It may be said that these words, unlike the words with which Rousseau kindled revolution, failed of their purpose. The Government remained deaf and blind to the demand of British freedom; a terrible war was not averted; one of the greatest disasters in our history ensued. None the less, they glow with the true fire, and the book that contains them ranks with acts, and, indeed, with battles. That we should thus be coupling Rousseau and Burke—two men of naturally violent antipathy—is but one of the common ironies of history, which in the course of years obliterates differences and soothes so many hatreds. To be accepted and honoured by the same mind, and even for similar service, the two apparent opposites must have had something in common. What they had in common was the great qualities that Maine discovered in Rousseau—the vivid imagination and the genuine love for their fellow-men; and by imagination I mean the power of realising the thoughts, feelings, and sufferings of others. Thus from these two qualities combined in the presence of oppression, cruelty, or the ordinary stupid and callous denial of freedom, there sprang that flame of indignation from which alone the burning book derives its fire. Examine those other books whose titles I have mentioned, and their origin will in every case be found the same. They are the flaming children of rage, and rage is begotten by imaginative power out of love for the common human kind.



VI

"WHERE CRUEL RAGE"

"Fret not thyself," sang the cheerful Psalmist—"fret not thyself because of evildoers." For they shall soon be cut down like the grass; they shall be rooted out; their sword shall go through their own heart; their arms shall be broken; they shall consume as the fat of lambs, and as the smoke they shall consume away; though they flourish like a green bay-tree, they shall be gone, and though we seek them, their place shall nowhere be found.

A soothing consolation lies in the thought. Why should we fluster ourselves, why wax so hot, when time thus brings its inevitable revenges? Composed in mind, let us pursue our own unruffled course, with calm assurance that justice will at length prevail. Let us comply with the dictates of sweetness and light, in reasonable expectation that iniquity will melt away of itself, like a snail before the fire. If we have confidence that vengeance is the Lord's and He will repay, where but in that faith shall we find an outlet for our indignation at once so secure, so consolatory, and so cheap?

It was the pious answer made by Dr. Delany to Swift at the time when, torn by cruel rage, Swift was entering upon the struggle against Ireland's misery. Swift appealed to him one day "whether the corruptions and villainies of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?" But Delany answered, "That in truth they did not." "Why—why, how can you help it? How can you avoid it?" asked the indignant heart. And the judicious answer came: "Because I am commanded to the contrary; 'Fret not thyself because of the ungodly.'" Under the qualities revealed in Swift and Delany by that characteristic scene, is also revealed a deeply-marked distinction between two orders of mankind, and the two speakers stand as their types. Dr. Delany we all know. He may be met in any agreeable society—himself agreeable and tolerant, unwilling to judge lest he be judged, solicitous to please, careful not to lose esteem, always welcome among his numerous acquaintances, sweetly reasonable, and devoutly confident that the tale of hideous wrong will right itself without his stir. No figure is more essential for social intercourse, or moves round the cultivated or political circle of his life with more serene success.

To the great comfort of cultivated and political circles, the type of Swift is not so frequent or so comprehensible. What place have those who fret not themselves because of evildoers—what place in their tolerant society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation? It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the best wits and writers of his time. Bolingbroke wrote to him: "I loved you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now, better was beyond the power of conception." Pope, also after twenty years of intimate friendship, could write of him: "My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives." Arbuthnot could write to him:

"DEAR FRIEND,—The last sentence of your letter plunged a dagger in my heart. Never repeat those sad, but tender, words, that you will try to forget me. For my part, I can never forget you—at least till I discover, which is impossible, another friend whose conversation could procure me the pleasure I have found in yours."

The friends of Swift—the men who could write like this—men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay—were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them? Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the "Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning:

"In Pope I cannot read a line, But with a sigh I wish it mine; When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous biting way; Arbuthnot is no more my friend Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce; Refined it first, and showed its use."

And so on down to the lines:

"If with such talents Heaven has blest 'em, Have I not reason to detest 'em?"

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure; but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked, and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion, being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing whilst he was still a youth, in The Tale of a Tub, he composed a terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness of style seem foretold: "Last week," he says, "I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse." "Only a woman's hair," was found written on the packet in which the memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the Drapier Letters, Ireland lay before him like a woman flayed. Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan):

"It fevered his blood, it broke his rest, it drove him at times half frantic with furious indignation, it sunk him at times in abysses of sullen despondency, it awoke in him emotions which in ordinary men are seldom excited save by personal injuries."

This cruel rage over the wrongs of a people whom he did not love, and whom he repeatedly disowned, drove him to the savage denunciations in which he said of England's nominee: "It is no dishonour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?" It drove him also to the great principle, still too slowly struggling into recognition in this country, that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." It inspired his Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, in which the advice to "burn everything that came from England except the coals and the people," might serve as the motto of the Sinn Fein movement. And it inspired also that other "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a burden to their Parents and Country, and making them beneficial to the Public. Fatten them up for the Dublin market; they will be delicious roast, baked, or boiled."

As wave after wave of indignation passed over him, his wrath at oppression extended to all mankind. In Gulliver's Travels it is the human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being flayed! But it is not pity he feels for the victim now. In man he only sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal degradation of Yahoos. Unlike other satirists—unlike Juvenal or Pope or the author of Penguin Island, who comes nearest to his manner—he pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice, but upon the race of man as a whole. "I heartily hate," he wrote to Pope soon after Gulliver was published, "I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." The philanthropist will often idealise man in the abstract and hate his neighbour at the back door, but that was not Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by various lusts.

"Noli aemulari," sang the cheerful Psalmist; "Fret not thyself because of evildoers." How easy for most of us it is to follow that comfortable counsel! How little strain it puts upon our popularity or our courage! And how amusing it is to watch the course of human affairs with tolerant acquiescence! Yes, but, says Swift, "amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think," and may we not say that acquiescence is the cowardice of those who dare not feel? There will always be some, at least, in the world whom savage indignation, like Swift's, will continually torment. It will eat their flesh and exhaust their spirits. They would gladly be rid of it, for, indeed, it stifles their existence, depriving them alike of pleasure, friends, and the objects of ambition—isolating them in the end as Swift was isolated. If only the causes of their indignation might cease, how gladly they would welcome the interludes of quiet! But hardly is one surmounted than another overtops them like a wave, nor have the stern victims of indignation the smallest hope of deliverance from their suffering, until they lie, as Swift has now lain for so many years, where cruel rage can tear the heart no more—"Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit."



VII

THE CHIEF OF REBELS

"It is time that I ceased to fill the world," said the dying Victor Hugo, and we recognise the truth of the saying, though with a smile. For each generation must find its own way, nor would it be a consolation to have even the greatest of ancient prophets living still. But yet there breathes from the living a more intimate influence, for which an immortality of fame cannot compensate. When men like Tolstoy die, the world is colder as well as more empty. They have passed outside the common dangers and affections of man's warm-blooded circle, lighted by the sun and moon. Their spirit may go marching on; it may become immortal and shine with an increasing radiance, perpetual as the sweet influences of the Pleiades. But their place in the heavens is fixed. We can no longer watch how they will meet the glorious or inglorious uncertainties of the daily conflict. We can no longer make appeal for their succour against the new positions and new encroachments of the eternal adversary. The sudden splendour of action is no longer theirs, and if we would know the loss implied in that difference, let us imagine that Tolstoy had died before the summer of 1908, when he uttered his overwhelming protest against the political massacres ordained by Russia. In place of that protest, in place of the poignant indignation which appealed to Stolypin's hangmen to fix their well-soaped noose around his own old neck, since, if any were guilty, it was he—in place of the shame and wrath that cried, "I cannot be silent!" we should have had nothing but our own memory and regret, murmuring to ourselves, "If only Tolstoy had been living now! But perhaps, for his sake, it is better he is not."

