II
This “daring and courage,” however, is the prerogative of individuals; specially equipped, or selected (as it seems) by a life trained from the earliest years to confront hostile forces in the open air and sunshine; skilled and heartened by combats with the sea. How far can such characters be identified in the Crowd: the special product of modern industrial civilisation? Those who would attempt a diagnosis of the present must find themselves more and more turning their attention from the individual to the aggregation: upon the individuals which act in an aggregation in a manner different from their action as isolated units of humanity. We have to deal, in fact, not only with the Crowd casually collected in sudden movement by persons accustomed to live alone, but with whole peoples which in London and the larger cities are reared in a Crowd, labour in a Crowd, in a Crowd take their enjoyments, die in a Crowd, and in a Crowd are buried at the end.
“Has there been a row?” asked a journalist of a gathering at Westminster summoned by “Suffragettes” and unemployed leaders. “No,” was the cheerful reply, “but we still ’ave ’opes.” It is a crowd which “still ’as ’opes” that forms the matrix or solid body of these agglomerations of humanity whose doings to-day excite some interest and some perplexity amongst observers of social change. In the midst are the criminal and the enthusiast, those who are openly at war with Society, those who are battered by its complications and troublous demands, those, again, in whom devotion to some ideal cause burns like a flame at the heart. But these are all encompassed and embedded in the multitude of the unimportant: gathered from nowhere, journeying nowhither, swaying and eddying, swept into random groups and whirlpools, choking for a moment all the city ways, and in a moment leaving them all silent and deserted; the city Crowd which has seen little that is encouraging at the present, but “has hopes” of something wonderful yet to be revealed.
You may see it in the dim morning of every London day, struggling from the outskirts of the city into tramcars and trains which are dragging it to its centres of labour: numberless shabby figures hurrying over the bridges or pouring out of the exits of the central railway stations. You may discern in places the very pavements torn apart, and tunnels burrowed in the bowels of the earth, so that the astonished visitor from afar beholds a perpetual stream of people emerging from the middle of the street, seemingly manufactured in some laboratory below. It flows always along the high road of the huge town in the daytime, like a liquid unprecipitated, or a river in even stream carrying down dust to the sea. But at any moment an unexpected incident, tragic or trivial, may change the liquid from clear to cloudy, or reveal, like the river suddenly banked in obstruction, the debris and turgid elements which it has hitherto borne along so buoyantly. A motor omnibus stands still, a cab horse collapses, men’s voices are raised in altercation, an itinerant agitator demands work for all, or announces the day of judgment. Immediately a knot appears in the texture of the wood, a whirlpool in the water. The multitude of the unimportant gather together, “having hopes.” With incredible rapidity appear amongst them the criminal, the loafer, the enthusiast; the stream of busy persons has become transferred into the city Crowd.
There is a note of menace in it, in the mixed clamour which rises from its humours and angers, like the voice of the sea in gathering storm. There is the evidence of possibilities of violence in its waywardness, its caprice, its always incalculable mettle and temper, forming in the aggregate a personality differing altogether from the personalities of its component atoms. Satisfied, curious, eager only for laughter and emotion, it will cheer the police which is scattering it like chaff and spray, mock openly at those who have come with set purposes, idle and sprawl on a summer afternoon at Hyde Park or an autumn evening in Parliament Square. But one feels that the smile might turn suddenly into fierce snarl or savagery, and that panic and wild fury are concealed in its recesses, no less than happiness and foolish praise. But more than the menace, the overwhelming impression is one of ineptitude; a kind of life grotesque and meaningless. It is in the city Crowd, where the traits of individual distinction have become merged in the aggregate, and the impression (from a distance) is of little white blobs of faces borne upon little black twisted or misshapen bodies, that the scorn of the philosopher for the mob, the cynic for humanity, becomes for the first time intelligible. Separate the drops and particles of it, follow each man homeward through the various ways of the city labyrinth—at the end you will find Humanity in its unchangeable and abiding existence: a tiny suburban home with cottage and garden, a tenement in a cliff of workmen’s dwellings, a “child’s white face to kiss at night,” a “woman’s smile by candle light.” In each individual is resistance, courage, aspiration; a persistence which carries through the daily task with some energy and some enjoyment, and not entire discredit at the end. But immediately the mass of separate persons has become welded into the aggregate, this note of distinction vanishes. Humanity has become the Mob, pitifully ineffective before the organised resistance of police and military, and almost indecently naked of discipline or volition in the comparison; gaping open-mouthed, jeering at devotions which it cannot understand, like some uncouth monster which can be cajoled and flattered into imprisonment or ignoble action; like the Crowd which in all ages has rejoiced, one day at the crowning, the next at the crucifixion, of its King.
