"Mr. Macquisten: You Labour men have forgotten what sweat is.
Mr. W. Thorne: I have never seen many lawyers sweat, anyhow.
Mr. Speaker: This discussion is becoming intemperate.
An Hon. Member: The Hon. Member for Springburn never sweated in his life.
Mr. Macquisten: Yes, I have laboured in the docks."
That is it, you see. Sweating is the great criterion of usefulness to-day. If you cannot show that you have sweated in the past, you must at least show that you are sweating now, or have every intention of sweating in a moment or two. Personally, as a private secretary, I find it very difficult, though I do my best. As a private secretary I labour in a rich house in the notoriously idle neighbourhood of South Kensington, where nobody would believe that anybody laboured, much less perspired over it. So when I pass, on the way to my rich house, a builder's labourer or a milkman or a dustman, I have to exhibit as clearly as I can all the signs of a harsh employment and industrial fatigue. I take great pains about this; I walk much faster; I frown heavily and I look as pale as possible. In the Tube I close my eyes. I hope all this is effective, but as far as I can see the milkman never looks at me, and the builder is always saying to another builder, "'E says to me, 'Wot abaht it?' 'e says, and I says to 'im, 'Yus, wot abaht it?' I says." But it is worth the effort.
Well, that is why that poor man was carrying a typewriter. I wonder why everybody else in the Tube carries an "attaché-case." It has been calculated that if all the attaché-cases which get on to the train at Hammersmith at 9 a.m. were left on the platform, six men or twelve women or three horses could take their place in every car. That means about ninety more men or one-hundred-and-eighty more women or forty-five more horses could leave Hammersmith between 9 a.m. and 9.30. So that if attaché-cases were forbidden the traffic problem would be practically solved.
Why shouldn't they be forbidden? It depends, of course, on what is inside the cases; and nobody knows that for certain. But one can guess. I have been guessing for a long time. At first I thought they were full of very confidential papers. In the old days the attaché-case was the peculiar trademark of private secretaries and diplomats and high-up people like that. Even attachés carried them sometimes. The very lowest a man with an attaché-case could be was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate, home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them for that. The attaché-case has been degraded; it is universal. This might be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one attaché-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are carried by females, so that theory is no good.
Well, then, I imagined sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing like a cheap attaché-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a powder-puff from one end of London to the other. So I had to fall back on my own experience.
I know, at any rate, what is inside mine. There are some rather grubby envelopes which I borrowed from the House of Commons, and some very grubby blotting-paper from the same source, and either a ream of foolscap or a quire of foolscap, whichever is which; some pipe-cleaners and a few pieces of milk-chocolate; and a letter from the Amalgamated Association of Fish-Friers which ought to have been answered a long time ago; and a memorandum on Hog-Importing which I am always going to read while waiting at the station; and a nice piece of thick string with which I have tied a bowline on a bight; and two broken pencils and some more envelopes; and a Parliamentary Whip of last year and a stationery bill of the year before; and several bills of my employer, not to mention a cheque for ninety-seven pounds which I suppose he would like me to send to the bank; and a great deal of fluff and a pipe or two and four or five stamped letters which it is now too late to post. That is all there is in my case.