III
Or, again, we may attempt to understand a particular class of society from knowledge of a typical member of it: from one life, to judge all. The difficulty in the case of the multitude is due to the fact that any person who has arisen into public fame possesses, from the very fact of such attainment, qualities which to the many are denied. The new Labour members in the House of Commons are often supposed to reveal the “working man” at last arrived: to be able to furnish a kind of selected sample of the English industrial populations. They may perhaps stand for the working man in opinion. The majority of them are certainly remote from him in characteristic. Many are Scotsmen; and there is no deeper gulf than that which yawns between the Scotch and the English proletariat. They are mostly men of laborious habits, teetotalers, of intellectual interests, with a belief in the reasonableness of mankind. The English working man is not a teetotaler, has little respect for intellectual interests, and does not in the least degree trouble himself about the reasonableness of mankind. He is much more allied in temperament and disposition to some of the occupants of the Conservative back benches, whose life, in its bodily exercises, enjoyment of eating and drinking, and excitement of “sport,” he would himself undoubtedly pursue with extreme relish if similar opportunities were offered him. Figures like Mr. Snowden, with his passionate hunger for reform, like Mr. Henderson, with his preaching of religious and ethical ideals in Wesleyan Chapels, like Mr. George Barnes or Mr. Jowett, with their almost pathetic appeals to rational argument in the belief that reason directs the affairs of the world, are figures in whose disinterested service and devotion to the work of improvement any class might be proud. But in their excellences as in their defects they stand sharply distinct from the excellences and defects of the average English artisan. They care for things he cares nothing for: he cares for things which seem to them trivial and childish. In Mr. Grayson, again, a certain type has become articulate; the “Clarionette” with red tie, flannel shirt, and bicycle, who has been moved to continuous anger by the vision of trampled women and starving children in the cities of poverty. Such men see the world transfigured in the light of a great crusade. They are convinced that by demonstration and violence to-day, or (at latest) to-morrow, “the people” will rise in their millions and their might, pluck down the oppressors who are “sucking their blood,” and inaugurate the golden age of the Socialistic millennium. But meantime the “people” are thinking of almost everything but the Socialistic millennium. They are thinking how to get steady work; of the iniquities of the “foreigner”; of the possibility or desirability of war, now with the Transvaal, now with Germany. They are thinking which horse is going to win in some particular race, or which football eleven will attain supremacy in some particular league. They are thinking that wife or child is ill or happy, of entertainment, of the pleasure in reminiscence of one past holiday or the pleasure in anticipation of another. They are thinking (in a word) of all the variegated and complex joys and sorrows which make up the common lot of humanity.
One figure, however, in this interesting and excellent party does directly exhibit the character of a particular class. In Mr. “Will Crooks”—a kind of East End superman—the proletariat of London has found voice. He is the East End with all its qualities—with all its qualities intensified, but with the same proportion kept between them. It is true Mr. Crooks is a teetotaler, and never puts a penny on a horse: and that, in part, distinguishes him from an industrial population which finds the necessary relief from a grey existence in the excitement of the possibility of gain, or in the convivial glass of an evening. He would probably affirm that in the excitement and conviviality of Parliament and a political career he finds sufficient substitute for such milder intoxicants. But reading him you are reading the East End working man, and learning much that was before inexplicable: why the East End exists, and why it continues to exist: why no sudden flame of violence consumes these crowded streets and tenements: of its cheerfulness, its energy, its humour, its unquenchable patience. You are learning also some of its weaknesses: its willingness to think well of others, its readiness to make allowances and to forgive—so fatal to the austere work of Government; its reckless, whole-hearted charity, which is the despair of the Provident Visitor and the Charity Organisation Society; its perpetual search for short cuts, and the summary severing of the knot of old problems.
