The condition of England

I

THE Multitude is the People of England: that eighty per cent. (say) of the present inhabitants of these islands who never express their own grievances, who rarely become articulate, who can only be observed from outside and very far away. It is a people which, all unnoticed and without clamour or protest, has passed through the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life of the city. Nine out of ten families have migrated within three generations: they are still only, as it were, commencing to settle down in their new quarters, with the paint scarcely dry on them, and the little garden still untilled. How has the migration affected them? How will they expand or degenerate in the new town existence, each in the perpetual presence of all? That is a question of as profound interest in answering as it is difficult to answer. The nineteenth century—in the life of the wage-earning multitudes—was a century of disturbance. The twentieth promises to be a century of consolidation. What completed product will emerge from its city aggregation, the children of the crowd? You must learn of them to-day, as I have said, from outside: from the few observers who have lived amongst them and recorded their experience; from the very few representative men, with articulate utterance, which they have flung up from amongst themselves. You must examine masses of documents and statistics embodied in Government publications, or tentative efforts towards a sociology: recording how they live, and eat and drink, and obtain shelter, and marry and are given in marriage; the particulars of their upbringing, how they seek or elude religions and charity, and escape from the laws which are passed for their protection, and enjoy and suffer, and live and die. The mass of this chaotic and undigested evidence waits for the observer who will create from it some general picture of the life of the English people. And when all these statistics and cold facts are assimilated, there yet remains the further inquiry of the temper and spirit of a race subjected to such forces; hampered and limited by the narrow walls between which they labour and endure.

The tangible things come first, in some such evidence as that provided by Government investigation, in the Blue Book bearing a forbidding title, the “Cost of Living of the Working Classes.” It shows them, gathered into astonishing cities, working for variable wage. It reveals the dwellings which they seek to transform into homes. It follows their wages from production to distribution, in the cost of their daily economy, the manner in which they divide up their exiguous incomes, the amounts they think it worth while to allot to shelter, to food, and to pleasure. It analyses over a thousand “family budgets,” each giving details of how much is spent weekly on butter, tapioca, or treacle. It shows the rate of birth and the rate of death: varying from city to city, both materially changing. It gives, in fact, in outline only, that blurred image of a huge and industrial population whose complete apprehension would furnish the key to many of the pressing problems of to-day.

Here are the houses in which for a season they abide; in part the product of their own volition, in part the creation of external changes which they can but little control. They have had no choice in these constructions. Their demands and desires have scarcely counted in the provision made for them. Their impetuous need was shelter: shelter “on the spot,” around the sites of the new factories which had sucked them up from the deserted countryside. And they were thankful to take what was offered them by those men who foresaw the changes which were coming, and could accumulate fortunes in the rapid provision of immediate necessities. Swept into aggregations by the demand of the newest industries, the clay and stone has been hastily fashioned into place for human habitation. And now these stand to-day, made by, and yet making, the temper and characteristic of the people. Here the normal standard is a four-roomed cottage; there, “back to back” houses ravage the health of their inhabitants; here again huge piles of tenements encompass the bewildered occupants in a kind of human ant-heap; there the ancient dwelling of the wealthy or comfortable classes have been “swarmed out” by the busy people. Carlyle pictured mankind flowing, as it were, through the visible arena of material things. A wave of humanity beats through these solid constructions; it vanishes, another succeeds. “Orpheus built the walls of Thebes by the mere sound of his lyre. Who built these walls of Weissnichtwo, summoning out all the sandstone rocks to dance and shape themselves into Doric and Ionic pillars, squared ashlar houses, and noble streets?” All cities are thus built “to music.” What discordant melody to-day is responsible for the creation of Jarrow, or Salford, or Canning Town?

