Britain for the British

by Robert Blatchford

Here is the evidence of a man of science, Professor Huxley—

Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme ... that condition which the French call la misère, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave.... When the organisation of society, instead of mitigating this tendency, tends to continue and intensify it; when a given social order plainly makes for evil and not for good, men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try a fresh experiment. I take it to be a mere plain truth that throughout industrial Europe there is not a single large manufacturing city which is free from a vast mass of people whose condition is exactly that described, and from a still greater mass who, living just on the edge of the social swamp, are liable to be precipitated into it.

Here is the evidence of a British peer, Lord Durham—

There was still more sympathy and no reproach whatever to be bestowed upon the children—perhaps waifs and strays in their earliest days—of parents destitute, very likely deserving, possibly criminal, who had had to leave these poor children to fight their way in life alone. What did these children know or care for the civilisation or the wealth of their native land? What example, what incentive had they ever had to lead good and honest lives? Possibly from the moment of their birth they had never known contentment, what it had been to feel bodily comfort. They were cast into that world, and looked upon it as a cruel and heartless world, with no guidance, no benign influence to guide them in their way, and thus they were naturally prone to fall into any vicious or criminal habits which would procure them a bare subsistence.

Here is the evidence of a Tory Minister, Sir John Gorst—

I do not think there is any doubt as to the reality of the evil; that is to say, that there are in our civilisation men able and willing to work who can't find work to do.... Work will have to be found for them.... What are usually called relief works may be a palliative for acute temporary distress, but they are no remedy for the unemployed evil in the long-run. Not only so; they tend to aggravate it.... If you can set 100 unemployed men to produce food, they are not taking bread out of other people's mouths. Men so employed would be producing what is now imported from abroad and what they themselves would consume. An unemployed man—whether he is a duke or a docker—is living on the community. If you set him to grow food he is enriching the community by what he produces. Therefore, my idea is that the direction in which a remedy for the unemployed evil is to be sought is in the production of food.

Here is the evidence of the Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury—

They looked around them and saw a growing mass of poverty and want of employment, and of course the one object which every statesman who loved his country should desire to attain, was that there might be the largest amount of profitable employment for the mass of the people.

He did not say that he had any patent or certain remedy for the terrible evils which beset us on all sides, but he did say that it was time they left off mending the constitution of Parliament, and that they turned all the wisdom and energy Parliament could combine together in order to remedy the sufferings under which so many of their countrymen laboured.