Lecture II
The Deadlock in Social Conditions: Luxury and Want Face to Face
Friends: I am to speak to you to-night on a subject which is a little outside our ordinary theosophical lectures. The Theosophist, as a rule, studies and talks about causes more than effects, concerning himself more with the getting rid of the causes of misery than with the effects that grow out of those causes and show themselves as particular forms of misery. Because of that he is sometimes called unpractical. But that is a misuse of words; for to understand the causes of misery and to remove them is far more practical than cutting off the tops of the weeds while you allow the roots to remain underground to reproduce new weeds to-morrow. To say that study with the discussion which grows out of it is unpractical is very much as though you declared that it was a practical thing to send out nurses and doctors to a field of battle to cut off limbs that had been shattered and to nurse the cripples back to health, and denied that to try to remove the causes of war was practical. Now, I admit that sending out nurses and doctors is a practical thing, but I allege that to work for the substitution of arbitration for war is a great deal more practical. So with the particular things with which I am to deal to-night. I am dealing with effects, but only with a view to lead you on to the study of causes, and to the fundamental changes that will have to be made in the building up of a greater and nobler civilisation. Part of the way to turn men’s minds in that direction, and to give them the necessary impulse of working for the higher and the greater, is to show them the intolerable nature of conditions among which we are living to-day. In doing that, I am by no means going astray from the teaching and the example of that great and misunderstood woman to whom I owe all that is happiest and best in my life, H. P. Blavatsky. Some of you who are students of Theosophy may remember that in her Key to Theosophy she speaks about the misery of the East End of London, and utters words of praise for the attempts which were being made to change it. She did a good deal more than speak words of praise; for one day, after I had been telling her of some of the piteous sights that I was seeing day by day as member of the London School Board, as it was then, for the East End of London, I had on the following morning a little characteristic note, in which she enclosed a couple of sovereigns, saying: “You know I am only a pauper, but give these to the little children who asked you yesterday for a flower.” Similarly, that quick sympathy with human suffering came out in an instance in which very few of us, perhaps, would be prepared to follow her example. She was going to America, and only had just money enough to buy her ticket across; she bought it, and on the wharf she saw a crying woman with some little children. She asked why they were distressed, and the woman told how she had bought bogus tickets from some scamp, and so could not go across the ocean to join her husband. H. P. B. walked back to the ticket office, got her first-class ticket changed for steerage tickets for herself and that unfortunate woman and children, and passed the voyage in the steerage part of an Atlantic liner—a very practical proof of the brotherhood which she proclaimed. So that, after all, I am not really going very far apart in taking up this particular subject of human misery and human suffering, showing you, what I dare say you know well enough, some of the cases which should stimulate to action. And if you say to me: It is an old story that you are telling us; then my answer to you will be that until the evils are remedied it is necessary to repeat the story over and over again.
Now let us look over this great civilisation, and see what I have called “The Deadlock in Social Conditions.” First let us remember, as a kind of preliminary atmosphere, that the great civilisations of the past have perished from this startling contrast of luxury and misery, and that what has happened over and over again in the past might quite well repeat itself amongst us to-day. For we are no stronger in our civilisation than were the civilisations of Rome, of Assyria, of Egypt; and we find in the Egyptian civilisation just the same sort of questions arising then as arise now, as though the world really had not progressed in this respect. In some of the unburied tablets and sculptures we find an edict about the wages of the workpeople, and how they were to be told not to be discontented, and not to refuse to work because they were dissatisfied with the amount of wage that they obtained; and in another case we find directions being sent in order to meet the difficulties that had been caused by what we in our own time should call a strike of working people. The difficulties are very old, and the world has not yet solved them. It is in the hope that the coming civilisation will solve them that I am drawing your attention again to them to-night. Now even here we have what we call our submerged classes, and those form one-tenth part of the population—a terrible proportion if you come to think of it. Sometimes, when there has been a mutiny in an army, a regiment is drawn up rank after rank, and every tenth man is marked out to be shot while the others go free. That is the condition of our civilisation now—every tenth person is marked out to misery. In India the proportion is even larger. The submerged classes there amount to one-sixth of the population, but, on the other hand, they are not nearly as miserable as are the corresponding classes here: they are more despised, but they are far happier, partly because the belief in which they have grown up, under the thousands of years that lie behind them in that civilisation, has ever been that a man’s condition in the present is due to causes that he himself has set going in the past. So that those people, instead of blaming their neighbours, blame themselves for the discomfort of their own position, and sometimes determine that their next birth shall be a happier one by making the very best they can of the disadvantages here. Then again, poverty there is really not as terrible as here; you read of a famine that sweeps away hundreds of thousands of the people, but is that really so very much more terrible than the continual condition of underfeeding in which our submerged classes live? The Registrar-General does not mark them down “Died of Starvation”—that would be shocking the public taste; but if you look into the matter you will see that when the starved sempstress going home carrying her work is struck by an east wind that whistles through her thin clothing and strikes on her underfed body, she is put down in the report as “Died of pneumonia, bronchitis, or consumption,” but in karma’s record she is marked down “Died of starvation,” for it is the perennial underfeeding that brings about the great mortality among the poor. I need only take a very few cases as examples in order to show you what this poverty means. I have taken them out of casual papers during the last week: from my own experience of the past I know them not to be exaggerated, but these particular cases happen to be going on just now. One of them is the case of the women who sew on cards the hooks and eyes which we buy very cheaply in the shops. Such a woman sews nearly 47,000 hooks and eyes for 1s. 2½d.—a thousand almost per farthing. Think what it means. Naturally she pulls in her children to help her; and so the children, who are obliged to go to school, for we have compulsory education, when they come back from learning their lessons have to sit down and set to work linking the hooks and the eyes together so as to save a little of the mother’s time, and the children, who ought to be playing and building up strong and healthy bodies, are kept there hour after hour preparing the hooks and eyes for which the mother is to receive the princely payment that I have mentioned. Take another case that everybody knows—shirt-making: 1s. a dozen for men’s shirts, and there is a fair amount of work in those; even that is not the lowest depth, for the woman who takes them out to make at 1s. per dozen lets them out again at 8d. per dozen to a woman more miserable than herself. And so the thing goes on, home after home, person after person. This and the preceding case I am taking from the last issue of The Christian Commonwealth. Another case is mentioned there of a woman who had been working along these lines; her particular work, I think, was 5d. per dozen for collars, and find your own thread. She was brought up as a typical case before the Royal Commission. We are always ready to appoint Royal Commissions, but not very much comes out of them after they have taken evidence. She was asked by a Member of Parliament: “How do you and your children live on what you get in this way?” “We don’t live,” was the answer of the woman, and she spoke truly. She worked sometimes twenty hours a day, from six o’clock in the morning till two o’clock next morning, in order to get enough to feed her children and herself. I could go on for hours giving you cases like this, but I only want typical ones, in order that you may realise the conditions in which so many are living while we are comfortable and at ease.
Pass on from that part of this terrible poverty which nothing apparently is able to touch to the next question that links itself very easily to what I have been saying—woman labour in general, and especially in many of the manufacturing industries. When women began to work at mills, and so on, it was looked upon as a good way for the women to add something to the comfort of the home. How has it worked? It has worked to drive down the wages of the men, and make the home more miserable even in money matters than it was before; and then the home has ceased to be a home, for there is no home where the mother leaves the children behind her, and goes out into the mill to earn the pence or the shillings wherewith those children are to be fed. It has been encouraged for the reason that a manufacturer gave very honestly and frankly before another Royal Commission. “Oh,” he said, “I prefer to employ married women because they are more docile.” That is true. The married woman is very much more docile because, when the question of any resistance comes, she thinks of the children who need food in the home. The baby hands are the hands that make her docile; it is the baby fingers feeling her bosom for the milk that will not come that makes the mother’s heart docile, yielding to everything for the sake of the little child. It has only made the complications of the labour market worse; it has only driven the men out to be unemployed in the streets, while they who ought to be mothers in the home are working in the factory instead. So the labour market only becomes more choked, the wages are rendered yet more miserable, and the men are thrown out while the women are employed, though the men cannot take the woman’s place in the home, and take care of the babies and look after the little ones; only a mother can do that, for nature has made mothers for that work, and the father cannot take their place, however gentle and loving he may be. So you get another problem there, hard to solve, difficult to set right, and one that is ever growing more and more pressing for solution, that is ever intensifying the misery of large numbers of the working population.
Pass on, again, from that—you see I am only touching each point—and take a question of national import, the deterioration of the physique of the people who live in our large cities. That has been going on now for generations, and it has been shown very plainly in the lowering standard of height for enlistment in the Army. On the other hand, if you look at the well-to-do classes you will find rather an increase in strength and physique amongst them, especially amongst the women, because these take so much more part in outdoor life than they did in the past, and so you find they are growing taller and stronger, but the great mass of the population is growing shorter and weaker. But it is that great mass of the population from which the majority of your nation comes. They reproduce most rapidly; they are the people who swell the Registrar-General’s returns; from them the future nation is most largely produced; and it is no good to have upper classes strong and vigorous and well-fed if the mass of your population is deteriorating in strength and vigour. There, again, you have one of these pressing problems which it is necessary to answer; for these problems are like the questions of the Sphinx: the Sphinx put the question, and if the man could not answer it, the Sphinx devoured him. And so with these problems in social organisation; the question is put, and the penalty for not answering is to be devoured, and for the civilisation to pass away.
Remedies of sorts are being put forward by doctors and sociologists; sterilisation of the unfit is one of the favourite nostrums or quack remedies of the day. But such remedies are worse than the disease, for they are brutal, and lead to deterioration of morale as well as of physique. You must go down to the root of the causes that make these the unfit, and not bring them forth from the social organisation by the myriad, and then try to find means to check their numbers; and so on that side, again, this insoluble difficulty is facing us.
Even these are not all the problems which are set for us by our Sphinx for which solution is demanded. We have seen terrible poverty, we have seen the question of woman employment, we have seen the question of deterioration of physique and swift multiplication of the unfit: what about the criminal population? We manufacture habitual criminals at a very rapid rate. We take up young men or young women, and we send them to jail for a week, a month, a year, five years, ten years. It goes on accumulating until the habitual offender gets sentences which will outlast his physical life. But that has done nothing to cure the man, that has done nothing to turn him into a good and useful citizen. The law, when it grips him, ought to turn him into a better type of man. Instead of that, he comes back over and over again, until the very habitual criminality that the law has very largely made is brought up as a reason for the magistrate to inflict upon him a heavier penalty. But that is not wisdom; it is folly. Very often a bright, clever lad, full of spirit, falls into crime. It is only one chance in a hundred if he is rescued, and does not gradually drift into the ranks of the habitual criminal. Surely at this stage of civilisation there must be some better way; and there is a better way, as I shall try to show you when I come to deal with brotherhood applied to social life.
If we go beyond these extreme cases, and look at the ordinary questions of supply and demand, of production and distribution, notice how society is gradually coming to a point where things cannot go on as they are, and yet where to change them means the dislocation of our whole productive and distributive system. We can see it best, perhaps, if we go to America, because in America there are not the softening influences which to some extent at least still prevail here, where society was once based on a more human foundation, instead of merely on the question of cash. We see what our systems are if we go over the water to America, where they have full play, without anything to prevent their complete development. There are one or two things that strike us in America of a rather remarkable character. First, the growth of the man who builds his own enormous fortune on the deliberate wrecking of the small fortunes of others. Let me give an example. A large number of people, mostly rather poor, gather together into a company in order to build a railway that is wanted for the development of the country where they are. They want quicker communication, they want better carriage of grain, of goods, and they build a railway. It is working fairly well, it is paying, perhaps not very largely, but still fairly satisfactorily. A much cleverer man than those people comes along, and he sees that that particular district is one that is likely to open up to a very large extent—one where railways will become most valuable property. He sets to work to build another railway that runs over the same ground as the first; it is not wanted except to make him rich. He then begins to destroy the other railway by charging smaller fares and lower freightage; he goes on doing that, putting in his capital, because his rates do not pay, until the other railway is driven down to the impossible level at which he has fixed prices and fares: when the shares of that other railway have sunk down to nearly nothing in the market, he steps in and buys them all up; when he has bought them all up he lets his sham railway go to pieces, and the whole of the district is in his hands, and he piles up an enormous fortune. On the other side of his fortune is the loss to all the shareholders who put their money into that railway in order to improve the means of communication in the place where they were living. They have been sacrificed that he might make enormous wealth. Such men are called “wreckers” in America, but they are honoured in society; they build hospitals, and even churches; they do all kinds of things with fragments of the wealth that they have taken; but I tell you that, although not by the law of the country, yet by the law of righteousness, these men are worse and more to be condemned than the burglar who steals the jewels of a lady or the gold plate of a millionaire. He is punished heavily when he is caught, and he deserves to be punished; burglary is obviously wrong; but worse than that open burglary that the law punishes is the hidden burglary of the brilliant brain against the stupid brain, which robs people of the result of their labour in order to accumulate it within the wrecker’s store.