the poor; and rich and poor alike must learn to think--which is an
accomplishment not possessed by many of either class. In the early
part of the century, when the ideas of the Revolution were still very
vital, there was hope that a time might come when wealth and power
would be shared so as to secure genuine human existence to the whole
population. Then came the mad hopes that followed the Reform Bill,
when grave Parliamentary men wept and huzzaed like schoolboys on
seeing that remarkable measure passed. People thought that the good
days had at last come, and even the workers who were still left out in
the cold fancied that in some vague way they were to receive benefits
worth having. The history of human delusions is a very sad one, as sad
almost as the history of human wickedness; and all those poor
enthusiasts had a sad awakening, for they found that the barren fights
of placemen would still go on, that the people would continue to be
shorn, and that the condition of the poor was uncommonly likely to be
worse than ever. The hour of hopefulness passed away, and there
succeeded bitter years of savage despair. The unhappy Chartists
struggled hard; and there is something pathetic in thinking how good
men were treated for preaching political commonplaces which are now
deemed almost Conservative. The wild time in which every crown in
Europe tottered was followed by another period of optimism; for the
great religious revival had begun, and the Church resumed her ancient
power over the people, despite the shock given by Newman's secession.
Then once again the query "Are we wealthy?" was answered with
enthusiasm; and even the poor were told that they were wealthy, for
had they not the reversion of complete felicity to crown their entry
into a future world? We must believe that there is some compensation
for this life's ills, or else existence would become no longer
bearable; but it was hard for people in general to think that
everything was for the best on this earth. Soon came the day of doubt
and bitterness, which assailed eager philanthropists and mere ordinary
people as well. The poor folk did not feel the effects of Darwin's
work, but those effects were terrible in certain quarters, for many
precipitate thinkers became convinced that we must perish like the
dumb beasts. Wherefore came the question, "Why should the poor go
without their share of the good things of this world, since there is
nothing for them in the next?" A very ugly query it is too, because,
when the question of number arises, rash spirits may say, as it was
said long ago, "Are we not many, and are you not few?"
I have not any fine theories, and I do not want to stir up enmities;
and I therefore say to the instructors of the poor, "Instead of egging
your men on to warfare, why not teach them how to use the laws which
they already have? No new laws are wanted; every rational and
necessary reform may be achieved by dint of measures now on the
statute-book--measures which seem to slumber as soon as the agitation
raised in passing them has glorified a certain number of placemen."
Every year we have the outcry, to which we have so often alluded,
about disgraceful dwellings; yet there is not a bad case in London or
elsewhere which could not be cured if the law were quietly set in
motion by men of business. As a matter of fact, a very great portion
of the wealth of the country is now at the service of the poor; but
they do not choose to take it--or, at any rate, they know nothing
about it. Look at the School Board elections, and see how many
exercise the right to vote. Yet, if the majority elected their own
School Board, they could divert enough charities to educate our whole
population, and they could do as they chose in their own schools.
Again, the Local Government Act renders it possible for the populace
to secure any public institutions that they may want, and in the main
they can order their own social life to their liking. What is the use
of incessant declamation? Organisation would be a thousand times
better. Let quiet men who do not want mere self-advertisement tell the
people what is their property and how to get it, and there will be no
need of the outcry of one class against another. It is a bitter grief
for all thinking men to observe the inequalities that continue to make
life positively accursed in many quarters, and the sights of shame
that abound ought to be seen no more; but rage can do nothing, while
wise teaching can do everything. The population question must be dealt
with by the people themselves; they must resolve to crush their masses
no more into slums; they must choose for themselves a nobler and a
purer life--and that can be accomplished by the laws which they may
set in action at once. Then they will be able to say, "England is
wealthy, and we have our share."