He stands to-day born of these people and part of them—the very child of the crowd. Most of his life has been spent there. He has plumbed the height and depth of human experience in this smoky and bewildering universe. As a child he has known hunger and the unsatisfied demand for bread. He has been an inmate of the workhouse, and the ruler of it; a forlorn waif in a Barrack School with unforgettable memories of its polished impersonal cruelty; and again the great man who comes down as visitor to the Barrack School of a later generation. He has tramped its streets in the vain search for work, and been glad to accept twopence from a friend. He has travelled on the upper half of a boot, tied on to the foot with string; and he has organised schemes for the unemployed which have been stimulated by that adventure into hell. He has obtained education as so many quick and intelligent East End boys are still obtaining it: from the riotous revel of the “penny dreadful,” through the British Workman, and the Sunday at Home, and similar literature which good people scatter gratuitously amongst the working classes; to the Pilgrim’s Progress and Shakespeare “Recitations,” and those social appeals of John Ruskin which have become the sacred writings of the new Labour revival. He hates charity organisation, the adventurous slum chronicler, officialdom, and institutions, just as the poor hate them to-day. He loves a joke, born of extravagance and a kind of boisterous humour, the salt which keeps this starved life from putrefaction. He understands his own people, amongst whom he has lived all his days. He is a living example—one of the few living examples—which offer hope that Democracy may still become a real thing.
I have seen “Will Crooks” addressing an open-air meeting outside the Arsenal Gates at Woolwich, in a wonderful bye-election which startled many political pundits with a vision of new things. It was the working man of London for a moment self-conscious: hearing itself for the first time speak. Picture an enormous sea of drab persons, a multitude of cloth caps and shapeless clothing, and little white faces. On a kind of rock, standing out of the sea—a humble carrier’s cart—a short man with a black beard and long arm is addressing this great crowd. To many observers the vision is a vision of foreboding; the proletariat rising at last in the mere might of its incalculable numbers, to demand its share of life’s good things, and brutally trample down all opposition. What is he saying to them? He is playing on this vast gathering as on an instrument of music, and he is making it discourse most excellent harmonies. At one moment he is stringing together the stories it delights in, and you can see the ripple of laughter running amongst the listeners like the wind through the cornfields. He is recounting the difficulties of the Imperialist Missionary down in Poplar: to the first woman: “Don’t you know you belong to an Empire on which the sun never sets?” And the reply: “Wot’s the good of talkin’ like that? Why, the sun never rises on our court.” To the second: “You’ve got to learn to make sacrifices for the Empire.”—“Wot’s the good of talkin’ about sacrifices when we can’t make both ends meet as it is? Both ends meet! We think we’re lucky if we get one end meat and the other end bread.” To a third: “If you don’t agree, you’re Little Englanders.”—“If I’m to pay another twopence a pound for meat, my children will soon be Little Englanders!”
Then in a moment he will change the note, and now he is telling them of a day in the life of the unemployed: the monotonous search for work, the kindness or insult at each application, the alternation of revolt and wretchedness, fury and apathy, the unwillingness to face the wife again in the evening with nothing with bad news. They all know it, they have mostly been through it; it is a shadow which hangs over them all. And a strange, impressive hush falls over the vast assembly, and men cough or rub their eyes, or turn away from each other’s faces. “Give ’em a chance,” he will suddenly cry, with uplifted arm, and the tension thus released finds relief in thunderous volleys of applause.
Such is “Will Crooks” in his own home, addressing his own people, a natural orator commanding to the full the humour and pathos of work-a-day life, whose influence is directed towards wholesome things, with never an unworthy appeal. And such, in its essential soundness, in its perplexity before complicated issues, in its acceptance of all established things, even in its distrust of itself, its almost exaggerated willingness to receive guidance from others, is the million-peopled constituency who through this man has found voice—the Multitude which forms the people of England.