And now that he is dead, and the world is chilled by the loss of its greatest and most fiery personality, the adversary may breathe more freely. As Tolstoy was crossing a city square—I suppose the "Red Square" in Moscow—on the day when the Holy Synod of Russia excommunicated him from the Church, he heard someone say, "Look! There goes the devil in human form!" And for the next few weeks he continued to receive letters clotted with anathemas, damnations, threats, and filthy abuse. It was no wonder. To all thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the devil in human form. To them he was the gainsayer, the destroyer, the most shattering of existent forces. And, in themselves, how large and powerful a section of every modern State they are! They may almost be called the Church and State incarnate, and they seldom hesitate to call themselves so. But, against all their authorities, formulae, and traditions, Tolstoy stood in perpetual rebellion. To him their parchments and wigs, their cells and rods and hang-ropes, their mitres, chasubles, vestments, incense, chantings, services, bells, and books counted as so much trumpery. For him external law had no authority. If it conflicted with the law of the soul, it was the soul's right and duty to disregard or break it. Speaking of the law which ordained the flogging of peasants for taxes, he wrote: "There is but one thing to say—that no such law can exist; that no ukase, or insignia, or seals, or Imperial commands can make a law out of a crime." Similarly, the doctrines of the Church, her traditions, sacraments, rituals, and miracles—all that appeared to him to conflict with human intelligence and the law of his soul—he disregarded or denied. "I deny them all," he wrote in his answer to the Holy Synod's excommunication (1901); "I consider all the sacraments to be coarse, degrading sorcery, incompatible with the idea of God or with the Christian teaching." And, as the briefest statement of the law of his soul, he added:

"I believe in this: I believe in God, whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all. I believe that he is in me, and I in him. I believe that the will of God is most clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man Jesus, whom to consider as God, and pray to I esteem the greatest blasphemy. I believe that man's true welfare lies in fulfilling God's will, and his will is that men should love one another, and should consequently do to others as they wish others to do to them—of which it is said in the Gospels that this is the law and the prophets."

The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe. To such rebels the world, after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them now and then as a matter of habit. But Tolstoy's rebellion did not stop at Church and State. He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars. Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the rest of the reforming or rebellious parties—what were they doing but struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments, officials, and authorities under different forms and different names? In the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little influence upon the course of revolution. He formed no party; no band of rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have been any. When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil, and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul. "It seems to me," he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,

"It seems to me now specially important to do what is right quietly and persistently, not only without asking permission from Government, but consciously avoiding participation in it.... What can a Government do with a man who will not publicly lie with uplifted hand, or will not send his children to a school he thinks bad, or will not learn to kill people, or will not take part in idolatry, or in coronations, deputations, and addresses, or who says and writes what he thinks and feels?... It is only necessary for all these good, enlightened, and honest people whose strength is now wasted in Revolutionary, Socialistic, or Liberal activity (harmful to themselves and to their cause) to begin to act thus, and a nucleus of honest, enlightened, and moral people would form around them, united in the same thoughts and the same feelings. Public opinion—the only power which subdues Governments—would become evident, demanding freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, justice, and humanity."

From a distance, the bustling politicians and reformers of happier lands might regard this quietism or wise passiveness as a mere counsel of despair, suitable enough as a shelter in the storm of Russia's tyranny, but having little significance for Western men of affairs. Yet even so they had not silenced the voice of this persistent rebel; for he rose in equal rebellion against the ideals, methods, and standards of European cities. Wealth, commerce, industrial development, inventions, luxuries, and all the complexity of civilisation were of no more account to him than the toys of kings and the tag-rag of the churches. Other rebels had preached the gospel of pleasure to the poor, and had themselves acted on their precepts. Other reformers, even religious reformers, had extolled the delights of women, wine, and song. But here was a man despising these as the things after which the Gentiles seek. Love intrigues, banquets, wealthy establishments, operas, theatres, poetry, and fashionable novels—what had they to do with the kingdom of God that is within? He touched nothing from which he did not strip the adornment. He left life bare and stern as the starry firmament, and he felt awe at nothing, not even at the starry firmament, but only at the sense of right and wrong in man. He did not summon the poor to rise against "the idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere asceticism," or "a fanatic's intolerance."

Yet they could not choose but hear. Mr. Kipling, in agreement with an earlier prophet, once identified rebellion with the sin of witchcraft, and about Tolstoy there was certainly a witching power, a magic or demonic attraction, that gave the hearer no peace. Perhaps more even than from his imaginative strength, it arose from his whole-hearted sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do, there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him a disturbing and incalculable magic—an upheaving force, like leaven stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned and unchartered peace.

Critics have divided his life into artistic and prophetic hemispheres; they have accused him of giving up for man what was meant for artistic circles. But the seas of both hemispheres are the same, and there was no division in Tolstoy's main purpose or outlook upon life from first to last. In his greatest imaginative works (and to me they appear the highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in prose)—in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in the miserable isolation of Ivan Ilyitch; in the resurrection of the prostitute Maslova; and in the hardly endurable tragedy of Anna Karenin herself, there runs exactly the same deep undercurrent of thought and exactly the same solution of life's question as in the briefer and more definite statements of the essays and letters. The greatest men are generally all of a piece, and of no one is this more true than of Tolstoy. Take him where you please, it is strange if after a few lines you are not able to say, "That is the finger of Tolstoy; there is the widely sympathetic and compassionate heart, so loving mankind that in all his works he has drawn hardly one human soul altogether detested or contemptible. But at the same time there is the man whose breath is sincerity, and to whom no compromise is possible, and no mediocrity golden."

To the philosophers of the world his own solution may appear a simple issue, indeed, out of all his questioning, struggles, and rebellions. It was but a return to well-worn commandments. "Do not be angry, do not lust, do not swear obedience to external authority, do not resist evil, but love your enemies"—these commands have a familiar, an almost parochial, sound. Yet in obedience to such simple orders the chief of rebels found man's only happiness, and whether we call it obedience to the voice of the soul or the voice of God, he would not have minded much. "He lives for his soul; he does not forget God," said one peasant of another in Levin's hearing; and Tolstoy takes those quiet words as Levin's revelation in the way of peace. For him the soul, though finding its highest joy of art and pleasure only in noble communion with other souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of God. The only submission possible, and the only possible hope of peace, lay in obedience to the self thus isolated and bare. "O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments!" cried the ancient poet, uttering the voice that speaks to the soul in loneliness; "O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments! Then had thy peace been as a river."



