Chapter IV: The Multitude (2)

Do they care? Yes, undoubtedly, with, beneath all the love of fun and frolic, a really pathetic desire to know the truth: to understand what actually lies behind these fluent orations and facile statistics, and all the fury of illustration and argument which descended upon their inconspicuous abodes. Will they ever know? That is an unanswerable query. There are the knots and gatherings of convinced politicians, who will cheer for “Chamberlain” or denounce Protection, just as there are the knots and gatherings of convinced religious adherents, crystallised out of the huge aggregation of indifference, who worship in various forms a God who is unknown to the general. But the physical conditions of the city life are so novel to them, the bustle and violence of it all so insistent, the effect of the mechanical labour, the little leisure, mostly consumed in transit, the grey, similar streets of tiny houses so desolating, that it is hard to stimulate a high political, social, or religious aspiration. They will continue, for the most part, tacking from side to side in blind, uncertain fashion, firmly convinced at one moment that they have solved the secret, firmly convinced a few months afterwards that they have been mistaken. They will continue their hurried, uncertain lives with indomitable patience, courage, and hope always for “better times.” They will be deluded, and after a time they will recognise their delusion, and after a further time be as readily deluded again. They will trust individuals with a fine generosity. They still believe that things are true because they see them in the newspapers. They exhibit an extraordinary absence of envy of those who are better off than themselves, an extraordinary patience in enduring unendurable things. The Crowd never revolts until the conditions have already become intolerable. It never complains unless its wrongs and disabilities have become themselves clamorous for redress; unless, if it ceased, the very stones would cry out. It is always being betrayed, cajoled, deceived, exploited: now stimulated to fury in warfares carefully engineered by the wealthier classes, in which it has no interest: now directed from those who are exploiting it into anger against “the foreigner,” who is generally a crowd of similar persons being similarly inflamed against itself. It throws up occasional leaders who disappear from its horizon into other universes, from which come only rumours of justification or betrayal. It is being perpetually excited by words and phrases which mean little, which it repeats with an air of owlish wisdom: concerning the satisfactions of Imperial citizenship or the need for new ships, or the advantages of municipal reform. So it continues its patient subterranean life, staggering forward through time, bearing on its shoulders the vast edifice of modern industry: labouring, not without pride and pleasure, for advantage that other people shall enjoy.

And it possesses its own enjoyments also, and these not only those of which the moralist would disapprove: a too exuberant thirst for drink, or a passionate desire to obtain reward without labour. Charles Lamb would “often shed tears in the Strand for fulness of joy at so much life.” His joy might be more keenly excited to-day, upon the days when the City crowd is out for a real holiday: something more agreeable than the Election carnival, and with no smudge of moral improvement on it. You may see it in the Saturday football crowds in all the manufacturing cities: see it in concentrated form when a selection of all the Saturday football crowds has poured into London for the “final contest” at the Crystal Palace for the “Cup,” which is the goal of all earthly ambition. All the long night overcrowded trains have been hurrying southward along the great trunk lines, and discharging unlimited cargoes of Lancashire and Yorkshire artisans in the grey hours of early morning. They sweep through the streets of the Metropolis, boisterous, triumphant. They blink round historic monuments, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral. They all wear grey cloth caps, they are all decorated with coloured favours; they are all small men, with good-natured undistinguished faces. To an Oriental visitor they would probably all appear exactly alike, an endless reproduction of the same essential type. In the afternoon the bulk of them gather at the Crystal Palace, to see their carefully labelled representatives compete for the highest prize in the contest between various professional teams for the football championship. They encourage these hired persons with shrill cries. They follow the various fortunes of the game with approval or discontent. At the end one half is kindled to elation, the other sunk in disappointment. A crowd of adult English citizens assembles round that arena, in number some five times as great as the total Boer commandoes which surrendered after the Peace of Vereeniging, which had defended a country half the size of Europe against all the armies of the British Empire. And the irresistible query is suggested by the sight of that congestion of grey, small people with their facile excitements and their little white faces inflamed by this artificial interest, whether, in a day of trial, similar resources could be drawn from them, of tenacity, courage, and an unwearying devotion to an impersonal ideal. “_If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? And if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?_”