Some excellent articles have been turned out by the brilliant
professor of biology who inspects our fisheries for us. He has done
rare service for the people in his own way--no one better, for he was
one of the first who eagerly advocated the education of the masses;
but I fear he is now becoming "disillusionised." He talked once about
erecting a Jacob's Ladder from the gutter to the university; and he
has found that the ladder--such as it is--has merely been used to
connect the tradesman's shop and the artisan's dwelling with the
exalted place of education. The poor gutter-child cannot climb the
ladder; he is too hungry, too thin, too weak for the feat, and hence
the professor's famous epigram has become one of the things at which
scientific students of the human race smile sadly and kindly. And now
the professor grows savage and so wildly Conservative that we fear he
may denounce Magna Charta next as a gross error. I know very well that
all men are not equal, and the professor's keenest logic cannot make
me see that point any more clearly than at present. But suppose that
one fine day some awkward leader of the people says, "You tell us,
professor, that we are wealthy, and that it is right that some men
should be gorged while we are bitten with famine. If Britain is so
wealthy, how is it that eleven million acres of good agricultural land
are now out of cultivation, while the people whom the land used to
feed are crushed in the slums of the towns in the case of labourers,
or gone beyond the sea in the case of the farmers?" I want to be
impartial, but freely own that I should not like to answer that
question, and I do not believe the professor could. The men who used
to supply our fighting force are now becoming extinct. If they go into
the town and pick up some kind of work, then the second generation are
weaklings and a burden to us; while, if they go abroad, they are still
removed from the Mother of Nations, who needs her sons of the soil,
even though she may feel proud of the gallant new States which they
are rearing. And, while rats and mice and obscure vermin are gradually
taking possession of the land on which Britons were bred, the signs of
bursting wealth are thick among us. Is a nation rich that cannot
afford even to keep the kind of men who once defended her? To me the
gradual return of the land to its primitive wildness is more than
depressing. There are districts on the borders of Hertford and Essex
which might make a sentimental traveller sit down and cry. It all
seems strange; it looks so poverty-stricken, so filthy, so sordid, so
like the site of a slum after all the houses have been levelled for a
dozen years; and this in the midst of our England! I say nothing about
land-laws and so forth, but I will say that those who fancy the towns
can survive when the farms are deserted are much mistaken. "Are we
wealthy?" "Yes," and "No." We are wealthy in the wrong places, and we
are poor in the wrong places; and the combination will end in mischief
unless we are very soon prepared to make an alteration in most of our
ways of living. In many respects it is a good world; but it might be
made better, nobler, finer in every quarter, if the poor would only
recognise wise and silent leaders, and use the laws which men have
made in order to repair the havoc which other men have also made.
XI.
THE VALUES OF LABOUR.
Only about a quarter-century ago unlearned men of ability would often
sigh and say, "Ah, if I was only a scholar!" Admirers of a clever and
illiterate workman often said, "Why, if he was a scholar, he would
make a fortune in business for himself!" Women mourned the lack of
learning in the same way, and I have heard good dames deplore the fact
that they could not read. I pity most profoundly those on whom the
light of knowledge has never shone kindly; and yet I have a comic sort
of misgiving lest in a short time a common cry may be, "Ah, if I was
only not a scholar!" The matchless topsy-turvydom which has marked the
passage of the last ten years, the tremendously accelerated velocity
with which labour is moving towards emancipation from all control,
have so confused things in general that an observer must stand back
and get a new focus before he can allow his mind to dwell on the
things that he sees. One day's issue of any good newspaper is enough
to show what a revolution is upon us, for we merely need to run the
eye down columns at random to pick out suggestive little scraps. At
present we cannot get that "larger view" about which Dr. W.B.
Carpenter used to talk; he was wont to study hundreds and thousands of
soundings and measurements piecemeal, and the chaos of figures
gradually took form until at length the doctor had in his mind a
complete picture of enormous ocean depths. In somewhat the same way we
can by slow degrees form a picture of a changed state of society, and
we find that the faculties of body or mind which used to bring their
possessor gain are now nearly worthless. In one column of a journal I
find that a trained schoolmistress is required to take charge of a
village school. The salary is sixteen pounds per annum; but, if the
lady is fortunate enough to have a husband, work can be procured for
him daily on the farm. This is just a little disconcerting. The
teacher must see to the mental and moral training of fifty children;
she must have spent at least seven years in learning before she was
allowed to take charge of a school; then she remained two more years
on probation, and all the time her expenses were not light. As the
final reward of her exertions, she is offered six shillings per week,
out of which she must dress neatly--for a slatternly schoolmistress
would be a dreadful object--buy sufficient food, and hold her own in
rural society! The reverend man who advertises this delectable
situation must have a peculiar idea regarding the class into which an
educated lady like the teacher whom he requires would likely to marry.
