PRISONERS
I
The surface view of society is always satisfactory. You may walk
to-day through the streets of a Russian city, and watch the people
at their business and their pleasure, with no revelation of the
unseen hunger for change which is tearing at the heart of it. You may
traverse England from north to south and east to west, admiring the
beauty of its garden landscape, the refined kindly life of its country
houses, the opulence and contentment of its middle class, the evidence
everywhere of security and repose. Only at intervals, and through
challenges which (after all) are easily forgotten, is there thrust
before the attention of the observer some manifestation of the life of
the underworld. The sea shines and sparkles in the sunshine beneath an
unclouded sky. Why excite disquietude concerning the twisted, distorted
life which lives and grows and dies in the darkness of the unplumbed
deep?
To investigate the life there, it is no longer necessary to follow
the romantic novelist or even the private statistician. All these may
be under the charge of sensationalism, of writing to a purpose. They
excite impatience amongst outside critics, who are convinced that the
poor could all be prosperous if they would only work industriously,
exercise thought, and avoid alcoholic refreshment. It would be well,
therefore, to keep to the safe sobriety of official publications, to
all those series of Commissions, Committees, Reports, and Inquiries
which, outwardly forbidding, are found on examination to be filled
with a rich human interest. Any one familiar with the reports of the
Government Inspectors appointed to control the forces of greed and
of degeneration in the obscurer regions of modern life, need never
be accused of hysteria if he finds the thing henceforth a perpetual
companion.
In the annual Reports of the Factory Inspectors, for example, he can
see the result of occasional complaints, of sporadic surprise visits;
with imagination he can extend these revelations over widening areas of
submerged life. These summaries appear as the letting down of dredges
into the depth and the bringing to light of the things which exist far
below the surface. They are records of the daily and hourly warfare
of the embodied conscience of the community against human fear and
human greed. That conscience, working through a great machinery of
protected law, is endeavouring to guard the men and women and children
of the nation against the more outrageous forms of destruction:
against the readiness with which the Fear of Destitution is pressing
them into all forms of distorted, intolerable, poisonous pursuits.
The laws are passed, the inspectors appointed, then the nation turns
to other interests in confidence that all is well. Such confidence is
based upon an altogether inadequate estimate of the two strongest
impulses in the life of man. Avarice can usually overcome terror. Fear
acting against greed is occasionally triumphant. But when the two are
operating in unison, the result is as the letting out of water. In
every trade there are those who will supplant their neighbours by the
cheapening of the cost, the lengthening of hours, the avoidance of
appliances. In every city there is the unlimited supply of disorganised
women’s and children’s labour, which sees before it no alternative but
of a quick or of a prolonged decay. The will to live still resists all
efforts to render human desire impossible. The apathy of the East,
accumulated through centuries of oppression, has not yet infected the
industrial life of the West. So the unequal strife continues, between
the attempt to raise these broken people into some semblance of
rational and humane existence, and the pressure which drives them to
choke themselves with dust, and poison themselves with noxious vapour,
and ravage into collapse and ruin the bodies and souls of women and
children.
They never complain until things have become intolerable. The anonymous
complaints show the same percentage of justification as the signed.
They work in unventilated workrooms. They are stinted of holidays. They
are compelled to work overtime. They endure accident and disease. They
are fined and cheated in innumerable ways. Their life is often confined
to a mere routine of work and sleep. Yet they endure; and even at the
heart of foul and impossible conditions retain always some rags of
decency and honour. Some break loose from the accepted drudgery for a
brief period of pleasure and idleness; to be found afterwards in the
silent, stern discipline of the Rescue Home; where, says a Report, “the
extreme youth of many of the inmates is a very distressing feature
of many of the homes, and it is grievous that the sins of others
should be so heavily visited upon these poor children, to whom the
simple natural joys of home life are now denied.” Here austere virtue
encourages “in some of the Scotch institutions,” where the hours of
work are from eight to seven, “a poor dietary,” although “many of the
inmates were young undeveloped girls.” But most are still resisting;
as in the non-penitential laundries where “as a rule complaints are
amply justified,” although “the workers still find it very difficult
to summon up courage enough to speak the truth as to irregularities,
from fear of the loss of employment, and consequent shortage of the
necessities of life”; or in the “millinery workshop, with a large
shop attached, in North London,” which ingeniously evades the factory
law by combining operations of millinery apprentice with that of shop
assistant, and “on my visiting one of the mothers of the girls she
told me her young daughter still arrived home worn-out and crying
with exhaustion”; or in the outworker’s home in the City of London,
where a “young girl” is “making and elaborately trimming babies’ white
silk bonnets beneath a ceiling black as ink, and walls with black
and different coloured patches, looking as if some madman had found
a pastime in scratching them,” and the girl spares “½d. for potash,
and to the best of her ability washed and scraped the vermin from the
walls.” Noting how clean and tidy she is in her own person, says the
inspector, “I am not surprised to see the shudder with which she speaks
of the struggle with dirt and filth.”
