Part 19
The war has focussed attention on the need for arresting infant mortality. Good! But there is little use in saving babies if you are not going to feed them decently when they are out of swaddling clothes. A big step forward has been taken of late years towards the feeding of necessitous children, both at school and in crêches but many more steps need to be taken. If this is not a State matter, then nothing is. To neglect the nourishment of its children is at once the paltriest economy, the least sagacious policy, and the worst inhumanity of which a nation can be guilty. The old-fashioned idea that children must go hungry or be fed so as to grow up rickety because their parents (being “rotters” already) must not be rotted further is a doctrine devoid both of common sense and compassion. A nation either has a will towards a future, or it has none. If it has none, for what are we fighting this most bloody war? What does our honour matter, or our independence either? But the future of a nation is its children. As they grow up, healthy, clean, hopeful, efficient, so will our future be. As they grow up—half-fed, dirty, don’t care, and ignorant—so will Britain! If to look after the children makes worse paupers of the parents, well—let it! Have some courage. Do not be hypnotized by a word, and, grasping the shadow, lose the substance. Give the children blood in their little bodies, and hope in their little brains. Any decent parent will be the better for that; the indecent parent is a loss already, and must be cut. Working-class mothers who neglect to feed their children better than themselves are but exceptions, nor will a sounder system of State-help seriously alter the deepest instinct of human nature. The heroism of British soldiers in the trenches is no greater than the lifelong heroism of British mothers in the slums struggling against want. This is a matter that should not be left to the discretion of local bodies. Once the principle has been admitted—and who can honestly deny that it has?—the rest should be simply a question of fact medically certified not here and there, but all over the country. Either it is justice and wisdom to feed the children, or it is not, and the scruples, however philosophical, of gentlemen prepared to watch other people’s children go hungry should not any longer be indulged.
The estimated number of school children in England and Wales being fed by the State in 1911-1912 was 230,000 out of a school population of 5,357,367. The estimated number of this school population showing signs of malnutrition is variously given at from 10 to 20 per cent. Taking it at 15 per cent., or 800,000 children, we have more than half a million school children wanting meals and not getting them. This is appalling. There is no other word for it. But when the children _under_ school age who need food and are not getting it, are added to this number, the proportions of this national folly and inhumanity stagger the brain. It does not yet seem to be grasped that these children, who are fighting not only against insufficiency of proper food, but against bad air and bad housing, grow up with so much per cent. knocked off their national value. A stitch in time is supposed to save nine. A pound spent on the age of growth brings back many pounds from the age of stability. To those few who ride the doctrine of Liberty to the death of national health it may simply be said: So long as you have no hope of repealing compulsory education, you have no right to let children receive it in an unfit condition. Education and decent nourishment are inseparable; and decent nourishment is as necessary in the years that come before as in the years of schooling. No! In reality the principle is now rooted, and, like other things, it’s all a question of money. But a country with a capital of £16,000,000,000 and an income of £2,100,000,000 cannot really afford to allow this state of affairs to continue—especially after the gold-letting of this war. The state our national finances will be in makes it all the more imperative that we should have a well-nourished and efficient population, or we shall never get out of the slough.
During this war our heroism has jibbed at Liquor. That jovial monster looms nearly as large as ever. We shall have a National Debt after the war of three or four thousand millions, perhaps more. And yet the cheapest thing that could possibly be done, in the long run, would be to increase it and buy up the Liquor Trade; achieve that dream of Joseph Chamberlain, “the total and absolute elimination of any idea of private gain in the retail sale of liquor”; convert drink into food to the tune of some eighty millions a year; and vastly diminish the number of children that require State nourishment, and the number of underfed men and women. In 1911, £162,797,229 was the drink bill of the nation; of which it is estimated that about £110,000,000 was spent by the working class. The working classes are no more inclined to liquor than the rest of the population, but they have obviously less to spare for the indulgence of their inclination. With proper control of the liquor traffic they will perhaps spend half what they spend now, extracting therefrom just as much enjoyment, and most of the other half will go into the bodies of themselves and their children in the form of food.
Before the war one-tenth of our people were getting too little food; two-tenths more just balanced on a knife-edge of bare sufficiency. And the great majority of this third of our population were too closely or too badly housed for health.
