In Darkest England and the Way Out Part 24

Imprisonment, False Infants, Custody of Intestacy, Cases of

Judgment Summonses

Landlord and Tenant Cases Leases, Lapses and Renewals of Legacies, Disputed Libel Cases Licences

Marriage Law, Question of the Masters' and Servants' Acts Meeting, Right of Public Mortgages

Negligence, Alleged Next of Kill Wanted Nuisances, Alleged

Partnership, The Law of Patents, Registration and Infringement of p.a.w.nbrokers and their Pledges Police Cases Probate

Rates and Taxes Reversionary Interests

Seduction, Cases of Servants' Wrongful Dismissal Sheriffs Sureties Estreated

Tenancies, Disputed Trade Marks, Infringement of Trespa.s.s, Cases of Trustees and Trusts

Wages Kept Back Wills, Disputed and Unproved Women, Cruelty to Workmen, Grievances of &c.,&c.

The Advice Bureau will therefore be, first of all, a place where men and women in trouble can come when they please to communicate in confidence the cause of their anxiety, with a certainty that they will receive a sympathetic hearing and the best advice.

Secondly, it will be a Poor Man's Lawyer, giving the best legal counsel as to the course to be pursued in the various circ.u.mstances with which the poor find themselves confronted.

Thirdly, it will act as a Poor Man's Tribune, and will undertake the defence of friendless prisoners supposed to be innocent, together with the resistance of illegal extortions, and the prosecution of offenders who refuse legal satisfaction for the wrongs they have committed.

Fourthly, it will act wherever it is called upon as a Court of Arbitration between litigants, where the decision will be according to equity, and the costs cut down to the lowest possible figure.

Such a Department cannot be improvised; but it is already in a fair way of development, and it can hardly fail to do great good.

SECTION 5.--OUR INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT.

An indispensable adjunct of this Scheme will be the inst.i.tution of what may be called an Intelligence Department at Headquarters. Power, it has been said, belongs to the best informed, and if we are effectually to deal with the forces of social evil, we must have ready at our fingers' ends the acc.u.mulated experience and information of the whole world on this subject. The collection of facts and the systematic record of them would be invaluable, rendering the result of the experiments of previous generations available for the information of our own.

At the present there is no central inst.i.tution, either governmental or otherwise, in this country or any other, which charges itself with the duty of collecting and collating the ideas and conclusions on Social Economy, so far as they are likely to help the solution of the problem we have in hand. The British Home Office has only begun to index its own papers. The Local Government Board is in a similar condition, and, although each particular Blue Book may be admirably indexed, there is no cla.s.sified index of the whole series. If this is the case with the Government, it is not likely that the innumerable private organisations which are pecking here and there at the social question should possess any systematised method for the purpose of comparing notes and storing information. This Intelligence Department, which I propose to found on a small scale at first, will have in it the germ of vast extension which will, if adequately supported become a kind of University, in which the acc.u.mulated experiences of the human race will be ma.s.sed, digested, and rendered available to the humblest toiler in the great work of social reform. At the present moment, who is there that can produce in any of our museums and universities as much as a cla.s.sified index of publications relating to one of the many heads under which I have dealt with this subject? Who is there among all our wise men and social reformers that can send me a list of all the best tracts upon-- say, the establishment of agricultural colonies or the experiments that have been made in dealing with inebriates; or the best plans for the construction of a working man's cottage?

For the development of this Scheme I want an Office to begin with, in which, under the head of the varied subjects treated of in this volume, I may have arranged the condensed essence of all the best books that have been written, and the names and addresses of those whose opinions are worth having upon them, together with a note of what those opinions are, and the results of experiments which have been made in relation to them. I want to establish a system which will enable me to use, not only the eyes and hands of Salvation Officers, but of sympathetic friends in all parts of the world, for purposes of noticing and reporting at once every social experiment of importance, any words of wisdom on the social question, whether it may be the breeding of rabbits, the organisation of an emigration service, the best method of conducting a Cottage Farm, or the best way of cooking potatoes.

There is nothing in the whole range of our operations upon which we should not be acc.u.mulating and recording the results of human experience. What I want is to get the essence of wisdom which the wisest have gathered from the widest experience, rendered instantly available for the humblest worker in the Salvation Factory or Farm Colony, and for any other toiler in similar fields of social progress.

