Chapter 10

Owing to these same circumstances, the wage-earners of that day enjoyed what their descendants would consider a most blissful freedom from anxiety. On the one side, the demand for labour was fairly steady. It was the demand of a community not rapidly growing in numbers, nor yet subject to crazes and sudden changes of a fashion--a community patiently, nay, cheerfully, conservative in its ambitions, not given to rash speculation, but contented to go plodding on in its time-honoured and modest well-being. What the townsfolk wanted one year they wanted the next, and so onwards with but quiet progress. And as the demand for labour was thus steady, so on the other side was the supply of it. A dissatisfied employer could not advertise, then, in a London daily paper, and get scores of men applying to him for work at a day's notice; nor, indeed, would strangers have been able to do the work in many cases, so curiously was its character determined by local conditions. Besides, town opinion, still prejudiced by memories of the old Poor Law, would have viewed with extreme disfavour, had such an experiment ever been tried, the importation of men and families whose coming must surely result in pauperism for somebody, and in a consequent charge upon the rates.

So, putting together the leading factors--namely, a steady demand for countrified labour, a steady supply of it, and an employing class full of country ideas--we get a rough idea of the conditions of wage-earning in the neighbourhood, when the folk of this valley, fenced out from their common, were forced to look to wage-earning as their sole means of living. That the conditions were ideal it would be foolish to suppose; but that, for villagers at least, they had certain advantages over present conditions is not to be denied. Especially we may note two unpleasing features of modern wage-earning which had not then made their appearance.

In the first place, the work itself was interesting to do, was almost worth doing for its own sake, when it still called for much old-world skill and knowledge, and when the praises of the master were the praises of an expert who well knew what he was talking about. On these terms, it was no mean pleasure that the able labouring men had in their labour. They took a pride in it--as you may soon discern if you will listen to the older men talking. I have heard them boast, as of a triumph, of the fine flattering surprise of some master, when he had come to look at their day's work, and found it more forward, or better done, than he had dared to hope. The words he said are treasured up with delight, and repeated with enthusiasm, after many years.

As for the other point, it has already been touched upon. Harsh the employers might be--more callous by far, I believe, than they are now; but in their general outlook they were not, as yet, so very far removed from the men who worked for them. Their ideas of good and bad were such as the peasant labourer from this valley could understand; and master and man were not greatly out of touch in the matter of civilization. It made a vast difference to the labourer's comfort. He might be hectored, bullied, cheated even, but he hardly felt himself degraded too. It was not a being out of another sphere that oppressed him; not one who despised him, not one whose motives were strange and mysterious. The cruellest oppression was inhuman rather than unhuman--the act, after all, only of a more powerful, not of a more dazzling, personage--so that it produced in him no humiliating sense of belonging to an inferior order of creation. And, of course, oppression was exceptional. Employers were obliged to get on comfortably with their work-people, by the conditions governing the supply of labour. I have in my mind several cases mentioned to me by people long ago dead, in which men for various faults (drunkenness in one instance, theft in another) were dismissed from their employment again and again, yet as often reinstated, because the master found it easier to put up with their faults than to do without their skill. It may be inferred, therefore, that ordinary men got along fairly well with their masters in the ordinary course.

This state of things, however, has gradually passed away. As I shall show in another chapter, the labourer may now take but little interest and but little pride in his work; but the change in that direction is not more pronounced than is the change in the relations between the villagers and the employing classes. It is a cruel evil that the folk of the valley have suffered there. No longer are they a group whose peculiarities are respected while their qualities are esteemed. In their intercourse with the outer world they have become, as it were, degraded, humiliated; and when they go out of the valley to earn wages, it is to take the position of an inferior and almost servile race. The reason is that the employing class, as a whole, has moved on, leaving the labourers where they were, until now a great gulf divides them. Merely in relative wealth, if that were all, the difference has widened enormously. Seventy or eighty years ago, I have heard say, the shopkeeper in the town who had as much as a hundred pounds put by was thought a rich man. There are now many artisans there whose savings exceed that figure, while the property of the townsmen who employ labour is, of course, valued often in thousands. The labouring people alone remain without savings, as poor as their grandfathers when the common was first enclosed.

