“God help the poor!” concludes one half-unintelligible complaint of swindling deductions, where, on investigation, “the workers were at first terrified to give me information,” says the inspector, “and I was met with entirely false statements.” “God help the poor!” is written over all this haunting and dolorous record. It is the record of prisoners: sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis.[9]
Gentility, again, is desirable. So is the supervision of the morals of young men and women. Both are enjoyed—in abundance it would seem—by the shop assistants, half a million of whom “live-in,” or are affected by the living-in system. Some twenty thousand of them, organised in a Trades Union, are endeavouring to climb into citizenship: with less moral supervision it may be, but with the individual development that comes from self-ordered life and some suggestion of freedom. The necessity for the receipt of wages of something like a pound a week, if these people are to choose their own lodgings and dwell at ease, is a necessity which offers a considerable barrier to reform. And with the prospect of financial disability laid upon them if the present system is abolished, there is small wonder that a number of employers are enthusiastic over its advantages. The “discontented” Unionists—discontented in the opinion of many of their employers, like the dog who went mad in Goldsmith’s elegy in order “to gain some private ends”—keep up the agitation bravely. On occasional bank holidays, when their less vigorous brethren are enjoying their four days a year of statutory idleness in the open air, they suddenly appear like fish attaining sunshine from deep waters: hold their “conferences,” pass their resolutions, then vanish again into the neat, obsequious serviceable men and women who attend to the whims of customers and encourage their tentative efforts towards purchase. Meetings of shop assistants are held in the big cities after darkness has fallen. A crowded company of unknown persons assembles to pass resolutions against “living-in” or in favour of short hours, then vanishes again, into the barracks or pleasant commercial “hotels” in which they reside. Evidence is obtained with difficulty even when a Government consents to interfere, and appoints a Commission to investigate. “Miss X——” does not wish to give her name. “If my name is published I get the swap,” she says, “and I have to go at a minute’s notice; and my employer would not mind spoiling my reference. He does not know that I have come here to-day.” “I was summoned to come yesterday,” says Mr. Y—— wearily, “and I asked for a day off; but I suppose I shall be dismissed when I go back for taking two days, so that I do not suppose it will matter a great deal whether my name appears or not.” There are plenty of specific cases of ill-treatment and niggardly treatment against which no inspection can guard: of poor food and monotonous food, overcrowding in bedroom, squalor of accommodation, lack of suitable sanitary and washing arrangements, and the like. But the emphasis of those who resist is not upon specific complaints. It is directed against a general system which herds men and women together, all of one class and one occupation, in unnatural contiguity, and leave them there, under regulations rather humiliating to adult persons, to make the best of life seen through distorted glasses, and from the inside of a regulated home. There are testimonies, indeed, of the excellence of the best, in perpetual care for the welfare of the employees. It is perhaps a misfortune that the comfort and kindliness of these best should throw an ægis of justification over a system which is the worst, and even in the average, stands on so many counts condemned.
“Living-in,” declares the Report, in certain retail trades, is generally made a condition of employment, either express or implied. The board and lodging accommodation is often inferior and inadequate. Sleeping and other accommodation is frequently bad. On the moral side the system has often not only no advantage, but is actually harmful. The daily rush from counter to dining-room and back, the unappetising food, the wearying sameness of the menu, the insufficiency of the food, often supplemented by “extras” sold by the firm, like the “tuck shop” system of the English public school, are all described by actual sufferers, in experience which seems to have stepped clean out of the pages of Kipps or Vivian. Five beds “invested with bugs in one room,” an attic in which three men sleep “that in the heat of summer smelt like a fowl-house,” beds with four clean sheets in six months, rooms with rats plentiful, bedrooms which open into corridors, the light being obtainable through a pane of glass in the wooden partitions—these and other similar experiences testify to the price which often has to be paid for the “moral supervision” which the young shopman or shop girl enjoys. The Report declares that in a number of cases at least this claim of moral supervision is cant—the old cant of cheapness; the cant in its revived form of the “moral supervision” of the workhouse children which were bought up in batches for the factories eighty years ago. An employer “would place no obstacle in the way of his male assistants marrying,” is the confession of one, “though,” he adds, “he certainly does not like his assistants to marry on an inadequate wage.” “Male and female created He them,” says Mr. Lewisham’s friend in a well-known novel, “which was d—d rough luck on assistant masters.” It would seem to be rough luck also on shop assistants who have the bad taste to prefer matrimony to moral guidance.
