The condition of England

by Charles F. G. Masterman

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.

CHAPTER VI
THE COUNTRYSIDE

OUTSIDE this exuberant life of the cities, standing aloof from it, and with but little share in its prosperity, stands the countryside. Rural England, beyond the radius of certain favoured neighbourhoods, and apart from the specialised population which serves the necessities of the country house, is everywhere hastening to decay. No one stays there who can possibly find employment elsewhere. All the boys and girls with energy and enterprise forsake at the commencement of maturity the life of the fields for the life of the town. A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages. In scattered feudal districts a liberal distribution of alms and of charity masquerading as employment may serve to retain a subservient population in a “model village.” When these hierarchies and generosities are absent the cottages crumble to pieces and are never repaired; no new cottages are constructed: the labourer loses not only intimacy with the land, but even all desire for the land; that longing for a particular position of his own which is the strongest animating force in the peasantry of every other country in the world. The villages are left to old men and to children, to the inert, unenterprising, and intellectually feeble. Whole ancient skilled occupations—hedging and ditching, the traditional treatment of beasts and growing things—are becoming lost arts in rural England. Behind the appearance of a feverish prosperity and adventure—motors along all the main roads, golf-courses, gamekeepers, gardeners, armies of industrious servants, excursionists, hospitable entertainment of country house-parties—we can discern the passing of a race of men.

From every region of southern England comes the same testimony. “There is no social life at all,” writes a Somerset clergyman. “A village which once fed, clothed, policed, and regulated itself cannot now dig its own wells or build its own barns. Still less can it act its own dramas, build its own church, or organise its own work and play. It is pathetically helpless in everything.” He sees no forces in being adequate to arrest this prolonged secular decline. “As things go on now,” is his forecast, “we shall have empty fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen, in all the green of England. Nomadic herds will sweep over the country, sowing, shearing, grass-cutting, reaping and binding with machines: a system which does not make for health, peace, discipline, nobleness of life.” “England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.”[13]

In rural Essex another observer finds the land becoming “one vast wilderness,” “a retreat for foxes and a shelter for conies”: with the houses tumbling into decay, no new houses built, apathy settling down like a grey cloud over all. “The sturdy sons of the village have fled; they have left behind the old men, the lame, the mentally deficient, the vicious, the born tired.” Farm buildings and cottages are rapidly going to pieces. He notes the steady increase in the agricultural returns of “Land laid down to grass.” “It would be better described,” he declares, “as land which has laid itself down to twitch and thistle.” He heaps scorn upon “those glowing patriots who, in their anxiety to build up an Empire, have been grabbing at continents and lost their own land.”[14]

And in Wiltshire, again, another observer can show the two great wants of the labourer still unsatisfied—Hope and a Home. He laments the passing of the old village gentry, who still had some sympathy and channels of communication with the labourer; and the substitution for them of the large farmer, who utterly hates and despises the class beneath him. “‘As long as a man stays on the land, he can’t call his soul his own,’ is an expression often heard among the poor.” He exhibits the striking contrast between the brother and sister: the sister who has “gone into service,” and found a demand for her work, and acquired under such conditions hope, independence, and a vigour of mind; the brother left on the fields, with the prospect before him of unchanging manual labour, at unchanging, scanty wages, until the workhouse absorbs him at the end. He shows the tragedy of the mere material collapse in the material conditions; village after village, in which no new cottages have been built for a hundred years; crumbling walls, falling into decay; crowded families, with all the starved life and degradation inevitably associated with such overcrowding; the whole presenting an aspect of fatigue and of decline. “To outsiders, who live in country villages, the wonder is not why many leave, but why any stay.” He will not agree that this is merely the normal condition of the rural population, as seen through jaundiced eyes. Once there was life in rural England. That life is vanishing like a dream. “‘Still as a slave before his lord,’ represents the attitude of the farm hand in the presence of his employer. No sheep before her shearers was ever more dumb than the milkers and carters and ploughmen at the village meetings to which their masters choose to summon them. They are cowed. It is to this that the race has come whom Froissart has described as ‘le plus périlleux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux et orgueilleux.’ Pride is dead in their souls.”[15]

This writer does not despair of revival as a result of large and drastic changes. “The monopoly of great farmers must be broken up,” he boldly declares, “before the dawn of hope can rise upon the English peasant.” He has discovered deep in the heart of the country labourer that “Love of the Land” which has survived through all the generations of hopeless drudgery. He recognises it as “a survival from the days when an able-bodied Englishman, bred on and to the land, might cherish the hope of one day calling a corner of it his own, at least as the tenant of a landlord without personal interest in the degradation of his dependants.” Here is the sole asset we possess in the work of rural revival. Parliament has been attempting by legislation to give to some select persons in the villages direct access to the land. The labourer to-day is slowly and doubtfully realising that a law has been passed which is designed to work for his benefit. The whole conception is new to him. “Law” he has hitherto regarded as something remote or inimical, symbolised by the village policeman, or the magistrates who penalise poaching and petty larceny. Those who made themselves missionaries of the new Act in the villages found everywhere this first incredulity. They announced the decree of Government that henceforth the first charge on the land should be the allotment or small holding; that nothing was to stand in the way of the provision of such holding when it was desired; that, if necessary by compulsion, the claims of sport, the claims of pleasure, the ambitions of the large farmer adding field to field, the prejudice or caprice of those who dislike the creation of these small plots and gardens, were to be made to yield to the primary necessity of finding land for the landless. The labourer was silent, astonished, doubtful, wondering if this was a new trick designed for his disadvantage. There were meetings at night, to which men came furtively; suggestions that one is a “spy,” and dogged silence until he has departed; doubt as to what Mr. A. (the landlord) would think of it, or whether Mr. B. (the farmer) would dispossess all those who apply for land, or if Mr. C. (the vicar) would be inclined to look favourably on the affair. The stirring and the movement for a time seemed real; far more real than many had ventured to hope for when the Act was passing through Parliament. But the rather cumbrous machinery is difficult to put into operation, and the future is still uncertain. If the Parish Councils and County Councils and Central Commissioners prove adequate to the situation, they may yet reveal life where there now is little but death, and a transformation of England’s deserted countryside. If the difficulties are insuperable or action too long delayed, with Councils embarking upon one experiment chosen from ten applications, postponing for months or years any energetic action; there will be no vocal protest, and few who cannot look beneath the surface will realise what has happened. The serene life of rural England, viewed from the country house or city observatory, will continue undisturbed. There will be no revolution, red flags, open riots, rick-burning. But the people will quietly melt away, into the cities, beyond the sea. The last of the Sibylline Books will have been flung into the flames.

