himself a being of the most limited and practical outlook. His
narrowness of imagination, his lack of general ideas, has been the
despair of the Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist. He
may have struck before, but only for definite increments of wages or
definite limitations of toil; his acceptance of the industrial system
and its methods has been as complete and unquestioning as his acceptance
of earth and sky. Now, with an effect of suddenness, this ceases to be
the case. A new generation of workers is seen replacing the old, workers
of a quality unfamiliar to the middle-aged and elderly men who still
manage our great businesses and political affairs. The worker is
beginning now to strike for unprecedented ends—against the system,
against the fundamental conditions of labour, to strike for no defined
ends at all, perplexingly and disconcertingly. The old-fashioned strike
was a method of bargaining, clumsy and violent perhaps, but bargaining
still; the new-fashioned strike is far less of a haggle, far more of a
display of temper. The first thing that has to be realised if the Labour
question is to be understood at all is this, that the temper of Labour
has changed altogether in the last twenty or thirty years. Essentially
that is a change due to intelligence not merely increased but greatly
stimulated, to the work, that is, of the board schools and of the cheap
Press. The outlook of the workman has passed beyond the works and his
beer and his dog. He has become—or, rather, he has been replaced by—a
being of eyes, however imperfect, and of criticism, however hasty and
unjust. The working man of to-day reads, talks, has general ideas and a
sense of the round world; he is far nearer to the ruler of to-day in
knowledge and intellectual range than he is to the working man of fifty
years ago. The politician or business magnate of to-day is no better
educated and very little better informed than his equals were fifty
years ago. The chief difference is golf. The working man questions a
thousand things his father accepted as in the very nature of the world,
and among others he begins to ask with the utmost alertness and
persistence why it is that he in particular is expected to toil. The
answer, the only justifiable answer, should be that that is the work for
which he is fitted by his inferior capacity and culture, that these
others are a special and select sort, very specially trained and
prepared for their responsibilities, and that at once brings this new
fact of a working-class criticism of social values into play. The old
workman might and did quarrel very vigorously with his specific
employer, but he never set out to arraign all employers; he took the law
and the Church and Statecraft and politics for the higher and noble
things they claimed to be. He wanted an extra shilling or he wanted an
hour of leisure, and that was as much as he wanted. The young workman,
on the other hand, has put the whole social system upon its trial, and
seems quite disposed to give an adverse verdict. He looks far beyond the
older conflict of interests between employer and employed. He criticises
the good intentions of the whole system of governing and influential
people, and not only their good intentions, but their ability. These are
the new conditions, and the middle-aged and elderly gentlemen who are
dealing with the crisis on the supposition that their vast experience of
Labour questions in the ’seventies and ’eighties furnishes valuable
guidance in this present issue are merely bringing the gunpowder of
misapprehension to the revolutionary fort.
The workman of the new generation is full of distrust, the most
demoralising of social influences. He is like a sailor who believes no
longer either in the good faith or seamanship of his captain, and,
between desperation and contempt, contemplates vaguely but persistently
the assumption of control by a collective forecastle. He is like a
private soldier obsessed with the idea that nothing can save the
situation but the death of an incompetent officer. His distrust is so
profound that he ceases not only to believe in the employer, but he
ceases to believe in the law, ceases to believe in Parliament, as a
means to that tolerable life he desires; and he falls back steadily upon
his last resource of a strike, and—if by repressive tactics we make it
so—a criminal strike. The central fact of all this present trouble is
that distrust. There is only one way in which our present drift towards
revolution or revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is by
restoring the confidence of these alienated millions, who visibly now
are changing from loyalty to the Crown, from a simple patriotism, from
habitual industry, to the more and more effective expression of a
deepening resentment.
This is a psychological question, a matter of mental states. Feats of
legal subtlety are inopportune, arithmetical exploits still more so. To
emerge with the sum of 4_s._ 6½_d._ as a minimum, by calculating on the
basis of the mine’s present earnings, from a conference which the miners
and everybody else imagined was to give a minimum of 5_s._, may be
clever, but it is certainly not politic in the present stage of Labour
feeling. To stamp violently upon obscure newspapers nobody had heard of
before and send a printer to prison, and to give thereby a flaming
advertisement to the possible use of soldiers in civil conflicts and set
every barrack-room talking, may be permissible, but it is certainly very
ill-advised. The distrust deepens.
