TRUE HISTORY OF A TRAMP
He awoke in the Dark Ages and smelt dawn in the dark, and knew he was
not wholly a slave. It was as if, in some tale of Hans Andersen, a
stick or a stool had been left in the garden all night and had grown
alive and struck root like a tree. For this is the truth behind the
old legal fiction of the servile countries, that the slave is a
"chattel," that is a piece of furniture like a stick or a stool. In
the spiritual sense, I am certain it was never so unwholesome a fancy
as the spawn of Nietzsche suppose to-day. No human being, pagan or
Christian, I am certain, ever thought of another human being as a
chair or a table. The mind cannot base itself on the idea that a comet
is a cabbage; nor can it on the idea that a man is a stool. No man was
ever unconscious of another's presence--or even indifferent to
another's opinion. The lady who is said to have boasted her
indifference to being naked before male slaves was showing off--or she
meant something different. The lord who fed fishes by killing a slave
was indulging in what most cannibals indulge in--a satanist
affectation. The lady was consciously shameless and the lord was
consciously cruel. But it simply is not in the human reason to carve
men like wood or examine women like ivory, just as it is not in the
human reason to think that two and two make five.
But there was this truth in the legal simile of furniture: that the
slave, though certainly a man, was in one sense a dead man; in the
sense that he was _moveable_. His locomotion was not his own: his
master moved his arms and legs for him as if he were a marionette. Now
it is important in the first degree to realise here what would be
involved in such a fable as I have imagined, of a stool rooting itself
like a shrub. For the general modern notion certainly is that life and
liberty are in some way to be associated with novelty and not standing
still. But it is just because the stool is lifeless that it moves
about. It is just because the tree is alive that it does stand still.
That was the main difference between the pagan slave and the Christian
serf. The serf still belonged to the lord, as the stick that struck
root in the garden would have still belonged to the owner of the
garden; but it would have become a _live_ possession. Therefore the
owner is forced, by the laws of nature, to treat it with _some_
respect; something becomes due from him. He cannot pull it up without
killing it; it has gained a _place_ in the garden--or the society. But
the moderns are quite wrong in supposing that mere change and holiday
and variety have necessarily any element of this life that is the only
seed of liberty. You may say if you like that an employer, taking all
his workpeople to a new factory in a Garden City, is giving them the
greater freedom of forest landscapes and smokeless skies. If it comes
to that, you can say that the slave-traders took negroes from their
narrow and brutish African hamlets, and gave them the polish of
foreign travel and medicinal breezes of a sea-voyage. But the tiny
seed of citizenship and independence there already was in the serfdom
of the Dark Ages, had nothing to do with what nice things the lord
might do to the serf. It lay in the fact that there were some nasty
things he could not do to the serf--there were not many, but there
were some, and one of them was eviction. He could not make the serf
utterly landless and desperate, utterly without access to the means of
production, though doubtless it was rather the field that owned the
serf, than the serf that owned the field. But even if you call the
serf a beast of the field, he was not what we have tried to make the
town workman--a beast with no field. Foulon said of the French
peasants, "Let them eat grass." If he had said it of the modern London
proletariat, they might well reply, "You have not left us even grass
to eat."
There was, therefore, both in theory and practice, _some_ security for
the serf, because he had come to life and rooted. The seigneur could
not wait in the field in all weathers with a battle-axe to prevent the
serf scratching any living out of the ground, any more than the man in
my fairy-tale could sit out in the garden all night with an umbrella
to prevent the shrub getting any rain. The relation of lord and serf,
therefore, involves a combination of two things: inequality and
security. I know there are people who will at once point wildly to all
sorts of examples, true and false, of insecurity of life in the Middle
Ages; but these are people who do not grasp what we mean by the
characteristic institutions of a society. For the matter of that,
there are plenty of examples of equality in the Middle Ages, as the
craftsmen in their guild or the monks electing their abbot. But just
as modern England is not a feudal country, though there is a quaint
survival called Heralds' College--or Ireland is not a commercial
country, though there is a quaint survival called Belfast--it is true
of the bulk and shape of that society that came out of the Dark Ages
and ended at the Reformation, that it did not care about giving
everybody an equal position, but did care about giving everybody a
position. So that by the very beginning of that time even the slave
had become a slave one could not get rid of, like the Scotch servant
who stubbornly asserted that if his master didn't know a good servant
he knew a good master. The free peasant, in ancient or modern times,
is free to go or stay. The slave, in ancient times, was free neither
to go nor stay. The serf was not free to go; but he was free to stay.