What this vanishing life signifies, in its strength and in its weaknesses, can only be revealed to those who through months and years have made it the subject of sympathetic study. The landlord, the farmer, the clergyman, the newspaper correspondent primed with casual conversation in the village inn, think that they know the labourer. They probably know nothing whatever about him. With his limited vocabulary, with his racial distrust of the stranger, and all of another class, with a mind which maintains such reticence except in moments of overpowering emotion, that labourer stands, a perplexing enigmatic figure alone in a voluble, self-analysing world. In certain sympathetic studies he is revealed in his strength and his weakness, by those who are able to get behind much that is superficially unattractive to the solid endurance and courage and helpfulness beneath it all.

In his Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, Mr. “George Bourne” has presented an illuminating picture of an old man who himself stands for the last relic of a vanishing race. He has collected and treasured the sayings of “Bettesworth” as he passes slowly downward in the day’s decline; remarks trivial or commonplace, worldly wisdom, strange superstitions, acceptance of the sunshine, bewilderment before the hostile forces of the world. There are years passed in almost daily intercourse before his master discovers that Bettesworth had once fought through the Crimean war. That experience had made no permanent impression of horror or of pride. The events of the day, which influence men’s passions in some mobile, distant universe, filter down into this quiet country like the noise of something far away. And the South African War, and the death of the Queen, and a General Election scarcely do more than ripple the surface of these deep waters. Of more importance is the untimely summer rain which ruins the harvest, dispossession from a cottage, the illness of a wife, the calamity of advancing age. The heroic patience and endurance of the labourer is here revealed, in face of accepted and inevitable change. He resists the embraces of the workhouse with that dogged despair with which the English rural poor have resisted the “Bastilles” since their foundation. He clings to life and its possible activities, continuing his work, suffering and half blind, meeting death when it comes as the poor have usually met it, without hope and without fear; his mind at the end with the past rather than with the future. The Pagan remains, and refuses to be silenced by the long centuries of Christian tradition. There is scepticism concerning “these here places nobody ever bin to an’ come back again to tell we.” “Nobody don’t know nothin’ about it. ’Tain’t as if they come back to tell ye. There’s my father what bin dead this forty year, what a crool man he must be not to’ve come back in all that time, if he was able, an’ tell me about it. That’s what I said to Colonel Sadler. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you had better talk to the Vicar.’ ‘Vicar?’ I says; ‘he won’t talk to me. Besides, what do he know about it more’n anybody else?’”

He is seen moving into his squalid cottage, and refusing to be dislodged from his lair: resisting, to the death, the services of the efficient poor law infirmary or the suggestion of Hospital kindliness. He had a theory that “bread never ought to be no less than a shillin’ a gallon” if farmers were to prosper: but on hearing of the new “fiscal reform,” “Oh dear!” is his comment, “we don’t want no taxes on food.” In war-time he is on the side of “our country,” and has a subtle explanation of the report of “missing” in the newspapers. “Prisoners—or else burnt.” “They burns ’em, some says.” He enjoys his life to the end; despising, so long as is possible, the forces of ill-health, advancing old age, weariness; exhibiting in circumstances of bereavement and squalid misery the astonishing endurance and clinging to life which is found amongst the rural poor of England. “During the last year or two of his life he was seldom without pain. He could joke about his passing indispositions as he could defy his landlord. A neighbour looking in upon him, and seeing his serious condition, said genially, ‘You ben’t goin’ to die, be ye, Freddy?’ And he answered, ‘I dunno. Shouldn’t care if I do. ’Tis a poor feller as can’t make up his mind to die once. If we had to die two or three times, then there might be something to fret about.’” Later, he adds more seriously, “But nobody dunno when, that’s the best of it.”

The author recounts, with a poignant simplicity, the incidents of the old man’s death: in hot July weather, with the year at the summit of riotous life, and every element in nature taunting the impotence of humanity before the triumphant forces of destruction. “He is dying,” was the thought at the end, “without any suspicion that any one could think of him with admiration and reverence.” His race is perishing in similar ignorance, unhonoured and unsung: without a suspicion that “any one could think of it with admiration and reverence.” The agricultural labourer survived the intolerable conditions of the early century when his life was one impossible struggle against penury and starvation. He stands to-day for a moment, an old man in a crumbling home, the last of a long line of high tradition and heritage. He stands to-day without successors: occupying the region of his ancestors, which they had peopled since England first was: which they had maintained, with no ignoble life, through the transitory centuries.