But it is a question of civilization far more than of wealth that now divides the employing classes from the employed. The former have discarded much of their provincialism; they are astir with ambitions and ideas at which the old town would have stood aghast. In beliefs and in tastes they are a new people. They have new kinds of knowledge; almost one may say that they use their brains in new ways; and the result is that between them and the village labourer mutual understanding has broken down. How far the separation has gone is betrayed in the fact that the countrified speech, common to village and town fifty years ago, has become a subject of derision to the town-people, forgetful of their own ancestry. So, in field and street and shop, the two kinds of folk meet face to face, not with an outlook, and hardly with a speech, which both can appreciate, but like distinct races, the one dominant, the other subject.

And, all but inevitably, the breach is daily widened by the conditions on which the new civilization of the employing class is based. For, with all its good features, it is rather a barbaric civilization, in this sense--that it is more a matter of fineness in possessions than in personal qualities. It cannot be maintained without a costly apparatus of dress and furniture, and of drudges to do the dirty work; and consequently it demands success in that competitive thrift which gives a good money-income. Without that the employers are nowhere. They are themselves driven very hard; they must make things pay; to secure the means of civilization for themselves, they must get them out of the labourer with his eighteen shillings a week. In vain, therefore, are they persuaded by their newest ideas to see in him an Englishman as good as themselves: they may assent to the principle, but in practice it is as imperative as ever to make him a profitable drudge. Accordingly, those relations of mutual approval which were not uncommon of old between master and man cannot now be maintained. If it is impossible for the village folk to understand the town folk, it is equally impossible for the town folk to understand the village folk. They cannot afford to understand. The peasant outlook is out of date--a cast-off thing; and for cleaving to it the labourer is despised. If he could be civilized, and yet be made to "pay," that is what would best suit the middle-classes; and that is really the impossible object at which they aim, when they try to "do him good." They want to make him more like themselves, and yet keep him in his place of dependence and humiliation.

It must be said that amongst a section of the employers there is no desire to "do good" even on these terms. While the labouring people, on their side, betray little or no class feeling of hostility towards employers, the converse is not true, but jealousy, suspicion, some fear--the elements of bitter class-war, in fact--frequently mark the attitude of middle-class people towards the labouring class. It seems to be forgotten that the men are English. One hears them spoken of as an alien and objectionable race, worth nothing but to be made to work. The unemployment which began to beggar so many of my village neighbours after the South African War was actually welcomed by numerous employers in this district. "It will do the men good," people said to me; "it will teach them their place. They were getting too independent." The election of 1906, when the Conservative member for the division was unseated, brought out a large crop of similarly malevolent expressions. "Look at the class of people who have the vote," said a disgusted villa lady, with her nose in the air. "Only the low, ignorant people wear those colours," another lady assured her little boy, whose eyes preferred "those colours" to the favours in his own buttonhole. More pointed was the overheard remark of a well-to-do employer, irritated by the election crowds in the town: "As my wife says, it was bad enough before. The children of the lower classes used, as it was, to take the inside of the pavement, and we had to walk on the kerb. But now we shall be driven out into the road."

I would not mention these things were it not for their significance to the village folk. By becoming wage-earners solely, the villagers have fallen into the disfavour of an influential section of the middle-classes, most of whom have no other desire than to keep them in a sufficient state of servility to be useful. How else is one to interpret that frequent middle-class outcry against education: "What are we going to do for servants?" or how else the grudging attitude taken up towards the few comforts that cottage people are able to enjoy? I listened lately to two men talking of "Tariff Reform"--one of them a commercial traveller, lofty in his patriotism. When mention was made of some old man's tale, that in his boyhood be rarely tasted meat, "unless a sheep died," the commercial traveller commented scornfully, "And now every working man in the kingdom thinks he must have meat twice a day"--as though such things ought not to be in the British Empire. The falsehood of the remark enhanced its significance. It was the sort of thing to say in hotel-bars, or in the offices of commerce--the sort of thing that goes down well with employers. It indicated that the animus of which I am speaking is almost a commonplace. In truth, I have heard it expressed dozens of times, in dozens of ways, yet always with the same implied suggestion, that the English labouring classes are a lower order of beings, who must be treated accordingly.

