CHAPTER IV

THE MULTITUDE

I

The Multitude is the People of England: that eighty per cent. (say)

of the present inhabitants of these islands who never express their

own grievances, who rarely become articulate, who can only be observed

from outside and very far away. It is a people which, all unnoticed

and without clamour or protest, has passed through the largest secular

change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life

of the city. Nine out of ten families have migrated within three

generations: they are still only, as it were, commencing to settle down

in their new quarters, with the paint scarcely dry on them, and the

little garden still untilled. How has the migration affected them? How

will they expand or degenerate in the new town existence, each in the

perpetual presence of all? That is a question of as profound interest

in answering as it is difficult to answer. The nineteenth century--in

the life of the wage-earning multitudes--was a century of disturbance.

The twentieth promises to be a century of consolidation. What completed

product will emerge from its city aggregation, the children of the

crowd? You must learn of them to-day, as I have said, from outside:

from the few observers who have lived amongst them and recorded their

experience; from the very few representative men, with articulate

utterance, which they have flung up from amongst themselves. You must

examine masses of documents and statistics embodied in Government

publications, or tentative efforts towards a sociology: recording how

they live, and eat and drink, and obtain shelter, and marry and are

given in marriage; the particulars of their upbringing, how they seek

or elude religions and charity, and escape from the laws which are

passed for their protection, and enjoy and suffer, and live and die.

The mass of this chaotic and undigested evidence waits for the observer

who will create from it some general picture of the life of the English

people. And when all these statistics and cold facts are assimilated,

there yet remains the further inquiry of the temper and spirit of a

race subjected to such forces; hampered and limited by the narrow walls

between which they labour and endure.

The tangible things come first, in some such evidence as that provided

by Government investigation, in the Blue Book bearing a forbidding

title, the “Cost of Living of the Working Classes.” It shows them,

gathered into astonishing cities, working for variable wage. It reveals

the dwellings which they seek to transform into homes. It follows their

wages from production to distribution, in the cost of their daily

economy, the manner in which they divide up their exiguous incomes, the

amounts they think it worth while to allot to shelter, to food, and

to pleasure. It analyses over a thousand “family budgets,” each giving

details of how much is spent weekly on butter, tapioca, or treacle. It

shows the rate of birth and the rate of death: varying from city to

city, both materially changing. It gives, in fact, in outline only,

that blurred image of a huge and industrial population whose complete

apprehension would furnish the key to many of the pressing problems of

to-day.

Here are the houses in which for a season they abide; in part the

product of their own volition, in part the creation of external changes

which they can but little control. They have had no choice in these

constructions. Their demands and desires have scarcely counted in the

provision made for them. Their impetuous need was shelter: shelter

“on the spot,” around the sites of the new factories which had sucked

them up from the deserted countryside. And they were thankful to take

what was offered them by those men who foresaw the changes which

were coming, and could accumulate fortunes in the rapid provision

of immediate necessities. Swept into aggregations by the demand of

the newest industries, the clay and stone has been hastily fashioned

into place for human habitation. And now these stand to-day, made by,

and yet making, the temper and characteristic of the people. Here

the normal standard is a four-roomed cottage; there, “back to back”

houses ravage the health of their inhabitants; here again huge piles

of tenements encompass the bewildered occupants in a kind of human

ant-heap; there the ancient dwelling of the wealthy or comfortable

classes have been “swarmed out” by the busy people. Carlyle pictured

mankind flowing, as it were, through the visible arena of material

things. A wave of humanity beats through these solid constructions;

it vanishes, another succeeds. “Orpheus built the walls of Thebes by

the mere sound of his lyre. Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo,

summoning out all the sandstone rocks to dance and shape themselves

into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble

streets?” All cities are thus built “to music.” What discordant melody

to-day is responsible for the creation of Jarrow, or Salford, or

Canning Town?

England at once, under such an analysis, separates itself into

divergent parts. There is rural England, still largely unaffected by

modern science and invention, except by the loss of population, drained

away; the agricultural labourers, the fishermen, and the artisans

of the sleeping provincial towns. There is urban England in hastily

created industrial centres, vocal with the clanging of furnaces and

the noise of the factories; but still a population in manageable

aggregation, set in open spaces, never far from green fields under

a wide sky. And there is London: a population, a nation in itself;

breeding, as it seems, a special race of men; which only is also

produced, and that in less intensive cultivation, in the few other

larger cities--Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool--where the conditions

of coagulation offer some parallel to this monster clot of humanity.

Everywhere, indeed, this million-peopled, exaggerated London sets at

defiance the generalisations drawn from the normal town areas. House

rent is immensely higher. The mean weekly price for two rooms in London

is six shillings, in the provinces a little more than one half; for

four rooms the variation is between nine shillings in the one, five

shillings in the other. A portion of this surplus is the booty of more

highly-paid labour. The greater part vanishes in the increased value

of the land, heaped up by the mere fact of aggregation, and flowing

away into the pockets of many affluent and fortunate persons. London

has been normally Tory; defiant of “Socialism,” defiant of change.

The cause of this cannot be found entirely in the existence of a

metropolis and capital of the Empire living a parasitic existence on

tribute levied upon the boundaries of the world. For in most of the

great capitals of Europe the advocates of revolutionary programmes

find to-day their most fruitful fields of propaganda. It may perhaps

best be understood in the apprehension of an actual picture of visible

things. The answer is hidden in these strings and congestions of little

comfortable two-storeyed red and grey cottages, which multiplied with

such amazing rapidity in the preceding generation; pushing their

tentacles from factory or industrial centre out over the neighbouring

fields, and proclaiming with their cleanliness and tiny gardens and

modest air of comfort, a working population prosperous and content. One

type of dwelling, indeed, is found to be more or less prevalent through

all the urban aggregation. That is the small four or five-roomed

cottage, containing on the ground floor a front parlour, a kitchen, and

a scullery built as an addition to the main part of the house; and

on the upper floor the bedrooms, the third bedroom in the five-roomed

house being built over the scullery. And in such dwelling-places,

if anywhere, is concealed the secret of the future of the people of

England. Abroad, the self-contained “flat,” the gigantic tenement, in

which the single family is embedded in a cliff of bricks and mortar, is

more and more coming to be the staple dwelling of the working classes.

Broad, tree-planted avenues, with fast electric locomotion, cut through

carefully planned cities of storey piled on storey. The whole effect

is grandiose and spacious, if it lacks the picturesqueness of that

enormous acreage of chimney-pots and tiny tumbled cottages which is

revealed in a kind of smoky grandeur from the railway embankments of

South and East London--the desperate efforts made by a race reared in

village communities to maintain in the urban aggregation some semblance

of a home. Such is the shelter; what of the food? The price of bread

varies. Family budgets of the weekly incomes are extraordinarily

suggestive of the struggle which takes place in the industrial areas

of the city. Classified according to amount of net receipts, they

reveal an ever-growing proportion devoted to the essentials of bodily

nutriment; until, at the bottom, where the income appears permanently

below the “living wage,” there is practically no margin left when the

food demand is satisfied. “For the incomes below thirty shillings,

two-thirds of the total income is spent on food, ‘declares a Board

of Trade investigator,’ while in the case of the incomes of forty

shillings and above, about fifty-seven per cent. is spent on food.”

Amongst the poorest, actually one-fifth of the total food expenditure

is spent on bread and flour: a conclusive statistic condemning those

who lightly justify a tax on imported corn on the ground that so

much stale bread is committed to the pigsty. Tea, in these lowest

incomes, demands ninepence farthing a week, and sugar eightpence. It

is expenditure on the margin, counted in farthings, a life exceedingly

difficult to realise amongst those to whom a few coppers more or less

means no appreciable difference.

Variations--from town to town--in a civilisation which is in all

essentials homogeneous, and a life of easy flow from one labour

centre to another, tend to lessen or to vanish. Yet there still are

apparent local variations in wages which appear to be independent of

variations in wealth or in prices. Again there are most remarkable

differences in habits, customs, productivity, and statistics of birth

and death. Why (for example) should Middlesborough have the highest

birth-rate of England? Why indeed, the cynical might ask, should any

children be born in Middlesborough at all, considering the more than

dismal picture which investigation discloses of existence in that

feverish industrial centre? There is appalling wastage of life force

in these percentages of infant mortality, especially in the factory

centres--soiled, useless child lives, whose existence stands for no

intelligible significance in any rational scheme of human affairs.

There are statistics of mortality which reveal so many years knocked

off human life in the transition from the life of the field to the

life of the factory. And there is the evidence also, amongst the

industrial peoples as amongst the classes above them, of perhaps the

most remarkable change which is operating to-day in modern England:

in the tumbling down of the birth-rate with ominous rapidity, until

nothing but a similar reduction of the death-rate, with the increase of

sanitation and the limitation of disease, seems to stand between the

two meeting in a henceforth stationary population. Is the vitality of

the race being burnt up in mine and furnace, in the huddled mazes of

the city? And is the future of a colonising people to be jeopardised,

not by difficulties of overlordship at the extremities of its dominion,

but by obscure changes in the opinion, the religion, and the energies

at the heart of the Empire? These and other subjects confront even a

superficial examination of the material condition of England. Karl

Marx was wrong in his defiant assertion that economic causes were the

sole factors in the transformations of history. He would have been

right had he asserted that many startling overturnings of opinion, in

political and social, and even religious change, can ultimately be

traced back to the economic condition of obscure masses of the common

people. The majority are in regular labour in summer and winter,

tearing from coal and furnace and factory the vast industrial wealth

of England. Their disabilities are imperfect houses set often in quite

needlessly squalid surroundings: the possibility of finding, through no

fault of their own, their labour no longer required; specific diseases

and risks of specific accidents which are associated with various

specific occupations. Their advantages are a rate of payment higher for

shorter hours of work than is at present prevailing (in the majority

of trades) in any other country of Europe. The artisan is far better

fed than the agricultural labourer, is more intelligent, quicker and

more active, with greater pleasures available in popular entertainment,

or a Saturday half-holiday, or a week at the seaside. Yet his span

of life is shorter and his work more precarious. He possesses little

opportunity for the accumulation of property. He has no “stake in the

country,” and has no permanent possession, lacking even a tiny plot of

land which he can bequeath from father to child. His effects--on his

decease--are generally negligible. The Multitude, with a substantial

although inadequate share of the income of the country, possesses but

an infinitesimal proportion of its capital.