No one can question the revolution which has overtaken the industrial centres in the last two generations of their growth. Reading the records of the “hungry forties” in the life of the Northern cities is like passing through a series of evil dreams. Cellars have vanished into homes, wages have risen, hours of labour diminished, temperance and thrift increased, manners improved. The new civilisation of the Crowd has become possible, with some capacity of endurance, instead of (as before) an offence which was rank and smelling to heaven. But this life having been created and fixed in its development, the curious observer is immediately confronted with the inquiry: what of its future? Are the main lines set us at the present, and later development confined to variations in length and direction along these lines? In such a case progress will mean a further repetition of the type: two cotton factories where there is now one; five thousand small, grey-capped men where there are now three; perhaps, in some remote millennium, fourteen days of boisterous delight at Blackpool where now are only seven. A race can thus be discerned in the future, small, wiry, incredibly nimble and agile in splicing thread or adjusting machinery, earning high wages in the factories, slowly advancing (one may justly hope) in intelligence and sobriety, and the qualities which go to make the good citizen. These may at the last limit their hours of labour everywhere to the ideal of an eight hours day; everywhere raise their remuneration to a satisfactory minimum wage; everywhere find provision for insecurity, unemployment, old age. The “Crowd” is then complete. The City civilisation is established. Progress pauses--exhausted, satisfied. Man is made.

John Stuart Mill in early manhood was troubled with an inquiry that nearly compelled him to abandon the effort of reform. Suppose all the old wrongs righted, and the whole work of liberation accomplished, what then? He saw a vision of mankind in a kind of infinite boredom, an everlasting end of the world. The desolation of such a vision was only removed by study of the poems of Wordsworth. He found fresh inspiration for the work of progress in the vision of mankind, at last tranquil and satisfied, occupying its leisure in reading Wordsworth’s poetry. The modern city crowd would allow scant tolerance to such visions as these. They demand excitement, adventure: the vision of that physical activity and control which is denied to themselves. To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before is the ideal of the lower, physical energies. To establish two football contests where only one existed is the translation of it into terms of the soul. A young workman from Sheffield, confronted with the prospect of certain and speedy death, journeys to London by the midnight train to see the final Cup Tie. On his return he takes to his bed. “In his last moments he asked his mother to so place the Wednesday colours that he might see them, exclaiming, ‘I am glad I have lived to see good old Wednesday win the Cup.’” And so he died.

This reaching out of the crowd from its own drab life into the adventurous and coloured world of “make-believe” is not peculiar to these islands. Pallid young men collect outside the hotels in Madrid or Seville, where the bull-fighters are established before the contests, feeling a kind of satisfaction in the physical proximity to the heroes of their devotion; just as pallid young men collect outside the hotels in the English cities, happy in the conviction that only a thin wall of brick and stone separates them from those whom they contemplate with a kind of worship. In America, always more determined and fearless in pushing the new development to a logical conclusion, we find the actual schools of training for the baseball player, similar to the schools of the gladiators, whose ruins still survive in Pompeii and old Roman cities. Is this, after all, an artificial product of a time of tranquillity? Is its nature ephemeral? And will mankind ever again in these countries find physical exhaustion in the life of the fields, and mental excitement in the business of war and conquest? No one can answer. Certainly even that political activity in England, which is largely a great game, played with good humour and the element of uncertainty which gives spice to all adventure, for the majority does not count at all in comparison with these more obvious satisfactions. And of any other competitive attraction there is no trace at all. The intellectual profess contempt or despair. The “sporting” element exult in enthusiasm. The wisest at least will accept the fact, without too great exaggeration of praise or blame. For this is Democracy; victorious; unashamed.

The country has furnished these citizens, or their immediate ancestors. But now the country has been bled “white as veal.” The cities will be compelled in the future to trust to inbreeding; to rear, as best they may, in their own labyrinths children who will mate with children of a similar upbringing. What will be the effect of such inbreeding, in five generations, or in ten? There can be no certain reply. Perhaps the cities themselves will not last long enough to ever furnish a certain reply. But the carefullest observers can already note some lines of definite change. Mr. Bray in his _Town Child_ has indicated some of them. He is inclined to take a gloomy vision of the future.

