CHAPTER V
PRISONERS
I
THE surface view of society is always satisfactory. You may walk to-day through the streets of a Russian city, and watch the people at their business and their pleasure, with no revelation of the unseen hunger for change which is tearing at the heart of it. You may traverse England from north to south and east to west, admiring the beauty of its garden landscape, the refined kindly life of its country houses, the opulence and contentment of its middle class, the evidence everywhere of security and repose. Only at intervals, and through challenges which (after all) are easily forgotten, is there thrust before the attention of the observer some manifestation of the life of the underworld. The sea shines and sparkles in the sunshine beneath an unclouded sky. Why excite disquietude concerning the twisted, distorted life which lives and grows and dies in the darkness of the unplumbed deep?
To investigate the life there, it is no longer necessary to follow the romantic novelist or even the private statistician. All these may be under the charge of sensationalism, of writing to a purpose. They excite impatience amongst outside critics, who are convinced that the poor could all be prosperous if they would only work industriously, exercise thought, and avoid alcoholic refreshment. It would be well, therefore, to keep to the safe sobriety of official publications, to all those series of Commissions, Committees, Reports, and Inquiries which, outwardly forbidding, are found on examination to be filled with a rich human interest. Any one familiar with the reports of the Government Inspectors appointed to control the forces of greed and of degeneration in the obscurer regions of modern life, need never be accused of hysteria if he finds the thing henceforth a perpetual companion.
In the annual Reports of the Factory Inspectors, for example, he can see the result of occasional complaints, of sporadic surprise visits; with imagination he can extend these revelations over widening areas of submerged life. These summaries appear as the letting down of dredges into the depth and the bringing to light of the things which exist far below the surface. They are records of the daily and hourly warfare of the embodied conscience of the community against human fear and human greed. That conscience, working through a great machinery of protected law, is endeavouring to guard the men and women and children of the nation against the more outrageous forms of destruction: against the readiness with which the Fear of Destitution is pressing them into all forms of distorted, intolerable, poisonous pursuits. The laws are passed, the inspectors appointed, then the nation turns to other interests in confidence that all is well. Such confidence is based upon an altogether inadequate estimate of the two strongest impulses in the life of man. Avarice can usually overcome terror. Fear acting against greed is occasionally triumphant. But when the two are operating in unison, the result is as the letting out of water. In every trade there are those who will supplant their neighbours by the cheapening of the cost, the lengthening of hours, the avoidance of appliances. In every city there is the unlimited supply of disorganised women’s and children’s labour, which sees before it no alternative but of a quick or of a prolonged decay. The will to live still resists all efforts to render human desire impossible. The apathy of the East, accumulated through centuries of oppression, has not yet infected the industrial life of the West. So the unequal strife continues, between the attempt to raise these broken people into some semblance of rational and humane existence, and the pressure which drives them to choke themselves with dust, and poison themselves with noxious vapour, and ravage into collapse and ruin the bodies and souls of women and children.
They never complain until things have become intolerable. The anonymous complaints show the same percentage of justification as the signed. They work in unventilated workrooms. They are stinted of holidays. They are compelled to work overtime. They endure accident and disease. They are fined and cheated in innumerable ways. Their life is often confined to a mere routine of work and sleep. Yet they endure; and even at the heart of foul and impossible conditions retain always some rags of decency and honour. Some break loose from the accepted drudgery for a brief period of pleasure and idleness; to be found afterwards in the silent, stern discipline of the Rescue Home; where, says a Report, “the extreme youth of many of the inmates is a very distressing feature of many of the homes, and it is grievous that the sins of others should be so heavily visited upon these poor children, to whom the simple natural joys of home life are now denied.” Here austere virtue encourages “in some of the Scotch institutions,” where the hours of work are from eight to seven, “a poor dietary,” although “many of the inmates were young undeveloped girls.” But most are still resisting; as in the non-penitential laundries where “as a rule complaints are amply justified,” although “the workers still find it very difficult to summon up courage enough to speak the truth as to irregularities, from fear of the loss of employment, and consequent shortage of the necessities of life”; or in the “millinery workshop, with a large shop attached, in North London,” which ingeniously evades the factory law by combining operations of millinery apprentice with that of shop assistant, and “on my visiting one of the mothers of the girls she told me her young daughter still arrived home worn-out and crying with exhaustion”; or in the outworker’s home in the City of London, where a “young girl” is “making and elaborately trimming babies’ white silk bonnets beneath a ceiling black as ink, and walls with black and different coloured patches, looking as if some madman had found a pastime in scratching them,” and the girl spares “½d. for potash, and to the best of her ability washed and scraped the vermin from the walls.” Noting how clean and tidy she is in her own person, says the inspector, “I am not surprised to see the shudder with which she speaks of the struggle with dirt and filth.”