In such surroundings and despite such drawbacks, there labours a hardy

race of men, whose efforts, in skill, perseverance, and indefatigable

industry, have earned them supremacy in the markets of the world. It

is an industrial order in transition, evidently being swept forward

by forces beyond individual control, to a condition in the future

which would be almost inconceivable to the present. It is a population

of weekly wage-earners which has struggled out of servitude into

independence, but which still remains goaded into activity by fear--not

of the lash of the overseer, but of the grim and implacable forces of

hunger and cold. Slavery, Serfdom, Poverty: these, says the author of

the _Nemesis of Nations_, form three stages in the changing condition

of the social basis of civilisation. “Poverty” is the foundation

of the present industrial order. It is a poverty which is removed,

for the most part, from actual lack of physical necessities, though

it is always never far distant from such a privation. It is rather

“industrialism”--the “proletariat”--a state of human affairs for which

we have in English no defining title. In working it provides others

with leisure, and the complex and refining influences which leisure can

bring. It works in the city aggregations, always twisting threads, or

clanging machinery, or stoking effectual fires. Its products post o’er

land and ocean without rest--swinging steel bridges over the rivers of

East Africa, furnishing Nicaragua with carpets, or encasing the women

of Upper Burmah in Lancashire cotton fabrics. What is the meaning of it

all? What is the end of it all? We cannot tell the meaning outside; the

future of a world when the “iron age” has become triumphant, and man,

a midget, controlling by his intelligence huge and ponderable forces,

will be lost in the labyrinths of his enormous machines. Certain

forms of American activity on the shores of Lake Michigan, or in the

devastated North-East of Pennsylvania, provide sufficient forecast of

such a future. Nor can we tell the meaning (as it were) inside: in the

lives of those two differentiated classes which the modern industrial

life is daily creating; the life of those who enjoy, on the one hand,

in Pleasure Cities, in all branches of eager and sometimes morbid

amusement; and the life of the new race which will be evolved out of

these strenuous gnomes who labour in the heart of the city congestions.

Of very special interest, however, is the testimony of those who have

endeavoured to get behind the form of cottage or quality of food, to

apprehension of the actual life of the people who dwell in the one

and are nourished by the other. Such efforts have been made, and not

unsuccessfully, by Lady Bell at Middlesborough, by Mr. Charles Booth

in London, by Mr. Reynolds amongst his friends the Devon fishermen, by

Mr. Reginald Bray from his block tenement in Camberwell. They all bear

testimony concerning a life novel to humanity, whose development and

future is still doubtful.

Lady Bell, in her study of such life in a prosperous northern centre,

goes near to provide a bird’s-eye view of the city “proletariat” in

its present uncertain state. It is a town erected almost in two nights

and a day by the demands of the new iron manufacture. Its hundred

thousand population are practically all workers. It exists solely for

the purpose of translating human energy into material values. Its

inhabitants have been sucked in like the draught in its own blast

furnaces: from the neighbouring countryside, from the neighbouring

townships, from Scotland and Ireland, and places far afield. Round

the furnaces there have rapidly heaped together mazes of little

two-storeyed cottages. The furnaces, the grey streets, a few public

buildings, all set in a background of greyness, in a devastated

landscape, under a grey sky--that is the proletarian city. Lady Bell

set herself (in her own happy phrase) to reveal what the Iron Trade,

which people outside “know but by name, perhaps, as a huge measuring

gauge of the national prosperity, is in reality, when translated

into terms of human beings.” She takes her readers through the great

furnaces and down into the interiors of the little houses. She exhibits

the habits, manners, pleasures, and pains of the people. She shows in

one chapter the literature patronised by this population; in another

the people at work; in another the people at play. Again, she will

describe the lives of the children, the lives of the wife and mother,

the influences of sickness, accident, or old age. The slave populations

who built Babylon, or upon which the Athenian oligarchy which called

itself a Democracy essayed philosophy and beauty, remain to-day more

as a myth than as a memory. The poverty populations, upon which are

built to-day England’s unparalleled accumulation, will stand in the

future, with at least a corner of their lives lifted. Such a corner

will interpret to a less harassed age a life once peopling these waste

places, which will then be but ruins and a memory.

Here is a population in many respects more fortunate than its fellows.

Its wages are high; its hours of work are few. Its life, though

exacting and laborious, demanding, perhaps, from human nature more than

human nature can readily give, is more exhilarating than the long hours

in the humid air of the cotton factory, or the perpetual scribbling

in an underground office cellar. It is wrestling continually with the

iron: tearing it out of the ironstone, directing rivers of molten metal

into their proper channels, bending the intractable stone and the huge

forces of heat and affinity to the will of man. And in life also it is

wrestling with huge forces which it but dimly understands, poised on

a perilous pathway from which one slip means utter destruction. “The

path the iron worker daily treads at the edge of the sandy platform,

that narrow path that lies between running streams of fire on the one

hand and a sheer drop on the other, is but an emblem of the Road of

Life along which he must walk. If he should stumble, either actually

or metaphorically, as he goes, he has but a small margin in which to

recover himself.” There is a less defensible side of the people’s life

in the enormous disproportion of attendance at public-houses and at

places of religious worship; the universal prevalence of betting and

gambling; the thoughtlessness and wastefulness which often produces

economic collapse; the ignorance of child-rearing and the laws of

health; the darker side of the artificial restriction of families.

But these become explained rather than condemned by the revelation

of the contrast in the condition of child-bearing in one of these

crowded, tiny homes with the condition in the surroundings of those

who live in another universe. Boys and girls of fourteen or younger

are turned loose to pick their way through the most difficult period

of life, just at the season when the boys and girls of another class

are most completely surrounded with careful and humane influences.

The married woman of the working classes, “handicapped as she is by

physical conditions and drawbacks, with but just bodily strength enough

to encounter the life described,” may be defended against the fluent

criticism of “her more prosperous sisters--whose duties are divided

among several people, and even then not always accomplished with

success.”

So is being heaped up the wealth of the world. Under darkened skies,

and in an existence starved of beauty, these communities of men and

women and children continue their unchanging toil. Is the price being

paid too great for the result attained? The cities have sucked in the

healthy, stored-up energies of rural England; with an overwhelming

percentage to-day of country upbringing. Must they ever thus be

parasitic on another life outside, and this nation divide into

breeding-grounds for the creation of human energies and consuming

centres where these energies are destroyed? The standard of longevity

has pitifully fallen in such places from that prevalent amongst the

agricultural labourers. Workers formerly too old at sixty are now too

old ten years earlier. The men are scourged by specific diseases; the

mortality of the children is appalling. One is apt to be surprised,

says Lady Bell, of the iron workers of Middlesborough, to find how many

of the workmen are more or less ailing in different ways. “But we cease

to be surprised when we realise how apt the conditions are to tell upon

the health even of the strongest, and how many of the men engaged in it

are spent by the time they are fifty. To say that this happens to half

of them is probably a favourable estimate.” Of the women, Lady Bell

brushes aside with a welcome contempt that newspaper and drawing-room

cant which explains that a beneficent Providence has made the working

classes insensible to pains and conditions which other classes would

find intolerable. “It is not only bringing children into the world

that affects the health of the working women. It is an entire delusion

to believe that they are, as a rule, stronger, hardier, healthier,

than the well-to-do. Their life is a continuous toil. They rarely go

outside the doors of their houses, except for Saturday marketing and

Sunday-evening exercise. Recreation, the stimulus of changed garments,

rest during the day, or the other minor comforts which other classes

find so necessary, are not for them. They are mostly convinced that

it is wrong to sit down and read a book at any hour of the day. Their

interests, not unnaturally, turn towards the stimulus of drinking, and

of betting and gambling--two elements which at least can give colour in

a life set in grey.”[3]

Every observer, in this and its hundred similar fellows, can see family

affection, endurance, kindliness, and patience beyond all praise;

a resistance (even in the last extremity) to the triumphant powers

of darkness. What is more difficult to show is any interpretation

of the whole business, an ideal which can illuminate the present

disability, or a vision in which to-day’s efforts will appear

intelligible in the light of an end. Lacking such vision, the verdict

of a nineteenth-century prophet still sounds mournful over much of

industrial England that abides unchanged. “The two most frightful

things I have ever yet seen in my life,” wrote Ruskin, “are the

south-eastern suburbs of Bradford, and the scene from Wakefield Bridge,

by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce

courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical

ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of

a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.”

Yet all England has not yet been roofed over and become subservient to

furnace and factory: and there are other observers who find amongst

the labouring populations, especially amongst those who are compelled

to face danger and to cultivate endurance, an excellence denied to

classes sometimes deemed more fortunate. We may pass from the blackness

and almost uncouth violence of Middlesborough to the jolly fishermen

of the South Coast: to find not the iron trade, but the ocean harvest,

“translated into terms of human beings.” Mr. Reynolds, who has lived

amongst such a fishermen’s colony in a Devonshire watering-place,

can give encouraging testimony to the happiness found there, the

generosity, the standards of the poor; to a definite and remote

civilisation, which gazes out upon the activities of the wealthier

classes above it, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with a little envy,

certainly with no hatred or predatory aim.