He is vanishing from the world, and there are few that regret his departure. “Progress” has effected a destruction where penury and starvation had failed. He endured through all the lean years, somehow obtaining nourishment and rearing his children, clinging tenaciously to the earth, within the earth-bound horizon. At length appears the end; a rather squalid and mournful end—to a life which had once stood for the bedrock life of England. The peasant’s resources, the peasant’s vigour and resistance, the peasant’s slow-moving, deliberate mind, had borne the burden of war and change. From his villages came the old folk-songs of the nation; he built the village churches, which are the treasures of rural England, and once took a pride in them. His secret wisdom, his fragments of half-heathen, half-Christian philosophy, his standards of bitterness and enjoyment, once made up the temper and mettle of the common people of England. The period of his greatest degradation coincided with the period of a sudden offer of escape. As the common land passed from his occupation, and he sank steadily to the landless depth of day labour, the cities, with their unlimited demands for the peasant energy and vigour, open to him welcoming arms. The few that remain are coming more and more to present the appearance of a declining race: a race which has lost the secrets of the arts which once flourished in the region in which it dwells. The English countryside to-day, still a thing of beauty, with its thatched cottages and old high-timbered roofs and glory of village churches, presents a picture similar to those in which races of dulled intelligence blink and creep within cities of magnificent architecture once raised by their ancestors, the secrets of whose construction they have neither energy nor intelligence to regain. “The evidence is abundant and positive,” writes Dr. Jessop, as a result of most careful examination of first-hand authority, “that the work done upon the fabrics of our churches and the other work done in the beautifying of the interior of our churches, such as the wood carving of our screens, the painting of the lovely figures in the panels of those screens, the embroidery of the banners and vestments, the frescoes on the walls, the engraving of the monumental brasses, the stained glass in the windows, and all that vast aggregate of artistic achievements which existed in immense profusion in our village churches till the frightful spoliation of those who in the sixteenth century stripped them bare—all this was executed by local artists.” He will not listen to the tradition of indebtedness to monk and squire. “In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” he declares, “there were no squires—that is the naked truth.” The property belonged to the parish: it was always growing. It was of a richness and variety almost incredible to those who to-day see but the last guttering flame of parochial life, the attempt by parish councils, guilds of village players, and all the enterprise of occasional vigorous resistance, to combat the spreading atrophy of decay. Here are “ornaments and church furniture, bells and candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and banners: vestments which were miracles of splendour in their colours and materials and incomparable artistic finish of needlework: not to speak of the fine linen and the veils, the carpets and the hangings.”[16] It is a treasury of wealth, not so much in its direct suggestion of opulence, of services and bequests freely given, as in its indication of a life which can take pride in itself and its labour: a life, however difficult and limited, yet finding occasion for a handicraft in which men and women may delight, and some interests other than that of concentration upon dull and trivial things.

Such were the beginnings of this long sorrowful progress: in villages which could create these things and take a pride in them. The end reveals an England vulgarised by the clamour and vigour of the newer wealthy, racing each other down on motor cars from the noise of the town, into the heart of a great silence: the silence that broods over a doomed and passing race. There remains at the summit a joyful absorption in physical exercises and pleasures: in the midst of which, almost unnoticed amid the new gaiety, “Bettesworth” is shambling to a pauper grave, and his children vanishing from the life of open sky into the mazes of the lamplit city.

“In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are imprisoned between hedges, and driven along rights of way.” The beauty of continental landscape—of the Touraine and the Midi, the little Norman orchards, the extraordinarily fruitful fields of Southern Germany, the rude plenty of the Balkan principalities—is the beauty of “peasants’ country”: the beauty that is provided by security and close cultivation, excited wherever the peasant is assured that he will reap what he has sown. The beauty of English landscape is the beauty of “landlords’ country”—the open woods, the large grass fields and wide hedges, the ample demesnes, which signify a country given up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease. The one is a park: the other, a source of food supply and the breeding-place of men. The typical English countryside is that of great avenues leading to residences which lack no comfort, broad parks, stretches of private land, sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting, shooting, and a kind of stately splendour. The typical continental countryside is that of tiny white-washed or wooden broad-eaved cottages, freely scattered over a region of fruit and flowers and close-tilled coveted land, which, in fact, is one large garden. The record of the great landowners of this country is of vast accumulations of acres: aggregations of whole counties, or estates dotted over many counties, each organised on the same plan of inherited feudal tradition. Where the money can still be obtained from external sources—the new wealth of the towns, or tribute from new nations abroad—some semblance of that feudal tradition still remain. Cottages are let at less than their market prices, old men and women on the estate are comfortably pensioned, there are almshouses and model villages and “Church” schools, a deferential and grateful population, and all the apparatus of the model village, guided and controlled by the occupant of the great house. Yet even from these well-favoured regions the census returns reveal the population fleeing from the neighbourhood as if from some raging pestilence: making what haste they can to be gone. The smaller “landed gentry” have been most hardly hit by agricultural depressions, the general fall in prices, and the obligations of a growing standard of luxury, confronting a falling income. Here the estates are encumbered or falling into decay. The physical aspect of comfort and pleasant non-economic industry is far less apparent. There is evidence, even in the outward scene, of the malady within. In the case of some of the larger estates, and a great number of the smaller, the land is being transferred to those who, having made fortunes in trade, business, or financial speculation, have desire of settling down into the life of the country gentleman. In many of the home counties, for example, the bulk of the older estates have passed into the hands of the owners of the “new wealth,” the Plutocracy which looks for its consummation in ownership of a portion of the land of England. Many of them are assiduous in rural welfare: some have taken over what remain of the feudal tradition as a “going concern,” and delight in the fresh air, the opportunities for “sport” and exercise, the ample bestowal of patronage, and all the manifold energies and charities which flow from the great house into the surrounding countryside. There are some also who introduce a breath of fresh air—even an unashamed Democratic spirit—into the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the remoter regions of rural England. To others, however, all this is frankly a toy and a plaything. They have purchased an estate, as they would purchase food or raiment, for the purposes of enjoyment. They convert the house into a tiny piece of the city, transplanted to the healthier air of the fields. They entertain themselves and their friends in the heart of an England, for whose vanishing traditions and enthusiasms they care not at all. In that England, indeed, everything seems to arrive too late. Men only awaken to the necessity of doing something after the opportunity for that particular something has already gone. The rural Labourers’ Union succeeded and collapsed just before the great fall in prices: instead of effecting its objects at the time when wages could easily have been raised out of the natural profits of the land. To-day land is being slowly and laboriously offered to the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea. In another period of years, progress may have compelled the breaking up of the big estates; once again, after the population who would avail themselves to-day of such offers, to-morrow will have passed from the scene. In exercise and enjoyment, in parties and pleasant gardens, amid a playing at the ancient rural traditions, and through the newer mechanisms of locomotion, the decay passes almost unnoticed. The few who lift up their voices in warning are openly despised as agitators, or condemned as political pessimists. The rural reformer finds himself not so much opposed as ridiculed. What remains of the system, fortified by the city wealth, is so evidently unassailable by what remains of any resistent forces, that it can afford to contemplate all efforts towards revolt with a good-tempered disdain. Occasionally a village learns of some legislation designed for its benefit, of “Small Holdings” which a benignant Government designs for the advantage of the adventurous, of the apparatus of rural Self-Government, which can give to the poorest some right of control of the village commercial activities. It cautiously or boldly essays the paths of progress. The inhabitants apply for land to the great landowners who constitute the County Council, or organise themselves into a tiny village caucus for the capture of the Parish Meeting. Then, in quiet and effectual action, the movement of revolt is scattered and suppressed. It is explained to the applicants how unsuitable they are for the position of independent agricultural industry: or the leaders of the democratic upheaval are informed that it is not in the least convenient to their owners that they should concern themselves with the intricacies of local self-government. In a few months, or, at most, a few years, order reigns—at Auburn, as at Warsaw. And those who had been galvanised into some semblance of life have, for the most part, disappeared: to London, to the nearest city, to the British dominions beyond the sea. Such pitiful uprising, with its consequent disasters, evokes no resentment against the dominant power. It rather evokes resentment against those who had stirred up the forces of disturbance. In a certain village in Oxfordshire an unwary Liberal member of Parliament recently stimulated resistance to the enclosure by the landlord of a right-of-way. The resistance was sustained, and the village preserved in its ancient privilege. But all six witnesses who had testified to the ancient customs were dismissed from their occupations, and driven from the district. And indignation fell, not on the landlord who thus revealed his power, but on the member of Parliament who revealed his impotence. It was the Liberal, not the Conservative organisation, which henceforth found a united opposition to its energies: as the population, worshipping always only the strongest, discovered its leaders deported over so unsatisfying a controversy as the vindication of a public right. There was a general village uprising in the Election of 1885, when the newly enfranchised labourers turned eagerly to the promise of independence upon the land. There was another village uprising in 1906, when the labourers turned sullenly away from the proposal to tax their food. But the one was an uprising of Hope: the other, of Fear. In the intervening period there had vanished, from large areas of rural England, the possibility of the reconstruction of a rural civilisation.