Now what have we done with this man? It is quite simple. There is no
historical complexity about it in that respect. We have taken away his
freedom to stay. We have turned him out of his field, and whether it
was injustice, like turning a free farmer out of his field, or only
cruelty to animals, like turning a cow out of its field, the fact
remains that he is out in the road. First and last, we have simply
destroyed the security. We have not in the least destroyed the
inequality. All classes, all creatures, kind or cruel, still see this
lowest stratum of society as separate from the upper strata and even
the middle strata; he is as separate as the serf. A monster fallen
from Mars, ignorant of our simplest word, would know the tramp was at
the bottom of the ladder, as well as he would have known it of the
serf. The walls of mud are no longer round his boundaries, but only
round his boots. The coarse, bristling hedge is at the end of his
chin, and not of his garden. But mud and bristles still stand out
round him like a horrific halo, and separate him from his kind. The
Martian would have no difficulty in seeing he was the poorest person
in the nation. It is just as impossible that he should marry an
heiress, or fight a duel with a duke, or contest a seat at
Westminster, or enter a club in Pall Mall, or take a scholarship at
Balliol, or take a seat at an opera, or propose a good law, or protest
against a bad one, as it was impossible to the serf. Where he differs
is in something very different. He has lost what was possible to the
serf. He can no longer scratch the bare earth by day or sleep on the
bare earth by night, without being collared by a policeman.
Now when I say that this man has been oppressed as hardly any other
man on this earth has been oppressed, I am not using rhetoric: I have
a clear meaning which I am confident of explaining to any honest
reader. I do not say he has been treated worse: I say he has been
treated differently from the unfortunate in all ages. And the
difference is this: that all the others were told to do something, and
killed or tortured if they did anything else. This man is not told to
do something: he is merely forbidden to do anything. When he was a
slave, they said to him, "Sleep in this shed; I will beat you if you
sleep anywhere else." When he was a serf, they said to him, "Let me
find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else's
field." But now he is a tramp they say to him, "You shall be jailed if
I find you in anyone else's field: _but I will not give you a field_."
They say, "You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside
your shed: _but there is no shed_." If you say that modern
magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with
entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps
were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open
air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun
of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced
about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but
deliberately didn't. To which the policeman replied that twopence
would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a
bed: and _therefore_ (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to
be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much
struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for
not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain
that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they
would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as
they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame. These things
are being done in every part of England every day. They have their
parallels even in every daily paper; but they have no parallel in any
other earthly people or period; except in that insane command to make
bricks without straw which brought down all the plagues of Egypt. For
the common historical joke about Henry VIII. hanging a man for being
Catholic and burning him for being Protestant is a symbolic joke only.
The sceptic in the Tudor time could do something: he could always
agree with Henry VIII. The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For
you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws
sticking out of his hair and says, "Procure threepence from nowhere
and I will give you leave to do without it."
If it be answered that he can go to the workhouse, I reply that such
an answer is founded on confused thinking. It is true that he is free
to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which he is free
to go to jail, only in the same sense in which the serf under the
gibbet was free to find peace in the grave. Many of the poor greatly
prefer the grave to the workhouse, but that is not at all my argument
here. The point is this: that it could not have been the general
policy of a lord towards serfs to kill them all like wasps. It could
not have been his standing "Advice to Serfs" to say, "Get hanged." It
cannot be the standing advice of magistrates to citizens to go to
prison. And, precisely as plainly, it cannot be the standing advice of
rich men to very poor men to go to the workhouses. For that would mean
the rich raising their own poor rates enormously to keep a vast and
expensive establishment of slaves. Now it may come to this, as Mr.
Belloc maintains, but it is not the theory on which what we call the
workhouse does in fact rest. The very shape (and even the very size)
of a workhouse express the fact that it was founded for certain quite
exceptional human failures--like the lunatic asylum. Say to a man, "Go
to the madhouse," and he will say, "Wherein am I mad?" Say to a tramp
under a hedge, "Go to the house of exceptional failures," and he will
say with equal reason, "I travel because I have no house; I walk
because I have no horse; I sleep out because I have no bed. Wherein
have I failed?" And he may have the intelligence to add, "Indeed, your
worship, if somebody has failed, I think it is not I." I concede, with
all due haste, that he might perhaps say "me."
The speciality then of this man's wrong is that it is the only
historic wrong that has in it the quality of _nonsense_. It could only
happen in a nightmare; not in a clear and rational hell. It is the top
point of that anarchy in the governing mind which, as I said at the
beginning, is the main trait of modernity, especially in England. But
if the first note in our policy is madness, the next note is certainly
meanness. There are two peculiarly mean and unmanly legal mantraps in
which this wretched man is tripped up. The first is that which
prevents him from doing what any ordinary savage or nomad would
do--take his chance of an uneven subsistence on the rude bounty of
nature.