Sixty years ago, Disraeli described the rich and poor of England as

two nations. To-day, even national distinctions seem less estranging

than the fissure between the summit and basis of society. “Their

civilisations are not two stages of the same civilisation, but two

civilisations, two traditions which have grown up concurrently.”

And a similar testimony is expressed by many who have intimate and

first-hand knowledge of the life of the hand worker. “The more one

sees of the poor in their own homes,” is the verdict of Miss Loane,

a witness of varied and peculiar experience, “the more one becomes

convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole, can be more

justly described as different from those of the upper classes than

as better or worse.” Most present-day failures in legislation and

social experiment are due to neglect of this fact. It has been assumed

that the artisan is but a stunted or distorted specimen of the small

tradesman; with the same ideals, the same aspirations, the same

limitations: demanding the same moulding towards the fashioning of

a completed product. We are gradually learning that “the people of

England” are as different from, and as unknown to, the classes that

investigate, observe, and record, as the people of China or Peru.

Living amongst us and around us, never becoming articulate, finding

even in their directly elected representatives types remote from their

own, these people grow and flourish and die, with their own codes of

honour, their special beliefs and moralities, their judgment and often

their condemnation of the classes to whom has been given leisure and

material advantage. The line is cut clean by both parties, neither

desiring to occupy the territory of the other. “There is not one high

wall, but two high walls, between the classes and the masses,” declares

this witness; “and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the

higher and more difficult to climb.”

The scene is laid in the huddled cottages of a fisher village of

a South Coast watering-place. The observer penetrates behind the

appearance--to the normal visitor--of a rather squalid fishing suburb,

with swarms of untidy children, and the fishermen, deferential, seeking

patronage of the brisk or bored holiday-maker. He has lived amongst

them and loved them. He has convinced them that he has no desire to do

them good. He comes to their life having “swallowed all the formulas”

with a perhaps exaggerated contempt for the “intellectuals” and the

upholders of the middle class moral code. He is enchanted by the life

he finds there, despite all its discomforts. In the existence of the

poor, in an experience fixed on the hard rind of life, tasting to

the full its salt and bitter flavours, he finds a sincerity and an

adventure denied to the more secure classes above. Always faced by

elemental facts, and demanding a continuous courage for the maintenance

of an unending struggle, these men and women exhibit clean-cut, simple

qualities which vindicate their existence before any absolute standard

of values.

The poor are inclined to suspect and dislike the classes just above

them, the tradesmen. Nowhere is the moral standard more divergent

than between the frugal, laborious, and rather timid assiduities

of the lower middle class on the one hand, and on the other the

reckless, generous, improvident life of the working peoples. To the

“gentleman,” the attitude of the sea-folk is different. He is despised

for his ignorance. He is sometimes regarded as fair game for deceit

or extortion, outside the moral standard of the home community, just

as the coloured peoples are regarded as outside the recognised codes

of civilisation to-day. Yet there is little envy of his riches and

enjoyments, and even a certain admiration, so long as he conforms to

certain accepted laws of kindliness. “‘An ’orrible lie!’ between two

poor people is fair play from a poor man to a wealthier, just as, for

instance, the wealthy man considers himself at liberty to make speeches

full of hypocritical untruth when he is seeking the suffrage of the

free and independent electors, or is trying to teach the poor man how

to make himself more profitable to his employer.” The “gentlemen” are

permitted idleness, luxuriousness, and the freest self-indulgence

without criticism; but anything from them in the nature of meanness

is resented. Haggling, for example, over the hire of a boat, is an

unpardonable offence. The fishermen, on their occasional holidays,

spend their savings lavishly and without question; why should not the

“gentlemen” do the same? “When Tony goes away himself, he pays what is

asked; regrets it afterwards, if at all; and comes home when his money

is done. ‘If a gen’leman,’ he says, ‘can’t afford to pay the rate, what

du ’ee come on the beach to hire a boat for--an’ try to beat a fellow

down? I reckon ’tis only a _sort o’ gen’leman_ as does that!’”

And this, indeed, is only congruous with that changed estimate of

moral values which prevails amongst the poor. Mr. Reynolds, amongst

his Devon fishermen, finds the same general summing-up of moral guilt

or excellence as Miss Loane has found in the mean streets of the great

cities. “Generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth,

love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a

rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required

for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular

estimation.” It is the emotional, indeed, against the intellectual:

to one point of view, life in an incomplete condition of development;

to another, life lived nearer to its central heart. Certainly, in the

combination of Christian and ethical dicta which make up the popular

moral code of modern civilisation, the standard of the poor is nearer

to the Christian standard. One can see how many of the New Testament

assertions have been fashioned from the common democratic mind, as

Socrates and Plato from the aristocratic. Yet religion counts for

little in the scheme of human affairs. There is, indeed, nothing of

a definite denial; the fishing village would be scandalised by any

truculent disproof of Christianity. The children go regularly to Sunday

school; their parents believe in God and in a better time coming. But

the general spirit reveals that widespread and prevailing uncertainty,

and conviction of uncertainty, which to-day is the most dominant

attitude in face of ultimate problems. “Tony” the fisherman pronounces

religion to be “the business of the clergy, who are paid for it, and

of those who take it up as a hobby, including the impertinent persons

who thrust hell-fire tracts upon the fisher-folk. ‘Us can’t ’spect to

know nort about it,’ says Tony. ‘’Tain’t no business o’ ours. May be

as they says; may be not. It don’t matter, that I sees. ’Twill be all

the same in a hundred years’ time, when we’re a-grinning up at the

daisy-roots.’”[4]

It was thought, says Mr. Charles Booth, of a certain experiment in East

London, that as the poor were not going to the churches, they would

attend the Hall of Science. When the Hall of Science was opened, it

was as deserted as the churches. The people wanted neither religion

nor its antidote. All they wanted was to be left alone. All that

the poor want, runs the popular Socialist declaration, is that the

rich shall get off their backs. All that the poor want, would be a

truer aphorism, is to be left alone. They don’t want to be cleaned,

enlightened, inspected, drained. They don’t want regulations of the

hours of their drinking. They assiduously avoid the hospitals and

parish rooms. They don’t want compulsory thrift, elevation to remote

standards of virtue and comfort, irritation into intellectual or moral

progress. In that diverting novel, the _Lord of Latimer Street_, the

peer who owns the neighbourhood, disguised as a lodger in a block of

scandalous tenements in Bermondsey, announces with pride that the

philanthropic landlord is going to pull them down and convert the site

into a recreation-ground for the people. The result is an awakening of

universal fury amongst the residents in these deplorable abodes. Why

can’t he leave them alone? They pay their rents without complaining.

They are not jealous of his enjoyments. They are not endeavouring to

seize his money or despoil his goods. Why can’t he go and spend the

money at Monte Carlo or Newmarket “as the other lords do,” as indeed

they would like to do, if they were lords? Many who are conscious that

the poor want to be left alone are not convinced that they ought to

be left alone. Yet it is doubtful if much personal interference can

be of any practical service. The effect of our meddling is similar to

the effect of the preaching of Western morals in the East. The old

faiths are destroyed. The new faiths are not assimilated. Mr. Reynolds,

certainly, has no doubt on the matter. He is scornful concerning the

boom of Elementary Education. He dislikes the preaching of thrift.

Amongst the poor, “extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often

a singular dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries,

just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men

flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the

spiritual squalor of the lower middle class.” He is willing to make

almost any sacrifice for his friends, if only they can retain their

chief vindicating quality--that insouciance or contempt for life’s

ills and dangers which enables them ever to take the thunder and the

sunshine with a frolic welcome. He finds this greatly characteristic

of his fishermen: he probably would find less manifestation of it in

the difficult darkness of the cities, where Fear, rather than Courage,

is the driving force of common humanity. But, however much Churches

may talk about sin and virtue, “we know well in our hearts,” says this

observer, “that pluck and courage are the great twin virtues, and that

cowardice is the fundamental sin.” He finds amongst the poor not only

the “will to live,” but the “courage to live”; not only endurance of

existence, but exultation in it. They are not afraid of life. They

keep something of the adventure which takes all risks: the resolute

action which cannot even see the risks it is taking. With Stevenson,

they will have nothing to do with the negative virtues. With the

original Christian axiom--as Renan saw it--they reveal that “the heart

of the common people is the great reservoir of the self-devotion and

resignation by which alone the world can be saved.”

II

This “daring and courage,” however, is the prerogative of individuals;

specially equipped, or selected (as it seems) by a life trained from

the earliest years to confront hostile forces in the open air and

sunshine; skilled and heartened by combats with the sea. How far can

such characters be identified in the Crowd: the special product of

modern industrial civilisation? Those who would attempt a diagnosis of

the present must find themselves more and more turning their attention

from the individual to the aggregation: upon the individuals which act

in an aggregation in a manner different from their action as isolated

units of humanity. We have to deal, in fact, not only with the Crowd

casually collected in sudden movement by persons accustomed to live

alone, but with whole peoples which in London and the larger cities are

reared in a Crowd, labour in a Crowd, in a Crowd take their enjoyments,

die in a Crowd, and in a Crowd are buried at the end.

“Has there been a row?” asked a journalist of a gathering at

Westminster summoned by “Suffragettes” and unemployed leaders.