England at once, under such an analysis, separates itself into divergent parts. There is rural England, still largely unaffected by modern science and invention, except by the loss of population, drained away; the agricultural labourers, the fishermen, and the artisans of the sleeping provincial towns. There is urban England in hastily created industrial centres, vocal with the clanging of furnaces and the noise of the factories; but still a population in manageable aggregation, set in open spaces, never far from green fields under a wide sky. And there is London: a population, a nation in itself; breeding, as it seems, a special race of men; which only is also produced, and that in less intensive cultivation, in the few other larger cities—Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool—where the conditions of coagulation offer some parallel to this monster clot of humanity. Everywhere, indeed, this million-peopled, exaggerated London sets at defiance the generalisations drawn from the normal town areas. House rent is immensely higher. The mean weekly price for two rooms in London is six shillings, in the provinces a little more than one half; for four rooms the variation is between nine shillings in the one, five shillings in the other. A portion of this surplus is the booty of more highly-paid labour. The greater part vanishes in the increased value of the land, heaped up by the mere fact of aggregation, and flowing away into the pockets of many affluent and fortunate persons. London has been normally Tory; defiant of “Socialism,” defiant of change. The cause of this cannot be found entirely in the existence of a metropolis and capital of the Empire living a parasitic existence on tribute levied upon the boundaries of the world. For in most of the great capitals of Europe the advocates of revolutionary programmes find to-day their most fruitful fields of propaganda. It may perhaps best be understood in the apprehension of an actual picture of visible things. The answer is hidden in these strings and congestions of little comfortable two-storeyed red and grey cottages, which multiplied with such amazing rapidity in the preceding generation; pushing their tentacles from factory or industrial centre out over the neighbouring fields, and proclaiming with their cleanliness and tiny gardens and modest air of comfort, a working population prosperous and content. One type of dwelling, indeed, is found to be more or less prevalent through all the urban aggregation. That is the small four or five-roomed cottage, containing on the ground floor a front parlour, a kitchen, and a scullery built as an addition to the main part of the house; and on the upper floor the bedrooms, the third bedroom in the five-roomed house being built over the scullery. And in such dwelling-places, if anywhere, is concealed the secret of the future of the people of England. Abroad, the self-contained “flat,” the gigantic tenement, in which the single family is embedded in a cliff of bricks and mortar, is more and more coming to be the staple dwelling of the working classes. Broad, tree-planted avenues, with fast electric locomotion, cut through carefully planned cities of storey piled on storey. The whole effect is grandiose and spacious, if it lacks the picturesqueness of that enormous acreage of chimney-pots and tiny tumbled cottages which is revealed in a kind of smoky grandeur from the railway embankments of South and East London—the desperate efforts made by a race reared in village communities to maintain in the urban aggregation some semblance of a home. Such is the shelter; what of the food? The price of bread varies. Family budgets of the weekly incomes are extraordinarily suggestive of the struggle which takes place in the industrial areas of the city. Classified according to amount of net receipts, they reveal an ever-growing proportion devoted to the essentials of bodily nutriment; until, at the bottom, where the income appears permanently below the “living wage,” there is practically no margin left when the food demand is satisfied. “For the incomes below thirty shillings, two-thirds of the total income is spent on food, ‘declares a Board of Trade investigator,’ while in the case of the incomes of forty shillings and above, about fifty-seven per cent. is spent on food.” Amongst the poorest, actually one-fifth of the total food expenditure is spent on bread and flour: a conclusive statistic condemning those who lightly justify a tax on imported corn on the ground that so much stale bread is committed to the pigsty. Tea, in these lowest incomes, demands ninepence farthing a week, and sugar eightpence. It is expenditure on the margin, counted in farthings, a life exceedingly difficult to realise amongst those to whom a few coppers more or less means no appreciable difference.