Southey, seeing their variable beginnings, proclaimed that cities were the “graveyards of modern civilisation.” Wordsworth found there the “soul of beauty and enduring life,” amid the press “of self-destroying transitory things” diffused but “through meagre lines and colours.” A long tradition, from Rousseau to Tolstoy, has denounced the growing multiplication of the town. Mr. Bray endeavours to see the town through the mind of the growing child: the child, not of the city splendour, but of the city squalor; pent up within the elements there provided for the perceptive material of the developing mind. He finds the keynote of it all in its self-destruction and its transitoriness. The new forms of sickness from which the body suffers are due “to the more malignant because more concentrated contagion of man.” But it is mind sickness which he most dreads; in an environment where little makes for silence, permanence, or repose; where “all things, whether animate or inanimate, change and change ceaselessly; they seem to emerge from the nowhere without rhyme or reason, for a brief space form a portion of the child’s universe, and then, without rhyme or reason, pass out into the nowhere again.” Excitement, noise, and a kind of forlorn and desperate ugliness are the spirits watching round the cradle of too many children of the town; whose work, when fully accomplished, has created the less reputable characteristics of the city crowd. “The human element, a very incarnation of the spirit of unrest, encourages a temperament, shallow and without reserve, which passes in rapid alternation from moods of torpor to moods of effervescent vivacity, and nurtures a people eager for change and yet discontented with all that change brings; impatient of the old, but none the less intolerant of the new.” “Isn’t the noise of the machines awful?” was the question put to a young factory worker. “Yes,” he replied, “not so much when they are going on as when they stop.” The City-bred Race are going to find the noise “awful” when it “stops.” Already in America one can detect a kind of disease of activity, in a people to whom “business” has become a necessary part of life. The general effect is of children of overstrung nerves, restless and aimless, now taking up a book, now a plaything, now roaming round the room in uncertain uneasiness. The city-bred people, we are confidently informed, will never go “back to the land.” In part this may mean that they will never return to long hours of hopeless drudgery for shameful wage. In part it may point to a certain condition of “nerves” excited by city upbringing: a real disease of the soul. Silence, solitariness, open spaces under a wide sky, appear thus intolerable to a people never quite content but in the shouts, the leagues of lights, and the roaring of the wheels. And the scattering and separation of man from man in a region still untamed and given to large mysterious forces, the wind and weather under huge spaces of the night, produces in a race thus reared something of the impression of children left alone in the dark.

Life thus developing, in lack of “the elements of permanence, of significance, of idealistic imaginings,” demands some special conscious and deliberate effort to supply those elements. The main interest of the State (immortal and conservative) is to preserve its own existence. This preservation is impossible unless it can guarantee to the next generation a healthy start; physical and mental efficiency, with the best moral training at its disposal, to those who will be the citizens of the future. Changes which might guarantee such preservation are denounced to-day as involving a weakening or destruction of the family. To many observers it is just the absence of such changes which are ensuring the weaknesses and destruction of the family. In the present confusion, on the other hand, infantile mortality shows no decrease in half a century, and the birth-rate steadily declines; on the other hand, where the mere pressure of animal and physical necessity has become too burdensome, the family is breaking to pieces under the strain.

“Few people,” rightly says Mr. Bray, “seem to realise how nearly the lives of the poor reach the limits of human endurance.” He believes that “the affections of the parents would increase, and the home duties be performed with greater success and animation,” if “with a vigour less impaired by intolerable toil.” He draws an arresting contrast between the long mechanical drudgery of the life of wife and mother in a poor family, and the life of a mother in those decent middle class homes where perhaps the family tie is strongest to-day; not the rich and extravagant, but those who can afford some space and some leisure and the luxury of a servant. “The ties of family are stronger among the servant-keeping class than among the poorer class,” is his conclusion, “and they are stronger because the stress of physical toil is weaker, and the pains of parenthood less insistent.”