Why is it that this writing down of values takes place when mankind is thus collected into aggregations: that the spirit of the mob is so much less reputable than the spirit of its separate components? In part, perhaps, because the trivial and vacant elements are uppermost amongst a city race whose aspirations and purposes are independent of organised collective energies and aims. They have gathered for recreation, to be amused; for curiosity, to be surprised; for companionship, in a region where night has its empire, not without its terrors, just beyond the boundaries of their limited experience. The tragedy of common life is apparent, a modern philosopher has declared, not where poverty is the heritage of all but the few, or because existence offers at best a struggle uncertain and austere; but whenever that life is closed within limited horizons, and moved by no ideal springs. The visionary who cherishes the hope of a renovated society in which all shall be satisfied, the woman who flings herself into prison in the expectation that through her sacrifice the freedom of women will be attained, is a figure to the outward eye, indistinguishable in its obscurity from the multitude around who jeer and wonder and applaud. But these visionaries and enthusiasts possess a secret denied to their fellows, which gives their little lives a significance absent from the encompassing multitude; in the sense of consecration to a purpose, a meaning, and a goal.
Meantime that spirit abides but in the few; and the Crowd remains, to-day as yesterday, an instrument which the strong man has always used and always despised in the using. The new features of it come from the change that has gathered men from the countryside and the tiny town and hurried them into the streets of an immense city; henceforth always to move in a company, each tied as with a chain to his fellows, never to stand alone. In such a transformation there would seem some danger of the normal life of man becoming the life of the Crowd, with features intensified and distorted when collected in tumult or demonstration. We seem to see in the experience of a generation an increasing tendency thus to merge the individual in the mass, more frequent and unfailing response to the demand for agitation, which, in fact, is an excuse for absurdity or violence. Man, always seeking to escape from himself, found various channels of egress; in drink, in religious emotion, in political energy. He has now found that he can escape from himself by merely linking up with others like himself to become units in a Crowd. The secret is perhaps most clearly apprehended in America, where the Crowd consciousness is excited as deliberately as the religious emotion of a revivalist meeting; and after due preparation an aggregate of human beings suddenly breaks into carefully fermented lunacy. So that selected delegates of the political parties—men, being selected, it would seem, for special calculation, intelligence, and prudence—will shout at Denver or Chicago meaningless cacophinations for an hour and a half on end, march round and round the hall playing instruments and singing discordant songs, or suddenly take off their coats, or stand on their heads, or beat each other with bits of board. It is the experience of the flagellants and pilgrims of medieval times, with hysteria no longer left to chance, but organised as a fine art. In our own “mafficking,” in the tearing to pieces of the City Volunteers, in unemployed demonstrations, even in a spectacle so diverting and yet so foreboding as the “sieges of St. Stephen’s” by the “Suffragettes,” there are traces of similar if less exaggerated emotion: as man, communicating the infection of the Crowd consciousness to his fellow-men, suddenly abandons his individual volitions and restraints, and loses himself in the volition of the Crowd. A note of hysteria may seem to be an inevitable accompaniment of a city life so divorced from the earth’s ancient tranquillity as never to appear entirely sane. And the future of the city populations, ever “speeded up” by more insistent bustles and noises and nervous explosions, takes upon itself, in its normal activities, something hitherto abnormal to humanity. We shall probably encounter more appeals to the multiplied power of assembly, more determination to find a short cut in lawlessness towards attainment, more passive and active resistance in attempts at government by violence rather than government by reason. Others, besides the unemployed or the women, will make this visible protest before all men by exhibition of their willingness to face ridicule, discomfort, physical injury, and even martyrdom in their ardour for the triumph of their cause. In a vision across the centuries, with time foreshortened, even material things take upon themselves the quality of motion: and the cities may be seen rising and falling, in growth, in triumph, and decay, like the fire that flares and in a moment fades. In similar vision the streets of those cities are always filled with this tumultuous and curious Crowd: restless, leaderless, astonished at itself and at the world, finding little intelligible either in the universe without or the universe within. Before which assembly in perpetual session there pass the phantom figures of those who appeal for its favour and its judgment: at first to a Crowd contemptuous, then to a Crowd acquiescent and astonished, ultimately to a Crowd applauding: themselves members of it, yet standing always separate and apart; because they alone are working towards an end.
