So is being heaped up the wealth of the world. Under darkened skies, and in an existence starved of beauty, these communities of men and women and children continue their unchanging toil. Is the price being paid too great for the result attained? The cities have sucked in the healthy, stored-up energies of rural England; with an overwhelming percentage to-day of country upbringing. Must they ever thus be parasitic on another life outside, and this nation divide into breeding-grounds for the creation of human energies and consuming centres where these energies are destroyed? The standard of longevity has pitifully fallen in such places from that prevalent amongst the agricultural labourers. Workers formerly too old at sixty are now too old ten years earlier. The men are scourged by specific diseases; the mortality of the children is appalling. One is apt to be surprised, says Lady Bell, of the iron workers of Middlesborough, to find how many of the workmen are more or less ailing in different ways. “But we cease to be surprised when we realise how apt the conditions are to tell upon the health even of the strongest, and how many of the men engaged in it are spent by the time they are fifty. To say that this happens to half of them is probably a favourable estimate.” Of the women, Lady Bell brushes aside with a welcome contempt that newspaper and drawing-room cant which explains that a beneficent Providence has made the working classes insensible to pains and conditions which other classes would find intolerable. “It is not only bringing children into the world that affects the health of the working women. It is an entire delusion to believe that they are, as a rule, stronger, hardier, healthier, than the well-to-do. Their life is a continuous toil. They rarely go outside the doors of their houses, except for Saturday marketing and Sunday-evening exercise. Recreation, the stimulus of changed garments, rest during the day, or the other minor comforts which other classes find so necessary, are not for them. They are mostly convinced that it is wrong to sit down and read a book at any hour of the day. Their interests, not unnaturally, turn towards the stimulus of drinking, and of betting and gambling—two elements which at least can give colour in a life set in grey.”[3]
Every observer, in this and its hundred similar fellows, can see family affection, endurance, kindliness, and patience beyond all praise; a resistance (even in the last extremity) to the triumphant powers of darkness. What is more difficult to show is any interpretation of the whole business, an ideal which can illuminate the present disability, or a vision in which to-day’s efforts will appear intelligible in the light of an end. Lacking such vision, the verdict of a nineteenth-century prophet still sounds mournful over much of industrial England that abides unchanged. “The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life,” wrote Ruskin, “are the south-eastern suburbs of Bradford, and the scene from Wakefield Bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.”
Yet all England has not yet been roofed over and become subservient to furnace and factory: and there are other observers who find amongst the labouring populations, especially amongst those who are compelled to face danger and to cultivate endurance, an excellence denied to classes sometimes deemed more fortunate. We may pass from the blackness and almost uncouth violence of Middlesborough to the jolly fishermen of the South Coast: to find not the iron trade, but the ocean harvest, “translated into terms of human beings.” Mr. Reynolds, who has lived amongst such a fishermen’s colony in a Devonshire watering-place, can give encouraging testimony to the happiness found there, the generosity, the standards of the poor; to a definite and remote civilisation, which gazes out upon the activities of the wealthier classes above it, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with a little envy, certainly with no hatred or predatory aim.
Sixty years ago, Disraeli described the rich and poor of England as two nations. To-day, even national distinctions seem less estranging than the fissure between the summit and basis of society. “Their civilisations are not two stages of the same civilisation, but two civilisations, two traditions which have grown up concurrently.” And a similar testimony is expressed by many who have intimate and first-hand knowledge of the life of the hand worker. “The more one sees of the poor in their own homes,” is the verdict of Miss Loane, a witness of varied and peculiar experience, “the more one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole, can be more justly described as different from those of the upper classes than as better or worse.” Most present-day failures in legislation and social experiment are due to neglect of this fact. It has been assumed that the artisan is but a stunted or distorted specimen of the small tradesman; with the same ideals, the same aspirations, the same limitations: demanding the same moulding towards the fashioning of a completed product. We are gradually learning that “the people of England” are as different from, and as unknown to, the classes that investigate, observe, and record, as the people of China or Peru. Living amongst us and around us, never becoming articulate, finding even in their directly elected representatives types remote from their own, these people grow and flourish and die, with their own codes of honour, their special beliefs and moralities, their judgment and often their condemnation of the classes to whom has been given leisure and material advantage. The line is cut clean by both parties, neither desiring to occupy the territory of the other. “There is not one high wall, but two high walls, between the classes and the masses,” declares this witness; “and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb.”