He utters grave warning to those well-meaning philanthropists who, in the name of Family Sanctity, are opposing the reforms which Social Reformers most ardently desire. “If it be a question of providing work for the unemployed, meals for the children, pensions for the old; if it be a matter of municipal trams, municipal wash-houses, municipal dwellings, in every instance,” he protests, “they raise the cry that the independence of the family is threatened, and exhort their friends to fight the measure to the death. Is it surprising that the word ‘Family’ has come to stink in the nostrils of those who are striving to improve the conditions of the poor? Is it any cause for wonder if they begin to attack the Family, and inquire what manner of monster that is which can only be preserved by bringing as offerings to its den hungry children and suffering mothers?” “The sanctity of the family,” he boldly affirms, “is menaced at the present time by the austerity of the thoughtful rather than by the sentimentality of the thoughtless.”[5]

However this may be, the Crowd consciousness and the city upbringing must of necessity act as a disintegrating force, tearing the family into pieces. If the Crowd condition, which, in part, is to supplement it, may be made a dignified and noble thing, there need be less regret over a change which, desirable or otherwise, would appear to be inevitable. The communal midday meal, for example, which the school children of the cities are coming to partake of altogether, should be something better than a squalid scramble for physical sustenance in soup or suet. The communal recreation, one would hope, may develop in something more desirable than the aimless activities of the Hampstead Heath bank holiday. The communal politics should be something more restrained than the stampeded “Swing of the Pendulum,” first against one party in power, then against the other. The communal intellect might be directed towards other and more reputable ends than the devising of the last lines of “Limericks,” or the search for true “tips” of horses, in the effort after unearned monetary gain. And the spirit of a collective mind, “the spirit of the hive,” residing in the various industrial cities, may find expression and a conscious revelation of itself, in something more beautiful and also more intelligible than the chaotic squalor of uniformly mean streets and buildings which make up the centres of industrial England.

Certainly, unless the life of the Crowd can be redeemed, all other redemption is vain. Here is the battle-ground for the future of a race and national character. “Democracy,” says Canon Barnett, the wisest of all living social reformers, “is now established. The working classes have the largest share in the government of the nation, and on them its progress depends.” They possess, in his verdict, “the strenuousness and modesty which comes by contact with hardship, and the sympathy which comes by daily contact with suffering. They, as a class, are more unaffected, more generous, more capable of sacrifice, than members of other classes. They have solid sense and are good men of business, but they cannot be said to have the wide outlook which takes in a unity in which all classes are included. They are indifferent to knowledge and to beauty, so they do not recognise proportion in things, and their field of pleasure is very restricted between sentiment and comfort.” “They suffer, as the great German socialist said, from ‘wantlessness.’ They prefer honest mediocrity to honest intellect, and would still vote for W. H. Smith rather than John Stuart Mill. Their actions are generous, but their philosophy of life is often of that shallow sort which says, ‘Does Job serve God for naught?’ and they are often, therefore, to be captured by ‘a policy of blood and iron’: they are easily taken by popular cries; they are fickle and easily made ‘the puppets of Banks and Stock Exchanges.’ They are sympathetic, but for want of knowledge their suspicions are soon roused, and they soon distrust their leaders.” Yet his final conclusion is that “the working class is the hope of the nation, and their moral qualities justify the hope.”[6]

III

Or, again, we may attempt to understand a particular class of society from knowledge of a typical member of it: from one life, to judge all. The difficulty in the case of the multitude is due to the fact that any person who has arisen into public fame possesses, from the very fact of such attainment, qualities which to the many are denied. The new Labour members in the House of Commons are often supposed to reveal the “working man” at last arrived: to be able to furnish a kind of selected sample of the English industrial populations. They may perhaps stand for the working man in opinion. The majority of them are certainly remote from him in characteristic. Many are Scotsmen; and there is no deeper gulf than that which yawns between the Scotch and the English proletariat. They are mostly men of laborious habits, teetotalers, of intellectual interests, with a belief in the reasonableness of mankind. The English working man is not a teetotaler, has little respect for intellectual interests, and does not in the least degree trouble himself about the reasonableness of mankind. He is much more allied in temperament and disposition to some of the occupants of the Conservative back benches, whose life, in its bodily exercises, enjoyment of eating and drinking, and excitement of “sport,” he would himself undoubtedly pursue with extreme relish if similar opportunities were offered him. Figures like Mr. Snowden, with his passionate hunger for reform, like Mr. Henderson, with his preaching of religious and ethical ideals in Wesleyan Chapels, like Mr. George Barnes or Mr. Jowett, with their almost pathetic appeals to rational argument in the belief that reason directs the affairs of the world, are figures in whose disinterested service and devotion to the work of improvement any class might be proud. But in their excellences as in their defects they stand sharply distinct from the excellences and defects of the average English artisan. They care for things he cares nothing for: he cares for things which seem to them trivial and childish. In Mr. Grayson, again, a certain type has become articulate; the “Clarionette” with red tie, flannel shirt, and bicycle, who has been moved to continuous anger by the vision of trampled women and starving children in the cities of poverty. Such men see the world transfigured in the light of a great crusade. They are convinced that by demonstration and violence to-day, or (at latest) to-morrow, “the people” will rise in their millions and their might, pluck down the oppressors who are “sucking their blood,” and inaugurate the golden age of the Socialistic millennium. But meantime the “people” are thinking of almost everything but the Socialistic millennium. They are thinking how to get steady work; of the iniquities of the “foreigner”; of the possibility or desirability of war, now with the Transvaal, now with Germany. They are thinking which horse is going to win in some particular race, or which football eleven will attain supremacy in some particular league. They are thinking that wife or child is ill or happy, of entertainment, of the pleasure in reminiscence of one past holiday or the pleasure in anticipation of another. They are thinking (in a word) of all the variegated and complex joys and sorrows which make up the common lot of humanity.

One figure, however, in this interesting and excellent party does directly exhibit the character of a particular class. In Mr. “Will Crooks”--a kind of East End superman--the proletariat of London has found voice. He is the East End with all its qualities--with all its qualities intensified, but with the same proportion kept between them. It is true Mr. Crooks is a teetotaler, and never puts a penny on a horse: and that, in part, distinguishes him from an industrial population which finds the necessary relief from a grey existence in the excitement of the possibility of gain, or in the convivial glass of an evening. He would probably affirm that in the excitement and conviviality of Parliament and a political career he finds sufficient substitute for such milder intoxicants. But reading him you are reading the East End working man, and learning much that was before inexplicable: why the East End exists, and why it continues to exist: why no sudden flame of violence consumes these crowded streets and tenements: of its cheerfulness, its energy, its humour, its unquenchable patience. You are learning also some of its weaknesses: its willingness to think well of others, its readiness to make allowances and to forgive--so fatal to the austere work of Government; its reckless, whole-hearted charity, which is the despair of the Provident Visitor and the Charity Organisation Society; its perpetual search for short cuts, and the summary severing of the knot of old problems.

He stands to-day born of these people and part of them--the very child of the crowd. Most of his life has been spent there. He has plumbed the height and depth of human experience in this smoky and bewildering universe. As a child he has known hunger and the unsatisfied demand for bread. He has been an inmate of the workhouse, and the ruler of it; a forlorn waif in a Barrack School with unforgettable memories of its polished impersonal cruelty; and again the great man who comes down as visitor to the Barrack School of a later generation. He has tramped its streets in the vain search for work, and been glad to accept twopence from a friend. He has travelled on the upper half of a boot, tied on to the foot with string; and he has organised schemes for the unemployed which have been stimulated by that adventure into hell. He has obtained education as so many quick and intelligent East End boys are still obtaining it: from the riotous revel of the “penny dreadful,” through the _British Workman_, and the _Sunday at Home_, and similar literature which good people scatter gratuitously amongst the working classes; to the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and Shakespeare “Recitations,” and those social appeals of John Ruskin which have become the sacred writings of the new Labour revival. He hates charity organisation, the adventurous slum chronicler, officialdom, and institutions, just as the poor hate them to-day. He loves a joke, born of extravagance and a kind of boisterous humour, the salt which keeps this starved life from putrefaction. He understands his own people, amongst whom he has lived all his days. He is a living example--one of the few living examples--which offer hope that Democracy may still become a real thing.