The definite excitement, and the deflection of that excitement into certain prepared channels, seems likely to become one of the arts of the political game. It is only in the last few months that those who have been studying the latest methods of electioneering have elaborated a new system of appeal to a new race of men. The old discussion by argument, commonplace posters, and literature, even the cheery riotings of rival mobs, is already voted as a thing stale and outworn. Instead, we are to see an effort to capture, not individuals as individuals, but the Crowd as a Crowd. It is the first noteworthy recognition in politics that this creature has a personality—a personality altogether different from the personalities of its independent members. The first successful start was effected in the spring of 1908 in the Crowd, at its very centre and crown, in a bye-election in the heart of London. A particular segment of its grey streets, in no way different from its half-century of neighbours, had been chalked round with entirely artificial boundaries, and labelled the Parliamentary constituency of Peckham. And it was in this forbidding and desolate neighbourhood that the new electioneering set itself the high test of hypnotising, not each single Imperial citizen who happened to live in Peckham, but Peckham itself—the very heart of it—the Peckham Crowd.
The report of this novel and entertaining crusade soon spread from Peckham to its neighbours: what would appeal to Peckham would also appeal to them; and every evening an appreciable percentage of the four millions which lie around Peckham, and in whose streets Peckham is embedded, poured into the centre of disturbance. There they soon fell under the spell so sedulously prepared for them. They surged up and down the narrow ways, chaffing each other, cheering the candidates, keen, alert, glad each to find himself in the heart of a London Crowd. Any man or woman upon whom fell the itch of speech secured a box, mounted on it, held forth to those who would listen, on teetotalism, or vaccination, or the wickedness of the Government, or the variable price of beer. And the Crowd listened, as it may be seen listening to any distorted nonsense in the public parks on Sunday afternoons: with an aspect of intense seriousness, the respect which the inarticulate Englishman instinctively feels for the voluble. Party feeling was supposed to run high, the newspapers on each side called shrilly for the defeat of plunderers and miscreants: “‘Thou shalt not steal,’ there is no time limit to that,” in huge letters stretched across the street, challenged the cries from Liberal placards that unless the people strangled the drink monopoly they would be strangled by it. Yet it seemed that the great mass of this astonishing multitude—the good-tempered, short-sighted, happy-go-lucky London citizen—regarded all such fiery invective with fortitude, if not with indifference. He was out for fun: to hear a little politics, though not too much; speakers who attempted argument or quotation were speedily deserted; what he liked was noisy rhetoric and denunciation. “Give it ’em hot!” was his favourite advice to any orator of either colour. He delighted in quick repartee, the ready scoring off an interrupter, the good telling of some story with a very obvious point at the end. He liked to see the coal-carts wading through the crowded streets, with the big and little sacks of coal; and the so-called procession of the unemployed from Woolwich, actual, tangible figures, visible before his very eyes; and the huge painted donkey, half as high again as himself, bearing the legend, “My brother is going to vote for Gautrey” (the Government candidate); and the Suffragettes there in person, the very women (some of them agreeable to look at) who have been carried out of Parliament by the police, and done their “time” in Holloway Gaol. He sought, above all, a new sensation: cheering, now a man who, from the summit of a soap-box proclaimed the approaching end of the world; now “Mr. Hunnable,” as he surmised that in the coming University boat race both Oxford and Cambridge would be found among the first three; now a sad-faced woman, whose contribution to the discussion consisted in ringing a huge dinner-bell for half-an-hour without stopping; whose thoughts, like the thoughts of the Turk who followed Anacharsis Clootz in the French Convention, “remain conjectural to this hour.”