They die like flies directly they are born. The tender-hearted may
perhaps rejoice in this extravagant mortality. To some the waste of
it will appear most apparent. In the Pottery Towns, for example,
the infantile mortality is well up to 200 in the 1000: due, says
the report, “to the employment of married women in the earthenware
and china works.” A regular slaughter of innocents every year in
Longton, says the Medical Officer of Health, “is due to this and
premature births.” But the waste of death is the least element in this
extravagance. “The damage done,” says another Medical Officer, “cannot
entirely be measured by mortality figures, for these take no account of
the impaired vitality of the infants who manage to survive to swell the
ranks of the degenerate.” Stunted, inefficient, overworked, underfed,
they struggle towards maturity. Quaint and grotesque occupations are
found for them; as for the “forty little girls, twenty-one of whom
were half-timers,” who are found licking adhesive labels by the mouth
at the rate of thirty gross a day, “whose tongues had the polished tip
characteristic of label lickers, and the rest of the tongue coated with
brown gum.” Or there are the girls who carry heavy wedges of clay and
boxes of scrap (forbidden to such labour by the French Factory Laws of
fourteen years ago); as in the “complaint awaiting investigation” from
a mother of her daughter who has outgrown her strength, and is now ill
with what she believes is consumption; “who when working complained
much of pain in the shoulder on which she carried the clay and scrap,
and of pain in the collar bone on the same side.” Or the children in
the Nottingham lace trade, whose eyesight is impaired or destroyed by
the double work of school and employment; and the half-time school at
Dundee, where “narrow-chested children sit on backless benches”; or
the half-timers at Belfast, “undersized, round-shouldered, delicate
in appearance,” where the head teacher testifies, “these children
seem always tired; during the recreation period they prefer sitting
down in the playground to running about, and in this matter they are
especially noticeable in comparison with the children who do not work.”
They struggle towards maturity, unorganised, unprotected; fined in one
dressmaking workshop in West London in fines which were supposed to
be sent to the Fresh Air Fund--a statement which, says the inspector,
“had no foundation in fact”; or “verbally promised 2s. 6d.” for making
a sample silk blouse, for which “when Saturday came, the occupier,
instead of giving the agreed price, refused to pay more 1s. 3d.”
Most of them will die under thirty, is the testimony of the teacher
concerning her half-time pupils; but if they live it out, in old age
they will be once more dragged in by fear and bewilderment to compete
against the coming generations, and make the life of those coming
generations more difficult to endure.
“God help the poor!” concludes one half-unintelligible complaint of
swindling deductions, where, on investigation, “the workers were at
first terrified to give me information,” says the inspector, “and
I was met with entirely false statements.” “God help the poor!” is
written over all this haunting and dolorous record. It is the record of
prisoners: _sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis_.[9]
Gentility, again, is desirable. So is the supervision of the morals of
young men and women. Both are enjoyed--in abundance it would seem--by
the shop assistants, half a million of whom “live-in,” or are affected
by the living-in system. Some twenty thousand of them, organised in a
Trades Union, are endeavouring to climb into citizenship: with less
moral supervision it may be, but with the individual development
that comes from self-ordered life and some suggestion of freedom.
The necessity for the receipt of wages of something like a pound a
week, if these people are to choose their own lodgings and dwell at
ease, is a necessity which offers a considerable barrier to reform.
And with the prospect of financial disability laid upon them if the
present system is abolished, there is small wonder that a number of
employers are enthusiastic over its advantages. The “discontented”
Unionists--discontented in the opinion of many of their employers,
like the dog who went mad in Goldsmith’s elegy in order “to gain some
private ends”--keep up the agitation bravely. On occasional bank
holidays, when their less vigorous brethren are enjoying their four
days a year of statutory idleness in the open air, they suddenly
appear like fish attaining sunshine from deep waters: hold their
“conferences,” pass their resolutions, then vanish again into the
neat, obsequious serviceable men and women who attend to the whims
of customers and encourage their tentative efforts towards purchase.
Meetings of shop assistants are held in the big cities after darkness
has fallen. A crowded company of unknown persons assembles to pass
resolutions against “living-in” or in favour of short hours, then
vanishes again, into the barracks or pleasant commercial “hotels”
in which they reside. Evidence is obtained with difficulty even
when a Government consents to interfere, and appoints a Commission
to investigate. “Miss X----” does not wish to give her name. “If my
name is published I get the swap,” she says, “and I have to go at a
minute’s notice; and my employer would not mind spoiling my reference.
He does not know that I have come here to-day.” “I was summoned to
come yesterday,” says Mr. Y----wearily, “and I asked for a day off;
but I suppose I shall be dismissed when I go back for taking two days,
so that I do not suppose it will matter a great deal whether my name
appears or not.” There are plenty of specific cases of ill-treatment
and niggardly treatment against which no inspection can guard: of
poor food and monotonous food, overcrowding in bedroom, squalor of
accommodation, lack of suitable sanitary and washing arrangements,
and the like. But the emphasis of those who resist is not upon
specific complaints. It is directed against a general system which
herds men and women together, all of one class and one occupation, in
unnatural contiguity, and leave them there, under regulations rather
humiliating to adult persons, to make the best of life seen through
distorted glasses, and from the inside of a regulated home. There
are testimonies, indeed, of the excellence of the best, in perpetual
care for the welfare of the employees. It is perhaps a misfortune
that the comfort and kindliness of these best should throw an ægis
of justification over a system which is the worst, and even in the
average, stands on so many counts condemned.
“Living-in,” declares the Report, in certain retail trades, is
generally made a condition of employment, either express or implied.
The board and lodging accommodation is often inferior and inadequate.
Sleeping and other accommodation is frequently bad. On the moral side
the system has often not only no advantage, but is actually harmful.
