repudiating ultimate purposes. To these the present is already in
Autumn, and its noises and tumults but the jarrings of a machine
running down; worn with the dust of its own grinding. Others, like
the psychological novelists, attempt analysis without affirmation
or denial. They exhibit the world as they see it, or a particular
select portion of it. They dissect a character or a situation in all
its implications and aspects. They would be the first to repudiate
either approval or criticism of this subject-matter of delicate and
refined writing. At the opposite pole are the apostles of protest--a
Gorky, a Wells, a Mark Rutherford, who stab and slash at a life so
remote from the ideal, in furious revolt against its complacencies
and cruelties. Some fall back on dreams and memories, finding, either
in a transfigured past or in the kingdom of fantasy which never was
upon the solid ground, satisfaction denied in a world which has become
“so unworthy.” And others seek refuge in dreams of a transfigured
humanity from the implacable defiance of present things; with pictures
of that new world which yet shall rise when “every life shall be a
song.” Beyond these are the fugitives who frankly take to flight;
like Lafcadio Hearn, turning first to the south, then to the east,
“to the unexplored Eastern mind which may yet afford a refuge from
‘modernism,’” and finding his latter days saddened by the aggressive
entrance of “modernism” even into these remote fastnesses, and
civilisation ravaging the simplicities of old Japan. In the near East,
Mr. Scott James found the challenge frankly flung down, and the two
forces--romanticism and “modernism”--joined at death grips. “‘Time!’
ejaculates the Montenegrin. ‘What is time? Time is nothing. You live,
and then you die.’” The same resistance, the same overthrow is being
revealed here as Mr. Fielding Hall discovered in a far East, and so
unforgetably stamped into literature, in his picture of the passing
of the soul of Burma before a conquering imperialism and a vigorous
commercial development. “I know what it means, this civilisation,” says
the priest of “Our Lady of the Rocks” in the remote mountain fastness
of the Balkans. “My poor people. They have no idea what life is, out in
the great world, and it is coming to them.” “Till now they have lived
with God and the mountains. It is so very little that one needs in this
life. We have so short a time here.”

A few years ago I selected for criticism and for praise certain
contemporary writers who were refusing to take “opium.”[21] These set
themselves definitely in the heart of present affairs to endeavour to
understand and to interpret the meaning of their day and generation.
In almost every case the progress of things since that estimate has
taken them into darker and more ominous outlook upon the future of the
modern world. To Mr. Wells it is all a “spectacle of forces running to
waste, of people who use and do not replace; the story of a country
hectic with a wasting, aimless fever of trade and money-making and
pleasure-seeking.” The hero of his greatest novel reveals an experience
fragmentary and disconnected in a tumultuous world. Mr. Wells can
show that world in its rockings and upheavals, until beneath the
seeming calm and conventionality of the surface view, is heard the
very sound of the fractures and fallings; an age in the headlong
rush of change. George Ponderevo is at one time floating immense
financial companies, a king of speculation, courted by the great, one
of England’s “Conquerors.” At another he is quarrelling and forgiving
and quarrelling again with a little commonplace uncomprehending
wife down in a commonplace villa at Ealing. He is learning to fly,
absorbed in the work of scientific invention--the one real thing of
solid resistance in a universe of slush and mud and make-believe.
He is engaged in random, fantastic sociabilities at Beckenham or
Chislehurst, discussing, under the conflagrations of sun and star, the
respective merits, as domestic pets, of cat or dog. He is plunging,
in disconnected adventure, into a piratical raid into West Africa
after “quap,” a poisonous radio-active product of enormous value; and
again, emerging from that terrific battle with unclean and tenacious
forces, he is balancing toast on a tea-cup in a London drawing-room.
He tumbles into love, driven forward by blind, tyrannous forces which
overthrow reason and conventional restraint, against which he has never
been warned, in whose service he can find no meaning. And in problems
of sex which appear simple to the orthodox upholders of the existing
moral standards, and simple, again, to the orthodox revolters from
the existing moral standards, he can find nothing but perplexity and
confusion--no certain guidance at all.

At the beginning the child is reared under the shadow of Bladesover,
under the dominance of the great house, in the feudal tradition seen
from the underside. And here was a civilisation which could be
approved or condemned, but which at least stood as a coherent thing--a
rule of life, a code of conduct, an organic society. But as he grows
to manhood, Bladesover is sinking into decay, perishing, not knowing
that it is perishing, thinking that it will endure for ever. The man
who is living amid that long-drawn decline is wandering between two
worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. It is an age in
passing. What is coming to replace it? No one knows. The religion, the
moral affirmations and denials of Bladesover are vanishing with it.
Like the great house, the outward seeming still maintains an appearance
of life; still church steeple and feudal tower together dominate the
countryside. But the inner heart of it has gone. Man, as he achieves
maturity, as he achieves sincerity from the rubbish heap of dead and
dying assertions and denials in which he is being upreared, finds
himself naked and alone in the midst of all the clamour and violence
of encompassing hordes of his fellows. No pillar of cloud by day, no
pillar of fire by night, directs his onward journey. And the irony
of the experience is provided by the fact that the moment of the
apprehension of this loneliness is the moment also of the apprehension
of magnificence in material achievement--when civilisation, intoxicated
with the attainment of comfort, is crowning itself with flowers and
calling itself immortal. The effect is similar to that of the splendour
of a palace which is found to be designed by a madman.

It is a “new hotel population” revealed as the ascendant race: the
“multitude of economically ascendant people who are learning how to
spend money.” They are “running the world, practically, running it
faster and faster.” Of the fate of such an Age the hero here makes no
prophecy. The sadness of his frustrated life, the denial of the only
thing in life that he passionately desires, fills the whole scene with
the sense of baffled purposes, of a striving that ends in nothing. “It
may be,” he confesses at the end, “I see decay all about me because I
am, in a sense, decay. To others it may be a scene of achievement and
construction radiant with hope. I, too, have a sort of hope, but it is
a remote hope, a hope that finds no promise in this Empire or in any of
the great things of our time. How they will look in history I do not
know.”[22]

And here speaks the ordinary man in his moment of introspection: in
that rare moment when standing aside from the hurry and dust of it
all he asks himself whence? why? and to what end? The other qualified
critics of the time are scarcely less discomforting. Mr. Bernard
Shaw, after devoting half his lifetime to the satirising of the
advocates of order, seems determined to devote the other half to the
satirising of the advocates of change. Ridicule of the hypocrisy and
self-deceptions which are the permanent accompaniments of reform, is a
task not only easy in itself, but exceedingly agreeable to all those
to whom Reform itself is tiresome. The satirist enjoys, therefore, a
widespread popularity. The portrait of the blatent Liberal phrasemonger
in _John Bull’s Other Island_, the failure of philanthropy and the
triumph of efficiency in _Major Barbara_, the universal confusion
which falls upon the new moralists in the conversation in _Getting
Married_, seems extraordinarily pleasant to all those to whom Liberal
ideas and philanthropic ardours and new moralities are undesirable
intruders in a well-regulated existence. Only occasionally, and then
through the intervention of a “madman,” does the voice of the prophet
declare “woe” to a world of blindness and illusion. Little Rosscullen,
the Irish parallel to the remote Montenegrin village, invaded by
the representatives of “Progress” is found far from any condition
of idyllic innocence. Amid the splendour of the natural scene, the
granite rock and heather in the setting sun, poverty, selfishness,
superstition, ignorance, indifferent cruelty compete for mastery.
The priest tyrannises and bullies, the farmer cheats the labourer;
furtive cunning and idleness and revengeful memories occupy the
place of the simple devotion and pastoral rejoicings of the popular
picture. But the new world which is to civilise this dreary swamp
of humanity out of existence offers to the observer food no more
satisfying to the hungry heart of man. The “Progress” which modern
life here unfolds to the medieval is a “progress” which terminates
in blind endings--the product of the Town of Vanity. “I shall bring
money here,” is the twentieth-century promise to all Rosscullens.
“I shall raise wages. I shall found public institutions, a library,
a polytechnic (undenominational, of course), a gymnasium, a cricket
club, perhaps an art school. I shall make a garden city of Rosscullen.
The round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored.” To which
the twelfth century replies in an epitaph written over the graves
of many kings. “Believe me, I do every justice to the efficiency of
you and your syndicate. Mr. Broadbent will get into Parliament most
efficiently; which is more than St. Patrick could do if he were alive
now. You may even build the hotel efficiently, if you can find enough
efficient masons, carpenters, and plumbers, which I rather doubt.
When the hotel becomes insolvent your English business habits will
secure the thorough efficiency of the liquidation. You will reorganise
the scheme efficiently. You will legislate its second bankruptcy
efficiently. You will get rid of its original shareholders efficiently,
after efficiently ruining them. And you will finally profit very
efficiently by getting that hotel for a few shillings in the pound.
Besides these efficient operations, you will foreclose your mortgages
most efficiently. You will drive Haffigan to America very efficiently.
You will find a use for Barney Doran’s foul mouth and bullying temper
by employing him to slave-drive your labourers very efficiently. And
when at last this poor desolate countryside becomes a busy mint in
which we shall all slave to make money for you, with our Polytechnic
to teach us how to do it efficiently, and our library to fuddle the
few imaginations your distilleries will spare, and our repaired Round
Tower, with admission sixpence, and refreshments and penny-in-the-slot
mutoscopes to make it interesting, then no doubt your English and
American shareholders will spend all the money we make for them very
efficiently in shooting and hunting, in operations for cancer and
appendicitis, in gluttony and gambling; and you will devote what they
save to fresh land-development schemes. For four wicked centuries the
world has dreamt this foolish dream of efficiency. And the end is not
yet. But the end will come.”[23]

Which outburst, like the denunciation of the American millionaires by
the preacher whom they pay for such services, excites no resentment,
but rather applause. “Too true,” replies Mr. Broadbent, “only too true,
and most eloquently put.” “He has made me feel a better man,” is the
grateful verdict. “I feel now as I never did before, that I am right
in devoting my life to the cause of Ireland. Come along and help me to
choose the site for the new hotel.”

Nor are the younger writers of to-day entirely free from this
infection of fatigue and of revolt against the triumphant forces of
the modern world. In the days of the Reaction in politics, a few were
conspicuous both for the vigour of their attacks against its falsities
and cowardices, and also for their undismayed assertion of another
ideal. Yet after that Reaction’s overthrow they seem to find little
satisfaction: and reveal in their criticism a rejection, not merely
of systems of government or worship of false gods in modern life,
but of the whole soul of a civilisation visibly--as it appears to
them--sick unto death. Mr. Belloc--one of our few living masters of
irony--has advanced from the limited survey of “Mr. Burden” an attack,
with some kindliness and some good nature, upon a particular phase of
financial manipulation, to the bitter and mirthless impeachment of
“Mr. Clutterbuck”--an attack on modern life itself as fundamentally a
thing unclean. Rich men struggle for money or worldly honour as dogs
fight over offal. Middle classes, vacuous in intelligence, humourless
in daily existence, reveal as sole ambition, longing for wealth and
rank and social advancement. Behind is a shadowy background of inert,
vacant “populace,” ignorant, violent, despicable, only appearing in
the scene to be cajoled and deluded in popular elections. The general
result is the picture of a Society afflicted with an incurable decay,
a carcase eaten of maggots and worms. Mr. Chesterton, again, first
entered the arena of controversy in another spirit: crashing upon the
stage sword in hand, and with a breath of jolly fresh air offering to
lead all humanity to the downfall of Doubting Castle. His challenge and
defiance were to all pessimisms and life denials, to all who refused
to affirm that to-day was the first of days, and every dawn a miracle.
The slums of the cities were stupendous, the suburbs sublime. Each
fat red pillar-box was a symbol of enchantment. Dragons’ eyes glared
from the lights of engines, and the lamp-posts shouted, like the sons
of God, for joy that they were made. But to-day in our solitary and
splendid optimist the rejoicing has already become sickled o’er with
the pale cast of doubt. The music of his rustic flute has kept not for
long its happy country tone, and has taken a stormier note from the
tempest-tossed children of mankind. So the sunlight fades in the vision
of a people which has abandoned Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, of
political parties bought for ignoble ends, a nation which has turned
its back upon the clean ways of progress, and lies deferential and
prostrate before an oligarchy of rich men; who only cannot be bought
because they have sold themselves already.