Upon such material clever men set themselves to work with commendable zeal: knowing that the Crowd may be stampeded by constant repetition of the same thing, by pictorial illustration from which it cannot escape, and by the excitement of the appeal flashed upon it seemingly from a variety of different sources that it should advance along a particular road. So a “Coal Consumers’ Defence League” asserted, with monotonous insistence, that coal would rise in price if the Government candidate were elected; and attained the hypnotic success which always recompenses a monotonous insistence sufficiently prolonged. And the “Brewery Debenture Shareholders’ League” announced the approaching misery of the widow and the orphan. And long lines of street bookmakers, in tall white hats and genial, vacant, or bibulous faces, inquired of the passing mob why they should not be allowed to bet in the streets if they wished. And every public-house became a Tory committee room, with all its windows plastered with Tory bills and cartoons, and the evidence of a brisk trade and many conversions within its walls. Outside the Metropolitan Gasworks at the dinner-hour, and in Peckham High Street after nightfall, a cloud of mingled, confused oratory and invective rose to the unconscious stars; as six or seven meetings, each within easy earshot of each other, shouted in hoarse accents for women’s votes or cheaper food or the rights of the publican. Wagon-loads of pictorial illustration wedged their way through the coagulated masses of South London, now lit with fierce glare of torches, now disguised as an illuminated fire-engine pumping truth upon the Liberal mendacities; now loaded with slum children, looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly happy and healthy, but dolorously labelled “Victims of the Public-house Monopoly.” Hysteria, as in all such deliriums, was never far away; women shrieked aloud at meetings, and had to be removed; madness fell upon a boy of twelve, and he stood on the top of a barrel, talking Tariff Reform. The extraordinary good humour, the extraordinary stupidity, and the extraordinary latent forces, so concealed as to be unknown even to themselves, in these shabby, cheery, inefficient multitudes of bewildered and contented men and women, were the dominant impressions of this gigantic entertainment.
Do they care? Yes, undoubtedly, with, beneath all the love of fun and frolic, a really pathetic desire to know the truth: to understand what actually lies behind these fluent orations and facile statistics, and all the fury of illustration and argument which descended upon their inconspicuous abodes. Will they ever know? That is an unanswerable query. There are the knots and gatherings of convinced politicians, who will cheer for “Chamberlain” or denounce Protection, just as there are the knots and gatherings of convinced religious adherents, crystallised out of the huge aggregation of indifference, who worship in various forms a God who is unknown to the general. But the physical conditions of the city life are so novel to them, the bustle and violence of it all so insistent, the effect of the mechanical labour, the little leisure, mostly consumed in transit, the grey, similar streets of tiny houses so desolating, that it is hard to stimulate a high political, social, or religious aspiration. They will continue, for the most part, tacking from side to side in blind, uncertain fashion, firmly convinced at one moment that they have solved the secret, firmly convinced a few months afterwards that they have been mistaken. They will continue their hurried, uncertain lives with indomitable patience, courage, and hope always for “better times.” They will be deluded, and after a time they will recognise their delusion, and after a further time be as readily deluded again. They will trust individuals with a fine generosity. They still believe that things are true because they see them in the newspapers. They exhibit an extraordinary absence of envy of those who are better off than themselves, an extraordinary patience in enduring unendurable things. The Crowd never revolts until the conditions have already become intolerable. It never complains unless its wrongs and disabilities have become themselves clamorous for redress; unless, if it ceased, the very stones would cry out. It is always being betrayed, cajoled, deceived, exploited: now stimulated to fury in warfares carefully engineered by the wealthier classes, in which it has no interest: now directed from those who are exploiting it into anger against “the foreigner,” who is generally a crowd of similar persons being similarly inflamed against itself. It throws up occasional leaders who disappear from its horizon into other universes, from which come only rumours of justification or betrayal. It is being perpetually excited by words and phrases which mean little, which it repeats with an air of owlish wisdom: concerning the satisfactions of Imperial citizenship or the need for new ships, or the advantages of municipal reform. So it continues its patient subterranean life, staggering forward through time, bearing on its shoulders the vast edifice of modern industry: labouring, not without pride and pleasure, for advantage that other people shall enjoy.
