The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

Conceive the extension of this class all over Britain: the further vast contingents of this army of poverty in the slums of Glasgow and Liverpool and Manchester, in all our great manufacturing and shipping towns, even in the heart of pretty rural England, where the wretched wage and low standard and large family stunt and degrade our agricultural worker. It is a very serious error to imagine that this is merely an unhappy issue of the crowding in our great cities. In picturesque and highly respectable York Mr. Rowntree found that thirty per cent. of the citizens lived in very real poverty: that ten per cent. did not earn money enough to buy a normal and sufficient quantity of plain food, to say nothing of luxuries.

This is the problem of poverty. If you want it in figures, a fourth of the inhabitants of London, where rents are appalling, live on from eighteen to twenty-one shillings weekly per family, and some hundreds of thousands live on less than this. One might with some profit and pertinence go on to inquire into the life of the half of the population of London who are described as “comfortable workers.” Whether the little luxuries they have are a fit reward for the hard work they usually do, whether there can be any development of distinctively human powers among them, whether we may cherish a feeling of entire security in basing our political system on that foundation, are questions worth putting; and some day they will put them to us. But it is better for the moment to confine ourselves to that pitiful fourth of the community which lives in degrading poverty because it has only irregular or wretchedly paid employment. Is it an exaggeration to suspect that this vast acreage of poverty will make the future historian hesitate to class us as civilised?

Our social structure is of the nature of a pyramid. At its apex, glittering in the sun, calling forth our pride and praise, are culture and wealth and power, and all the fine things they bring into existence. At its base are the supporting stones, crushed into the soil by the towering mass: the millions of stunted or brutalised lives. I know both extremes of this social order, and I have felt, hundreds of times, that if it is permanently to retain this pyramidal form, the refined lives and great achievements of the few resting on this broad base of squalid and undeveloped lives, civilisation is an impossible dream. I have felt that, if men and women realised the full meaning and range of poverty, they would suspend the progress of art and science, of commerce and industry, for a hundred years, if need were, in order to concentrate the best intelligence of the race upon the search for the remedy of this vast disorder. And, if it be true, as I think, that these people, once dead, are dead for ever, and that the tradition of a hundredfold reward in heaven for their privations on earth is an illusion with which pastors and masters have reconciled them to their burdens, I would, if I could, send that assurance like a trumpet-blast through the slums of the world and make this vast army of the stricken summon us, the intelligent minority, to a tardy judgment.

I do not, as will appear later, advocate the equal distribution of wealth. I do assuredly not plead that one who has wealth should give it to the poor: to see it gather again, perhaps, in less worthy hands. I add the contrast of wealth at this point only in order to make quite sensible the darkness of the life of millions. One’s first task is to establish, with what faint power the pen has, the appalling magnitude of the evil. If any very large number of us did really grasp the human significance of these facts and figures, the industrial problem would not long be resigned, as it is, to bloodless economists and obscure propagandist bodies.

And the second aim of those who would see the world bettered is, as I said, to inquire into the effect of the remedies we actually trust and apply. Here we enter the mistier region of controversy, and I can but set out the grounds of my sincere convictions.

Of labour bureaux, in the first place, it will not be doubted that they are an advantage to employed and employers. They are an advance toward organisation. They bring the worker more promptly to the work that awaits him. But they, obviously, do not add one iota to the insufficient work, for which myriads are struggling: they do not add one penny to the wage that is earned: and they are of little or no service to the poorest workers, who chiefly concern us.

Old age pensions and insurance and free education are, similarly, great advantages to the workers, in which we may justly take some pride, but they do not promise to abolish or greatly diminish poverty. The pension, or the insurance benefit, is necessarily granted on the poverty scale, and is in some sense a recognition of it as one of the permanent institutions of life; and the elementary instruction which we give has raised the qualifications for work, as well as the equipment, so that the proportion of unemployed, or ill-employed, is little changed. Nor would it be entirely wrong to say that, in relieving the poor man of the direct charge of education and insurance, we have put the difference on his rent.

Of our poor-law system, that lamentable compromise with a stupid old tradition, it is difficult to speak with patience. The able-bodied idlers of our workhouses and our countryside are a mockery of the workers. The tramp, the professional idler in search of idleness, maintained in his repulsive ways by an undiscriminating system of poorhousing and by a large body of “charitable” women, is one of the quaintest survivals of an older order. His father idled through life before him, and he in turn drags along the road a mate and children who will sustain the ignoble tradition. He ought to be washed, clothed, and put on an industrial estate; and, if his disease prove incurable, he ought to be anæthetised out of existence, or at least prevented from reproducing his like.

Then there are the emigration societies. One fears that in large part they transport to the colonies either the men whom the colonies do not want, the men who will enlarge the slum-area of colonial cities, or the men whom we ought not to spare. At the best, emigration is a means of leaving the problem of poverty to our grandchildren, who will find no more open spaces for the dumping of our human surplus. In point of fact, however, apart from the dispatch of a small proportion of specially prepared boys, emigration is not affecting our problem of poverty. The half-million very poor of London, with the corresponding hundreds of thousands in our other cities, do not make emigrants at all; and very few of the next and far larger class are, or could be, fit for agricultural deportation.

Lastly of these devices which the less thoughtful are apt to regard as relieving poverty, we have the Salvation Army, which is quite the most preposterous social sham of our age. But its religious-social burlesque, its pretentious concealment of bad results and loud proclamation of good results, its refusal to print a plain balance-sheet from which a social student can measure the definite good done and the cost of it, its undercutting of existing work, and so on, have been sufficiently exposed to excuse us from dwelling on it. It contains some earnest men and women, and has had undoubted successes, but the system is too nebulous, garrulous, and wasteful to merit serious attention.