And in a thousand lesser ways in various efforts through industrious
novelists and essayists, in the newspaper and the pulpit, there is
made manifest this bewilderment, doubt, and uncertainty of the future.
“Neither hast Thou saved Thy people at all,” is the summary of many who
hoped so much from the discoveries and progresses of the last century,
and now find their hopes unexpectedly baffled. The majority of writers
are in revolt against the organisation of present-day society. Some
call themselves Socialists. But by “Socialist” they mean little but an
impeachment of the present. With some that impeachment is definitely of
certain specific and economic evils. Poverty in the midst of plenty,
extravagance of wealth helpless before extravagance of penury, a
growing absorption in pleasure, lack of simplicity, of patriotism, or
of impersonal ideals, are the subjects which fill their pages with
lamentation. There are others, however, in whom the criticism goes
deeper, with whom complaint against life’s ironies and injustices has
passed into complaint against life itself. They can see present wrongs,
but if all these wrongs were righted, they can see no rational or
satisfying ideal. Level the poor to the rich, convert Poplar or Wapping
into Belgravia or Mayfair, make every labourer’s cottage, as by the
waving of a fairy wand, into the security and splendour of the country
house. What after all, they declare, have you accomplished but the
conversion of a society scourged with hunger and cold into a society
afflicted with a great weariness. Humanity, at last self-conscious,
has understood the meaning of the World Process and will be no longer
fooled by its futile, irrational demands.

What can be discovered, in this evidence of wasting and decay, of
another character: of a literature which accepts the present with
rejoicing, or looks through the present to a transfigured future, or
sees the present itself transfigured by a perpetual benediction? Can
there still be descried, under grey skies and in an age of comfort
rather than of inspiration, those who still assert the reality of the
Vision Splendid, and essay adventure down all the great ways of the
world.

Still two voyages are being accepted: a voyage without, in the actual
encounter with primitive and hostile forces, and in a universe of salt
and bracing challenges; and a voyage within, across distant horizons
and to stranger countries than any visible to the actual senses.
In the latter there is revealed a continuous tradition through the
older mystics, of those who are secure in whatever wild whirlpools or
stretches of sullen marsh the river of time may flow, because their
goods are gathered

  “Where change is not, nor parting any more,
  Nor revolution of the moon and sun.”

The Reverend Thomas Treherne, in a quiet corner of seventeenth-century
England, could declare that “all Time was Eternity and a perpetual
Sabbath.” “The corn was orient, and immortal wheat which never should
be reaped, nor was ever sown. The dust and stones of the streets
were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the
world.” “Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I know nothing
of sickness or death, or rents or exactions, either for tribute or
bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with
the works of God in their splendour and glory. I saw all in the
peace of Eden.”[24] A hundred years later Blake in the dusty byways
of dead cities could carry on the tradition of those who accept and
yet rejoice--perpetually charging themselves in Whitman’s cheerful
proclamation with “contentment and triumph.” Seeing God visibly with
the naked eye, angels “with bright angelic wings bespangling every
bough with stars” in the trees of Peckham Rye, and the sun not as a
golden guinea hung in the sky, but as a multitude of the heavenly host
singing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” this master mystic could defiantly proclaim
that “though on earth things seem permanent, they are less permanent
than a shadow, as we all know too well.” A century afterwards the
tradition still abides, and life is still illuminated by an adventure
through and beyond the sense-given impression of the outward show,
into a universe of fire and splendour. To some it is effort towards a
secret, a refusal to accept the knowledge which is given as the last
word on the matter: an attempt to get once more behind both science and
revelation to the Quiet which lies beyond all the noises of the world.
To others it is a spiritual pilgrimage, not so much towards knowledge
as towards attainment; an attempt through the will, in the business of
life, to identify life as a journey: along a “road which leads to a
light on the far horizon and beyond to the presence of God.” In each
there is an escape from a tyranny of a present offering grey streets
encompassing grey people, evolving itself into a future which offers
more grey streets encompassing more grey people. Against so desolate a
prospect sounds the summons of high enterprise, in the affirmation of a
splendour not yet revealed, of shadowy presences and casements opening
upon the perilous seas of fairyland.

In the other voyage, that enterprise is offered in no shadowy region
of dreams, but amid the hard and tangible materials of to-day: in that
“Romance” whose habitation is everlasting, and kingdom without end.
It is the inspiration of Stevenson and his successors: accepting all
things, delighting in all things with the solemn engrossing play of
children; living in “make-believe,” knowing it make-believe, and yet
not desiring to have it otherwise. “He seems to be marching through a
land and atmosphere,” says a critic, “where the men are strange men,
and the lights are garish, and there is a queer noise of music borne
upon the wind. And yet this land, for all its strangeness, is found to
be the land we knew before, but seen under a new perspective, upon a
more imaginative plane.” He has never lacked successors: some finding
in the actual adventure of so-called settled and orderly life all the
amazing romance of the vicissitudes of fortune: some, like Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, exhibiting just outside the ordered garden the riotous forces
of natural and untameable things--the hills and the sea--calling upon
man joyfully to an encounter which may be ruinous but is never dull.
So there is inspiration in such a great writer as Mr. Joseph Conrad,
with his sense of companionship, laughter, and fury in the defiance of
wind and tempest: in a lesser example, in that “Beloved Vagabond” who
discovered “why I was sent into the world. It was to play the fiddle up
and down the sunny land of France.”


II

But this, after all, is “make-believe”--the play of children; and
children grow tired of their toys. Dressed up in gorgeous garments,
marching through the world with helmet and tin sword, they may pretend
that tremendous events accompany every day. If, to the majority, these
tremendous events do not accompany every day, they are destined sooner
or later to be found out. Lives insurgent and confined may take delight
in the vision of strange countries and far horizons, just as Dick
Heldar at his window looking over the lights of the enormous city is
roused into a sickness of longing by the song of the “Men of the Sea.”
But to the general such emotions must remain a passion vicariously
experienced. We must seek elsewhere for a spirit, expressing itself
through literature, to which any large proportion of the citizens of
the twentieth century can respond. It must be a spirit which will
reveal the present as itself satisfying, apart from unknown to-morrows
and dead yesterdays. It must stand independent of all attainments
of political and social changes, as something by which human life
will find itself ennobled, when all the old wrongs are righted and an
economic basis of possible existence secured for all. It must be a
spirit of joy as well as of reason: yielding exultant satisfaction in
a delight which is beyond the mere momentary enjoyment of the senses
in the dull instincts of thrift and gain. And it must be independent
for the immediate future of supernatural securities and definite
theories as to the meaning and purpose of the world. Such theories will
continue, indeed, to be maintained with greater or less allegiances by
large sections and organisations of the new race. These are not likely
at any reckonable time to unite upon any single dominant philosophy of
life, or, in union, to impose that dominant philosophy upon the people
outside. For a large and probably an increasing proportion, relief from
a kind of life-weariness must come from some element in the world as
it is given; from renewed expression, either in response to the life
of the earth, or in the fulfilment of artistic and creative powers, or
in new forms of enthusiasm for their fellow-men, of the possibilities
before a people which sees existence less as a pilgrimage than as a
present boon.

Indications towards such a new inspiration are not lacking in Europe
and America. They are found in the works of such a writer as Whitman,
with his ecstasy at the “ever-returning miracle of the sunrise,” the
love of ferries and crowds, cities and men, and all the beauty of the
world. A more exotic but still hopeful creed is that of Maeterlinck,
with his delight in the white road, and the silence of the night, and
the splendour of the sunset; his vision of a humanity whose hearts will
grow more gentle with the weather, absorbed in persuading the earth to
bring forth ever more marvellous treasures of fruit and flowers. And in
England also, in such writings as those of William Morris and Richard
Jefferies, there would appear a kind of foretaste of a spirit which in
its acceptance and its rejoicing, may be found to build up behind the
deserts of life-weariness a triumphant affirmation of the greatness of
Present Things.

This exultant optimism would often seem to be entirely independent
of narrow circumstance or present discouragement. “You never enjoy
the world aright,” says Mr. Thomas Treherne, “till you so love the
beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade
others to enjoy it.” Most of those who in latter years of depression
and grey skies have revealed themselves as “covetous and earnest to
persuade others to enjoy it,” have been great physical sufferers. From
a life of physical torment, perhaps intensified and heightened by that
torment, they have been engaged in “corroborating for ever the triumph
of things.” Stevenson and Henley, Whitman and Jefferies, all those who
have “made to-day the first of days and this field Eden,” have learnt
the intoxication of present pleasure from association with present
pain. “He was a very marked case of hysteria in man,” was one medical
verdict upon Jefferies. In the long years of torture which terminated
in premature death, “in some way not yet to be explained,” says his
latest biographer, “the mortal pining of his body was related to the
intense vivacity of his last years.” “Some of my best work,” he wrote,
“was done in this intense agony.” In the midst of which agonies he
stands as typical of the company of “Life Worshippers” who, awakening
while other men were asleep, could behold something of the splendour
of the world, the magic of each moment as it passes, vindicating its
existence before it dies.

This “Life Worship” becomes revealed as a gluttonous grasping at the
present, the sucking of the rind and core of its delights; a response
to the consciousness of the crowd; a refusal to accept any standard but
the standard of Life, before which many impulses and all inhibitions
stand judged and condemned. “I believe in the Body,” is the beginning
of the Creed. “I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest
blasphemy; blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in
the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship.... The ascetics
are the only persons that are impure.” In Jefferies worship of natural
things became a kind of physical avidity; intensified by a sense of
touch and vision exceedingly delicate and violent. He devoured colour,
finding “every spot of it a sort of food.” In the later spring “the
ears listen and want more,” he writes: “the eyes are gratified with
gazing, and desire yet further; the nostrils are filled with sweet
odours of flower and sap. The touch, too, had its pleasures, dallying
with leaf and flower.” “Can you not almost grasp the odour-laden air,”
he asks, “and hold it in the hollow of the hand?” It is a riot of
sense-given impression, accepting, without questioning, very content.
These men are of the company who find the world “more to man since
he is fallen than it was before,” accepting the challenge of the
mystic--“you never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth
in your veins, till you are clothed with the Heavens and crowned with
the Stars.”

It is a pageant, the pageant of the moment which passes and yet
abides, ever old and ever young. It delights in “the old road, the
same flowers.” It accepts the wind’s whispering that “there never was
a yesterday, and never will be a to-morrow.” It finds “always hope
in the hills.” “All the grasses of the meadow were my pets,” wrote
Jefferies of his childhood’s days. “I loved them all.” Of poppies,
“there is genius in them,” he proclaims, “the genius of colour, and
they are saved.” With Thoreau he will abandon all for which most men
labour to hear one cricket sing. “I found from the dandelion,” he
cries, “that there were no books.” “The sunlight puts out the words
of the printed books as it puts out the fire; the very grass blades
confound the wise.” To that sunlight he brings as a testing instrument
all clamorous and appealing things: the hopes and dreams and perplexing
ways of men. He is a worshipper of the sun, falling in the afternoon in
Trafalgar Square, on the crowded Brighton promenade, in the woods of
high June, or under a cold November day. He applauds it stored in the
gold of the wheat or woven into the petals of the rose. “More sunshine;
more flowers” is a perpetual hope for the future of mankind. For this
sunshine is life--riotous, confident, unashamed; life congruous to
and illuminating all the physical beauty of the human body, of the
world of out of doors; the life which made him almost intoxicated with
the marbles in the British Museum, which drew him, resisting, to the
unknown city multitudes; which left him in childhood on the downs,
“utterly alone with the sun and the earth,” lost in an ecstasy, an
inflatus at “the inexpressible beauty of it all.”

