CHAPTER X
The One Thing Needful
The most ardent advocate of our present civilisation, the blindest worshipper of what we call progress, can hardly fail to be aware of the steadily increasing and brutal ugliness of life. Civilisation, whatever else it is, is a state in which a few people have the chance of living beautifully—those who take that chance are fewer still—and the enormous majority live, by no choice or will of their own, lives which at the best are uncomfortable, anxious, and lacking in beauty, and at the worst are so ugly, diseased, desperate, and wretched that those who feel their condition most can hardly bear to think of them, and those who have not imagination enough to feel it fully yet cannot bear it unless they succeed in persuading themselves that the poor of this world are the heirs of the next, while hoping, at the same time, that a portion of Lazarus's heavenly legacy may, after all, be reserved for Dives.
The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills and dales with factories and mines and pot banks—coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement of bright rivers with the refuse of oil and dye works; the eating up of the green country by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of streets; the smoke and fog that veil the sun in heaven; the sordid enamelled iron advertisements that scar the fields of earth—all the torn paper and straw and dirt and disorder spring from one root. And from the same root spring pride, anger, cruelty, and sycophancy, the mean subservience of the poor and the mean arrogance of the rich. As the fair face of the green country is disfigured by all this machinery which ministers to the hope of getting rich, so is the face of man marred by the fear of getting poor. Look at the faces you see in the street—old and young, gay and sad—on all there is the brand of anxiety, a terrible anxiety that never rests, a fear that never sleeps, the anxiety for the future: the fear of poverty for the rich, the fear of starvation for the poor. Think of the miles and miles of sordid squalor and suffering in the East of London—not in comfortable Whitechapel, but out Canning Town way; think of Barking and Plaistow and Plashet and Bow—then think of Park Lane and Bond Street. And if your eyes are not blinded, the West is no less terrible than the East. If you want to be sure of this, bring a hungry, ragged child from that Eastern land and set it outside a West End restaurant; let it press its dirty little face against the plate glass and gaze at the well-to-do people gorging and guzzling round the bright tables inside. The diners may be smart, the ragged child may be picturesque—but bring the two together, and consider the conjunction.
THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT.
And all this ugliness springs from the same cause. As Ruskin says: "We have forgotten God." We have therefore forgotten His attributes, mercy, loving-kindness, justice, truth, and beauty. Their names are still on our lips, but the great, stupid, crashing, blundering machine which we call civilisation knows them not. The Devil's gospel of laissez-faire still inspires the calloused heart of man. Each for himself, and Mammon for the foremost. We no longer care that life should be beautiful for all God's children—we wish it to be beautiful for us and forget who, as we wish that wish, becomes our foster-father. There can be no healing of the great wound in the body of mankind till each one of us would die rather than see the ugliness of a wound on the body of the least of these our brethren. But so dulled and stupefied is our sense of beauty, our sense of brotherhood, that our brother's wounds do not hurt us. We have not imagination enough to know how it feels to be wounded. Just as we have not imagination enough to see the green fields that lie crushed where Manchester sprawls in the smoke—the fair hills and streams on which has grown the loathsome fungus of Stockport.