The daily rush from counter to dining-room and back, the unappetising
food, the wearying sameness of the menu, the insufficiency of the
food, often supplemented by “extras” sold by the firm, like the “tuck
shop” system of the English public school, are all described by actual
sufferers, in experience which seems to have stepped clean out of
the pages of _Kipps_ or _Vivian_. Five beds “invested with bugs in
one room,” an attic in which three men sleep “that in the heat of
summer smelt like a fowl-house,” beds with four clean sheets in six
months, rooms with rats plentiful, bedrooms which open into corridors,
the light being obtainable through a pane of glass in the wooden
partitions--these and other similar experiences testify to the price
which often has to be paid for the “moral supervision” which the young
shopman or shop girl enjoys. The Report declares that in a number of
cases at least this claim of moral supervision is cant--the old cant
of cheapness; the cant in its revived form of the “moral supervision”
of the workhouse children which were bought up in batches for the
factories eighty years ago. An employer “would place no obstacle in
the way of his male assistants marrying,” is the confession of one,
“though,” he adds, “he certainly does not like his assistants to marry
on an inadequate wage.” “Male and female created He them,” says Mr.
Lewisham’s friend in a well-known novel, “which was d--d rough luck
on assistant masters.” It would seem to be rough luck also on shop
assistants who have the bad taste to prefer matrimony to moral guidance.
Such well-known employers like Mr. Debenham and Mr. Derry in London,
who have changed from the living-in to the natural system, brush all
this cant and vapour away with a healthy breath of fresh air. “The
character of some employers,” says the latter, “I would not trust from
their own housekeepers. I do not think that drapers are worse than
any other commercial men, but all commercial men are the same.” He
sees “no difficulty in finding proper apartments outside,” with people
“in whom we should have every confidence to put our own children.” “I
am quite out of touch with excuses which have been made by employers
at conferences I have been at, with regard to the moral side of the
question. I think it is sheer nonsense.”
The system is sometimes enforced by a system of “fines”: the
substitute, in a humanitarian age, for more drastic disciplinary
measures of the older servitudes. Fines for smoking or reading in
bedrooms, fines for sleeping out without permission or for arriving
after locking-up time, fines for taking supper away, for burning
candles after the gas is turned out, for heating water on the gas,
exhibit the method by which adjustment has to be effected and the
smoothness of the communal existence maintained. “The system,” says
Miss Bonfield, “robs the assistant, whether men or women, of the
sense of personal responsibility which is developed by ordering and
controlling one’s own life. The herding together of large numbers of
either sex, restricted as to the most ordinary intercourse with the
opposite sex, creates an unnatural and vicious atmosphere which is
morally dangerous to both men and women.” She repudiates the idea that
there is “any kind of home life, any kind of home consideration”--at
least in her personal experience. The dinner-hour she found “the most
disagreeable interval of the day.” “In a long business experience I
have never yet had a properly made cup of tea.” “The sitting-room of
a business house is usually a most dreary place, very much like the
waiting-room of a railway station.” In many shops the hours worked
are seventy per week: the atmosphere in one experience “particularly
vitiated, and the assistants chronically overtired.” The work is
peculiarly stimulating to nervous strain: fretful customers,
sometimes friendly, sometimes bullying, often merely tiresome--for
hour after hour of the day. Even when the catering is excellent, is
another experience, the girls “have no appetite for food.” “What
they need is fresh air and more outdoor exercise. The factory girl
who eats her unscientific meal in the street, does so with a greater
relish and with more profit to health than does her sister of the
shop extract from the choice meals eaten in the atmosphere of the
shop dining-room.” “I have frequently gone to my dinner feeling
faint for want of food, and on entering the dining-room have been
nauseated to such an extent as to be unable to eat anything except
dry bread.” Compensations appear, however, in some cases to exist. In
the report of one establishment--only men living-in--after “washing
accommodation inadequate, food badly cooked, table service not clean,
men’s sitting-room, three chairs and broken table for the use of twenty
men,” it is encouraging to read that “every apprentice is required to
attend a place of worship at least once on a Sunday.” So is fostered
the traditional religion of the people. There is a suggestion that the
feverish competition in retail trade, and the general willingness to
obtain a maximum of profit, has even here produced a change in spirit
and temper. “I have been able to watch the change,” says Miss Bonfield,
“since first I went into the distributing trade. The old system of
trying to build up an establishment on the value of your goods, and
on giving real work for money, has been steadily changing, and the
assistant now who is considered the smartest assistant is the one who
can sell to customers worthless goods, goods that yield a very large
profit, goods that look fairly showy on the surface but are not really
wearable, and are not satisfactory in other ways.” From both sides--men
and women--comes personal testimony to an “immorality of the mind”
which is “worse than immorality of the body”--an “over-sexed” condition
due to the herding together of young men or young women of a certain
age in an atmosphere of nerve stimulation and little physical exercise
and limited external interests. One male assistant protests against
“the daily rush from counter to dining-room and back to counter without
even a breath of fresh air. Often the food provided is unappetising,
cooked and served very roughly, served in dining-rooms situated in
the basement, artificially lighted and without proper ventilation.”
