Essays in Rebellion Part 5

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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s:

"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 cla.s.ses 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, oak.u.m, 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sisting 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 quant.i.ty 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. Mult.i.tudes 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 n.o.blest 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 cla.s.ses; 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 cla.s.ses 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 b.l.o.o.d.y grave. If only we could abolish the civilian and his ign.o.ble 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 cla.s.ses. 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 m.u.f.f; 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 b.u.t.ter, 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.

Few have given the Home Office credit for the amount of interesting and cheap amus.e.m.e.nt it then afforded by parcelling out the country among the military authorities. In a period of general la.s.situde 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s, 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed since the days when, as the n.o.blest 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.sed 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 doc.u.ments 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 sc.r.a.pings 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 pa.s.s on to "The Sensitive Plant," or "When We Two Parted." As we pa.s.s, 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: