Chapter 8

Few have given the Home Office credit for the amount of interesting and cheap amusement it then afforded by parcelling out the country among the military authorities. In a period of general lassitude and holiday, it supplied the populace with a spectacle more widely distributed than the Coronation, and equally encouraging to loyalty. For it is not only pleasure that the sight of the soldiers in their midst provides: it gives every man and woman and child an opportunity of realising the significance of uniforms. Here are soldiers, men sprung from the working classes, speaking the same language, and having the same thoughts; men who have been brought up in poor homes, have known hunger, and have nearly all joined the army because they were out of work. And now that they are dressed in a particular way, they stand there with guns and those beautiful gleaming knives, ready, at a word, to kill people--to kill their own class, their own friends and relations, if it so happens. The word of command from an officer is alone required, and they would do it. People talk about the reading of the Riot Act and the sounding of the bugles in warning before the shooting begins; but no such warning is necessary. Lord Mansfield laid it down in 1780 that the Riot Act was but "a step in terrorism and of gentleness." There is no need for such gentleness. At an officer's bare word, a man in uniform must shoot. And all for a shilling a day, with food and lodging! To the inexperienced intelligence of men and women, the thing seems incredible, and the country owes a debt of gratitude to the Home Office for showing the whole working population that it is true. Certainly, the soldiers themselves strongly object to being put to this use. Their Red Book of instructions insists that the primary duty of keeping order rests with the civil power. It lays it down that soldiers should never be required to act except in cases where the riot cannot reasonably be expected to be quelled without resorting to the risk of inflicting death. But the Home Office, in requiring soldiers to act throughout the whole country at points where no riot at all was reasonably expected, gave us all during that railway strike an object-lesson in the meaning of uniform more impressive than the pictures on a Board School wall. Mr. Brailsford has well said, "the discovery of tyrants is that, for a soldier's motive, a uniform will serve as well as an idea."

Not a century has passed since the days when, as the noblest mind of those times wrote, a million of hungry operative men rose all up, came all out into the streets, and--stood there. "Who shall compute," he asked:

"Who shall compute the waste and loss, the destruction of every sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by Peterloo alone! Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut down--the number of the slain and maimed is very countable; but the treasury of rage, burning, hidden or visible, in all hearts ever since, more or less perverting the effort and aim of all hearts ever since, is of unknown extent. 'How came ye among us, in your cruel armed blindness, ye unspeakable County Yeomanry, sabres flourishing, hoofs prancing, and slashed us down at your brute pleasure; deaf, blind to all _our_ claims and woes and wrongs; of quick sight and sense to your own claims only! There lie poor, sallow, work-worn weavers, and complain no more now; women themselves are slashed and sabred; howling terror fills the air; and ye ride prosperous, very victorious--ye unspeakable: give _us_ sabres too, and then come on a little!' Such are Peterloos."

The parallel, if not exact, is close enough. During popular movements in Germany and Russia, the party of freedom has sometimes hoped that the troops would come over to their side--would "fraternise," as the expression goes. The soldiers in those countries are even more closely connected with the people than our own, for about one in three of the young men pass into the army, whether they like it or not, and in two or three years return to ordinary life. Yet the hope of "fraternisation" has nearly always been in vain. Half a dozen here and there may stand out to defend their brothers and their homes. But the risk is too great, the bonds of uniform and habit too strong. Hitherto in England, we have jealously preserved our civil liberties from the dragooning of military districts, and the few Peterloos of our history, compared with the suppressions in other countries, prove how justified our jealousy has been. It may be true--we wish it were always true, that, as Carlyle says, "if your Woolwich grapeshot be but eclipsing Divine Justice, and the God's radiance itself gleam recognisable athwart such grapeshot, then, yes, then, is the time coming for fighting and attacking." We all wish that were always true, and that the people of every country would always act upon it. But for the moment, we are grateful for the reminder that, whether it eclipses Divine Justice or not, the grapeshot is still there, and that a man in uniform, at a word of command, will shoot his mother.

XIII

"OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US"

We have forgotten, else it would be impossible they should try to befool us. We have forgotten the terrible years when England lay cold and starving under the clutch of the landlords and their taxes on food. Terror is soon forgotten, for otherwise life could not endure. Not seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered. How many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no more of it, nor imagine its reality. It seems very long ago, like Waterloo or the coach to York--so long ago that we can almost hope it was not true.