“The sameness of the menu becomes positively wearying.” “In a large
number of cases the food provided is insufficient for the physical
need of the employee.” Mr. Tilley, once a shop assistant in the town,
now a draper on his own account in a small way in the country, roundly
asserts that “the good conditions are the exception, bad conditions
the rule.” “Celibacy is a condition of employment. Here we are faced
by the greatest of the many evils which arise from this,” as he calls
it, “pernicious system.” “It is absolutely essential,” is his summary,
“for the physical and moral welfare of the assistants that ‘living-in’
should be abolished.” The old order of things has changed. The personal
element between employer and employee is steadily vanishing. And the
assistant of to-day finds himself bound and fettered with this legacy
of feudal days which his employer is often using for all it is worth
to exploit the labour of the employees in this and kindred trades. The
emancipation of the shop workers of this country can never come until
they are rid of this “living-in” system, is the announcement which is
robbing them of freedom of action, individuality of character, and the
“political and social rights of an Englishman.”[10]
“The political and social rights of an Englishman.” We are fortunate in
the possession of a man of genius who has also had personal experience
of this particular life, and has left in literature a sharp-cut
picture of the “political and social rights” interpreted into terms
of daily experience. “‘By Jove,’ said Buggins, ‘it won’t do to give
these here Blacks votes.’ ‘No fear,’ said Kipps. ‘They’re different
altogether,’ said Buggins. ‘They ’aven’t the sound sense of Englishmen,
and they ’aven’t the character. There’s a sort of tricky dishonesty
about ’em.... They’re too timid to be honest. Too slavish. They aren’t
used to being free, like we are; and if you gave ’em freedom, they
wouldn’t make a proper use of it. Now _we_--Oh, _damn_!’ For the gas
had suddenly gone out, and Buggins had the whole column of Society Club
Chat still to read.”
“What becomes of the good shop assistant when he grows old?” is
a question almost as difficult to answer as the question, “What
becomes of good Americans when they die?” The Government Committee
could obtain no certain evidence. “I cannot say what does become of
them. Some start in business on their own account; but now that the
conditions are so changed, that is very difficult. They leave the
drapery trade. Some get inferior situations. You may find old drapers’
assistants driving cabs to-day.” In South Wales, says one, “amongst
the miners, I myself have come across an enormous number of old shop
assistants.” The majority, like the majority of assistant masters in a
slightly more exalted station of life, seem to slide out into all sorts
of bypaths--in the one Empire building, tomato growing, or running
preparatory schools whose competition and fate seems generally similar
to that of the small retail drapery stores; in the other, “insurance
agents, booksellers, and things of that kind.” But the work is genteel;
sharply distinguished from that of the artisan: it is supposed to be
especially suitable to boys and girls of delicate physique: and there
are many who, from the beginning, would wish no otherwise than to be
shepherded, tended, taken in and provided for, without the pains and
risks of outside adventure. “We’re in a blessed drainpipe,” says Mr.
Minton to Kipps cheerfully, “and we’ve got to crawl along it till we
die.” Only to a percentage, at first, and then in effort, which every
year diminishes, does the conviction come, as to “Kipps” in the night
watches, when “all others in the dormitory are asleep and snoring,”
that “the great stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into
its wheels, a vast irresistible force which he had neither strength of
will nor knowledge to escape.” “Night after night he would resolve
to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse, or drown
himself, and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in
fear of a sixpenny fine.”[11]
And the alternatives--especially for the women--are not all so
promising that they can afford lightly to forego the advantage here
offered of assured food and shelter. Far below is a vision of pitiful
poverty, into which, at any time, any unfortunate worker may be
precipitated; rarely, henceforth, ever to rise into the clear air
of intelligible life. Somewhere festering at the basis, round the
foundations of the great mansion of England’s economic supremacy, are
to be discovered the workers of the “Sweated Trades.” At intervals
of ten, fifteen, or twenty years the dredger is let down, to scrape
up samples of the material of the ocean floor: in Royal Commissions,
Committees of the House of Commons, or the House of Lords. It is always
the same there, whatever tides and tempests trouble the surface far
above: a settled mass of congested poverty shivering through life
upon the margin below which life ceases to endure. The sensational
novelist utters his study in fiction, the cause and the remedy; the
public conscience is stirred by the exhibitions of “sweated” goods
and “sweated” women: after a time distraction intervenes, a war, a
colonial football or cricket tour, ecclesiastical dispute over posture
of praying, or colour of garment. The sweated workers, for one moment
indecently revealed in the sunshine, return again to the welcome
obscurity of their twilight world. A recent House of Commons Committee
has once more raked over the bottom; examined, with blinking eyes, the
strange things found there; reported in favour of Government action.
The evidence is of the monotonous simplicity familiar to all similar
investigations. “My attention,” says Mr. Holmes, the police court
missionary, “was drawn to the home workers first about ten years ago.
I met two or three widows at the police court, charged with attempted
suicide, and I naturally took interest in them. I visited their homes,
and became aware of the conditions under which they lived; the prices
paid for their work, the hours they generally worked, the amount of
rent they paid, the kind of food they ate, and everything of that
description. On one occasion I took three widows for a holiday. Each of
them had attempted suicide, and was broken down in health of mind and
body through hard work and poor food. The story of their lives, their
manner, their appearance, and their broken spirit was a revelation.”