The scene is laid in the huddled cottages of a fisher village of a South Coast watering-place. The observer penetrates behind the appearance—to the normal visitor—of a rather squalid fishing suburb, with swarms of untidy children, and the fishermen, deferential, seeking patronage of the brisk or bored holiday-maker. He has lived amongst them and loved them. He has convinced them that he has no desire to do them good. He comes to their life having “swallowed all the formulas” with a perhaps exaggerated contempt for the “intellectuals” and the upholders of the middle class moral code. He is enchanted by the life he finds there, despite all its discomforts. In the existence of the poor, in an experience fixed on the hard rind of life, tasting to the full its salt and bitter flavours, he finds a sincerity and an adventure denied to the more secure classes above. Always faced by elemental facts, and demanding a continuous courage for the maintenance of an unending struggle, these men and women exhibit clean-cut, simple qualities which vindicate their existence before any absolute standard of values.
The poor are inclined to suspect and dislike the classes just above them, the tradesmen. Nowhere is the moral standard more divergent than between the frugal, laborious, and rather timid assiduities of the lower middle class on the one hand, and on the other the reckless, generous, improvident life of the working peoples. To the “gentleman,” the attitude of the sea-folk is different. He is despised for his ignorance. He is sometimes regarded as fair game for deceit or extortion, outside the moral standard of the home community, just as the coloured peoples are regarded as outside the recognised codes of civilisation to-day. Yet there is little envy of his riches and enjoyments, and even a certain admiration, so long as he conforms to certain accepted laws of kindliness. “‘An ’orrible lie!’ between two poor people is fair play from a poor man to a wealthier, just as, for instance, the wealthy man considers himself at liberty to make speeches full of hypocritical untruth when he is seeking the suffrage of the free and independent electors, or is trying to teach the poor man how to make himself more profitable to his employer.” The “gentlemen” are permitted idleness, luxuriousness, and the freest self-indulgence without criticism; but anything from them in the nature of meanness is resented. Haggling, for example, over the hire of a boat, is an unpardonable offence. The fishermen, on their occasional holidays, spend their savings lavishly and without question; why should not the “gentlemen” do the same? “When Tony goes away himself, he pays what is asked; regrets it afterwards, if at all; and comes home when his money is done. ‘If a gen’leman,’ he says, ‘can’t afford to pay the rate, what du ’ee come on the beach to hire a boat for—an’ try to beat a fellow down? I reckon ’tis only a sort o’ gen’leman as does that!’”