Such well-known employers like Mr. Debenham and Mr. Derry in London, who have changed from the living-in to the natural system, brush all this cant and vapour away with a healthy breath of fresh air. “The character of some employers,” says the latter, “I would not trust from their own housekeepers. I do not think that drapers are worse than any other commercial men, but all commercial men are the same.” He sees “no difficulty in finding proper apartments outside,” with people “in whom we should have every confidence to put our own children.” “I am quite out of touch with excuses which have been made by employers at conferences I have been at, with regard to the moral side of the question. I think it is sheer nonsense.”
The system is sometimes enforced by a system of “fines”: the substitute, in a humanitarian age, for more drastic disciplinary measures of the older servitudes. Fines for smoking or reading in bedrooms, fines for sleeping out without permission or for arriving after locking-up time, fines for taking supper away, for burning candles after the gas is turned out, for heating water on the gas, exhibit the method by which adjustment has to be effected and the smoothness of the communal existence maintained. “The system,” says Miss Bonfield, “robs the assistant, whether men or women, of the sense of personal responsibility which is developed by ordering and controlling one’s own life. The herding together of large numbers of either sex, restricted as to the most ordinary intercourse with the opposite sex, creates an unnatural and vicious atmosphere which is morally dangerous to both men and women.” She repudiates the idea that there is “any kind of home life, any kind of home consideration”—at least in her personal experience. The dinner-hour she found “the most disagreeable interval of the day.” “In a long business experience I have never yet had a properly made cup of tea.” “The sitting-room of a business house is usually a most dreary place, very much like the waiting-room of a railway station.” In many shops the hours worked are seventy per week: the atmosphere in one experience “particularly vitiated, and the assistants chronically overtired.” The work is peculiarly stimulating to nervous strain: fretful customers, sometimes friendly, sometimes bullying, often merely tiresome—for hour after hour of the day. Even when the catering is excellent, is another experience, the girls “have no appetite for food.” “What they need is fresh air and more outdoor exercise. The factory girl who eats her unscientific meal in the street, does so with a greater relish and with more profit to health than does her sister of the shop extract from the choice meals eaten in the atmosphere of the shop dining-room.” “I have frequently gone to my dinner feeling faint for want of food, and on entering the dining-room have been nauseated to such an extent as to be unable to eat anything except dry bread.” Compensations appear, however, in some cases to exist. In the report of one establishment—only men living-in—after “washing accommodation inadequate, food badly cooked, table service not clean, men’s sitting-room, three chairs and broken table for the use of twenty men,” it is encouraging to read that “every apprentice is required to attend a place of worship at least once on a Sunday.” So is fostered the traditional religion of the people. There is a suggestion that the feverish competition in retail trade, and the general willingness to obtain a maximum of profit, has even here produced a change in spirit and temper. “I have been able to watch the change,” says Miss Bonfield, “since first I went into the distributing trade. The old system of trying to build up an establishment on the value of your goods, and on giving real work for money, has been steadily changing, and the assistant now who is considered the smartest assistant is the one who can sell to customers worthless goods, goods that yield a very large profit, goods that look fairly showy on the surface but are not really wearable, and are not satisfactory in other ways.” From both sides—men and women—comes personal testimony to an “immorality of the mind” which is “worse than immorality of the body”—an “over-sexed” condition due to the herding together of young men or young women of a certain age in an atmosphere of nerve stimulation and little physical exercise and limited external interests. One male assistant protests against “the daily rush from counter to dining-room and back to counter without even a breath of fresh air. Often the food provided is unappetising, cooked and served very roughly, served in dining-rooms situated in the basement, artificially lighted and without proper ventilation.” “The sameness of the menu becomes positively wearying.” “In a large number of cases the food provided is insufficient for the physical need of the employee.” Mr. Tilley, once a shop assistant in the town, now a draper on his own account in a small way in the country, roundly asserts that “the good conditions are the exception, bad conditions the rule.” “Celibacy is a condition of employment. Here we are faced by the greatest of the many evils which arise from this,” as he calls it, “pernicious system.” “It is absolutely essential,” is his summary, “for the physical and moral welfare of the assistants that ‘living-in’ should be abolished.” The old order of things has changed. The personal element between employer and employee is steadily vanishing. And the assistant of to-day finds himself bound and fettered with this legacy of feudal days which his employer is often using for all it is worth to exploit the labour of the employees in this and kindred trades. The emancipation of the shop workers of this country can never come until they are rid of this “living-in” system, is the announcement which is robbing them of freedom of action, individuality of character, and the “political and social rights of an Englishman.”[10]
“The political and social rights of an Englishman.” We are fortunate in the possession of a man of genius who has also had personal experience of this particular life, and has left in literature a sharp-cut picture of the “political and social rights” interpreted into terms of daily experience. “‘By Jove,’ said Buggins, ‘it won’t do to give these here Blacks votes.’ ‘No fear,’ said Kipps. ‘They’re different altogether,’ said Buggins. ‘They ’aven’t the sound sense of Englishmen, and they ’aven’t the character. There’s a sort of tricky dishonesty about ’em.... They’re too timid to be honest. Too slavish. They aren’t used to being free, like we are; and if you gave ’em freedom, they wouldn’t make a proper use of it. Now we—Oh, damn!’ For the gas had suddenly gone out, and Buggins had the whole column of Society Club Chat still to read.”