The spread of “Socialism” amongst these, the voters who can decide elections, has been causing anxiety to many observers, especially to those who find a difficulty in discovering what function they would be called upon to fulfil in the Socialistic State. “Socialism,” however, up to the present, has been mainly a movement amongst the intellectuals and the Middle Classes: almost the male members of a type whose female representatives find the cause necessary to their energies and devotions in the agitation for women’s vote. The “Socialists” who assail each other so fiercely in queer, violent little newspapers, the writers of tracts, pamphlets, and appeals, the young men and women at the Universities who a generation ago would all have called themselves “Radicals,” and now all call themselves “Socialists,” are principally drawn from that “intellectual proletariat” which to-day is finding a growing gulf between possibility and desire. The stiff pictures of reconstructed worlds—a Bellamy’s “Utopia,” a Morris’s “Nowhere”—offer little attraction to the ordinary working man; whose idea of a Utopia is something far removed from these scenes of severe toil and voluntary or compulsory virtue. Mr. Wells has described, in brilliant, bitter sentences, the kind of Socialism thus propagated, and the classes to which it appeals. Academic, uncompromising Marxian Socialism appears as “the dusky largeness of a great meeting at the Queen’s Hall,” with the back of Mr. Hyndman’s head moving quickly, and the place “thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people,” and in the chair “Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict, a blonde lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about which the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken.” The impression was of “the gathering of village trades-people about the lady patroness. And at the end of the proceedings, after the red flag had been waved, after the ‘Red Flag’ had been sung by the choir and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to the Countess, in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.” And the Fabian Society, the laboratory in which intellectual Socialism is matured, with whose policy Mr. Wells is, on the whole, in agreement, appears to him incarnate in a “small, active, unpretending figure with the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip, the glasses, the slightly lisping, insinuating voice”; with a following of “Webbites to caricature Webb” with excessive bureaucratic notions, and a belief that everything can be done without any one wishing to do it; the disciple “who dreams of the most foxy and wonderful digging by means of box-lids, table-spoons, dish-covers—anything but spades designed and made for the jobs in hand—just as he dreams of an extensive expropriation of landlords by a Legislature that includes the present unreformed House of Lords.”[7]
In face of such realities as these—the few with their enthusiasm for a new gospel or with ingenious devices for effecting the millennium by back-door entrances, the many with their occasional gusts of interest, their normal lassitude and contempt for those who disprove God or attack Society—the observer is often discouraged in the work of reform. “Socialists,” says one of their most brilliant younger writers, “cannot look with full confidence upon the English electorate. It is hardly disputable that millions of electors in the greater cities have reached a point of personal decadence—physical, mental, and moral—to which no continental country furnishes a parallel on any comparable scale. Time is steadily multiplying these millions; and for English Socialism there is therefore a race against Time which it is very likely not to win.”[8] Mr. Ensor’s testimony is in part endorsed by the very remarkable evidence of various popular elections; that “Socialism” amongst the working peoples propagates and triumphs in times of plenty, withers up and vanishes in times of depression. This is exactly the reverse of the accepted belief, which thought that the poor are stung into Socialism by suffering, as poets are stung into poetry by wrong.
Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, the assertion is probably true that “bad times”—especially in connection with unemployment—are enemies rather than friends of the Socialist cause. It is quite a mistake to suppose that Socialism gains its firmest grip first upon the poorest; that its chief allies are hunger and cold. In England the poorest are often impervious to a direct political or social appeal; they are sunk below the level of consciousness which can respond to any hope of change. The skilled artisans of Colne Valley and Jarrow vote Socialist when trade is good and all the factories are working overtime. The slums of Southwark or Ancoats fail to respond to the vision of a new good time coming, although their present state is beyond measure deplorable. What they are looking for is a relief of the immediate necessities of the moment, for food and drink for the day. Given these, they are content until the next scarcity arrives. More especially is this true of unemployment. When the artisan or labourer is in work, he will find leisure to interest himself in various social gospels, study the exhortation of the street corners, inquire the meaning of capital value and class war and the exploitation of the working man. When he is out of work, he is naturally filled with but one impulse, which passes quickly from a terror into an obsession—an impulse to obtain work again. That impulse operates even amongst the men who remain in the factory. They see their companions turned away, tramping the streets in search of a job, undergoing all the privations which they themselves have experienced in similar vicissitudes in the past. They know that they have no security but one week’s notice: that any Saturday the announcement will be made to them that their services will no longer be required. Under such circumstances the whole social problem narrows itself down to the one problem of maintenance; or rather, the problem of maintenance enlarges itself to fill the whole horizon. Yesterday or to-morrow men may cherish the dream of a transformed society. To-day the question is merely the continuance of such work as will provide for immediate food and shelter. That is why Socialism has grown in times of prosperity, and withered in times of decline. It is the “Tariff Reformer,” and not the Socialist, who seems likely to gain in days of trade depression. In those days “work for all” is a more persuasive appeal than “Justice to the worker,” or “State ownership of all the means of production.” Man, fallen to bedrock and fighting for his life, has little inclination to turn to visions of universal justice in a redeemed Society.