The broken spirit, indeed, so characteristic of those who, from the
beginning, have enlisted in the service of fourteen hours’ work a
day, does not appear entirely to have brought the felicity which--in
orthodox views--accompanies a docile and grateful working-class
population. Nor does the complete absence of Trades Unions--those
“cruel organisations”--appear to have effected that “economic liberty”
which the supporters of “Free Labour” endeavour to obtain by the
smashing of these instruments of tyranny. “My experience of ten years
is this,” says Mr. Holmes, “that I have found them to be the most
industrious, sober, and honest class of the community that it has
been my lot ever to meet with; in fact, their goodness appals me.”
Here, indeed, are the examples, at length realised in the flesh, of
the workings of the “laws” of the older political economy: the “iron
law of wages” driving, through the frantic competition for employment
by the workers against each other, those wages down to the minimum
of existence. “I know one widow,” is the testimony, “who is working,
and has done nothing else than work, at these little things at her
own home in Bethnal Green for forty years, and her payment for that
work now is practically the same as it was at the beginning of that
period. Her fingers have got stiffer, and she cannot earn quite so much
now.” “It is the apathy of the people”--after forty years of it--one
witness complains, “engaged in all these things, and their helplessness
which forms the greatest obstacle to their advancement.” These
apathetic classes, indeed, appear largely as those for whom petitions
are presented in the Christian Church for special and peculiar
mercies--“women labouring with child; sick persons; young children.”
And the reply to the petition is this Home work, falling as the gentle
dew from heaven upon the place beneath, and blessing him that gives and
him that takes: obtained “by sending boy or girl to the city for the
stuff with a more or less dilapidated, cast-off perambulator, which
they push home full up with shirts or mantles or skirts, which are
taken back to the warehouse when finished.” The actual workers appear
before the Committee in kindly anonymity, having little violence of
protest against Providence, the employers, or themselves. The tendency
of payments, they are compelled to confess on examination, have
steadily gone down; that is because “women are always applying for
work, and they have no work to give them; and therefore they cut the
prices down, because the women go and beg for work.” The “expenses”
of each of two workers sharing a room, “without the rent,” are one
shilling and threepence a week. “Do you have a fire in this room?” is
asked. “No,” is the reply; “we light a lamp to warm ourselves.” The
difficulty of the Committee, in examination of wages budgets, was to
find any margin at all for food and firing; a difficulty which the
witnesses were unable to remove. Prices, confesses one, “have come down
ever so much; they have come down in the last four years so that I
cannot keep myself now.” “It is almost a mystery,” is the challenge to
another, “how you manage to live at all.” Yet others do well, earning
(in one case) ten shillings a week--for work between “fifteen and
sixteen hours a day”--sometimes up at six o’clock, and “I work till
ten at night.” These, however, are the limited hours of a “very quick”
worker. “Can you suggest anything,” is the forlorn inquiry to one of
them, “that anybody could do for you which would induce your master, or
perhaps compel your master, to give you a fairer or a larger wage?” “If
he would only time an article,” is the doubtful reply; “state how long
the article would take to make, and give you a certain wage of so much
an hour, it would be fair, if it was only a living wage; we only want
to live.”
This “want to live” is the endurance, not of the “unemployables,” but
of those who are engaged night and day in an insect-like activity:
uncomplaining, with an Eastern endurance, in the dark. Investigation
amongst the “sample” witnesses who appeared before the Committee
exhibited no contradiction of their veracity. “I wanted to say about
the girl C----,” says the investigator, “whose father is out of work,
that her home was visited, and that practically everything in it has
been pawned: they are owing money, of course, and are expecting the
bailiffs in, so that she is at a crisis in her affairs. The girl C----
has hardly any clothes, and when we found her she was almost starving.
She is really in a very bad position. She has her old father, who hawks
her goods sometimes in the evening, and that is how she makes some
extra money.” Of another G----. “I cannot find out myself,” is the
testimony, “how she can subsist at all.” “How she manages to support
herself and her child is an ‘absolute mystery.’” “She looks rather
starved herself at present.” Even where some kind of organisation
exists, it is found almost impossible to arouse these industrious
persons to any visions or hopes of permanent betterment. “In going
about among them,” says one witness, concerning the Nottingham lace
makers, “I have found that the first difficulty you had to overcome
was the abject apathy that existed among them. You see they are most
of them, very many of them, working for the next meal, and nothing you
say about the meal for to-morrow affects them: they are not concerned
about that. After you have aroused some interest in them, you have also
to arouse some sort of courage.”[12]
So, while the white hotels rise on all the shores of England, and
the apparatus of pleasure is developing into ever new and ingenious
forms of entertainment, continues through the nights and days the grey
struggle of the Abyss. It is the indomitable will to live, resisting
always that press of circumstance which would squeeze out the life
of the disinherited, and leave a solitude where once was industry
and action. The question how long such will survive, in the depths,
the absence of all that life should mean, is as unanswerable as the
question how long the will to live will survive the satiety at the
summit which comes from superfluity of pleasure. For a society fissured
into an unnatural plentitude on the one hand finds as its inevitable
consummation a society fissured into an unnatural privation on the
other. Here is the “price of prosperity” as interpreted at the dim
foundations of the social order; a menace to the future, less in the
fury of its revolt than through the infection of its despair.
