The impression I get, in our big towns, is most peculiar--considering
that we are a free people. The faces and forms have a look of being
possessed. To express my meaning exactly is difficult. There is a dulled
and driven look, and yet a general expression of "Keep smiling--Are we
down-hearted? No." It is as if people were all being forced along by a
huge invisible hand at the back of their necks, whose pressure they
resent yet are trying to make the best of, because they cannot tell
whence it comes. To understand, you must watch the grip from its very
beginnings. The small children who swarm in the little grey playground
streets of our big towns pass their years in utter abandonment. They
roll and play and chatter in conditions of amazing unrestraint and
devil-may-care-dom in the midst of amazing dirt and ugliness. The
younger they are, as a rule, the chubbier and prettier they are.
Gradually you can see herd-life getting hold of them, the impact of ugly
sights and sounds commonising the essential grace and individuality of
their little features. On the lack of any standard or restraint, any
real glimpse of Nature, any knowledge of a future worth striving for, or
indeed of any future at all, they thrive forward into that hand-to-mouth
mood from which they are mostly destined never to emerge. Quick and
scattery as monkeys, and never alone, they become, at a rake's progress,
little fragments of the herd. On poor food, poor air, and habits of
least resistance, they wilt and grow distorted, acquiring withal the
sort of pathetic hardihood which a Dartmoor pony will draw out of moor
life in a frozen winter. All round them, by day, by night, stretches the
huge, grey, grimy waste of streets, factory walls, chimneys, murky
canals, chapels, public-houses, hoardings, posters, butchers' shops--a
waste where nothing beautiful exists save a pretty cat or pigeon, a blue
sky, perhaps, and a few trees and open spaces. The children of the class
above, too, of the small shop-people, the artisans--do they escape? Not
really. The same herd-life and the same sights and sounds pursue them
from birth; they also are soon divested of the grace and free look which
you see in country children walking to and from school or roaming the
hedges. Whether true slum children, or from streets a little better off,
quickly they all pass out of youth into the iron drive of commerce and
manufacture, into the clang and clatter, the swish and whirr of wheels,
the strange, dragging, saw-like hubbub of industry, or the clicking and
pigeon-holes of commerce; perch on a devil's see-saw from monotonous
work to cheap sensation and back. Considering the conditions it is
wonderful that they stand it as well as they do; and I should be the
last to deny that they possess remarkable qualities. But the modern
industrial English town is a sort of inferno where people dwell with a
marvellous philosophy. What would you have? They have never seen any way
out of it. And this, perhaps, would not be so pitiful if for each
bond-servant of our town-tyranny there was in store a prize--some
portion of that national wealth in pursuit of which the tyrant drives
us; if each worker had before him the chance of emergence at, say,
fifty. But, Lord God! for five that emerge, ninety-and-five stay bound,
less free and wealthy at the end of the chapter than they were at the
beginning. And the quaint thing is--they know it; know that they will
spend their lives in smoky, noisy, crowded drudgery, and in crowded
drudgery die. Wealth goes to wealth, and all they can hope for is a few
extra shillings a week, with a corresponding rise in prices. They know
it, but it does not disturb them, for they were born of the towns, have
never glimpsed at other possibilities. Imprisoned in town life from
birth, they contentedly perpetuate the species of a folk with an ebbing
future. Yes, ebbing! For if it be not, why is there now so much
conscious effort to arrest the decay of town workers' nerves and sinews?
Why do we bother to impede a process which is denied? If there be no
town-blight on us, why a million indications of uneasiness and a
thousand little fights against the march of a degeneration so natural,
vast, and methodical, that it brings them all to naught? Our physique is
slowly rotting, and that is the plain truth of it.
But it does not stop with deteriorated physique. Students of faces in
the remoter country are struck by the absence of what, for want of a
better word, we may call vulgarity. That insidious defacement is seen to
be a thing of towns, and not at all a matter of "class." The simplest
country cottager, shepherd, fisherman, has as much, often a deal more,
dignity than numbers of our upper classes, who, in spite of the desire
to keep themselves unspotted, are still, from the nature of their
existence, touched by the herd-life of modern times. For vulgarity is
the natural product of herd-life; an amalgam of second-hand thought,
cheap and rapid sensation, defensive and offensive self-consciousness,
gradually plastered over the faces, manners, voices, whole beings, of
those whose elbows are too tightly squeezed to their sides by the
pressure of their fellows, whose natures are cut off from Nature, whose
senses are rendered imitative by the too insistent impact of certain
sights and sounds. Without doubt the rapid increase of town-life is
responsible for our acknowledged vulgarity. The same process is going on
in America and in Northern Germany; but we unfortunately had the lead,
and seem to be doing our best to keep it. Cheap newspapers, on the
sensational tip-and-run system, perpetual shows of some kind or other,
work in association, every kind of thing in association, at a speed too
great for individual digestion, and in the presence of every device for
removing the need for individual thought; the thronged streets, the
football match with its crowd emotions; beyond all, the cinema--a
compendium of all these other influences--make town-life a veritable
forcing-pit of vulgarity. We are all so deeply in it that we do not see
the process going on; or, if we admit it, hasten to add: "But what does
it matter?--there's no harm in vulgarity; besides, it's inevitable, you
can't set the tide back." Obviously, the vulgarity of town-life cannot
be exorcised by Act of Parliament; there is not indeed the faintest
chance that Parliament will recognise such a side to the question at
all, since there is naturally no public opinion on this matter.
Everybody must recognise and admire certain qualities specially fostered
by town-life; the extraordinary patience, cheerful courage, philosophic
irony, and unselfishness of our towns-people--qualities which in this
war, both at the front and at home, have been of the greatest value.