“What becomes of the good shop assistant when he grows old?” is a question almost as difficult to answer as the question, “What becomes of good Americans when they die?” The Government Committee could obtain no certain evidence. “I cannot say what does become of them. Some start in business on their own account; but now that the conditions are so changed, that is very difficult. They leave the drapery trade. Some get inferior situations. You may find old drapers’ assistants driving cabs to-day.” In South Wales, says one, “amongst the miners, I myself have come across an enormous number of old shop assistants.” The majority, like the majority of assistant masters in a slightly more exalted station of life, seem to slide out into all sorts of bypaths—in the one Empire building, tomato growing, or running preparatory schools whose competition and fate seems generally similar to that of the small retail drapery stores; in the other, “insurance agents, booksellers, and things of that kind.” But the work is genteel; sharply distinguished from that of the artisan: it is supposed to be especially suitable to boys and girls of delicate physique: and there are many who, from the beginning, would wish no otherwise than to be shepherded, tended, taken in and provided for, without the pains and risks of outside adventure. “We’re in a blessed drainpipe,” says Mr. Minton to Kipps cheerfully, “and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die.” Only to a percentage, at first, and then in effort, which every year diminishes, does the conviction come, as to “Kipps” in the night watches, when “all others in the dormitory are asleep and snoring,” that “the great stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape.” “Night after night he would resolve to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse, or drown himself, and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in fear of a sixpenny fine.”[11]
And the alternatives—especially for the women—are not all so promising that they can afford lightly to forego the advantage here offered of assured food and shelter. Far below is a vision of pitiful poverty, into which, at any time, any unfortunate worker may be precipitated; rarely, henceforth, ever to rise into the clear air of intelligible life. Somewhere festering at the basis, round the foundations of the great mansion of England’s economic supremacy, are to be discovered the workers of the “Sweated Trades.” At intervals of ten, fifteen, or twenty years the dredger is let down, to scrape up samples of the material of the ocean floor: in Royal Commissions, Committees of the House of Commons, or the House of Lords. It is always the same there, whatever tides and tempests trouble the surface far above: a settled mass of congested poverty shivering through life upon the margin below which life ceases to endure. The sensational novelist utters his study in fiction, the cause and the remedy; the public conscience is stirred by the exhibitions of “sweated” goods and “sweated” women: after a time distraction intervenes, a war, a colonial football or cricket tour, ecclesiastical dispute over posture of praying, or colour of garment. The sweated workers, for one moment indecently revealed in the sunshine, return again to the welcome obscurity of their twilight world. A recent House of Commons Committee has once more raked over the bottom; examined, with blinking eyes, the strange things found there; reported in favour of Government action. The evidence is of the monotonous simplicity familiar to all similar investigations. “My attention,” says Mr. Holmes, the police court missionary, “was drawn to the home workers first about ten years ago. I met two or three widows at the police court, charged with attempted suicide, and I naturally took interest in them. I visited their homes, and became aware of the conditions under which they lived; the prices paid for their work, the hours they generally worked, the amount of rent they paid, the kind of food they ate, and everything of that description. On one occasion I took three widows for a holiday. Each of them had attempted suicide, and was broken down in health of mind and body through hard work and poor food. The story of their lives, their manner, their appearance, and their broken spirit was a revelation.” The broken spirit, indeed, so characteristic of those who, from the beginning, have enlisted in the service of fourteen hours’ work a day, does not appear entirely to have brought the felicity which—in orthodox views—accompanies a docile and grateful working-class population. Nor does the complete absence of Trades Unions—those “cruel organisations”—appear to have effected that “economic liberty” which the supporters of “Free Labour” endeavour to obtain by the smashing of these instruments of tyranny. “My experience of ten years is this,” says Mr. Holmes, “that I have found them to be the most industrious, sober, and honest class of the community that it has been my lot ever to meet with; in fact, their goodness appals me.” Here, indeed, are the examples, at length realised in the flesh, of the workings of the “laws” of the older political economy: the “iron law of wages” driving, through the frantic competition for employment by the workers against each other, those wages down to the minimum of existence. “I know one widow,” is the testimony, “who is working, and has done nothing