First Illustration: The English in the Napoleonic Wars, and in the Boer War.
Never in modern times did a nation of toilers longer or more loyally support a war than did the working class of England support the British Government in the Napoleonic Wars—a fifth of a century of continuous blood-letting. Never before or since did the working class of a nation longer or more gladly give up its choicest men to butcher and be butchered than did the English working class for the Napoleonic Wars. Never did men serve more loyally or longer or fight more bravely. This long storm of death closed with the awful Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
After such service we might expect the patriotic capitalists of England to be most thoughtfully and finely kind to the toilers who supported the wars and to the veterans who fought the wars.
But what happened?
After the Battle of Waterloo, leaving tens of thousands of their comrades on the skull-strewn plains of the Continent, the hypnotized veterans—scarred, ragged and proud—returned home—home from hell—returned to England with glad hearts ignorantly and gullibly expecting a joyous “welcome home” by the masters who had flattered, brutalized, ruled, and used them. Welcome home! The cruel mockery of it! The hideous irony of the masters’ prompt treatment of them! Promptly these brave and ignorant men from the battlefields were openly scorned and threatened by the industrial masters of England. Never were masters more cruel toward deluded veteran patriots. Never were masters more heartless toward millions of half-starved toilers—than were the British masters toward the half-starved ragged British workers whose labor had supported the army in the field for twenty years.
Promptly at the close of the Napoleonic wars a movement was made in the British Parliament to relieve the leisure class of one-half the income tax, but none was made to ease the burdens of the starving working class. There was biting irony in the fact that
“One of the first parliamentary struggles [following the war] was the proposal of the government to reduce the income tax from 10 to 5 per cent., and to apply this half [the unremitted half] of it, producing about $37,500,000, toward the expense of maintaining a standing army of 150,000 men.”[[122]]
Of course the purpose of this to-be-increased army was to have an armed guard ready to crush the “hobo” heroes home from the war and unemployed, ready also to hold down the great multitude of poorly paid or unemployed toilers—all now loudly complaining against the increasing misery thrust into their lives.
The landlords at once advanced the land rents and the house rents so outrageously that many thousands of feeble working class veterans were forced into trampdom, and were then brutally abused for vagrancy. The huge and hungry army of the unemployed actually found that in some ways peace was, at that time, even worse than war—for the working class.
This outrageous treatment, this brutal contempt for the workers from their pretentiously patriotic rulers may seem to the reader impossible. The case, however, is so typical as to be worth space for evidence. And here is some testimony from witnesses not prejudiced, perhaps, in favor of the workers. Professor J. E. Thorold Rogers writes thus of the matter:[[123]]
“In point of fact, the sufferings of the working classes (in England) during this dismal period [the first twenty years of the nineteenth century] ... were certainly intensified by the harsh partiality of the law; but they were due in the main to deeper causes. Thousands of homes were starved in order to find means to support the great war, the cost of which was really supported by the labor of those who toiled on and earned the wealth which was lavished freely, and at a good rate of interest for the lenders, by the government. The enormous taxation and the gigantic loans came from the store of accumulated capital, which the employers wrung from the poor wages of labor, or the landlords extracted from the growing grains of their tenants. To outward appearance, the strife was waged by armies and generals; but in reality the resources on which the struggle was based were the stint and starvation of labor, the over-taxed and underfed toils of childhood, the underpaid and uncertain employment of men. Wages were mulcted in order to provide the waste of war, and the profits of commerce and manufacture.”
The case is summed up by another authority:[[124]]
“Distress instead of plenty, misery instead of comfort—these were the first results of peace.”
The English historian, J. R. Green, is thus frank:[[125]]
“The war enriched the landowner, the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer; but it impoverished the poor. It is indeed from these fatal years that we must date that war of the classes, that social severance between employers and employed, which still forms the main difficulty of English politics.”
S. R. Gardiner furnishes this testimony:[[126]]
“Towards the end of 1816 riots broke out in many places, which were put down.... The government ignored the part which physical distress played in promoting the disturbances.... The Manchester Massacre ... a vast meeting of at least 50,000 gathered on August 16, 1816, in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester.... The Hussars charged, and the weight of disciplined soldiery drove the crowd into a huddled mass of shrieking fugitives, pressed together by their efforts to escape. When at last the ground was cleared many victims were piled one upon another.”
The people who had fed and clothed and armed the soldiers, were now cut down and trampled down in heaps by mounted soldiers. The historians Brodrick and Frotheringham summarize the matter as follows:[[127]]
“Four troops of Hussars then made a dashing charge ... the people fled in wild confusion before them; some were cut down, more were trampled down; an eye-witness describes ‘several mounds of human beings lying where they had fallen.’”