What is it going to be—_after_—unless our measures in regard to food, to housing, and to drink, are heroic? For heroic measures we shall need a keener sense of justice, a larger humanity, than we have ever had. Though the war may conceivably not diminish humane feeling in those who fight, it blunts the sensibilities of those who do not see its horrors at first-hand. Tales of others’ sufferings have become the daily fodder of the brain; narratives of death and misery the companions of every hour. Alongside the brutalities and agonies of the war, the injustice and cruelties of normal civil live seem pale and tame. Man has only a certain capacity for feeling; one expects callousness now towards civil inhumanities. But must that callousness last after peace has come? If so, we are in a bad way.
What is it that our modern State is reaching after? Presumably health, and balance. And what are these qualities built on, if not on Justice? At the back of all social inhumanities will be found a lack of reasonable freedom and opportunity for some people, and the possession in other people of too much freedom and opportunity. And for the swift redress of social cruelties, the thorough attainment of social justice, we have at present not only to contend with human nature, but with an admitted deficiency in our legislative machinery.
When the chief obstacle to laws is not the callousness of public opinion, but a mere block on the lines of procedure, some drastic change is due, a new departure wanted. Before the war many measures of reform hung in the wind year after year, not because there was no public feeling behind them, not even because there were the usual political cleavages concerning them, but simply because time could not be found in which to pass them. Of such were: Measures for the feeding and education of children; the control of drink; rural housing; improvement of slum areas; furtherance of the minimum wage; reform of the Poor Law; of the Divorce Law; of the disability that attends the needy in their access to civil justice; of the imprisonment of poor persons for debt; of the procedure in regard to pauper lunatics; of the prison system; of provision for the blind; measures for the better treatment of animals. All these and others hung in the wind; are they to go on hanging those when the war is over? Wanted before, they will be wanted still more badly then, because the general conditions of life will for some years, perhaps many years, be harder; and economic pressure fosters rough and unjust treatment.
Is it too early for a united effort, to think out, in readiness for peace, a scheme of parliamentary procedure which shall afford time for the serious and uninterrupted consideration of non-party measures, and the furtherance of needed reforms?
Party no longer exists, but they who think it has gone for good dwell in a fools’ paradise. As sure as fate it will spring up again, because it is rooted in temperamental difference. But must it come back with all its old cat-and-dog propensities, and waste of national time? It will, unless some method be devised that will remove some of party’s unhandsome opportunities and save it from itself. Politicians alone know the difficulties, many and great, in the way of a better procedure. Surely, while faction is in abeyance, Parliament will set its wits to overcoming those difficulties, so that when the war ends we may not witness again the tedious and distressful blocking of so many needed measures that prevailed aforetime. Party was made for the Country, not the Country for Party; and what was tolerated with Job-like patience before this vast upheaval is not by any means likely to be tolerated after. Needs will be more insistent; the sense of reality much greater; the aspiration towards National Health a live thing, because it will be so desperately necessary.
Reform of parliamentary procedure is obviously the prime precedent for national reform. Shall not then the question be even now given all the attention that can be spared to it? What better moment—when men of all parties are filled with the one great thought—Our Country!
V—A LAST WORD
One more word before these vapourings cease. The national task in this war is still mighty enough to absorb all action, but not quite all thought, for it is no spasmodic effort, meaning nothing to the future. To carry the spirit of to-day into a long to-morrow, making of our patriotism not a mere torrent soon spent and leaving an arid plain, but a life-giving, even-flowing river—for that one must not lose the sense of continuity; one must think ahead. More! One must resolve—resolve that this new unity shall stand not only the strain of war, but the greater strain of the coming Peace. After—will come the test. Having guaranteed our country for the moment from destructive powers without, shall we at once redeliver it to the destructive powers within—go back to strife over Ireland, the Suffrage, the Welsh Church, and the Second Chamber? Or, preserving our new-found unity, settle generously and in a large spirit those distressful matters, and pass on to the real work—to a wider and freer view of Empire, to the right training of the nation, the right feeding of the nation, to securing for each man, woman, and child a solid foundation of health and hope; to the restoration of the land and of our food supply; to clearance of mutual suspicions, and the stablishing of a new trustfulness between Labour and Capital; to the banishment of inhumanity; the freeing of the eyes of Justice; and interment of the privileges of class?
Shall we go back to rolling in the troughs of a dirty sea or set new sail and steer out with a true faith in our destiny as the Ship of Freedom and Justice?
“When the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be, But when the devil got well, the devil a saint was he!”
