To expect men and women to become “Socialists” in times of trade depression, is to expect the survivors of Messina, stricken by earthquake and famine, to meditate with enthusiasm upon the future of the race. Socialism, founded on Poverty and Social Discontent, and finding there its argument for change, does not flourish in the heart of that poverty and hungry wretchedness. The Socialist uses the sweated women and starving children as material for inflaming to pity and anger. But he rarely obtains adherents from the husbands of the women or the fathers of the children thus broken at the basis of society. The unemployed leaders are a different class and type from the unemployed whom they shepherd and control. And the average citizen has not yet come entirely to trust the new gospel; is not yet convinced that its adherents will make a better job of it than the “boodlers” and “blood suckers” whom they denounce so fervently. No Socialist councillor has ever been convicted of municipal corruption: and Socialists are sometimes surprised that a party so pure in aim and disinterested in service should be so often rejected by the electorate. But purity of purpose and incorruptibility of standard are not yet regarded by the average citizen as being the most essential qualifications for local or national government. The “man in the street,” here and in America, would seem to be content—except in sudden hurricanes of revolt against too flagrant corruption—with a not too ostentatious standard of civic purity, if the men who are running the machine are men of substance, energy, and position. Miss Addams, from Hull House, has described the failure of the reform party to carry an election even against the most offensive “boodlers.” The people acknowledged the corruption, but were convinced that all the aldermen do it, and that the alderman of their particular ward was unique in being so generous to his clients. “To their simple minds he gets it from the rich, and so long as he gives some of it out to the poor, and, as a true Robin Hood, with open hand, they have no objection to offer.” The people are found to be ashamed to be represented by a bricklayer—the intelligent, clean-handed nominee of the reforming party. The “boodler” is elected “because he is a good friend and neighbour. He exemplifies and exaggerates the popular type of a good man. He has attained what his constituents secretly long for.” They become generally convinced that “the lecturers who were talking against corruption were only the cranks, not the solid business men who had discovered and built up Chicago.” The same difficulty faces all those reformers to-day, who, in a settled, orderly, and on the whole comfortable, society, exhibit a too violent agitation for reform. The “comrades” propagate the cause with a splendid devotion, arguing at street corners, descending like locusts at bye-elections, organising themselves cheerily into missionary bands with particular buttons and badges and neckties. Men listen to their eloquence; but the citizen with a stake in the community shrinks from entrusting to them control of the ratepayers’ money, and the rank and file of the working people turn away from a type so different to their own boisterous, happy-go-lucky, acquiescent existence. An appeal for “Labour representation” can fill the working man with enthusiasm—the enthusiasm of Mr. Crooks’s first sensational victory at Woolwich. An appeal for “Socialism” attracts him when his own position is secure: when that is precarious he is fearful, unless his trouble is prolonged until it threatens a revolution. And an England with permanently declining trade, with the cream of its artisan population permanently out of employment, is an England which this generation has never known: something which, if it occurs in the future, will tear to pieces all our accepted standards, and render all prophecy vain.
Yet there is danger perhaps in exaggerating this complacency, acquiescence, and absorption in such passing pleasures as are possible upon a limited weekly wage, which at present keep so many of the working people in this country aloof from political and social discontent. Those who in similar situation have counted upon a boundless patience have often found that patience rudely exhausted, and all their calculations brought to nought. No one can pretend that a condition of stable equilibrium exists, in which as to-day, with the removal of supernatural sanctions and promises of future redress, the working people find a political freedom accompanying an economic servitude. We have carried out to the full on the one side, says M. Viviani, in France—and the same is true, though in less universal degree, in England—the promise of the Revolution. We have advanced from the affirmation of Equality of Citizenship to universal suffrage, and from universal suffrage to universal education. There has vanished the hope that once kept the labourer docile—hope of the attainment of better times beyond the grave. “Ensemble, et d’un geste magnifique, nous avons eteint dans le ciel des lumières qu’on ne rallumera plus.” Are we able to believe, he inquires, that the work has ended? No, is the reply, it is only beginning. Political liberation has to find expression for itself in the economic sphere: must inevitably work itself out there, with the use of that instrument—the Democratic instrument of Government—which gives to the people full control over its own fortunes. To-day each citizen of the crowd “compares with sadness his political power with his economic dependence: humiliated every day with the contrast between his divided personality—on one side a misérable, on the other a sovereign: on one an animal, on the other a god.”
