The condition of England

by Charles F. G. Masterman

I

THE Multitude is the People of England: that eighty per cent. (say) of the present inhabitants of these islands who never express their own grievances, who rarely become articulate, who can only be observed from outside and very far away. It is a people which, all unnoticed and without clamour or protest, has passed through the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life of the city. Nine out of ten families have migrated within three generations: they are still only, as it were, commencing to settle down in their new quarters, with the paint scarcely dry on them, and the little garden still untilled. How has the migration affected them? How will they expand or degenerate in the new town existence, each in the perpetual presence of all? That is a question of as profound interest in answering as it is difficult to answer. The nineteenth century—in the life of the wage-earning multitudes—was a century of disturbance. The twentieth promises to be a century of consolidation. What completed product will emerge from its city aggregation, the children of the crowd? You must learn of them to-day, as I have said, from outside: from the few observers who have lived amongst them and recorded their experience; from the very few representative men, with articulate utterance, which they have flung up from amongst themselves. You must examine masses of documents and statistics embodied in Government publications, or tentative efforts towards a sociology: recording how they live, and eat and drink, and obtain shelter, and marry and are given in marriage; the particulars of their upbringing, how they seek or elude religions and charity, and escape from the laws which are passed for their protection, and enjoy and suffer, and live and die. The mass of this chaotic and undigested evidence waits for the observer who will create from it some general picture of the life of the English people. And when all these statistics and cold facts are assimilated, there yet remains the further inquiry of the temper and spirit of a race subjected to such forces; hampered and limited by the narrow walls between which they labour and endure.

The tangible things come first, in some such evidence as that provided by Government investigation, in the Blue Book bearing a forbidding title, the “Cost of Living of the Working Classes.” It shows them, gathered into astonishing cities, working for variable wage. It reveals the dwellings which they seek to transform into homes. It follows their wages from production to distribution, in the cost of their daily economy, the manner in which they divide up their exiguous incomes, the amounts they think it worth while to allot to shelter, to food, and to pleasure. It analyses over a thousand “family budgets,” each giving details of how much is spent weekly on butter, tapioca, or treacle. It shows the rate of birth and the rate of death: varying from city to city, both materially changing. It gives, in fact, in outline only, that blurred image of a huge and industrial population whose complete apprehension would furnish the key to many of the pressing problems of to-day.

Here are the houses in which for a season they abide; in part the product of their own volition, in part the creation of external changes which they can but little control. They have had no choice in these constructions. Their demands and desires have scarcely counted in the provision made for them. Their impetuous need was shelter: shelter “on the spot,” around the sites of the new factories which had sucked them up from the deserted countryside. And they were thankful to take what was offered them by those men who foresaw the changes which were coming, and could accumulate fortunes in the rapid provision of immediate necessities. Swept into aggregations by the demand of the newest industries, the clay and stone has been hastily fashioned into place for human habitation. And now these stand to-day, made by, and yet making, the temper and characteristic of the people. Here the normal standard is a four-roomed cottage; there, “back to back” houses ravage the health of their inhabitants; here again huge piles of tenements encompass the bewildered occupants in a kind of human ant-heap; there the ancient dwelling of the wealthy or comfortable classes have been “swarmed out” by the busy people. Carlyle pictured mankind flowing, as it were, through the visible arena of material things. A wave of humanity beats through these solid constructions; it vanishes, another succeeds. “Orpheus built the walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his lyre. Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo, summoning out all the sandstone rocks to dance and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble streets?” All cities are thus built “to music.” What discordant melody to-day is responsible for the creation of Jarrow, or Salford, or Canning Town?