Is that to be our case? Let us not underrate the danger. At this moment and until the war is over, we are full of patriotism and good-will. We _have_ to be. There’s the trouble. Once Peace comes, and the unifying force of our common peril is over, what then? Is the old raw party spirit to ramp among us again? If a man would discover what danger there is of a return to every kind of disunity, let him take a definite national question and see how much of his private interest or conviction he is prepared to abate for the sake of the public good. Mighty little! Are we to dissolve again into those “rascally Radicals” and those “infernal Tories”; into “grinders of the poor” and “discontented devils”; into “brutal men” and “hysterical females” with all the other warring tribes of the Armageddon of Peace? Are we to lose utterly the inspiring vision of our Country, in the squabbles of domestic life? Some of that intense vision must go, alas! But surely not all. And yet all _will_ go unless we keep in mind the thought that this war is not an end, but the means to an end, which none of us will see, but all of us can further in time of peace as well as in time of war—an end for whose attainment the blood and treasure now spilled is but as a preliminary.
It will be heart-breaking if from this stupendous cataclysm no lasting good to the world and to Britain can be brought forth. Its horror, even now, few realize who are not at the front. One who was many months on ambulance duty in the French lines wrote these words:
“They talk of the war! Let them come close in! Let them see lying around emaciated heads with no bodies within a couple of hundred yards; let them see the bloody confusion of heads and entrails and limbs which is showered around when a trench is mined; let them see the heads with ears and noses bitten off as if by mad dogs; let them see the men driven insane by the sights and sounds of the battlefield, who turn and rend their comrades and have to be shot down by them; let them come where hundreds of wounded men are lying on contested ground screaming the whole night through (and not one in a million has ever heard a man scream!) and then talk of the war!”
If from this horror, fought through and endured, as we believe, for the future of our Land and the future of mankind, there is to come no blessing, no advance to freedom and health and justice. . . . What then? Nothing will be easier than to take up again the peace life of Britain as it was, and worse than it was, because coarsened by the passions of war, and embittered by the strain of a greater economic stress. Nothing will be easier than to give rein to the instincts of greed, pugnacity, and rancour, now hard held in by sentiment and the common peril; to step back and walk blindly in a country where all is faction; where class shuns class, and men and women are bitterly opposed; where the youth of the nation is all the time running to seed; where children go hungry and millions throughout the land are miserably housed and fed; where the access to justice is often still beyond the reach of the poor; where helplessness is not yet a guarantee against ill-usage. Once the war effort is over, nothing will be easier than—from a resolved and united nation—to become a crowd pressing this way and that, without view and without vision, seeking purse and place, or, at the best, fulfilment of small factious policies.
No one can tell yet what will be the world-sequel of this war—whether it will bring a long peace or other wars; the enlargement of democracy or the hardening of autocratic rule; the United States of Europe or a congery of distrustful Powers working for another “Day.” Only one thing we know, that in our charge will be our own national life, to make or to mar; to prepare against whatever fortune the outer world shall brew, to prepare against the subtle march of inward dissolution. Our future does not lie on the knees of the gods; it lies in our own hands, and hearts, and brains, and the use that we shall make of them.
Swift is the descent to hell, and no wings fly so fast thither as the wings of material success. Shall we go that way? Or shall we, having fixed our eyes on a goal far beyond the finish of this war, quietly, resolutely in our conduct to the outer world and in our national life, begin at once transmuting into deeds those words: Freedom, Health, Justice for All?
As a man thinks and dreams, so does he act. It is time to think and dream a little of the future, while the spirit of unity is on us, the vision of our Country with us; so that, when we see again the face of Peace, we may continue to act in unity, having in our hearts the good of our Land, and in our eyes the vision of her, growing ever to truer greatness and beauty.
THE ISLANDS OF THE BLESSED
(Read at a Conference on the National Life of the Allied Countries, Stratford-on-Avon, August, 1916.)
I suppose there are Britons who have never seen the sea; thousands, perhaps—unfortunate. But is there a Briton who has not in some sort the feeling that he is a member of a great ship’s crew? Is there one who never rejoices that his Land sails in space, unboarded, untouched by other lands? It must be strange to be native of a country where, strolling forth, one may pass into the fields or woods of another race. In all that we are, have been, and shall be, the sea comes first—the sea, sighing up quiet beaches, thundering off headlands, the sea blue and smiling under our white cliffs, or lashing the long sands, the sea out beyond foreshore and green fields, or rolling in on wind-blown rocks and wastes. The sea with its smile, and its frown, and its restless music; the grim, loyal, protecting sea—our mother and our comrade, our mysterious friend!