They die like flies directly they are born. The tender-hearted may perhaps rejoice in this extravagant mortality. To some the waste of it will appear most apparent. In the Pottery Towns, for example, the infantile mortality is well up to 200 in the 1000: due, says the report, “to the employment of married women in the earthenware and china works.” A regular slaughter of innocents every year in Longton, says the Medical Officer of Health, “is due to this and premature births.” But the waste of death is the least element in this extravagance. “The damage done,” says another Medical Officer, “cannot entirely be measured by mortality figures, for these take no account of the impaired vitality of the infants who manage to survive to swell the ranks of the degenerate.” Stunted, inefficient, overworked, underfed, they struggle towards maturity. Quaint and grotesque occupations are found for them; as for the “forty little girls, twenty-one of whom were half-timers,” who are found licking adhesive labels by the mouth at the rate of thirty gross a day, “whose tongues had the polished tip characteristic of label lickers, and the rest of the tongue coated with brown gum.” Or there are the girls who carry heavy wedges of clay and boxes of scrap (forbidden to such labour by the French Factory Laws of fourteen years ago); as in the “complaint awaiting investigation” from a mother of her daughter who has outgrown her strength, and is now ill with what she believes is consumption; “who when working complained much of pain in the shoulder on which she carried the clay and scrap, and of pain in the collar bone on the same side.” Or the children in the Nottingham lace trade, whose eyesight is impaired or destroyed by the double work of school and employment; and the half-time school at Dundee, where “narrow-chested children sit on backless benches”; or the half-timers at Belfast, “undersized, round-shouldered, delicate in appearance,” where the head teacher testifies, “these children seem always tired; during the recreation period they prefer sitting down in the playground to running about, and in this matter they are especially noticeable in comparison with the children who do not work.” They struggle towards maturity, unorganised, unprotected; fined in one dressmaking workshop in West London in fines which were supposed to be sent to the Fresh Air Fund—a statement which, says the inspector, “had no foundation in fact”; or “verbally promised 2s. 6d.” for making a sample silk blouse, for which “when Saturday came, the occupier, instead of giving the agreed price, refused to pay more 1s. 3d.” Most of them will die under thirty, is the testimony of the teacher concerning her half-time pupils; but if they live it out, in old age they will be once more dragged in by fear and bewilderment to compete against the coming generations, and make the life of those coming generations more difficult to endure.
“God help the poor!” concludes one half-unintelligible complaint of swindling deductions, where, on investigation, “the workers were at first terrified to give me information,” says the inspector, “and I was met with entirely false statements.” “God help the poor!” is written over all this haunting and dolorous record. It is the record of prisoners: sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis.[9]
Gentility, again, is desirable. So is the supervision of the morals of young men and women. Both are enjoyed—in abundance it would seem—by the shop assistants, half a million of whom “live-in,” or are affected by the living-in system. Some twenty thousand of them, organised in a Trades Union, are endeavouring to climb into citizenship: with less moral supervision it may be, but with the individual development that comes from self-ordered life and some suggestion of freedom. The necessity for the receipt of wages of something like a pound a week, if these people are to choose their own lodgings and dwell at ease, is a necessity which offers a considerable barrier to reform. And with the prospect of financial disability laid upon them if the present system is abolished, there is small wonder that a number of employers are enthusiastic over its advantages. The “discontented” Unionists—discontented in the opinion of many of their employers, like the dog who went mad in Goldsmith’s elegy in order “to gain some private ends”—keep up the agitation bravely. On occasional bank holidays, when their less vigorous brethren are enjoying their four days a year of statutory idleness in the open air, they suddenly appear like fish attaining sunshine from deep waters: hold their “conferences,” pass their resolutions, then vanish again into the neat, obsequious serviceable men and women who attend to the whims of customers and encourage their tentative efforts towards purchase. Meetings of shop assistants are held in the big cities after darkness has fallen. A crowded company of unknown persons assembles to pass resolutions against “living-in” or in favour of short hours, then vanishes again, into the barracks or pleasant commercial “hotels” in which they reside. Evidence is obtained with difficulty even when a Government consents to interfere, and appoints a Commission to investigate. “Miss X——” does not wish to give her name. “If my name is published I get the swap,” she says, “and I have to go at a minute’s notice; and my employer would not mind spoiling my reference. He does not know that I have come here to-day.” “I was summoned to come yesterday,” says Mr. Y—— wearily, “and I asked for a day off; but I suppose I shall be dismissed when I go back for taking two days, so that I do not suppose it will matter a great deal whether my name appears or not.” There are plenty of specific cases of ill-treatment and niggardly treatment against which no inspection can guard: of poor food and monotonous food, overcrowding in bedroom, squalor of accommodation, lack of suitable sanitary and washing arrangements, and the like. But the emphasis of those who resist is not upon specific complaints. It is directed against a general system which herds men and women together, all of one class and one occupation, in unnatural contiguity, and leave them there, under regulations rather humiliating to adult persons, to make the best of life seen through distorted glasses, and from the inside of a regulated home. There are testimonies, indeed, of the excellence of the best, in perpetual care for the welfare of the employees. It is perhaps a misfortune that the comfort and kindliness of these best should throw an ægis of justification over a system which is the worst, and even in the average, stands on so many counts condemned.