II
So appears--at the base--the regular hive of industry: the life
of those who, uncomplaining, maintain the work of the world. This
fixity of tenure in a house which may be termed a home is the ideal
of the Social Reformer. To such a goal of human endeavour he would
always direct the errant impulses of those who fail to appreciate its
full satisfactions: who shirk with indifference, who revolt in open
rebellion against the accepted standards of civilisation. These latter
form no negligible company. They include women who, uncheered by the
remuneration of the factory girl or the domestic servant, have embraced
unrecognised careers and professions offering more immediate monetary
returns, if less guaranteed security of livelihood. They include a
prison population of habitual thieves and outcasts who have definitely
declared war against their neighbours, and whose life consists of
adventure varied by long periods of compulsory silence. They include
the “unemployable,” the vagrants, the people born tired and the people
who have grown tired; the army of broken persons, weak in body or
in mind, which choke up the workhouses and asylums: an aggregation
of human failure which represents a “bye-product” of the industrial
organisation whose worth in the market has not yet been adequately
demonstrated.
The Tramp Life, the underside of the world, generally appears in
writing in exaggerated sunshine or gloom. Some who have lived through
it--notably Mr. Bart Kennedy and Mr. W. H. Davies--have written sincere
and truthful reminiscences of adventure in England and America. They
set themselves, in union with a great company, to “cheat Admetus”: to
live on the industrial populations, just as the idle rich live on the
industrial populations, without giving back adequate return. They
perform this feat, partly by begging, partly by stealing, partly by
grudging spells of special and not unenjoyable labour highly paid at
certain seasons of the year--such as fruit-picking, cotton-gathering,
clam-fishing, and the like. When they grow tired of the open road, they
take to the railway, accepting free passage hidden in the goods van
or riding upon the front of the engine. They have their experiences,
also, of society’s reprisals, in occasional spells of imprisonment,
not altogether disagreeable in the more humane cities of America. The
general impression conveyed is of a life of adventure and considerable
physical satisfactions, of health in the open air, of a variegated
and coloured experience along the great ways of the world which is
denied to the assiduous and driven labourer of machine and factory.
That is one side of the picture. The other is given by Government
reports and personal investigations by such observers as Miss Higgs
and Mr. Ensor, of the casual ward, the common lodging-house, and all
the race who have eluded or been squeezed out of the meshes of regular
toil. And here there is impression of degradation and permanent
discomfort, dirt, squalor, and misery, a shambling, discouraged rabble
of creatures that once were men and women. Those who have scrutinised
the wreckage of humanity which collects in the so-called “able-bodied”
workhouses, or can be seen drawn up on cold nights in ragged regiments
on the Embankment waiting for the midnight dole of soup, will be
more inclined to believe in the degradation than in the adventure.
Yet the few persons who have gone forth without prejudice to know
these despised and broken persons--tramps, criminals, prostitutes,
unemployed, unemployable--who wander through the darkened ways of the
City, have no such experience of universal collapse to record. Those
who come as learners rather than teachers--with a sense of humour, of
friendliness, an ultimate reverence for anything human, above all, with
acceptance rather than with criticism--are perpetually astonished at
the resistance which humanity is able to present to the most calamitous
of outward circumstance.
The revelation of the authentic witnesses--those in whom this queer
universe has become articulate--is of a complete overturning of the
accepted standards. In _Slavery_, Mr. Kennedy has traced the whole
process of escape: from upbringing in a cellar dwelling at Manchester,
through revolt against the tyranny of monotonous toil, to an enlisting
in a kind of buccaneering expedition against all the world. It is the
normal civilised universe seen (as it were) from the reverse side in
which the grey has become blue and the blue grey. The inhabitants
are at war upon the working world; using its charity and its clumsy
legislation in order to suck from that world no small advantage. They
have eluded, like the inheriting wealthy, the obligations of labour;
like the inheriting wealthy they possess their own exacting moral
codes, differing from the moral codes of working humanity, which
supports them, if not with equanimity, at least with fortitude. Mr. W.
H. Davies, in his _Autobiography of a Super-tramp_, offers a similar
and more amazing life history. “I was born thirty-five years ago,
in a public-house called the Church House, in the town of N----,”
is the commencement of a story not altogether unworthy of Defoe’s
_Robinson Crusoe_. Without his sincere, if somewhat intrusive, moral
determinations, this voyager is also living amongst the aborigines on
the desert island of this “floating, transitory world.” In the final
chapter he sums up the philosophical advice which he would bequeath to
similar sojourners. The most important dogma of it is “contained in
the simple words: ‘Never live in a house next door to your landlord or
landlady’; which,” he declares, “deserves to become a proverb.” “Many
people might not consider this warning necessary,” he concludes, “but
the hint may be useful to poor travellers like myself, who, sick of
wandering, would settle down to the peace and quiet of after days.”