VIII

THE IRON CROWN

When we read of a man who, for many years, wore on his left arm an iron bracelet, with spikes on the inside which were pressed into the flesh, we feel as though we had taken a long journey from our happy land. When we read that the bracelet was made of steel wire, with the points specially sharpened, and the whole so clamped on to the arm that it could never come off, but had to be cut away after death, we might suppose that we had reached the world where Yogi and Sanyasi wander in the saffron robe, or sit besmeared with ashes, contemplating the eternal verities, unmoved by outward things. Like skeletons of death they sit; thorns tear their skin, their nails pierce into their hands, day and night one arm is held uplifted, iron grows embedded in their flesh, like a railing in a tree trunk, they hang in ecstasy from hooks, they count their thousand miles of pilgrimage by the double yard-measure of head to heel, moving like a geometer caterpillar across the burning dust. To overcome the body so that the soul may win her freedom, to mortify—to murder the flesh so that the spirit may reach its perfect life, to torture sense so that the mind may dwell in peace, to obliterate the limits of space, to silence the ticking of time, so that eternity may speak, and vistas of infinity be revealed—that is the purport of their existence, and in hope of attaining to that consummation they submit themselves with deliberate resolve to the utmost anguish and abasement that the body can endure.

Contemplating from a philosophic distance the Buddhist monasteries that climb the roof of the world, or the indistinguishable multitudes swarming around the shrines on India's coral strand, we think all this sort of thing is natural enough for unhappy natives to whom life is always poor and hard, and whose bodies, at the best, are so insignificant and so innumerable that they may well regard them with contempt, and suffer their torments with indifference. But the man of whose spiky bracelet we read was not in search of Nirvana's annihilation, nor had he ever prayed in nakedness beside the Ganges. Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, was as little like a starveling Sanyasi as any biped descendant of the anthropoids could possibly be. A noticeable man, singularly handsome, of conspicuous, indeed of almost precarious, personal attraction, a Prince of the Church, clothed, quite literally, in purple and fine linen, faring as sumptuously as he pleased every day, welcome at the tables of the society that is above religion, irreproachable in address, a courtier in manner, a diplomatist in mind, moving in an entourage of state and worldly circumstance, occupied in the arts, constructing the grandest building of his time, learned without pedantry, agreeably cultivated in knowledge, urbane in his judgment of mankind, a power in the councils of his country, a voice in the destinies of the world—so we see him moving in a large and splendid orbit, complete in fine activities, dominant in his assured position, almost superhuman in success. And as he moves, he presses into the flesh of his left arm those sharpened points of steel.

"Remember!" We hear again the solemn tone, warning of mortality. We see again the mummy, drawn between tables struck silent in their revelry. We listen to the slave whispering in the ear while the triumph blares. "Remember!" he whispers. "Remember thou art man. Thou shalt go! Thou shalt go! Thy triumph shall vanish as a cloud. Time's chariot hurries behind thee. It comes quicker than thine own!" So from the iron bracelet a voice tells of the transitory vision. All shall go; the jewelled altars and the dim roofs fragrant with incense; the palaces, the towers, and domed cathedrals; the refined clothing, the select surroundings, the courteous receptions of the great; the comfortable health, the noble presence, the satisfactory estimation of the world—all shall go. They shall fade away; they shall be removed as a vesture, and like a garment they shall be rolled up. Press the spikes into thy mouldering flesh. Remember! Even while it lives, it is corrupting, and the end keeps hurrying behind. Remember! Remember thou art man.

But below that familiar voice which warns the transient generations of their mortality, we may find in those sharpened spikes a more profound and nobler intention. "Remember thou art man," they say; but it is not against overweening pride that they warn, nor do they remind only of death's wings. "Remember thou art man," they say, "and as man thou art but a little lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honour. This putrefying flesh into which we eat our way—this carrion cart of your paltry pains and foolish pleasures—is but the rotten relic of an animal relationship. Remember thou art man. Thou art the paragon of animals, the slowly elaborated link between beast and god, united by this flesh with tom-cats, swine, and hares, but united by the spirit with those eternal things that move fresh and strong as the ancient heavens in their courses, and know not fear. What pain of spikes and sharpened points, what torment that this body can endure from cold or hunger, from human torture and burning flame, what pleasure that it can enjoy from food and wine and raiment and all the satisfactions of sense is to be compared with the glory that may be revealed at any moment in thy soul? Subdue that bestial and voracious body, ever seeking to extinguish in thee the gleam of heavenly fire. Press the spikes into the lumpish and uncouth monster of thy flesh. Remember! Remember thou art God."

"Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" We have grown so accustomed to the cry that we hardly notice it, and yet that the cry should ever have been raised—that it should have arisen in all ages and in widely separated parts of the world—is the most remarkable thing in history. Pleasure is so agreeable, and none too common; or, if one wanted pain for salt, are there not pains enough in life's common round? Does it not take us all our time to mitigate the cold, the heat, and hunger; to escape the beasts and rocks and thunderbolts that bite and break and blast us; to cure the diseases that rack and burn and twist our poor bodies into hoops? Why should we seek to add pain to pain, and raise a wretched life to the temperature of a torture-room? It is the most extraordinary thing, at variance alike with the laws of reason and moderation. Certainly, there is a kind of self-denial—a carefulness in the selection of pleasure—which all the wise would practise. To exercise restraint, to play the aristocrat in fastidious choice, to guard against satiety, and allow no form of grossness to enter the walled garden or to drink at the fountain sealed—those are to the wise the necessary conditions of calm and radiant pleasure, and in outward behaviour the Epicurean and the Stoic are hardly to be distinguished. For the Epicurean knows well that asceticism stands before the porch of happiness, and the smallest touch of excess brings pleasure tumbling down.

But mankind seems not to trouble itself about this delicate adjustment, this cautious selection of the more precious joy. In matters of the soul, man shows himself unreasonable and immoderate. He forgets the laws of health and chastened happiness. The salvation of his spirit possesses him with a kind of frenzy, making him indifferent to loss of pleasure, or to actual pain and bodily distress. He will seek out pain as a lover, and use her as a secret accomplice in his conspiracy against the body's domination. Under the stress of spiritual passion he becomes an incalculable force, carried we know not where by his determination to preserve his soul, to keep alight just that little spark of fire, to save that little breath of life from stifling under the mass of superincumbent fat. We may call him crazy, inhuman, a fanatic, a devil-worshipper; he does not mind what we call him. His eyes are full of a vision before which the multitude of human possessions fade. He is engaged in a contest wherein his soul must either overcome or perish everlastingly; and we may suppose that, even if the soul were not immortal, it would still be worth the saving.

It is true that in this happy country examples of ascetic frenzy are comparatively rare. There is little fear of overdoing the mortification of the flesh. We practise a self-denial that takes the form of training for sport, but, like the spectators at a football match, we do our asceticism chiefly by proxy, and are fairly satisfied if the clergy do not drink or give other cause for scandal. It is very seldom that Englishmen have been affected by spiritual passion of any kind, and that is why our country, of all the eastern hemisphere, has been least productive of saints. But still, in the midst of our discreet comfort and sanity of moderation, that spiky bracelet of steel, eating into the flesh of the courtly and sumptuous Archbishop, may help to remind us that, whether in war, or art, or life, it is only by the passionate refusal of comfort and moderation that the high places of the spirit are to be reached. "Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground!" is the song of all pioneers, and if man is to be but a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour, the crown will be made of iron or, perhaps, of thorns.