“Living-in,” declares the Report, in certain retail trades, is generally made a condition of employment, either express or implied. The board and lodging accommodation is often inferior and inadequate. Sleeping and other accommodation is frequently bad. On the moral side the system has often not only no advantage, but is actually harmful. The daily rush from counter to dining-room and back, the unappetising food, the wearying sameness of the menu, the insufficiency of the food, often supplemented by “extras” sold by the firm, like the “tuck shop” system of the English public school, are all described by actual sufferers, in experience which seems to have stepped clean out of the pages of Kipps or Vivian. Five beds “invested with bugs in one room,” an attic in which three men sleep “that in the heat of summer smelt like a fowl-house,” beds with four clean sheets in six months, rooms with rats plentiful, bedrooms which open into corridors, the light being obtainable through a pane of glass in the wooden partitions—these and other similar experiences testify to the price which often has to be paid for the “moral supervision” which the young shopman or shop girl enjoys. The Report declares that in a number of cases at least this claim of moral supervision is cant—the old cant of cheapness; the cant in its revived form of the “moral supervision” of the workhouse children which were bought up in batches for the factories eighty years ago. An employer “would place no obstacle in the way of his male assistants marrying,” is the confession of one, “though,” he adds, “he certainly does not like his assistants to marry on an inadequate wage.” “Male and female created He them,” says Mr. Lewisham’s friend in a well-known novel, “which was d—d rough luck on assistant masters.” It would seem to be rough luck also on shop assistants who have the bad taste to prefer matrimony to moral guidance.
Such well-known employers like Mr. Debenham and Mr. Derry in London, who have changed from the living-in to the natural system, brush all this cant and vapour away with a healthy breath of fresh air. “The character of some employers,” says the latter, “I would not trust from their own housekeepers. I do not think that drapers are worse than any other commercial men, but all commercial men are the same.” He sees “no difficulty in finding proper apartments outside,” with people “in whom we should have every confidence to put our own children.” “I am quite out of touch with excuses which have been made by employers at conferences I have been at, with regard to the moral side of the question. I think it is sheer nonsense.”
The system is sometimes enforced by a system of “fines”: the substitute, in a humanitarian age, for more drastic disciplinary measures of the older servitudes. Fines for smoking or reading in bedrooms, fines for sleeping out without permission or for arriving after locking-up time, fines for taking supper away, for burning candles after the gas is turned out, for heating water on the gas, exhibit the method by which adjustment has to be effected and the smoothness of the communal existence maintained. “The system,” says Miss Bonfield, “robs the assistant, whether men or women, of the sense of personal responsibility which is developed by ordering and controlling one’s own life. The herding together of large numbers of either sex, restricted as to the most ordinary intercourse with the opposite sex, creates an unnatural and vicious atmosphere which is morally dangerous to both men and women.” She repudiates the idea that there is “any kind of home life, any kind of home consideration”—at least in her personal experience. The dinner-hour she found “the most disagreeable interval of the day.” “In a long business experience I have never yet had a properly made cup of tea.” “The sitting-room of a business house is usually a most dreary place, very much like the waiting-room of a railway station.” In many shops the hours worked are seventy per week: the atmosphere in one experience “particularly vitiated, and the assistants chronically overtired.” The work is peculiarly stimulating to nervous strain: fretful customers, sometimes friendly, sometimes bullying, often merely tiresome—for hour after hour of the day. Even when the catering is excellent, is another experience, the girls “have no appetite for food.” “What they need is fresh air and more outdoor exercise. The factory girl who eats her unscientific meal in the street, does so with a greater relish and with more profit to health than does her sister of the shop extract from the choice meals eaten in the atmosphere of the shop dining-room.” “I have frequently gone to my dinner feeling faint for want of food, and on entering the dining-room have been nauseated to such an extent as to be unable to eat anything except dry bread.” Compensations appear, however, in some cases to exist. In the report of one establishment—only men living-in—after “washing accommodation inadequate, food badly cooked, table service not clean, men’s sitting-room, three chairs and broken table for the use of twenty men,” it is encouraging to read that “every apprentice is required to attend a place of worship at least once on a Sunday.” So is fostered the traditional religion of the people. There is a suggestion that the feverish competition in retail trade, and the general willingness to obtain a maximum of profit, has even here produced a change in spirit and temper. “I have been able to watch the change,” says Miss Bonfield, “since first I went into the distributing trade. The old system of trying to build up an establishment on the value of your goods, and on giving real work for money, has been steadily changing, and the assistant now who is considered the smartest assistant is the one who can sell to customers worthless goods, goods that yield a very large profit, goods that look fairly showy on the surface but are not really wearable, and are not satisfactory in other ways.” From both sides—men and women—comes personal testimony to an “immorality of the mind” which is “worse than immorality of the body”—an “over-sexed” condition due to the herding together of young men or young women of a certain age in an atmosphere of nerve stimulation and little physical exercise and limited external interests. One male assistant protests against “the daily rush from counter to dining-room and back to counter without even a breath of fresh air. Often the food provided is unappetising, cooked and served very