An agricultural labourer may be an honest fellow enough, but, as the
husband of an educated woman, he might be out of place; and I fancy
that a schoolmistress whose husband pulled turnips and wore corduroys
might not secure the maximum of deference from her scholars. In
contrast to this grotesque advertisement I run down a list of cooks
required, and I find that the average wage of the cook is not far from
three times that of the teacher, while the domestic has her food
provided for liberality. The village schoolmistress in the old days
was never well paid; but then she was a private speculator; we never
expected to see the specialised product of training and time reckoned
at the same value as the old dame's, who was able to read and knit,
but who could do little more. While we are comparing the wages of
teachers and cooks, I may point out that the _chef_, whose training
lasts seven years, earns, as we calculate, one hundred and thirty
pounds per year more than the average English schoolmaster. This is
perhaps as it should be, for the value of a good _chef_ is hardly to
be reckoned in money; and yet the figures look funny when we first
study them. And now we may turn to the wages of dustmen, who are, it
must be admitted, a most estimable class of men and most useful. I
find that the London dustman earns more than an assistant master under
the Salford School Board, and, besides his wages, he picks up many
trifles. The dustman may dwell with his family in two rooms at
three-and-sixpence per week; his equipment consists of a slop,
corduroys, and a sou'-wester hat, which are sufficient to last many a
day with little washing. But the assistant, whose education alone cost
the nation one hundred pounds cash down, not to speak of his own
private expenditure, must live in a respectable locality, dress
neatly, and keep clear of that ugly soul-killing worry which is
inflicted by trouble about money. Decidedly the dustman has the best
of the bargain all round, for, to say the least, he does not need to
labour very much harder than the professional man. This instance tends
to throw a very sinister and significant flash on the way things are
tending. Again, some of the gangs of Shipping Federation men have full
board and lodging, two changes of clothes free, beer and rum in
moderate quantities, and thirty shillings per week. Does anybody in
England know a curate who has a salary like that? I do not think it
would be possible to find one on the Clergy List. No one grudges the
labourers their extra food and high wages; I am only taking note of a
significant social circumstance. The curate earns nothing until he is
about three-and-twenty; if he goes through one of the older
universities, his education costs, up to the time of his going out
into the world, something very like two thousand pounds; yet, with all
his mental equipment, such as it is, he cannot earn so much as a
labourer of his own age. Certainly the humbler classes had their day
of bondage when the middleman bore heavily on them; they got clear by
a mighty effort which dislocated commerce, but we hardly expected to
find them claiming, and obtaining, payments higher than many made to
the most refined products of the universities! It is the way of the
world; we are bound for change, change, and yet more change; and no
man may say how the cycles will widen. Luxury has grown on us since
the thousands of wealthy idlers who draw their money from trade began
to make the stream of lavish expenditure turn into a series of rushing
rapids. The flow of wasted wealth is no longer like the equable
gliding of the full Thames; it is like the long deadly flurry of the
waters that bears toward Niagara. These newly-enriched people cause
the rise of the usual crop of parasites, and it is the study of the
parasites which forces on the mind hundreds of reflections concerning
the values of different kinds of labour. A little while ago, for
example, an exquisitely comic paragraph was printed with all innocence
in many journals. It appeared that two of the revived species of
parasites known as professional pugilists were unable to dress
properly before they began knocking each other about, "because their
valets were not on the spot." I hope that the foul old days of the
villainous "ring" may never be recalled by anything seen in our day,
for there never were any "palmy days," though there were some ruffians
who could not be bought. Yet the worst things that happened in the
bygone times were not so much fitted to make a man think solemnly as
that one delicious phrase--"their valets were not on the spot." In the
noble days, when England was so very merry, it often happened that a
man who has been battered out of all resemblance to humanity was left
to dress himself as best he could on a bleak marsh, and his chivalrous
friends made the best of their way home, while the defeated gladiator
was reckoned at a dog's value. Now-a-days those sorely-entreated
creatures would have their valets. In one department of industry
assuredly the value of labour has altered. The very best of the brutal
old school once fought desperately for four hours, though it was
thought that he must be killed, and his reason was that, if he lost,
he would have to beg his bread. Now-a-days he would have a valet, a
secretary, a manager, and a crowd of plutocratic admirers who would
load him with money and luxuries. I was tickled to the verge of
laughter by finding that one of these gentry was paid thirty pounds
per night for exhibiting his skill, and my amusement was increased
when it turned out that one of those who paid him thirty pounds
strongly objected on learning that the hero appeared at two other
places, from each of which he received the same sum. Thus for
thirty-six minutes of exertion per day the man was drawing five
hundred and forty pounds per week. All these things appeared in the
public prints; but no public writer took any serious notice of a
symptom which is as significant as any ever observed in the history of
mankind. It is almost awe-striking to contemplate these parasites, and
think what their rank luxurious existence portends. Here we see a man
of vast wealth, whereof every pound was squeezed from the blood and
toil of working-men; he passes his time now in the company of these
fellows who have earned a reputation by pounding each other. The
wealthy bully and his hangers-on are dangerous to the public peace;
their language is too foul for even men of the world to endure it, and
the whole crew lord it in utter contempt of law and decency. That is
the kind of spectacle to be seen in our central city almost every
night. Consider a story which accidently came out a few weeks ago
owing to legal proceedings and kept pleasure-seeking and
scandalmongering London laughing for a while, and say whether any
revelation ever gave us a picture of a more unspeakable society. A
rich man, A., keeps a prizefighter, B., to "mind" him, as the quaint
phrase goes. Mr. A. is offended by another prizefighter, C., and he
offers B. the sum of five hundred pounds if he will give C. a beating
in public. B. goes to C., and says, "I will give you ten pounds if you
will let me thrash you, and I won't hurt you much." C. gladly
consents, so B. pockets four hundred and ninety pounds for himself,
and the noble patron's revenge is satisfied. There is a true tale of
rogues and a fool--a tale to make one brood and brood until the sense
of fun passes into black melancholy. Five hundred men worked for sixty
hours per week before that money was earned--and think of the value
received for the whole sum when it was spent! Truly the parasite's
exertions are lucrative to himself!
