PEOPLE WHOSE BOOTS DON’T HURT THEM
Well, I did not talk merely to torment him; nor have I written this
merely to torment you. You see I have a persistent persuasion that all
these miseries are preventable miseries, which it lies in the power of
men to cure.
Everybody does not suffer misery from boots.
One person I know, another friend of mine, who can testify to that; who
has tasted all the miseries of boots, and who now goes about the world
free of them, but not altogether forgetful of them. A stroke of luck,
aided perhaps by a certain alacrity on his own part, lifted him out of
the class in which one buys one’s boots and clothes out of what is left
over from a pound a week, into the class in which one spends seventy or
eighty pounds a year on clothing. Sometimes he buys shoes and boots at
very good shops; sometimes he has them made for him; he has them stored
in a proper cupboard, and great care is taken of them; and so his boots
and shoes and slippers never chafe, never pinch, never squeak, never
hurt nor worry him, never bother him; and, when he sticks out his toes
before the fire, they do not remind him that he is a shabby and
contemptible wretch, living meanly on the dust heaps of the world. You
might think from this he had every reason to congratulate himself and be
happy, seeing that he has had good follow after evil; but, such is the
oddness of the human heart, he isn’t contented at all. The thought of
the multitudes so much worse off than himself in this matter of
foot-wear, gives him no sort of satisfaction. Their boots pinch _him_
vicariously. The black rage with the scheme of things that once he felt
through suffering in his own person in the days when he limped shabbily
through gaily busy, fashionable London streets, in split boots that
chafed, he feels now just as badly as he goes about the world very
comfortably himself, but among people whom he knows with a pitiless
clearness to be almost intolerably uncomfortable. He has no optimistic
illusion that things are all right with them. Stupid people who have
always been well off, who have always had boots that fit, may think
that; but not so, he. In one respect the thought of boots makes him even
more viciously angry now, than it used to do. In the old days he was
savage with his luck, but hopelessly savage; he thought that bad boots,
ugly uncomfortable clothes, rotten houses, were in the very nature of
things. Now, when he sees a child sniffing and blubbering and halting
upon the pavement, or an old country-woman going painfully along a lane,
he no longer recognises the Pinch of Destiny. His rage is lit by the
thought, that there are fools in this world who ought to have foreseen
and prevented this. He no longer curses fate, but the dulness of
statesmen and powerful responsible people who have neither the heart,
nor courage, nor capacity, to change the state of mismanagement that
gives us these things.
Now do not think I am dwelling unduly upon my second friend’s good
fortune, when I tell you that once he was constantly getting pain and
miserable states of mind, colds for example, from the badness of his
clothing, shame from being shabby, pain from the neglected state of his
teeth, from the indigestion of unsuitable food eaten at unsuitable
hours, from the insanitary ugly house in which he lived and the bad air
of that part of London, from things indeed quite beyond the unaided
power of a poor over-worked man to remedy. And now all these
disagreeable things have gone out of his life; he has consulted dentists
and physicians, he has hardly any dull days from colds, no pain from
toothache at all, no gloom of indigestion....
I will not go on with the tale of good fortune of this lucky person. My
purpose is served if I have shown that this misery of boots is not an
unavoidable curse upon mankind. If one man can evade it, others can. By
good management it may be altogether escaped. If you, or what is more
important to most human beings, if any people dear to you, suffer from
painful or disfiguring boots or shoes, and you can do no better for
them, it is simply because you are getting the worse side of an
ill-managed world. It is not the universal lot.
And what I say of boots is true of all the other minor things of life.
If your wife catches a bad cold because her boots are too thin for the
time of the year, or dislikes going out because she cuts a shabby ugly
figure, if your children look painfully nasty because their faces are
swollen with toothache, or because their clothes are dirty, old, and
ill-fitting, if you are all dull and disposed to be cross with one
another for want of decent amusement and change of air—don’t submit,
don’t be humbugged for a moment into believing that this is the dingy
lot of all mankind. Those people you love are living in a badly-managed
world and on the wrong side of it; and such wretchednesses are the daily
demonstration of that.
Don’t say for a moment: “Such is life.” Don’t think their miseries are
part of some primordial curse there is no escaping. The disproof of that
is for any one to see. There are people, people no more deserving than
others, who suffer from none of these things. You may feel you merit no
better than to live so poorly and badly that your boots are always
hurting you; but do the little children, the girls, the mass of decent
hard-up people, deserve no better fate?
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