“The human wealth of a populous countryside, in which all classes lived, and could live, at peace for centuries—that,” says Mr. Ensor, “is our achievement as a nation, the source and condition of our other greatnesses, the bark on whose fragments, ‘majestic though in ruin,’ we can still found, if not our loudest, at least our most legitimate fame.”[17] All that is over. It would appear to be over for ever. A few old men, gathered round the hearthstone of the village inn, testify in the nights of winter to the passing of a whole people. Already the manifestations of resistance and of aspiration, associated with the democratic victories of the last election, are sinking back into the older acquiescence: as the rulers of the countryside exhibit, by a combination of kindliness and austerity, how undesirable is such an overthrow of the accepted ways. Villas and country houses establish themselves in the heart of this departing race: in it, but not of it, as alien from its ancient ways as if dropped from the clouds into another world. Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within. You can see the evidence of their activity in the dust-laden hedges of the south country roads, a grey mud colour, with no evidence of green; in the ruined cottage gardens of the south country villages. From those villages themselves not only the evidence of activity has departed, but the very memories of it. They cannot, to-day, make the folklore popular songs. They cannot even cherish the folklore songs which were made by their fathers. And “few sadder or more thought-begetting experiences can be undergone,” is the testimony of a lover of this land, “than to sit in an inn in a remote country village, and hear rustics troll tin-kettle ditties about Seven Dials or the Old Kent Road.”

Over all which vision of a secular decay Nature still flings the splendour of her dawns and sunsets upon a land of radiant beauty. Here are deep rivers flowing beneath old mills and churches; high-roofed red barns and large thatched houses; with still unsullied expanses of cornland and wind-swept moor and heather, and pine woods looking down valleys upon green gardens; and long stretches of quiet down standing white and clean from the blue surrounding sea. Never, perhaps, in the memorable and spacious story of this island’s history has the land beyond the city offered so fair an inheritance to the children of its people, as to-day, under the visible shadow of the end.

CHAPTER VII
SCIENCE AND PROGRESS

SUCH appear some, at least, of the characteristics of the various classes of Society to-day in England. In general material condition there is little to excite foreboding. A proportion of the population is raised well above the privations of poverty larger than ever before in history. Extravagance and a longing for pleasure and excitement are common to all classes. The aggregation of plenty is such as the Old World has never before seen. The vision, as a whole, is of a laborious energetic race, deserting the countryside for the cities, and there heaping up wealth, which is shared, in some degree, by all but the poorest. If anything is wrong in material conditions it is in the apparatus, not of accumulation, but of distribution. An altogether inadequate proportion of this accumulation is the absolute possession of a tiny class which sits secure upon the summit. In heavy tolls levied upon labour in the form of royalties and the monopoly rents of land, in inherited fortune which reaps its interest from remote regions and foreign kingdoms, in unusual profit of industrial investment through times of trade “boom,” in financial speculation and all the various special advantage of business, commerce, and manufacture in this free market of England, there is being concentrated in few hands vast and ever-increasing fortune. Security accepted as normal, comfort more widely spread than ever before, and a standard of extravagance and display which would have astonished all previous ages, characterise the heart of the Empire at the height of its material greatness. “Situate at the entering of the sea,” with a population exceeding Scotland or Ireland, and the revenues of many European States, the greatest city of that Empire is taking toll from the industry of all the world. In the midst of which outward evidence of attainment sounds almost unnoticed the complaining of a poverty more degraded and intolerable than in many less successful lands: whose misery is intensified by its conjunction in adjacent cities with a people evidently given up to the arts of enjoyment, and finding an ever-increasing plenty inadequate to its ever-increasing demand.

