But for national intercourse parochial customs and traditions are almost worse than none at all—like a Babel of Tongues. National standards have to be set up. We cannot, for instance, deal in Winchester quarts and Cheshire acres, in long hundreds and baker's dozens; we have no use for weights and measures that vary from county to county, or for a token coinage that is only valid in one town or in one trade. But most of all, for making our modern arrangements a standard English language is so necessary that those who are unfamiliar with it can neither manage their own affairs efficiently nor take their proper share in the national life.
And this is the situation of the labourer to-day. The weakness of it, moreover, is in almost daily evidence. One would have thought that at least in a man's own parish and his own private concerns illiteracy would be no disadvantage; yet, in fact, it hampers him on every side. Whether he would join a benefit society, or obtain poor-law relief, or insure the lives of his children, or bury his dead, or take up a small holding, he finds that he must follow a nationalized or standardized procedure, set forth in language which his forefathers never heard spoken and never learned to read. Even in the things that are really of the village the same conditions prevail. The slate-club is managed upon lines as businesslike as those of the national benefit society. The "Institute" has its secretary, and treasurer, and balance-sheet, and printed rules; the very cricket club is controlled by resolutions proposed and seconded at formal committee meetings, and duly entered in minute-books. But all this is a new thing in the village, and no guidance for it is to be found in the lingering peasant traditions.
To this day, therefore, the majority of my neighbours, whose ability for the work they have been prepared to do proves them to be no fools, are, nevertheless, pitiably helpless in the management of their own affairs. Most disheartening it is, too, for those whose help they seek, to work with them. In the cricket-club committee, on which I served for a year or two, it was noticeable that the members, eager for proper arrangements to be made, often sat tongue-tied and glum, incapable of urging their views, so that only after the meeting had broken up and they had begun talking with one another did one learn that the resolutions which had been passed were not to their mind. Formalities puzzled them—seemed to strike them as futilities. And so in other matters besides cricket. A local builder—a man of blameless integrity—had a curious experience. Somewhat against his wishes, he was appointed treasurer of the village Lodge of Oddfellows; but when, inheriting a considerable sum of money, he began to buy land and build houses, nothing would persuade the illiterate members of the society that he was not speculating with their funds. Audited accounts had no meaning for them; possibly the fact that he was doing a service for no pay struck them as suspicious; at any rate they murmured so openly that he threw up his office. Whom they have got in his place, and whether they are suspicious of him too, I do not know. My point is that, while modern thrift obliges them to enter into these fellowships, they remain, for mere want of book-learning, unable to help themselves, and dependent on the aid of friends from the middle or employing classes. In other words, the greater number of the Englishmen in the village have to stand aside and see their own affairs controlled for them by outsiders.
This is so wholly the case in some matters that nobody ever dreams of consulting the people who are chiefly concerned in them. In the education of their children, for one thing, they have no voice at all. It is administered in a standardized form by a committee of middle-class people appointed in the neighbouring town, who carry out provisions which originate from unapproachable permanent officials at Whitehall. The County Council may modify the programme a little; His Majesty's inspectors—strangers to the people, and ignorant of their needs—issue fiats in the form of advice to the school teachers; and meanwhile the parents of the children acquiesce, not always approving what is done, but accepting it as if it were a law of fate that all such things must be arranged over their heads by the classes who have book-learning.
And this customary attitude of waiting for what the "educated" may do for them renders them apathetic where they might be, and where it is highly important that they should be, reliant upon their own initiative—I mean, in political action. The majority of the labourers in the village have extremely crude ideas of representative government. A candidate for Parliament is not, in their eyes, a servant whom they may appoint to give voice to their own wishes; he is a "gentleman" who, probably from motives of self-interest, comes to them as a sort of quack doctor, with occult remedies, which they may have if they will vote for him, and which might possibly do them good. Hence they hardly look upon the Government as an instrument at all under the control of people like themselves; they view it, rather, as a sort of benevolent tyranny, whose constitution is no concern of theirs. Commons or Lords, Liberals or Tories—what does it matter to the labourer which of them has the power, so long as one or other will cast an occasional look in his direction, and try to do something or other to help him? What they should do rests with the politicians: it is their part to suggest, the labourer's to acquiesce.
Such are some of the more obvious disabilities from which the cottage people suffer, largely for want of book-learning. I think, however, that they are beginning to be aware of the disadvantage, for, though they say little about it, I have heard of several men getting their children to teach them, in the evening, the lessons learnt at school during the day. Certainly the old contempt for "book-learning" is dying out. And now and then one hears the most ingenuous confessions of incompetence to understand matters of admitted interest. An old woman, discussing "Tariff Reform," said: "We sort o' people can't understand it for ourselves. What we wants is for somebody to come and explain it to us. And then," she added, "we dunno whether we dares believe what they says." If you could hear one even of the better-taught labourers trying to read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate his difficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of a paragraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of the argument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, may easily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heard of the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor, and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausing circumspection which a parenthesis demands.