I have seen “Will Crooks” addressing an open-air meeting outside the Arsenal Gates at Woolwich, in a wonderful bye-election which startled many political pundits with a vision of new things. It was the working man of London for a moment self-conscious: hearing itself for the first time speak. Picture an enormous sea of drab persons, a multitude of cloth caps and shapeless clothing, and little white faces. On a kind of rock, standing out of the sea--a humble carrier’s cart--a short man with a black beard and long arm is addressing this great crowd. To many observers the vision is a vision of foreboding; the proletariat rising at last in the mere might of its incalculable numbers, to demand its share of life’s good things, and brutally trample down all opposition. What is he saying to them? He is playing on this vast gathering as on an instrument of music, and he is making it discourse most excellent harmonies. At one moment he is stringing together the stories it delights in, and you can see the ripple of laughter running amongst the listeners like the wind through the cornfields. He is recounting the difficulties of the Imperialist Missionary down in Poplar: to the first woman: “Don’t you know you belong to an Empire on which the sun never sets?” And the reply: “Wot’s the good of talkin’ like that? Why, the sun never rises on our court.” To the second: “You’ve got to learn to make sacrifices for the Empire.”--“Wot’s the good of talkin’ about sacrifices when we can’t make both ends meet as it is? Both ends meet! We think we’re lucky if we get one end meat and the other end bread.” To a third: “If you don’t agree, you’re Little Englanders.”--“If I’m to pay another twopence a pound for meat, my children will soon be Little Englanders!”

Then in a moment he will change the note, and now he is telling them of a day in the life of the unemployed: the monotonous search for work, the kindness or insult at each application, the alternation of revolt and wretchedness, fury and apathy, the unwillingness to face the wife again in the evening with nothing with bad news. They all know it, they have mostly been through it; it is a shadow which hangs over them all. And a strange, impressive hush falls over the vast assembly, and men cough or rub their eyes, or turn away from each other’s faces. “Give ’em a chance,” he will suddenly cry, with uplifted arm, and the tension thus released finds relief in thunderous volleys of applause.

Such is “Will Crooks” in his own home, addressing his own people, a natural orator commanding to the full the humour and pathos of work-a-day life, whose influence is directed towards wholesome things, with never an unworthy appeal. And such, in its essential soundness, in its perplexity before complicated issues, in its acceptance of all established things, even in its distrust of itself, its almost exaggerated willingness to receive guidance from others, is the million-peopled constituency who through this man has found voice--the Multitude which forms the people of England.

The spread of “Socialism” amongst these, the voters who can decide elections, has been causing anxiety to many observers, especially to those who find a difficulty in discovering what function they would be called upon to fulfil in the Socialistic State. “Socialism,” however, up to the present, has been mainly a movement amongst the intellectuals and the Middle Classes: almost the male members of a type whose female representatives find the cause necessary to their energies and devotions in the agitation for women’s vote. The “Socialists” who assail each other so fiercely in queer, violent little newspapers, the writers of tracts, pamphlets, and appeals, the young men and women at the Universities who a generation ago would all have called themselves “Radicals,” and now all call themselves “Socialists,” are principally drawn from that “intellectual proletariat” which to-day is finding a growing gulf between possibility and desire. The stiff pictures of reconstructed worlds--a Bellamy’s “Utopia,” a Morris’s “Nowhere”--offer little attraction to the ordinary working man; whose idea of a Utopia is something far removed from these scenes of severe toil and voluntary or compulsory virtue. Mr. Wells has described, in brilliant, bitter sentences, the kind of Socialism thus propagated, and the classes to which it appeals. Academic, uncompromising Marxian Socialism appears as “the dusky largeness of a great meeting at the Queen’s Hall,” with the back of Mr. Hyndman’s head moving quickly, and the place “thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people,” and in the chair “Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict, a blonde lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about which the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken.” The impression was of “the gathering of village trades-people about the lady patroness. And at the end of the proceedings, after the red flag had been waved, after the ‘Red Flag’ had been sung by the choir and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to the Countess, in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.” And the Fabian Society, the laboratory in which intellectual Socialism is matured, with whose policy Mr. Wells is, on the whole, in agreement, appears to him incarnate in a “small, active, unpretending figure with the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip, the glasses, the slightly lisping, insinuating voice”; with a following of “Webbites to caricature Webb” with excessive bureaucratic notions, and a belief that everything can be done without any one wishing to do it; the disciple “who dreams of the most foxy and wonderful digging by means of box-lids, table-spoons, dish-covers--anything but spades designed and made for the jobs in hand--just as he dreams of an extensive expropriation of landlords by a Legislature that includes the present unreformed House of Lords.”[7]