And always the hope is latent that “something will turn up” which will solve all the unfortunate social problems, and make every one happy and content. Sometimes it is to be the advance of mechanical discovery, sometimes a new spirit of kindliness and patience: sometimes fuller conquests of trade or commerce or Imperial dominion; but always the bringing in from outside of a Deus ex machina which will supplement nobody’s loss with everybody’s gain. The advance in acquisition during a century of invention has been so astonishing, the progress of whole classes from a low-grade, comfortless, ignorant life into a highly-paid, skilled, intelligent working people so remarkable, that to many the continuance of such a process seems inevitable. Amelioration is to come as a legitimate child of the forces of change, and without effort or sacrifice is to reveal a continuous process of uplifting. Certainly by all material and tangible tests—income, prices, security, comfort, addition to leisure and wages—the bulk of the people of this country have advanced so incredibly since the “Hungry Forties” that the reality of those days would appear to the present generation but as bad dreams. They cannot believe that these things were actually enacted upon these islands less than eighty years ago. The Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Labour in the Factories,—the most sensational blue book of the century,—for example, would seem rather to refer to the Spaniards in the West Indies or the administration of King Leopold in the Congo than to the solid ground and pleasant airs of England. And in every kind of material test—fall of pauperism, fall of the death-rate, decline of infectious and poverty diseases—or increase of wages, shortening of hours of labour, fall in prices; or, again, spread of education and of means of recreation, improvement in houses and in the sanitation of cities, the offering of opportunities of advancement: in all these the advance has been so amazing that there would seem to be no place for the pessimist who would prophesy coming disaster.

It is rather in the region of the spirit that the doubts are still disturbing. Fulness of bread in the past has been accompanied with leanness of soul. And the modern prophet is still undecided whether this enormous increase of life’s comforts and material satisfactions has revealed an equal and parallel advance in courage and compassion and kindly understandings. The nations, equipped with ever more complicated instruments of warfare, face each other as armed camps across frontiers mined and tortured with the apparatus of destruction. A scared wealthy and middle class confronts a cosmopolitan uprising of the “proletariat,” whose discontent it can neither appease nor forget. The industrious populations which have been swept into masses and congestions by the new industry has not yet found an existence serene, and intelligible, and human. No one, to-day, looking out upon a disturbed and sullen Europe, a disturbed and confident America, but is conscious of a world in motion: whither, no man knows. “The people of our Christian world,” so runs the cry of the first of living prophets—“the people of our Christian world live like animals, guided in their lives merely by personal interests and by their struggle with one another: differing from animals only in that the animals, from time immemorial, have kept the same stomachs, claws, and fangs, while people move with ever-increasing rapidity from roads to railroads, from horses to steam, from spoken sermons and letters to printing, to telegraphs and telephones, and from sailing boats to ocean steamers, from swords to gunpowder, cannons, quick-firing guns, bombs, and war aeroplanes. And life, with telegraphs, telephones, electricity, bombs, and aeroplanes, and with hatred of all for all: directed, not by some uniting spiritual principle, but, on the contrary, by animal instincts which divide, and which employ mental powers for their own satisfaction, becomes even more and more insane and wretched.”[18]

What mechanical invention, what mechanical skill, have any promise to offer of immediate and large improvement? Will the cunning ingenuity of men, which embarked on the path of scientific exploration with such large hopes of service to humanity as well as attainment of truth, be able, even at this last, through the multiplication of machinery to eliminate poverty, through the development of the arts of healing to eliminate pain? Or if this be unattainable and delusive, can we find through these and other progressive agencies a permanent healing for the sick soul of humanity? Is the twentieth century to advocate a scheme of life which will itself provide a consolation in the loss of the older faiths, and redeem mankind from a mere animal struggle for the apparatus of material pleasure?

The “Bankruptcy of Science” is a term which has become common to European literature since M. Brunetiere first scandalised the naive ingenuous persons who accepted empiricism as a new religion. And, in a large movement of popular opinion, mankind has turned with some indignation and some regret from a method which has proved altogether inadequate to the immense hopes that it once excited amongst its first admirers. The greatness of the disappointment is proportioned to the greatness of the promise. The accusation—in its popular form—is an unfair one. Natural science, as such, makes no claim to remedy human ills; makes no claim, indeed, to exercise any kind of influence upon human life at all. It does not reveal, and it does not profess to reveal, the secret and meaning of the Universe. That is the function of a metaphysic. It does not labour in aid of religion, art, economic equality, or social comfort. It does not labour against them. It leaves them alone. These are outside its province. There is no possibility through investigations in the higher mathematics, of solving the problem of the injustices of human fortune. There is no prospect through examination of the brains of dead animals to discover or disprove the existence of the human soul. There is no promise, by however subtle elaboration of mechanical invention, permanently to better the lot of those poor who in every variation of human society are always living near the margin of what is humanly endurable. Such disabilities are no charge against human reason, concentrated upon investigation of the nature of the material Universe. They are a charge, if charge at all, against the somewhat too sanguine dreamers who asserted that through human reason, in investigation of the nature of the material Universe, mankind would finally achieve secrets which would make them rivals of the older gods. The large hopes and dreams of the Early Victorian time have vanished: never, at least in the immediate future, to return. The science which was to allay all diseases, the commerce which was to abolish war, and weave all nations into one human family, the research which was to establish ethics and religion on a secure and positive foundation, the invention which was to enable all humanity, with a few hours of not disagreeable work every day, to live for the remainder of their time in ease and sunshine—all these have become recognised as remote and fairy visions. One man now produces—by the aid of machinery—what a thousand could but hardly produce a century ago. “Argosies of commerce” post over land and ocean without rest. Not two but two hundred blades of grass grow where one blade grew before. Factories and furnaces, in never-ceasing activity, vomit forth ever more elaborate products, clothing, furniture, houses, implements of brass and steel, by methods which would have excited wonder and worship in earlier, simpler ages. Yet ten millions, disinherited, out of a doubtful forty, shiver through their lives on the verge of hunger: to the bulk of the remainder existence presents no certain joys, either in a guaranteed prosperity or in any serviceable and illuminating purpose of being. Civilisation, in the early twentieth century in England, suffers no illusions as to the control of natural forces, or the exploration of natural secrets furnishing a cure either for the diseases from which it suffers in the body, or the more deep-seated maladies of the soul.