And as “Life Worship” approves, it also condemns; all energies directed
towards blind alleys, burrowings underground; all that is unable
to encounter with exultation the test of that strong stimulus and
fever. It rebels always against the mechanic pacing to and fro; the
set grey life; the apathetic end. Its vision of modern England is of
the man with the muckrake, ever being offered the golden crown, ever
assiduously and with downcast eyes raking together the sticks and
small stones and the dust of the floor. “The pageantry of power,” says
Jefferies, “the still more foolish pageantry of wealth; the senseless
precedence of place; words fail me to express my utter contempt for
such pleasure or such ambitions.” He is dissatisfied that life for the
general is “so little and so mean.” “Back to the sun” he is always
preaching, from “house life”--“house life” which he denounces as the
creed of the half-alive. “Remain; be content; go round and round in
one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient
fables, old age, and death.” As a mystic he belongs to the class of
those who aspire, rather than of those who acquiesce. These are never
in danger of becoming quietists. Rejoicing in the moment, they are
never content with the moment, demanding always that which the moment,
with all its rich benefits, can never bestow. They ask “for a larger
frame, a longer day, more sunshine, a longer sleep.” They rise from
the banquet of life never satisfied, encouraging illimitable desires.
Longing--an invalid--for “the unwearied strength of Ninus to hunt
unceasingly in the fierce sun,” “still I should desire greater strength
and a stouter bow,” cries Jefferies; “wilder creatures to combat.” “The
intense life of the senses,” he asserts, “there is never enough of
them.” “I should like to be loved by every beautiful woman on earth.”
Meat and bread he finds pleasant and wine refreshing, but “these
are the least of all.” He has never had enough of the vehemence of
exertion, the vehemence of sunlight and life, the insatiate desire of
love, divine and beautiful, the uncontrollable desire of beauty. “Give
me these in greater abundance,” he prays, “than was ever known to man
or woman.” It is the prayer of a cripple, in poverty and pain, stricken
down ere the journey has well-nigh begun; so soon to pass to where all
journeys end.[25]

And what they desire for themselves they come to desire also for all
companions, as they march singing down the great roads of the universe.
It is a life which will transfer no affections to some problematical
future, but here and now will riot and rejoice in the glory of the sum
of things. Jefferies was perplexed and saddened by the confusion that
man has made of his world. “In twelve thousand written years the world
has not yet built itself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised
itself for its own comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the
wonder with which it fills me.” Yet he believes that there would be
enough for all, if only all were willing to share it. He brushes aside
the ordinary ambitions which inflame mankind: “money, furniture,
affected show, and the pageantry of wealth.” He longs for the coming of
a day when the ambition of the multitude will be fixed on the idea of
form and beauty. “I would submit to a severe discipline,” he declares,
“and to go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness
of the human race in the future.” “The labour of our predecessors in
this country, in all other countries of the earth, is entirely wasted.
We live--that is, we snatch an existence--and our works become nothing.
The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of
immense commerce, end in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea
that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement.
Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding
of, and sympathy with, these things.” But he does not despair of the
future. “Earth,” he asserts in _The Pageant of Summer_, “holds secrets
enough to give them the life of the favoured immortals.” His heart was
fixed firm and stable in the belief that “ultimately the sunshine and
the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were,
interwoven into man’s existence.” “There is so much for us yet to
come,” he believes, “so much to be gathered and enjoyed.”

So these writers can look towards the future with hope. Their visions
and Utopias do not end in a sense of dust and ashes--an infinite
weariness. The cities ever growing higher of M. Anatole France, in the
heart of which men pile up wealth on a diet of sour milk and digestive
tablets, the fat, settled comfort of Mr. Bellamy, the roofed-in
labyrinthine airless ant-heaps of Mr. Wells’s nightmare all leave
an impression of emptiness and fatigue. But here is the sense of an
inspiration and splendour which could become part of the common life
of humanity. Nor does this splendour require, as in former appeals in
literature, assumptions which the modern world is finding impossible.
Wordsworth offered an escape from the tyrannies of a mechanical
civilisation, in an exaltation of the appeal of Nature and of the life
of the poor. But he demanded for his acceptance assumptions concerning
both Nature and the Poor which men to-day are by no means prepared
to give. He found the one charged with a spiritual presence, the
other transformed by unusual tranquillity and piety. Not through such
assumptions will society, in the immediate years to come, find the
satisfaction which is the goal of all its wandering. There is more hope
in the way of the Life Worshippers like Jefferies than of the Nature
Worshippers like Wordsworth. Wordsworth assumes a Nature benignant and
responsive, a spirit whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and
in the mind of man. The result is a kind of refined and sometimes too
rarefied Pantheism, which is compelled often to shut its eyes to the
Nature which is “red in tooth and claw,” and equally bestows increase
and destruction. Jefferies wove from his dawns and sunsets no roseate
scheme of natural religion. He acknowledged the “blunt cruelty” of
natural things. He always confessed no intelligence in human affairs:
outside, a Nature not so much hostile as utterly indifferent to all
the ardours of mankind. “The sea, the earth, the sun, the trees, the
hills, care nothing for human life.” He had no specific “humanitarian”
teaching, and in early days delighted in the work of devastation and of
slaughter. He was bored by the claims of science, and thought nothing
of the jargon of “Evolution.” The strength of his position rests in
his association of these realities with the overmastering “passion of
life.” To him it was an adventure always, into a region of fairyland,
occupied as to another modern mystic with “dust like the wreck of
temples and thistle-down like the ruin of stars.” His strength was in
himself. It was from that hidden, mysterious source of vitality that
the colours appeared which he sought in field and flower, that rain
of fairy gold which flung itself over the common things until every
bush was burning with fire. He did not find a Presence which disturbed
with the joy of elevating thoughts. He found a Glamour--inimitable,
inexplicable--which excited to passionate emotion. Others have demanded
Order, Understanding, evidence of Purpose or Compassion. He asked
only for Beauty. And that Beauty is not denied to the supplicant. The
Seasons pass in their procession; Birth and Death weave their webs of
being; men are seeking, and in vain, for sympathy and pity behind
the veil of visible things. Enough for him that here the sunlight
flickering on the stems of old trees, the sap creeping up through a
million tiny stems, the changes of expanding petals and of withered
autumn leaves, can reveal a magic and a mystery which time shall never
dim nor age destroy.

This unquestioning love of the Earth and the children of it is perhaps
the most hopeful element for future progress. In a century of doubts
and scepticisms it may serve to bridge the gulf between the old and the
new. Whilst men are still confused concerning the purposes of Nature,
and still doubtful concerning any definite or intelligent progress
towards a final end, it is much that inspiration and contentment can
be found in its present beauty and appeal. The “glory of the sum of
things” may thus come to be interpreted in some particular sense-given
experience, untroubled--in that present--by inquiry concerning a past
that is dead or a future that is not yet born. Forgetful of the cold
of a vanished winter, and of the inevitable fading of the flowers, man
can accept the summer day, from dawn to sunset, as an “Eternal moment,”
something that is good in itself apart from remembrance of what has
been or anticipation of what shall be. And if this acquiescence and
enjoyment be supplemented by the recreation of a creative energy,
in that special happiness which comes from the fashioning by human
handiwork of things of delight, the possibilities of an inspiration
can be discerned which even for a time, putting aside occupation in
ultimate mysteries, may “bring satisfaction to the ways of men.”

The demand for more and fuller life, which attempts in empty effort,
in acceleration, in sense-given pleasure, in the mere blind and
laborious effort at the attainment of wealth, may be here pictured
as realising itself in no material or brutal fashion, through an
experience which itself is its own justification. In such a life as
that of William Morris there is the suggestion of a possibility of
progress, more satisfying and at the same time more hopeful than
Mill’s refuge in transcendental poetry. It is an advance on Jefferies
because more determined and alive: more positive in its proclamation
of life’s good things. It is the artist as craftsman on the one hand,
as lover of the earth on the other, who appears typical of the best
that can be expected in a world which has abandoned adventure beyond
the sense-given universe. His Socialism indeed led him amongst strange
companions and into mean unlovely regions of the Newer England.
But this Socialism was just the emotional revolt against all the
multitudinous ugliness and captivity and starved limited life of
those whose life could have been a thing so different. The very thing
that seemed to be intolerable, in a society which called itself a
civilisation, was that the variable, fascinating aspects of a changing
year should proclaim its appeal on wall and garden, and mankind pass
by, with blind uncomprehending gaze, in a pursuit after irrelevant
things; and that in the industry of a whole race of men engaged in
extravagant toil, there should be absent from that toil the delight
in inventiveness and original handwork which alone can convert labour
into a joy. His first allies had been absorbed in the effort at
escape: through Rossetti’s exotic twilight, or Burne Jones’s radiant
visions of a world beyond the world. He also had sought the consolation
which comes from far-off places, in a medieval England seen under a
light which never was on sea or land. He drew from this passion of
the past the best that the past could give; a sharp sense of the good
things which are still offered to a world of children living always
in fairyland: untroubled by present doubts and future fears. “With
him,” says his biographer, “the love of things had all the romance and
passion that is generally associated with the love of persons only.”
“It has come to be to me,” he wrote in 1882, of the Manor House at
Kelmscott, “the type of the pleasant places of the earth, and of the
homes of harmless, simple people, not overburdened with the intricacies
of life. And as others love the race of men through their lovers, so I
love the earth through that small space of it.”

“Children we twain are,” he could write of himself and his book,
“late made wise in love, but in all else most childish still.” Loving
the earth and the joy of it, seeking still the pleasure of the eyes,
exulting in its visible beauty, the waters gliding through the Hollow
Land where the hills are blue, a walled garden in the happy poplar
land, with old grey stones over which red apples shone “at the right
time of the year” he could always cherish the hope that “our small
corner of the world may once again become beautiful and dramatic
withal”: because the red apples and grey stones and blue hills were
possessions which required for their acceptance no impossible extension
of present human achievement. In his vision of satisfaction “now it is
a picture of some great room full of merriment,” says a critic, “now
of the winepress, now of the golden threshing-floor, now of an old
mill among apple trees, now of cool water after heat of the sun, now
of some well-sheltered, well-tilled place among woods or mountains,
where men and women live happily, knowing of nothing that is too far
off or too great for the affections.” The one cloud in the landscape
comes from the knowledge that it will change and vanish: that, behind,
are always the hurrying of the inexorable hours and the beating of the
great wings of Death. But if the transitoriness of love and beauty
causes some pang of sadness, the intensity of it is deepened by this
conviction of its passing. The shadow creeping slowly over the dial,
the vision of bare November with its ruined choirs in the splendour of
the August afternoon, can excite a longing wild with all regret. But
they can excite also an ever-deepening exultation in Beauty all the
more desirable because it is “Beauty that must die”; and a passion for
the love and labour of the day because so soon “the night cometh,” when
all love and labour are done.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such are indications of a possible escape from a literature that
appears in the bulk in active warfare against “progress,” as the
word is understood in twentieth-century England. The critics and the
novelists, no less than the poets, would seem to have deserved Plato’s
rigorous sentence of expulsion from a civilisation against which they
are openly at war. They cry pitifully or passionately over the huge
ant-heap of modern industry, “What shall it profit?” Those who listen
to their crying will probably drop under in the struggle, from mere
inability--when the choice is offered--to fashion any intelligible goal
of attainment. They exhibit progress making inevitable more men, but by
no means better men. They demonstrate, as with the physical accuracy of
the dissector’s scalpel, the same selfishnesses and superstitions and
weaknesses and impulses of lust and cowardice and greed, multiplying
to-day as yesterday. They reveal in the few, as conspicuously as in
the many, life directed by prejudice rather than by reason, arrogance
and avarice and blindness exercising their ancient empire. They ask
sometimes with impatience, sometimes with deliberation, if this be the
final word in the matter: if the desirable things which are possible
to human experience are always to be sacrificed to Accumulation or
Acceleration, or a joyless extravagance, or (at the bottom) a mere
animal struggle for food and shelter. And Civilisation, in reply to
these “Anarchists,” speaks with voice less certain than in former days;
being itself perplexed why, after the long journey has been attempted
and all the miracle achieved, it cannot at last see clearly on the
horizon the walls and towers of the Golden City of men’s dreams.