It can be done, and in the service of the people it ought to be done.

I look for helpers in this department among those who hitherto may not have cared for the Salvation Army, but who in the seclusion of their studies and libraries will a.s.sist in the compiling of this great Index of Sociological Experiments, and who would be willing, in this form, to help in this Scheme, as a.s.sociates, for the ameliorating of the condition of the people, if in nothing else than in using their eyes and ears, and giving me the benefit of their brains as to where knowledge lies, and how it can best be utilised. I propose to make a beginning by putting two capable men and a boy in an office, with instructions to cut out, preserve, and verify all contemporary records in the daily and weekly press that have a bearing upon any branch of our departments. Round these two men and a boy will grow up, I confidently believe, a vast organisation of zealous unpaid workers, who will co-operate in making our Intelligence Department a great storehouse of information--a universal library where any man may learn what is the sum of human knowledge upon any branch of the subject which we have taken in hand.

SECTION 6.--CO-OPERATION IN GENERAL.

If anyone asked me to state in one word what seemed likely to be the key of the solution of the Social Problem I should answer unhesitatingly Co-operation. It being always understood that it is Co-operation conducted on righteous principles, and for wise and benevolent ends; otherwise a.s.sociation cannot be expected to bear any more profitable fruit than Individualism. Co-operation is applied a.s.sociation--a.s.sociation for the purpose of production and distribution. Co-operation implies the voluntary combination of individuals to the attaining an object by mutual help, mutual counsel, and mutual effort. There is a great deal of idle talk in the world just now about capital, as if capital were the enemy of labour.

It is quite true that there are capitalists not a few who may be regarded as the enemies, not only of labour, but of the human race; but capital itself, so far from being a natural enemy of labour, is the great object which the labourer has constantly in view.

However much an agitator may denounce capital, his one great grievance is that he has not enough of it for himself. Capital, therefore, is not an evil in itself; on the contrary, it is good--so good that one of the great aims of the social reformer ought to be to facilitate its widest possible distribution among his fellow-men. It is the congestion of capital that is evil, and the labour question will never be finally solved until every labourer is his own capitalist.

All this is trite enough, and has been said a thousand times already, but, unfortunately, with the saying of it the matter ends.

Co-operation has been brought into practice in relation to distribution with considerable success, but co-operation, as a means of production, has not achieved anything like the success that was antic.i.p.ated.

Again and again enterprises have been begun on co-operative principles which bid fair, in the opinion of the promoters, to succeed; but after one, two, three, or ten years, the enterprise which was started with such high hopes has dwindled away into either total or partial failure.

At present, many co-operative undertakings are nothing more or less than huge Joint Stock Limited Liability concerns, shares of which are held largely by working people, but not necessarily, and sometimes not at all by those who are actually employed in the so-called co-operative business. Now, why is this? Why do co-operative firms, co-operative factories, and co-operative Utopias so very often come to grief?

I believe the cause is an open secret, and can be discerned by anyone who will look at the subject with an open eye.

The success of industrial concerns is largely a question of management.

Management signifies government, and government implies authority, and authority is the last thing which co-operators of the Utopian order are willing to recognise as an element essential to the success of their Schemes. The co-operative inst.i.tution which is governed on Parliamentary principles, with unlimited right of debate and right of obstruction, will never be able to compete successfully with inst.i.tutions which are directed by a single brain wielding the united resources of a disciplined and obedient army of workers. Hence, to make co-operation a success you must superadd to the principle of consent the principle of authority; you must invest in those to whom you entrust the management of your co-operative establishment the same liberty of action that is possessed by the owner of works on the other side of the repudiation of the rotten and effete regime of the Bourbons, the French peasants and workmen imagined that they were inaugurating the millennium when they scrawled Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity across all the churches in every city of France.

They carried their principles of freedom and license to the logical ultimate, and attempted to manage their army on Parliamentary principles. It did not work; their undisciplined levies were driven back; disorder reigned in the Republican camp; and the French Revolution would have been stifled in its cradle had not the instinct of the nation discerned in time the weak point in its armour.