They are worth much of the price paid. But in this life all is a
question of balance; and my contention is, not so much that town-life in
itself is bad, as that we have pushed it to a point of excess terribly
dangerous to our physique, to our dignity, and to our sense of beauty.
Must our future have no serene and simple quality, not even a spice of
the influence of Nature, with her air, her trees, her fields, and wide
skies? Say what you like, it is elbow-room for limbs and mind and lungs
which keeps the countryman free from that dulled and driven look, and
gives him individuality. I know all about the "dullness" and "monotony"
of rural life, bad housing and the rest of it. All true enough, but the
cure is not exodus, it is improvement in rural-life conditions, more
co-operation, better cottages, a fuller, freer social life. What we in
England now want more than anything is air--for lungs and mind. We have
overdone herd-life. We _are_ dimly conscious of this, feel vaguely that
there is something "rattling" and wrong about our progress, for we have
had many little spasmodic "movements" back to the land these last few
years. But what do they amount to? Whereas in 1901 the proportion of
town to country population in England and Wales was 3 10/37--1, in 1911
it was 3 17/20--1; very distinctly greater! At this crab's march we
shall be some time getting "back to the land." Our effort, so far, has
been something like our revival of Morris dancing, very pleasant and
æsthetic, but without real economic basis or strength to stand up
against the lure of the towns. And how queer, ironical, and pitiful is
that lure, when you consider that in towns one-third of the population
are just on or a little below the line of bare subsistence; that the
great majority of town workers have hopelessly monotonous work, stuffy
housing, poor air, and little leisure. But there it is--the charm of the
lighted-up unknown, of company, and the streets at night! The countryman
goes to the town in search of adventure. Honestly--does he really find
it? He thinks he is going to improve his prospects and his mind. His
prospects seldom brighten. He sharpens his mind, only to lose it and
acquire instead that of the herd.
To compete with this lure of the towns, there must first be _national_
consciousness of its danger; then coherent _national_ effort to fight
it. We must destroy the shibboleth: "All for wealth!" and re-write it:
"All for health!"--the only wealth worth having. Wealth is not an end,
surely. Then, to what is it the means, if not to health? Once we admit
that in spite of our wealth our national health is going downhill
through town-blight, we assert the failure of our country's ideals and
life. And if, having got into a vicious state of congested town
existence, we refuse to make an effort to get out again, because it is
necessary to "hold our own commercially," and feed "the people" cheaply,
we are in effect saying: "We certainly are going to hell, but look--how
successfully!" I suggest rather that we try to pull ourselves up again
out of the pit of destruction, even if to do so involves us in a certain
amount of monetary loss and inconvenience. Yielding to no one in desire
that "the people" should be well, nay better, fed, I decline utterly to
accept the doctrine that there is no way of doing this compatible with
an increased country population and the growth of our own food. In
national matters, where there is a general and not a mere Party will,
there is a way, and the way is not to be recoiled from because the first
years of the change may necessitate Governmental regulation. Many people
hold that our salvation will come through education. Education on right
lines underlies everything, of course; but unless education includes the
growth of our own food and return to the land in substantial measure,
education cannot save us.
It may be natural to want to go to hell; it is certainly easy; we have
gone so far in that direction that we cannot hope to be haloed in our
time. For good or evil, the great towns are here, and we can but
mitigate. The indicated policy of mitigation is fivefold:--
(1) Such solid economic basis to the growth of our food as will give us
again national security, more arable land than we have ever had, and on
it a full complement of well-paid workers, with better cottages, and a
livened village life.
(2) A vast number of small holdings, State-created, with co-operative
working.
(3) A wide belt-system of garden allotments round every town, industrial
or not.
(4) Drastic improvements in housing, feeding, and sanitation in the
towns themselves.
(5) Education that shall raise not only the standard of knowledge but
the standard of taste in town and country.
All these ideals are already well in the public eye--on paper. But they
are incoherently viewed and urged; they do not as yet form a national
creed. Until welded and supported by all parties in the State, they will
not have driving power enough to counteract the terrific momentum with
which towns are drawing us down into the pit. One section pins its faith
to town improvement; another to the development of small holdings; a
third to cottage building; a fourth to education; a fifth to support of
the price of wheat; a sixth to the destruction of landlords.
Comprehensive vision of the danger is still lacking, and comprehensive
grasp of the means to fight against it.
We are by a long way the most town-ridden country in the world; our
towns by a long way the smokiest and worst built, with the most inbred
town populations. We have practically come to an end of our
country-stock reserves. Unless we are prepared to say: "This is a
desirable state of things; let the inbreeding of town stocks go on--we
shall evolve in time a new type immune to town life; a little ratty
fellow all nerves and assurance, much better than any country
clod!"--which, by the way, is exactly what some of us do say! Unless we
mean as a nation to adopt this view and rattle on, light-heartedly,
careless of menace from without and within, assuring ourselves that
health and beauty, freedom and independence, as hitherto understood,
have always been misnomers, and that nothing whatever matters so long as
we are rich--unless all this, we must give check to the present state of
things, restore a decent balance between town and country stock, grow
our own food, and establish a permanent tendency away from towns.
All this fearfully unorthodox and provocative of sneers, and--goodness
knows--I do not enjoy saying it. But needs must when the devil drives.
It may be foolish to rave against the past and those factors and
conditions which have put us so utterly in bond to towns--especially
since this past and these towns have brought us such great wealth and so
dominating a position in the world. It cannot be foolish, now that we
have the wealth and the position, to resolve with all our might to free
ourselves from bondage, to be masters, not servants, of our fate, to get
back to firm ground, and make Health and Safety what they ever should
be--the true keystones of our policy.