Chapter 7

It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where the working classes of London chiefly live. Matthew Arnold said our lower classes were brutalised, and he was right, but not if by brutality he meant cruelty, violence, or active sin. What characterises them and their streets is poverty. Poverty and her twins, unhappiness and waste. Under unhappiness, we may include the outward conditions of discomfort--the crowded rooms, the foul air, the pervading dirt, the perpetual stench of the poor. In winter the five or six children in a bed grow practised in turning over all at the same time while still asleep, so as not to disturb each other. In a hot summer the bugs drive the families out of the rooms to sleep on the doorstep. Cleanliness is an expensive luxury almost as far beyond poverty's reach as diamonds. The foul skin, the unwashed clothes, the layer of greasy smuts, the boots that once fitted someone, and are now held on by string, the scraps of food bought by the pennyworth, the tea, condensed milk, fried fish, bread and "strawberry flavour," the coal bought by the "half-hundred," the unceasing noise, the absence of peace or rest, the misery of sickness in a crowd--all such things may be counted among the outward conditions of unhappiness, and only people who have never known them would call them trivial. But by the unhappiness that springs from poverty I mean far worse than these.

The definition of happiness as "an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence, in a fully developed life" is ancient now, but I have never found a better. From happiness so defined, poverty excludes our working-classes in the lump, almost without exception. For them an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence is almost unknown, and a fully developed life impossible. In both these respects their condition has probably become worse within the last century. If there is a word of truth in what historians tell us, a working-man must certainly have had a better chance of exercising an energy of his soul before the development of factories and machinery. What energy of the personal soul is exercised in a mill-hand, a tea-packer, a slop-tailor, or the watcher of a thread in a machine? How can a man or woman engaged in such labour for ten hours a day at subsistence wage enjoy a fully developed life? It seems likely that the old-fashioned workman who made things chiefly with his own hands and had some opportunity of personal interest in the work, stood a better chance of the happiness arising from an energy of the soul. His life was also more fully developed by the variety and interest of his working material and surroundings. This is the point to which our prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done. For certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the highest possible happiness.

The second offspring of poverty in these working regions of our city is waste. And I have called waste the twin brother of unhappiness because the two are very much alike. By waste I do not here mean the death-rate of infants, though that stands at one in four. No one, except an exploiter of labour, would desire a mere increase in the workpeople's number without considering the quality of the increase. But by waste I mean the multitudes of boys and girls who never get a chance of fulfilling their inborn capacities. The country's greatest shame and disaster arise from the custom which makes the line between the educated and the uneducated follow the line between the rich and the poor, almost without deviation. That a nature capable of high development should be precluded by poverty from all development is the deepest of personal and national disasters, though it happen, as it does happen, several thousand times a year. Physical waste is bad enough--the waste of strength and health that could easily be retained by fresh air, open spaces, and decent food, and is so retained among well-to-do children. This physical waste has already created such a broad distinction that foreigners coming among us detect two species of the English people. But the mental waste is worse. It is a subject that Mr. Paterson dwells upon, and he speaks with authority, as one who has taught in the Board Schools and knows the life of the people across the bridges from the banana-box to the grave.

"Boys who might become classical scholars," he writes, "stick labels on to parcels for ten years, others who have literary gifts clear out a brewer's vat. Real thinkers work as porters in metal warehouses, and after shouldering iron fittings for eleven hours a day, find it difficult to set their minds in order.... With even the average boy there is a marked waste of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirty, and the aggregate loss to the country is heavy indeed."

At fourteen, just when the "education" of well-to-do boys is beginning, the working boy's education stops. For ten or eleven years he has been happy at school. He has looked upon school as a place of enjoyment--of interest, kindliness, warmth, cleanliness, and even quiet of a kind. The school methods of education may not be the best. Mr. Paterson points out all that is implied in the distinction between the "teachers" of the Board Schools and the "masters" of the public schools. Too much is put in, not enough drawn out from the child's own mind. The teacher cannot think much of individual natures, when faced with a class of sixty. Yet it would be difficult to overrate the service of the Board Schools as training grounds for manners, and anyone who has known the change in our army within twenty-five years will understand what I mean. At fourteen the boy has often reached his highest mental and spiritual development. When he leaves school, shades of the prison-house begin to close upon him. He jumps at any odd job that will bring in a few shillings to the family fund. He becomes beer-boy, barber's boy, van-boy, paper-boy, and in a year or two he is cut out by the younger generation knocking at the door. He has learnt nothing; he falls out of work; he wanders from place to place. By the time he is twenty-two, just when the well-to-do are "finishing their education," his mind is dulled, his hope and interest gone, his only ambition is to get a bit of work and keep it. At the best he develops into the average working-man of the regions I have called unknown. Mr. Paterson thus describes the class:

"These are the steady bulk of the community, insuring the peace of the district by their habits and opinions far more effectively than any vigilance of police or government. Yet, if they are indeed satisfactory, how low are the civic standards of England, how fallen the ideals and beauties of Christianity! No man that has dreams can rest content because the English worker has reached his high level of regular work and rare intoxication."

One does not rest content; far from it. But the perpetual wonder is, not that "the lower classes are brutalised," but that this brutality is so tempered with generosity and sweetness. It is not their crime that surprises, but their virtue; not their turbulence or discontent, but their inexplicable acquiescence. And yet there are still people who sneer at "the mob," "the vulgar herd," "the great unwashed," as though principles, gentility, and soap were privileges in reward of merit, and not the accidental luck of money's chaotic distribution.

XI

THE WORTH OF A PENNY

A year or two ago, some wondered why strike had arisen out of strike; why the whole world of British labour had suddenly and all at once begun to heave restlessly as though with earthquake; why the streams of workpeople had in quick succession left the grooves along which they usually ran from childhood to the grave. "It is entirely ridiculous," said the _Times_, with the sneer of educated scorn, "it is entirely ridiculous to suppose that the whole industrial community has been patiently enduring real grievances which are simultaneously discovered to be intolerable." But to all outside the circle of the _Times_, the only ridiculous part of the situation was that the industrial community should patiently have endured their grievances so long.

That working people should simultaneously discover them to be intolerable, is nothing strange. It is all very well to lie in gaol, from which there seems no chance of escape. Treadmill, oakum, skilly, and the rest--one may as well go through with them quietly, for fear of something worse. But if word goes round that one or two prisoners have crept out of gaol, who would not burn to follow? Would not grievances then be simultaneously discovered to be intolerable? The seamen were but a feeble lot; their union was poor, their combination loose. They were cooped up within the walls of a great Employers' Federation, which laughed at their efforts to scramble out. Yet they escaped; the walls were found to be not so very high and strong; in one place or another they crumbled away, and the prisoners escaped. They gained what they wanted; their grievances were no longer intolerable. What working man or woman on hearing of it did not burn to follow, and did not feel the grievances of life harder to be tolerated than before? If that feeble lot could win their pennyworth of freedom, who might not expect deliverance? People talk of "strike fever" as though it were an infection; and so it is. It is the infection of a sudden hope.

After the sneer, the _Times_ proceeded to attribute the strikes to a natural desire for idleness during the hot weather. Seldom has so base an accusation been brought against our country, even by her worst enemies. The country consists almost entirely of working people, the other classes being a nearly negligible fraction in point of numbers. The restlessness and discontent were felt far and wide among nearly all the working people, and to suggest that hundreds of thousands contemplated all the risks and miseries of stopping work because they wanted to be idle in the shade displayed the ignorance our educated classes often display in speaking of the poor. For I suppose the thing was too cruel for a joke.

Hardly less pitiable than such ignorance was the nonchalant excuse of those who pleaded: "We have our grievances too. We all want something that we haven't got. We should all like our incomes raised. But we don't go about striking and rioting." It reminds one of Lord Rosebery's contention, some fifteen years ago, that in point of pleasure all men are fairly equal, and the rich no happier than the poor. It sounds very pretty and philosophic, but those who know what poverty is know it to be absolutely untrue. If Lord Rosebery had ever tried poverty, he would have known it was untrue. All the working people know it, and they know that the grievances in which one can talk about income are never to be compared with the grievances which hang on the turn of a penny, or the chance of a shilling more or a shilling less per week.