CHAPTER IX

RELIGION AND PROGRESS


Literature--at its highest estimate--is, however, only the luxury of
the few. It influences a strictly limited class. It is produced by a
still more limited class. It is so little operative upon the general
life of the nation that its very claim to be considered in a survey of
the “Condition of England” is doubtful. The published writings which
in the least degree influence the life and opinion of the majority are
the published writings not of the present but of the past. In so far
as such existence occupies itself with anything beyond the newspapers
or the sensational and generally excellent cheap fiction of the day,
it is with the “World’s Classics,” or the reprints of established
authors, which now are so plentifully provided in portable form by the
various contemporary publishers. Whatever evidence of weariness or
revolt may be exhibited by the tiny group of practising authors makes
no impression upon the contented, boisterous spirit of Middle Class
England; which is inclined to attribute all such criticism to a temper
soured by disappointment or a disordered digestion. And below such
classes lie the huge and inarticulate multitudes of the city people,
who find what spiritual and emotional satisfactions “literature” can
bring in the journals and popular writings which they consume with
ever-increasing avidity. They seek romance--and find it--in a complex
murder case, in stories of crime which seem to the fastidious sordid
and disgusting, in stories dependent in their appeal upon sudden
vicissitudes of fortune, in which chance or resolution are always
breaking down the insupportable sequences of cause and effect. That a
man shall reap as he has sown, that to-morrow shall be as yesterday,
that inevitable law shall bind and control the revolt of human passion
against circumstance--these are the affirmations of moralist and
philosopher against which the popular spirit is in continual rebellion.
Rebellion will endure so long as the human will affirms itself free,
and passion can draw its inspiration from some fire beyond the
boundaries of the world. That fire descends in the Divine fury of all
revolutions; which burn up and suddenly consume the civilisation which
has become orderly and comfortable and weary of it all. It descends
also when to some remote obscure human being, set in the enormous city,
life suddenly acquires significance and high meaning, in utter devotion
to a person or a cause.

To such the optimism and rejoicing of Jefferies or Morris is as much
an enigma as the questionings and denials of Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr.
Bernard Shaw. They experience no exultation in Nature because they
are cut off from the experience of Nature. They are untroubled by
the question of the goal of the industrial process because their
own particular part in it--the daily labour, the maintenance of
the home, the occasional recreation of Saturday Sport or Sunday
Excursion--absorbs all their available energies. “In June 1902,”
says Mr. Ensor, “the writer piloted four crippled workmen from a
working-class district in Manchester about some grounds on the edge of
the suburbs, and put to them a practical flower catechism. Three of
them, be it noted, had, before the events which left them cripples,
enjoyed high wages and relative prosperity. None of them knew or could
name forget-me-nots, daisies, dandelions, clover, pansies, or lilies
of the valley, three of them were baffled by a poppy, the fourth felt
confident that it was ‘a rose.’”[26] Of what avail, to such a company,
to proclaim the exultation of the pageant of Summer, or the joy in old
walled gardens under the apple trees “at the right time of the year.”
And the crowd which grows delirious over the spectacle of the football
contests, and frankly sets itself to enjoyment, in its own jolly
fashion, in the Election scrimmage or on an August Bank Holiday, is not
likely to find either inspiration or sadness in the problem of what is
to be the fate of the human race when economic stability is finally
secured.

Among all of these--and they comprise in all classes the overwhelming
majority--the place of a Philosophy or a Literature must be taken by a
Religion. And the question of the survival of a Religion--in the most
liberal interpretation of the term--is the question of the survival
of any extra-material ideal in the civilisation of the twentieth
century. In this, the last of our researches into “the Condition of
England,” generalisation is more than ever difficult. Religions which
appear dead are so often discovered to be only sleeping, variations
in faiths and devotions are so frequent between youth and age, a dark
fortune and a bright, that it is quite impossible to accept any mere
superficial demonstration of development or decay. Statistics of
church-going, varying from generation to generation, such as those of
a recent census in London, may indicate a fluctuation in faith, or
an alteration in social custom. Impressions of individual observers,
such as the researches of Mr. Charles Booth and his assistants
into the religious life of the Capital, may at the best be the
impressions gathered from various separated workers set in the midst
of silent untestifying millions. In every age the sterner moralist
has proclaimed a national apostasy, and witnessed with astonishment a
world repudiating its ancient pieties. In every age the prophecy of
immediate collapse has been falsified by the events of history. More
than a hundred and fifty years ago the least sensational of all great
Christian apologists declared that in England “it is come, I know
not how, to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much a
subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be
fictitious.” “And accordingly,” he continues in famous words, “they
treat it as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point amongst
all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a
principal subject of mirth and ridicule as it were, by way of reprisals
for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.” Yet
the “pleasures of the world” find themselves still interrupted by a
faith which, with its grave dug and its epitaph set up, unexpectedly
refuses to expire. Any variation or section of it, whose end has been
confidently predicted, will suddenly flare up again into violent
life and upset all the calculations of its undertakers. In 1830 “the
acutest characters of the time,” says Mr. Wilfred Ward, “considered
that the Church of England was on its death-bed.” “It was folding its
robes,” was Mozley’s verdict, “to die with what decency it could.”
“The Church as it now stands,” wrote Arnold, “no human power could
save.” But to-day on any impartial judgment the “Established Church”
whatever gains or losses it may have received in the long struggle
with indifference and unbelief, would never be threatened with any
such suggestions of immediate destruction. Sidney Smith in 1827 could
plead for toleration to Roman Catholics not because they were strong
but because they were weak. The power of the Papacy was obviously a
dead thing, in the future so conspicuously to become impotent, that he
could exhort his fellow-countrymen to some charity towards a forlorn
and piteous supplicant. “There is no Court of Rome,” he could assert,
“and no Pope. There is a waxwork Pope and a waxwork Court of Rome.
Popes of flesh and blood have long since disappeared. The follies of
one century,” he proclaimed, “are scarcely credible to that which
succeeds it; what will be said of all the intolerable trash which is
issued forth at public meetings of ‘No Popery’? If the world lasts till
1927, this childish nonsense will have got out of the drawing-room and
passed through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen.” “If the world
lasts till 1927,” there will probably be still orators of “No Popery,”
and scornful critics of the same. But he would be a rash prophet to-day
who would endorse Sidney Smith’s argument for toleration of a Pope and
Court of Rome as being “waxworks,” when these “waxworks” have revealed
themselves, in the interval, so amazingly alive.

Yet I think there can be no doubt that apart from any questions of
future revival, present belief in religion, as a conception of life
dependent upon supernatural sanctions or as a revelation of a purpose
and meaning beyond the actual business of the day, is slowly but
steadily fading from the modern city race. Tolerance, kindliness,
sympathy, civilisation continually improve. Affirmation of any
responsibility, beyond that to self and to humanity, continually
declines. Life therefore gradually ceases to be influenced or coloured
by any atmosphere of “other worldliness.” Present disabilities find
no compensation in the hope of a future redress, which makes the
present endurable. The general standard of humanitarian sentiment is
probably higher in the cities than ever before, certainly exhibiting
immense advance from that in the rude squalid barbarism of the
submerged eighteenth-century life, or the vast penury and discontent
of the early nineteenth. But a “background” was implied or assumed
practically by the whole population, in these troublous days. Men
lived as the beasts, and as the beasts perished. Yet few of them
would have definitely denied that there existed a Creator and there
awaited for them a judgment. The “Atheist” was as unpopular a figure
as the Republican; and the sacking of the house of a “Unitarian” as
congenial an occupation as a “No Popery” riot. To-day that “background”
has vanished. The Churches are extraordinarily active, endeavouring
in this way and in that to influence the lives of the people. Their
humanitarian and social efforts are widely appreciated. Their definite
dogmatic teachings seem to count for little at all. They labour on
steadily amid a huge indifference. The very material of their appeal is
vanishing. Fear which is the beginning of wisdom no longer terrifies a
society which sees orderly arrangements everywhere accepting the secure
as the normal. It cannot believe that, even if any future world exists
at all--of which existence it is becoming increasingly doubtful--that
future world will not in essence re-establish the decencies and
commonplaces of the modern city state. There is less material therefore
to-day for the appeal--to the general--of the revivalist preacher, with
which Wesley and Whitefield changed the face of eighteenth-century
England. The fleeing from the city of Destruction, the crying out
against the “burden” of sin, the vision of the flames of hell flaring
close to the Celestial City, represent an apparatus of experience that
is alien to the present. “Religion,” was Dolling’s testimony from
Poplar, “has, so to speak, gone to pieces. There is no opposition. We
do not care enough to oppose. God is not in any of our thoughts: we
do not even fear Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we
have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to. Heaven has no
attraction, because we should be out of place there. And Hell has no
terrors.”

And although this fading of the background is perhaps less manifest
in country than in town, and less in the industrial provinces than in
the capital, its effect can be apprehended amongst all classes of the
community and throughout the whole of the modern world. The meaning
is gone from phrases which are still repeated, whose significance is
becoming historical merely. The tide is ebbing within and without the
Churches. The drift is towards a non-dogmatic affirmation of general
kindliness and good fellowship, with an emphasis rather on the service
of men than the fulfilment of the will of God. Most modern activities
of the great religious bodies are coming more and more to enlarge
themselves into efforts towards social or humanitarian reforms. Even
the noisy warfare between the various denominations may be interpreted
less as a sign of secure vitality than as evidence of uncertain
position; a struggle excited less by confidence than by foreboding.
Whirlpools of brave and often feverish energy are maintained amid the
prevailing indifference. The children are everywhere persuaded to
attend the centres of religious teaching; everywhere, as they struggle
to manhood and womanhood in a world of such doubtful certainties,
they exhibit a large falling away. The sternness and severity and
compelling claims of the ancient injunctions to repentance and an
ordered life become replaced by a general sense of vague and misty
optimism, in which the former beliefs are less definitely denied than
put aside as negligible and irrelevant to the business of the day.
“The great bulk,” is one general verdict of Mr. Booth’s investigation,
“seem to be incapable of attaining to that pressing sense of sin
which is the common basis not only of these but of most other forms
of Christian teaching.” “Those who have any definite convictions,”
testifies a hospital chaplain, “are few and far between: they have for
the most part put religion deliberately out of their lives, and dislike
to be reminded of it.” Another observer finds “a very great variety
of aim, but an almost universal sense of disappointment.” “All have
empty churches,” is the sweeping verdict over one large industrial
borough, “and the general attitude of the people is that of complete
indifference.” “Those of the poor who attend religious services,” is
another general verdict, “are mostly bought.” “They take their religion
lightly,” is perhaps the final word upon twentieth-century England,
“and are much inclined to believe that it will all come right in the
end.”[27]

These changes amongst the wealthy and prosperous are perhaps
negligible; because--with of course many exceptions--in no society have
“they that have riches” ever entered but hardly into the kingdom of any
God. But among the Middle Classes--the centre and historical support
of England’s Protestant creed--the drift away is acknowledged by all
to be conspicuous--by friend as well as by enemy. The country is here
following the town; and amongst the industrial people the prophecy of
Taine thirty years ago would appear to be fulfilling itself to-day: “By
an insensible and slow backward movement, the great rural mass, like
the great urban mass, is gradually going back to Paganism.”

It is a European movement, conspicuous even to the superficial
observer. At intervals there are efforts at diagnosis, even random
efforts at cure. Missions and revivals produce transitory tides
invigorating the older faiths--like the Catholic reaction in France
after the disasters of 1870, or the rise of the Salvation Army a little
later in the great towns of England. Despite such rallies, however,
the process continues. It continues without violence, continuously,
steadily, as a kind of impersonal motion of secular change. It is the
passing of a whole civilisation away from the faith in which it was
founded and out of which it has been fashioned. Mr. Hueffer, in his
_Spirit of the People_, tells the story of a neighbour who after a late
evening service in the village church suddenly discovered that he no
longer believed in the immortality of the soul. And that is typical of
the change in the world of to-day. It is not becoming atheist. It is
ceasing to believe, without being conscious of the process, until it
suddenly wakes up to the fact that the process is complete.

Most attempted explanations fall into the quite natural error of
ascribing the indifference towards the enterprise of the Churches of
the English city populations to those particular elements of their
teaching or action which they regard as pernicious. In examination
of these mysterious multitudes which have collected in the new towns
it is always possible to find anything that one desires--drunkenness
and temperance, happiness and misery, aspiration and indifference,
cowardice and courage. This is specially true when the observer seeks
to penetrate beneath the surface and to examine the actual spiritual
beliefs and apprehensions accepted by large masses of men whose
thoughts on such subjects are never clearly expressed. A few years
ago a number of the religious leaders of this country collected in a
symposium their explanation of this change.[28] And the replies are
very characteristic in their reference of causes to things which are
disliked or denied. Dr. Horton, from his study at Hampstead, opines
that drink is the chief cause of the indifference to Christianity of
the working classes. He would add also absence of good preaching. He
judges from the crowds which come to hear the good preacher, that
preachers of similar power would draw similar crowds beneath every
pulpit. But it is just as possible, and perhaps more demonstrable by
experience, that the good preacher only attracts the preacher-loving
class from the bad preachers, without substantially recruiting the
class from the indifferent outside. The water is decanted from bottle
to bottle without increasing its bulk. And drink certainly does not
separate from religion the Scotch or Irish in their own land, or the
Irish in the great cities of England and America. Nor is there any
particular reason why drunkenness should exercise a more general
estrangement than the other, more respectable of the deadly sins. Mr.
Silas Hocking, again, dislikes war and sacerdotalism. He therefore
announces that the Church’s alliance with war and sacerdotalism are
the cause of the modern falling away from religion. But the Church
and war have lived in some condition of mutual tolerance for nineteen
centuries. And as in his vision Christianity practically ceased to
exist, “since in the early centuries it became corrupted by paganism,”
we may assume that here also some friendly agreement had been possible
beforetime, which might not be impossible to-day.