Menaced by foreign wars and intestine revolt, the Republic established an iron discipline in its army, and enforced obedience by the summary process of military execution. The liberty and the enthusiasm developed by the outburst of the long pent-up revolutionary forces supplied the motive power, but it was the discipline of the revolutionary armies, the stern, unbending obedience which was enforced in all ranks from the highest to the lowest, which created for Napoleon the admirable military instrument by which he shattered every throne in Europe and swept in triumph from Paris to Moscow.

In industrial affairs we are very much like the French Republic before it tempered its doctrine of the rights of man by the duty of obedience on the part of the soldier. We have got to introduce discipline into the industrial army, we have to superadd the principle of authority to the principle of co-operation, and so to enable the worker to profit to the full by the increased productiveness of the willing labour of men who are employed in their own workshops and on their own property.

There is no need to clamour for great schemes of State Socialism.

The whole thing can be done simply, economically, and speedily if only the workers will practice as much self-denial for the sake of establishing themselves as capitalists, as the Soldiers of the Salvation Army practice every year in Self Denial Week. What is the sense of never making a levy except during a strike? Instead of calling for a shilling, or two shillings, a week in order to maintain men who are starving in idleness because of a dispute with their masters, why should there not be a levy kept up for weeks or months, by the workers, for the purpose of setting themselves up in business as masters? There would then be no longer a capitalist owner face to face with the ma.s.ses of the proletariat, but all the means of production, the plant, and all the acc.u.mulated resources of capital would really be at the disposal of labour. This will never be done, however, as long as co-operative experiments are carried on in the present archaic fashion.

Believing in co-operation as the ultimate solution, if to co-operation you can add subordination, I am disposed to attempt something in this direction in my new Social Scheme. I shall endeavour to start a Co-operative Farm on the principles of Ralahine, and base the whole of my Farm Colony on a Co-operative foundation.

In starting this little Co-operative Commonwealth, I am reminded by those who are always at a man's elbow to fill him with forebodings of ill, to look at the failures, which I have just referred to, which make up the history of the attempt to realise ideal commonwealths in this practical workaday world. Now, I have read the history of the many attempts at co-operation that have been made to form communistic settlements in the United States, and am perfectly familiar with the sorrowful fate with which nearly all have been overtaken; but the story of their failures does not deter me in the least, for I regard them as nothing more than warnings to avoid certain mistakes, beacons to ill.u.s.trate the need of proceeding on a different tack.

Broadly speaking, your experimental communities fail because your Utopias all start upon the system of equality and government by vote of the majority, and, as a necessary and unavoidable consequence, your Utopians get to loggerheads, and Utopia goes to smash, I shall avoid that rock. The Farm Colony, like all the other departments of the Scheme, will be governed, not on the principle of counting noses, but on the exactly opposite principle of admitting no noses into the concern that are not willing to be guided by the directing brain.

It will be managed on principles which a.s.sert that the fittest ought to rule, and it will provide for the fittest being selected, and having got them at the top, will insist on universal and unquestioning obedience from those at the bottom. If anyone does not like to work for his rations and submit to the orders of his superior Officers he can leave. There is no compulsion on him to stay. The world is wide, and outside the confines of our Colony and the operations of our Corps my authority does not extend. But judging from our brief experience it is not from revolt against authority that the Scheme is destined to fail.

There cannot be a greater mistake in this world than to imagine that men object to be governed. They like to be governed, provided that the governor has his "head screwed on right" and that he is prompt to hear and ready to see and recognise all that is vital to the interests of the commonwealth. So far from there being an innate objection on the part of mankind to being governed, the instinct to obey is so universal that even when governments have gone blind, and deaf, and paralytic, rotten with corruption, and hopelessly behind the times, they still contrive to live on. Against a capable Government no people ever rebel, only when stupidity and incapacity have taken possession of the seat of power do insurrections break out.

SECTION 7.--A MATRIMONIAL BUREAU.