“No,” was the cheerful reply, “but we still ’ave ’opes.” It is a

crowd which “still ’as ’opes” that forms the matrix or solid body

of these agglomerations of humanity whose doings to-day excite some

interest and some perplexity amongst observers of social change. In

the midst are the criminal and the enthusiast, those who are openly

at war with Society, those who are battered by its complications and

troublous demands, those, again, in whom devotion to some ideal cause

burns like a flame at the heart. But these are all encompassed and

embedded in the multitude of the unimportant: gathered from nowhere,

journeying nowhither, swaying and eddying, swept into random groups and

whirlpools, choking for a moment all the city ways, and in a moment

leaving them all silent and deserted; the city Crowd which has seen

little that is encouraging at the present, but “has hopes” of something

wonderful yet to be revealed.

You may see it in the dim morning of every London day, struggling

from the outskirts of the city into tramcars and trains which are

dragging it to its centres of labour: numberless shabby figures

hurrying over the bridges or pouring out of the exits of the central

railway stations. You may discern in places the very pavements torn

apart, and tunnels burrowed in the bowels of the earth, so that the

astonished visitor from afar beholds a perpetual stream of people

emerging from the middle of the street, seemingly manufactured in

some laboratory below. It flows always along the high road of the huge

town in the daytime, like a liquid unprecipitated, or a river in even

stream carrying down dust to the sea. But at any moment an unexpected

incident, tragic or trivial, may change the liquid from clear to

cloudy, or reveal, like the river suddenly banked in obstruction,

the debris and turgid elements which it has hitherto borne along so

buoyantly. A motor omnibus stands still, a cab horse collapses, men’s

voices are raised in altercation, an itinerant agitator demands work

for all, or announces the day of judgment. Immediately a knot appears

in the texture of the wood, a whirlpool in the water. The multitude

of the unimportant gather together, “having hopes.” With incredible

rapidity appear amongst them the criminal, the loafer, the enthusiast;

the stream of busy persons has become transferred into the city Crowd.

There is a note of menace in it, in the mixed clamour which rises from

its humours and angers, like the voice of the sea in gathering storm.

There is the evidence of possibilities of violence in its waywardness,

its caprice, its always incalculable mettle and temper, forming in the

aggregate a personality differing altogether from the personalities of

its component atoms. Satisfied, curious, eager only for laughter and

emotion, it will cheer the police which is scattering it like chaff

and spray, mock openly at those who have come with set purposes, idle

and sprawl on a summer afternoon at Hyde Park or an autumn evening in

Parliament Square. But one feels that the smile might turn suddenly

into fierce snarl or savagery, and that panic and wild fury are

concealed in its recesses, no less than happiness and foolish praise.

But more than the menace, the overwhelming impression is one of

ineptitude; a kind of life grotesque and meaningless. It is in the city

Crowd, where the traits of individual distinction have become merged

in the aggregate, and the impression (from a distance) is of little

white blobs of faces borne upon little black twisted or misshapen

bodies, that the scorn of the philosopher for the mob, the cynic for

humanity, becomes for the first time intelligible. Separate the drops

and particles of it, follow each man homeward through the various

ways of the city labyrinth--at the end you will find Humanity in its

unchangeable and abiding existence: a tiny suburban home with cottage

and garden, a tenement in a cliff of workmen’s dwellings, a “child’s

white face to kiss at night,” a “woman’s smile by candle light.” In

each individual is resistance, courage, aspiration; a persistence which

carries through the daily task with some energy and some enjoyment, and

not entire discredit at the end. But immediately the mass of separate

persons has become welded into the aggregate, this note of distinction

vanishes. Humanity has become the Mob, pitifully ineffective before

the organised resistance of police and military, and almost indecently

naked of discipline or volition in the comparison; gaping open-mouthed,

jeering at devotions which it cannot understand, like some uncouth

monster which can be cajoled and flattered into imprisonment or

ignoble action; like the Crowd which in all ages has rejoiced, one day

at the crowning, the next at the crucifixion, of its King.

Why is it that this writing down of values takes place when mankind is

thus collected into aggregations: that the spirit of the mob is so much

less reputable than the spirit of its separate components? In part,

perhaps, because the trivial and vacant elements are uppermost amongst

a city race whose aspirations and purposes are independent of organised

collective energies and aims. They have gathered for recreation, to be

amused; for curiosity, to be surprised; for companionship, in a region

where night has its empire, not without its terrors, just beyond the

boundaries of their limited experience. The tragedy of common life

is apparent, a modern philosopher has declared, not where poverty is

the heritage of all but the few, or because existence offers at best

a struggle uncertain and austere; but whenever that life is closed

within limited horizons, and moved by no ideal springs. The visionary

who cherishes the hope of a renovated society in which all shall be

satisfied, the woman who flings herself into prison in the expectation

that through her sacrifice the freedom of women will be attained, is a

figure to the outward eye, indistinguishable in its obscurity from the

multitude around who jeer and wonder and applaud. But these visionaries

and enthusiasts possess a secret denied to their fellows, which

gives their little lives a significance absent from the encompassing

multitude; in the sense of consecration to a purpose, a meaning, and a

goal.

Meantime that spirit abides but in the few; and the Crowd remains,

to-day as yesterday, an instrument which the strong man has always used

and always despised in the using. The new features of it come from the

change that has gathered men from the countryside and the tiny town and

hurried them into the streets of an immense city; henceforth always to

move in a company, each tied as with a chain to his fellows, never to

stand alone. In such a transformation there would seem some danger of

the normal life of man becoming the life of the Crowd, with features

intensified and distorted when collected in tumult or demonstration. We

seem to see in the experience of a generation an increasing tendency

thus to merge the individual in the mass, more frequent and unfailing

response to the demand for agitation, which, in fact, is an excuse for

absurdity or violence. Man, always seeking to escape from himself,

found various channels of egress; in drink, in religious emotion, in

political energy. He has now found that he can escape from himself by

merely linking up with others like himself to become units in a Crowd.

The secret is perhaps most clearly apprehended in America, where the

Crowd consciousness is excited as deliberately as the religious emotion

of a revivalist meeting; and after due preparation an aggregate of

human beings suddenly breaks into carefully fermented lunacy. So that

selected delegates of the political parties--men, being selected, it

would seem, for special calculation, intelligence, and prudence--will

shout at Denver or Chicago meaningless cacophinations for an hour and

a half on end, march round and round the hall playing instruments

and singing discordant songs, or suddenly take off their coats, or

stand on their heads, or beat each other with bits of board. It is the

experience of the flagellants and pilgrims of medieval times, with

hysteria no longer left to chance, but organised as a fine art. In our

own “mafficking,” in the tearing to pieces of the City Volunteers, in

unemployed demonstrations, even in a spectacle so diverting and yet

so foreboding as the “sieges of St. Stephen’s” by the “Suffragettes,”

there are traces of similar if less exaggerated emotion: as man,

communicating the infection of the Crowd consciousness to his

fellow-men, suddenly abandons his individual volitions and restraints,

and loses himself in the volition of the Crowd. A note of hysteria may

seem to be an inevitable accompaniment of a city life so divorced from

the earth’s ancient tranquillity as never to appear entirely sane.

And the future of the city populations, ever “speeded up” by more

insistent bustles and noises and nervous explosions, takes upon itself,

in its normal activities, something hitherto abnormal to humanity.

We shall probably encounter more appeals to the multiplied power

of assembly, more determination to find a short cut in lawlessness

towards attainment, more passive and active resistance in attempts

at government by violence rather than government by reason. Others,

besides the unemployed or the women, will make this visible protest

before all men by exhibition of their willingness to face ridicule,

discomfort, physical injury, and even martyrdom in their ardour for the

triumph of their cause. In a vision across the centuries, with time

foreshortened, even material things take upon themselves the quality of

motion: and the cities may be seen rising and falling, in growth, in

triumph, and decay, like the fire that flares and in a moment fades.

In similar vision the streets of those cities are always filled with

this tumultuous and curious Crowd: restless, leaderless, astonished

at itself and at the world, finding little intelligible either in the

universe without or the universe within. Before which assembly in

perpetual session there pass the phantom figures of those who appeal

for its favour and its judgment: at first to a Crowd contemptuous,

then to a Crowd acquiescent and astonished, ultimately to a Crowd

applauding: themselves members of it, yet standing always separate and

apart; because they alone are working towards an end.

The definite excitement, and the deflection of that excitement into

certain prepared channels, seems likely to become one of the arts of

the political game. It is only in the last few months that those who

have been studying the latest methods of electioneering have elaborated

a new system of appeal to a new race of men. The old discussion by

argument, commonplace posters, and literature, even the cheery riotings

of rival mobs, is already voted as a thing stale and outworn. Instead,

we are to see an effort to capture, not individuals as individuals,

but the Crowd as a Crowd. It is the first noteworthy recognition in

politics that this creature has a personality--a personality altogether

different from the personalities of its independent members. The first

successful start was effected in the spring of 1908 in the Crowd, at

its very centre and crown, in a bye-election in the heart of London.

A particular segment of its grey streets, in no way different from

its half-century of neighbours, had been chalked round with entirely

artificial boundaries, and labelled the Parliamentary constituency

of Peckham. And it was in this forbidding and desolate neighbourhood

that the new electioneering set itself the high test of hypnotising,

not each single Imperial citizen who happened to live in Peckham, but

Peckham itself--the very heart of it--the Peckham Crowd.