And this, indeed, is only congruous with that changed estimate of moral values which prevails amongst the poor. Mr. Reynolds, amongst his Devon fishermen, finds the same general summing-up of moral guilt or excellence as Miss Loane has found in the mean streets of the great cities. “Generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation.” It is the emotional, indeed, against the intellectual: to one point of view, life in an incomplete condition of development; to another, life lived nearer to its central heart. Certainly, in the combination of Christian and ethical dicta which make up the popular moral code of modern civilisation, the standard of the poor is nearer to the Christian standard. One can see how many of the New Testament assertions have been fashioned from the common democratic mind, as Socrates and Plato from the aristocratic. Yet religion counts for little in the scheme of human affairs. There is, indeed, nothing of a definite denial; the fishing village would be scandalised by any truculent disproof of Christianity. The children go regularly to Sunday school; their parents believe in God and in a better time coming. But the general spirit reveals that widespread and prevailing uncertainty, and conviction of uncertainty, which to-day is the most dominant attitude in face of ultimate problems. “Tony” the fisherman pronounces religion to be “the business of the clergy, who are paid for it, and of those who take it up as a hobby, including the impertinent persons who thrust hell-fire tracts upon the fisher-folk. ‘Us can’t ’spect to know nort about it,’ says Tony. ‘’Tain’t no business o’ ours. May be as they says; may be not. It don’t matter, that I sees. ’Twill be all the same in a hundred years’ time, when we’re a-grinning up at the daisy-roots.’”[4]
It was thought, says Mr. Charles Booth, of a certain experiment in East London, that as the poor were not going to the churches, they would attend the Hall of Science. When the Hall of Science was opened, it was as deserted as the churches. The people wanted neither religion nor its antidote. All they wanted was to be left alone. All that the poor want, runs the popular Socialist declaration, is that the rich shall get off their backs. All that the poor want, would be a truer aphorism, is to be left alone. They don’t want to be cleaned, enlightened, inspected, drained. They don’t want regulations of the hours of their drinking. They assiduously avoid the hospitals and parish rooms. They don’t want compulsory thrift, elevation to remote standards of virtue and comfort, irritation into intellectual or moral progress. In that diverting novel, the Lord of Latimer Street, the peer who owns the neighbourhood, disguised as a lodger in a block of scandalous tenements in Bermondsey, announces with pride that the philanthropic landlord is going to pull them down and convert the site into a recreation-ground for the people. The result is an awakening of universal fury amongst the residents in these deplorable abodes. Why can’t he leave them alone? They pay their rents without complaining. They are not jealous of his enjoyments. They are not endeavouring to seize his money or despoil his goods. Why can’t he go and spend the money at Monte Carlo or Newmarket “as the other lords do,” as indeed they would like to do, if they were lords? Many who are conscious that the poor want to be left alone are not convinced that they ought to be left alone. Yet it is doubtful if much personal interference can be of any practical service. The effect of our meddling is similar to the effect of the preaching of Western morals in the East. The old faiths are destroyed. The new faiths are not assimilated. Mr. Reynolds, certainly, has no doubt on the matter. He is scornful concerning the boom of Elementary Education. He dislikes the preaching of thrift. Amongst the poor, “extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often a singular dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries, just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the spiritual squalor of the lower middle class.” He is willing to make almost any sacrifice for his friends, if only they can retain their chief vindicating quality—that insouciance or contempt for life’s ills and dangers which enables them ever to take the thunder and the sunshine with a frolic welcome. He finds this greatly characteristic of his fishermen: he probably would find less manifestation of it in the difficult darkness of the cities, where Fear, rather than Courage, is the driving force of common humanity. But, however much Churches may talk about sin and virtue, “we know well in our hearts,” says this observer, “that pluck and courage are the great twin virtues, and that cowardice is the fundamental sin.” He finds amongst the poor not only the “will to live,” but the “courage to live”; not only endurance of existence, but exultation in it. They are not afraid of life. They keep something of the adventure which takes all risks: the resolute action which cannot even see the risks it is taking. With Stevenson, they will have nothing to do with the negative virtues. With the original Christian axiom—as Renan saw it—they reveal that “the heart of the common people is the great reservoir of the self-devotion and resignation by which alone the world can be saved.”
II
This “daring and courage,” however, is the prerogative of individuals; specially equipped, or selected (as it seems) by a life trained from the earliest years to confront hostile forces in the open air and sunshine; skilled and heartened by combats with the sea. How far can such characters be identified in the Crowd: the special product of modern industrial civilisation? Those who would attempt a diagnosis of the present must find themselves more and more turning their attention from the individual to the aggregation: upon the individuals which act in an aggregation in a manner different from their action as isolated units of humanity. We have to deal, in fact, not only with the Crowd casually collected in sudden movement by persons accustomed to live alone, but with whole peoples which in London and the larger cities are reared in a Crowd, labour in a Crowd, in a Crowd take their enjoyments, die in a Crowd, and in a Crowd are buried at the end.