Justin McCarthy’s statement of the case is instructive:[[128]]
“There was widespread distress [in 1816]. There were riots in the counties of England arising out of the distress. There were riots in various parts of London.... The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended.... A large number of working men conceived the idea of walking to London to lay an account of their distress before the heads of government [Perfectly reasonable?].... The nickname of Blanketeers was given to them because of their portable sleeping arrangements. (Every man carried a blanket.) ... The ‘Massacre of Peterloo’ ... took place not long after.... It was a vast meeting—some 80,000 men and women are stated to have been present.... The yeomanry, a mounted militia force, ... dashed in upon the crowd, spurring their horses and flourishing their sabres. Eleven persons were killed and several hundred were wounded. The government brought in ... the famous Six Acts. These Acts were simply measures to render it more easy to put down and disperse meetings ... and to suppress any manner of publication which they chose to call seditious.... It was the conviction of the ruling class that the poor and the working classes of England were preparing a revolution.... In 1818, a motion for annual parliaments and universal suffrage was lost by a majority of 106 to nobody.”
Says Professor Jesse Macy:[[129]]
“By a series of repressive measures popular agitation was arrested.... Popular agitation was brought to an end by force. So complete was the repression that there occurred no great political consequences until the movement which carried the Reform Bill [1832].”
“Silence!” is always the order of despotism when the “bruised lips” of starving slaves speak loud for freedom.
Thus did the proud, “patriotic” masters of England spit in the faces of the starving working class who supported the war and laugh to scorn the old working class soldiers who had fought the long and horrible war. Thus were the battle-scarred heroes—and their families—sabred and bayoneted. Thus were some of the rights they already had, torn from their hands. Thus were they denied a voice in the government they served. Thus were the toilers and veterans outraged—duped, despised, snubbed—during and after the “glorious” Napoleonic wars.
The shameless Caesars who constituted the English government of the time heaped wrong upon wrong by sending police spies into the great public meetings of the ragged veterans of war and industry to stir them up to violence, thus furnishing the government excuse for its brutalities and repressive legislation.[[130]]
An anonymous author furnishes interesting fact and comment:[[131]]
“The world will have to revise its notions of patriotism in the light of modern commerce.... Look at the strength of the interests. Where is the Government that would dare prohibit Birmingham firms from executing [filling] orders for a foreign Government? Even in our small frontier wars [British] soldiers must expect to be shot at with British rifles.”
At one time in the Napoleonic wars English manufacturers, “patriotic business men,” of course, filled one order for 16,000 military coats, 37,000 jackets, and 200,000 pairs of shoes to be used, as the commercial patriots knew, by the French army while slaughtering English soldiers.[[132]] That was about a hundred years ago. But the silk-hat patriot is still the same hypocrite, talking loudly about “honoring the hero” whom he despises both socially and industrially. British veterans of the Boer War of recent years—tens of thousands of them—have cursed the day they enlisted, with the patriotism of ignorance, to serve in South Africa. The Government broke its promises with them shamelessly and wholesale; and many of these veterans, on returning from the war, were scorned at the English factory door, turned down at the shops and mines, and had to beg on the streets of London and other cities. It is the old story: duped, tricked, teased to the trenches—then snubbed, as usual.
When the soldier boys got back to England from the Boer war they were weak, poor, ragged and very weary, many hundreds of them scarcely able to walk. But no matter: they were at once driven from the ships like cattle, forced to fall into line, and march wavering and staggering from weakness and weariness—forced to march past the Queen’s reviewing stand, to be smiled at and flattered by a bunch of royal and noble parasites and thus be “honored” while they starved, “honored” as they staggered past in their rags, gazed at by shining gluttons and fat-headed lords who were too shrewd and cowardly to go themselves to South Africa to slaughter the Boers, steal gold and diamond mines and otherwise defend their own capitalist interests.
On this cruel reviewing march of many weary miles past the Queen of the home-coming butchers a great number of the men fainted in their famished weakness. Many eye-witnesses to this outrage were in tears....
The march ended.
The guns were put away with pride.
The blood of Dutch workingmen was wiped from the English swords—with British pride.
Blood-stained banners were piously placed in libraries, museums, and churches—with true Christian pride.
The war was over.
The butchers had come back to “their” dear country—and washed their hands.
Then—then what?
Then these cheap and stupid assassins of their class went to look for a job—teased the lordly parasites of England for whom they had been fighting—teased them for a job, whined like spaniels at the feet of the industrial masters of England, begged for a job.
And received insults.
A job is not guaranteed by any capitalist constitution on all the earth, even tho’ a job may mean salvation from starvation..
A hunting dog, having found the shot-mangled bird in the grass and briars, brings the game to his master confident of substantial favors—and gets the favors.
These English human hunting dogs had obediently hunted human game in South Africa, and they returned to their masters, their faces shining with the expectancy (and, almost, with the intelligence) of a retriever with a bleeding bird in his mouth.
And they were slapped in the face at the factory door with “Not wanted!”
Snubbed.
“Honored.” “Reviewed.” Reviewed? Certainly. That is part rule-by-wind trick.
Flattered—then kicked in the face when they asked for permission to work and by work save their own lives from the wolves of poverty.
“A nod from a lord is a breakfast—for a fool.”