The report of this novel and entertaining crusade soon spread from

Peckham to its neighbours: what would appeal to Peckham would also

appeal to them; and every evening an appreciable percentage of the

four millions which lie around Peckham, and in whose streets Peckham

is embedded, poured into the centre of disturbance. There they soon

fell under the spell so sedulously prepared for them. They surged up

and down the narrow ways, chaffing each other, cheering the candidates,

keen, alert, glad each to find himself in the heart of a London Crowd.

Any man or woman upon whom fell the itch of speech secured a box,

mounted on it, held forth to those who would listen, on teetotalism,

or vaccination, or the wickedness of the Government, or the variable

price of beer. And the Crowd listened, as it may be seen listening to

any distorted nonsense in the public parks on Sunday afternoons: with

an aspect of intense seriousness, the respect which the inarticulate

Englishman instinctively feels for the voluble. Party feeling was

supposed to run high, the newspapers on each side called shrilly for

the defeat of plunderers and miscreants: “‘Thou shalt not steal,’

there is no time limit to that,” in huge letters stretched across the

street, challenged the cries from Liberal placards that unless the

people strangled the drink monopoly they would be strangled by it.

Yet it seemed that the great mass of this astonishing multitude--the

good-tempered, short-sighted, happy-go-lucky London citizen--regarded

all such fiery invective with fortitude, if not with indifference.

He was out for fun: to hear a little politics, though not too much;

speakers who attempted argument or quotation were speedily deserted;

what he liked was noisy rhetoric and denunciation. “Give it ’em hot!”

was his favourite advice to any orator of either colour. He delighted

in quick repartee, the ready scoring off an interrupter, the good

telling of some story with a very obvious point at the end. He liked

to see the coal-carts wading through the crowded streets, with the

big and little sacks of coal; and the so-called procession of the

unemployed from Woolwich, actual, tangible figures, visible before his

very eyes; and the huge painted donkey, half as high again as himself,

bearing the legend, “My brother is going to vote for Gautrey” (the

Government candidate); and the Suffragettes there in person, the very

women (some of them agreeable to look at) who have been carried out

of Parliament by the police, and done their “time” in Holloway Gaol.

He sought, above all, a new sensation: cheering, now a man who, from

the summit of a soap-box proclaimed the approaching end of the world;

now “Mr. Hunnable,” as he surmised that in the coming University boat

race both Oxford and Cambridge would be found among the first three;

now a sad-faced woman, whose contribution to the discussion consisted

in ringing a huge dinner-bell for half-an-hour without stopping; whose

thoughts, like the thoughts of the Turk who followed Anacharsis Clootz

in the French Convention, “remain conjectural to this hour.”

Upon such material clever men set themselves to work with commendable

zeal: knowing that the Crowd may be stampeded by constant repetition

of the same thing, by pictorial illustration from which it cannot

escape, and by the excitement of the appeal flashed upon it seemingly

from a variety of different sources that it should advance along a

particular road. So a “Coal Consumers’ Defence League” asserted, with

monotonous insistence, that coal would rise in price if the Government

candidate were elected; and attained the hypnotic success which

always recompenses a monotonous insistence sufficiently prolonged.

And the “Brewery Debenture Shareholders’ League” announced the

approaching misery of the widow and the orphan. And long lines of

street bookmakers, in tall white hats and genial, vacant, or bibulous

faces, inquired of the passing mob why they should not be allowed to

bet in the streets if they wished. And every public-house became a

Tory committee room, with all its windows plastered with Tory bills

and cartoons, and the evidence of a brisk trade and many conversions

within its walls. Outside the Metropolitan Gasworks at the dinner-hour,

and in Peckham High Street after nightfall, a cloud of mingled,

confused oratory and invective rose to the unconscious stars; as six

or seven meetings, each within easy earshot of each other, shouted

in hoarse accents for women’s votes or cheaper food or the rights of

the publican. Wagon-loads of pictorial illustration wedged their way

through the coagulated masses of South London, now lit with fierce

glare of torches, now disguised as an illuminated fire-engine pumping

truth upon the Liberal mendacities; now loaded with slum children,

looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly happy and healthy, but

dolorously labelled “Victims of the Public-house Monopoly.” Hysteria,

as in all such deliriums, was never far away; women shrieked aloud

at meetings, and had to be removed; madness fell upon a boy of

twelve, and he stood on the top of a barrel, talking Tariff Reform.

The extraordinary good humour, the extraordinary stupidity, and the

extraordinary latent forces, so concealed as to be unknown even

to themselves, in these shabby, cheery, inefficient multitudes of

bewildered and contented men and women, were the dominant impressions

of this gigantic entertainment.

Do they care? Yes, undoubtedly, with, beneath all the love of fun and

frolic, a really pathetic desire to know the truth: to understand what

actually lies behind these fluent orations and facile statistics, and

all the fury of illustration and argument which descended upon their

inconspicuous abodes. Will they ever know? That is an unanswerable

query. There are the knots and gatherings of convinced politicians, who

will cheer for “Chamberlain” or denounce Protection, just as there are

the knots and gatherings of convinced religious adherents, crystallised

out of the huge aggregation of indifference, who worship in various

forms a God who is unknown to the general. But the physical conditions

of the city life are so novel to them, the bustle and violence of it

all so insistent, the effect of the mechanical labour, the little

leisure, mostly consumed in transit, the grey, similar streets of tiny

houses so desolating, that it is hard to stimulate a high political,

social, or religious aspiration. They will continue, for the most

part, tacking from side to side in blind, uncertain fashion, firmly

convinced at one moment that they have solved the secret, firmly

convinced a few months afterwards that they have been mistaken. They

will continue their hurried, uncertain lives with indomitable patience,

courage, and hope always for “better times.” They will be deluded, and

after a time they will recognise their delusion, and after a further

time be as readily deluded again. They will trust individuals with a

fine generosity. They still believe that things are true because they

see them in the newspapers. They exhibit an extraordinary absence of

envy of those who are better off than themselves, an extraordinary

patience in enduring unendurable things. The Crowd never revolts until

the conditions have already become intolerable. It never complains

unless its wrongs and disabilities have become themselves clamorous

for redress; unless, if it ceased, the very stones would cry out. It

is always being betrayed, cajoled, deceived, exploited: now stimulated

to fury in warfares carefully engineered by the wealthier classes, in

which it has no interest: now directed from those who are exploiting

it into anger against “the foreigner,” who is generally a crowd of

similar persons being similarly inflamed against itself. It throws up

occasional leaders who disappear from its horizon into other universes,

from which come only rumours of justification or betrayal. It is being

perpetually excited by words and phrases which mean little, which it

repeats with an air of owlish wisdom: concerning the satisfactions

of Imperial citizenship or the need for new ships, or the advantages

of municipal reform. So it continues its patient subterranean life,

staggering forward through time, bearing on its shoulders the vast

edifice of modern industry: labouring, not without pride and pleasure,

for advantage that other people shall enjoy.

And it possesses its own enjoyments also, and these not only those of

which the moralist would disapprove: a too exuberant thirst for drink,

or a passionate desire to obtain reward without labour. Charles Lamb

would “often shed tears in the Strand for fulness of joy at so much

life.” His joy might be more keenly excited to-day, upon the days when

the City crowd is out for a real holiday: something more agreeable than

the Election carnival, and with no smudge of moral improvement on it.

You may see it in the Saturday football crowds in all the manufacturing

cities: see it in concentrated form when a selection of all the

Saturday football crowds has poured into London for the “final contest”

at the Crystal Palace for the “Cup,” which is the goal of all earthly

ambition. All the long night overcrowded trains have been hurrying

southward along the great trunk lines, and discharging unlimited

cargoes of Lancashire and Yorkshire artisans in the grey hours of early

morning. They sweep through the streets of the Metropolis, boisterous,

triumphant. They blink round historic monuments, Westminster Abbey, St.

Paul’s Cathedral. They all wear grey cloth caps, they are all decorated

with coloured favours; they are all small men, with good-natured

undistinguished faces. To an Oriental visitor they would probably all

appear exactly alike, an endless reproduction of the same essential

type. In the afternoon the bulk of them gather at the Crystal Palace,

to see their carefully labelled representatives compete for the highest

prize in the contest between various professional teams for the

football championship. They encourage these hired persons with shrill

cries. They follow the various fortunes of the game with approval

or discontent. At the end one half is kindled to elation, the other

sunk in disappointment. A crowd of adult English citizens assembles

round that arena, in number some five times as great as the total Boer

commandoes which surrendered after the Peace of Vereeniging, which

had defended a country half the size of Europe against all the armies

of the British Empire. And the irresistible query is suggested by

the sight of that congestion of grey, small people with their facile

excitements and their little white faces inflamed by this artificial

interest, whether, in a day of trial, similar resources could be drawn

from them, of tenacity, courage, and an unwearying devotion to an

impersonal ideal. “_If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have

wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the

land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt

thou do in the swelling of Jordan?_”

No one can question the revolution which has overtaken the industrial

centres in the last two generations of their growth. Reading the

records of the “hungry forties” in the life of the Northern cities is

like passing through a series of evil dreams. Cellars have vanished

into homes, wages have risen, hours of labour diminished, temperance

and thrift increased, manners improved. The new civilisation of the

Crowd has become possible, with some capacity of endurance, instead

of (as before) an offence which was rank and smelling to heaven.