As for the market-price of book-learning or clerkly skill, it is not
worth so much as naming. The clerk was held to be a wondrous person in
times when the "neck-verse" would save a man from the gallows; but
"clerk" has far altered its meaning, and the modern being of that name
is in sorrowful case. So contemptibly cheap are his poor services that
he in person is not looked upon as a man, but rather as a lump of raw
material which is at present on sale in a glutted market. All the
walks of life wherein men proceed as though they belonged to the
leisured class are becoming no fit places for self-respecting people.
Gradually the ornamental sort of workers are being displaced; the idle
rich are too plentiful, but I question whether even the idle rich have
done, so much harm as the genteel poor who are ashamed of labour. I do
not like to see wages going downward, but there are exceptions, and I
am almost disposed to feel glad that the searchers after "genteel"
employment are now very much like the birds during a long frost. The
enormous lounging class who earn nothing do not offer an agreeable
subject for contemplation, and their parasites are horrible--there is
no other word. Yet we may gather a little consolation when we think
that the tendency is to raise the earnings of those who do something
or produce something. It is not good to know that a dustman makes more
money than hundreds of hard-worked and well-educated men, for this is
a grotesque state of things brought about by imbecile Government
officials. Neither do I quite like to know that a lady whose education
occupied nine years of her life is offered less wages than a good
housemaid. But I do assuredly like to hear how the higher class of
manual labourers flourish; they are the salt of the earth, and I
rejoice that they are no longer held down and regarded as in some way
inferior to men who do nothing for two hundred pounds a year, except
try to look as if they had two thousand pounds. The quiet man who does
the delicate work on the monster engines of a great ocean steamer is
worthy of his hire, costly as his hire may be. On his eye, his
judgment of materials, his nerve, and his dexterity of hand depend
precious lives. For three thousand miles those vast masses of
machinery must force a huge hull through huge seas; the mighty and
shapely fabrics of metal must work with the ease of a child's toy
locomotive, and they must bear a strain that is never relaxed though
all the most tremendous forces of Nature may threaten. What a charge
for a man! His earnings could hardly be raised high enough if we
consider the momentous nature of the duty he fulfils; he is an
aristocrat of labour, and we do not know that there is not something
grotesque in measuring and arguing over the money-payment made to him.
Then there are the specially skilled hands who in their monkish
seclusion work at the instruments wherewith scientific wonders are
wrought. The rewards of their toil would have seemed fabulous to such
men as Harrison the watchmaker; but they also form an aristocracy, and
they win the aristocrat's guerdon without practising his idleness. The
mathematician who makes the calculations for a machine is not so well
paid as the man who finishes it; the observatory calculator who
calculates the time of occulation for a planet cannot earn so much as
the one who grinds a reflector. In all our life the same tendency is
to be seen: the work of the hand outdoes in value the work of the
brain.
XII.
THE HOPELESS POOR.
By fits and starts the public wake up and own with much clamour that
there is a great deal of poverty in our midst. While each new fit
lasts the enthusiasm of good people is quite impressive in its
intensity; all the old hackneyed signatures appear by scores in the
newspapers, and "Pro Bono Publico," "Audi Alteram Partem," "X.Y.Z.,"
"Paterfamilias," "An Inquirer," have their theories quite pat and
ready. Picturesque writers pile horror on horror, and strive, with the
delightful emulation of their class, to outdo each other; far-fetched
accounts of oppression, robbery, injustice, are framed, and the more
drastic reformers invariably conclude that "Somebody" must be hanged.
We never find out which "Somebody" we should suspend from the dismal
tree; but none the less the virtuous reformers go on claiming victims
for the sacrifice, while, as each discoverer solemnly proclaims his
bloodthirsty remedy, he looks round for applause, and seems to say,
"Did you ever hear of stern and audacious statesmanship like mine? Was
there ever such a practical man?"