IX

"THE IMPERIAL RACE"

"The public are particularly requested not to tease the Cannibals." So ran one of the many flaming notices outside the show. Other notices proclaimed the unequalled opportunity of beholding "The Dahomey Warriors of Savage South Africa; a Rare and Peculiar Race of People; all there is Left of them"—as, indeed, it might well be. Another called on the public "not to fail to see the Coloured Beauties of the Voluptuous Harem," no doubt also the product of Savage South Africa. But of all the gilded placards the most alluring, to my mind, was the request not to tease the Cannibals. It suggested so appalling a result.

I do not know who the Cannibals were. Those I saw appeared to be half-caste Jamaicans, but there may have been something more savage inside, and certainly a Dahomey warrior from South Africa would have to be ferocious indeed if his fierceness was to equal his rarity. But the particular race did not matter. The really interesting thing was that the English crowd was assumed to be as far superior to the African savage as to a wild beast in a menagerie. The proportion was the same. The English crowd was expected to extend to the barbarians the same inquisitive patronage as to jackals and hyenas in a cage, when in front of the cages it is written, "Do not irritate these animals. They bite."

The facile assumption of superiority recalled a paradoxical remark that Huxley made about thirty years ago, when that apostle of evolution suddenly scandalised progressive Liberalism by asserting that a Zulu, if not a more advanced type than a British working man, was at all events happier. "I should rather be a Zulu than a British workman," said Huxley in his trenchant way, and the believers in industrialism were not pleased. By the continual practice of war, and by generations of infanticide, under which only the strongest babies survived, the Zulus had certainly at that time raised themselves to high physical excellence, traces of which still remain in spite of the degeneracy that follows foreign subjection. I have known many African tribes between Dahomey and Zululand too well to idealise them into "the noble savage." I know how rapidly they are losing both their bodily health and their native virtues under the deadly contact of European drink, clothing, disease, and exploitation. Yet, on looking round upon the London crowds that were particularly requested not to tease the cannibals, my first thought was that Huxley's paradox remained true.

The crowds that swarmed the Heath were not lovely things to look at. Newspapers estimated that nearly half a million human beings were collected on the patch of sand that Macaulay's imagination transfigured into "Hampstead's swarthy moor." But even if we followed the safe rule and divided the estimated number by half, a quarter of a million was quite enough. "Like bugs—the more, the worse," Emerson said of city crowds, and certainly the most enthusiastic social legislator could hardly wish to make two such men or women stand where one stood before. Scarlet and yellow booths, gilded roundabouts, sword-swallowers in purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough. Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even "ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a crowd be seen—a mass of people so devoid of character in costume, or of tradition and pride in ornament.

But it was not merely the absence of colour and beauty in dress, or the want of national character and distinction—a plainness that would afflict even a Russian peasant from the Ukraine or a Tartar from the further Caspian. It was the uncleanliness of the garments themselves that would most horrify the peoples not reckoned in the foremost ranks of time. A Hindu thinks it disgusting enough for a Sahib to put on the same coat and trousers that he wore yesterday without washing them each morning in the tank, as the Hindu washes his own garment. But that the enormous majority of the Imperial race should habitually wear second, third, and fourth-hand clothes that have been sweated through by other people first, would appear to him incredible. If ever he comes to England, he finds that he must believe it. It is one of the first shocks that strike him with horror when he emerges from Charing Cross. "Can these smudgy, dirty, evil-smelling creatures compose the dominant race?" is the thought of even the most "loyal" Indian as he moves among the crowd of English workpeople. And it is only the numbing power of habit that silences the question in ourselves. Cheap as English clothing is, second-hand it is cheaper still, and I suppose that out of that quarter-million people on the Heath every fine Bank Holiday hardly one per cent. wears clothes that no one has worn before him. Hence the sickening smell that not only pervades an English crowd but hangs for two or three days over an open space where the crowd has been. "I can imagine a man keeping a dirty shirt on," said Nietzsche, "but I cannot imagine him taking it off and putting it on again." He was speaking in parables, as a philosopher should; but if he had stood among an English working crowd, his philosophic imagination would have been terribly strained by literal fact.

Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine" or mangy "boa"—such is accepted as the natural costume for the heirs of all the ages. Prehistoric man, roaming through desert and forest in his own shaggy pelt, was infinitely better clad. So is the aboriginal African with a scrap of leopard skin, or a single bead upon a cord. To judge by clothing, we may wonder to what purpose evolution ever started upon its long course of groaning and travailing up to now. And more than half-concealed by that shabby clothing, what shabby forms and heads we must divine! How stunted, puny, and ill-developed the bodies are! How narrow-shouldered the men, how flat-breasted the women! And the faces, how shapeless and anaemic! How deficient in forehead, nose, and jaw! Compare them with an Afghan's face; it is like comparing a chicken with an eagle. Writing in the Standard of April 8, 1912, a well-known clergyman assured us that "when a woman enters the political arena, the bloom is brushed from the peach, never to be restored." That may seem a hard saying to Primrose Dames and Liberal Women, but the thousands of peaches that entered the arena (as peaches will) on Hampstead Heath, had no bloom left to brush, and no political arena could brush it more.

Deficient in blood and bone, the products of stuffy air, mean food, and casual or half-hearted parentage, often tainted with hereditary or acquired disease, the faces are; but, worse than all, how insignificant and indistinguishable! It is well known that a Chinaman can hardly distinguish one Englishman from another, just as we can hardly distinguish the Chinese. But in an English working crowd, even an Englishman finds it difficult to distinguish face from face. Yet as a nation we have always been reckoned conspicuous for strong and even eccentric individuality. Our well-fed upper and middle classes—the public school, united services, and university classes—reach a high physical average. Perhaps, on the whole, they are still the best specimens of civilised physique. Within thirty years the Germans have made an astonishing advance. They are purging off their beer, and working down their fat. But, as a rule, the well-fed and carefully trained class in England still excels in versatility, decision, and adventure. Unhappily, it is with few—only with a few millions of well-to-do people, a fraction of the whole English population—and with a few country-bred people and open-air workers, that we succeed. The great masses of the English nation are tending to become the insignificant, indistinguishable, unwholesome, and shabby crowd that becomes visible at football matches and on Bank Holidays upon the Heath.