And yet our fathers have told us of it. They and their fathers lived through it at its worst. Only six years have passed since Mrs. Cobden Unwin collected the evidence of aged labourers up and down the country, and issued their piteous memories in the book called _The Hungry 'Forties_. Ill-spelt, full of mistakes, the letters are stronger documents than the historian's eloquence. In every detail of misery, one letter agrees with the other. In one after another we read of the quartern loaf ranging from 7_d_. to 11-1/2_d_., and heavy, sticky, stringy bread at that; or we read of the bean porridge or grated potato that was their chief food; or, if they were rather better off, they told of oatmeal and a dash of red herring--one red herring among three people was thought a luxury. And then there was the tea--sixpence an ounce, and one ounce to last a family for a week, eked out with the scrapings of burnt crusts to give the water a colour. One man told how his parents went to eat raw snails in the fields. Another said the look of a butcher's shop was all the meat they ever got. "A ungry belly makes a man desprit," wrote one, but for poaching a pheasant the hungry man was imprisoned fourteen years. Seven shillings to nine shillings a week was the farm labourer's wage, and it took twenty-six shillings then to buy the food that seven would buy now. What a vivid and heartrending picture of cottage life under the landlord's tax is given in one old man's memory of his childish hunger and his mother's pitiful self-denial! "We was not allowed free speech," he writes, "so I would just pull mother's face when at meals, and then she would say, 'Boy, I can't eat this crust,' and O! the joy it would bring my little heart."

We have forgotten it. Wretched as is the daily life of a large part of our working people--the only people who really count in a country's prosperity--we can no longer realise what it was when wages were so low and food so dear that the struggle with starvation never ceased. But in those days there were men who saw and realised it. The poor die and leave no record. Their labour is consumed, their bodies rot unnamed, and their habitations are swept away. They do not tell their public secret, and at the most their existence is recorded in the registers of the parish, the workhouse, or the gaol. But from time to time men have arisen with the heart to see and the gift of speech, and in the years when the oppression of the landlords was at its worst a few such men arose. We do not listen to them now, for no one cares to hear of misery. And we do not listen, because most of them wrote in verse, and verse is not liked unless it tells of love or beauty or the sticky pathos of drawing-room songs. But it so happens that two of the first who saw and spoke also sang of love and beauty with a power and sweetness that compel us to listen still. And so, in turning their well-known pages, we suddenly come upon things called "The Masque of Anarchy" or "The Age of Bronze," and, with a moment's wonder what they are all about, we pass on to "The Sensitive Plant," or "When We Two Parted." As we pass, we may just glance at the verses and read:

"What is Freedom?--ye can tell That which slavery is, too well-- For its very name has grown To an echo of your own. 'Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs....

'Tis to see your children weak With their mothers pine and peak, When the winter winds are bleak-- They are dying whilst I speak."

Or, turning on, perhaps, in search of the "Ode to the West Wind," we casually notice the song beginning:

"Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay you low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save, From the cradle to the grave, Those ungrateful drones who would Drain your sweat--nay, drink your blood?"

And so to the conclusion:

"With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb, And weave your winding-sheet, till fair England be your sepulchre."

Or else, in looking once more for that exquisite scene between Haidée and Don Juan on the beach, we fall unawares upon these lines:

"Year after year they voted cent. per cent., Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why? for rent! They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant To die for England--why then live?--for rent!

* * * * *

And will they not repay the treasures lent? No; down with everything, and up with rent! Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent, Being, end, aim, religion--rent, rent, rent!"

The men who uttered such lines were driven from their class, their homes, and their country. They were despised and hated, like all who protest against oppression and remind the smug world of uncomfortable things. But they were great poets. One of them was our sweetest singer, the other was, when he wrote, the most conspicuous figure in Europe, and the most shattering force. Even England, which cares so little for her greatest inheritance of passionate intellect, cannot yet forget them. But others who sang the same terrible theme she has long forgotten, or she keeps them only on the shelves of curious and dusty investigators. Such men, I mean, as Ebenezer Elliot, Ebenezer Jones, Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, William James Linton, and Gerald Massey, who so lately died.

They were not high-born, nor were they shining poets like the twin stars of freedom whom I have quoted. Little scholarship was theirs, little perfection of song. Some had taught themselves their letters at the forge, some in the depths of the mine, some sang their most daring lines in prison cells where they were not allowed even to write down the words. Nearly all knew poverty and hunger at first hand; nearly all were persecuted for righteousness' sake. For maintaining the cause of the poor and the helpless they were mocked and reviled; scorn was their reward. The governing classes whose comfort they disturbed wished them dead; so did the self-righteous classes whose conscience they ruffled. That is the common fate of any man or woman who probes a loathsome evil, too long skimmed over. The peculiarity of these men was that, when they were driven to speak, they spoke in lines that flew on wings through the country. Indignation made their verse, and the burning memory of the wrongs they had seen gave it a power beyond its own expression. Which shall we recall of those ghostly poems, once so quick with flame? Still, at moments of deep distress or public wrong-doing, we may hear the echo of the Corn-law Rhymer's anthem:

"When wilt thou save the people? O God of mercy! when? Not kings and lords, but nations! Not thrones and crowns, but men!"