And yet employers of this type, representing the wealth, perhaps, but by no means the culture, of modern civilization, are, in fact, nearer to the unlettered labourers in their outlook, and are therefore by far less embarrassing to them, than those of another and kindlier type which figures largely in this parish to-day. Those people for whom the enclosure of the common, as it has turned out, made room in the valley--I mean the well-to-do residents--employ local labour, not for profit at all, but to minister to their own pleasure, in their gardens and stables, and the majority of them would be genuinely glad to be helpful to their poorer neighbours. The presence of poverty reproaches them; their consciences are uneasy; or, better still, some kind of regard, some kind of respect, goes out from them towards the toilsome men and the over-burdened women whom, in fact, they have displaced. Yet compassion is not the same thing as understanding, and the cottagers know very well that even their best friends of this kind have neither the knowledge nor the taste to appreciate them in their own way. Sympathy for their troubles--yes, there is that; but sympathy with their enjoyments hardly any property-owner dreams of cultivating; and this is the more true the more the property-owner has been polished by his own civilization. A lady long resident here was quite surprised to hear from me, some months ago, that the cottagers are ardent gardeners. "Dear me!" she said; "I had no idea of it." And yet one of the ablest men of the parish had tended her own garden for years.

Hence it is in their intercourse with these--the well-meaning and cultivated--that the villagers are most at a loss. In those embittered employers who merely seek to make money out of him the labourer does at least meet with some keen recognition of his usefulness; but with these others he is all at sea. Non-introspective, a connoisseur of garden crops and of pig-sties, and of saved-up seeds; cunning to understand the "set" of spade or hoe, and the temper of scythe and fag-hook; jealous of the encroachment of gravelled walk or evergreen hedge upon the useful soil; an expert in digging and dunging--he is very well aware that the praises of the villa-people employing him are ignorant praises. His best skill is, after all, overlooked. The cunning of his craft excites in them none of the sympathy of a fellow-expert, and is but poorly rewarded by their undiscriminating approval. At the same time, the things which these people require of him--the wanton things they ask him to do with the soil, levelling it to make lawns, wasting it upon shrubberies and drives, while they fence-in the heath patches and fence-out the public--prove to him more fully than any language can do that they put a different sort of value upon the countryside from its old value, and that they care not a straw for the mode of life that was his before they came here. All their ways are eloquent of condemnation of his tastes. And yet again, while his old skill fails to be understood, and his old outlook to be appreciated, he finds that the behaviour preferred in him is oftener than not a behaviour which his forefathers would have thought silly, to say the least--a finikin, fastidious behaviour, such as he would scorn to practise at home. Thus in all ways the employers most conscientiously humane are those who can least avoid, in their tastes and their whole manner of living, snubbing him and setting him down in an inferior place. They cannot help it, now that they have thrust themselves upon him as neighbours. The more they interest themselves in him, the more glaringly is the difference which separates themselves from him brought out.

Whether, if the common had remained open, the villagers could still have held aloof, at this time of day, from the movements of the outer world is a question not worth discussion. The enclosure was brought to pass; the keystone was knocked out of the arch; and here are some of the indirect consequences. From a position in which the world's distinctions of class and caste were hardly noticed--a position which was, so to speak, an island of refuge, where self-respect could be preserved in preserving the old rough peasant ways--the valley folk have been forced into such relations with the world outside the valley as we have seen. They are no longer a separate set, unclassified, but a grade has been assigned to them in the classification of society at large, and it is wellnigh the lowest grade of all, for only the pauper and criminal classes are below them. In this sense, therefore, they are a "degraded" people, though by no fault of their own. Amongst "the masses" is where they are counted. Moreover, since they are now, as we have seen, competing against one another for the right to live, none of the concessions are made to them now that were of old made to the group of them, but they count, and are judged, individually, amongst the millions of the English proletariat. "Inferiority" has come into their lives; it is expected of them to treat almost everybody else as a superior person. But the cruellest indignity of all is that, although we regard them as inferiors, we still look to them to admire and live up to our standards; and they are to conform to our civilization, yet without the income it requires or the social recognition it should secure. And if they will not do this willingly, then shall they be coerced, or at least kept in order, by "temperance" and other "reforming" legislation, and by the police.

XII

THE HUMILIATED

The effects of this "inferiority" which has been thrust upon the villagers are not exactly conspicuous in any particular direction. As it has been shown already, the people themselves seem almost unaware of any grievance in the matter, the change having come upon them too gradually for it to be sharply felt. They bear no malice against their employers. You would hardly learn, from anything that they consciously say or do, that in becoming so humiliated they have been hurt in their feelings, or have found it necessary to change their habits.