Many social reformers very frequently ascribe the abandonment of
the churches by the working classes to the fact that the Church has
been the Church of a class, filled with respectabilities and caste
distinctions, and hostile to the newer movements for the collective
welfare of labour. Such reformers, that is to say, eagerly desire
that the Church should abandon the stiff and formal ways of its class
traditions, should become more friendly and universal in its appeal,
and should concern itself actively and intelligently with the problems
of poverty and social discontent. But it would seem impossible to
assume that such a transformation of organised Christianity would
bring back the people to the spiritual affirmation of their fathers.
Letters frequently appear in the newspapers, alike pathetic and
passionate, from those who have been sweated by “Christian” employers,
or have been offended by hearing clergymen openly supporting “wars of
aggression” or opposing the franchise and free libraries. But there is
no evidence--because in the nature of things such evidence cannot be
forthcoming--to prove that the correspondents or the crowd represented
by them would be accepting the enormous affirmations of Theism or of
Christianity if all these things were suddenly changed.

Again, many good men have perhaps too fatuously discovered and
proclaimed that there is “no hostility to Christ” amongst the working
men. One observer in the symposium above quoted can find satisfaction
in the fact that a crowd of men flung up their caps and cheered His
name on Tower Hill. “Such straws show which way the wind blows.”
Such “straws” show nothing more than any noise and excitement have
shown since the day of the riding into Jerusalem, or the scene in
the Judgment Hall of Pilate. Why should any one to-day be “hostile
to Christ”? And what relationship has such vague toleration or
applause to anything in the nature of a vital and compelling
faith? All such sentiment belongs to the same class as that of the
comfortable householder, leading a life of respectable and benignant
self-indulgence, who will inform you in a burst of confidence that his
religion is that of the “Sermon on the Mount,” or one “of willingness
to do good.” There is no more common illusion than the interpretation
of ethical judgment as spiritual affirmation. To all such advocates
of an inexacting standard Christianity appears as a rule of common
life, which has been somehow evaded or destroyed. But Christianity
is something widely different from a rule of common life. It is a
creed, not a system of morals. Religion is an attempt at some ultimate
assertion concerning the being and purpose of the world. No tolerance
of the virtues specifically Christian or admiration of a life lost in
the distant centuries can guarantee that creed’s validity, or restore a
faith which appears to be slipping over the visible horizon of mankind.

There is morality without faith; kindliness and devotion with no
“consciousness of a divine inheritance or of the sin by which it is
lost.” Such is the testimony of Canon Barrett, from thirty years’
experience of every class in English society. The people of East London
especially are better mannered, better dressed, more respectable, more
sober than the people of a previous generation. But they have “less
idealism,” “less superstition.” “Joy” is in consequence lacking. Life
is more respectable, less vivid. The salt of life is somehow losing
its savour. Whatever scale of value is represented by the outlook upon
larger spiritual kingdoms is vanishing. And the scale is in consequence
contracting, truncated. “The desertion of the churches and the somewhat
undignified efforts of the churches to attract congregations are
equally the outward signs of spiritual failing.”

Here is the kernel of the whole matter. Ethical advance is
accompanied (as it seems) by spiritual decline. It was the process
which so perplexed Mr. Gladstone more than half a century ago.
Growth of morality is coincident with decline in religion. Violent
controversialists still endeavour to demonstrate the opposite,
exhibiting murders, thefts, and adulteries accompanying the
introduction of secular education or the disestablishment of a Church.
On a large survey the facts do not bear such an interpretation. The
work of civilisation steadily advances. The vision of a universe beyond
or behind the material steadily fades.

       *       *       *       *       *

My effort here is confined to diagnosis, not prophecy. And prophecy
concerning religion is of all forecasts the most impossible. For never
is it safe to assume that any piece of solid ground may not suddenly
flare and tremble, or any common bush commence to burn with fire.
Remembering the historic failures in similar ages of rationalism, the
contemptuous dismissal by Tacitus, in a kind of footnote, of the faith
which was to transform the world, he would be rash who asserted that
even to-day and in this secure civilisation there may not be the seed
growing which will survive when this very society shall have vanished
from the earth. My own belief is that the so-called intellectual
difficulties of belief are to-day less operative amongst the masses of
mankind than certain other changes which are powerful in modern life.
I should put in the forefront of these the creation of the towns, with
their machinery and their confusion; the condition of labour within
their boundaries; and the establishment of security and order in the
present “Roman Peace” which has come upon the western races of Europe.
The result, as Dolling saw it amongst his people in East London, is
a life universally dull, decorous, decent. Nor can we estimate what
developments may originate from such a condition of uniform comfort and
acquiescence. General Booth in his Salvation Army, the most remarkable
spiritual product of the present age, has shown how the inspiration may
come in a sudden flaming up of the incalculable elements of the soul
of man, amongst seemingly drab and unimportant people; with a craving
for self-immolation, and the intrusion into commonplace accepted ways
of the vision of blood and fire. The fruit and duration of such a state
are equally difficult to foresee. Sidgwick concluded at the end of his
days that “humanity would never acquiesce in a godless world.” “If
they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts,” was Carlyle’s
fierce comment, “all or most of them, there will be seen for some
length of time, perhaps for several centuries, such a world as few
are dreaming of.” The first experiment on a large scale of society
organised on a positive basis came to a premature end: through the
intrusion of Christianity and the advent of the barbarian. The second
seems about to be established. It should prove an interesting study to
any observer possessing the felicity of seeing alike its commencement
and its close. But it is not impossible that the same two disturbing
elements--the advent of the barbarian, intrusion of Christianity--may
once again prevent the realisation, upon adequate scale and through any
substantial period, of life seeking comfort in a rational society.




CHAPTER X

THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY


Such--in briefest outline--is the England which confronts the challenge
of a new century. It represents a civilisation containing many of the
elements of human welfare, and enjoying a widespread happiness and
personal comfort. Such comfort appears as somewhat unjustly divided
between class and class. A main body of adequately rewarded and
generally satisfied workers are set between the unnaturally wealthy
on the one side, on the other the unnaturally poor. The superficial
appearance is of a “plutocracy” with riches extravagantly accumulated
and extravagantly expended; a middle class industrious and a little
bewildered; a labouring population industrious, and in times of
prosperity contented; below, a life which cries almost unheeded from
a condition of perpetual privation. In all cases prosperity has
brought some especial dangers: a weakening of the willingness to
work, a rejection of earlier simplicities, a too eager absorption in
pleasure. Representatives of the rich, from the security and ignorance
of the country house and the country-house outlook upon society,
bring charges against the working man: of loafing and neglecting
his labour; of betting, drinking, and idling; of organising trades
unions as a tyranny on the “ca’ canny” principle, designed to restrain
the honest toiler from giving a fair day’s labour for a fair wage.
Representatives of the working people, on the other hand, inflamed to
bitterness by the wretchedness and degradation of those who endure
an animal life in the abyss, bring a fierce indictment against the
wealthy: of luxurious living, of callous indifference to the wrongs
they see around them, of the contented plundering of the poor. The fact
is that each class, in its several station, has pretty much the same
characteristics, impulses, desires. If the poor were suddenly made
rich, in a short space of time the majority would find themselves able
to enjoy superfluous dinners, artificially created pleasures, and the
satisfaction of an abundant life, without any sharp sense of judgment
and condemnation in the knowledge of the huge misery that accompanies
all this waste. If the rich were suddenly made poor they would soon
be forcing their children to leave school prematurely in order to
earn wages at mean occupations, would be organising themselves into
“tyrannous” trades unions, would be mitigating the monotony of their
lives by the excitement of a shilling on a horse or the encouragement
of alcoholic stimulation. Dives and Lazarus may some day experience
that kaleidoscopic change which has been dear to the heart of the
discontented in all ages: a reversal of the accepted social order in a
poor man’s Paradise. A very short time afterwards the child of Lazarus
would be found faring sumptuously every day; indifferent to the
descendant of Dives, lying at his gate, impotent, full of sores.

The observer will therefore not be greatly affected, in his choice of
advocacy and action, by the particular arguments and appeals which may
be advanced for the one side or the other. He sees a literature which
vindicates an unequal distribution of wealth, in the necessity for
leisure and a secured comfort for a certain proportion of the people,
if there is to survive an amenity of manners, a cultivation of the
arts, the traditions of a governing class. He sees a literature which
stretches gaunt fingers over the costly clothes and furniture, and
exhibits upon them the stains of blood. No reasoned or intellectual
appeal will compel him to accept the one side or the other, to
appear as the advocate of order or the advocate of change. Instinct,
sentiment, temperament, upbringing in the case of the many; in the case
of the few, a deliberate effort of the will, without much intellectual
justification, and certainly as no nicely balanced adjustment of
alternative, will direct statesmen or publicist to-day to choose the
side of the rich or the side of the poor.

Among the many it is of little importance to any one but the individual
which side is chosen. What is of importance is that, the choice being
made, each man should see things clearly; should “clear himself of
cant”; should realise that he is a soldier fighting for a cause, to be
deflected from his purpose by no weakness and no vacillation. Whatever
the future may bring, to him the matter of vital moment is that he
should refuse to betray under any temptation those who have trusted him
with their allegiance.

The reformers who have enrolled themselves with the advocates of change
must not expect too speedily to realise even an appreciable percentage
of their aims. Most men, setting out to move the mountain, will be
content at the end if they have made some impression on the molehill.
The divergence between the roseate vision of the ideal and the hard
effort of practical affairs is a divergence which sometimes excites
impatience and sometimes awakens suspicion of lethargy and compromise.
Yet in a settled society, such as that of England to-day, where the
overwhelming forces of the community are against any too sudden
dislocation, we may be very content if some visible improvement can be
estimated in a year or a decade. The forlorn and tattered flag “Work
or Revolt,” flapping dejectedly over a procession of the ineffectual
unemployed, is more scornful and cruel in dissociation of promise and
performance than any attack from outside. It exhibits a challenge to
the forces of this country by those who would be mown down like sheep
or massacred like flies if they gave any real trouble or excited any
real anxiety amongst the governing classes of England.

And this “security” is exceedingly strengthened by the inability of
the majority of mankind to picture any life but the life that they
have always known. The defiance of the future by the present--the
insistence of hard, tangible things against a kingdom of dreams
and speculations--is a defiance too often forgotten by those who
are impatient of the slow processes of change. They see evil to be
overcome, visions of clearer horizons and a fairer dawn. They cannot
understand why mankind round them--equally intelligent, equally
pitiful--do not find their feet marching to the same militant melody.
They fail to apprehend rightly the crushing effect of the present,
especially as embodied in solid, material realities, upon the minds of
the majority. To these, history is but a misty panorama of uncertain
meaning, geography a story of things wonderful and strange, but remote
and negligible. Here is the real world: the houses of commerce,
four-square, of stone, ample Government offices, law courts, police
stations, secure private dwellings. “Let him change it who can,” their
innermost souls declare, in a declaration which actually signifies,
“It never will be changed at all.” By the many, of all classes, the
affirmation of the Psalmist would be readily re-echoed,--“He has
held the round world so fast, that it cannot be moved at any time.”
Inhabitants of the earthquake zones are always convinced that each
successive tremor will be the last tremor, that now, at length, the old
earth, after a final shaking, has settled down to sleep. And the same
is true of the shaking of the children of earth--the call, sounding
to the nations in succeeding centuries, which has shattered custom,
convention, security, and all the accepted ways. Each revolution is
always the last revolution, the final effort of a violence which has
expired in this ultimate convulsion. Now, at last, and after all the
centuries, mankind is to be allowed to “settle down” in reasonable
comfort to accept and to enjoy.

