Sadder and sadder, Lancelot tried to listen to the conversation of the men round him. To his astonishment he hardly understood a word of it. It was half articulate, nasal, guttural, made up almost entirely of vowels, like the speech of savages. He had never before been struck with the significant contrast between the sharp, clearly-defined articulation, the vivid and varied tones of the gentleman, or even of the London street-boy when compared with the coarse, half-formed growls, as of a company of seals, which he heard round him. That single fact struck him, perhaps, more deeply than any; it connected itself with many of his physiological fancies; it was the parent of many thoughts and plans of his after-life. Here and there he could distinguish a half sentence. An old shrunken man opposite him was drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipe-stem, and discoursing of the glorious times before the great war, ‘when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than there were hands.’ ‘Poor human nature!’ thought Lancelot, as he tried to follow one of those unintelligible discussions about the relative prices of the loaf and the bushel of flour, which ended, as usual, in more swearing, and more quarrelling, and more beer to make it up—‘Poor human nature! always looking back, as the German sage says, to some fancied golden age, never looking forward to the real one which is coming!’
‘But I say, vather,’ drawled out some one, ‘they say there’s a sight more money in England now, than there was afore the war-time.’
‘Eees, booy,’ said the old man; ‘but its got into too few hands.’
‘Well,’ thought Lancelot, ‘there’s a glimpse of practical sense, at least.’ And a pedlar who sat next him, a bold, black-whiskered bully, from the Potteries, hazarded a joke,—
‘It’s all along of this new sky-and-tough-it farming. They used to spread the money broadcast, but now they drills it all in one place, like bone-dust under their fancy plants, and we poor self-sown chaps gets none.’
This garland of fancies was received with great applause; whereat the pedlar, emboldened, proceeded to observe, mysteriously, that ‘donkeys took a beating, but horses kicked at it; and that they’d found out that in Staffordshire long ago. You want a good Chartist lecturer down here, my covies, to show you donkeys of labouring men that you have got iron on your heels, if you only know’d how to use it.’
‘And what’s the use of rioting?’ asked some one, querulously.
‘Why, if you don’t riot, the farmers will starve you.’
‘And if we do, they’d turn sodgers—yeomanry, as they call it, though there ain’t a yeoman among them in these parts; and then they takes sword and kills us. So, riot or none, they has it all their own way.’
Lancelot heard many more scraps of this sort. He was very much struck with their dread of violence. It did not seem cowardice. It was not loyalty—the English labourer has fallen below the capability of so spiritual a feeling; Lancelot had found out that already. It could not be apathy, for he heard nothing but complaint upon complaint bandied from mouth to mouth the whole evening. They seemed rather sunk too low in body and mind,—too stupefied and spiritless, to follow the example of the manufacturing districts; above all, they were too ill-informed. It is not mere starvation which goads the Leicester weaver to madness. It is starvation with education,—an empty stomach and a cultivated, even though miscultivated, mind.