In face of such realities as these--the few with their enthusiasm for a new gospel or with ingenious devices for effecting the millennium by back-door entrances, the many with their occasional gusts of interest, their normal lassitude and contempt for those who disprove God or attack Society--the observer is often discouraged in the work of reform. “Socialists,” says one of their most brilliant younger writers, “cannot look with full confidence upon the English electorate. It is hardly disputable that millions of electors in the greater cities have reached a point of personal decadence--physical, mental, and moral--to which no continental country furnishes a parallel on any comparable scale. Time is steadily multiplying these millions; and for English Socialism there is therefore a race against Time which it is very likely not to win.”[8] Mr. Ensor’s testimony is in part endorsed by the very remarkable evidence of various popular elections; that “Socialism” amongst the working peoples propagates and triumphs in times of plenty, withers up and vanishes in times of depression. This is exactly the reverse of the accepted belief, which thought that the poor are stung into Socialism by suffering, as poets are stung into poetry by wrong.

Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, the assertion is probably true that “bad times”--especially in connection with unemployment--are enemies rather than friends of the Socialist cause. It is quite a mistake to suppose that Socialism gains its firmest grip first upon the poorest; that its chief allies are hunger and cold. In England the poorest are often impervious to a direct political or social appeal; they are sunk below the level of consciousness which can respond to any hope of change. The skilled artisans of Colne Valley and Jarrow vote Socialist when trade is good and all the factories are working overtime. The slums of Southwark or Ancoats fail to respond to the vision of a new good time coming, although their present state is beyond measure deplorable. What they are looking for is a relief of the immediate necessities of the moment, for food and drink for the day. Given these, they are content until the next scarcity arrives. More especially is this true of unemployment. When the artisan or labourer is in work, he will find leisure to interest himself in various social gospels, study the exhortation of the street corners, inquire the meaning of capital value and class war and the exploitation of the working man. When he is out of work, he is naturally filled with but one impulse, which passes quickly from a terror into an obsession--an impulse to obtain work again. That impulse operates even amongst the men who remain in the factory. They see their companions turned away, tramping the streets in search of a job, undergoing all the privations which they themselves have experienced in similar vicissitudes in the past. They know that they have no security but one week’s notice: that any Saturday the announcement will be made to them that their services will no longer be required. Under such circumstances the whole social problem narrows itself down to the one problem of maintenance; or rather, the problem of maintenance enlarges itself to fill the whole horizon. Yesterday or to-morrow men may cherish the dream of a transformed society. To-day the question is merely the continuance of such work as will provide for immediate food and shelter. That is why Socialism has grown in times of prosperity, and withered in times of decline. It is the “Tariff Reformer,” and not the Socialist, who seems likely to gain in days of trade depression. In those days “work for all” is a more persuasive appeal than “Justice to the worker,” or “State ownership of all the means of production.” Man, fallen to bedrock and fighting for his life, has little inclination to turn to visions of universal justice in a redeemed Society.