There is something very abject about forbidding this; because it is
precisely this adventurous and vagabond spirit which the educated
classes praise most in their books, poems and speeches. To feel the
drag of the roads, to hunt in nameless hills and fish in secret
streams, to have no address save "Over the Hills and Far Away," to be
ready to breakfast on berries and the daybreak and sup on the sunset
and a sodden crust, to feed on wild things and be a boy again, all
this is the heartiest and sincerest impulse in recent culture, in the
songs and tales of Stevenson, in the cult of George Borrow and in the
delightful little books published by Mr. E.V. Lucas. It is the one
true excuse in the core of Imperialism; and it faintly softens the
squalid prose and wooden-headed wickedness of the Self-Made Man who
"came up to London with twopence in his pocket." But when a poorer but
braver man with less than twopence in his pocket does the very thing
we are always praising, makes the blue heavens his house, we send him
to a house built for infamy and flogging. We take poverty itself and
only permit it with a property qualification; we only allow a man to
be poor if he is rich. And we do this most savagely if he has sought
to snatch his life by that particular thing of which our boyish
adventure stories are fullest--hunting and fishing. The extremely
severe English game laws hit most heavily what the highly reckless
English romances praise most irresponsibly. All our literature is full
of praise of the chase--especially of the wild goose chase. But if a
poor man followed, as Tennyson says, "far as the wild swan wings to
where the world dips down to sea and sands," Tennyson would scarcely
allow him to catch it. If he found the wildest goose in the wildest
fenland in the wildest regions of the sunset, he would very probably
discover that the rich never sleep; and that there are no wild things
in England.
In short, the English ruler is always appealing to a nation of
sportsmen and concentrating all his efforts on preventing them from
having any sport. The Imperialist is always pointing out with
exultation that the common Englishman can live by adventure anywhere
on the globe, but if the common Englishman tries to live by adventure
in England, he is treated as harshly as a thief, and almost as harshly
as an honest journalist. This is hypocrisy: the magistrate who gives
his son "Treasure Island" and then imprisons a tramp is a hypocrite;
the squire who is proud of English colonists and indulgent to English
schoolboys, but cruel to English poachers, is drawing near that deep
place wherein all liars have their part. But our point here is that
the baseness is in the idea of _bewildering_ the tramp; of leaving
him no place for repentance. It is quite true, of course, that in the
days of slavery or of serfdom the needy were fenced by yet fiercer
penalties from spoiling the hunting of the rich. But in the older case
there were two very important differences, the second of which is our
main subject in this chapter. The first is that in a comparatively
wild society, however fond of hunting, it seems impossible that
enclosing and game-keeping can have been so omnipresent and efficient
as in a society full of maps and policemen. The second difference is
the one already noted: that if the slave or semi-slave was forbidden
to get his food in the greenwood, he was told to get it somewhere
else. The note of unreason was absent.
This is the first meanness; and the second is like unto it. If there
is one thing of which cultivated modern letters is full besides
adventure it is altruism. We are always being told to help others, to
regard our wealth as theirs, to do what good we can, for we shall not
pass this way again. We are everywhere urged by humanitarians to help
lame dogs over stiles--though some humanitarians, it is true, seem to
feel a colder interest in the case of lame men and women. Still, the
chief fact of our literature, among all historic literatures, is human
charity. But what is the chief fact of our legislation? The great
outstanding fact of modern legislation, among all historic
legislations, is the forbidding of human charity. It is this
astonishing paradox, a thing in the teeth of all logic and
conscience, that a man that takes another man's money with his leave
can be punished as if he had taken it without his leave. All through
those dark or dim ages behind us, through times of servile stagnation,
of feudal insolence, of pestilence and civil strife and all else that
can war down the weak, for the weak to ask for charity was counted
lawful, and to give that charity, admirable. In all other centuries,
in short, the casual bad deeds of bad men could be partly patched and
mended by the casual good deeds of good men. But this is now
forbidden; for it would leave the tramp a last chance if he could beg.
Now it will be evident by this time that the interesting scientific
experiment on the tramp entirely depends on leaving him _no_ chance,
and not (like the slave) one chance. Of the economic excuses offered
for the persecution of beggars it will be more natural to speak in the
next chapter. It will suffice here to say that they are mere excuses,
for a policy that has been persistent while probably largely
unconscious, with a selfish and atheistic unconsciousness. That policy
was directed towards something--or it could never have cut so cleanly
and cruelly across the sentimental but sincere modern trends to
adventure and altruism. Its object is soon stated. It was directed
towards making the very poor man work for the capitalist, for any
wages or none. But all this, which I shall also deal with in the next
chapter, is here only important as introducing the last truth touching
the man of despair. The game laws have taken from him his human
command of Nature. The mendicancy laws have taken from him his human
demand on Man. There is one human thing left it is much harder to take
from him. Debased by him and his betters, it is still something
brought out of Eden, where God made him a demigod: it does not depend
on money and but little on time. He can create in his own image. The
terrible truth is in the heart of a hundred legends and mysteries. As
Jupiter could be hidden from all-devouring Time, as the Christ Child
could be hidden from Herod--so the child unborn is still hidden from
the omniscient oppressor. He who lives not yet, he and he alone is
left; and they seek his life to take it away.