It is making life noisier: is it making life—to the general—a richer, a better thing: existence more worth the living? Once more, here is no charge against invention, against the persistent labours of select and powerful minds to ascertain what knowledge is obtainable by the method of experiment and observation. They might justly reply that it is not in their province to make life a richer and better thing: existence more worth the living. Their function—in so far as it touches human life at all—is to increase the aggregate control of “mind over matter”; to release man from the mere impotent cowering before the brute forces of Chance and Necessity, which can deal with him as a plaything, or overwhelm him, casually and indifferently, without praise and without blame. They have no function to determine what distribution of this increase in human wealth and control will most make for the happiness and development of the human family, or to adjust whatever affirmations they may be able to advance with some certitude to historical religions, moralities, or customary courses of conduct. “The changing conditions of history,” says a great modern philosopher, “touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our opportunities, and open chances to us for new ideals. But with each new ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on the old ideal will vanish: and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that the total sum of significance is positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any other of the world.”

As the mechanical discoveries swing forward there will always be those buoyant persons to whom the newer inventions are most welcome, contrasted with the more conservative elements who ask for quiet, and some position secure from the cyclic disturbances of change. In the next generation, any particular change has become the normal, and excites neither satisfaction nor disgust. So it has been with improved locomotion, with telegraphs and telephones, with all the outward apparatus which has set the unchanged human spirit in a world of marvel and miracle. The most obvious scientific advance which is already visible upon the horizon, is the invention of flying: which may be accepted, almost before these words are in print, as something no longer so astonishing as to excite enthusiasm or foreboding. It may exercise the profoundest influence upon the possibilities of war, of land frontiers, of divisions between contending nations. It has no real power either of infecting with disease a civilisation that is healthy, or of healing a civilisation that is sick and tired. For many years, perhaps, aerial navigation may be the sport and plaything of rich and adventurous spirits, like the first motor cars; creating occasional sensations by circling round St Paul’s Cathedral, or descending unexpectedly in other people’s back gardens. That is the stage when mankind will rejoice in the ingenuity of its inventors, heedless of the tremendous changes which such inventors must ultimately originate. Then the airship will find itself utilised for military purposes, perhaps with startling result. Then for locomotion and the transfer of people and merchandise from place to place above the recognised boundaries of ocean or territory. Finally, it will appear as a normal factor of man’s life, transfiguring the world as much as the steamship or the railway; occupied in the service of the poor as well as of the rich, under private as well as public control. It may eliminate natural boundaries which have exercised a dominant influence upon human life since human life first was. The “precious stone set in a silver sea,” with its moat defensive “against the envy of less happier lands,” may find itself suddenly helpless and vulnerable before armies dropping from the skies. War itself may become impossible or utterly destructive. Protective barriers disappear, and the ingenuities of the construction of a scientific tariff melt into thin air. Man, whether he will or no, is drawn inevitably nearer to man. He must federate, or perish in homicidal mania and blind impulse of hatred and revenge.

On the other hand, quite apart from the question of national rivalries or the old impelling causes of the madness of war, there is the further consideration of the influence of such achievements upon the delicate fabric of the body and soul of mankind. At best, any large accomplishment of flying must mean an increased hustling and speeding up of human life; more hurry, more bustle, more breathlessness, more triumphant supremacy of material things. In all our mechanical ingenuities we have constructed masters for us, rather than servants; being compelled, immediately such ingenuities have found fruit in invention, to adjust our lives to the new conditions which these, and not we ourselves, henceforth dictate and impose. We are compelled, for example, to avail ourselves of the telegraph and the telephone; we are driven to the express train, the motor omnibus, the various expedients which are adapted to acceleration, rather than to happiness. If we do not adjust our lives to such accelerations, we are swept aside or trodden under by the crowds which press behind; like those who fail in the daily leap for the Brooklyn cars at New York, and are swept aside or trodden under almost unheeded. Has all this violence and tumult made life richer, fairer, more desirable for the children of men? Or is man losing in the mere blind effort of acceleration some of those experiences which once transfigured and glorified his little span of days? “Can you really turn a ray of light by magnetism?” shouted Carlyle scornfully. “And if you can, what should I care?” Matthew Arnold complained that the modern Englishman “thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell and from Camberwell to Islington, and when railway trains run between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal dismal life at Camberwell to an illiberal dismal life at Islington, and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.” Airships journeying daily from Paris to Pekin might excite exultation in a humanity which has emulated the exploits of Icarus, without exciting, like Icarus, the wrath of the jealous gods. Of what profit if they be found merely to transfer to Paris an existence which has become intolerable at Pekin, and to Pekin an existence which has become intolerable at Paris? It is a remarkable fact in the history of European development, that all the recent success of scientific and mechanical invention has been accompanied by an ever profounder questioning of the advantage of it all; so that to-day, when we seem on the verge of such discoveries as would have made our ancestors shout for joy in the mere triumph of creative energy, great writers are inquiring, with more bitterness and uncertainty than ever before, whether a verdict of bankruptcy has not been passed upon the whole of this complicated and baffled society. Mr. Wells has exhibited the old potato digger, “a greengrocer by trade, a gardener by disposition,” confronting with a deepening disgust the restlessness of being. “Heaven had planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately, Heaven had not planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and incessant change.” He is revealed in his little garden; gas-works and electric power stations rising up to heaven beside him, mono-rails running across his head, flocks of balloons and aeroplanes clouding the horizon; everywhere on earth and sky the impression of a hustling, distorted, dissatisfied energy, writhing into fresh forms of grotesque invention. “This here Progress,” is his dull conviction; “it keeps on. You’d hardly think it could keep on.” It is not only Mr. Tom Smallways who is bothered with doubts of an uncertain future. The vision of all poverty and sweat of labour vanishing by the occasional pressing of a button, while mankind lies at ease on the hillside like the Olympian gods, has joined the vision of all disease abolished by scientific ingenuity in the kingdom of the shades. Flying will bring men together, abolish boundaries, multiply the facilities of exchange, increase the wealth of a few. Can it offer satisfaction for one of the necessities of the soul? There will always be those who find a bracing and tonic in the roar and exultation of riotous life, the mingling of the machine with the inspiration of the crowd. There will always be others who will seek satisfaction in quietness and common things—the untroubled horizon, the secure possession of the heart of humanity. Between which two extremes the mass of mankind will go forward, sometimes indifferent, not without courage and patience, towards a life increasing in complexity, and making ever more difficult demands on body and soul.