roughly, served in dining-rooms situated in the basement, artificially lighted and without proper ventilation.” “The sameness of the menu becomes positively wearying.” “In a large number of cases the food provided is insufficient for the physical need of the employee.” Mr. Tilley, once a shop assistant in the town, now a draper on his own account in a small way in the country, roundly asserts that “the good conditions are the exception, bad conditions the rule.” “Celibacy is a condition of employment. Here we are faced by the greatest of the many evils which arise from this,” as he calls it, “pernicious system.” “It is absolutely essential,” is his summary, “for the physical and moral welfare of the assistants that ‘living-in’ should be abolished.” The old order of things has changed. The personal element between employer and employee is steadily vanishing. And the assistant of to-day finds himself bound and fettered with this legacy of feudal days which his employer is often using for all it is worth to exploit the labour of the employees in this and kindred trades. The emancipation of the shop workers of this country can never come until they are rid of this “living-in” system, is the announcement which is robbing them of freedom of action, individuality of character, and the “political and social rights of an Englishman.”[10]
“The political and social rights of an Englishman.” We are fortunate in the possession of a man of genius who has also had personal experience of this particular life, and has left in literature a sharp-cut picture of the “political and social rights” interpreted into terms of daily experience. “‘By Jove,’ said Buggins, ‘it won’t do to give these here Blacks votes.’ ‘No fear,’ said Kipps. ‘They’re different altogether,’ said Buggins. ‘They ’aven’t the sound sense of Englishmen, and they ’aven’t the character. There’s a sort of tricky dishonesty about ’em.... They’re too timid to be honest. Too slavish. They aren’t used to being free, like we are; and if you gave ’em freedom, they wouldn’t make a proper use of it. Now we—Oh, damn!’ For the gas had suddenly gone out, and Buggins had the whole column of Society Club Chat still to read.”
“What becomes of the good shop assistant when he grows old?” is a question almost as difficult to answer as the question, “What becomes of good Americans when they die?” The Government Committee could obtain no certain evidence. “I cannot say what does become of them. Some start in business on their own account; but now that the conditions are so changed, that is very difficult. They leave the drapery trade. Some get inferior situations. You may find old drapers’ assistants driving cabs to-day.” In South Wales, says one, “amongst the miners, I myself have come across an enormous number of old shop assistants.” The majority, like the majority of assistant masters in a slightly more exalted station of life, seem to slide out into all sorts of bypaths—in the one Empire building, tomato growing, or running preparatory schools whose competition and fate seems generally similar to that of the small retail drapery stores; in the other, “insurance agents, booksellers, and things of that kind.” But the work is genteel; sharply distinguished from that of the artisan: it is supposed to be especially suitable to boys and girls of delicate physique: and there are many who, from the beginning, would wish no otherwise than to be shepherded, tended, taken in and provided for, without the pains and risks of outside adventure. “We’re in a blessed drainpipe,” says Mr. Minton to Kipps cheerfully, “and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die.” Only to a percentage, at first, and then in effort, which every year diminishes, does the conviction come, as to “Kipps” in the night watches, when “all others in the dormitory are asleep and snoring,” that “the great stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape.” “Night after night he would resolve to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse, or drown himself, and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in fear of a sixpenny fine.”[11]
And the alternatives—especially for the women—are not all so promising that they can afford lightly to forego the advantage here offered of assured food and shelter. Far below is a vision of pitiful poverty, into which, at any time, any unfortunate worker may be precipitated; rarely, henceforth, ever to rise into the clear air of intelligible life. Somewhere festering at the basis, round the foundations of the great mansion of England’s economic supremacy, are to be discovered the workers of the “Sweated Trades.” At intervals of ten, fifteen, or twenty years the dredger is let down, to scrape up samples of the material of the ocean floor: in Royal Commissions, Committees of the House of Commons, or the House of Lords. It is always the same there, whatever tides and tempests trouble the surface far above: a settled mass of congested poverty shivering through life upon the margin below which life ceases to endure. The sensational novelist utters his study in fiction, the cause and the remedy; the public conscience is stirred by the exhibitions of “sweated” goods and “sweated” women: after a time distraction intervenes, a war, a colonial football or cricket tour, ecclesiastical dispute over posture of praying, or colour of garment. The sweated workers, for one moment indecently revealed in the sunshine, return again to the welcome obscurity of their twilight world. A recent House of Commons Committee has once more raked over the bottom; examined, with blinking eyes, the strange things found there; reported in favour of Government action. The evidence is of the monotonous simplicity familiar to all similar investigations. “My attention,” says Mr. Holmes, the police court missionary, “was drawn to the home workers first about ten years ago. I met two or three widows at the police court, charged with attempted suicide, and I naturally took interest in them. I visited their homes, and became aware of the conditions under which they lived; the prices paid for their work, the hours they generally worked, the amount of rent they paid, the kind of food they ate, and everything of that description. On one occasion I took three widows for a holiday. Each of them had attempted suicide, and was broken down in health of mind and body through hard work and poor food. The story of their lives, their manner, their appearance, and their broken spirit was a revelation.” The