England at once, under such an analysis, separates itself into divergent parts. There is rural England, still largely unaffected by modern science and invention, except by the loss of population, drained away; the agricultural labourers, the fishermen, and the artisans of the sleeping provincial towns. There is urban England in hastily created industrial centres, vocal with the clanging of furnaces and the noise of the factories; but still a population in manageable aggregation, set in open spaces, never far from green fields under a wide sky. And there is London: a population, a nation in itself; breeding, as it seems, a special race of men; which only is also produced, and that in less intensive cultivation, in the few other larger cities—Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool—where the conditions of coagulation offer some parallel to this monster clot of humanity. Everywhere, indeed, this million-peopled, exaggerated London sets at defiance the generalisations drawn from the normal town areas. House rent is immensely higher. The mean weekly price for two rooms in London is six shillings, in the provinces a little more than one half; for four rooms the variation is between nine shillings in the one, five shillings in the other. A portion of this surplus is the booty of more highly-paid labour. The greater part vanishes in the increased value of the land, heaped up by the mere fact of aggregation, and flowing away into the pockets of many affluent and fortunate persons. London has been normally Tory; defiant of “Socialism,” defiant of change. The cause of this cannot be found entirely in the existence of a metropolis and capital of the Empire living a parasitic existence on tribute levied upon the boundaries of the world. For in most of the great capitals of Europe the advocates of revolutionary programmes find to-day their most fruitful fields of propaganda. It may perhaps best be understood in the apprehension of an actual picture of visible things. The answer is hidden in these strings and congestions of little comfortable two-storeyed red and grey cottages, which multiplied with such amazing rapidity in the preceding generation; pushing their tentacles from factory or industrial centre out over the neighbouring fields, and proclaiming with their cleanliness and tiny gardens and modest air of comfort, a working population prosperous and content. One type of dwelling, indeed, is found to be more or less prevalent through all the urban aggregation. That is the small four or five-roomed cottage, containing on the ground floor a front parlour, a kitchen, and a scullery built as an addition to the main part of the house; and on the upper floor the bedrooms, the third bedroom in the five-roomed house being built over the scullery. And in such dwelling-places, if anywhere, is concealed the secret of the future of the people of England. Abroad, the self-contained “flat,” the gigantic tenement, in which the single family is embedded in a cliff of bricks and mortar, is more and more coming to be the staple dwelling of the working classes. Broad, tree-planted avenues, with fast electric locomotion, cut through carefully planned cities of storey piled on storey. The whole effect is grandiose and spacious, if it lacks the picturesqueness of that enormous acreage of chimney-pots and tiny tumbled cottages which is revealed in a kind of smoky grandeur from the railway embankments of South and East London—the desperate efforts made by a race reared in village communities to maintain in the urban aggregation some semblance of a home. Such is the shelter; what of the food? The price of bread varies. Family budgets of the weekly incomes are extraordinarily suggestive of the struggle which takes place in the industrial areas of the city. Classified according to amount of net receipts, they reveal an ever-growing proportion devoted to the essentials of bodily nutriment; until, at the bottom, where the income appears permanently below the “living wage,” there is practically no margin left when the food demand is satisfied. “For the incomes below thirty shillings, two-thirds of the total income is spent on food, ‘declares a Board of Trade investigator,’ while in the case of the incomes of forty shillings and above, about fifty-seven per cent. is spent on food.” Amongst the poorest, actually one-fifth of the total food expenditure is spent on bread and flour: a conclusive statistic condemning those who lightly justify a tax on imported corn on the ground that so much stale bread is committed to the pigsty. Tea, in these lowest incomes, demands ninepence farthing a week, and sugar eightpence. It is expenditure on the margin, counted in farthings, a life exceedingly difficult to realise amongst those to whom a few coppers more or less means no appreciable difference.