And as with flying, so with all similar advances in mechanical discovery. Man creates and man consumes; no happier for a provision which merely feeds a restless, hungry impulse towards change. So many houses, so many clothes, so many elaborate meals, so many holidays to-day. The number is doubled to-morrow. The many acquiesce: the few, on the one extreme, accept and rejoice; the few, on the other, push aside the banquet untasted, or spurn the feast with bitter gibe at the futility of it all. “The barrenness and ignobleness of the labourer’s life,” says a modern philosopher, “consists in the fact that it is moved by no ideal inner springs.” But the labourer has no monopoly in such a loss and deficiency. The whole of modern life has the accusation resting upon it, that it is moved by no ideal inner springs. Some find satisfaction in political energies, others in religious ardours; others, again,—in the mere play and triviality of wealth accumulation,—card games, or ingenious children’s diversions carried into the larger universe of human affairs. Pursuit of knowledge claims a tiny “remnant,” with a high intellectual hunger; or enthusiasm for the future of the race, as they see always, luminous and clear on the horizon, the shining of the star of a new dawn. But to the general these “ideal inner springs” are wanting. They feel confused in a world of confusion. Social unrest affects large masses of them whose restlessness finds no clear fruit in action. Literature proclaims a disenchantment. Man wanders unsatisfied in the spacious palaces of his new material splendour. Many, after a rebellion at the time of adolescence, settle down into acceptance; into making the “best of it” in a world hard to understand, but, on the whole, easy to endure. Others still refuse to relinquish the past for the intangible, elusive promises of the future. “Enlightened persons,” wrote Châteaubriand, “cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can persist in sitting in the shadow of what they call ruins. Tell me, for pity’s sake, in the individual and philosophical society which you offer me, where shall I find a family and a God?”

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In the abolition of poverty by mechanical appliance, in the provision of ethical and moral satisfactions for the human spirit which desires richer gifts than material supremacy, this empirical method would seem hitherto to have failed. They would appear, however, to be on surer ground who prophesy its success in the war against disease. Here at least discovery can have none but beneficial results; and the competition is one of absolute human advantage. Yet the progress of the modern campaign against diseases, distinguished as it has been by triumphs which appear almost miraculous, still suffers resistance which baffle and frustrate its purpose. There appears a kind of unseen antagonist, who will rally in one region forces which have been beaten elsewhere, and is determined never to allow mankind the full fruits of victory. That all diseases will be slain by science, and all slain speedily, was one of the accepted anticipations of the earlier nineteenth century. In the great outburst of a triumphant optimism which inspired the Early Victorian literature, the present, whose discontents were clearly diagnosed, was sharply contrasted with a future where such discontents would be no more. Here, on the solid ground, a new race should arise, whose life, if limited, should be at least secure. On one side, it may be confessed, there are evidences of an almost exultant advance. The surest ground for optimism, for faith in the “beneficent processes of the unseen time,” is provided by examination of how many human scourges have been rendered innocuous within living memory. We have eliminated from Europe the menace of those sweeping cyclones of pestilence, whose terrors brood like a grey cloud over all the brightness of the Middle Ages. One-third of Christendom perished in the few months’ agony of the Black Death. The sound of its lamentation, the madness caused by its apparently irresistible destruction, still remains revealed in those “Dances of Death” which absorbed the later medieval time, and in the literature of protest and despair of a similar age. The Plague still ravages the East, but science has succeeded, and apparently will succeed, in protecting Europe against it. Other malignant fevers we seem on a fair road to stamp out altogether. Smallpox has almost disappeared, under the combined effects of sanitation and vaccination. Diphtheria has lost its terrors since the arrival of the antitoxin treatment. Hydrophobia has become merely a dread memory of the past. Even tuberculosis, the special and terrible scourge of the northern races, is likely to become in the future but as an evil memory of old years. Science again, through the devotion and intelligence of a long roll of volunteers, has boldly sallied out from the limited abodes of men into the wild and shaggy regions of Nature, in the determination to strike its enemy boldly at the centre of its empire. It is not content with mere preventives and prophylactics, dosing men with drugs or covering them with veils and protections. It is setting itself to extirpate the very instruments of the propagation of the disease. Its enemy is the insect. That extraordinary populous and intelligent kingdom might have once attained the supremacy of the world, but for some inexplicable limitations in size which has prevented any of its denizens from challenging the forces of mankind. Michelet has described the kind of horror with which the head of an ant inspired him, as first seen under the microscope; with its vast and complicated eyes, its evidence of incalculable brain power, but with the utter absence of any of those human qualities which are revealed even in the vertebrate animals. Yet those ants can exhibit inexplicable powers of communication, and a social organisation which has been the envy of many a philosopher, as he contrasts it with the chaos of human life. Ants charged with “Boom food,” ant communities of many thousands, all six feet high, might provide a considerable obstacle to the accepted supremacy of mankind. But the insect, however tiny, is becoming more and more to be recognised as one of the enemies of the human race. There is here no possibility of compromise. We can be sentimental over the horse, the cat, the dog. If we are sentimental over the insect, we are lost. “Why should I harm thee, little fly?” was Uncle Toby’s famous inquiry. “Is there not room enough in the world for me and thee?” Science is unhesitatingly pronouncing a grim negative to the question. There is not sufficient room in the world for “me and thee.” This is probably true of the common house-fly, who more and more is coming to be branded as a propagator of disease. It is already accepted of his cousin, the mosquito, against whom the whole of the world is turning with a set purpose of extermination. The alleged unhealthiness of marshes and tropical regions, formerly ascribed to heat and noxious vapours, is now declared to be entirely explicable by the spread of a definite bacterium through the bites of insects. Where the insects are destroyed the white man flourishes. Panama, in the early days of the Canal building, was converted into a visible hell, in which a population rioted and rotted and died, as they rioted and rotted and died in the days of the plague. The Americans to-day have descended there with all scientific resources. They burn the insect, they choke its offspring with oil, they drain the stagnant pools where it can breed, they consume it in clouds of evil-smelling smoke. They are rapidly making Panama a healthier place than New York or Chicago. All down the coast of South America, yellow fever has decimated mankind for centuries. To-day it is well on its way to becoming a thing of the past. Six years ago an international campaign was inaugurated against the Stegomya fasciata, the “white-ribbed mosquito,” which spreads the disease. At Rio Janeiro, Dr. Cruz, “Cruz the mosquito killer,” has practically removed its menace. Repairing choked-up gutters, draining stagnant marshes, fumigating and isolating, scattering oil on the still waters, he is speedily and relentlessly exterminating this enemy of mankind. Yellow fever and malarias will become shortly things of the past, as the warfare, at present of necessity limited to the neighbourhood of the cities, is extended through all the waste places of the world.

