From Workhouse to Westminster Part 27

He still kept his College by the Dock Gates going, notwithstanding his election to Parliament. Indeed, he was still as much the servant of Poplar as of Woolwich.

Parliament, of course, added enormously to his work. Friends urged him to give up several of his public posts. He was advised to retire from the Asylums Board, and doubtless would have done so but for a powerful appeal sent to him not to desert the Board's children. He wanted to resign from the Poplar Board of Guardians, of which he had then been Chairman for half a dozen successive years; but all parties in the borough pleaded with him to remain, and the Conservatives and Liberals withdrew their candidates in his ward in order that he might be returned unopposed. He was showered with requests to remain for the sake of the poor. At last he agreed, on the understanding that he should give less time to the work. This was perhaps an unwise decision, for owing to the slackening of his personal vigilance the administration was besmirched by irregularities which of course laid the Chairman's Poor Law policy open to the attacks of his opponents.

The only post he gave up was that on the Poplar Borough Council. The Labour League would not hear of his resigning from the London County Council, and within a year of his election to Parliament, Poplar re-elected him to the L.C.C. with a majority of over 1,600.

The demands made upon him to address public meetings in other parts of the country became terrific after Woolwich. I found him one afternoon turning over the pages of his engagement book with a worried look.

"I'm just wondering whether I can do it," he said. "I find I'm booked to speak at thirteen different meetings at different places within the next fortnight, and I've just got a pressing appeal to speak at another within the same time."

The appeals came from the churches, from temperance societies, from Adult Sunday Schools, from P.S.A.'s, as well as from Labour organisations.

The Labour Party, which was then organising for its great political triumph of 1906, had his first consideration always. He addressed Labour meetings all over the country, nearly always with an audience of three or four thousand. He was at Glasgow, Birmingham, Leicester, Plymouth, Liverpool, Exeter, Darlington, Ipswich, Chatham, Newcastle, Blackburn, Barnard Castle, Huddersfield, Edinburgh, Cardiff, all within a few months.

Everywhere he turned Mr. Chamberlain's tariff proposals into ridicule.

He made his great Birmingham audience laugh the loudest. He told that and other audiences:--

Mr. Chamberlain has shown you two loaves, the Free Trade loaf and the Protection loaf.

"There's hardly any difference between them," he tells you. "Why make all this fuss?"

Let him take the two loaves down a Birmingham court and ask a poor woman with children to cut them up. She'll soon tell him the difference between the solid Free Trade loaf and the spongy Protectionist loaf. You trust the mother of a family to know the difference between good bread and blown-out pastry.

"Ah, but we must make sacrifices in the interest of the Empire,"

says Mr. Chamberlain.

Let him come down our way and talk like that in Poplar. I tried it the other day.

"Times is awful bad just now, Mr. Crooks," said one of a party of women who stopped me on my way to the House of Commons.

"Yes," I said, "but don't you know the new kind of comfort the Imperialists have found for you? They say you belong to an Empire on which the sun never sets. It's so filling, isn't it, when you're hungry?"

"An Empire on which the sun never sets!" cried one of the women, pointing towards her slum tenement. "What's the good of talking to us like that? Why, the sun never rises on our court!"

"That may be," I say, "but you've got to pay more for your bread and your meat, all in the interests of the Empire. You've got to learn to make sacrifices for the Empire."

"Look here, Will," says the eldest among them; "I've known you since you was in petticoats, and you've never deceived me yet.

Wot's the use of talking to us about sacrifices when we can't make both ends meet as it is?"

"Both ends meet!" exclaimed one of the women. "We think we are lucky if we can get one end meat and the other end bread."

"Wot's it all about, Mr. Crooks?" asked another. "Here's bread gone up a ha'penny a loaf. And sugar and tea's gone up. And the children say they don't get so many sweets for a farthing now as they used to."

"And," I added, "meat's likely to go up too--all in the interests of the Empire. Twopence a pound more for Colonial mutton."

"What!" they cried in a body. "Twopence more for mutton!"

"Haven't you heard?" I went on. "The Tariff Reformers have a great scheme to bind the Empire together by letting the Colonies charge us more for our food. If you don't agree with them they'll call you little Englanders."

"That's just it," said one of the women. "If I'm to pay another twopence a pound for meat my children will soon be Little Englanders!"

Then turning suddenly from his anecdotal style, Crooks would go on to ask his audience how a worthy Imperial race was to be built up on a lack of food?

The Empire begins in the workman's kitchen. The imposition of new duties on food imports, though no more than a penny or twopence, means to many a poor housewife the difference between having and going without.

I know one large family where the recent addition of a half-penny on the loaf robbed the children of a slice of bread a day. Do you know what that means? Have you ever lived in a family where the slices have to be counted, and where every child could eat twice as much as its allowance? I belonged to such a family as a child, and when a clergyman came round once and found my mother crying over an empty cupboard, he said:

"Ah, well; G.o.d sends the bread for all the mouths."

"That's all very fine," my mother said; "but He seems to send the mouths to our house and the bread to yours."

The policy of Preference came in for his banter equally with that of Protection. Under any scheme of Preference, the relation of this country, with its large imports, to our Colonies, which take comparatively few of our exports, he used to say reminded him of a boxing-match between a thin man and a fat man. After the first round or two the fat man stops and says:

"This ain't fair; you've got more to strike at than I have."

"Very well, then," says the thin man, "let's chalk my size out on your body, and all blows outside the chalk mark don't count."

Mr. Chamberlain seems to have heard how Crooks was riddling with ridicule his Protection and Preference policies up and down the country.

At any rate, the ex-Minister began his favourite policy of Retaliation.

At some of his public meetings he supported his argument by representing Crooks as having said at Leith that the poor of this country were worse off than the poor of any other country.

As soon as Crooks heard of this he wrote to Mr. Chamberlain:--

SIR,--I do not for a moment think you deliberately misquoted the words I used at Leith, but whoever sent you the information is absolutely without excuse for the blunder. For what I said I have said in twenty different parts of the kingdom to tens of thousands of our fellow-countrymen--viz. "that even if, as Mr. Chamberlain suggests, the Colonies do desire Preference, it is no reason why the poor of Great Britain should pay more for their bread to help those Colonies which have no poor, or certainly no poverty compared with the poverty we have in this country."

This, as you will note, makes a very great difference in the reading of your quotation of what I really did say.

I am, yours truly,

WILL CROOKS.

In reply Mr. Chamberlain sent a tardy apology, thus:--

SIR,--I have your letter of December 17th, and in reply I beg to say that the statement which you say you have repeatedly used is in no sense inconsistent with the statement which you were reported to have made at Leith, and which referred not to the Colonies but to foreign countries. Unfortunately, I have only the extract which was sent to me and not the whole speech, and of course if you deny having used the words which I quoted I most readily accept your contradiction.

I am, yours faithfully,

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.

A fallacy very popular with Protectionists was neatly dealt with by Crooks at a meeting of the London County Council. One of the Moderate members asked whether an a.s.surance could be given that certain tramway materials would be of British manufacture.