Variations—from town to town—in a civilisation which is in all essentials homogeneous, and a life of easy flow from one labour centre to another, tend to lessen or to vanish. Yet there still are apparent local variations in wages which appear to be independent of variations in wealth or in prices. Again there are most remarkable differences in habits, customs, productivity, and statistics of birth and death. Why (for example) should Middlesborough have the highest birth-rate of England? Why indeed, the cynical might ask, should any children be born in Middlesborough at all, considering the more than dismal picture which investigation discloses of existence in that feverish industrial centre? There is appalling wastage of life force in these percentages of infant mortality, especially in the factory centres—soiled, useless child lives, whose existence stands for no intelligible significance in any rational scheme of human affairs. There are statistics of mortality which reveal so many years knocked off human life in the transition from the life of the field to the life of the factory. And there is the evidence also, amongst the industrial peoples as amongst the classes above them, of perhaps the most remarkable change which is operating to-day in modern England: in the tumbling down of the birth-rate with ominous rapidity, until nothing but a similar reduction of the death-rate, with the increase of sanitation and the limitation of disease, seems to stand between the two meeting in a henceforth stationary population. Is the vitality of the race being burnt up in mine and furnace, in the huddled mazes of the city? And is the future of a colonising people to be jeopardised, not by difficulties of overlordship at the extremities of its dominion, but by obscure changes in the opinion, the religion, and the energies at the heart of the Empire? These and other subjects confront even a superficial examination of the material condition of England. Karl Marx was wrong in his defiant assertion that economic causes were the sole factors in the transformations of history. He would have been right had he asserted that many startling overturnings of opinion, in political and social, and even religious change, can ultimately be traced back to the economic condition of obscure masses of the common people. The majority are in regular labour in summer and winter, tearing from coal and furnace and factory the vast industrial wealth of England. Their disabilities are imperfect houses set often in quite needlessly squalid surroundings: the possibility of finding, through no fault of their own, their labour no longer required; specific diseases and risks of specific accidents which are associated with various specific occupations. Their advantages are a rate of payment higher for shorter hours of work than is at present prevailing (in the majority of trades) in any other country of Europe. The artisan is far better fed than the agricultural labourer, is more intelligent, quicker and more active, with greater pleasures available in popular entertainment, or a Saturday half-holiday, or a week at the seaside. Yet his span of life is shorter and his work more precarious. He possesses little opportunity for the accumulation of property. He has no “stake in the country,” and has no permanent possession, lacking even a tiny plot of land which he can bequeath from father to child. His effects—on his decease—are generally negligible. The Multitude, with a substantial although inadequate share of the income of the country, possesses but an infinitesimal proportion of its capital.

In such surroundings and despite such drawbacks, there labours a hardy race of men, whose efforts, in skill, perseverance, and indefatigable industry, have earned them supremacy in the markets of the world. It is an industrial order in transition, evidently being swept forward by forces beyond individual control, to a condition in the future which would be almost inconceivable to the present. It is a population of weekly wage-earners which has struggled out of servitude into independence, but which still remains goaded into activity by fear—not of the lash of the overseer, but of the grim and implacable forces of hunger and cold. Slavery, Serfdom, Poverty: these, says the author of the Nemesis of Nations, form three stages in the changing condition of the social basis of civilisation. “Poverty” is the foundation of the present industrial order. It is a poverty which is removed, for the most part, from actual lack of physical necessities, though it is always never far distant from such a privation. It is rather “industrialism”—the “proletariat”—a state of human affairs for which we have in English no defining title. In working it provides others with leisure, and the complex and refining influences which leisure can bring. It works in the city aggregations, always twisting threads, or clanging machinery, or stoking effectual fires. Its products post o’er land and ocean without rest—swinging steel bridges over the rivers of East Africa, furnishing Nicaragua with carpets, or encasing the women of Upper Burmah in Lancashire cotton fabrics. What is the meaning of it all? What is the end of it all? We cannot tell the meaning outside; the future of a world when the “iron age” has become triumphant, and man, a midget, controlling by his intelligence huge and ponderable forces, will be lost in the labyrinths of his enormous machines. Certain forms of American activity on the shores of Lake Michigan, or in the devastated North-East of Pennsylvania, provide sufficient forecast of such a future. Nor can we tell the meaning (as it were) inside: in the lives of those two differentiated classes which the modern industrial life is daily creating; the life of those who enjoy, on the one hand, in Pleasure Cities, in all branches of eager and sometimes morbid amusement; and the life of the new race which will be evolved out of these strenuous gnomes who labour in the heart of the city congestions.