broken spirit, indeed, so characteristic of those who, from the beginning, have enlisted in the service of fourteen hours’ work a day, does not appear entirely to have brought the felicity which—in orthodox views—accompanies a docile and grateful working-class population. Nor does the complete absence of Trades Unions—those “cruel organisations”—appear to have effected that “economic liberty” which the supporters of “Free Labour” endeavour to obtain by the smashing of these instruments of tyranny. “My experience of ten years is this,” says Mr. Holmes, “that I have found them to be the most industrious, sober, and honest class of the community that it has been my lot ever to meet with; in fact, their goodness appals me.” Here, indeed, are the examples, at length realised in the flesh, of the workings of the “laws” of the older political economy: the “iron law of wages” driving, through the frantic competition for employment by the workers against each other, those wages down to the minimum of existence. “I know one widow,” is the testimony, “who is working, and has done nothing else than work, at these little things at her own home in Bethnal Green for forty years, and her payment for that work now is practically the same as it was at the beginning of that period. Her fingers have got stiffer, and she cannot earn quite so much now.” “It is the apathy of the people”—after forty years of it—one witness complains, “engaged in all these things, and their helplessness which forms the greatest obstacle to their advancement.” These apathetic classes, indeed, appear largely as those for whom petitions are presented in the Christian Church for special and peculiar mercies—“women labouring with child; sick persons; young children.” And the reply to the petition is this Home work, falling as the gentle dew from heaven upon the place beneath, and blessing him that gives and him that takes: obtained “by sending boy or girl to the city for the stuff with a more or less dilapidated, cast-off perambulator, which they push home full up with shirts or mantles or skirts, which are taken back to the warehouse when finished.” The actual workers appear before the Committee in kindly anonymity, having little violence of protest against Providence, the employers, or themselves. The tendency of payments, they are compelled to confess on examination, have steadily gone down; that is because “women are always applying for work, and they have no work to give them; and therefore they cut the prices down, because the women go and beg for work.” The “expenses” of each of two workers sharing a room, “without the rent,” are one shilling and threepence a week. “Do you have a fire in this room?” is asked. “No,” is the reply; “we light a lamp to warm ourselves.” The difficulty of the Committee, in examination of wages budgets, was to find any margin at all for food and firing; a difficulty which the witnesses were unable to remove. Prices, confesses one, “have come down ever so much; they have come down in the last four years so that I cannot keep myself now.” “It is almost a mystery,” is the challenge to another, “how you manage to live at all.” Yet others do well, earning (in one case) ten shillings a week—for work between “fifteen and sixteen hours a day”—sometimes up at six o’clock, and “I work till ten at night.” These, however, are the limited hours of a “very quick” worker. “Can you suggest anything,” is the forlorn inquiry to one of them, “that anybody could do for you which would induce your master, or perhaps compel your master, to give you a fairer or a larger wage?” “If he would only time an article,” is the doubtful reply; “state how long the article would take to make, and give you a certain wage of so much an hour, it would be fair, if it was only a living wage; we only want to live.”
This “want to live” is the endurance, not of the “unemployables,” but of those who are engaged night and day in an insect-like activity: uncomplaining, with an Eastern endurance, in the dark. Investigation amongst the “sample” witnesses who appeared before the Committee exhibited no contradiction of their veracity. “I wanted to say about the girl C——,” says the investigator, “whose father is out of work, that her home was visited, and that practically everything in it has been pawned: they are owing money, of course, and are expecting the bailiffs in, so that she is at a crisis in her affairs. The girl C—— has hardly any clothes, and when we found her she was almost starving. She is really in a very bad position. She has her old father, who hawks her goods sometimes in the evening, and that is how she makes some extra money.” Of another G——. “I cannot find out myself,” is the testimony, “how she can subsist at all.” “How she manages to support herself and her child is an ‘absolute mystery.’” “She looks rather starved herself at present.” Even where some kind of organisation exists, it is found almost impossible to arouse these industrious persons to any visions or hopes of permanent betterment. “In going about among them,” says one witness, concerning the Nottingham lace makers, “I have found that the first difficulty you had to overcome was the abject apathy that existed among them. You see they are most of them, very many of them, working for the next meal, and nothing you say about the meal for to-morrow affects them: they are not concerned about that. After you have aroused some interest in them, you have also to arouse some sort of courage.”[12]
So, while the white hotels rise on all the shores of England, and the apparatus of pleasure is developing into ever new and ingenious forms of entertainment, continues through the nights and days the grey struggle of the Abyss. It is the indomitable will to live, resisting always that press of circumstance which would squeeze out the life of the disinherited, and leave a solitude where once was industry and action. The question how long such will survive, in the depths, the absence of all that life should mean, is as unanswerable as the question how long the will to live will survive the satiety at the summit which comes from superfluity of pleasure. For a society fissured into an unnatural plentitude on the one hand finds as its inevitable consummation a society fissured into an unnatural privation on the other. Here is the “price of prosperity” as interpreted at the dim foundations of the social order; a menace to the future, less in the fury of its revolt than through the infection of its despair.