The increasing apprehension of this contrast, and the increasing consequential effort at readjustment, will furnish the guiding thread to the various political and social changes of the twentieth century. It will influence and control the rise and fall of political parties, each doing the work all unconsciously of forces which it does not understand. It will lead in various ways, and through all oppositions and reactions, towards an organised society profoundly differing from our own.
CHAPTER V
PRISONERS
I
THE surface view of society is always satisfactory. You may walk to-day through the streets of a Russian city, and watch the people at their business and their pleasure, with no revelation of the unseen hunger for change which is tearing at the heart of it. You may traverse England from north to south and east to west, admiring the beauty of its garden landscape, the refined kindly life of its country houses, the opulence and contentment of its middle class, the evidence everywhere of security and repose. Only at intervals, and through challenges which (after all) are easily forgotten, is there thrust before the attention of the observer some manifestation of the life of the underworld. The sea shines and sparkles in the sunshine beneath an unclouded sky. Why excite disquietude concerning the twisted, distorted life which lives and grows and dies in the darkness of the unplumbed deep?
To investigate the life there, it is no longer necessary to follow the romantic novelist or even the private statistician. All these may be under the charge of sensationalism, of writing to a purpose. They excite impatience amongst outside critics, who are convinced that the poor could all be prosperous if they would only work industriously, exercise thought, and avoid alcoholic refreshment. It would be well, therefore, to keep to the safe sobriety of official publications, to all those series of Commissions, Committees, Reports, and Inquiries which, outwardly forbidding, are found on examination to be filled with a rich human interest. Any one familiar with the reports of the Government Inspectors appointed to control the forces of greed and of degeneration in the obscurer regions of modern life, need never be accused of hysteria if he finds the thing henceforth a perpetual companion.
In the annual Reports of the Factory Inspectors, for example, he can see the result of occasional complaints, of sporadic surprise visits; with imagination he can extend these revelations over widening areas of submerged life. These summaries appear as the letting down of dredges into the depth and the bringing to light of the things which exist far below the surface. They are records of the daily and hourly warfare of the embodied conscience of the community against human fear and human greed. That conscience, working through a great machinery of protected law, is endeavouring to guard the men and women and children of the nation against the more outrageous forms of destruction: against the readiness with which the Fear of Destitution is pressing them into all forms of distorted, intolerable, poisonous pursuits. The laws are passed, the inspectors appointed, then the nation turns to other interests in confidence that all is well. Such confidence is based upon an altogether inadequate estimate of the two strongest impulses in the life of man. Avarice can usually overcome terror. Fear acting against greed is occasionally triumphant. But when the two are operating in unison, the result is as the letting out of water. In every trade there are those who will supplant their neighbours by the cheapening of the cost, the lengthening of hours, the avoidance of appliances. In every city there is the unlimited supply of disorganised women’s and children’s labour, which sees before it no alternative but of a quick or of a prolonged decay. The will to live still resists all efforts to render human desire impossible. The apathy of the East, accumulated through centuries of oppression, has not yet infected the industrial life of the West. So the unequal strife continues, between the attempt to raise these broken people into some semblance of rational and humane existence, and the pressure which drives them to choke themselves with dust, and poison themselves with noxious vapour, and ravage into collapse and ruin the bodies and souls of women and children.
