But if the mere tax and increase had impressed the poor unfavourably, a circumstance soon came to light that enraged them.
In spite of the tax the members of the Unity League were still being supplied with oil at the old prices, and they were assured that they would continue to be supplied without advance, even if the tax were doubled!
The poor, ever suspicious of the doings of those of their own class when set high in authority, at once leapt to the conclusion that they were being made the victims of a double game. It was nothing to them that the Anglo-Pennsylvanian and the Anglo-Caucasian companies were now trading at a loss; it was common knowledge that their richer League neighbours had not had the price of their oil increased, and they knew all too well that they themselves had. With the lack of balanced reasoning that had formerly been one of the Government's best weapons, they at once concluded that they alone were paying the tax, and the unparalleled injustice of it sowed a crop of bitterness in their hearts.
If that was the net result at home, the foreign effect of the policy was not a whit more satisfactory. Studland, the Consul-General at Odessa, one of the most capable men in the Service, cabled a despatch full of temperate and solemn warning the moment he heard of the step. It was too late then, if, indeed, his words would have been regarded. Russia replied by promptly trebling her existing tax on imported coal, and at the same time gave Germany rebate terms that practically made it a tax on English coal. It was said that Russia had only been waiting for a favourable opportunity, and was more anxious to develop her own new coal fields in the Donetz basin than to import at all. As far as the Treasury was concerned, the oil tax yielded little more than was absorbed by the thirty thousand extra men thrown out of work by Russia's action. The Government had given a rook for a bishop.
A little time ago the Cabinet had been prepared to greet winter as a friend. Without quite possessing the ingenuousness of their amiable Comrade Bilch, they had thought cynically of the pampered aristocrats shivering in Mayfair drawing-rooms, of the comfort-loving middle classes sitting before their desolate suburban hearths, of blue-faced men setting out breakfastless for freezing offices, and of pallid women weeping as they tried to warm the hands of little children, as they put them in their icy beds.
And now? All their cynical sympathy had apparently been in vain. There were not going to be any cold breakfasts, freezing offices, or shivering women and children. Warming stoves and radiators raised the temperature of a room much quicker than a fire did, and kept it equable without any attention. Oil cookers took the place of the too often erratic kitchen range. Mrs Strummery innocently threw the Premier into a frenzy one morning by dilating on the advantages of a "Britonette" stove which she had been shown by a Tottenham Court Road ironmonger. The despised, helpless "classes" were going on very comfortably. They were going on even gaily; "Oil Scrambles" constituted a new and popular form of entertainment for long evenings; from Wimbledon came the information that "Candle Cinderellas" would have a tremendous rage during the approaching season; and in Cheapside and the Strand the penny hawkers were minting money with the novel and diverting "Coal Sack Puzzle."
But the winter was approaching, though no longer as a friend. If England should say to-morrow what Lancashire was saying that day, there were portents of stirring times in the air. Already Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire were muttering in their various uncouth dialects, and Lanark was subscribing to disquieting sentiments in its own barbarous tongue. Derbyshire was becoming uneasy, Staffordshire was scarcely answering to the wheel, and Nottingham was in revolt against what it considered to be the too compliant attitude of the Representation Committee. The rioting in Monmouth was only restrained from becoming serious in its proportions by the repeated assurances from Westminster that the end was in sight; and the "Beaconmen" of Glamorgan were openly boasting that before long they would "light such a candle" that the ashes would fall upon London like a Vesuvian cloud.
Still nearer home was the disturbing spectacle of the railway-men thrown out of work, the coal carters, the stablemen, the gasworkers, the canal boatmen, the general labourers, the tool-makers, the wheel-wrights, the chimney sweepers, the brushmakers. The sequence of dependence could be traced, detail by detail, through every page of the trade directory.
They had all been taught to clamour to the Government in every emergency, and this administration they regarded as peculiarly their own. It was not a case of Frankenstein's Monster getting out of hand; this Monster had created its Frankenstein, and could dissolve him if he proved obstinate. All that Frankenstein had ventured to do so far had been to reduce the Unemployed Grant to three quarters of its normal rate "in view of the unprecedented conditions of labour," and where two or more unemployed were members of one family, to make a further small deduction. The action had not been well received. "In view of the unprecedented conditions of labour" the unemployed had looked for more rather than for less. When the rate was fixed they had been given to understand that it represented the minimum on which an out-of-work man could be decently asked to live. Why, then, had their own party reduced it? Funds? Tax some luxury!
Even the Government assurance, an ingenious adaptation of truth by the light of Mr Chadwing's figures, that they "did not anticipate having to impose the reduced grant for many more weeks, but at the same time counselled economy in every working-class home," did not restore mutual good feeling. The general rejoinder was that the Government had "better not," and the reference to economy was stigmatised as gratuitously inept.