But this life having been created and fixed in its development, the

curious observer is immediately confronted with the inquiry: what

of its future? Are the main lines set us at the present, and later

development confined to variations in length and direction along these

lines? In such a case progress will mean a further repetition of the

type: two cotton factories where there is now one; five thousand small,

grey-capped men where there are now three; perhaps, in some remote

millennium, fourteen days of boisterous delight at Blackpool where now

are only seven. A race can thus be discerned in the future, small,

wiry, incredibly nimble and agile in splicing thread or adjusting

machinery, earning high wages in the factories, slowly advancing (one

may justly hope) in intelligence and sobriety, and the qualities which

go to make the good citizen. These may at the last limit their hours

of labour everywhere to the ideal of an eight hours day; everywhere

raise their remuneration to a satisfactory minimum wage; everywhere

find provision for insecurity, unemployment, old age. The “Crowd”

is then complete. The City civilisation is established. Progress

pauses--exhausted, satisfied. Man is made.

John Stuart Mill in early manhood was troubled with an inquiry that

nearly compelled him to abandon the effort of reform. Suppose all the

old wrongs righted, and the whole work of liberation accomplished, what

then? He saw a vision of mankind in a kind of infinite boredom, an

everlasting end of the world. The desolation of such a vision was only

removed by study of the poems of Wordsworth. He found fresh inspiration

for the work of progress in the vision of mankind, at last tranquil

and satisfied, occupying its leisure in reading Wordsworth’s poetry.

The modern city crowd would allow scant tolerance to such visions as

these. They demand excitement, adventure: the vision of that physical

activity and control which is denied to themselves. To make two blades

of grass grow where one grew before is the ideal of the lower, physical

energies. To establish two football contests where only one existed

is the translation of it into terms of the soul. A young workman from

Sheffield, confronted with the prospect of certain and speedy death,

journeys to London by the midnight train to see the final Cup Tie.

On his return he takes to his bed. “In his last moments he asked

his mother to so place the Wednesday colours that he might see them,

exclaiming, ‘I am glad I have lived to see good old Wednesday win the

Cup.’” And so he died.

This reaching out of the crowd from its own drab life into the

adventurous and coloured world of “make-believe” is not peculiar to

these islands. Pallid young men collect outside the hotels in Madrid or

Seville, where the bull-fighters are established before the contests,

feeling a kind of satisfaction in the physical proximity to the heroes

of their devotion; just as pallid young men collect outside the hotels

in the English cities, happy in the conviction that only a thin wall of

brick and stone separates them from those whom they contemplate with

a kind of worship. In America, always more determined and fearless

in pushing the new development to a logical conclusion, we find the

actual schools of training for the baseball player, similar to the

schools of the gladiators, whose ruins still survive in Pompeii and

old Roman cities. Is this, after all, an artificial product of a time

of tranquillity? Is its nature ephemeral? And will mankind ever again

in these countries find physical exhaustion in the life of the fields,

and mental excitement in the business of war and conquest? No one

can answer. Certainly even that political activity in England, which

is largely a great game, played with good humour and the element of

uncertainty which gives spice to all adventure, for the majority does

not count at all in comparison with these more obvious satisfactions.

And of any other competitive attraction there is no trace at all.

The intellectual profess contempt or despair. The “sporting” element

exult in enthusiasm. The wisest at least will accept the fact, without

too great exaggeration of praise or blame. For this is Democracy;

victorious; unashamed.

The country has furnished these citizens, or their immediate ancestors.

But now the country has been bled “white as veal.” The cities will be

compelled in the future to trust to inbreeding; to rear, as best they

may, in their own labyrinths children who will mate with children of

a similar upbringing. What will be the effect of such inbreeding, in

five generations, or in ten? There can be no certain reply. Perhaps the

cities themselves will not last long enough to ever furnish a certain

reply. But the carefullest observers can already note some lines of

definite change. Mr. Bray in his _Town Child_ has indicated some of

them. He is inclined to take a gloomy vision of the future.

Southey, seeing their variable beginnings, proclaimed that cities were

the “graveyards of modern civilisation.” Wordsworth found there the

“soul of beauty and enduring life,” amid the press “of self-destroying

transitory things” diffused but “through meagre lines and colours.” A

long tradition, from Rousseau to Tolstoy, has denounced the growing

multiplication of the town. Mr. Bray endeavours to see the town through

the mind of the growing child: the child, not of the city splendour,

but of the city squalor; pent up within the elements there provided

for the perceptive material of the developing mind. He finds the

keynote of it all in its self-destruction and its transitoriness. The

new forms of sickness from which the body suffers are due “to the more

malignant because more concentrated contagion of man.” But it is mind

sickness which he most dreads; in an environment where little makes

for silence, permanence, or repose; where “all things, whether animate

or inanimate, change and change ceaselessly; they seem to emerge from

the nowhere without rhyme or reason, for a brief space form a portion

of the child’s universe, and then, without rhyme or reason, pass out

into the nowhere again.” Excitement, noise, and a kind of forlorn and

desperate ugliness are the spirits watching round the cradle of too

many children of the town; whose work, when fully accomplished, has

created the less reputable characteristics of the city crowd. “The

human element, a very incarnation of the spirit of unrest, encourages

a temperament, shallow and without reserve, which passes in rapid

alternation from moods of torpor to moods of effervescent vivacity,

and nurtures a people eager for change and yet discontented with all

that change brings; impatient of the old, but none the less intolerant

of the new.” “Isn’t the noise of the machines awful?” was the question

put to a young factory worker. “Yes,” he replied, “not so much when

they are going on as when they stop.” The City-bred Race are going to

find the noise “awful” when it “stops.” Already in America one can

detect a kind of disease of activity, in a people to whom “business”

has become a necessary part of life. The general effect is of children

of overstrung nerves, restless and aimless, now taking up a book, now

a plaything, now roaming round the room in uncertain uneasiness. The

city-bred people, we are confidently informed, will never go “back to

the land.” In part this may mean that they will never return to long

hours of hopeless drudgery for shameful wage. In part it may point to

a certain condition of “nerves” excited by city upbringing: a real

disease of the soul. Silence, solitariness, open spaces under a wide

sky, appear thus intolerable to a people never quite content but in the

shouts, the leagues of lights, and the roaring of the wheels. And the

scattering and separation of man from man in a region still untamed

and given to large mysterious forces, the wind and weather under huge

spaces of the night, produces in a race thus reared something of the

impression of children left alone in the dark.

Life thus developing, in lack of “the elements of permanence, of

significance, of idealistic imaginings,” demands some special conscious

and deliberate effort to supply those elements. The main interest of

the State (immortal and conservative) is to preserve its own existence.

This preservation is impossible unless it can guarantee to the next

generation a healthy start; physical and mental efficiency, with the

best moral training at its disposal, to those who will be the citizens

of the future. Changes which might guarantee such preservation are

denounced to-day as involving a weakening or destruction of the family.

To many observers it is just the absence of such changes which are

ensuring the weaknesses and destruction of the family. In the present

confusion, on the other hand, infantile mortality shows no decrease

in half a century, and the birth-rate steadily declines; on the other

hand, where the mere pressure of animal and physical necessity has

become too burdensome, the family is breaking to pieces under the

strain.

“Few people,” rightly says Mr. Bray, “seem to realise how nearly the

lives of the poor reach the limits of human endurance.” He believes

that “the affections of the parents would increase, and the home duties

be performed with greater success and animation,” if “with a vigour

less impaired by intolerable toil.” He draws an arresting contrast

between the long mechanical drudgery of the life of wife and mother in

a poor family, and the life of a mother in those decent middle class

homes where perhaps the family tie is strongest to-day; not the rich

and extravagant, but those who can afford some space and some leisure

and the luxury of a servant. “The ties of family are stronger among the

servant-keeping class than among the poorer class,” is his conclusion,

“and they are stronger because the stress of physical toil is weaker,

and the pains of parenthood less insistent.”

He utters grave warning to those well-meaning philanthropists who, in

the name of Family Sanctity, are opposing the reforms which Social

Reformers most ardently desire. “If it be a question of providing work

for the unemployed, meals for the children, pensions for the old; if

it be a matter of municipal trams, municipal wash-houses, municipal

dwellings, in every instance,” he protests, “they raise the cry that

the independence of the family is threatened, and exhort their friends

to fight the measure to the death. Is it surprising that the word

‘Family’ has come to stink in the nostrils of those who are striving to

improve the conditions of the poor? Is it any cause for wonder if they

begin to attack the Family, and inquire what manner of monster that is

which can only be preserved by bringing as offerings to its den hungry

children and suffering mothers?” “The sanctity of the family,” he

boldly affirms, “is menaced at the present time by the austerity of the

thoughtful rather than by the sentimentality of the thoughtless.”[5]

However this may be, the Crowd consciousness and the city upbringing

must of necessity act as a disintegrating force, tearing the family

into pieces. If the Crowd condition, which, in part, is to supplement

it, may be made a dignified and noble thing, there need be less regret

over a change which, desirable or otherwise, would appear to be

inevitable. The communal midday meal, for example, which the school

children of the cities are coming to partake of altogether, should be

something better than a squalid scramble for physical sustenance in

soup or suet. The communal recreation, one would hope, may develop in

something more desirable than the aimless activities of the Hampstead

Heath bank holiday. The communal politics should be something more

restrained than the stampeded “Swing of the Pendulum,” first against

one party in power, then against the other. The communal intellect

might be directed towards other and more reputable ends than the

devising of the last lines of “Limericks,” or the search for true

“tips” of horses, in the effort after unearned monetary gain. And

the spirit of a collective mind, “the spirit of the hive,” residing

in the various industrial cities, may find expression and a conscious

revelation of itself, in something more beautiful and also more

intelligible than the chaotic squalor of uniformly mean streets and

buildings which make up the centres of industrial England.