Indeed, the positive alteration in their manners, by which I mean the adoption of new ways in place of old ones, has probably not amounted to a great deal. I admit that I have no means of estimating how much it does amount to. During fifty years, in which every cottager must now and then have become aware of constraint put upon him or her by the superior attitude of the employing class, it is quite possible that there have been innumerable small concessions and adaptations of manner, and that these have accumulated into a general change which would surprise us if it could be measured. But I incline to think that the effects of class-pressure have been chiefly negative; that, while employers have been adopting new modes of life, all that has happened to the labouring folk here in the valley is that this or that habit, found inexpedient at last, has been quietly dropped. A sort of reserve in the village temper, a want of gaiety, a subdued air--this, which one cannot help observing, is probably the shadow cast upon the people from the upraised middle-class. It looks suggestive, too. Yet, upon examining it, one fails to find in it any definite token that would show exactly how and where the village temper has been touched, or in what light "superior" persons are regarded in the cottages. The people appear enigmatic. They keep their own counsel. Whether they are bewildered or amused at the behaviour of employers, or alarmed or embittered by it, or actually indifferent to it, no sign escapes them when members of the employing class are by.

In these circumstances, it is instructive to turn aside for a while from the grown-up people of the village, and to consider their children; because the children do not learn about the employing class by direct intercourse, but derive from their parents such ideas as they have of what is safe to do, and what is proper, where employing people are concerned. As soon as this truth is realized, a curious significance appears in some characteristic habits of the village school boys and girls. The boys, especially, deserve remark. That they are in general "rough," "uncivilized," I suppose might go without saying. It might also go without saying, were it not that the comparison turns out to be useful, that in animal spirits, physical courage, love of mischief and noise, they are at least a match for middle-class boys who go to the town grammar-school. I wish I could say that they have an equally good sense of "playing the game," an equally strong _esprit de corps_, and so on. Unfortunately, these traditions have hardly reached the village school as yet, and perhaps will not easily make their way there, amongst the children of parents whom the struggle for life compels to be so suspicious and jealous. The question is, however, beside the point now. Viewed without prejudice, the village boys must be thought quite as good material as any other English boys; you can see that there is the making of strong and brave men in them. With similar chances they would not be inferior in any respect to the sons of the middle classes.

But under existing conditions the two sorts of boys develop some curious differences of habit. Where those from middle-class homes are self-possessed, those from the labourers' cottages are not merely shy, not merely uncouth and lubberly; they grow furtive, suspicious, timid as wild animals, on the watch for a chance to run. Audacious enough at bird's-nesting, sliding, tree-climbing, fighting, and impertinent enough towards people of their own kind, they quail before the first challenge of "superiority." All aplomb goes from them then. It is distressing to see how they look: with an expression of whimpering rebellion, as though the superior person had unhuman qualities, not to be reckoned on--as though there were danger in his presence. An incident of a few years ago, very trumpery in itself, displayed to me in the sharpest distinctness the contrast between the two orders of boys in this respect. In the hedge which parts my garden from the lane there is a nut-tree, too tempting to all boys when the nuts are ripe. At that season one hears whispered and exclamatory confabulations going on in the lane, and then large stones go crashing up into the tree, falling back sometimes within the hedge, where there is a bit of grass and a garden seat. Occasionally, playing the absurd part of irate property-owner, I have gone to the gate near by to drive off the offenders, but have opened it only in time to see a troop of urchins, alarmed by the click of the gate-latch, scurrying away like rabbits round the bend of the lane. One Sunday afternoon, however, when I looked out after a stone had fallen nearly on my head, it was to find two boys calmly waiting for me to approach them. Their school caps showed them to be two boys of the grammar-school. The interview went comically. Upon being told crossly that they were a nuisance, the boys apologized--an act which seemed to put me in the wrong. In my annoyance at that, I hinted ironically that, in fact, I was a benevolent person, quite willing to admit boys inside the hedge to pick up nuts, if nuts they really must have. Then I turned away. To my astonishment, they took me at my word, followed me into the garden, and calmly began to pick up nuts; while I withdrew, discomfited. I have since smiled to think of the affair; but I recall it now with more interest, for the sake of the contrast it affords between middle-class boys and labouring-class boys in exactly similar circumstances. Where the former behave confidently, because they feel safe, the latter are overtaken by panic, and run to cover.