‘“Let us all join heart and hand
Through every town and city,
Of every age and every sex,
Young men and maidens pretty,
To haste this golden age’s reign
On every hill and valley,
Then Paradise shall greet our eyes
Through every street and alley.”’
‘Ah,’ said Wentworth, ‘I see there is nothing new under the sun.’
‘But the taxes?’ said Buxton. He continued: ‘This scheme was published long before the French Revolution broke out. Up in the north there had risen a solitary and original thinker who advocated female voting, universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, and had got hold of the idea—which has led many of our modern apostles to fame and fortune—that the land lay at the root of the Condition of England question, that all private property in land must be destroyed, and that it must be done at once.
‘Spence, then, was, to use the cant of the present day, a Progressist. To him belongs the honour of having first presented the land question in all its bearings to the general public. What was his reward?—a Government prosecution with a fine of £20 and a year’s imprisonment at Shrewsbury. Well might a nobleman, as Wilberforce tells us, show him the picture of crucified Christ, and bid him mark the end of a Reformer.
‘One cause of Spence’s failure is obvious—he tried to do too much. “When I began to study,” says he, “I found everything erected on certain unalterable principles. I found every art and science a perfect whole. Nothing was in anarchy but language and politics. But both of these I reduced to order; the one by a new alphabet, the other by a new constitution.” Of what he called his natural or philosophical orthography we know but little, save that one of his works was printed in it. Had he aimed at less he would have accomplished more. He was no vulgar demagogue; that trade was not a paying one when Spence proclaimed himself “the unpaid advocate of the disinherited seed of Adam.” “This, gentlemen,” he exclaimed when on his trial—he was too poor to retain attorney or counsel for his defence—“this, gentlemen, is the Rights of Man; and upon this Book of Nature have I built my commonwealth, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” He added, as well he might: “I solemnly avow that what I have written and published has been done with as good a conscience and as much philanthropy as ever possessed the heart of any prophet-philosopher or apostle that ever existed.”
‘It was all in vain. The Government of the day feared the result of his teaching. Had he set up for a philosopher and clothed his ideas in mystic language, perhaps he might have been overlooked; but he published what he called “Pig’s Meat” for the people, and that made him dangerous. He had no friends and became an easy prey. He was poor, he stood alone, and was generally held to be little better than a lunatic; even the professed friends of liberty kept aloof from him. Well might be exclaim, as he did before his judges, “Perhaps, my lords, I have entertained too high an opinion of human nature, for I do not find mankind very grateful clients.” After his trial and imprisonment Spence became an itinerant vendor of books and pamphlets, chiefly his own works, which he carried about in a vehicle constructed for the purpose. He died somewhere about 1812, while Britons were hard at work on sea and in every land in Europe setting right public matters according to their fashion—paying foreigners to fight for their own independence, singing all the while that they never would be slaves.’
‘We are wiser now,’ said Wentworth.
‘Perhaps,’ was the cynical reply. ‘You are everlastingly talking,’ he continued, ‘of an outcast London; but, after all, it is on outcast London that the chief blame of its misery lies. Let us have an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and at once, in outcast London, where boys and girls become fathers and mothers before they are out of their teens, and when they have no chance of earning a living, and know not and care not for the little ones they bring into the world. In respectable London a man does not marry till he fancies he can keep a wife. In outcast London it is the reverse. In such a case population represents the thoughtlessness of the nation. In many cases it represents the most brutal selfishness. Men and women can’t complain if they reap what they have sown; but have not we a right to say a word on behalf of the children? For men and women to bring up their children in the way in which it is done in outcast London is a crime. To bring a baby into the world to lead a diseased and wretched life where it can never get a mouthful of wholesome food, a ray of sunlight, a particle of fresh air, to curse a young life that God meant to be so full of bliss, is a crime so awful that we can see no fitting punishment. To improve outcast London the first thing is to stop the supply. There is no remedy if reckless pauperism is to be allowed to grow rampant in our midst.
‘One word more,’ said Wentworth. ‘Suppose we think more of the decent poor, and less of the outcast. Suppose we give the respectable working man as much sympathy as we give his good-for-nothing brother. Suppose we take the sober operative as much by the hand as we do the inebriate. Suppose we act on the idea that industry is honourable, and that the men who live by it are men to be honoured; that the world with all its blessings is for the worker, whether he tills the soil or ploughs the deep, whether he builds the loftiest viaduct or burrows in the deepest mine.’