And it possesses its own enjoyments also, and these not only those of which the moralist would disapprove: a too exuberant thirst for drink, or a passionate desire to obtain reward without labour. Charles Lamb would “often shed tears in the Strand for fulness of joy at so much life.” His joy might be more keenly excited to-day, upon the days when the City crowd is out for a real holiday: something more agreeable than the Election carnival, and with no smudge of moral improvement on it. You may see it in the Saturday football crowds in all the manufacturing cities: see it in concentrated form when a selection of all the Saturday football crowds has poured into London for the “final contest” at the Crystal Palace for the “Cup,” which is the goal of all earthly ambition. All the long night overcrowded trains have been hurrying southward along the great trunk lines, and discharging unlimited cargoes of Lancashire and Yorkshire artisans in the grey hours of early morning. They sweep through the streets of the Metropolis, boisterous, triumphant. They blink round historic monuments, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral. They all wear grey cloth caps, they are all decorated with coloured favours; they are all small men, with good-natured undistinguished faces. To an Oriental visitor they would probably all appear exactly alike, an endless reproduction of the same essential type. In the afternoon the bulk of them gather at the Crystal Palace, to see their carefully labelled representatives compete for the highest prize in the contest between various professional teams for the football championship. They encourage these hired persons with shrill cries. They follow the various fortunes of the game with approval or discontent. At the end one half is kindled to elation, the other sunk in disappointment. A crowd of adult English citizens assembles round that arena, in number some five times as great as the total Boer commandoes which surrendered after the Peace of Vereeniging, which had defended a country half the size of Europe against all the armies of the British Empire. And the irresistible query is suggested by the sight of that congestion of grey, small people with their facile excitements and their little white faces inflamed by this artificial interest, whether, in a day of trial, similar resources could be drawn from them, of tenacity, courage, and an unwearying devotion to an impersonal ideal. “If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?”
No one can question the revolution which has overtaken the industrial centres in the last two generations of their growth. Reading the records of the “hungry forties” in the life of the Northern cities is like passing through a series of evil dreams. Cellars have vanished into homes, wages have risen, hours of labour diminished, temperance and thrift increased, manners improved. The new civilisation of the Crowd has become possible, with some capacity of endurance, instead of (as before) an offence which was rank and smelling to heaven. But this life having been created and fixed in its development, the curious observer is immediately confronted with the inquiry: what of its future? Are the main lines set us at the present, and later development confined to variations in length and direction along these lines? In such a case progress will mean a further repetition of the type: two cotton factories where there is now one; five thousand small, grey-capped men where there are now three; perhaps, in some remote millennium, fourteen days of boisterous delight at Blackpool where now are only seven. A race can thus be discerned in the future, small, wiry, incredibly nimble and agile in splicing thread or adjusting machinery, earning high wages in the factories, slowly advancing (one may justly hope) in intelligence and sobriety, and the qualities which go to make the good citizen. These may at the last limit their hours of labour everywhere to the ideal of an eight hours day; everywhere raise their remuneration to a satisfactory minimum wage; everywhere find provision for insecurity, unemployment, old age. The “Crowd” is then complete. The City civilisation is established. Progress pauses—exhausted, satisfied. Man is made.
John Stuart Mill in early manhood was troubled with an inquiry that nearly compelled him to abandon the effort of reform. Suppose all the old wrongs righted, and the whole work of liberation accomplished, what then? He saw a vision of mankind in a kind of infinite boredom, an everlasting end of the world. The desolation of such a vision was only removed by study of the poems of Wordsworth. He found fresh inspiration for the work of progress in the vision of mankind, at last tranquil and satisfied, occupying its leisure in reading Wordsworth’s poetry. The modern city crowd would allow scant tolerance to such visions as these. They demand excitement, adventure: the vision of that physical activity and control which is denied to themselves. To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before is the ideal of the lower, physical energies. To establish two football contests where only one existed is the translation of it into terms of the soul. A young workman from Sheffield, confronted with the prospect of certain and speedy death, journeys to London by the midnight train to see the final Cup Tie. On his return he takes to his bed. “In his last moments he asked his mother to so place the Wednesday colours that he might see them, exclaiming, ‘I am glad I have lived to see good old Wednesday win the Cup.’” And so he died.