To a man receiving £20 a week the difference of £2 one way or other is important, but it is not vital. If his income drops to £18 a week he and his family have just as much to eat and drink and wear; probably they live in the same house as before; the only change is a different place for the summer holiday, and, perhaps, the dress-circle instead of the stalls at a theatre. To a man with £200 a week the loss of £20 a week hardly makes any difference at all. He may grumble; he may drop a motor, or a yacht, but in his ordinary daily life he feels no change. To a docker making twenty shillings a week the difference of two shillings is not merely important, it is vital. The addition of it may mean three rooms for the family instead of two; it may mean nine shillings a week instead of seven to feed five mouths; it may mean meat twice a week, or half as much more bread and margarine than before, or a saving for second-hand clothes, and perhaps threepenn'orth of pleasure. In full work a docker at the old 7d. an hour would make more than twenty shillings a week; but the full weeks are rare, and about eighteen shillings would be all he could get on an average. The extra penny an hour for three days' work might bring him in about half a crown. To him and to his wife and children the difference was not merely important, it was vital.

Or take the case of the 15,000 women who struck for a rise in South London, and got it. We may put their average wage at nine shillings a week. In the accounts of a woman who is keeping a family of three, including herself, on that wage, a third of the money goes to the rent of one room. Two shillings of the rest go for light, fuel, and soda. That leaves four shillings a week to feed and clothe three people. Even Lord Rosebery could hardly maintain that the opportunities for pleasure on that amount were equal to his own. But the women jam-makers won an advance of two shillings by their strike; the box-makers from 1_s_. 3_d_. to three shillings; even the glue and size workers got a shilling rise. It was hardly up to Lord Rosebery's standard yet. It did not represent the _Times_ paradise of sitting idle in the shade. But think what it means when week by week you have jealously watched nine solid pennies going in bread, nine more in meat, and another six in tea! Or think what such an addition means to those working-women from the North, who at the same time protested in Trafalgar Square against the compulsory insurance because the payment of threepence a week would lose them two of their dinners--twice the penn'orth of bread and ha'porth of cheese that they always enjoyed for dinner!

When I was assisting in an inquiry into wages and expenditure some years ago, one head of a family added as a note at the foot of his budget: "I see that we always spend more than we earn, but as we are never in debt I attribute this result to the thriftiness of my wife." Behind that sentence a history of grievances patiently endured is written, but only the _Times_ would wonder that such grievances are discovered to be intolerable the moment a gleam of hope appears. When the _Times_, in the same article, went on to protest that if the railwaymen struck, they would be kicking not only against the Companies but "against the nature of things," I have no clear idea of the meaning. The nature of things is no doubt very terrible and strong, but for working people the most terrible and strongest part of it is poverty. All else is sophisticated; here is the thing itself. One remembers two sentences in Mr. Shaw's preface to _Major Barbara_:

"The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love, and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty."

Strikes are the children of Poverty by Hope. For a long time past the wealth of the country has rapidly increased. Gold has poured into it from South Africa, dividends from all the world; trade has boomed, great fortunes have been made; luxury has redoubled; the standard of living among the rich has risen high. The working people know all this; they can see it with their eyes, and they refuse to be satisfied with the rich man's blessing on the poor. What concerns them more than the increase in the quantity of gold is the natural result in the shrinkage of the penny. It is no good getting sevenpence an hour for your work if it does not buy so much as the "full, round orb of the docker's tanner," which Mr. John Burns saw rising over the dock gates more than twenty years ago, when he stood side by side with Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, and when Sir H. Llewellyn Smith and Mr. Vaughan Nash wrote the story of the contest. If prosperity has increased, so have prices, and what cost a tanner then costs eightpence now, or more than that. To keep pace with such a change is well worth a strike, since nothing but strikes can avail. So vital is the worth of a penny; so natural is it to kick against the nature of things, when their nature takes the form of steady poverty amid expanding wealth. That is the simultaneous discovery which raised the ridicule of the _Times_--that, and the further discovery that, in Carlyle's phrase, "the Empire of old Mammon is everywhere breaking up." The intangible walls that resisted so obstinately are fading away. The power of wealth is suspected. Strike after strike secures its triumphant penny, and no return of Peterloo, or baton charges on the Liverpool St. George's Hall, driving the silent crowd over the edge of its steep basis "as rapidly and continually as water down a steep rock," as was seen during the strikes of August 1911, can now check the infection of such a hope. It was an old saying of the men who won our political liberties that the redress of grievances must precede supply. The working people are standing now for a different phase of liberty, but their work is their supply, and having simultaneously discovered their grievances to be intolerable, they are making the same old use of the ancient precept.