II
So appears—at the base—the regular hive of industry: the life of those who, uncomplaining, maintain the work of the world. This fixity of tenure in a house which may be termed a home is the ideal of the Social Reformer. To such a goal of human endeavour he would always direct the errant impulses of those who fail to appreciate its full satisfactions: who shirk with indifference, who revolt in open rebellion against the accepted standards of civilisation. These latter form no negligible company. They include women who, uncheered by the remuneration of the factory girl or the domestic servant, have embraced unrecognised careers and professions offering more immediate monetary returns, if less guaranteed security of livelihood. They include a prison population of habitual thieves and outcasts who have definitely declared war against their neighbours, and whose life consists of adventure varied by long periods of compulsory silence. They include the “unemployable,” the vagrants, the people born tired and the people who have grown tired; the army of broken persons, weak in body or in mind, which choke up the workhouses and asylums: an aggregation of human failure which represents a “bye-product” of the industrial organisation whose worth in the market has not yet been adequately demonstrated.
The Tramp Life, the underside of the world, generally appears in writing in exaggerated sunshine or gloom. Some who have lived through it—notably Mr. Bart Kennedy and Mr. W. H. Davies—have written sincere and truthful reminiscences of adventure in England and America. They set themselves, in union with a great company, to “cheat Admetus”: to live on the industrial populations, just as the idle rich live on the industrial populations, without giving back adequate return. They perform this feat, partly by begging, partly by stealing, partly by grudging spells of special and not unenjoyable labour highly paid at certain seasons of the year—such as fruit-picking, cotton-gathering, clam-fishing, and the like. When they grow tired of the open road, they take to the railway, accepting free passage hidden in the goods van or riding upon the front of the engine. They have their experiences, also, of society’s reprisals, in occasional spells of imprisonment, not altogether disagreeable in the more humane cities of America. The general impression conveyed is of a life of adventure and considerable physical satisfactions, of health in the open air, of a variegated and coloured experience along the great ways of the world which is denied to the assiduous and driven labourer of machine and factory. That is one side of the picture. The other is given by Government reports and personal investigations by such observers as Miss Higgs and Mr. Ensor, of the casual ward, the common lodging-house, and all the race who have eluded or been squeezed out of the meshes of regular toil. And here there is impression of degradation and permanent discomfort, dirt, squalor, and misery, a shambling, discouraged rabble of creatures that once were men and women. Those who have scrutinised the wreckage of humanity which collects in the so-called “able-bodied” workhouses, or can be seen drawn up on cold nights in ragged regiments on the Embankment waiting for the midnight dole of soup, will be more inclined to believe in the degradation than in the adventure. Yet the few persons who have gone forth without prejudice to know these despised and broken persons—tramps, criminals, prostitutes, unemployed, unemployable—who wander through the darkened ways of the City, have no such experience of universal collapse to record. Those who come as learners rather than teachers—with a sense of humour, of friendliness, an ultimate reverence for anything human, above all, with acceptance rather than with criticism—are perpetually astonished at the resistance which humanity is able to present to the most calamitous of outward circumstance.
The revelation of the authentic witnesses—those in whom this queer universe has become articulate—is of a complete overturning of the accepted standards. In Slavery, Mr. Kennedy has traced the whole process of escape: from upbringing in a cellar dwelling at Manchester, through revolt against the tyranny of monotonous toil, to an enlisting in a kind of buccaneering expedition against all the world. It is the normal civilised universe seen (as it were) from the reverse side in which the grey has become blue and the blue grey. The inhabitants are at war upon the working world; using its charity and its clumsy legislation in order to suck from that world no small advantage. They have eluded, like the inheriting wealthy, the obligations of labour; like the inheriting wealthy they possess their own exacting moral codes, differing from the moral codes of working humanity, which supports them, if not with equanimity, at least with fortitude. Mr. W. H. Davies, in his Autobiography of a Super-tramp, offers a similar and more amazing life history. “I was born thirty-five years ago, in a public-house called the Church House, in the town of N——,” is the commencement of a story not altogether unworthy of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Without his sincere, if somewhat intrusive, moral determinations, this voyager is also living amongst the aborigines on the desert island of this “floating, transitory world.” In the final chapter he sums up the philosophical advice which he would bequeath to similar sojourners. The most important dogma of it is “contained in the simple words: ‘Never live in a house next door to your landlord or landlady’; which,” he declares, “deserves to become a proverb.” “Many people might not consider this warning necessary,” he concludes, “but the hint may be useful to poor travellers like myself, who, sick of wandering, would settle down to the peace and quiet of after days.”