Variations—from town to town—in a civilisation which is in all essentials homogeneous, and a life of easy flow from one labour centre to another, tend to lessen or to vanish. Yet there still are apparent local variations in wages which appear to be independent of variations in wealth or in prices. Again there are most remarkable differences in habits, customs, productivity, and statistics of birth and death. Why (for example) should Middlesborough have the highest birth-rate of England? Why indeed, the cynical might ask, should any children be born in Middlesborough at all, considering the more than dismal picture which investigation discloses of existence in that feverish industrial centre? There is appalling wastage of life force in these percentages of infant mortality, especially in the factory centres—soiled, useless child lives, whose existence stands for no intelligible significance in any rational scheme of human affairs. There are statistics of mortality which reveal so many years knocked off human life in the transition from the life of the field to the life of the factory. And there is the evidence also, amongst the industrial peoples as amongst the classes above them, of perhaps the most remarkable change which is operating to-day in modern England: in the tumbling down of the birth-rate with ominous rapidity, until nothing but a similar reduction of the death-rate, with the increase of sanitation and the limitation of disease, seems to stand between the two meeting in a henceforth stationary population. Is the vitality of the race being burnt up in mine and furnace, in the huddled mazes of the city? And is the future of a colonising people to be jeopardised, not by difficulties of overlordship at the extremities of its dominion, but by obscure changes in the opinion, the religion, and the energies at the heart of the Empire? These and other subjects confront even a superficial examination of the material condition of England. Karl Marx was wrong in his defiant assertion that economic causes were the sole factors in the transformations of history. He would have been right had he asserted that many startling overturnings of opinion, in political and social, and even religious change, can ultimately be traced back to the economic condition of obscure masses of the common people. The majority are in regular labour in summer and winter, tearing from coal and furnace and factory the vast industrial wealth of England. Their disabilities are imperfect houses set often in quite needlessly squalid surroundings: the possibility of finding, through no fault of their own, their labour no longer required; specific diseases and risks of specific accidents which are associated with various specific occupations. Their advantages are a rate of payment higher for shorter hours of work than is at present prevailing (in the majority of trades) in any other country of Europe. The artisan is far better fed than the agricultural labourer, is more intelligent, quicker and more active, with greater pleasures available in popular entertainment, or a Saturday half-holiday, or a week at the seaside. Yet his span of life is shorter and his work more precarious. He possesses little opportunity for the accumulation of property. He has no “stake in the country,” and has no permanent possession, lacking even a tiny plot of land which he can bequeath from father to child. His effects—on his decease—are generally negligible. The Multitude, with a substantial although inadequate share of the income of the country, possesses but an infinitesimal proportion of its capital.

In such surroundings and despite such drawbacks, there labours a hardy race of men, whose efforts, in skill, perseverance, and indefatigable industry, have earned them supremacy in the markets of the world. It is an industrial order in transition, evidently being swept forward by forces beyond individual control, to a condition in the future which would be almost inconceivable to the present. It is a population of weekly wage-earners which has struggled out of servitude into independence, but which still remains goaded into activity by fear—not of the lash of the overseer, but of the grim and implacable forces of hunger and cold. Slavery, Serfdom, Poverty: these, says the author of the Nemesis of Nations, form three stages in the changing condition of the social basis of civilisation. “Poverty” is the foundation of the present industrial order. It is a poverty which is removed, for the most part, from actual lack of physical necessities, though it is always never far distant from such a privation. It is rather “industrialism”—the “proletariat”—a state of human affairs for which we have in English no defining title. In working it provides others with leisure, and the complex and refining influences which leisure can bring. It works in the city aggregations, always twisting threads, or clanging machinery, or stoking effectual fires. Its products post o’er land and ocean without rest—swinging steel bridges over the rivers of East Africa, furnishing Nicaragua with carpets, or encasing the women of Upper Burmah in Lancashire cotton fabrics. What is the meaning of it all? What is the end of it all? We cannot tell the meaning outside; the future of a world when the “iron age” has become triumphant, and man, a midget, controlling by his intelligence huge and ponderable forces, will be lost in the labyrinths of his enormous machines. Certain forms of American activity on the shores of Lake Michigan, or in the devastated North-East of Pennsylvania, provide sufficient forecast of such a future. Nor can we tell the meaning (as it were) inside: in the lives of those two differentiated classes which the modern industrial life is daily creating; the life of those who enjoy, on the one hand, in Pleasure Cities, in all branches of eager and sometimes morbid amusement; and the life of the new race which will be evolved out of these strenuous gnomes who labour in the heart of the city congestions.

