The Message

by A. J. Dawson

During one day—I think it was Wednesday—huge armies of the hungry unemployed—nine-tenths of our wage-earners were unemployed—were set to work upon entrenchments in the north of London. But there was no sort of organization, and most of the men streamed back into the town that night, unpaid, unfed, and sullenly resentful.

Then, like cannon shots, came the reports of the fall of York, Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Hull, and Huddersfield, and the apparently wanton demolition of Norwich Cathedral. The sinking of the Dreadnought near the Nore was known in London within the hour. Among the half-equipped regulars who were hurried up from the southwest, I saw dozens of men intercepted in the streets by the hungry crowds, and hustled into leaving their fellows.

Then came Friday's awful "surrender riot" at Westminster, a magnificent account of which gives Martin's big work its distinctive value. I had left Constance Grey's flat only half an hour before the riot began, and when I reached Trafalgar Square there was no space between that and the Abbey in which a stone could have been dropped without falling upon a man or a woman. There were women in that maddened throng, and some of them, crying hoarsely in one breath for surrender and for bread, were suckling babies.

No Englishman who witnessed it could ever forget that sight. The Prime Minister's announcement that the surrender should be made came too late. The panic and hunger-maddened incendiaries had been at work. Smoke was rising already from Downing Street and the back of the Treasury. Then came the carnage. One can well believe that not a single unnecessary bullet was fired. Not to believe that would be to saddle those in authority with a less than human baseness. But the question history puts is: Who was primarily to blame for the circumstances which led up to the tragic necessity of the firing order?

Posterity has unanimously laid the blame upon the Administration of that day, and assuredly the task of whitewashing "The Destroyers" would be no light or pleasant one. But, again, we must remind ourselves that the essence of the British Constitution has granted to us always, for a century past at least, as good a Government as we have deserved. "The Destroyers" may have brought shame and humiliation upon England. Unquestionably, measures and acts of theirs produced those effects. But who and what produced "The Destroyers" as a Government? The only possible answer to that is, in the first place, the British public; in the second place, the British people's selfish apathy and neglect, where national duty and responsibility were concerned, and blindly selfish absorption, in the matter of its own individual interests and pleasures.

One hundred and thirty-two men, women, and children killed, and three hundred and twenty-eight wounded; the Treasury buildings and the official residence of the Prime Minister gutted; that was the casualty list of the "Surrender Riot" at Westminster. But the figures do not convey a tithe of the horror, the unforgettable shame and horror, of the people's attack upon the Empire's sanctuary. The essence of the tragedy lay in their demand for immediate and unconditional surrender; the misery of it lay in "The Destroyers'" weak, delayed, terrified response, followed almost immediately by the order to those in charge of the firing parties—an order flung hysterically at last, the very articulation of panic.

No one is likely to question Martin's assertion that Friday's tragedy at Westminster must be regarded—"not alone as the immediate cause of Black Saturday's national humiliation, but also as the crucial phase, the pivot upon which the development of the whole disastrous week turned." But the Westminster Riot at least had the saving feature of unpremeditation. It was, upon the one side, the outcry of a wholly undisciplined, hungry, and panic-smitten public; and, upon the other side, the irresponsible, more than half-hysterical action of a group of terrified and incompetent politicians. These men had been swept into great positions, which they were totally unfitted to fill, by a tidal wave of reactionary public feeling, and of the blind selfishness of a decadence born of long freedom from any form of national discipline; of liberties too easily won and but half-understood; of superficial education as to rights, and abysmal ignorance as to duties.

But, while fully admitting the soundness of Martin's verdict, for my part I feel that my experiences during that week left me with memories not perhaps more shocking, but certainly more humiliating and disgraceful to England, than the picture burnt into my mind by the Westminster Riot. I will mention two of these.

By Wednesday a large proportion of the rich residents of Western London had left the capital to take its chances, while they sought the security of country homes, more particularly in the southwestern counties. Such thoroughfares as Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Bond Street were no longer occupied by well-dressed people with plenty of money to spend. Their usual patrons were for the most part absent; but, particularly at night, they were none the less very freely used—more crowded, indeed, than ever before. The really poor, the desperately hungry people, had no concern whatever with the wrecking of the famous German restaurants and beer-halls. They were not among the Regent Street and Piccadilly promenaders.

The Londoners who filled these streets at night—the people who sacked the Leicester Square hotel and took part in the famous orgy which Blackburn describes as "unequalled in England since the days of the Plague, or in Europe since the French Revolution"; these people were not at all in quest of food. They were engaged upon a mad pursuit of pleasure and debauchery and drink. "Eat, drink, and be vicious; but above all, drink and be vicious; for this is the end of England!" That was their watchword.