To expect men and women to become “Socialists” in times of trade depression, is to expect the survivors of Messina, stricken by earthquake and famine, to meditate with enthusiasm upon the future of the race. Socialism, founded on Poverty and Social Discontent, and finding there its argument for change, does not flourish in the heart of that poverty and hungry wretchedness. The Socialist uses the sweated women and starving children as material for inflaming to pity and anger. But he rarely obtains adherents from the husbands of the women or the fathers of the children thus broken at the basis of society. The unemployed leaders are a different class and type from the unemployed whom they shepherd and control. And the average citizen has not yet come entirely to trust the new gospel; is not yet convinced that its adherents will make a better job of it than the “boodlers” and “blood suckers” whom they denounce so fervently. No Socialist councillor has ever been convicted of municipal corruption: and Socialists are sometimes surprised that a party so pure in aim and disinterested in service should be so often rejected by the electorate. But purity of purpose and incorruptibility of standard are not yet regarded by the average citizen as being the most essential qualifications for local or national government. The “man in the street,” here and in America, would seem to be content—except in sudden hurricanes of revolt against too flagrant corruption—with a not too ostentatious standard of civic purity, if the men who are running the machine are men of substance, energy, and position. Miss Addams, from Hull House, has described the failure of the reform party to carry an election even against the most offensive “boodlers.” The people acknowledged the corruption, but were convinced that all the aldermen do it, and that the alderman of their particular ward was unique in being so generous to his clients. “To their simple minds he gets it from the rich, and so long as he gives some of it out to the poor, and, as a true Robin Hood, with open hand, they have no objection to offer.” The people are found to be ashamed to be represented by a bricklayer—the intelligent, clean-handed nominee of the reforming party. The “boodler” is elected “because he is a good friend and neighbour. He exemplifies and exaggerates the popular type of a good man. He has attained what his constituents secretly long for.” They become generally convinced that “the lecturers who were talking against corruption were only the cranks, not the solid business men who had discovered and built up Chicago.” The same difficulty faces all those reformers to-day, who, in a settled, orderly, and on the whole comfortable, society, exhibit a too violent agitation for reform. The “comrades” propagate the cause with a splendid devotion, arguing at street corners, descending like locusts at bye-elections, organising themselves cheerily into missionary bands with particular buttons and badges and neckties. Men listen to their eloquence; but the citizen with a stake in the community shrinks from entrusting to them control of the ratepayers’ money, and the rank and file of the working people turn away from a type so different to their own boisterous, happy-go-lucky, acquiescent existence. An appeal for “Labour representation” can fill the working man with enthusiasm—the enthusiasm of Mr. Crooks’s first sensational victory at Woolwich. An appeal for “Socialism” attracts him when his own position is secure: when that is precarious he is fearful, unless his trouble is prolonged until it threatens a revolution. And an England with permanently declining trade, with the cream of its artisan population permanently out of employment, is an England which this generation has never known: something which, if it occurs in the future, will tear to pieces all our accepted standards, and render all prophecy vain.
Yet there is danger perhaps in exaggerating this complacency, acquiescence, and absorption in such passing pleasures as are possible upon a limited weekly wage, which at present keep so many of the working people in this country aloof from political and social discontent. Those who in similar situation have counted upon a boundless patience have often found that patience rudely exhausted, and all their calculations brought to nought. No one can pretend that a condition of stable equilibrium exists, in which as to-day, with the removal of supernatural sanctions and promises of future redress, the working people find a political freedom accompanying an economic servitude. We have carried out to the full on the one side, says M. Viviani, in France—and the same is true, though in less universal degree, in England—the promise of the Revolution. We have advanced from the affirmation of Equality of Citizenship to universal suffrage, and from universal suffrage to universal education. There has vanished the hope that once kept the labourer docile—hope of the attainment of better times beyond the grave. “Ensemble, et d’un geste magnifique, nous avons eteint dans le ciel des lumières qu’on ne rallumera plus.” Are we able to believe, he inquires, that the work has ended? No, is the reply, it is only beginning. Political liberation has to find expression for itself in the economic sphere: must inevitably work itself out there, with the use of that instrument—the Democratic instrument of Government—which gives to the people full control over its own fortunes. To-day each citizen of the crowd “compares with sadness his political power with his economic dependence: humiliated every day with the contrast between his divided personality—on one side a misérable, on the other a sovereign: on one an animal, on the other a god.”
The increasing apprehension of this contrast, and the increasing consequential effort at readjustment, will furnish the guiding thread to the various political and social changes of the twentieth century. It will influence and control the rise and fall of political parties, each doing the work all unconsciously of forces which it does not understand. It will lead in various ways, and through all oppositions and reactions, towards an organised society profoundly differing from our own.