This tyranny of the present upon the imagination, is perhaps
the greatest of all obstacles to reform. It is not only that the
inhabitants of London cannot picture what London was when the Abbey
of Westminster stood up white from green gardens, and over the river
where now dwell two millions of persons the roads ran on causeways
through sullen marshes lit by will-o’-the-wisps and fever fires. It is
that they are unable even to imagine a time when Cadogan Square was a
huddle of slum tenements, and Islington an expanse of meadow land, and
the places they now occupy, quiet fields. Lacking such imagination,
they find it impossible to stand up and face the domination of the
present with the naked vision of the future. Mr. Wells, at the end
of his voyage into Utopia, has described the traveller returning,
standing, after so adventurous a journey, at the familiar spot where
the Strand debouches into Trafalgar Square. Everything is the same--the
railway stations, the tall buildings with winking sky signs, the
column and the lions of the Square, the long, low, brooding ugliness
of the National Gallery. Amongst them move the busy people, hurrying,
to-day as yesterday, to and from their sedentary occupations and their
comfortable suburban homes. It all appears “so fast” that “it cannot
be moved at any time.” Utopia, before this intrusive reality--to be
seen, touched, handled--rises from the earth and joins all other
cloud cities “built in heaven.” An ironical touch may be given by the
sight of a squalid, tiny crowd gathered round one of these pillars,
with banners demanding the speedy coming of “the Social Revolution”;
mocked at alike by the solid architecture, the indulgent policemen,
the indifferent multitude that passes by. Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in
a dialogue recently published, confronted a banker, of enlightened
views, with the protest of an idealist and reformer against present
social injustices. The reformer--from a University common room--has
much the best of the argument. Looking out from those pleasant paths
and gardens, not only over the injustices of the present, but also
over all time and all existence, he can reveal to the man of business
the impossibility of these injustices continuing, the urgent necessity
for change. The banker has but one argument, but with that he can
overwhelm his antagonist. That argument is the actual existence of the
present, in solid, appreciable reality. He can counter the reformer’s
acute and ready phrases with steamships and factories, Lombard Street,
Pimlico, Manchester; against which the random Socialist, academic or
anarchical, can make no more impression than a rat attempting to gnaw
through the granite stones of the Bank of England. Here in part is the
insistence of things against ideas, the dominance of the material;
“the things” which, according to Emerson, are “in the saddle and
ride mankind.” Samuel Butler once pictured the revolt of the machine
against its master, a kind of universal Frankenstein monster come to
life and striking blindly in the dark, like the furious rebellion
of some slave race which in the past has occasionally wiped out a
civilisation in hideous ruin. But apart from the possibility of such
revolt, no first visitor to the newer industrial centres but is aware
of a certain shrivelling up of man’s importance before the aggregate
of material construction. The sense of proportion is dwarfed by the
mere divergence in size and stability, as the weak, unprotected human
body is contrasted with vast levers and furnaces which at any moment
could crack him like an eggshell, or shrivel him up like sawdust. Human
life and mechanical life come to be pictured in permanence like those
gaunt and sullen streets of East London, where tiny cottages crouch
beneath tall encompassing walls so high that between them men scarce
can see the sun. And behind the weight laid upon the imagination by
mass and matter is the perhaps more oppressive weight of custom and
convention. “Every body”--so commences Newton’s famous law--“continues
in its state of rest or motion in a straight line.” More than of
any projectiles careering through space is this true of the mind of
man--continuing always, unless forcibly and sometimes brutally wrested
away by impacting forces, in its motion in a straight line. Bagehot
tells a story of the “very conservative” people of Fiji. “A chief was
one day going over a mountain path, followed by a long string of his
people, when he happened to stumble and fall; all the rest of the
people immediately did the same except one man, who was set upon by the
rest to know whether he considered himself better than the chief.” Fiji
is too remote a dwelling-place for such a leader. He resides to-day in
Dulwich, in Poplar, in Eaton Square.

Not only is the present in its resistance to the future secure in
its own armies and entrenchments. It is continually trafficking--and
successfully--with the forces of the invader, purchasing them in
single spies and in battalions. Every reform, successfully effected,
transfers whole divisions and army corps from the attacking to the
defending army. The giving of old age pensions, for example, at one
stroke swings half a million aged persons passionately on the side
of the _status quo_, passionately against any upheaval which would
jeopardise, or might be thought to jeopardise, the regular reckonable
dole of two half-crowns per week. And amongst individuals, nine out
of ten at least of the men who would be competent to lead a movement
towards change are to-day immediately caught up in the huge machine and
provided outlet for their ambitions within a tangible and realisable
present. How many potential Labour leaders and Socialists, through
the operation of the huge sieve-net of the new scholarship system,
are being swept into secondary schools from working-class homes? and
thence, as clerks in great businesses, through university training,
in subsequent Government or private employment, destined to be firmly
cemented into the fabric of the present social order? Even the Labour
leader, if successful, tends to become conservative, to despise
the material he once organised, the masses of unskilled labour, as
scattered dust or crumbling snow.

But the great majority of the children of ability in the industrial
classes are being intercepted before the opportunity of becoming
“Labour leaders” will arise. Their energies are being deflected from
politics into commercial or industrial enterprise. Socialism seems
destined to be left to the idealist and the economic failure, to
the man with ready tongue and little stable capacity for work, like
the “Masterman” so cruelly portrayed in Mr. Wells’s “Kipps,” to the
reformer who revolts from the harsh operation of present law, but
finds no allies except a proletariat from which the intelligence has
been steadily drained in early boyhood. We seem destined to pass from
the antithesis of the class war--the rich against the poor--to the
antithesis which Nietzsche foresaw many years ago--the Many against
the Few; the demands of incapacity to share in the benefits created
by the competent. It is under such circumstances that the very sombre
architecture of the present seem to smile down derisive indulgence at
the vapourings and pleadings of those who still hope to change the
world a little. The infant, says Mr. Whiteing in _The Yellow Van_, was
blowing lustily upon a tin whistle as the van of the land reformers
passed under the walls of Allonby Castle. “Nothing happened to the
walls.”

Yet against this tyranny of the present the reformer, after all, has
some sources of protection. “He laughs best who laughs the last”: and
the longest laugh is always on the side of the forces of change. The
hills are nothing, and flow from form to form; the mountains smoke at
the touch of His hand: “He washeth away the things which grow out of
the dust of the earth and destroyest the hope of man.” Researches in
the great canyon of Arizona have revealed not only an eating through
miles of solid rock by the flow of a quiet stream of water in a gulf
created through almost limitless time, but behind this, in incalculable
space of years, a succession of previous operations, formation and
upheaval of continents and their overthrow, swinging the plummet of the
mind into abysses beyond the powers of that mind ever to comprehend.
The sun and rain and delicate air are wasting away, not only the
backbone of the mountains, but also the granite stones of the Bank of
England. The Future has great allies. Despite the momentary insistence
of the material in factory and furnace, the mind can find tranquillity
in realisation that this is merely the Idea, clothing itself for a
season and in a temporary habitation; the Idea which can make the rocks
dance to its music, and the solid ground tremble at its advent. Such
has always been the vision of the poet; of all who can see not beyond
the present, but through the present, to the future. To all such insight

  “Cities and thrones and powers
    Stand in Time’s eye
  Almost as long as flowers
    Which daily die.”

And as of Nineveh there remains but a heap, and of Tyrus a spit of
sandy shore, and of Sagesta but one solemn temple looking down the
valley to the sea, so a triumphant imagination can fling off the yoke
of the present, to see in solid England dynamic instead of static
forces, and all the cities in motion and flow towards some unknown
ends. This may not provide any peculiar satisfaction for present
endeavour. There is no guarantee, because change is inevitable, that
change will come along desirable ways. Nor does any consolation reside
in the knowledge that one day, without a shadow of uncertainty, great
London itself will become but a vast tomb for all its busy people, and
of its splendour and pride not one stone be left upon another. But
it does release from the tyranny of a present which sees no change
possible. If change must come, then it may be deflected along desirable
ways. The direction of forces is so much easier than the initiation
of them. _E pur si muove_ is the eternal affirmation, as much over
societies which appear stationary as over societies which appear
reckless in progress. For over each successive present, with its ample
Government offices, its law courts, its police stations, its secure
private dwellings, there will be written as epitaph the inexorable law
of a universe, not of Being, but of Becoming: “A wind passeth over it.
It is gone. The place thereof shall know it no more.”

       *       *       *       *       *

And of all illusions of the opening twentieth century perhaps the most
remarkable is that of security. Already gigantic and novel forces of
mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents, are
exhibiting a society in the beginnings of change. It would seem likely
that the very rapid disintegration, which has taken place in a period
of external tranquillity, in beliefs and ideas, may be giving place
to a reverse condition: of a time of internal quietude accompanied by
large external transformations. With Europe facing an international
discontent amongst its industrial peoples, the nations, as an armed
camp, heaping up instruments of destruction, the East suddenly awake,
the people in England and America writhing in the grasp of a money
power more and more concentrated in the hands of enormous Corporations,
he would be but a blind prophet who, looking to the future, would
assert that all things will continue as until now.

A few years back men loved to anticipate an age of innocence and gold;
with humanity at last tranquil and satisfied, in the socialistic
millennium or the anarchic heaven of childhood. To-day the critic of a
less sanguine outlook openly proclaims that modern civilisation carries
within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Two great imaginative
writers, M. Anatole France in Paris, Mr. H. G. Wells in London, have
presented their visions of the coming end of an age. The picture of
the former is more ironical, more completely the cry of Vanity in a
world of disillusionment. The picture of the latter is more scientific.
Here is one way at least in which the thing may happen, in which the
end may come. And if not in this way, yet in any similar and entirely
unexpected fashion, arising out of that present danger: the instability
which of necessity must prevail when vast implements of destruction
are placed in the hands of a civilisation imperfectly self-controlled,
and subject to panic fears and hatreds. It is in the realisation of so
remarkable a danger that the story of the outbreak of aerial warfare
becomes not so much a nightmare vision of the future as a vigorous
criticism of the present. Mr. Wells had formerly demanded supernatural
machinery to effect his outpouring of calamity and terror. A comet,
bearing a strange gas, will make every one sane. With a sudden gasp
of amazement, they will realise the essential insanity of the life
which they had hitherto regarded as natural to mankind. Martians,
descending from the darkened sky, with irresistible powers of heat
ray and poisonous dust, will wipe out humanity as a man will wipe out
a wasp’s nest. But here[29] he has returned to the solid ground, and
without any assumptions but those of but a slight advance in mechanical
invention, exhibits the forces which make towards a cosmic overthrow.
The apparatus required is not much more than will undoubtedly be
furnished within the next half-century. “Flying” is now assured; has
come to stay. It is merely a matter of years or perhaps months before
every external apparatus that the author requires for his apocalypse
will be at the disposal of mankind. And with that invention there comes
a new epoch in the history of humanity. Given effective flying--to
be utilised in war not for the transference of men, but for coercing
a nation into submission--the march of events appears to follow a
possible chain of sequence. Each nation, armed to the teeth in a world
which has scarcely apprehended war--a city-bred people--is to-day
restrained from fighting by fear of consequences. Each nation--in
this grim forecast--thinking itself secure in the possession of a new
invincible weapon, plunges into effort for the overlordship of the
world. The German air fleet invades New York. The city, “drinking
up the wealth of a continent as Rome once drank up the wealth of the
Mediterranean, and Babylon the wealth of the East,” after a hopeless
resistance, capitulates. The poor, neglected in their quarters of
squalor, like the poor in Paris in 1870, raise the cry that they are
betrayed. Sporadic violence against the invader breaks the truce. The
Germans, enraged, determine to make an example which will crush out
the need for further effort in a cruelty which is ultimately to prove
a kindness. Fire and brimstone rain down from the airships, like the
fire and brimstone which rained down upon the cities of the plain. At
the end New York is a smoking mass of ruins: a cemetery of a million
dead. The assumption of terrorism would have been justified had war
been operating under the old conditions. Rage and a fury of revenge
on such occasion will always overcome cowardice; man, in a kind of
madness, will be content to be destroyed, if only he can destroy. It is
only when the resistance becomes obviously senseless--when he has no
means of hurting his enemy--that he finally accepts the inevitable. But
in the new conditions of air-fighting such an equilibrium would never
be attained. There are no frontiers that can be guarded. Desperate
men, equipping these new craft, can always exact terrible reprisals.
In return for New York’s destruction, Berlin is smashed to powder by
American airships; in return for Berlin, other American cities. Madness
and delirium seize the people: the whole world is at war; modern
civilisation blows up and vanishes from the world.