There is another direction in which something ought to be done to restore the natural advantages enjoyed by every rural community which have been destroyed by the increasing tendency of mankind to come together in huge ma.s.ses. I refer to that which is after all one of the most important elements in every human life, that of marrying and giving in marriage. In the natural life of a country village all the lads and la.s.ses grow up together, they meet together in religious a.s.sociations, in daily employments, and in their amus.e.m.e.nts on the village green. They have learned their A, B, C and pothooks together, and when the time comes for pairing off they have had excellent opportunities of knowing the qualities and the defects of those whom they select as their partners in life. Everything in such a community lends itself naturally to the indispensable preliminaries of love-making, and courtships, which, however much they may be laughed at, contribute more than most things to the happiness or life. But in a great city all this is destroyed. In London at the present moment how many hundreds, nay thousands, of young men and young women, who are living in lodgings, are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of any one of the other s.e.x!

The street is no doubt the city subst.i.tute for the village green, and what a subst.i.tute it is!

It has been bitterly said by one who knew well what he was talking about, "There are thousands of young men to-day who have no right to call any woman by her Christian name, except the girls they meet plying their dreadful trade in our public thoroughfares." As long as that is the case, vice has an enormous advantage over virtue; such an abnormal social arrangement interdicts morality and places a vast premium upon prost.i.tution. We must get back to nature if we have to cope with this ghastly evil. There ought to be more opportunities afforded for healthy human intercourse between young men and young women, nor can Society rid itself of a great responsibility for all the wrecks of manhood and womanhood with which our streets are strewn, unless it does make some attempt to bridge this hideous chasm which yawns between the two halves of humanity. The older I grow the more absolutely am I opposed to anything that violates the fundamental law of the family.

Humanity is composed of two s.e.xes, and woe be to those who attempt to separate them into distinct bodies, making of each half one whole!

It has been tried in monasteries and convents with but poor success, yet what our fervent Protestants do not seem to see is that we are reconstructing a similar false system for our young people without the safeguards and the restraints of convent walls or the sanctifying influence of religious conviction. The conditions of City life, the absence of the enforced companionship of the village and small town, the difficulty of young people finding harmless opportunities of friendly intercourse, all tends to create cla.s.ses of celibates who are not chaste, and whose irregular and lawless indulgence of a universal instinct is one of the most melancholy features of the present state of society. Nay, so generally is this recognised, that one of the terms by which one of the consequences of this unnatural state of things is popularly known is "the social evil," as if all other social evils were comparatively unworthy of notice in comparison to this.

While I have been busily occupied in working out my Scheme for the registration of labour, it has occurred to me more than once, why could not something like the same plan be adopted in relation to men who want wives and women who want husbands? Marriage is with most people largely a matter or opportunity. Many a man and many a woman, who would, if they had come together, have formed a happy household, are leading at this moment miserable and solitary lives, suffering in body and in soul, in consequence of their exclusion from the natural state of matrimony. Of course, the registration of the unmarried who wish to marry would be a matter of much greater delicacy than the registration of the joiners and stone-masons who wish to obtain work. But the thing is not impossible. I have repeatedly found in my experience that many a man and many a woman would only be too glad to have a friendly hint as to where they might prosecute their attentions or from which they might receive proposals. In connection with such an agency, if it were established--for I am mot engaging to undertake this task-- I am only throwing out a possible suggestion as to the development in the direction of meeting a much needed want, there might be added training homes for matrimony. My heart bleeds for many a young couple whom I see launching out into the sea of matrimony with no housewifery experience. The young girls who leave our public elementary schools and go out into factories have never been trained to home duties, and yet, when taken to wife, are unreasonably expected to fill worthily the difficult positions of the head of a household and the mother of a family. A month spent before marriage in a training home of housewifery would conduce much more to the happiness of the married life than the honeymoon which immediately follows it.

Especially is this the case with those who marry to go abroad and settle in a distant country. I often marvel when I think of the utter helplessness of the modern woman, compared with the handiness of her grandmother. How many of our girls can even bake a loaf? The baker has killed out one of our fundamental domestic arts. But if you are in the Backwoods or in the Prairie or in the Bush, no baker's cart comes round every morning with the new-made bread, and I have often thought with sorrow of the kind of stuff which this poor wife must serve up to her hungry husband. As it is with baking, so it is with washing, with milking, with spinning, with all the arts and sciences of the household, which were formerly taught, as a matter of course, to all the daughters who were born in the world. Talk about woman's rights, one of the first of woman's rights is to be trained to her trade, to be queen of her household, and mother of her children.