Certainly, unless the life of the Crowd can be redeemed, all other

redemption is vain. Here is the battle-ground for the future of a race

and national character. “Democracy,” says Canon Barnett, the wisest of

all living social reformers, “is now established. The working classes

have the largest share in the government of the nation, and on them its

progress depends.” They possess, in his verdict, “the strenuousness

and modesty which comes by contact with hardship, and the sympathy

which comes by daily contact with suffering. They, as a class, are more

unaffected, more generous, more capable of sacrifice, than members of

other classes. They have solid sense and are good men of business, but

they cannot be said to have the wide outlook which takes in a unity in

which all classes are included. They are indifferent to knowledge and

to beauty, so they do not recognise proportion in things, and their

field of pleasure is very restricted between sentiment and comfort.”

“They suffer, as the great German socialist said, from ‘wantlessness.’

They prefer honest mediocrity to honest intellect, and would still

vote for W. H. Smith rather than John Stuart Mill. Their actions are

generous, but their philosophy of life is often of that shallow sort

which says, ‘Does Job serve God for naught?’ and they are often,

therefore, to be captured by ‘a policy of blood and iron’: they are

easily taken by popular cries; they are fickle and easily made ‘the

puppets of Banks and Stock Exchanges.’ They are sympathetic, but for

want of knowledge their suspicions are soon roused, and they soon

distrust their leaders.” Yet his final conclusion is that “the working

class is the hope of the nation, and their moral qualities justify the

hope.”[6]

III

Or, again, we may attempt to understand a particular class of society

from knowledge of a typical member of it: from one life, to judge all.

The difficulty in the case of the multitude is due to the fact that any

person who has arisen into public fame possesses, from the very fact

of such attainment, qualities which to the many are denied. The new

Labour members in the House of Commons are often supposed to reveal the

“working man” at last arrived: to be able to furnish a kind of selected

sample of the English industrial populations. They may perhaps stand

for the working man in opinion. The majority of them are certainly

remote from him in characteristic. Many are Scotsmen; and there is no

deeper gulf than that which yawns between the Scotch and the English

proletariat. They are mostly men of laborious habits, teetotalers,

of intellectual interests, with a belief in the reasonableness of

mankind. The English working man is not a teetotaler, has little

respect for intellectual interests, and does not in the least degree

trouble himself about the reasonableness of mankind. He is much more

allied in temperament and disposition to some of the occupants of

the Conservative back benches, whose life, in its bodily exercises,

enjoyment of eating and drinking, and excitement of “sport,” he would

himself undoubtedly pursue with extreme relish if similar opportunities

were offered him. Figures like Mr. Snowden, with his passionate hunger

for reform, like Mr. Henderson, with his preaching of religious and

ethical ideals in Wesleyan Chapels, like Mr. George Barnes or Mr.

Jowett, with their almost pathetic appeals to rational argument in the

belief that reason directs the affairs of the world, are figures in

whose disinterested service and devotion to the work of improvement any

class might be proud. But in their excellences as in their defects they

stand sharply distinct from the excellences and defects of the average

English artisan. They care for things he cares nothing for: he cares

for things which seem to them trivial and childish. In Mr. Grayson,

again, a certain type has become articulate; the “Clarionette” with red

tie, flannel shirt, and bicycle, who has been moved to continuous anger

by the vision of trampled women and starving children in the cities of

poverty. Such men see the world transfigured in the light of a great

crusade. They are convinced that by demonstration and violence to-day,

or (at latest) to-morrow, “the people” will rise in their millions

and their might, pluck down the oppressors who are “sucking their

blood,” and inaugurate the golden age of the Socialistic millennium.

But meantime the “people” are thinking of almost everything but the

Socialistic millennium. They are thinking how to get steady work; of

the iniquities of the “foreigner”; of the possibility or desirability

of war, now with the Transvaal, now with Germany. They are thinking

which horse is going to win in some particular race, or which football

eleven will attain supremacy in some particular league. They are

thinking that wife or child is ill or happy, of entertainment, of

the pleasure in reminiscence of one past holiday or the pleasure in

anticipation of another. They are thinking (in a word) of all the

variegated and complex joys and sorrows which make up the common lot of

humanity.

One figure, however, in this interesting and excellent party does

directly exhibit the character of a particular class. In Mr. “Will

Crooks”--a kind of East End superman--the proletariat of London has

found voice. He is the East End with all its qualities--with all its

qualities intensified, but with the same proportion kept between

them. It is true Mr. Crooks is a teetotaler, and never puts a penny

on a horse: and that, in part, distinguishes him from an industrial

population which finds the necessary relief from a grey existence

in the excitement of the possibility of gain, or in the convivial

glass of an evening. He would probably affirm that in the excitement

and conviviality of Parliament and a political career he finds

sufficient substitute for such milder intoxicants. But reading him

you are reading the East End working man, and learning much that was

before inexplicable: why the East End exists, and why it continues to

exist: why no sudden flame of violence consumes these crowded streets

and tenements: of its cheerfulness, its energy, its humour, its

unquenchable patience. You are learning also some of its weaknesses:

its willingness to think well of others, its readiness to make

allowances and to forgive--so fatal to the austere work of Government;

its reckless, whole-hearted charity, which is the despair of the

Provident Visitor and the Charity Organisation Society; its perpetual

search for short cuts, and the summary severing of the knot of old

problems.

He stands to-day born of these people and part of them--the very child

of the crowd. Most of his life has been spent there. He has plumbed

the height and depth of human experience in this smoky and bewildering

universe. As a child he has known hunger and the unsatisfied demand for

bread. He has been an inmate of the workhouse, and the ruler of it; a

forlorn waif in a Barrack School with unforgettable memories of its

polished impersonal cruelty; and again the great man who comes down as

visitor to the Barrack School of a later generation. He has tramped its

streets in the vain search for work, and been glad to accept twopence

from a friend. He has travelled on the upper half of a boot, tied on to

the foot with string; and he has organised schemes for the unemployed

which have been stimulated by that adventure into hell. He has

obtained education as so many quick and intelligent East End boys are

still obtaining it: from the riotous revel of the “penny dreadful,”

through the _British Workman_, and the _Sunday at Home_, and similar

literature which good people scatter gratuitously amongst the working

classes; to the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and Shakespeare “Recitations,”

and those social appeals of John Ruskin which have become the sacred

writings of the new Labour revival. He hates charity organisation,

the adventurous slum chronicler, officialdom, and institutions, just

as the poor hate them to-day. He loves a joke, born of extravagance

and a kind of boisterous humour, the salt which keeps this starved

life from putrefaction. He understands his own people, amongst whom he

has lived all his days. He is a living example--one of the few living

examples--which offer hope that Democracy may still become a real thing.

I have seen “Will Crooks” addressing an open-air meeting outside the

Arsenal Gates at Woolwich, in a wonderful bye-election which startled

many political pundits with a vision of new things. It was the working

man of London for a moment self-conscious: hearing itself for the first

time speak. Picture an enormous sea of drab persons, a multitude of

cloth caps and shapeless clothing, and little white faces. On a kind

of rock, standing out of the sea--a humble carrier’s cart--a short man

with a black beard and long arm is addressing this great crowd. To many

observers the vision is a vision of foreboding; the proletariat rising

at last in the mere might of its incalculable numbers, to demand its

share of life’s good things, and brutally trample down all opposition.

What is he saying to them? He is playing on this vast gathering as on

an instrument of music, and he is making it discourse most excellent

harmonies. At one moment he is stringing together the stories it

delights in, and you can see the ripple of laughter running amongst

the listeners like the wind through the cornfields. He is recounting

the difficulties of the Imperialist Missionary down in Poplar: to the

first woman: “Don’t you know you belong to an Empire on which the sun

never sets?” And the reply: “Wot’s the good of talkin’ like that? Why,

the sun never rises on our court.” To the second: “You’ve got to learn

to make sacrifices for the Empire.”--“Wot’s the good of talkin’ about

sacrifices when we can’t make both ends meet as it is? Both ends meet!

We think we’re lucky if we get one end meat and the other end bread.”

To a third: “If you don’t agree, you’re Little Englanders.”--“If I’m to

pay another twopence a pound for meat, my children will soon be Little

Englanders!”

Then in a moment he will change the note, and now he is telling them of

a day in the life of the unemployed: the monotonous search for work,

the kindness or insult at each application, the alternation of revolt

and wretchedness, fury and apathy, the unwillingness to face the wife

again in the evening with nothing with bad news. They all know it, they

have mostly been through it; it is a shadow which hangs over them all.

And a strange, impressive hush falls over the vast assembly, and men

cough or rub their eyes, or turn away from each other’s faces. “Give

’em a chance,” he will suddenly cry, with uplifted arm, and the tension

thus released finds relief in thunderous volleys of applause.

Such is “Will Crooks” in his own home, addressing his own people,

a natural orator commanding to the full the humour and pathos of

work-a-day life, whose influence is directed towards wholesome things,

with never an unworthy appeal. And such, in its essential soundness,

in its perplexity before complicated issues, in its acceptance of

all established things, even in its distrust of itself, its almost

exaggerated willingness to receive guidance from others, is the

million-peopled constituency who through this man has found voice--the

Multitude which forms the people of England.