It is the normal world, in England and America, turned inside out,
seen from the other side of Looking Glass country. From this side are
examined the benevolence of the rich and the benevolence of the poor,
the Salvation Army shelter, the common gaol, the Charity Organisation
Society, the various efforts of Society to protect itself against
the locust and the caterpillar. The locust, it must be confessed,
especially in new countries, generally has the best of it. The artless
and somewhat clumsy organisations of State and city and private persons
spread their simple traps of cheese or delicacies for the mouse. The
mouse annexes the cheese and leaves the trap scatheless. Especially
is this true in America, where wealth, easily and carelessly heaped
together, is as easily and carelessly scattered. Many of Mr. Davies’
confessions of American begging experiences are almost incredible in
their suggestion of opulence. An hour or two in streets of modest
comfort will yield, to the experienced workman, a profusion of good
things--money, clothes, rich and pleasant food. Free rides by “beating”
the various trains, transformation with changing climate of summer
and winter from the north to the south, occasional interludes in
local gaols, where the officials, being paid by the number of their
captives, offer increasing attractions to those who will condescend to
accept such hospitalities, yield a healthful and variable existence of
adventure and repose. The companions of the road offer no despicable
advantages. There is, indeed, no “honour among thieves”; they rob each
other with effrontery, and make no assertion of chivalry or fine and
decent living. But they are generous in their sharing of the booty
with their companions, and possess a ready sociability which leads
them to partnerships and associations of some enduring value. The two
unforgivable crimes are work and thrift. Effort and Accumulation--the
gods of the working world--have become idols to be trampled on. Yet,
in the underworld, the appeal to compassion is still irresistible. The
cattlemen who bring the living food of England across the Atlantic
to Liverpool “are recognised as the scum of America, a wild, lawless
class of people, on whom,” says Mr. Davies, “the scum of Europe
unscrupulously impose.” Mr. Davies had frequently made the journey,
and tells horrible tales of the indifferent cruelty to the beasts.
Habitually the cattlemen arrive, fresh from such degrading experience,
upon a city of poverty. Habitually they part with their scanty earnings
in gifts to that poverty when they arrive. “Having kind hearts, they
are soon rendered penniless by the importunities of beggars.” “These
wild but kind-hearted men,” is the testimony, “grown exceedingly proud
by a comparison of the comfortable homes of America with these scenes
of extreme poverty in Liverpool and other large seaports, give and give
of their few shillings, until they are themselves reduced to the utmost
want.”
In America, under the expert advice of “Brum,” the young novice learnt
the valuable secrets of the trade. On entering any town, look out
for a church steeple with a cross, which denotes a Catholic church
and therefore a Catholic community. “If I fail in that portion of
the town I shall certainly not succeed elsewhere.” Fat women are
the best to beg from. “How can you expect these skinny creatures to
sympathise with another,” is the unanswerable argument, “when they
half-starve their own bodies?” In begging in England, avoid every town
that has not either a mill, a factory, or a brewery. But in America
the gold mines are the watering-places and haunts of the idle rich:
perhaps because they recognise natural allies in the other class of
Anarchist, perhaps because they satisfy a slumbering responsibility and
compassion in a careless scattering of uncalculated charity. Amongst
the New York watering-places “the people catered for us as though we
were the only tramps in the whole world, and as if they considered it
providential that we should call at their houses for assistance.” In
such providential plenty the standards are well maintained: otherwise
this inverted world might right itself and become normal once again.
The travellers are received with disfavour by a stranger, who later
is smitten with remorse. “Excuse me, boys, for not giving you a more
hearty welcome,” is the apology; “but really, I thought you were
working men, but I see you are true beggars.” In a cottage an aged
labourer, who had amassed a modest fortune after a life of toil, hangs
on the wall the shovel which he had used in early days. To these
wanderers the vision is as distasteful as an image of a saint to a
Covenanting assembly: a symbol of false gods.
Here is the voice of the Tramp as he appears to himself: full of
complacency as he looks back upon his past successes: naked before his
audience, and entirely unashamed. In the revelation of the submerged as
they appear to others--to those friends of theirs who possess sympathy
and humour and a wide acceptance--this subterranean existence appears
also full of excellent things: comradeship, kindliness, laughter,
and tears. Such vivid and truthful writing as that of Mr. Neil Lyons
in _Arthurs_ throws no unfriendly light upon the waste places of the
city. He has taken for the scene of his inquiry a London coffee-stall
“somewhere between Brixton and the obelisk in South London.” “This
is an ambiguous direction,” he declares. “But then we night-seekers
are jealous of our ill-fame, and the fear of the Oxford movement is
strong upon us.” Round this coffee-stall, attracted like moths to a
candle, gather in the heart of the sleeping city those to whom sleep is
denied. Night-workers seeking refreshment mingled here with women of
the streets; an occasional drunken sailor, a thief making a rendezvous
with a thief, tramps and wastrels, foregather for a moment within the
circle of light before drifting out into the darkness again. There are
some who are regular customers, who develop a kind of comradeship,
exchanging tales of misfortune; and from these the author weaves
a tragic or pitiful or romantic story of human lives. For all the
permanent elements of romance are in this underworld, only with the
values distorted and modified. Here, also, are sudden vicissitudes of
fortune, passionate human affections, love of woman and of child, fear
of violence and of death. It is life lived close to the margin, in
perpetual familiarity with the reality of common things; darkness and
cold, hunger and despair. It is life lived, that is to say, as perhaps
the majority of mankind are living it to-day; never so far removed from
the possibility of privation and of danger as to be able to settle down
tranquil in a universe of security. The common impression, amongst
those who do not dwell in such a universe, is that existence under
such conditions must reel back into savagery or apathy--into a kind
of numbness before all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or into the fierce fight for existence upon the sinking ship or in
the crumbling earthquake city. But experience is quite otherwise.
Comradeship, desire, human affection, kindliness, and pity, all here
survive amongst men so shabby and twisted as to appear scarcely human,
and women with painted faces not pleasant to look upon. Nay more, a
certain attitude of cheeriness and enjoyment seems to be bred out
of the very extremity of fortune. There is a rich humour in all Mr.