It is true that familiarity breeds respect. It is almost impossible for the average educated man to know anything whatever about the working classes. The educated and the workpeople move, as it were, in worlds of different dimensions, incomprehensible to each other. Very few men and women from our secondary schools and universities, for instance, can long enjoy solemnly tickling the faces of passing strangers with a bunch of feathers, or revolving on a wooden horse to a steam organ, or gazing at a woman advertised as "a Marvel of Flesh, Fat, and Beauty." The educated seldom appreciate such joys in themselves. If they like trying them, it is only "in the second intention." They enjoy out of patronage, or for literary sensation, rather than in grave reality. They are excluded from the mind to which such things genuinely appeal. But let not education mock, nor culture smile disdainfully at the short and simple pleasures of the poor. If by some miracle of revelation culture could once become familiar from the inside with one of those scrubby and rather abhorrent families, the insignificance would be transfigured, the faces would grow distinguishable, and all manner of admired and even lovable characteristics would be found. How sober people are most days of the week; how widely charitable; how self-sacrificing in hopes of saving the pence for margarine or melted fat upon the children's bread! They are shabby, but they have paid for every scrap of old clothing with their toil; they are dirty, but they try to wash, and would be clean if they could afford the horrible expense of cleanliness; they are ignorant, but within twenty years how enormously their manners to each other have improved! And then consider their Christian thoughtlessness for the morrow, how superb and spiritual it is! How different from the things after which the Gentiles of the commercial classes seek! On a Bank Holiday I have known a mother and a daughter, hanging over the very abyss of penury, to spend two shillings in having their fortunes told. Could the lilies of the field or Solomon in all his glory have shown a finer indifference to worldly cares?

Mankind, as we know, in the lump is bad, but that it is not worse remains the everlasting wonder. It is not the squalor of such a crowd that should astonish; it is the marvel that they are not more squalid. For, after all, what is the root cause of all this dirt and ignorance and shabbiness and disease? It is not drink, nor thriftlessness, nor immorality, as the philanthropists do vainly talk; still less is it crime. It is the "inequality" of which Canon Barnett has often written—the inequality that Matthew Arnold said made a high civilisation impossible. But such inequality is only another name for poverty, and from poverty we have yet to discover the saviour who will redeem us.



X

THE GREAT UNKNOWN

There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is broken only by an occasional church, a Board School, or a public-house. From the city's cathedral to every point of the compass, except the west, they stretch almost without limit till they reach the bedraggled fields maturing for development. They form by far the larger part of an Empire's capital. Each of them is, in fact, a vast town, great enough, as far as numbers go, to make the Metropolis of a powerful State. Out of half a dozen of them, such as Islington, Bethnal Green, or Bermondsey, the County Council could build half a score of Italian republics like the Florence or Pisa of old days, if only it had the mind. Each possesses a character, a peculiar flavour, or, at the worst, a separate smell. Many of them are traversed every day by thousands of rich and well-educated people, passing underground or overhead. Yet to nearly all of us they remain strange and almost untrodden. We do not think of them when we think of London. Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more familiar.

At elections, even politicians remember their existence. From time to time a philanthropist goes down there to share God's good gifts with his poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or painted boards. From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or Timbuctoo. When we scent an East End story on its way, do we not patiently await the battered head, the floating corpse, the dynamiter's den, or a woman crying over her ill-begotten babe? Do we not always get one or other of the lot? To read our story-tellers from Mr. Kipling downward, one might suppose the East End to be inhabited by bastards engaged in mutual murder, and the marvel is that anyone is left alive to be the subject of a tale. You may not bring an indictment against a whole nation, but no sensational writer hesitates to libel three million of our fellow-citizens. Put it in Whitechapel, and you may tell what filthy lie you please.

About once in a generation some "Bitter Cry" pierces through custom, and the lives of "the poor" become a subject for polite conversation and amateur solicitude. For three months, or even for six, that subject appears as the intellectual "roti" at dinner-tables; then it is found a little heavy, and cultured interest returns to its natural courses of plays, pictures, politics, a dancing woman, and the memorials of Kings. It is almost time now that the poor came up again, for a quarter of a century has gone since they were last in fashion, and men's collars and women's skirts have run their full orbit since. Excellent books have appeared, written with intimate knowledge of working life—books such as Charles Booth's London or Mr. Richard Free's Seven Years Hard, to mention only two; but either the public mind was preoccupied with other amusements, or it had not recovered from the lassitude of the last philanthropic debauch. Nothing has roused that fury of charitable curiosity which accompanies a true social revival, and leaves its victims gasping for the next excitement. The time was, perhaps, ripe, but no startling success awaited Mr. Alexander Paterson's book, Across the Bridges. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate sensations of fashion reached.

Mr. Paterson's experience lay on the south side of the river, and the district possesses peculiarities of its own. On the whole, I think, the riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East End. Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were growing when Shakespeare acted there. The population is more distinctly English than on the north side. Where the poverty is extreme it is more helpless. Work as a whole is rather steadier, but not so good. The smell is different and very characteristic, partly owing to the hop-markets. Life seems to me rather sadder and more depressing there, with less of gaiety and independence; but that may be because I am more intimate with the East End, and intimacy with working people nearly always improves their aspect. It is, indeed, fortunate for our sensational novelists that they remain so ignorant of their theme, for otherwise murders, monsters, and mysteries would disappear from their pages, and goodness knows how they would make a living then!

It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where the working classes of London chiefly live. Matthew Arnold said our lower classes were brutalised, and he was right, but not if by brutality he meant cruelty, violence, or active sin. What characterises them and their streets is poverty. Poverty and her twins, unhappiness and waste. Under unhappiness, we may include the outward conditions of discomfort—the crowded rooms, the foul air, the pervading dirt, the perpetual stench of the poor. In winter the five or six children in a bed grow practised in turning over all at the same time while still asleep, so as not to disturb each other. In a hot summer the bugs drive the families out of the rooms to sleep on the doorstep. Cleanliness is an expensive luxury almost as far beyond poverty's reach as diamonds. The foul skin, the unwashed clothes, the layer of greasy smuts, the boots that once fitted someone, and are now held on by string, the scraps of food bought by the pennyworth, the tea, condensed milk, fried fish, bread and "strawberry flavour," the coal bought by the "half-hundred," the unceasing noise, the absence of peace or rest, the misery of sickness in a crowd—all such things may be counted among the outward conditions of unhappiness, and only people who have never known them would call them trivial. But by the unhappiness that springs from poverty I mean far worse than these.

The definition of happiness as "an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence, in a fully developed life" is ancient now, but I have never found a better. From happiness so defined, poverty excludes our working-classes in the lump, almost without exception. For them an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence is almost unknown, and a fully developed life impossible. In both these respects their condition has probably become worse within the last century. If there is a word of truth in what historians tell us, a working-man must certainly have had a better chance of exercising an energy of his soul before the development of factories and machinery. What energy of the personal soul is exercised in a mill-hand, a tea-packer, a slop-tailor, or the watcher of a thread in a machine? How can a man or woman engaged in such labour for ten hours a day at subsistence wage enjoy a fully developed life? It seems likely that the old-fashioned workman who made things chiefly with his own hands and had some opportunity of personal interest in the work, stood a better chance of the happiness arising from an energy of the soul. His life was also more fully developed by the variety and interest of his working material and surroundings. This is the point to which our prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done. For certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the highest possible happiness.