The spread of “Socialism” amongst these, the voters who can decide

elections, has been causing anxiety to many observers, especially to

those who find a difficulty in discovering what function they would be

called upon to fulfil in the Socialistic State. “Socialism,” however,

up to the present, has been mainly a movement amongst the intellectuals

and the Middle Classes: almost the male members of a type whose

female representatives find the cause necessary to their energies and

devotions in the agitation for women’s vote. The “Socialists” who

assail each other so fiercely in queer, violent little newspapers, the

writers of tracts, pamphlets, and appeals, the young men and women at

the Universities who a generation ago would all have called themselves

“Radicals,” and now all call themselves “Socialists,” are principally

drawn from that “intellectual proletariat” which to-day is finding a

growing gulf between possibility and desire. The stiff pictures of

reconstructed worlds--a Bellamy’s “Utopia,” a Morris’s “Nowhere”--offer

little attraction to the ordinary working man; whose idea of a Utopia

is something far removed from these scenes of severe toil and voluntary

or compulsory virtue. Mr. Wells has described, in brilliant, bitter

sentences, the kind of Socialism thus propagated, and the classes to

which it appeals. Academic, uncompromising Marxian Socialism appears

as “the dusky largeness of a great meeting at the Queen’s Hall,” with

the back of Mr. Hyndman’s head moving quickly, and the place “thick

but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people,” and in the

chair “Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict,

a blonde lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge,

about which the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken.”

The impression was of “the gathering of village trades-people about the

lady patroness. And at the end of the proceedings, after the red flag

had been waved, after the ‘Red Flag’ had been sung by the choir and

damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to the

Countess, in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.”

And the Fabian Society, the laboratory in which intellectual Socialism

is matured, with whose policy Mr. Wells is, on the whole, in agreement,

appears to him incarnate in a “small, active, unpretending figure with

the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip, the glasses,

the slightly lisping, insinuating voice”; with a following of “Webbites

to caricature Webb” with excessive bureaucratic notions, and a belief

that everything can be done without any one wishing to do it; the

disciple “who dreams of the most foxy and wonderful digging by means

of box-lids, table-spoons, dish-covers--anything but spades designed

and made for the jobs in hand--just as he dreams of an extensive

expropriation of landlords by a Legislature that includes the present

unreformed House of Lords.”[7]

In face of such realities as these--the few with their enthusiasm for

a new gospel or with ingenious devices for effecting the millennium by

back-door entrances, the many with their occasional gusts of interest,

their normal lassitude and contempt for those who disprove God or

attack Society--the observer is often discouraged in the work of

reform. “Socialists,” says one of their most brilliant younger writers,

“cannot look with full confidence upon the English electorate. It is

hardly disputable that millions of electors in the greater cities have

reached a point of personal decadence--physical, mental, and moral--to

which no continental country furnishes a parallel on any comparable

scale. Time is steadily multiplying these millions; and for English

Socialism there is therefore a race against Time which it is very

likely not to win.”[8] Mr. Ensor’s testimony is in part endorsed by the

very remarkable evidence of various popular elections; that “Socialism”

amongst the working peoples propagates and triumphs in times of plenty,

withers up and vanishes in times of depression. This is exactly the

reverse of the accepted belief, which thought that the poor are stung

into Socialism by suffering, as poets are stung into poetry by wrong.

Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, the assertion is probably true that

“bad times”--especially in connection with unemployment--are enemies

rather than friends of the Socialist cause. It is quite a mistake to

suppose that Socialism gains its firmest grip first upon the poorest;

that its chief allies are hunger and cold. In England the poorest are

often impervious to a direct political or social appeal; they are sunk

below the level of consciousness which can respond to any hope of

change. The skilled artisans of Colne Valley and Jarrow vote Socialist

when trade is good and all the factories are working overtime. The

slums of Southwark or Ancoats fail to respond to the vision of a new

good time coming, although their present state is beyond measure

deplorable. What they are looking for is a relief of the immediate

necessities of the moment, for food and drink for the day. Given these,

they are content until the next scarcity arrives. More especially is

this true of unemployment. When the artisan or labourer is in work, he

will find leisure to interest himself in various social gospels, study

the exhortation of the street corners, inquire the meaning of capital

value and class war and the exploitation of the working man. When he is

out of work, he is naturally filled with but one impulse, which passes

quickly from a terror into an obsession--an impulse to obtain work

again. That impulse operates even amongst the men who remain in the

factory. They see their companions turned away, tramping the streets in

search of a job, undergoing all the privations which they themselves

have experienced in similar vicissitudes in the past. They know that

they have no security but one week’s notice: that any Saturday the

announcement will be made to them that their services will no longer

be required. Under such circumstances the whole social problem narrows

itself down to the one problem of maintenance; or rather, the problem

of maintenance enlarges itself to fill the whole horizon. Yesterday or

to-morrow men may cherish the dream of a transformed society. To-day

the question is merely the continuance of such work as will provide for

immediate food and shelter. That is why Socialism has grown in times

of prosperity, and withered in times of decline. It is the “Tariff

Reformer,” and not the Socialist, who seems likely to gain in days of

trade depression. In those days “work for all” is a more persuasive

appeal than “Justice to the worker,” or “State ownership of all the

means of production.” Man, fallen to bedrock and fighting for his life,

has little inclination to turn to visions of universal justice in a

redeemed Society.

To expect men and women to become “Socialists” in times of trade

depression, is to expect the survivors of Messina, stricken by

earthquake and famine, to meditate with enthusiasm upon the future of

the race. Socialism, founded on Poverty and Social Discontent, and

finding there its argument for change, does not flourish in the heart

of that poverty and hungry wretchedness. The Socialist uses the sweated

women and starving children as material for inflaming to pity and

anger. But he rarely obtains adherents from the husbands of the women

or the fathers of the children thus broken at the basis of society. The

unemployed leaders are a different class and type from the unemployed

whom they shepherd and control. And the average citizen has not yet

come entirely to trust the new gospel; is not yet convinced that its

adherents will make a better job of it than the “boodlers” and “blood

suckers” whom they denounce so fervently. No Socialist councillor

has ever been convicted of municipal corruption: and Socialists are

sometimes surprised that a party so pure in aim and disinterested in

service should be so often rejected by the electorate. But purity of

purpose and incorruptibility of standard are not yet regarded by the

average citizen as being the most essential qualifications for local

or national government. The “man in the street,” here and in America,

would seem to be content--except in sudden hurricanes of revolt against

too flagrant corruption--with a not too ostentatious standard of civic

purity, if the men who are running the machine are men of substance,

energy, and position. Miss Addams, from Hull House, has described the

failure of the reform party to carry an election even against the most

offensive “boodlers.” The people acknowledged the corruption, but were

convinced that all the aldermen do it, and that the alderman of their

particular ward was unique in being so generous to his clients. “To

their simple minds he gets it from the rich, and so long as he gives

some of it out to the poor, and, as a true Robin Hood, with open hand,

they have no objection to offer.” The people are found to be ashamed

to be represented by a bricklayer--the intelligent, clean-handed

nominee of the reforming party. The “boodler” is elected “because he is

a good friend and neighbour. He exemplifies and exaggerates the popular

type of a good man. He has attained what his constituents secretly long

for.” They become generally convinced that “the lecturers who were

talking against corruption were only the cranks, not the solid business

men who had discovered and built up Chicago.” The same difficulty

faces all those reformers to-day, who, in a settled, orderly, and on

the whole comfortable, society, exhibit a too violent agitation for

reform. The “comrades” propagate the cause with a splendid devotion,

arguing at street corners, descending like locusts at bye-elections,

organising themselves cheerily into missionary bands with particular

buttons and badges and neckties. Men listen to their eloquence; but

the citizen with a stake in the community shrinks from entrusting

to them control of the ratepayers’ money, and the rank and file of

the working people turn away from a type so different to their own

boisterous, happy-go-lucky, acquiescent existence. An appeal for

“Labour representation” can fill the working man with enthusiasm--the

enthusiasm of Mr. Crooks’s first sensational victory at Woolwich. An

appeal for “Socialism” attracts him when his own position is secure:

when that is precarious he is fearful, unless his trouble is prolonged

until it threatens a revolution. And an England with permanently

declining trade, with the cream of its artisan population permanently

out of employment, is an England which this generation has never

known: something which, if it occurs in the future, will tear to pieces

all our accepted standards, and render all prophecy vain.

Yet there is danger perhaps in exaggerating this complacency,

acquiescence, and absorption in such passing pleasures as are

possible upon a limited weekly wage, which at present keep so many of

the working people in this country aloof from political and social

discontent. Those who in similar situation have counted upon a

boundless patience have often found that patience rudely exhausted,

and all their calculations brought to nought. No one can pretend that

a condition of stable equilibrium exists, in which as to-day, with

the removal of supernatural sanctions and promises of future redress,

the working people find a political freedom accompanying an economic

servitude. We have carried out to the full on the one side, says M.

Viviani, in France--and the same is true, though in less universal

degree, in England--the promise of the Revolution. We have advanced

from the affirmation of Equality of Citizenship to universal suffrage,

and from universal suffrage to universal education. There has vanished

the hope that once kept the labourer docile--hope of the attainment of

better times beyond the grave. “_Ensemble, et d’un geste magnifique,

nous avons eteint dans le ciel des lumières qu’on ne rallumera plus._”

Are we able to believe, he inquires, that the work has ended? No, is

the reply, it is only beginning. Political liberation has to find

expression for itself in the economic sphere: must inevitably work

itself out there, with the use of that instrument--the Democratic

instrument of Government--which gives to the people full control over

its own fortunes. To-day each citizen of the crowd “compares with

sadness his political power with his economic dependence: humiliated

every day with the contrast between his divided personality--on one

side a _misérable_, on the other a sovereign: on one an animal, on the

other a god.”

The increasing apprehension of this contrast, and the increasing

consequential effort at readjustment, will furnish the guiding thread

to the various political and social changes of the twentieth century.

It will influence and control the rise and fall of political parties,

each doing the work all unconsciously of forces which it does not

understand. It will lead in various ways, and through all oppositions

and reactions, towards an organised society profoundly differing from

our own.