And if the discussion passes from the prevention to the cure, here also the sanguine dream of our fathers might seem in process of realisation. We can treat the tortured human body as Brutus wished to treat the condemned Cæsar—“Carve it as a dish fit for the gods,” and still preserve life and ensure recovery. First in antiseptic, then in aseptic surgery, we have discovered a method of safe operation, under which death would have been inevitable a few years ago. Gambetta perished in early manhood, because the doctors were afraid of an operation from which to-day over ninety per cent. of the patients recover. Opiates and anæsthetics, combined with the agile use of the knife, have eliminated on the one hand an almost inconceivable burden of pain, on the other have rendered possible a tearing and lacerating of the frail physical human body which would have seemed incredible to our predecessors. Nor can any one imagine that we are anywhere but in infancy in this particular progress. If, as eminent physiologists assert, the nerves of pain are distinct from the nerves of sensation or volition, it may be found possible to compound some subtle drug which will blockade these particular channels of communication, and render mankind henceforth completely immune from the pangs of physical suffering.

But then thought turns to the other side of the picture, and is immediately faced with a challenge to its optimism. As soon as one disease is eliminated, another steps into its place to continue the old tragic function of scourging mankind with pity and terror. Science is always discovering new maladies, which baffle its exultant energies. Medical, as distinct from surgical effort, is still largely in the condition of alchemy: stretching blind hands in the darkness towards a secret not yet revealed. A great man of science recently asserted that there were only two medicines whose beneficial effect—in application to specific disorders—could be guaranteed—quinine and mercury; and that the operations of both of them were completely mysterious. We drain our cities, we use our knives and our medicines, we maintain armies of doctors, huge hospitals, and halls of research. And the result is that in the factory centres one-fifth of the children born perish within the year. Consumption, plague, malaria disappear. Their places are readily assumed by cancer, which is steadily increasing; by appendicitis, which had not even a name twenty years ago; by meningitis, which is excited by the ordinary harmless cold in the head. One woman in every twelve dies of cancer, and the cure still remains altogether unknown. The human body in increase of prevention, seems also to lose the power of resistance. Carefully shielded from the rough forces of the world, it falls a prey to injuries born out of the very conditions of safety which it has so laboriously constructed. “He who has ordained all things in measure, number, and weight,” said Mansel, “has also given to the reason of man, as to his life, its boundaries, which it cannot pass.” Some unknown Power seems with these “boundaries” still to defy man’s determination to push them back or fling them down. In ten thousand years mankind has not added a cubit to his stature. The Greek vision of bodily perfection has shown no advance in succeeding time. In the Middle Age, with its outward squalor and frequent pestilences—so operative in men’s minds that to some observers the whole appears as a kind of physical delirium—there are figures of Popes and Emperors taking the field at eighty years of age, and an ineffaceable impression of an enormous physical vitality. It would appear that, at least as far as one can look ahead, uncertainty, sorrow, pain, and longing are to be accepted as companions of the life of men. From these, indeed, have been born men’s highest achievements. Metchnikoff still proclaims unfaltering faith in the triumph of human intelligence, and sees a vision of humanity sustained on a diet of soured milk, to well beyond a normally secure centenarianism. The cry of such might still be the cry of Tithonus—“Release me, and restore me to the ground,” in a desire for the return to the fate of “happy men that have the power to die.” For, however successful we may find ourselves in curing the maladies of the body, such efforts are of little use if there remains unhealed the deeper malady of the soul.

CHAPTER VIII
LITERATURE AND PROGRESS