The real task before a governing class that means to go on governing is
not just at present to get the better of an argument or the best of a
bargain, but to lay hold of the imaginations of this drifting, sullen
and suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country. What
we prosperous people, who have nearly all the good things of life and
most of the opportunity, have to do now is to justify ourselves. We have
to show that we are indeed responsible and serviceable, willing to give
ourselves, and to give ourselves generously, for what we have and what
we have had. We have to meet the challenge of this distrust.
The slack days for rulers and owners are over. If there are still to be
rulers and owners and managing and governing people, then in the face of
the new masses, sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as no
common people have ever been before, these rulers and owners must be
prepared to make themselves and display themselves wise, capable, and
heroic—beyond any aristocratic precedent. The alternative, if it is an
alternative, is resignation—to the Social Democracy.
And it is just because we are all beginning to realise the immense need
for this heroic quality in those who rule and are rich and powerful, as
the response and corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that are
threatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have all followed
the details of this great catastrophe in the Atlantic with such intense
solicitude. It was one of those accidents that happen with a precision
of time and circumstance that outdoes art; not an incident in it all
that was not supremely typical. It was the penetrating comment of chance
upon our entire social situation. Beneath a surface of magnificent
efficiency was—slap-dash. The ship was not even equipped to save its
third-class passengers; they had placed themselves on board with an
infinite confidence in the care that was to be taken of them, and they
went down, and most of their women and children went down with the cry
of those who find themselves cheated out of life.
In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen
and engineers—persons of the trade-union class—who shine as brightly as
any. And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the lot of that
tragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to be
caught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment. No
untried man dare say that he would have behaved better in his place. But
for capitalism and for our existing social system his escape—with five
and fifty third-class children waiting below to drown—was the
abandonment of every noble pretension. It is not the man I would
criticise, but the manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme
dignity of his position as would have sustained him in that crisis. He
was a rich man and a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man.
In the common man’s realisation that such is indeed the case with most
of those who dominate our world, lies the true cause and danger of our
social indiscipline. And the remedy in the first place lies not in
social legislation and so forth, but in the consciences of the wealthy.
Heroism and a generous devotion to the common good are the only
effective answer to distrust.
§ 2
The essential trouble in our growing labour disorder is the profound
distrust which has grown up in the minds of the new generation of
workers of either the ability or the good faith of the property-owning,
ruling and directing class. I do not attempt to judge the justice or not
of this distrust; I merely point to its existence as one of the striking
and essential factors in the contemporary labour situation.
This distrust is not, perhaps, the proximate cause of the strikes that
now follow each other so disconcertingly, but it embitters their spirit,
it prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have tried
to suggest that, whatever immediate devices for pacification might be
employed, the only way to a better understanding and co-operation, the
only escape from a social slide towards the unknown possibilities of
Social Democracy, lies in an exaltation of the standard of achievement
and of the sense of responsibility in the possessing and governing
classes. It is not so much “Wake up, England!” that I would say as “Wake
up, gentlemen!”—for the new generation of the workers is beyond all
question quite alarmingly awake and critical and angry. And they have
not merely to wake up, they have to wake up visibly and ostentatiously
if those old class reliances on which our system is based are to be
preserved and restored.
We need before anything else a restoration of class confidence. It is a
time when class should speak with class very frankly.
There is too much facile misrepresentation, too ready a disposition on
either side to accept caricatures as portraits and charges as facts.
However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind of
labour, this young, restive labour of the twentieth century, which can
read, discuss and combine, we need something in the nature of a social
contract. And it is when one comes to consider by what possible means
these suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and imperilled
social liner can be brought into generous co-operation with the second
and the first that one discovers just how lamentably out of date and out
of order our political institutions, which should supply the means for
just this inter-class discussion, have become. Between the busy and
preoccupied owning and employing class on the one hand, and the
distressed, uneasy masses on the other, intervenes the professional
politician, not as a mediator, but as an obstacle, who must be
propitiated before any dealings are possible. Our natural politics no
longer express the realities of the national life; they are a mere
impediment in the speech of the community. With our whole social order
in danger, our Legislature is busy over the trivial little affairs of
the Welsh Established Church, whose whole endowment is not equal to the
fortune of any one of half a dozen _Titanic_ passengers or a tithe of
the probable loss of another strike among the miners. We have a
Legislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of Gladstonian
legacies rather than governing our world to-day.
Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law’s
consequence, and, with us at least, the legal profession is the
political profession. It delights in false issues and merely technical
politics. Steadily with the ascendancy of the House of Commons the
barristers have ousted other types of men from political power. The
decline of the House of Lords has been the last triumph of the House of
Lawyers, and we are governed now to a large extent not so much by the
people for the people as by the barristers for the barristers. They set
the tone of political life. And since they are the most specialised, the
most specifically trained of all the professions, since their training
is absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive
artist and the controlled experiments of the scientific man, since the
business is with evidence and advantages and the skilful use of evidence
and advantages, and not with understanding, they are the least
statesmanlike of all educated men, and they give our public life a tone
as hopelessly discordant with our very great and urgent social needs as
one could well imagine. They do not want to deal at all with great and
urgent social needs. They play a game, a long and interesting game, with
parties as sides, a game that rewards the industrious player with
prominence, place, power and great rewards, and the less that game
involves the passionate interests of other men, the less it draws them
into participation and angry interference, the better for the steady
development of the politician’s career. A distinguished and active
fruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he found it, is the
political barrister’s ideal career. To achieve that, he must maintain
legal and political monopolies, and prevent the invasion of political
life by living interests. And so far as he has any views about labour
beyond the margin of his brief, the barrister politician seems to regard
getting men back to work on any terms and as soon as possible as the
highest good.
And it is with such men that our insurgent modern labour, with its
vaguely apprehended wants, its large occasions and its rapid emotional
reactions, comes into contact directly it attempts to adjust itself in
the social body. It is one of the main factors in the progressive
embitterment of the labour situation that whatever business is
afoot—arbitration, conciliation, inquiry—our contemporary system
presents itself to labour almost invariably in a legal guise. The
natural infirmities of humanity rebel against an unimaginative legality
of attitude, and the common workaday man has no more love for this great
and necessary profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade.
Little reasonable things from the lawyers’ point of view—the rejection,
for example, of certain evidence in the _Titanic_ inquiry because it
might amount to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption and
checking of a labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivial
points—irritate quite disproportionately.
Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and it is a very grave
national misfortune that at this time, when our situation calls aloud
for statecraft and a certain greatness of treatment, our public life
should be dominated as it has never been dominated before by this most
able and illiberal profession.
Now for that great multitude of prosperous people who find themselves at
once deeply concerned in our present social and economic crisis, and
either helplessly entangled in party organisation or helplessly outside
politics, the elimination and cure of this disease of statecraft, the
professional politician, has become a very urgent matter. To destroy
him, to get him back to his law courts and keep him there, it is
necessary to destroy the machinery of the party system that sustains
him, and to adopt some electoral method that will no longer put the
independent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the
party nominee. Such a method is to be found in proportional
representation with large constituencies, and to that we must look for
our ultimate liberation from our present masters, these politician
barristers. But the Labour situation cannot wait for this millennial
release, and for the current issue it seems to me patent that every
reasonable prosperous man will, even at the cost to himself of some
trouble and hard thinking, do his best to keep as much of this great and
acute controversy as he possibly can out of the lawyer’s and mere
politician’s hands and in his own. Leave Labour to the lawyers, and we
shall go very deeply into trouble indeed before this business is over.
They will score their points, they will achieve remarkable agreements
full of the possibility of subsequent surprises, they will make
reputations, and do everything Heaven and their professional training
have made them to do, and they will exasperate and exasperate!
Lawyers made the first French Revolution, and now, on a different side,
they may yet bring about an English one. These men below there are
still, as a class, wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared to
take orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom and nobility. They
make the most reasonable claims for a tolerable life, for certain
assurances and certain latitudes. Implicit rather than expressed is
their demand for wisdom and right direction from those to whom the great
surplus and freedom of civilisation are given. It is an entirely
reasonable demand if man is indeed a social animal. But we have got to
treat them fairly and openly. This patience and reasonableness and
willingness for leadership is not limitless. It is no good scoring our
mean little points, for example, and accusing them of breach of contract
and all sorts of theoretical wrongs because they won’t abide by
agreements to accept a certain scale of wages when the purchasing power
of money has declined. When they made that agreement they did not think
of that possibility. When they said a pound they thought of what was
then a pounds-worth of living. The Mint has since been increasing its
annual output of gold coins to two or three times the former amount, and
we have, as it were, debased the coinage with extraordinary quantities
of gold. But we who know and own did nothing to adjust that; we did not
tell the working man of that; we have let him find it out slowly and
indirectly at the grocer’s shop. That may be permissible from the
lawyer’s point of view, but it certainly isn’t from the gentleman’s, and
it is only by the plea that its inequalities give society a gentleman
that our present social system can claim to endure.