Speaking of colonists leads me to the suggestion whether something could not be done to supply, on a well-organised system, the thousands of bachelor miners or the vast host of unmarried males who are struggling with the wilderness on the outskirts of civilisation, with capable wives from the overplus of marriageable females who abound in our great towns. Woman supplied in adequate quant.i.ties is the great moraliser of Society, but woman doled out as she is in the Far West and the Australian bush, in the proportion of one woman to about a dozen men, is a fertile source of vice and crime. Here again we must get back to nature, whose fundamental laws our social arrangements have rudely set on one side with consequences which as usual she does not fail to exact with remorseless severity. There have always been born into the world and continue to be born boys and girls in fairly equal proportions, but with colonising and soldiering our men go away, leaving behind them a continually growing surplus of marriageable but unmarried spinsters, who cannot spin, and who are utterly unable to find themselves husbands. This is a wide field on the discussion of which I must not enter. I merely indicate it as one of those departments in which an intelligent philanthropy might find a great sphere for its endeavours; but it would be better not to touch it at all than to deal with it with light-hearted precipitancy and without due consideration of all the difficulties and dangers connected therewith. Obstacles, however, exist to be overcome and converted into victories. There is even a certain fascination about the difficult and dangerous, which appeals very strongly to all who know that it is the apparently insolvable difficulty which contains within its bosom the key to the problem which you are seeking to solve.

SECTION 8.--WHITECHAPEL-BY-THE-SEA.

In considering the various means by which some substantial improvement can be made in the condition of the toiling ma.s.ses, recreation cannot be omitted. I have repeatedly had forced upon me the desirability of making it possible for them to spend a few hours occasionally by the seaside, or even at times three or four days. Notwithstanding the cheapened rates and frequent excursions, there are mult.i.tudes of the poor who, year in and out, never get beyond the crowded city, with the exception of dragging themselves and their children now and then to the parks on holidays or hot summer evenings. The majority, especially the inhabitants of the East of London, never get away from the sunless alleys and grimy streets in which they exist from year to year.

It is true that a few here and there of the adult population, and a good many of the children, have a sort of annual charity excursion to Epping Forest, Hampton Court, or perhaps to the sea. But it is only the minority. The vast number, while possessed of a pa.s.sionate love of the sea, which only those who have mixed with them can conceive, pa.s.s their whole lives without having once looked over its blue waters, or watched its waves breaking at their feet.

Now I am not so foolish as to dream that it is possible to make any such change in Society as will enable the poor man to take his wife and children for a fortnight's sojourn, during the oppressive summer days, to brace them up for their winter's task, although this might be as desirable in their case as in that of their more highly favoured fellow-creatures. But I would make it possible for every man; woman and child, to get, now and then, a day's refreshing change by a visit to that never-failing source of interest. In the carrying out of this plan, we are met at the onset with a difficulty of some little magnitude, and that is the necessity of a vastly reduced charge in the cost of the journey. To do anything effective we must be able to get a man from Whitechapel or Stratford to the sea-side and back for a shilling.

Unfortunately, London is sixty miles from the sea. Suppose we take it at seventy miles. This would involve a journey of one hundred and forty miles for the small sum of 1s. Can this be done? I think it can, and done to pay the railway companies; otherwise there is no ground to hope for this part of my Scheme ever being realised. But I think that this great boon can be granted to the poor people without the dividends being sensibly affected. I am told that the cost of haulage for an ordinary pa.s.senger train, carrying from five hundred to a thousand persons, is 2s. 7d. per mile; a railway company could take six hundred pa.s.sengers seventy miles there, and bring them seventy miles back, at a cost of #18 1s. 8d. Six hundred pa.s.sengers at a shilling is #30, so that there would be a clear profit to the company of nearly #12 on the haulage, towards the payment of interest on the capital, wear and tear of line, &c. But I reckon, at a very moderate computation, that two hundred thousand persons would travel to and fro every season.

An addition of #10,000 to the exchequer of a railway company is not to be despised and this would be a mere bagatelle to the indirect profits which would follow the establishment of a settlement which must in due course necessarily become very speedily a large and active community.

This it would be necessary to bring home to the railway companies, and for the execution of this part of my Scheme I must wait till I get some manager sufficiently public-spirited to try the experiment. When such a man is found, I purpose to set at once about my Sea-Side Establishment.