The second offspring of poverty in these working regions of our city is waste. And I have called waste the twin brother of unhappiness because the two are very much alike. By waste I do not here mean the death-rate of infants, though that stands at one in four. No one, except an exploiter of labour, would desire a mere increase in the workpeople's number without considering the quality of the increase. But by waste I mean the multitudes of boys and girls who never get a chance of fulfilling their inborn capacities. The country's greatest shame and disaster arise from the custom which makes the line between the educated and the uneducated follow the line between the rich and the poor, almost without deviation. That a nature capable of high development should be precluded by poverty from all development is the deepest of personal and national disasters, though it happen, as it does happen, several thousand times a year. Physical waste is bad enough—the waste of strength and health that could easily be retained by fresh air, open spaces, and decent food, and is so retained among well-to-do children. This physical waste has already created such a broad distinction that foreigners coming among us detect two species of the English people. But the mental waste is worse. It is a subject that Mr. Paterson dwells upon, and he speaks with authority, as one who has taught in the Board Schools and knows the life of the people across the bridges from the banana-box to the grave.

"Boys who might become classical scholars," he writes, "stick labels on to parcels for ten years, others who have literary gifts clear out a brewer's vat. Real thinkers work as porters in metal warehouses, and after shouldering iron fittings for eleven hours a day, find it difficult to set their minds in order.... With even the average boy there is a marked waste of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirty, and the aggregate loss to the country is heavy indeed."

At fourteen, just when the "education" of well-to-do boys is beginning, the working boy's education stops. For ten or eleven years he has been happy at school. He has looked upon school as a place of enjoyment—of interest, kindliness, warmth, cleanliness, and even quiet of a kind. The school methods of education may not be the best. Mr. Paterson points out all that is implied in the distinction between the "teachers" of the Board Schools and the "masters" of the public schools. Too much is put in, not enough drawn out from the child's own mind. The teacher cannot think much of individual natures, when faced with a class of sixty. Yet it would be difficult to overrate the service of the Board Schools as training grounds for manners, and anyone who has known the change in our army within twenty-five years will understand what I mean. At fourteen the boy has often reached his highest mental and spiritual development. When he leaves school, shades of the prison-house begin to close upon him. He jumps at any odd job that will bring in a few shillings to the family fund. He becomes beer-boy, barber's boy, van-boy, paper-boy, and in a year or two he is cut out by the younger generation knocking at the door. He has learnt nothing; he falls out of work; he wanders from place to place. By the time he is twenty-two, just when the well-to-do are "finishing their education," his mind is dulled, his hope and interest gone, his only ambition is to get a bit of work and keep it. At the best he develops into the average working-man of the regions I have called unknown. Mr. Paterson thus describes the class:

"These are the steady bulk of the community, insuring the peace of the district by their habits and opinions far more effectively than any vigilance of police or government. Yet, if they are indeed satisfactory, how low are the civic standards of England, how fallen the ideals and beauties of Christianity! No man that has dreams can rest content because the English worker has reached his high level of regular work and rare intoxication."

One does not rest content; far from it. But the perpetual wonder is, not that "the lower classes are brutalised," but that this brutality is so tempered with generosity and sweetness. It is not their crime that surprises, but their virtue; not their turbulence or discontent, but their inexplicable acquiescence. And yet there are still people who sneer at "the mob," "the vulgar herd," "the great unwashed," as though principles, gentility, and soap were privileges in reward of merit, and not the accidental luck of money's chaotic distribution.



XI

THE WORTH OF A PENNY

A year or two ago, some wondered why strike had arisen out of strike; why the whole world of British labour had suddenly and all at once begun to heave restlessly as though with earthquake; why the streams of workpeople had in quick succession left the grooves along which they usually ran from childhood to the grave. "It is entirely ridiculous," said the Times, with the sneer of educated scorn, "it is entirely ridiculous to suppose that the whole industrial community has been patiently enduring real grievances which are simultaneously discovered to be intolerable." But to all outside the circle of the Times, the only ridiculous part of the situation was that the industrial community should patiently have endured their grievances so long.

That working people should simultaneously discover them to be intolerable, is nothing strange. It is all very well to lie in gaol, from which there seems no chance of escape. Treadmill, oakum, skilly, and the rest—one may as well go through with them quietly, for fear of something worse. But if word goes round that one or two prisoners have crept out of gaol, who would not burn to follow? Would not grievances then be simultaneously discovered to be intolerable? The seamen were but a feeble lot; their union was poor, their combination loose. They were cooped up within the walls of a great Employers' Federation, which laughed at their efforts to scramble out. Yet they escaped; the walls were found to be not so very high and strong; in one place or another they crumbled away, and the prisoners escaped. They gained what they wanted; their grievances were no longer intolerable. What working man or woman on hearing of it did not burn to follow, and did not feel the grievances of life harder to be tolerated than before? If that feeble lot could win their pennyworth of freedom, who might not expect deliverance? People talk of "strike fever" as though it were an infection; and so it is. It is the infection of a sudden hope.

After the sneer, the Times proceeded to attribute the strikes to a natural desire for idleness during the hot weather. Seldom has so base an accusation been brought against our country, even by her worst enemies. The country consists almost entirely of working people, the other classes being a nearly negligible fraction in point of numbers. The restlessness and discontent were felt far and wide among nearly all the working people, and to suggest that hundreds of thousands contemplated all the risks and miseries of stopping work because they wanted to be idle in the shade displayed the ignorance our educated classes often display in speaking of the poor. For I suppose the thing was too cruel for a joke.

Hardly less pitiable than such ignorance was the nonchalant excuse of those who pleaded: "We have our grievances too. We all want something that we haven't got. We should all like our incomes raised. But we don't go about striking and rioting." It reminds one of Lord Rosebery's contention, some fifteen years ago, that in point of pleasure all men are fairly equal, and the rich no happier than the poor. It sounds very pretty and philosophic, but those who know what poverty is know it to be absolutely untrue. If Lord Rosebery had ever tried poverty, he would have known it was untrue. All the working people know it, and they know that the grievances in which one can talk about income are never to be compared with the grievances which hang on the turn of a penny, or the chance of a shilling more or a shilling less per week.

To a man receiving L20 a week the difference of L2 one way or other is important, but it is not vital. If his income drops to L18 a week he and his family have just as much to eat and drink and wear; probably they live in the same house as before; the only change is a different place for the summer holiday, and, perhaps, the dress-circle instead of the stalls at a theatre. To a man with L200 a week the loss of L20 a week hardly makes any difference at all. He may grumble; he may drop a motor, or a yacht, but in his ordinary daily life he feels no change. To a docker making twenty shillings a week the difference of two shillings is not merely important, it is vital. The addition of it may mean three rooms for the family instead of two; it may mean nine shillings a week instead of seven to feed five mouths; it may mean meat twice a week, or half as much more bread and margarine than before, or a saving for second-hand clothes, and perhaps threepenn'orth of pleasure. In full work a docker at the old 7d. an hour would make more than twenty shillings a week; but the full weeks are rare, and about eighteen shillings would be all he could get on an average. The extra penny an hour for three days' work might bring him in about half a crown. To him and to his wife and children the difference was not merely important, it was vital.