This reaching out of the crowd from its own drab life into the adventurous and coloured world of “make-believe” is not peculiar to these islands. Pallid young men collect outside the hotels in Madrid or Seville, where the bull-fighters are established before the contests, feeling a kind of satisfaction in the physical proximity to the heroes of their devotion; just as pallid young men collect outside the hotels in the English cities, happy in the conviction that only a thin wall of brick and stone separates them from those whom they contemplate with a kind of worship. In America, always more determined and fearless in pushing the new development to a logical conclusion, we find the actual schools of training for the baseball player, similar to the schools of the gladiators, whose ruins still survive in Pompeii and old Roman cities. Is this, after all, an artificial product of a time of tranquillity? Is its nature ephemeral? And will mankind ever again in these countries find physical exhaustion in the life of the fields, and mental excitement in the business of war and conquest? No one can answer. Certainly even that political activity in England, which is largely a great game, played with good humour and the element of uncertainty which gives spice to all adventure, for the majority does not count at all in comparison with these more obvious satisfactions. And of any other competitive attraction there is no trace at all. The intellectual profess contempt or despair. The “sporting” element exult in enthusiasm. The wisest at least will accept the fact, without too great exaggeration of praise or blame. For this is Democracy; victorious; unashamed.
The country has furnished these citizens, or their immediate ancestors. But now the country has been bled “white as veal.” The cities will be compelled in the future to trust to inbreeding; to rear, as best they may, in their own labyrinths children who will mate with children of a similar upbringing. What will be the effect of such inbreeding, in five generations, or in ten? There can be no certain reply. Perhaps the cities themselves will not last long enough to ever furnish a certain reply. But the carefullest observers can already note some lines of definite change. Mr. Bray in his Town Child has indicated some of them. He is inclined to take a gloomy vision of the future.
Southey, seeing their variable beginnings, proclaimed that cities were the “graveyards of modern civilisation.” Wordsworth found there the “soul of beauty and enduring life,” amid the press “of self-destroying transitory things” diffused but “through meagre lines and colours.” A long tradition, from Rousseau to Tolstoy, has denounced the growing multiplication of the town. Mr. Bray endeavours to see the town through the mind of the growing child: the child, not of the city splendour, but of the city squalor; pent up within the elements there provided for the perceptive material of the developing mind. He finds the keynote of it all in its self-destruction and its transitoriness. The new forms of sickness from which the body suffers are due “to the more malignant because more concentrated contagion of man.” But it is mind sickness which he most dreads; in an environment where little makes for silence, permanence, or repose; where “all things, whether animate or inanimate, change and change ceaselessly; they seem to emerge from the nowhere without rhyme or reason, for a brief space form a portion of the child’s universe, and then, without rhyme or reason, pass out into the nowhere again.” Excitement, noise, and a kind of forlorn and desperate ugliness are the spirits watching round the cradle of too many children of the town; whose work, when fully accomplished, has created the less reputable characteristics of the city crowd. “The human element, a very incarnation of the spirit of unrest, encourages a temperament, shallow and without reserve, which passes in rapid alternation from moods of torpor to moods of effervescent vivacity, and nurtures a people eager for change and yet discontented with all that change brings; impatient of the old, but none the less intolerant of the new.” “Isn’t the noise of the machines awful?” was the question put to a young factory worker. “Yes,” he replied, “not so much when they are going on as when they stop.” The City-bred Race are going to find the noise “awful” when it “stops.” Already in America one can detect a kind of disease of activity, in a people to whom “business” has become a necessary part of life. The general effect is of children of overstrung nerves, restless and aimless, now taking up a book, now a plaything, now roaming round the room in uncertain uneasiness. The city-bred people, we are confidently informed, will never go “back to the land.” In part this may mean that they will never return to long hours of hopeless drudgery for shameful wage. In part it may point to a certain condition of “nerves” excited by city upbringing: a real disease of the soul. Silence, solitariness, open spaces under a wide sky, appear thus intolerable to a people never quite content but in the shouts, the leagues of lights, and the roaring of the wheels. And the scattering and separation of man from man in a region still untamed and given to large mysterious forces, the wind and weather under huge spaces of the night, produces in a race thus reared something of the impression of children left alone in the dark.
Life thus developing, in lack of “the elements of permanence, of significance, of idealistic imaginings,” demands some special conscious and deliberate effort to supply those elements. The main interest of the State (immortal and conservative) is to preserve its own existence. This preservation is impossible unless it can guarantee to the next generation a healthy start; physical and mental efficiency, with the best moral training at its disposal, to those who will be the citizens of the future. Changes which might guarantee such preservation are denounced to-day as involving a weakening or destruction of the family. To many observers it is just the absence of such changes which are ensuring the weaknesses and destruction of the family. In the present confusion, on the other hand, infantile mortality shows no decrease in half a century, and the birth-rate steadily declines; on the other hand, where the mere pressure of animal and physical necessity has become too burdensome, the family is breaking to pieces under the strain.
