“But what can they do?”
“Make things impossible.”
“They can’t run things themselves.”
“They aren’t convinced of that. Anyhow if they smash up things the employer goes first, and he’s the chap they seem to be principally after——”
Peter reflected. Then he gave a modern young Englishman’s view of the labour conflict. “The employers have been pretty tidy asses not to see that their workpeople get a better, more amusing life than they do. It was their business and their interest to do so. It could have been managed easily. But they’re so beastly disloyal. And so mean. They not only sweat labour themselves but they won’t stir a finger to save it from jerry-built housing, bad provisioning, tally-men, general ugliness, bad investments, rotten insurance companies—every kind of rotten old thing. Any one may help kill their sheep. They’ve got no gratitude to their workers. They won’t even amuse them. Why couldn’t they set up decent theatres for them, and things like that? It’s so stupid of them. These employers are the most dangerous class in the community. There’s enough for every one nowadays and over. It’s the first business of employers to see workpeople get their whack. What good are they if they don’t do that? But they never have. Labour is convinced now that they never will. They run about pretending to be landed gentry. They’ve got their people angry and bitter now, they’ve destroyed public confidence in their ways, and it serves them jolly well right if the workmen make things impossible for them. I think they will. I hope they will.”
“But this means breaking up the national industries,” said Oswald. “Where is this sort of thing going to end?”
“Oh! things want shaking up,” said Peter.
“Perhaps,” he added, “one must break up old things before one can hope for new. I suppose the masters won’t let go while they think there’s a chance of holding on....”
He had not a trace left of the Victorian delusion that this might after all be the best of all possible worlds. He thought that our politicians and our captains of industry were very poor muddlers indeed. They drifted. Each one sat in his own works, he said, and ran them for profit without caring a rap whither the whole system was going. Compared with Labour even their poverty of general ideas was amazing. Peter, warming with his subject, walked to and fro across the Pelham Ford lawn beside Oswald, proposing to rearrange industrialism as one might propose to reshuffle a pack of cards.
“But suppose things smash up,” said Oswald.