With the destructive fury of the war comes the collapse in the whole
edifice of credit which maintains the economic efficiency of the
industrial system. Men demand gold as in America in the last crisis,
hoarding it in their stockings or burying it in their gardens. The
stock of gold becomes exhausted, bonds and shares waste paper.
Factories close. The city populations find neither work nor bread.
In peril of imminent destruction from the enemy above, men claw and
mow at one another in blind struggle in the starving cities, reeling
back visibly into the beast; as they will do in extremity even when
an earthquake has shattered their city and death sits waiting at the
door of their houses. After the fighting comes the famine, after the
famine the great pestilence. The organisation of society is broken and
fissured. The vast multitude perish. The few that remain, like the
few that remained of the Roman civilisation after the impact of the
barbarian, are found at the end, in village communities or isolated
huts, or encamped in the ruins of once populous towns. Amid the nettle
and the ivy the survivors of London wander forlorn through the empty
labyrinths: as the survivors encamped in the ruins of Rome in the
long twilight which preceded the Middle Age. After the three hundred
years of diastole there came “the swift and unexpected systole, like
the closing of a fist.” “They could not understand it was a systole,”
writes Mr. Wells. “They could not think of it as anything but a jolt,
a hitch, a mere oscillatory indication of the swiftness of their
progress. Collapse, though it happened all about them, remained
incredible. Presently some falling mass smote them down, or the ground
opened beneath their feet. They died incredulous.” So incredulous
indeed died Babylon, Tyre, Rome; each refusing to believe that it was
witnessing the end of a world.

How far is this sombre vision a nightmare merely? How far a warning
of the things which may come to pass? Mr. Wells requires for his
_Götterdämmerung_ no fresh influx of barbarian hordes to smash
civilisation brutally to pieces, such as is feared by some: not even
the upheaval from below, in the consolidated masses of the poor, which
has seemed to M. Anatole France and others a force destined to consume
civilisation in fire and blood. He had accepted the undeniable note of
the age, that material advance has far transcended moral progress, and
that this inequality is full of the elements of danger. Man has wrested
secrets from sun and star, equipped himself with apparatus which should
make him rival the older gods, stolen, like Prometheus, the fire of
heaven to be his servant, and made the earth and the air to obey him.
Yet this unparalleled control of dead things has failed to eliminate
his silly national jealousies, his little prejudices and selfishnesses,
his clumsy determination to make his life a brutal, irrational thing.
Mr. Wells outpours his vials of wrath upon the Crowd: the vacant
street-bred people, the “common abundant life,” “flowing, in its
cheerful, aimless way,” towards the Abyss. His hero, one of this Crowd,
Mr. Bert Smallways, is one of “the sort of men who had made England and
America what they are.” “He had lived all his life in narrow streets,
and between mean houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle
of ideas from which there was no escape. He thought the whole duty of
man was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands, as he put it,
‘on the dibs,’ and have a good time.” But the author need not have gone
to the Crowd for his illustration. No lunacy that flourishes amongst
the little but is intensified amongst the great. The German Professors,
the conversation of an Oxford College Common Room will exhibit as
dangerous a combination of truculence and terror as any gathering of
patriots at a public-house bar. The war scare of a halfpenny paper,
with its frantic appeals to race prejudice and passion, is revealed in
deepening imbecilities in sixpenny magazines which circulate amongst
the country clergy, or half-crown reviews which lie upon the table of
country houses. Countless millions in Europe and Asia and America,
“instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a
torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers
had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and
reactions.” Everywhere in the early twentieth century this observer
finds “a sort of heated, irascible stupidity”; everywhere “congested
nations in inconvenient areas, stopping the exchange of population and
produce with each other, annoying each other with tariffs and every
possible commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies
and armies that grow every year more portentious.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people,” says M.
Anatole France of his “Penguins.” “They kept on making them still
higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices,
shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug cellars and
tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in
a giant town.” Everything here was constructed efficiently for the
production of wealth. The organisation was perfect. The ancient
aristocracies and democracies had alike departed. The Trusts, with
their Directors, were omnipotent. “Like all true aristocrats, like
the patricians of Republican Rome or the squires of old England,
these powerful men affected a great severity in their habits and
customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the meetings of the
Trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and puffy faces,
their lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows.... Denying
themselves all happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, they spent
their miserable lives in rooms without light or air, furnished only
with electrical apparatus, living on eggs and milk, and sleeping on
camp beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel buttons with their
fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never saw the
signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires that
they never experienced.” Society, as a whole, became organised on a
plutocratic, as once on a military, basis; and all classes endeavoured
to approximate themselves to the ideal standard set from above. Like
insects, the huge hive laboured night and day, driven forward by
the blind, furious instinct for accumulation. “All passions which
injured the increase or the preservation of wealth were regarded
as dishonourable. Neither indolence, nor idleness, nor the taste
for disinterested study, nor love of the arts, nor, above all,
extravagance, was ever forgiven. Pity was condemned as a dangerous
weakness.” “The State was firmly based on two great public virtues:
respect for the rich, contempt for the poor.” As they devoted their
whole intelligence to business, they sought no intellectual pleasures.
The theatre was reduced to pantomime and comic dances. The very rich
formed only a minority, but their collaborators were the entire
people. The agents of commerce or banking, the engineers and managers
of factories, received immense salaries, and were recruited from the
talent to whom this supreme career was always open. The system sucked
the efficient and enterprising from the populace below. What remained,
a spongy morass of low-grade life, shepherded, controlled, fed, and
housed by their masters, presented every sign of physical and moral
degeneration. “Of low stature, with small heads and narrow chests,
they were further distinguished from the comfortable classes by a
multitude of physiological anomalies, and, in particular, by a common
want of symmetry between the head and the limbs.” The more robust of
them became soldiers. From the remainder the employers continually
and methodically selected out the enterprising and talented, leaving
alone “labourers who were incapable of defending their rights, but were
yet intelligent enough to perform their toil, which highly perfected
machines rendered extremely simple.” “In a word, these miserable
employees were plunged in a gloomy apathy that nothing enlightened and
nothing exasperated. They were necessary instruments for the social
order, and well adapted to their purpose.”

Civilisation seemed to have at length attained its ideal, and to have
finally established a coherent, organic society. A system founded on
“what is strongest in human nature, pride and cupidity,” would seem to
have been guaranteed an earthly immortality. Yet there were grounds for
uneasiness, especially on the score of physical health. “The health of
the poor is what it must be,” said the experts in hygiene, “but that
of the rich leaves much to be desired.” The multi-millionaires were
bald at the age of eighteen. Some showed from time to time a dangerous
weakness of mind. Overstrung and enfeebled, they gave enormous sums
to ignorant charlatans, and there suddenly sprang up in the town the
medical or theological fortune of some trumpery bath-attendant who
had become a teacher or a prophet. The number of lunatics increased
continually. Suicides multiplied in the world of wealth.

M. Anatole France requires no visitants from another world to ensure
the destruction of his nightmare. He does not even need the national
jealousies and insanities of Mr. Wells equipped with new weapons of
destruction. His vision of a Penguin Chicago at Paris finally falls
to pieces from its own internal rottenness. Anarchists, wielding
tremendous explosives, accepted as deliverers by the enslaved and
degenerate proletariat, smash Society into pieces. One of them, a clerk
in the Electricity Trust, an afternoon in June, from the heights of
Fort Saint-Michel, witnesses the beginning of the end. To a little
child, playing there all unconscious of the coming cataclysm, he tells
the story of human progress. “A fisherman once threw his net into
the sea, and drew out a little sealed copper pot, which he opened
with his knife. Smoke came out of it, and as it mounted up to the
clouds the smoke grew thicker and thicker, and became a giant, who
gave such a terrible yawn that the whole world was blown to dust.”
The “yawn” is the weariness of a vast disillusionment: the awakening
of a slave population to the futility of its further continuance. At
first the Anarchists waged war on the Trusts, while the people stood
aloof, resentful, indifferent. Later, in the panic that accompanied
the immense ruin of property, the mob ceased work and indulged in a
pandemonium of destruction. Men fought for food and for plunder in the
darkened ways of the city. Society lost its structure and deliquesced
into a kind of sloppy morass. Epidemics followed the fighting, bred
from unburied corpses. Famine carried off those whom pestilence had
spared. “Reforms were introduced into institutions, and great changes
took place in habits and customs; but the country never recovered
the loss of its capital, and never regained its former prosperity.
Commerce and industry dwindled away. Civilisation abandoned those
countries which for so long it had preferred to all others. They became
insalubrious and sterile. The territories that had supported so many
millions of men became nothing more than a desert. On the hill of Fort
Saint-Michel wild horses cropped the coarse grass.”

The diastole had been followed by a systole. Mankind after the
European, as after the Roman, civilisation fell back into darkness. A
catastrophe of centuries was occupied by the evening, the midnight,
and the dawn. As once the barbarians walked with wonder along the
deserted Roman roads or suddenly emerged from forest and plain to
gaze astonished on the vast ruins of aqueducts and coliseums and once
populous cities, so the new child peoples which survived the cosmic
catastrophe contemplated the embankments, the crumbling bridges, the
tattered, torn fragments of deserted towns which marked the memories
of our dead race. The wheel of history slowly revolved through the
centuries, and after a time once again the unending cyclic process was
renewed and another “civilisation” erected which thought itself the
last word of human progress.

“Days flowed like water from the fountains, and the centuries passed
like drops falling from the ends of stalactites. Hunters came to chase
the bears upon the hills that covered the forgotten city. Shepherds
fed their flocks upon them. Labourers turned up the soil with their
ploughs. Gardeners cultivated their lettuces and grafted their pear
trees. They were not rich, and they had no arts. The walls of their
cabins were covered with old vines and roses. A goat-skin clothed their
tanned limbs, while their wives dressed themselves with the wool that
they themselves had spun. The goat-herds moulded little figures of men
and animals out of clay, or sang songs about the young girl who follows
her lover through woods or among the browsing goats; while the pine
trees whisper together, and the water utters its murmuring sound. The
master of the house grew angry with the beetles who devoured his figs.
He planned snares to protect his fowls from the velvet-tailed fox, and
he poured out wine for his neighbours, saying, ‘Drink! the flies have
not spoilt my vintage; the vines were dry before they came.’

“In the course of ages the wealth of the villages and the corn that
filled the fields were pillaged by barbarian invaders. The country
changed its masters many times. The conquerors built castles on the
hills. Cultivation increased: mills, forges, tanneries, and looms were
established. Roads were opened through the woods and over the marshes.
The river was covered with boats. The hamlets became large villages,
and, joining together, formed a town which protected itself by deep
trenches and lofty walls. Later, becoming the capital of a great State,
it found itself straitened within its now useless ramparts, and it
converted them into grass-grown villas. It grew very rich and large
beyond measure.

“The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people. They kept on
making them still higher. They built them of thirty or forty storeys,
with offices, shops, banks, societies, one above another. They dug
cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men
laboured in a giant town.”[30]

       *       *       *       *       *

After a time, says a great writer, the earth grows sick of her
children, like exhausted ground that will bear fruit no more. It
is impossible that society could “blow up” with such rapidity as is
here pictured; the process is, in any case, foreshortened. But any
student who has followed the history of Rome’s destruction--the gradual
disintegration of a society exceedingly complex and rational--will
never conceal from himself the possibility of similar vast changes in
the world of to-morrow. The process is always incredible to those who
think that mankind henceforth has but to settle down and be comfortable
in a world where tranquillity is secure. Dr. Dill has described such
a life under the Roman peace, with the municipalities competing in
magnificence of building, the arts of life secure, the farmhouse (in
one picture) with the peacocks in the garden under the sunlight, and
every accompanying element of enjoyment and repose. The only sorrow
which disturbed such an age was the sometimes transient regret that all
the great things had been accomplished; that humanity, in a completely
rational society, had nothing to contemplate in the future but a
continuous repetition of the present--an endless end of the world. A
few generations later that farmhouse lies deserted, the cities are
crumbling into ruin, society itself has fallen to pieces, terror,
and with terror childlike superstition and ferocity, have achieved
dominance. Night has resumed her ancient Empire. What guarantee does
the present offer against the repetition of a similar catastrophe?
Civilisation possesses weapons adequate to protection against forces
without. It has no protection against forces within. One of the passing
figures in Mr. Wells’s vision of desolation mourns over the vanishing
of all the bright hopes of a transfigured world. “The sense of fine
beginnings! It was all a sham. There were no beginnings. We’re just
ants in ant-hill circles, in a world that doesn’t matter: that goes on
and rambles into nothingness. New York--New York doesn’t even strike me
as horrible. New York was nothing but an ant-hill kicked to pieces by a
fool.”