To expect men and women to become “Socialists” in times of trade depression, is to expect the survivors of Messina, stricken by earthquake and famine, to meditate with enthusiasm upon the future of the race. Socialism, founded on Poverty and Social Discontent, and finding there its argument for change, does not flourish in the heart of that poverty and hungry wretchedness. The Socialist uses the sweated women and starving children as material for inflaming to pity and anger. But he rarely obtains adherents from the husbands of the women or the fathers of the children thus broken at the basis of society. The unemployed leaders are a different class and type from the unemployed whom they shepherd and control. And the average citizen has not yet come entirely to trust the new gospel; is not yet convinced that its adherents will make a better job of it than the “boodlers” and “blood suckers” whom they denounce so fervently. No Socialist councillor has ever been convicted of municipal corruption: and Socialists are sometimes surprised that a party so pure in aim and disinterested in service should be so often rejected by the electorate. But purity of purpose and incorruptibility of standard are not yet regarded by the average citizen as being the most essential qualifications for local or national government. The “man in the street,” here and in America, would seem to be content--except in sudden hurricanes of revolt against too flagrant corruption--with a not too ostentatious standard of civic purity, if the men who are running the machine are men of substance, energy, and position. Miss Addams, from Hull House, has described the failure of the reform party to carry an election even against the most offensive “boodlers.” The people acknowledged the corruption, but were convinced that all the aldermen do it, and that the alderman of their particular ward was unique in being so generous to his clients. “To their simple minds he gets it from the rich, and so long as he gives some of it out to the poor, and, as a true Robin Hood, with open hand, they have no objection to offer.” The people are found to be ashamed to be represented by a bricklayer--the intelligent, clean-handed nominee of the reforming party. The “boodler” is elected “because he is a good friend and neighbour. He exemplifies and exaggerates the popular type of a good man. He has attained what his constituents secretly long for.” They become generally convinced that “the lecturers who were talking against corruption were only the cranks, not the solid business men who had discovered and built up Chicago.” The same difficulty faces all those reformers to-day, who, in a settled, orderly, and on the whole comfortable, society, exhibit a too violent agitation for reform. The “comrades” propagate the cause with a splendid devotion, arguing at street corners, descending like locusts at bye-elections, organising themselves cheerily into missionary bands with particular buttons and badges and neckties. Men listen to their eloquence; but the citizen with a stake in the community shrinks from entrusting to them control of the ratepayers’ money, and the rank and file of the working people turn away from a type so different to their own boisterous, happy-go-lucky, acquiescent existence. An appeal for “Labour representation” can fill the working man with enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of Mr. Crooks’s first sensational victory at Woolwich. An appeal for “Socialism” attracts him when his own position is secure: when that is precarious he is fearful, unless his trouble is prolonged until it threatens a revolution. And an England with permanently declining trade, with the cream of its artisan population permanently out of employment, is an England which this generation has never known: something which, if it occurs in the future, will tear to pieces all our accepted standards, and render all prophecy vain.

Yet there is danger perhaps in exaggerating this complacency, acquiescence, and absorption in such passing pleasures as are possible upon a limited weekly wage, which at present keep so many of the working people in this country aloof from political and social discontent. Those who in similar situation have counted upon a boundless patience have often found that patience rudely exhausted, and all their calculations brought to nought. No one can pretend that a condition of stable equilibrium exists, in which as to-day, with the removal of supernatural sanctions and promises of future redress, the working people find a political freedom accompanying an economic servitude. We have carried out to the full on the one side, says M. Viviani, in France--and the same is true, though in less universal degree, in England--the promise of the Revolution. We have advanced from the affirmation of Equality of Citizenship to universal suffrage, and from universal suffrage to universal education. There has vanished the hope that once kept the labourer docile--hope of the attainment of better times beyond the grave. “_Ensemble, et d’un geste magnifique, nous avons eteint dans le ciel des lumières qu’on ne rallumera plus._” Are we able to believe, he inquires, that the work has ended? No, is the reply, it is only beginning. Political liberation has to find expression for itself in the economic sphere: must inevitably work itself out there, with the use of that instrument--the Democratic instrument of Government--which gives to the people full control over its own fortunes. To-day each citizen of the crowd “compares with sadness his political power with his economic dependence: humiliated every day with the contrast between his divided personality--on one side a _misérable_, on the other a sovereign: on one an animal, on the other a god.”

The increasing apprehension of this contrast, and the increasing consequential effort at readjustment, will furnish the guiding thread to the various political and social changes of the twentieth century. It will influence and control the rise and fall of political parties, each doing the work all unconsciously of forces which it does not understand. It will lead in various ways, and through all oppositions and reactions, towards an organised society profoundly differing from our own.