Or if we read his first little book of rhymes, that may be had for twopence now, we shall find the pictures of the life that was lived under Protection--the sort of life the landlords and their theorists invite us to enact again. From his "Black Hole of Calcutta" we take the lines:

"Bread-tax'd weaver, all can see What that tax hath done for thee, And thy children, vilely led, Singing hymns for shameful bread, Till the stones of every street Know their little naked feet."

Or let us take one verse from the lines, "O Lord, how long?"

"Child, what hast thou with sleep to do? Awake, and dry thine eyes! Thy tiny hands must labour too; Our bread is tax'd--arise! Arise, and toil long hours twice seven, For pennies two or three; Thy woes make angels weep in Heaven-- But England still is free."

Or we might recall "The Coming Cry," by Ebenezer Jones, with its great refrain:

"Perhaps it's better than starvation,--once we'll pray, and then We'll all go building workhouses, million, million men!"

Or we might recall Ernest Jones and his "Song of the 'Lower Classes,'" where the first verse runs:

"We plow and sow, we're so very, very low, That we delve in the dirty clay; Till we bless the plain with the golden grain And the vale with the fragrant hay. Our place we know, we're so very, very low, 'Tis down at the landlord's feet; We're not too low the grain to grow, But too low the bread to eat."

Or shall we take one verse from the terrible "Easter Hymn," written by the same true-hearted prisoner for freedom:

"Like royal robes on the King of Jews, We're mocked with rights that we may not use; 'Tis the people so long have been crucified, But the thieves are still wanting on either side.

_Chorus_--Mary and Magdalen, Peter and John, Swell the sad burden, and bear it on."

The iteration of the idea throughout the poem is tremendous in effect, and the idea comes close to Swinburne's ode, "Before a Crucifix":

"O sacred head, O desecrate, O labour-wounded feet and hands, O blood poured forth in pledge to fate Of nameless lives in divers lands, O slain and spent and sacrificed People, the grey-grown speechless Christ."

Time would fail to tell of Linton's "Torch-Dance of Liberty," or of Massey's "Men of Forty-eight," and there are many more--the utterance of men who spoke from the heart, knowing in their own lives what suffering was. But let us rather turn for a moment to the prose of a man who, also reared in hardship's school, had learnt to succour misery. Speaking at the time when Protection was biting and clawing the ground in the last death-struggle, as all men but the landlords hoped, Carlyle asked this question of the people:

"From much loud controversy, and Corn-law debating, there rises, loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this very question among others, Who made the Land of England? Who made it, this respectable English Land, wheat-growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily, hand over hand, for seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies: who did make it? 'We,' answer the much-consuming Aristocracy; 'We!' as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton Mowbray: 'It is we that made it, or are the heirs, assigns and representatives of those who did!'--My brothers, You? Everlasting honour to you, then; and Corn-laws many as you will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of Human pity for our famine bids you Hold!"

So our fathers have told us, and we have forgotten. It is all very long ago, and the Protectionist says that times have changed. Certainly times have changed, and it was deliverance from Protection that changed them most. But if landowners have changed, if they are now more alien from the people, and richer from other sources than land, we have no reason to suppose them less greedy or more pitiful; nor can a nation live on the off-chance of pity. Seventy years ago the net encompassed the land. We have seen how the people suffered under its entanglement. In the sight of all, landowners and speculators are now trying to spread that net again. Are we to suppose the English people have not the hereditary instinct of sparrows to keep them outside its meshes?

XIV

THE GRAND JURY

When Mr. Clarkson, of the Education Office, received a summons to attend the Grand Jury, or to answer the contrary at his peril, he was glad. "For now," he thought, "I shall share in the duties of democracy and be brought face to face with the realities of life."

"Mrs. Wilson," he said to the landlady, as she brought in his breakfast, "what does this summons mean by describing the Court as being in the suburbs of the City of London? Is there a Brixton Branch?"

"O Lordy me!" cried the landlady, "I do hope, sir, as you've not got yourself mixed up with no such things; but the Court's nigh against St. Paul's, as I know from going there just before my poor nephew passed into retirement, as done him no good."

"The summons," Mr. Clarkson went on, "the summons says I'm to inquire, present, do, and execute all and singular things with which I may be then and there enjoined. Why should only the law talk like that?"