else than work, at these little things at her own home in Bethnal Green for forty years, and her payment for that work now is practically the same as it was at the beginning of that period. Her fingers have got stiffer, and she cannot earn quite so much now.” “It is the apathy of the people”—after forty years of it—one witness complains, “engaged in all these things, and their helplessness which forms the greatest obstacle to their advancement.” These apathetic classes, indeed, appear largely as those for whom petitions are presented in the Christian Church for special and peculiar mercies—“women labouring with child; sick persons; young children.” And the reply to the petition is this Home work, falling as the gentle dew from heaven upon the place beneath, and blessing him that gives and him that takes: obtained “by sending boy or girl to the city for the stuff with a more or less dilapidated, cast-off perambulator, which they push home full up with shirts or mantles or skirts, which are taken back to the warehouse when finished.” The actual workers appear before the Committee in kindly anonymity, having little violence of protest against Providence, the employers, or themselves. The tendency of payments, they are compelled to confess on examination, have steadily gone down; that is because “women are always applying for work, and they have no work to give them; and therefore they cut the prices down, because the women go and beg for work.” The “expenses” of each of two workers sharing a room, “without the rent,” are one shilling and threepence a week. “Do you have a fire in this room?” is asked. “No,” is the reply; “we light a lamp to warm ourselves.” The difficulty of the Committee, in examination of wages budgets, was to find any margin at all for food and firing; a difficulty which the witnesses were unable to remove. Prices, confesses one, “have come down ever so much; they have come down in the last four years so that I cannot keep myself now.” “It is almost a mystery,” is the challenge to another, “how you manage to live at all.” Yet others do well, earning (in one case) ten shillings a week—for work between “fifteen and sixteen hours a day”—sometimes up at six o’clock, and “I work till ten at night.” These, however, are the limited hours of a “very quick” worker. “Can you suggest anything,” is the forlorn inquiry to one of them, “that anybody could do for you which would induce your master, or perhaps compel your master, to give you a fairer or a larger wage?” “If he would only time an article,” is the doubtful reply; “state how long the article would take to make, and give you a certain wage of so much an hour, it would be fair, if it was only a living wage; we only want to live.”
This “want to live” is the endurance, not of the “unemployables,” but of those who are engaged night and day in an insect-like activity: uncomplaining, with an Eastern endurance, in the dark. Investigation amongst the “sample” witnesses who appeared before the Committee exhibited no contradiction of their veracity. “I wanted to say about the girl C——,” says the investigator, “whose father is out of work, that her home was visited, and that practically everything in it has been pawned: they are owing money, of course, and are expecting the bailiffs in, so that she is at a crisis in her affairs. The girl C—— has hardly any clothes, and when we found her she was almost starving. She is really in a very bad position. She has her old father, who hawks her goods sometimes in the evening, and that is how she makes some extra money.” Of another G——. “I cannot find out myself,” is the testimony, “how she can subsist at all.” “How she manages to support herself and her child is an ‘absolute mystery.’” “She looks rather starved herself at present.” Even where some kind of organisation exists, it is found almost impossible to arouse these industrious persons to any visions or hopes of permanent betterment. “In going about among them,” says one witness, concerning the Nottingham lace makers, “I have found that the first difficulty you had to overcome was the abject apathy that existed among them. You see they are most of them, very many of them, working for the next meal, and nothing you say about the meal for to-morrow affects them: they are not concerned about that. After you have aroused some interest in them, you have also to arouse some sort of courage.”[12]
So, while the white hotels rise on all the shores of England, and the apparatus of pleasure is developing into ever new and ingenious forms of entertainment, continues through the nights and days the grey struggle of the Abyss. It is the indomitable will to live, resisting always that press of circumstance which would squeeze out the life of the disinherited, and leave a solitude where once was industry and action. The question how long such will survive, in the depths, the absence of all that life should mean, is as unanswerable as the question how long the will to live will survive the satiety at the summit which comes from superfluity of pleasure. For a society fissured into an unnatural plentitude on the one hand finds as its inevitable consummation a society fissured into an unnatural privation on the other. Here is the “price of prosperity” as interpreted at the dim foundations of the social order; a menace to the future, less in the fury of its revolt than through the infection of its despair.