These observers are justified at least in one contention: that
the future, whether in orderly progress or with sudden or gradual
retrogression, will be astonished at the “illusion of security”
in which to-day society reposes; forgetting that but a thin crust
separates it from the central elemental fires, that the heart of the
earth is a flame. There are forces of resistance to disintegration and
decay, even amongst this shabby crowd which appears to the indignant
observer but an aggregation of aimless, impossible lives. Mr. Wells
himself in earlier work has shown us the humanity and romantic ardour
of Mr. Hoopdriver and the resolute hope of Mr. Lewisham, even if in
later effort he can see little but the fatuous ineptitude of Mr.
“Art” Kipps or the ineffective blunderings of Mr. Bert Smallways.
Mr. Anatole France has revealed in his studies of contemporary life
kindly intelligent citizens, doing bravely the work of the day. In no
panic fear, certainly with no acquiescence and despair, the reformer
to-day will contemplate the possible future of a society beyond measure
complex, baffling and uncertain in its energies and aims. But the
warning, always useful, but now more than ever necessary, cannot be
too strongly emphasised: that with the vertical division between nation
and nation armed to the teeth, and the horizontal division between
rich and poor which has become a cosmopolitan fissure, the future of
progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity--at best--appears
but as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge
of rock, beaten by wind and wave; which cannot tell how many, if any
at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning. The
wise man will still go softly all his days; working always for greater
economic equality on the one hand, for understanding between estranged
peoples on the other; apprehending always how slight an effort of
stupidity or violence could strike a death-blow to twentieth-century
civilisation, and elevate the forces of destruction triumphant over the
ruins of a world.




CHAPTER XI

POSTSCRIPT


So at the end we are compelled to confess an essential ignorance.
To-day’s “human comedy” still remains unwritten. Those who have
essayed it are always unconsciously or deliberately foreshortening or
distorting: exhibiting excess of darkness or sunshine. We know little
of the forces fermenting in that strange laboratory which is the
birthplace of the coming time. We are uncertain whether civilisation is
about to blossom into flower, or wither in tangle of dead leaves and
faded gold. We can find no answer to the inquiry, whether we are about
to plunge into a new period of tumult and upheaval, whether we are
destined to an indefinite prolongation of the present half-lights and
shadows, whether, as we sometimes try to anticipate, a door is to be
suddenly opened, revealing unimaginable glories.

In face of such uncertainty, the verdict is often one of criticism
and despair. “The wisest man has warned us”--so runs a mournful
verdict--“not to expect the world ever to improve so much that the
better part of mankind will be in the majority. No wise man ever
undertakes to correct the disorders of the public estate.” “He who
cannot endure the madness of the public, but goeth about to think he
can cure it, is himself no less mad than the rest.”

Such a verdict, however, pays little heed to the effort of those
whose unregarded labour, now in patient adherence to duty, now in
“something more heroical than this age affecteth,” has bought the good
things which are the common heritage of to-day: a widespread comfort,
opportunities for happiness and content, freedom which is always but
hardly won and but hardly maintained.

Optimism and pessimism, in face of any civilisation in a changing
world, are equally untrue, equally futile. All human societies mingle
selfishness and sacrifice, exultation and weariness, laughter and
tears. No one age is especially wicked, especially tired, especially
noble. All ages are wicked, tired, noble. Progress is always impossible
and always proceeding. Preservation is always hazardous and always
attained. Every class is unfit to govern; and the government of the
world continues. Austerities, simplicities, and a common danger breed
virtues and devotions which are the parents of prosperity. Prosperity
breeds arrogance, extravagance, and class hatreds. Opulence and pride
in their turn breed national disasters. And these disasters engender
the austerities and simplicities which start the cycle again anew.

To accept all and to reject all are in this case equally desperate
courses. To turn aside in despair, to hold aloof in disdain, to
proclaim from the heart of comfort an easy approval, are policies
traitorous to the public good.

A king of France--so runs the medieval legend--when travelling in
Catalonia, discovered an ancient man engaged unremittingly in the
planting of date-kernels. “Why?” he asked, “do you sow the seeds of a
tree of such tardy growth, seeing that the dates will not ripen till a
hundred years be passed?” “Am I not then eating,” was the answer, “the
fruit of trees planted by my forefathers, who took thought for those
who were to come? And shall not I do like unto them?”[31]

It may be that the men “who took thought for those who were to come”
will be found upon the winning side.




FOOTNOTES:

[1] F. M. Hueffer in “The Spirit of the People,” a clever and
suggestive analysis of Middle Class England.

[2] _The Island Pharisees. J. Galsworthy._

[3] _At the Works. Lady Bell._

[4] _A Poor Man’s House. Stephen Reynolds._

[5] _The Town Child. R. A. Bray._

[6] _Towards Social Reform. Canon and Mrs. Barrett._

[7] _New Worlds for Old. H. G. Wells._

[8] _Socialism. R. C. Ensor._

[9] _Report of H.M. Factory Inspectors, 1907._

[10] _Report of the Committee on Truck, 1909._

[11] _Kipps. By H. G. Wells._

[12] _Report of Parliamentary Committee on Home Work, 1908._ To-day in
Parliament a “Trades’ Boards Bill” seems at last to offer a way towards
remedy.

[13] _C. L. Marson in The “Commonwealth._”

[14] _The Ruin of Rural England._

[15] _D. C. Pedder. Where Men Decay._

[16] _Before the Great Pillage. Dr. Jessop._

[17] _England a Nation._

[18] Tolstoy, _Fortnightly Review_, February 1909.

[19] _Modernism and Romance. By R. A. Scott James._ The whole book
forms a very interesting study of the possibilities of the survival of
“Romance” in the modern world.

[20] _Modernism and Romance._

[21] In a volume of essays, _In Peril of Change_.

[22] _Tono-Bungay. By H. G. Wells._

[23] _John Bull’s Other Island. G. Bernard Shaw._

[24] _A Century of Meditations. Thomas Treherne._

[25] See _The Story of My Heart_. _By Richard Jefferies._

[26] _England a Nation._

[27] _Life and Labour of the People. Religious Influences._

[28] _Christianity and the Working Classes_, edited by George Haw.

[29] _The War in the Air. By H. G. Wells._

[30] In these summaries and quotations I have used the excellent
translation of Mr. A. W. Evans’s _Penguin Island_ (John Lane).

[31] _Gentlemen Errant. Mrs. Cust._




INDEX


  Airships, 217

  American wealth, 30;
    athletics, 135;
    diseased activity, 136;
    begging in, 182, 183

  Aristocracy, intellectual failure of, 28

  Arnold, Matthew, quotation from, 6, 14, 25, 219, 265


  Baby, crying, 187

  Bagehot, 30, 284

  “Bankruptcy of Science,” 213

  Barnett, Canon, 141, 274

  Bell, Lady, _At the Works_, 106, 107, 109

  Belloc, 19, 240

  Birmingham, Bishop of, 88

  Blake, 244

  Bonfield, Miss, 168

  “Boodler” not disapproved, 153

  Booth, Charles, on religion in London, 268

  Bray, Reginald, “The Town Child,” 136, 139

  Butler, 265

  Butler, Samuel, 283


  Canyon, Arizona, 286

  Carlyle, quotation from, 6, 22, 47, 99, 219, 276

  “Castle Haven,” 32

  Châteaubriand, 222

  Chesterton, G. K., 241

  Child Labour, effect of, 162

  _Clarion_ and _Clarionette_, 143, 154

  “Conquerors, the,” 56

  Corruption, Civic, 153

  Crooks, Mr. Will, 144, 145, 146, 147

  Crowd, the, 118, 119, 293;
    strong man’s contempt for, 123;
    in America, 123

  “Cup Tie” and dying workman, 134


  Davies, W. H., 180, 181, 182, 183

  Democracy, 136, 141

  Dill, Dr., 301

  Disease, victory over, 224

  Dolling, 268


  Electioneering, the new, 128

  Ensor, Mr., 150, 179, 207, 263


  Family, limitation of, 86, 87, 103;
    budgets, 101;
    variations in, 102;
    working class and middle class contrasted, 139;
    “F. sanctity” rashly used in argument, 140

  Flowers, workmen’s ignorance of, 263

  Flying, developments of, 217, 290

  Football crowds, 131

  France, Anatole (Ile des Penguins), 294-295, 300;
    M. Bergeret, 302

  Froissart, 193


  Galsworthy, _The Island Pharisees_, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55

  Gladstone, 21

  Grayson, Mr., M.P., 143


  Half-Timers, 162

  Hardy, Thomas, 232

  Henderson, Mr., M.P., 143

  Henley, W. E., quotation from, 49

  Horton, Dr., on religion, 271

  Housing of the Poor, 99, 100

  Hueffer, F. M., Spirit of the People, 14, 35, 270


  Infantile death-rate, 161


  Jefferies, Richard, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253

  Jowett, Mr., M.P., 143

  Juvenal, 61


  Kennedy, Bart, 178, 180

  Kipling, quotation from, 287

  _Kipps_, 170, 171, 286


  Lamb, Charles, 131

  Land, love of, 193

  Life Worship, 249, 251

  Living-in, 161, 165;
    moral effect of, 167;
    employers on, 166

  Loane, Miss, 112, 115

  London County Council, Hôtel de Ville, 23;
    elections, 69

  _Lord of Latimer Street_, 116

  Lowes, Dickinson, 283

  Lyons, Neil, 184


  Mallock, 41

  Medieval craftsmen country people, English, 200

  Meredith, quotation from, 6

  Morris, quotation from, 6;
    Socialism of, 257, 258


  Newton’s law of motion, 284

  Noise of the machines, awful when it stops, 137


  Papacy, Sidney Smith on, 265

  Peckham election, 126

  Plutocracy, the, 40, 41

  “Populace,” 15

  Press, the Sunday, 3

  Prévost, M. Marcel, 56, 57, 58, 59


  Rescue Home, youth of inmates, 160

  Religion, middle classes and, 75;
    indifference to, 267;
    Booth on, 269;
    drink and, 271;
    Ward, 272;
    class feeling and, 272

  Renan, 118

  Reynolds, Stephen, _A Poor Man’s House_, 113-116

  Rights of way, only in England, 201

  “_Robert Thorne_,” 78

  Roman building, 24;
    vice but splendour, 46

  Ruskin, quotation from, 6, 111


  Sailor at midnight, 187

  Scott, James, R.A., 231

  “Season, the,” 44

  Security, conviction of, 8, 280, 282, 288

  Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 237, 238, 239

  Shop assistants, 164

  Sidgwick, Henry, 276

  Sinclair, Upton, 30, 31, 32

  Small holdings, 194

  Smith, Sidney, on Papacy, 265

  Snowden, Mr., 142

  Socialism, aristocracy under, 64;
    among the middle classes, 34;
    among the working classes, 148, 149

  Southey on the city, 136

  Standard of living, alteration in, 11, 21, 39

  Stevenson, R. L., 245

  Strike, railway, 16

  Suffragettes, 84, 119, 122, 127

  Super-wealth, 20, 26

  “Surrey Labourer,” 196

  Sweating, instances of, 160, 161, 174;
    character of workers, 173


  Taine, 270

  Tavannes, 48

  Teachers, elementary, 83

  Ties of family, where strongest, 139

  Tolstoy, 213

  Treherne, Thomas, 243, 248, 250

  Tramps, 178

  Tyranny in villages, 193, 205, 206


  Victorian Age, 5

  Village, decaying life of, 12, 65, 190, 191, 192, 193

  Viviani, M., quotation from, 155


  Wells, H. G., quotation from New Worlds for Old, 149;
    war in the air, 220, 290;
    Tono-Bungay, 237;
    Utopia, 282

  Wordsworth on the City, 136

  Workhouse, labourer’s dislike of, 197




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  MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED,
  _Edinburgh_




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