Lyons’s sketches, for much of which, indeed, the onlooker and recorder
may be responsible, but some of which is native to the original
character. Sometimes it assumes the form of verbal exaggeration and
comments in which all working-class London is so ready, the most
reputable product of the industrial metropolis. Sometimes it finds
satisfaction in the jollity excited by drink, as in the experience
of the drunken sailor who uplifts his voice in bloodthirsty ballads.
Sometimes it has the peculiar reckless insolence of the defiance, out
of extremity, of all time’s revenges; the reckless insolence of the
“seven men out of hell” in the story of the “Bolivar” who have “euchred
God’s almighty storm” and “bluffed the eternal sea.”
There is here, however, none of the idealisation, the roseate visions
of sordid and ugly things suddenly seen through a mist of make-believe,
which fills with an intolerable sentimentality the works of many
popular writers of fiction. “Arthur’s” clients, having plumbed the
bedrock of life, are suffering no illusions concerning it. They are
emphatically convinced that dust is dust and mud is mud, and that a
spade may justly be called a spade. Outside the coffee-stall itself,
in the small hours of the morning, there is continual necessity for
the suppression of rowdies and marauders and those who exhibit anarchic
tendencies in a civilisation remote from our own, but with very
definite standards. In that civilisation kindliness and good fellowship
stand at the summit of the hierarchy of virtues, and a large tolerance
replaces the negative prohibitions of the accepted commandments. And in
all that company of children, bewildered and confused in a world which
they have never learned to understand, the acceptance of a certain
level of honour and of order is more clearly recognised than amongst
those who, reaching towards the enforcement of austerer limitations,
are, perhaps, less successful in attainment. “Sometimes,” says Mr.
Lyons, “a sailorman in the throes of a fever may form our circle.
Arthur will then arise in his might, peer over his spectacles, and
lifting a withered forefinger say, ‘George, I’m surprised at you.
Be’ave yeself.’ And George, if he be not very drunk, will subside
instantly, saying, ‘Righto, Guv’nor,’ or he will ask respectfully for
another cup of coffee and a thick ’un, at the same time challenging the
company to deny that Arthur is a gentleman, or he himself a Briton.”
So that amongst incidents seemingly trivial--a crying baby, a meeting
of a tramp and his pal, the attempt of Arthur’s soldier son to choose
between two rival candidates for his affection--there is revealed a
whole depth of human helpfulness, and of human sympathy which is not
helpful but is exceedingly desirous to be so. In one of Mr. Lyons’s
exuberant evenings a man with a baby in his arms wearily drifts to
the coffee-stall, waiting for the belated all-night tram. And at once
this company of nightbirds and homeless populace become absorbed
in one overwhelming problem--how to stop the baby crying. “Arthur”
himself starts the enterprise. “I ain’t no amatoor at this business,”
he cheerily remarks. “Soothin’ down babies is one of my specialities.”
So he makes grimaces, shouts “Oy! oy! oy!” at the unfortunate infant,
emits shrieks to imitate a locomotive in “a performance very unusual
and distressing,” bays like a bloodhound (“trying the dawg on him,”
he calls it), imitates various other animals--with disastrous effect.
Arthur’s “man” then steps into the breach, “I know a dodge about
babies,” he remarks. “First of all,” explained the specialist, “you
turn ’im over on ’is chest. Then you say, ‘Hups a daisy! _There’s_ a
little man!’ and thumps him on his back. Then you give ’im a fork or
sich like to play with. Then you say, ‘Did ’e ’ave a dirty blackguard
of a father then?’ (no offence to _you_, sir, only it’s the custom),
and then you jerk ’im up an’ down, and ’old your breath till ’e falls
asleep.” This also fails. The owner of the infant meanwhile imparts
reminiscences of his life, his sister and the baby, full of intimate
detail, to the friendly company. A “certain old drab,” half-starved,
is stuffed with coffee and sardines and promised “tuppence” to stop
the child’s “’ollering.” She immediately succeeds. The tram arrives;
the father and child vanish in the night. It is twenty minutes past
one o’clock--in a submerged, undistinguished corner of six millions
of sleeping people. But all modern life is in it--the stupidity, the
gravity, the generosity, the ready companionship and sympathy under
misfortune which may be common to all, of half-lost, undistinguished
people who normally travel through mean streets to no profitable end.
They quote poetry--sentimental maunderings, the humorous ditties of
the lower-class music halls, or bloodthirsty, recounting how “Joe
Golightly” “stabbed ’im in the spine.” They crack their little jokes,
and score off each other and off themselves, when in the lowest depth
of poverty--with nothing between them and ultimate destitution. When
prosperity comes they share with each other, standing “treat” in
“cawfee” and sardines and hard-boiled eggs. There fall down to them
occasionally visitants from another world. Now it is a “gentleman”
killing himself as speedily as possible with drink and sordid
adventure, on the way between prosperity and death. Now it is a
“benevolent idiot” desiring to see the “darker side of London life,”
whose comments are received with marked disfavour by the normal members
of the street. Now it is a revivalist or philanthropist seeking
passionately to persuade them to return to the accepted ways of men.
His efforts are useless. They have chosen their portion, and in that
portion they will abide: drifting with all surrounding human lives,
through their narrow space of being, towards whatever fate or fortune
may offer them in that day when all days will have become as one day,
and to-morrow joined with yesterday’s seven thousand years.