Of very special interest, however, is the testimony of those who have endeavoured to get behind the form of cottage or quality of food, to apprehension of the actual life of the people who dwell in the one and are nourished by the other. Such efforts have been made, and not unsuccessfully, by Lady Bell at Middlesborough, by Mr. Charles Booth in London, by Mr. Reynolds amongst his friends the Devon fishermen, by Mr. Reginald Bray from his block tenement in Camberwell. They all bear testimony concerning a life novel to humanity, whose development and future is still doubtful.

Lady Bell, in her study of such life in a prosperous northern centre, goes near to provide a bird’s-eye view of the city “proletariat” in its present uncertain state. It is a town erected almost in two nights and a day by the demands of the new iron manufacture. Its hundred thousand population are practically all workers. It exists solely for the purpose of translating human energy into material values. Its inhabitants have been sucked in like the draught in its own blast furnaces: from the neighbouring countryside, from the neighbouring townships, from Scotland and Ireland, and places far afield. Round the furnaces there have rapidly heaped together mazes of little two-storeyed cottages. The furnaces, the grey streets, a few public buildings, all set in a background of greyness, in a devastated landscape, under a grey sky—that is the proletarian city. Lady Bell set herself (in her own happy phrase) to reveal what the Iron Trade, which people outside “know but by name, perhaps, as a huge measuring gauge of the national prosperity, is in reality, when translated into terms of human beings.” She takes her readers through the great furnaces and down into the interiors of the little houses. She exhibits the habits, manners, pleasures, and pains of the people. She shows in one chapter the literature patronised by this population; in another the people at work; in another the people at play. Again, she will describe the lives of the children, the lives of the wife and mother, the influences of sickness, accident, or old age. The slave populations who built Babylon, or upon which the Athenian oligarchy which called itself a Democracy essayed philosophy and beauty, remain to-day more as a myth than as a memory. The poverty populations, upon which are built to-day England’s unparalleled accumulation, will stand in the future, with at least a corner of their lives lifted. Such a corner will interpret to a less harassed age a life once peopling these waste places, which will then be but ruins and a memory.

Here is a population in many respects more fortunate than its fellows. Its wages are high; its hours of work are few. Its life, though exacting and laborious, demanding, perhaps, from human nature more than human nature can readily give, is more exhilarating than the long hours in the humid air of the cotton factory, or the perpetual scribbling in an underground office cellar. It is wrestling continually with the iron: tearing it out of the ironstone, directing rivers of molten metal into their proper channels, bending the intractable stone and the huge forces of heat and affinity to the will of man. And in life also it is wrestling with huge forces which it but dimly understands, poised on a perilous pathway from which one slip means utter destruction. “The path the iron worker daily treads at the edge of the sandy platform, that narrow path that lies between running streams of fire on the one hand and a sheer drop on the other, is but an emblem of the Road of Life along which he must walk. If he should stumble, either actually or metaphorically, as he goes, he has but a small margin in which to recover himself.” There is a less defensible side of the people’s life in the enormous disproportion of attendance at public-houses and at places of religious worship; the universal prevalence of betting and gambling; the thoughtlessness and wastefulness which often produces economic collapse; the ignorance of child-rearing and the laws of health; the darker side of the artificial restriction of families. But these become explained rather than condemned by the revelation of the contrast in the condition of child-bearing in one of these crowded, tiny homes with the condition in the surroundings of those who live in another universe. Boys and girls of fourteen or younger are turned loose to pick their way through the most difficult period of life, just at the season when the boys and girls of another class are most completely surrounded with careful and humane influences. The married woman of the working classes, “handicapped as she is by physical conditions and drawbacks, with but just bodily strength enough to encounter the life described,” may be defended against the fluent criticism of “her more prosperous sisters—whose duties are divided among several people, and even then not always accomplished with success.”