It is the normal world, in England and America, turned inside out, seen from the other side of Looking Glass country. From this side are examined the benevolence of the rich and the benevolence of the poor, the Salvation Army shelter, the common gaol, the Charity Organisation Society, the various efforts of Society to protect itself against the locust and the caterpillar. The locust, it must be confessed, especially in new countries, generally has the best of it. The artless and somewhat clumsy organisations of State and city and private persons spread their simple traps of cheese or delicacies for the mouse. The mouse annexes the cheese and leaves the trap scatheless. Especially is this true in America, where wealth, easily and carelessly heaped together, is as easily and carelessly scattered. Many of Mr. Davies’ confessions of American begging experiences are almost incredible in their suggestion of opulence. An hour or two in streets of modest comfort will yield, to the experienced workman, a profusion of good things—money, clothes, rich and pleasant food. Free rides by “beating” the various trains, transformation with changing climate of summer and winter from the north to the south, occasional interludes in local gaols, where the officials, being paid by the number of their captives, offer increasing attractions to those who will condescend to accept such hospitalities, yield a healthful and variable existence of adventure and repose. The companions of the road offer no despicable advantages. There is, indeed, no “honour among thieves”; they rob each other with effrontery, and make no assertion of chivalry or fine and decent living. But they are generous in their sharing of the booty with their companions, and possess a ready sociability which leads them to partnerships and associations of some enduring value. The two unforgivable crimes are work and thrift. Effort and Accumulation—the gods of the working world—have become idols to be trampled on. Yet, in the underworld, the appeal to compassion is still irresistible. The cattlemen who bring the living food of England across the Atlantic to Liverpool “are recognised as the scum of America, a wild, lawless class of people, on whom,” says Mr. Davies, “the scum of Europe unscrupulously impose.” Mr. Davies had frequently made the journey, and tells horrible tales of the indifferent cruelty to the beasts. Habitually the cattlemen arrive, fresh from such degrading experience, upon a city of poverty. Habitually they part with their scanty earnings in gifts to that poverty when they arrive. “Having kind hearts, they are soon rendered penniless by the importunities of beggars.” “These wild but kind-hearted men,” is the testimony, “grown exceedingly proud by a comparison of the comfortable homes of America with these scenes of extreme poverty in Liverpool and other large seaports, give and give of their few shillings, until they are themselves reduced to the utmost want.”
In America, under the expert advice of “Brum,” the young novice learnt the valuable secrets of the trade. On entering any town, look out for a church steeple with a cross, which denotes a Catholic church and therefore a Catholic community. “If I fail in that portion of the town I shall certainly not succeed elsewhere.” Fat women are the best to beg from. “How can you expect these skinny creatures to sympathise with another,” is the unanswerable argument, “when they half-starve their own bodies?” In begging in England, avoid every town that has not either a mill, a factory, or a brewery. But in America the gold mines are the watering-places and haunts of the idle rich: perhaps because they recognise natural allies in the other class of Anarchist, perhaps because they satisfy a slumbering responsibility and compassion in a careless scattering of uncalculated charity. Amongst the New York watering-places “the people catered for us as though we were the only tramps in the whole world, and as if they considered it providential that we should call at their houses for assistance.” In such providential plenty the standards are well maintained: otherwise this inverted world might right itself and become normal once again. The travellers are received with disfavour by a stranger, who later is smitten with remorse. “Excuse me, boys, for not giving you a more hearty welcome,” is the apology; “but really, I thought you were working men, but I see you are true beggars.” In a cottage an aged labourer, who had amassed a modest fortune after a life of toil, hangs on the wall the shovel which he had used in early days. To these wanderers the vision is as distasteful as an image of a saint to a Covenanting assembly: a symbol of false gods.
Here is the voice of the Tramp as he appears to himself: full of complacency as he looks back upon his past successes: naked before his audience, and entirely unashamed. In the revelation of the submerged as they appear to others—to those friends of theirs who possess sympathy and humour and a wide acceptance—this subterranean existence appears also full of excellent things: comradeship, kindliness, laughter, and tears. Such vivid and truthful writing as that of Mr. Neil Lyons in Arthurs throws no unfriendly light upon the waste places of the city. He has taken for the scene of his inquiry a London coffee-stall “somewhere between Brixton and the obelisk in South London.” “This is an ambiguous direction,” he declares. “But then we night-seekers are jealous of our ill-fame, and the fear of the Oxford movement is strong upon us.” Round this coffee-stall, attracted like moths to a candle, gather in the heart of the sleeping city those to whom sleep is denied. Night-workers seeking refreshment mingled here with women of the streets; an occasional drunken sailor, a thief making a rendezvous with a thief, tramps and wastrels, foregather for a moment within the circle of light before drifting out into the darkness again. There are some who are regular customers, who develop a kind of comradeship, exchanging tales of misfortune; and from these the author weaves a tragic or pitiful or romantic story of human lives. For all the permanent elements of romance are in this underworld, only with the values distorted and modified. Here, also, are sudden vicissitudes of fortune, passionate human affections, love of woman and of child, fear of violence and of death. It is life lived close to the margin, in perpetual familiarity with the reality of common things; darkness and cold, hunger and despair. It is life lived, that is to say, as perhaps the majority of mankind are living it to-day; never so far removed from the possibility of privation and of danger as to be able to settle down tranquil in a universe of security. The common impression, amongst those who do not dwell in such a universe, is that existence under such conditions must reel back into savagery or apathy—into a kind of numbness before all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or into the fierce fight for existence upon the sinking ship or in the crumbling earthquake city. But experience is quite otherwise. Comradeship, desire, human affection, kindliness, and pity, all here survive amongst men so shabby and twisted as to appear scarcely human, and women with painted faces not pleasant to look upon. Nay more, a certain attitude of cheeriness and enjoyment seems to be bred out of the very extremity of fortune. There is a rich humour in all Mr. Lyons’s sketches, for much of which, indeed, the onlooker and recorder may be responsible, but some of which is native to the original character. Sometimes it assumes the form of verbal exaggeration and comments in which all working-class London is so ready, the most reputable product of the industrial metropolis. Sometimes it finds satisfaction in the jollity excited by drink, as in the experience of the drunken sailor who uplifts his voice in bloodthirsty ballads. Sometimes it has the peculiar reckless insolence of the defiance, out of extremity, of all time’s revenges; the reckless insolence of the “seven men out of hell” in the story of the “Bolivar” who have “euchred God’s almighty storm” and “bluffed the eternal sea.”
