THE EMPLOYED PERSON
The English are a nation of employed persons. Wherever you go, from
Berwick to Land's End, you will find that in the main the men you
meet are somebody's employees. The better kind of them possibly write
"manager" on their cards; some of them even are managing directors;
others, again, are partners in wealthy houses or heads of such houses.
Yet, as I have said, they strike you almost to a man as being in
somebody's employment. Even the most prosperous of them have the
strained, repressed, furtive look which comes of the long turning of
other people's little wheels; while the masses, the employed English
masses, give you, as regards appearance, physique, and habit of mind
alike, an excellent notion of what a galley-slave must have been. The
fact of being employed is indeed the only big and abiding fact in the
average Englishman's life. It has its effect on the whole man from the
time of his youth to the time of his death; it influences his actions
and the trend of his thoughts to a far greater extent than any other
force--love and religion included. In the Englishman's view, to be
employed is the only road to subsistence, and, if one be ambitious, the
only road to honour. He must work for somebody, otherwise he cannot
be happy. The notion of working for himself appals him; and if by any
chance he be persuaded to take the plunge, the consideration that
he has no master weighs so heavily upon him that his end is usually
speedy ruin of one sort or another. That is to say, he either takes
advantage of his freedom to the extent of doing no work at all, or,
in the absence of the guiding hand, he loses his judgment and throws
to the winds the caution that kept him his place. It is a pity, there
can be no doubt; but the thing is in the English blood. If you are
an Englishman, you must be employed; if you are unemployed, you are
unhappy, and worse. For a full century the rich merchants, enterprising
manufacturers, colliery-owners, mill-owners, and what not, in whom
the English put their trust, have been preaching and fomenting this
doctrine by every means in their power. To their aid in spreading
the glorious truth they have brought the moralists and the Churches:
"'if a man will not work, neither shall he eat.' 'Servants, obey your
masters.' Punctuality is the soul of business. Be faithful over a few
things. Begin at the bottom rung of the ladder. Mr. So-and-so, the
notorious billionaire, was once a poor working-boy in Manchester.
Furthermore, if you _don't_ work and at our price--well, to say the
least of it, God will not love you."
And the English--poor bodies!--carry on their lives accordingly.
The whole scheme of things is arranged to fit in with the ideas of
employers as to what work means, under what conditions it should
be performed, and what should be its rewards. To live in the manner
pronounced to be respectable by the moralists and the Churches, you
must take upon yourself exactly the labours, and no others, prescribed
by the employers. In other words, to keep an eight-roomed house with a
piano in it, a wife with blouses and four new hats a year, and a little
family who can go to church on Sunday mornings dressed as well as any
of them, you must keep Messrs. Reachemdown's books, and pass through
your hands many thousands of Messrs. Reachemdown's moneys, for a salary
of L150 a year. When you get old and half blind through years of poring
over Reachemdown's figures, they will pension you off at a pound a
week, and get a younger man to do the work for the other L2. You, good,
easy Englishman, will, in your heart of hearts, be exceedingly grateful
to Reachemdown & Reachemdown, and count it not the least of your many
blessings that you have never wanted good work and kind employers.
You will say to your English son, "My boy, make up your mind to serve
people well, and in your old age they will never forget you. Always be
industrious, obliging, and respectful. Remember that a rolling stone
gathers no moss, and never forsake the substance for the shadow." And
the chances are that your fine English boy will do exactly what you,
his fine English father, have done. Indeed, if he be old enough at the
time of your "retirement," he might very appropriately take your place
at Reachemdown & Reachemdown's; then he will marry, he will live in a
house with a piano in it, his wife will have four new hats a year, and
his children will go to church on Sundays as well dressed as any of
them.
On the whole, I should be sorry to say that this sort of thing was
not desirable. If a nation is to be great, it is essential that it
should contain a large body of workers, and the more industrious and
dependable and trustworthy that body of workers, the better it is for
the State and for the pillars and props of the State, the employers
included. But the point is that the English take too much credit for
it and get too much ease out of it. It has been complained by Mr.
Crosland and other masters of elegant English that the Scot goes
to London and the smaller industrial markets and there enters into
successful competition with the English employed, and it appears to
annoy Mr. Crosland that the Scot should not be content with good work,
say book-keeping from nine to six, good wages, say L150 per annum, and
kind employers, say Messrs. Reachemdown & Reachemdown, all his life.
It seems to annoy him, too, that the Scot never acquires that pathetic
satisfaction in being employed which permeates the beautiful spirit of
his English competitor. You will meet hoary and bald-headed Englishmen
who will tell you with a quaver that they have been in the employment
of one and the same house, man and boy, for over half a century, sir!
Somehow the Englishman tells you this with a look of pride, and rather
expects you to regard him as a sort of marvel. It never occurs to
him that he is really bragging of his own ineptitude,--to use Mr.
Crosland's favourite abstraction,--his own lack of enterprise. The
number of Scots who have been in the employment of one house for forty
years, least of all the number of Scots who brag about it, is probably
not a round dozen. As a general rule, when a Scot has been in a house
forty years, it is his house.
Another matter in which the English employee appears to me to err
mightily is his treatment of his employer. In concerns of great
magnitude personal relations between employer and employed are often
impossible, because the employer seldom comes near the place where his
money is made for him. Quite frequently, however, he is accessible;
yet the employee knows him not. He would no more think of walking up
and shaking hands with him than he would think of casting himself from
the top of the factory chimney-stack. It is the unwritten law of the
English that the employer is a better man than the employed. For the
employee to say "How do!" to the employer; for the employee to meet
the employer in the street and omit to make respectful obeisances;
for the employee to assert anywhere outside his favourite pot-house
that Jack's as good as his master, would never do. If you are paid
wages, you must be grateful and respectful; and though you know quite
well that your employer is paying you just as little as ever he can,
you must still respect him. Broadly speaking, we manage these things
better in Scotland; and, for that matter, the Scot manages them
better in England. The English employee quirks and crawls before his
employer, because he knows that his employer can exercise over him
powers which, if they do not mean exactly life and death, do mean a
possibly long period of out-of-workness. And out-of-workness is, as a
rule, the most fearful thing in life that can happen to an Englishman,
for the simple reason that he never has anything behind him. If he
has been earning fifty pounds a year, he has spent it all; if he has
been earning a thousand a year, he has spent it all and more to it.
With the Scot it is different. No matter how small his earnings, he
invariably contrives to save a portion of them. When he has saved a
hundred pounds, he is practically an independent man, for a Scot with
a hundred pounds at his disposal can defy, and can afford to defy, any
employer that ever breathed the breath of life. Besides, hundred pounds
or no hundred pounds, the Scot will not grovel. He does his work and
his duty, and the rest can go hang. His days are not spent in blissful
contemplation of the joys of being in good work; he has no anxieties
as to how long it is going to last; he admits no superiorities; he is
afraid of no man. Some day, perhaps, the Englishman will learn to take
a leaf out of his book. The Englishman will learn that to be employed,
excepting with a view to greater things than subsistence, is to be in
a condition which borders very closely on degradation. He will learn
that services rendered and energies expended for long periods of years
without adequate reward, and with only a pretence at advancement, are a
discredit and not an honour. He will learn that a man's a man, and that
it is no man's business to be so faithful to another man that he cannot
be faithful to himself.