In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned trucks, running round corners [[284]]against one’s legs, of the great Chester station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen, strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace, was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of the Ignominious.
The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible, to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision, which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got out two bags of blue grapes, and [[285]]ate away unanimously, availing themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.
General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.
I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly [[286]]more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way.
They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them.
But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones. [[287]]The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from ‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’ in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with weariness A.M.,—idleness with disgust P.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has [[288]]no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the ‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all that is, they destroy?
But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,—How much of it is of any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!”
Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it!
Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t [[289]]have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.
Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter.[2] If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train.