I would like to accentuate that, because if we are to emerge again from
these acute social dissensions a reunited and powerful people, there has
to be a change of tone, a new generosity on the part of those who deal
with Labour speeches, Labour literature, Labour representatives, and
Labour claims. Labour is necessarily at an enormous disadvantage in
discussion; in spite of a tremendous inferiority in training and
education it is trying to tell the community its conception of its needs
and purposes. It is not only young as a participator in the discussion
of affairs; it is actually young. The average working man is not half
the age of the ripe politicians and judges and lawyers and wealthy
organisers who trip him up legally, accuse him of bad faith, mark his
every inconsistency. It isn’t becoming so to use our forensic
advantages. It isn’t—if that has no appeal to you—wise.
The thing our society has most to fear from Labour is not organised
resistance, not victorious strikes and raised conditions, but the black
resentment that follows defeat. Meet Labour half-way, and you will find
a new co-operation in government; stick to your legal rights, draw the
net of repressive legislation tighter, then you will presently have to
deal with Labour enraged. If the anger burns free, that means
revolution; if you crush out the hope of that, then sabotage and a
sullen general sympathy for anarchistic crime.
§ 3
In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the present
Labour situation. I have tried to show the profound significance in this
discussion of the distrust which has grown up in the minds of the
workers, and how this distrust is being exacerbated by our entirely too
forensic method of treating their claims. I want now to point out a
still more powerful set of influences which is steadily turning our
labour struggles from mere attempts to adjust hours and wages into
movements that are gravely and deliberately revolutionary.
This is the obvious devotion of a large and growing proportion of the
time and energy of the owning and ruling classes to pleasure and
excitement, and the way in which this spectacle of amusement and
adventure is now being brought before the eyes and into the imagination
of the working man.
The intimate psychology of work is a thing altogether too little
considered and discussed. One asks: “What keeps a workman working
properly at his work?” and it seems a sufficient answer to say that it
is the need of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer.
Work must to some extent interest; if it bores, no power on earth will
keep a man doing it properly. And the tendency of modern industrialism
has been to subdivide processes and make work more boring and irksome.
Also the workman must be satisfied with the living he is getting, and
the tendency of newspaper, theatre, cinematograph show and so forth is
to fill his mind with ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeable
and interesting than his own. Habit also counts very largely in the
regular return of the man to his job, and the fluctuations of
employment, the failure of the employing class to provide any
alternative to idleness during slack time, break that habit of industry.
And then, last but not least, there is self-respect. Men and women are
capable of wonders of self-discipline and effort if they feel that
theirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine the thing they are
doing is the thing they ought to do. A miner will cut coal in a
different spirit and with a fading zest if he knows his day’s output is
to be burnt to waste secretly by a lunatic. Man is a social animal; few
men are naturally social rebels, and most will toil very cheerfully in
subordination if they feel that the collective end is a fine thing and a
great thing.
Now, this force of self-respect is much more acutely present in the mind
of the modern worker than it was in the thought of his fathers. He is
intellectually more active than his predecessors, his imagination is
relatively stimulated, he asks wide questions. The worker of a former
generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers
begin to ask, not one man here or there, but in masses, in battalions,
in trades: “Why, then, are _we_ toilers, and for what is it that we
toil?”
What answer do we give them?
I ask the reader to put himself in the place of a good workman, a young,
capable miner, let us say, in search of an answer to that question. He
is, we will suppose, temporarily unemployed through the production of a
glut of coal, and he goes about the world trying to see the fine and
noble collective achievements that justify the devotion of his whole
life to humble toil. I ask the reader: What have we got to show that
man? What are we doing up in the light and air that justifies our demand
that he should go on hewing in narrow seams and cramped corners until he
can hew no more? Where is he to be taken to see these crowning fruits of
our release from toil? Shall we take him to the House of Commons to note
which of the barristers is making most headway over Welsh
Disestablishment, or shall we take him to the _Titanic_ inquiry to hear
the latest about those fifty-five third-class children (out of
eighty-three) who were drowned? Shall we give him an hour or so among
the portraits at the Royal Academy, or shall we make an enthusiastic
tour of London sculpture and architecture and saturate his soul with the
beauty he makes possible? The new Automobile Club, for example. “Without
you and your subordination we could not have had that.” Or suppose we
took him the round of the West-End clubs and restaurants and made him
estimate how many dinners London can produce at a pinch at the price of
his local daily minimum, say, and upward; or borrow an aeroplane at
Hendon and soar about counting all the golfers in the Home Counties on
any week-day afternoon. “You suffer at the roots of things, far below
there, but see all this nobility and splendour, these sweet, bright
flowers to which your rootlet life contributes.” Or we might spend a
pleasant morning trying to get a passable woman’s hat for the price of
his average weekly wages in some West-End shop....