Or take the case of the 15,000 women who struck for a rise in South London, and got it. We may put their average wage at nine shillings a week. In the accounts of a woman who is keeping a family of three, including herself, on that wage, a third of the money goes to the rent of one room. Two shillings of the rest go for light, fuel, and soda. That leaves four shillings a week to feed and clothe three people. Even Lord Rosebery could hardly maintain that the opportunities for pleasure on that amount were equal to his own. But the women jam-makers won an advance of two shillings by their strike; the box-makers from 1s. 3d. to three shillings; even the glue and size workers got a shilling rise. It was hardly up to Lord Rosebery's standard yet. It did not represent the Times paradise of sitting idle in the shade. But think what it means when week by week you have jealously watched nine solid pennies going in bread, nine more in meat, and another six in tea! Or think what such an addition means to those working-women from the North, who at the same time protested in Trafalgar Square against the compulsory insurance because the payment of threepence a week would lose them two of their dinners—twice the penn'orth of bread and ha'porth of cheese that they always enjoyed for dinner!

When I was assisting in an inquiry into wages and expenditure some years ago, one head of a family added as a note at the foot of his budget: "I see that we always spend more than we earn, but as we are never in debt I attribute this result to the thriftiness of my wife." Behind that sentence a history of grievances patiently endured is written, but only the Times would wonder that such grievances are discovered to be intolerable the moment a gleam of hope appears. When the Times, in the same article, went on to protest that if the railwaymen struck, they would be kicking not only against the Companies but "against the nature of things," I have no clear idea of the meaning. The nature of things is no doubt very terrible and strong, but for working people the most terrible and strongest part of it is poverty. All else is sophisticated; here is the thing itself. One remembers two sentences in Mr. Shaw's preface to Major Barbara:

"The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love, and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty."

Strikes are the children of Poverty by Hope. For a long time past the wealth of the country has rapidly increased. Gold has poured into it from South Africa, dividends from all the world; trade has boomed, great fortunes have been made; luxury has redoubled; the standard of living among the rich has risen high. The working people know all this; they can see it with their eyes, and they refuse to be satisfied with the rich man's blessing on the poor. What concerns them more than the increase in the quantity of gold is the natural result in the shrinkage of the penny. It is no good getting sevenpence an hour for your work if it does not buy so much as the "full, round orb of the docker's tanner," which Mr. John Burns saw rising over the dock gates more than twenty years ago, when he stood side by side with Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, and when Sir H. Llewellyn Smith and Mr. Vaughan Nash wrote the story of the contest. If prosperity has increased, so have prices, and what cost a tanner then costs eightpence now, or more than that. To keep pace with such a change is well worth a strike, since nothing but strikes can avail. So vital is the worth of a penny; so natural is it to kick against the nature of things, when their nature takes the form of steady poverty amid expanding wealth. That is the simultaneous discovery which raised the ridicule of the Times—that, and the further discovery that, in Carlyle's phrase, "the Empire of old Mammon is everywhere breaking up." The intangible walls that resisted so obstinately are fading away. The power of wealth is suspected. Strike after strike secures its triumphant penny, and no return of Peterloo, or baton charges on the Liverpool St. George's Hall, driving the silent crowd over the edge of its steep basis "as rapidly and continually as water down a steep rock," as was seen during the strikes of August 1911, can now check the infection of such a hope. It was an old saying of the men who won our political liberties that the redress of grievances must precede supply. The working people are standing now for a different phase of liberty, but their work is their supply, and having simultaneously discovered their grievances to be intolerable, they are making the same old use of the ancient precept.



XII

"FIX BAYONETS!"

"Oh, que j'aime le militaire!" sighed the old French song, no doubt with a touch of frivolity; but the sentiment moves us all. Sages have thought the army worth preserving for a dash of scarlet and a roll of the kettledrum; in every State procession it is the implements of death and the men of blood that we parade; and not to nursemaids only is the soldier irresistible. The glamour of romance hangs round him. Terrible with knife and spike and pellet he stalks through this puddle of a world, disdainful of drab mankind. Multitudes may toil at keeping alive, drudging through their scanty years for no hope but living and giving life; he shares with very few the function of inflicting death, and moves gaily clad and light of heart. "No doubt, some civilian occupations are very useful," said the author of an old drill-book; I think it was Lord Wolseley, and it was a large admission for any officer to have made. It was certainly Lord Wolseley who wrote in his Soldier's Pocket-Book that the soldier "must believe his duties are the noblest that fall to man's lot":

"He must be taught to despise all those of civil life. Soldiers, like missionaries, must be fanatics. An army thoroughly imbued with fanaticism can be killed, but never suffer disgrace; Napoleon, in speaking of it, said, 'Il en faut pour se faire tuer.'"

And not only to get himself killed, but to kill must the soldier be imbued with this fanaticism and self-glory. In the same spirit Mr. Kipling and Mr. Fletcher have told us in their History of England that there is only one better trade than being a soldier, and that is being a sailor:

"To serve King and country in the army is the second best profession for Englishmen of all classes; to serve in the navy, I suppose we all admit, is the best."

As we all admit it, certainly it does seem very hard on all classes that there should be anything else to do in the world besides soldiering and sailoring. It is most deplorable that, in Lord Wolseley's words, some civilian occupations are very useful; for, if they were not, we might all have a fine time playing at soldiers—real soldiers, with guns!—from a tumultuous cradle to a bloody grave. If only we could abolish the civilian and his ignoble toil, what a rollicking life we should all enjoy upon this earthly field of glory!

Such was the fond dream of many an innocent heart, when in August of 1911 we saw the soldiers distributed among the city stations or posted at peaceful junctions where suburb had met suburb for years in the morning, and parted at evening without a blow. There the sentry stood, let us say, at a gate of Euston station. There he stood, embodying glory, enjoying the second best profession for Englishmen of all classes. He was dressed in clean khaki and shiny boots. On his head he bore a huge dome of fluffy bearskin, just the thing for a fashionable muff; oppressive in the heat, no doubt, but imparting additional grandeur to his mien. There he stood, emblematic of splendour, and on each side of him were encamped distressful little families, grasping spades and buckets and seated on their corded luggage, unable to move because of the railway strike, while behind him flared a huge advertisement that said, "The Sea is Calling you." Along the kerbstone a few yards in front were ranged the children of the district, row upon row, uncombed, in rags, filthy from head to foot, but silent with joy and admiration as they gazed upon the face of war. For many a gentle girl and boy that Friday and Saturday were the days of all their lives—the days on which the pretty soldiers came.

Nor was it only the charm of nice clothes and personal appearance that attracted them. Horror added its tremulous delight. There the sentry stood, ready to kill people at a word. His right knee was slightly bent, and against his right foot he propped the long wooden instrument that he killed with. In little pouches round his belt he carried the pointed bits of metal that the instrument shoots out quicker than arrows. It was whispered that some of them were placed already inside the gun itself, and could be fired as fast as a teacher could count, and each would kill a man. And at the end of the gun gleamed a knife, about as long as a butcher's carving-knife. It would go through a fattish person's body as through butter, and the point would stick a little way through the clothes at his back. Down each side of the knife ran a groove to let the blood out, so that the man might die quicker. It was a pleasure to look at such a thing. It was better than watching the sheep and oxen driven into the Aldgate slaughter-houses. It was almost as good as the glimpse of the executioner driving up to Pentonville in his dog-cart the evening before an execution.