They never complain until things have become intolerable. The anonymous complaints show the same percentage of justification as the signed. They work in unventilated workrooms. They are stinted of holidays. They are compelled to work overtime. They endure accident and disease. They are fined and cheated in innumerable ways. Their life is often confined to a mere routine of work and sleep. Yet they endure; and even at the heart of foul and impossible conditions retain always some rags of decency and honour. Some break loose from the accepted drudgery for a brief period of pleasure and idleness; to be found afterwards in the silent, stern discipline of the Rescue Home; where, says a Report, “the extreme youth of many of the inmates is a very distressing feature of many of the homes, and it is grievous that the sins of others should be so heavily visited upon these poor children, to whom the simple natural joys of home life are now denied.” Here austere virtue encourages “in some of the Scotch institutions,” where the hours of work are from eight to seven, “a poor dietary,” although “many of the inmates were young undeveloped girls.” But most are still resisting; as in the non-penitential laundries where “as a rule complaints are amply justified,” although “the workers still find it very difficult to summon up courage enough to speak the truth as to irregularities, from fear of the loss of employment, and consequent shortage of the necessities of life”; or in the “millinery workshop, with a large shop attached, in North London,” which ingeniously evades the factory law by combining operations of millinery apprentice with that of shop assistant, and “on my visiting one of the mothers of the girls she told me her young daughter still arrived home worn-out and crying with exhaustion”; or in the outworker’s home in the City of London, where a “young girl” is “making and elaborately trimming babies’ white silk bonnets beneath a ceiling black as ink, and walls with black and different coloured patches, looking as if some madman had found a pastime in scratching them,” and the girl spares “½d. for potash, and to the best of her ability washed and scraped the vermin from the walls.” Noting how clean and tidy she is in her own person, says the inspector, “I am not surprised to see the shudder with which she speaks of the struggle with dirt and filth.”
They die like flies directly they are born. The tender-hearted may perhaps rejoice in this extravagant mortality. To some the waste of it will appear most apparent. In the Pottery Towns, for example, the infantile mortality is well up to 200 in the 1000: due, says the report, “to the employment of married women in the earthenware and china works.” A regular slaughter of innocents every year in Longton, says the Medical Officer of Health, “is due to this and premature births.” But the waste of death is the least element in this extravagance. “The damage done,” says another Medical Officer, “cannot entirely be measured by mortality figures, for these take no account of the impaired vitality of the infants who manage to survive to swell the ranks of the degenerate.” Stunted, inefficient, overworked, underfed, they struggle towards maturity. Quaint and grotesque occupations are found for them; as for the “forty little girls, twenty-one of whom were half-timers,” who are found licking adhesive labels by the mouth at the rate of thirty gross a day, “whose tongues had the polished tip characteristic of label lickers, and the rest of the tongue coated with brown gum.” Or there are the girls who carry heavy wedges of clay and boxes of scrap (forbidden to such labour by the French Factory Laws of fourteen years ago); as in the “complaint awaiting investigation” from a mother of her daughter who has outgrown her strength, and is now ill with what she believes is consumption; “who when working complained much of pain in the shoulder on which she carried the clay and scrap, and of pain in the collar bone on the same side.” Or the children in the Nottingham lace trade, whose eyesight is impaired or destroyed by the double work of school and employment; and the half-time school at Dundee, where “narrow-chested children sit on backless benches”; or the half-timers at Belfast, “undersized, round-shouldered, delicate in appearance,” where the head teacher testifies, “these children seem always tired; during the recreation period they prefer sitting down in the playground to running about, and in this matter they are especially noticeable in comparison with the children who do not work.” They struggle towards maturity, unorganised, unprotected; fined in one dressmaking workshop in West London in fines which were supposed to be sent to the Fresh Air Fund—a statement which, says the inspector, “had no foundation in fact”; or “verbally promised 2s. 6d.” for making a sample silk blouse, for which “when Saturday came, the occupier, instead of giving the agreed price, refused to pay more 1s. 3d.” Most of them will die under thirty, is the testimony of the teacher concerning her half-time pupils; but if they live it out, in old age they will be once more dragged in by fear and bewilderment to compete against the coming generations, and make the life of those coming generations more difficult to endure.