“Few people,” rightly says Mr. Bray, “seem to realise how nearly the lives of the poor reach the limits of human endurance.” He believes that “the affections of the parents would increase, and the home duties be performed with greater success and animation,” if “with a vigour less impaired by intolerable toil.” He draws an arresting contrast between the long mechanical drudgery of the life of wife and mother in a poor family, and the life of a mother in those decent middle class homes where perhaps the family tie is strongest to-day; not the rich and extravagant, but those who can afford some space and some leisure and the luxury of a servant. “The ties of family are stronger among the servant-keeping class than among the poorer class,” is his conclusion, “and they are stronger because the stress of physical toil is weaker, and the pains of parenthood less insistent.”
He utters grave warning to those well-meaning philanthropists who, in the name of Family Sanctity, are opposing the reforms which Social Reformers most ardently desire. “If it be a question of providing work for the unemployed, meals for the children, pensions for the old; if it be a matter of municipal trams, municipal wash-houses, municipal dwellings, in every instance,” he protests, “they raise the cry that the independence of the family is threatened, and exhort their friends to fight the measure to the death. Is it surprising that the word ‘Family’ has come to stink in the nostrils of those who are striving to improve the conditions of the poor? Is it any cause for wonder if they begin to attack the Family, and inquire what manner of monster that is which can only be preserved by bringing as offerings to its den hungry children and suffering mothers?” “The sanctity of the family,” he boldly affirms, “is menaced at the present time by the austerity of the thoughtful rather than by the sentimentality of the thoughtless.”[5]
However this may be, the Crowd consciousness and the city upbringing must of necessity act as a disintegrating force, tearing the family into pieces. If the Crowd condition, which, in part, is to supplement it, may be made a dignified and noble thing, there need be less regret over a change which, desirable or otherwise, would appear to be inevitable. The communal midday meal, for example, which the school children of the cities are coming to partake of altogether, should be something better than a squalid scramble for physical sustenance in soup or suet. The communal recreation, one would hope, may develop in something more desirable than the aimless activities of the Hampstead Heath bank holiday. The communal politics should be something more restrained than the stampeded “Swing of the Pendulum,” first against one party in power, then against the other. The communal intellect might be directed towards other and more reputable ends than the devising of the last lines of “Limericks,” or the search for true “tips” of horses, in the effort after unearned monetary gain. And the spirit of a collective mind, “the spirit of the hive,” residing in the various industrial cities, may find expression and a conscious revelation of itself, in something more beautiful and also more intelligible than the chaotic squalor of uniformly mean streets and buildings which make up the centres of industrial England.
Certainly, unless the life of the Crowd can be redeemed, all other redemption is vain. Here is the battle-ground for the future of a race and national character. “Democracy,” says Canon Barnett, the wisest of all living social reformers, “is now established. The working classes have the largest share in the government of the nation, and on them its progress depends.” They possess, in his verdict, “the strenuousness and modesty which comes by contact with hardship, and the sympathy which comes by daily contact with suffering. They, as a class, are more unaffected, more generous, more capable of sacrifice, than members of other classes. They have solid sense and are good men of business, but they cannot be said to have the wide outlook which takes in a unity in which all classes are included. They are indifferent to knowledge and to beauty, so they do not recognise proportion in things, and their field of pleasure is very restricted between sentiment and comfort.” “They suffer, as the great German socialist said, from ‘wantlessness.’ They prefer honest mediocrity to honest intellect, and would still vote for W. H. Smith rather than John Stuart Mill. Their actions are generous, but their philosophy of life is often of that shallow sort which says, ‘Does Job serve God for naught?’ and they are often, therefore, to be captured by ‘a policy of blood and iron’: they are easily taken by popular cries; they are fickle and easily made ‘the puppets of Banks and Stock Exchanges.’ They are sympathetic, but for want of knowledge their suspicions are soon roused, and they soon distrust their leaders.” Yet his final conclusion is that “the working class is the hope of the nation, and their moral qualities justify the hope.”[6]