On

by Hilaire Belloc

There are a great number of trades in the world of which one does not hear, because men do not make a full living by them. Most of them are interesting trades.

There is the famous example of the man who gave his trade on the Inquisition Form as "Maker of smoked glasses through which to watch such total eclipses of the sun as may be visible from Greenwich." There is the less known but equally remarkable case of the worm-eater; and to this I can swear to, because I read it in print with my own eyes. It happened years ago in a police court in London. The magistrate said to the poor man who was (as is the fashion of the poor) in trouble, "What is your trade?" to which he answered, "I am a worm-eater." It turned out that he was not a person who ate little worms, nor, metaphorically, a man who made his living out of dejection and humility, but a person who simulated the action of worms upon old wood. He was employed by the furniture fakers to discharge a load of very fine shot from a great distance at wood which had already been scraped and treated with acid and chipped about so that it looked old. This very fine shot made very fine holes which made the wood look as if it had been worm-eaten. Thus was he a worm-eater.

Then there are the men who do the hind legs of an animal in a pantomime, and there is the trade of the man who is not exactly a detective but, as it were, a detective's servant, and is not let into the secret but simply told to watch. There are great numbers of these honest folk. You may see them all up and down London, and you may mark them by two things. First of all, they always have something new about them, usually a new hat, because they are miserable men and their employers think that if they looked too poor they would be too conspicuous. It is a muddle-headed idea, but there it is. Therefore, they are always given something new in the way of clothing, and usually a hat. This done, they are apt to stay all day within a very narrow area, looking at a particular door and at the same time trying to look as though they were not looking at it. In this they fail. I had a long conversation with one of these innumerable London police-spies two years ago, and gave him great agony by going up to the house after he had spoken to me and warning the people inside.

But of all these hidden trades, the one I like most is that of Tag-Provider (as it used to be called in the old days of party politics). I believe the last of them is dead; at any rate, when I saw him ten years ago he was in a very anxious state, coughing, badly broken by age, and telling me he knew not which way to turn for a meal; yet he had had his prosperous days.

He lived in a little room, a lodging, at the top of an old house overlooking the river. I came across him quite by accident through my habit of writing rhymes—a pastime to which I have been given all my life. These rhymes I often print and sometimes sign; that is how he got hold of my name. He wrote to me and asked me whether I would go and look over some of his rhymes and see whether I thought they suited. When I got his letter I thought he was a poet who wanted advice, so I wrote my regular answer that I knew nothing about poetry and could not give advice. He wrote again imploringly, saying that he was not a poet in the ordinary sense but that in his profession it was necessary to introduce rhymes from time to time, and that my judgment really would be of great service to him, for he was good enough to say that I had quite a knack of rhyming, especially at rhyming words of three syllables, which is difficult. So I went round to see him, and being younger than I am now I was able to enjoy his conversation well enough for half an hour or more. He was very proud of his work, and had round his room autograph letters of congratulation which had been sent to him by the most famous politicians of his time. It was he who invented (it was one of the last of his actions) the tag "We want eight and we won't wait." When he asked me if this could be improved, I suggested "No fleet, no meat." He said this would not go down. I asked him why not. He said, "Because the public could not remember very short rhymes." They had to be rather long to have any effect, but not too long. He told me (and he was very proud of it) that he was also the inventor of "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right." "Here," said he proudly to me, "you have a very fine example of irregular rhyme with two balanced statements in opposition and contrast." "The first," he added, "is concrete, the second abstract: the first is purely historical without moral sequence, the second contains the deepest political and moral lesson."

I wish he had lived to the present day. He might have given us something really good and new, which we badly lack.

He also wrote "One tongue, one flag, one throne." He was not so proud of that, because, he said, that some fool had imported it into the United States, where it did not go down. The enthusiasts kept the "one tongue" part, but they did not know what to add, which spoiled the whole show. He did not make up the phrase "blood is thicker than water," but I suggested to him a very good way in which it could be turned into a poem during any one of those recurrent moments (they turn up every ten years or so) when our politicians are morally certain of wangling the American alliance. The rhyme I suggested was this:

Blood is thicker than water—

And so it oughter.

We had a great debate over this, and I fear it was his obstinacy which prevented this really fine rhyme from getting floated. It would have made a great difference, and we might, by this time, have acquired fame between us, had it not been for this silly old man's objections. So true is it that great events spring from small causes!