"Begging your pardon, sir," replied the landlady, "I sometimes do think it comes of their dressing so old-fashioned. But I'd ask it of you not to read me no more of such like, if you'd be so obliging. For it do make me come over all of a tremble."

"I wonder if her terror arises from the hideousness of the legal style or from association of ideas?" thought Mr. Clarkson as he opened a Milton, of which he always read a few lines every morning to dignify the day.

On the appointed date, he set out eastward with an exhilarating sense of change, and thoroughly enjoyed the drive down Holborn among the crowd of City men. "It's rather strangely like going to the seaside," he remarked to the man next him on the motor-'bus. The man asked him if he had come from New Zealand to see the decorations, and arrived late. "Oh no," said Mr. Clarkson, "I seldom think the Colonies interesting, and I distrust decoration in every form."

It was unfortunate, but the moment he mounted the Court stairs, the decoration struck him. There were the expected scenes, historic and emblematic of Roman law, blindfold Justice, the Balance, the Sword, and other encouraging symbols. But in one semicircle he especially noticed a group of men, women, and children, dancing to the tabor's sound in naked freedom. "Please, could you tell me," he asked of a stationary policeman, "whether that scene symbolises the Age of Innocence, before Law was needed, or the Age of Anarchy, when Law will be needed no longer?"

"Couldn't rightly say," answered the policeman, looking up sideways; "but I do wish they'd cover them people over more decent. They're a houtrage on respectable witnesses."

"All art--" Mr. Clarkson was beginning, when the policeman said "Grand Jury?" and pushed him through a door into a large court. A vision of middle-age was there gathering, and a murmur of complaint filled the room--the hurried breakfast, the heat, the interrupted business, the reported large number of prisoners, likely to occupy two days, or even three.

Silence was called, and four or five elderly gentlemen in black-and-scarlet robes--"wise in their wigs, and flamboyant as flamingoes," as a daily paper said of the judges at the Coronation--some also decorated with gilded chains and deep fur collars, in spite of the heat, entered from a side door and took their seats upon a raised platform. Each carried in his hand a nosegay of flowers, screwed up tight in a paper frill with lace-work round the edges, like the bouquets that enthusiasts or the management throw to actresses.

"Are those flowers to cheer the prisoners?" Mr. Clarkson whispered, "or are they the rudimentary survivals of the incense that used to counteract the smell and infection of gaol-fever?"

"Covent Garden," was the reply, and the list of jurors was called. The first twenty-three were sent into another room to select their foreman, and, though Mr. Clarkson had not the slightest desire to be chosen, he observed that the other jurors did not even look in his direction. Finally, a foreman was elected, no one knew for what reasons, and all went back to the Court to be "charged." A gentleman in black-and-scarlet made an hour's speech, reviewing the principal cases with as much solemnity as if the Grand Jury's decisions would affect the Last Judgment, and Mr. Clarkson began to realise his responsibility so seriously that when the jurors were dismissed to their duties, he took his seat before a folio of paper, a pink blotting-pad, and two clean quill pens, with a resolve to maintain the cause of justice, whatever might befall.

"Page eight, number twenty-one," shouted the black-robed usher, who guided the jurors as a dog guides sheep, and wore the cheerful air of congenial labour successfully performed. Turning up the reference in the book of cases presented to each juror, Mr. Clarkson found: "Charles Jones, 35, clerk; forging and uttering, knowing the same to be forged, a receipt for money, to wit, a receipt for fees on a plaint note of the Fulham County Court, with intent to defraud."

"This threatens to be a very abstruse case," he remarked to a red-faced juror on his right.

"A half of bitter would elucidate it wonderful to my mind," was the answer.

But already a policeman had been sworn, and given his evidence with the decisiveness of a gramophone.

"Any questions?" said the foreman, looking round the table. No one spoke.

"Signify, gentlemen, signify!" cried the genial usher, and all but Mr. Clarkson held up a hand.

"Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve," counted the usher, totting up the hands till he reached a majority. "True Bill, True Bill! Next case. Page eleven, number fifty-two."

"Do you mean to tell me that is all?" asked Mr. Clarkson, turning to his neighbour.

"Say no more, and I'll make it a quart," replied the red-faced man, ticking off the last case and turning up the new one, in which a doctor was already giving his evidence against a woman charged with the wilful murder of her newly-born male child.

"Signify, gentlemen, signify!" cried the usher. "Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve. True Bill, True Bill! Next case. Page fourteen, number seventy-two."

"Stop a moment," stammered Mr. Clarkson, half rising; "if you please, stop one moment. I wish to ask if we are justified in rushing through questions of life and death in this manner. What do we know of this woman, for instance--her history, her distress, her state of mind?"