Then the interest of the public sought a new stimulus.
I am inclined to think that modern journalism, with its craving for daily excitement and its acquiescence in the superficial, has incapacitated us for patient study. Few subjects unconnected with sex or bloodshed can hold the attention of a newspaper-reader for more than three days; and, when the men with schemes for employment had been photographed as they walked to Downing Street and when a popular novelist had protested passionately that the unemployed were not really bolshevists, the eyes of the nation were allured by pictures of Lord Curzon entering his train for the Lausanne conference, and controversialists with uncertain memories enquired rhetorically the name of the last woman to be hanged in England for complicity in murder. Like the peace negotiations, like the war, like the domestic and international unrest before the war, like the Irish problem, this unemployment business became a bore: the public was accustomed to the variety of a “continuous performance” in its cinematograph theatres, it expected a “new programme weekly” for its political stage.
I myself was compelled for professional reasons to study problems of public policy even after they had ceased to be fashionable. The only excuse for continuing our paper was to be found in my uncle’s warning that, after four years of peace, we were in at least no better position than at the outbreak of war; at his death, we had cut our last party-ties and were standing behind the government as friendly critic. If the new administration shewed no improvement on the old, we should have to consider—as I told my colleagues—whether we were to throw in our lot with labour, whether we should lay our paper in its overdue grave or whether we must extend to our own country the verdict of revolutionary Russia that the old machine of national and international government had broken down.
That verdict was pronounced in my private hearing by Griffiths himself, with a warning that he would repeat it publicly if the government failed to give him instant satisfaction. Our second interview was no more of my seeking than the first. When the House rose without curing unemployment then and there, he made it known—first of all at a mass-meeting in Trafalgar Square and then in handbills which were distributed about the streets—that he would instruct ministers in the meaning of unemployment by confronting them with the unemployed. This, in the vague phrase which he favoured, would “put things to the test”. The demonstrations at the opening of parliament had been hardly more than a parade. “Hunger marches” were now to be organized in every part of the country, converging on London at the same moment. After that . . .? I noticed that Griffiths carefully refrained from saying what would happen when fifty, or a hundred, thousand disappointed men found themselves empty-handed, empty-bellied, foot-sore and resentful at the closed door of an impotent office. And I pointed out this sinister omission in the next number of Peace.
There was nothing, Hornbeck told me at this time, in the speech or the manifesto to justify police interference; but any one who remembered Griffiths’ share in organizing the land-grabbing campaign could imagine how this new demonstration would be conducted and how it was likely to end. I went farther than most of my confrères and denounced the manifesto as deliberately provocative. Griffiths called to inform me that, if I chose to print lies, he could not stop me, but that, if I was interested in the truth, I might perhaps be not too proud to hear it from him.
I professed a prompt eagerness for truth in any form, though I was more interested to know what amusement or instruction he derived from so painfully academic a journal as Peace. I wondered how he came to associate me with its direction and why he visited me in Seymour Street rather than in Fetter Lane. My curiosity on this last point was satisfied when he ran a practised eye over the dimensions of the house and asked me how many the establishment comprised.
“You? And your wife? And six servants?,” he recapitulated. “No kids? A car and a man to drive it? Four meals a day? You don’t call that provocative?”
“If we had fewer servants, you’d have more unemployed,” I pointed out.
“It takes three men and four women to keep the two of you alive. The house is half empty. You waste more food in a day than my people eat in a week. You drive about in your jewels and fine clothes among people who’ve been cold and hungry for months. And then you tell me not to be . . . ‘provocative’!”
I reminded him that we were supposed to be discussing unemployment.