Few have given the Home Office credit for the amount of interesting and cheap amusement it then afforded by parcelling out the country among the military authorities. In a period of general lassitude and holiday, it supplied the populace with a spectacle more widely distributed than the Coronation, and equally encouraging to loyalty. For it is not only pleasure that the sight of the soldiers in their midst provides: it gives every man and woman and child an opportunity of realising the significance of uniforms. Here are soldiers, men sprung from the working classes, speaking the same language, and having the same thoughts; men who have been brought up in poor homes, have known hunger, and have nearly all joined the army because they were out of work. And now that they are dressed in a particular way, they stand there with guns and those beautiful gleaming knives, ready, at a word, to kill people—to kill their own class, their own friends and relations, if it so happens. The word of command from an officer is alone required, and they would do it. People talk about the reading of the Riot Act and the sounding of the bugles in warning before the shooting begins; but no such warning is necessary. Lord Mansfield laid it down in 1780 that the Riot Act was but "a step in terrorism and of gentleness." There is no need for such gentleness. At an officer's bare word, a man in uniform must shoot. And all for a shilling a day, with food and lodging! To the inexperienced intelligence of men and women, the thing seems incredible, and the country owes a debt of gratitude to the Home Office for showing the whole working population that it is true. Certainly, the soldiers themselves strongly object to being put to this use. Their Red Book of instructions insists that the primary duty of keeping order rests with the civil power. It lays it down that soldiers should never be required to act except in cases where the riot cannot reasonably be expected to be quelled without resorting to the risk of inflicting death. But the Home Office, in requiring soldiers to act throughout the whole country at points where no riot at all was reasonably expected, gave us all during that railway strike an object-lesson in the meaning of uniform more impressive than the pictures on a Board School wall. Mr. Brailsford has well said, "the discovery of tyrants is that, for a soldier's motive, a uniform will serve as well as an idea."

Not a century has passed since the days when, as the noblest mind of those times wrote, a million of hungry operative men rose all up, came all out into the streets, and—stood there. "Who shall compute," he asked:

"Who shall compute the waste and loss, the destruction of every sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by Peterloo alone! Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut down—the number of the slain and maimed is very countable; but the treasury of rage, burning, hidden or visible, in all hearts ever since, more or less perverting the effort and aim of all hearts ever since, is of unknown extent. 'How came ye among us, in your cruel armed blindness, ye unspeakable County Yeomanry, sabres flourishing, hoofs prancing, and slashed us down at your brute pleasure; deaf, blind to all our claims and woes and wrongs; of quick sight and sense to your own claims only! There lie poor, sallow, work-worn weavers, and complain no more now; women themselves are slashed and sabred; howling terror fills the air; and ye ride prosperous, very victorious—ye unspeakable: give us sabres too, and then come on a little!' Such are Peterloos."

The parallel, if not exact, is close enough. During popular movements in Germany and Russia, the party of freedom has sometimes hoped that the troops would come over to their side—would "fraternise," as the expression goes. The soldiers in those countries are even more closely connected with the people than our own, for about one in three of the young men pass into the army, whether they like it or not, and in two or three years return to ordinary life. Yet the hope of "fraternisation" has nearly always been in vain. Half a dozen here and there may stand out to defend their brothers and their homes. But the risk is too great, the bonds of uniform and habit too strong. Hitherto in England, we have jealously preserved our civil liberties from the dragooning of military districts, and the few Peterloos of our history, compared with the suppressions in other countries, prove how justified our jealousy has been. It may be true—we wish it were always true, that, as Carlyle says, "if your Woolwich grapeshot be but eclipsing Divine Justice, and the God's radiance itself gleam recognisable athwart such grapeshot, then, yes, then, is the time coming for fighting and attacking." We all wish that were always true, and that the people of every country would always act upon it. But for the moment, we are grateful for the reminder that, whether it eclipses Divine Justice or not, the grapeshot is still there, and that a man in uniform, at a word of command, will shoot his mother.



XIII

"OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US"

We have forgotten, else it would be impossible they should try to befool us. We have forgotten the terrible years when England lay cold and starving under the clutch of the landlords and their taxes on food. Terror is soon forgotten, for otherwise life could not endure. Not seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered. How many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no more of it, nor imagine its reality. It seems very long ago, like Waterloo or the coach to York—so long ago that we can almost hope it was not true.

And yet our fathers have told us of it. They and their fathers lived through it at its worst. Only six years have passed since Mrs. Cobden Unwin collected the evidence of aged labourers up and down the country, and issued their piteous memories in the book called The Hungry 'Forties. Ill-spelt, full of mistakes, the letters are stronger documents than the historian's eloquence. In every detail of misery, one letter agrees with the other. In one after another we read of the quartern loaf ranging from 7d. to 11-1/2d., and heavy, sticky, stringy bread at that; or we read of the bean porridge or grated potato that was their chief food; or, if they were rather better off, they told of oatmeal and a dash of red herring—one red herring among three people was thought a luxury. And then there was the tea—sixpence an ounce, and one ounce to last a family for a week, eked out with the scrapings of burnt crusts to give the water a colour. One man told how his parents went to eat raw snails in the fields. Another said the look of a butcher's shop was all the meat they ever got. "A ungry belly makes a man desprit," wrote one, but for poaching a pheasant the hungry man was imprisoned fourteen years. Seven shillings to nine shillings a week was the farm labourer's wage, and it took twenty-six shillings then to buy the food that seven would buy now. What a vivid and heartrending picture of cottage life under the landlord's tax is given in one old man's memory of his childish hunger and his mother's pitiful self-denial! "We was not allowed free speech," he writes, "so I would just pull mother's face when at meals, and then she would say, 'Boy, I can't eat this crust,' and O! the joy it would bring my little heart."

We have forgotten it. Wretched as is the daily life of a large part of our working people—the only people who really count in a country's prosperity—we can no longer realise what it was when wages were so low and food so dear that the struggle with starvation never ceased. But in those days there were men who saw and realised it. The poor die and leave no record. Their labour is consumed, their bodies rot unnamed, and their habitations are swept away. They do not tell their public secret, and at the most their existence is recorded in the registers of the parish, the workhouse, or the gaol. But from time to time men have arisen with the heart to see and the gift of speech, and in the years when the oppression of the landlords was at its worst a few such men arose. We do not listen to them now, for no one cares to hear of misery. And we do not listen, because most of them wrote in verse, and verse is not liked unless it tells of love or beauty or the sticky pathos of drawing-room songs. But it so happens that two of the first who saw and spoke also sang of love and beauty with a power and sweetness that compel us to listen still. And so, in turning their well-known pages, we suddenly come upon things called "The Masque of Anarchy" or "The Age of Bronze," and, with a moment's wonder what they are all about, we pass on to "The Sensitive Plant," or "When We Two Parted." As we pass, we may just glance at the verses and read:

"What is Freedom?—ye can tell That which slavery is, too well— For its very name has grown To an echo of your own. 'Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs....

'Tis to see your children weak With their mothers pine and peak, When the winter winds are bleak— They are dying whilst I speak."

Or, turning on, perhaps, in search of the "Ode to the West Wind," we casually notice the song beginning:

"Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay you low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save, From the cradle to the grave, Those ungrateful drones who would Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?"

And so to the conclusion:

"With plough and spade, and hoe and loom, Trace your grave, and build your tomb, And weave your winding-sheet, till fair England be your sepulchre."