There is here, however, none of the idealisation, the roseate visions of sordid and ugly things suddenly seen through a mist of make-believe, which fills with an intolerable sentimentality the works of many popular writers of fiction. “Arthur’s” clients, having plumbed the bedrock of life, are suffering no illusions concerning it. They are emphatically convinced that dust is dust and mud is mud, and that a spade may justly be called a spade. Outside the coffee-stall itself, in the small hours of the morning, there is continual necessity for the suppression of rowdies and marauders and those who exhibit anarchic tendencies in a civilisation remote from our own, but with very definite standards. In that civilisation kindliness and good fellowship stand at the summit of the hierarchy of virtues, and a large tolerance replaces the negative prohibitions of the accepted commandments. And in all that company of children, bewildered and confused in a world which they have never learned to understand, the acceptance of a certain level of honour and of order is more clearly recognised than amongst those who, reaching towards the enforcement of austerer limitations, are, perhaps, less successful in attainment. “Sometimes,” says Mr. Lyons, “a sailorman in the throes of a fever may form our circle. Arthur will then arise in his might, peer over his spectacles, and lifting a withered forefinger say, ‘George, I’m surprised at you. Be’ave yeself.’ And George, if he be not very drunk, will subside instantly, saying, ‘Righto, Guv’nor,’ or he will ask respectfully for another cup of coffee and a thick ’un, at the same time challenging the company to deny that Arthur is a gentleman, or he himself a Briton.”
So that amongst incidents seemingly trivial—a crying baby, a meeting of a tramp and his pal, the attempt of Arthur’s soldier son to choose between two rival candidates for his affection—there is revealed a whole depth of human helpfulness, and of human sympathy which is not helpful but is exceedingly desirous to be so. In one of Mr. Lyons’s exuberant evenings a man with a baby in his arms wearily drifts to the coffee-stall, waiting for the belated all-night tram. And at once this company of nightbirds and homeless populace become absorbed in one overwhelming problem—how to stop the baby crying. “Arthur” himself starts the enterprise. “I ain’t no amatoor at this business,” he cheerily remarks. “Soothin’ down babies is one of my specialities.” So he makes grimaces, shouts “Oy! oy! oy!” at the unfortunate infant, emits shrieks to imitate a locomotive in “a performance very unusual and distressing,” bays like a bloodhound (“trying the dawg on him,” he calls it), imitates various other animals—with disastrous effect. Arthur’s “man” then steps into the breach, “I know a dodge about babies,” he remarks. “First of all,” explained the specialist, “you turn ’im over on ’is chest. Then you say, ‘Hups a daisy! There’s a little man!’ and thumps him on his back. Then you give ’im a fork or sich like to play with. Then you say, ‘Did ’e ’ave a dirty blackguard of a father then?’ (no offence to you, sir, only it’s the custom), and then you jerk ’im up an’ down, and ’old your breath till ’e falls asleep.” This also fails. The owner of the infant meanwhile imparts reminiscences of his life, his sister and the baby, full of intimate detail, to the friendly company. A “certain old drab,” half-starved, is stuffed with coffee and sardines and promised “tuppence” to stop the child’s “’ollering.” She immediately succeeds. The tram arrives; the father and child vanish in the night. It is twenty minutes past one o’clock—in a submerged, undistinguished corner of six millions of sleeping people. But all modern life is in it—the stupidity, the gravity, the generosity, the ready companionship and sympathy under misfortune which may be common to all, of half-lost, undistinguished people who normally travel through mean streets to no profitable end.
They quote poetry—sentimental maunderings, the humorous ditties of the lower-class music halls, or bloodthirsty, recounting how “Joe Golightly” “stabbed ’im in the spine.” They crack their little jokes, and score off each other and off themselves, when in the lowest depth of poverty—with nothing between them and ultimate destitution. When prosperity comes they share with each other, standing “treat” in “cawfee” and sardines and hard-boiled eggs. There fall down to them occasionally visitants from another world. Now it is a “gentleman” killing himself as speedily as possible with drink and sordid adventure, on the way between prosperity and death. Now it is a “benevolent idiot” desiring to see the “darker side of London life,” whose comments are received with marked disfavour by the normal members of the street. Now it is a revivalist or philanthropist seeking passionately to persuade them to return to the accepted ways of men. His efforts are useless. They have chosen their portion, and in that portion they will abide: drifting with all surrounding human lives, through their narrow space of being, towards whatever fate or fortune may offer them in that day when all days will have become as one day, and to-morrow joined with yesterday’s seven thousand years.