The ancients dreamed of “the islands of the blessed”; we of these green and misty isles almost, I think, believe that we inhabit them.
A strange and abiding sense is love of Country! Though reason may revolt, and life here be hard, ugly, thankless, though one may even say, “I care no more for my own countrymen than for those of other lands; I am a citizen of the world!” No use! A stealing love has us fast bound; a web of who knows what memories of misty fields, and scents of clover and turned earth; of summer evenings, when sounds are far and clear; of long streets half-lighted, and town sights, not beautiful but homely; of the skies we were born beneath, and the roads we have trodden all our lives. What memories, too, of names and tales, small visions all upside down perhaps, yet true and warm to us because we listened and saw when we were no older than foals at their dams’ heels. It is not our actual Country, but its halo, that we love—the halo each one of us has made for it. There are evenings under the moon, dewy mornings, late afternoons, when over field and wood, over moor or park or town, unearthliness hovers; so, over our native land hovers a glamour that burns brighter when we are absent, and flames up in glory above her when we see her driven or hard pressed. No man yet knows the depths of our love for these islands of the blessed. May no man ever know it!
And to each of us there will be some ingle-nook where the spirit of our country most inhabits, where the fire of hearth and home glows best, and draws us with its warmth from wanderings bodily or spiritual. To know that in these isles no native-born but has a quiet shrine, be it lovely, or devoid of earthly beauty, where he or she in fancy worships the whole land, gives reality to the word Patriotism.
This love of country is so deep and sacred that we cannot utter it; let us not forget that it is as deep and sacred to the natives of other lands!
Looking back into the dark of history, how quaint is our origin—offspring of invading robbers, wave after wave, for some two thousand years before the Norman Conquest! If these be not in truth the blessed islands that the ancients dreamed of, they seem to have been sufficiently attractive. Who our Neolithic forerunners were, whence they came, or whether they were here before our isles cut loose from the mainland and set out on an endless voyage, we shall never, I suppose, know. A strain of their blood, more than we think perhaps, must still be alive within us; the rest of it is freebooting fluid—Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, all robbers; blent at last—and in Ireland not yet quite blent—to the observance of honour among thieves.
Ever since the sea brought us here—all but the Neolithic few—in the long-ships of the past, what a slow, ceaseless fusing has gone to the making of the modern Briton—that most singular among men! I hold the theory—how far scientifically tenable I know not—that the continued vitality of a race depends on two main conditions: the presence of many strains of blood not too violently differing one from the other, and the absence of too much sun. I hold that nations may become too inbred; or may have the sap dried out of them by heat. In Britain we cannot yet have reached the point of perfect fusion—are not in danger for a long time of becoming too inbred. Nor can the sun be called a desperate peril. We are “game,” as they say, for centuries yet; unless——! For our besetting danger is another.
How many of us realize that far beyond all other nations we are town dwellers, subject to town blight? That is a new, an insidious, malady, whose virulence we have hardly yet appreciated or had time to study. Can it be arrested by homœopathy—or must sweeping allopathic remedies be applied? Will town blight be cured by better town conditions, and our gradual adaptation—or by going back to the land? By both. But, if not by both within the next half-century, then—I fear—by neither. Town blight has had as yet but two full generations to lay its grip on us. We have time for its defeat if we have courage and sense. But it is an enemy more deadly than the Germans; not so easy to see and to fight against!
When children first discover gooseberries or other kindly fruits of the earth, they eat too quickly and too much. We were the first people to discover the means to “happiness” known as modern industrialism. With huge appetite we set upon it, and are caught by surfeit. I have heard this view of our case seriously countered—the Cockney and the northern townsman are thought to be our most vital types. Verily they have a pretty courage; but to such as are light-hearted on this matter I would say: “Go, in summer, to some seaside place where humble townsfolk have come to make holiday, as healthy and little pallid as they ever are, and—watch. Then wing off to some remote fishing village, or countryside where such peasants as are left are not too badly off, and—watch. Then summon your candour, and tell in which of your two fields of observation you have seen more vigour of limb, beauty of face, or at all events more freedom from petty distortions and a look of dwindling.”