XII

"FIX BAYONETS!"

"Oh, que j'aime le militaire!" sighed the old French song, no doubt with a touch of frivolity; but the sentiment moves us all. Sages have thought the army worth preserving for a dash of scarlet and a roll of the kettledrum; in every State procession it is the implements of death and the men of blood that we parade; and not to nursemaids only is the soldier irresistible. The glamour of romance hangs round him. Terrible with knife and spike and pellet he stalks through this puddle of a world, disdainful of drab mankind. Multitudes may toil at keeping alive, drudging through their scanty years for no hope but living and giving life; he shares with very few the function of inflicting death, and moves gaily clad and light of heart. "No doubt, some civilian occupations are very useful," said the author of an old drill-book; I think it was Lord Wolseley, and it was a large admission for any officer to have made. It was certainly Lord Wolseley who wrote in his _Soldier's Pocket-Book_ that the soldier "must believe his duties are the noblest that fall to man's lot":

"He must be taught to despise all those of civil life. Soldiers, like missionaries, must be fanatics. An army thoroughly imbued with fanaticism can be killed, but never suffer disgrace; Napoleon, in speaking of it, said, 'Il en faut pour se faire tuer.'"

And not only to get himself killed, but to kill must the soldier be imbued with this fanaticism and self-glory. In the same spirit Mr. Kipling and Mr. Fletcher have told us in their _History of England_ that there is only one better trade than being a soldier, and that is being a sailor:

"To serve King and country in the army is the second best profession for Englishmen of all classes; to serve in the navy, I suppose we all admit, is the best."

As we all admit it, certainly it does seem very hard on all classes that there should be anything else to do in the world besides soldiering and sailoring. It is most deplorable that, in Lord Wolseley's words, some civilian occupations are very useful; for, if they were not, we might all have a fine time playing at soldiers--real soldiers, with guns!--from a tumultuous cradle to a bloody grave. If only we could abolish the civilian and his ignoble toil, what a rollicking life we should all enjoy upon this earthly field of glory!

Such was the fond dream of many an innocent heart, when in August of 1911 we saw the soldiers distributed among the city stations or posted at peaceful junctions where suburb had met suburb for years in the morning, and parted at evening without a blow. There the sentry stood, let us say, at a gate of Euston station. There he stood, embodying glory, enjoying the second best profession for Englishmen of all classes. He was dressed in clean khaki and shiny boots. On his head he bore a huge dome of fluffy bearskin, just the thing for a fashionable muff; oppressive in the heat, no doubt, but imparting additional grandeur to his mien. There he stood, emblematic of splendour, and on each side of him were encamped distressful little families, grasping spades and buckets and seated on their corded luggage, unable to move because of the railway strike, while behind him flared a huge advertisement that said, "The Sea is Calling you." Along the kerbstone a few yards in front were ranged the children of the district, row upon row, uncombed, in rags, filthy from head to foot, but silent with joy and admiration as they gazed upon the face of war. For many a gentle girl and boy that Friday and Saturday were the days of all their lives--the days on which the pretty soldiers came.

Nor was it only the charm of nice clothes and personal appearance that attracted them. Horror added its tremulous delight. There the sentry stood, ready to kill people at a word. His right knee was slightly bent, and against his right foot he propped the long wooden instrument that he killed with. In little pouches round his belt he carried the pointed bits of metal that the instrument shoots out quicker than arrows. It was whispered that some of them were placed already inside the gun itself, and could be fired as fast as a teacher could count, and each would kill a man. And at the end of the gun gleamed a knife, about as long as a butcher's carving-knife. It would go through a fattish person's body as through butter, and the point would stick a little way through the clothes at his back. Down each side of the knife ran a groove to let the blood out, so that the man might die quicker. It was a pleasure to look at such a thing. It was better than watching the sheep and oxen driven into the Aldgate slaughter-houses. It was almost as good as the glimpse of the executioner driving up to Pentonville in his dog-cart the evening before an execution.