Of very special interest, however, is the testimony of those who have endeavoured to get behind the form of cottage or quality of food, to apprehension of the actual life of the people who dwell in the one and are nourished by the other. Such efforts have been made, and not unsuccessfully, by Lady Bell at Middlesborough, by Mr. Charles Booth in London, by Mr. Reynolds amongst his friends the Devon fishermen, by Mr. Reginald Bray from his block tenement in Camberwell. They all bear testimony concerning a life novel to humanity, whose development and future is still doubtful.

Lady Bell, in her study of such life in a prosperous northern centre, goes near to provide a bird’s-eye view of the city “proletariat” in its present uncertain state. It is a town erected almost in two nights and a day by the demands of the new iron manufacture. Its hundred thousand population are practically all workers. It exists solely for the purpose of translating human energy into material values. Its inhabitants have been sucked in like the draught in its own blast furnaces: from the neighbouring countryside, from the neighbouring townships, from Scotland and Ireland, and places far afield. Round the furnaces there have rapidly heaped together mazes of little two-storeyed cottages. The furnaces, the grey streets, a few public buildings, all set in a background of greyness, in a devastated landscape, under a grey sky—that is the proletarian city. Lady Bell set herself (in her own happy phrase) to reveal what the Iron Trade, which people outside “know but by name, perhaps, as a huge measuring gauge of the national prosperity, is in reality, when translated into terms of human beings.” She takes her readers through the great furnaces and down into the interiors of the little houses. She exhibits the habits, manners, pleasures, and pains of the people. She shows in one chapter the literature patronised by this population; in another the people at work; in another the people at play. Again, she will describe the lives of the children, the lives of the wife and mother, the influences of sickness, accident, or old age. The slave populations who built Babylon, or upon which the Athenian oligarchy which called itself a Democracy essayed philosophy and beauty, remain to-day more as a myth than as a memory. The poverty populations, upon which are built to-day England’s unparalleled accumulation, will stand in the future, with at least a corner of their lives lifted. Such a corner will interpret to a less harassed age a life once peopling these waste places, which will then be but ruins and a memory.

Here is a population in many respects more fortunate than its fellows. Its wages are high; its hours of work are few. Its life, though exacting and laborious, demanding, perhaps, from human nature more than human nature can readily give, is more exhilarating than the long hours in the humid air of the cotton factory, or the perpetual scribbling in an underground office cellar. It is wrestling continually with the iron: tearing it out of the ironstone, directing rivers of molten metal into their proper channels, bending the intractable stone and the huge forces of heat and affinity to the will of man. And in life also it is wrestling with huge forces which it but dimly understands, poised on a perilous pathway from which one slip means utter destruction. “The path the iron worker daily treads at the edge of the sandy platform, that narrow path that lies between running streams of fire on the one hand and a sheer drop on the other, is but an emblem of the Road of Life along which he must walk. If he should stumble, either actually or metaphorically, as he goes, he has but a small margin in which to recover himself.” There is a less defensible side of the people’s life in the enormous disproportion of attendance at public-houses and at places of religious worship; the universal prevalence of betting and gambling; the thoughtlessness and wastefulness which often produces economic collapse; the ignorance of child-rearing and the laws of health; the darker side of the artificial restriction of families. But these become explained rather than condemned by the revelation of the contrast in the condition of child-bearing in one of these crowded, tiny homes with the condition in the surroundings of those who live in another universe. Boys and girls of fourteen or younger are turned loose to pick their way through the most difficult period of life, just at the season when the boys and girls of another class are most completely surrounded with careful and humane influences. The married woman of the working classes, “handicapped as she is by physical conditions and drawbacks, with but just bodily strength enough to encounter the life described,” may be defended against the fluent criticism of “her more prosperous sisters—whose duties are divided among several people, and even then not always accomplished with success.”

So is being heaped up the wealth of the world. Under darkened skies, and in an existence starved of beauty, these communities of men and women and children continue their unchanging toil. Is the price being paid too great for the result attained? The cities have sucked in the healthy, stored-up energies of rural England; with an overwhelming percentage to-day of country upbringing. Must they ever thus be parasitic on another life outside, and this nation divide into breeding-grounds for the creation of human energies and consuming centres where these energies are destroyed? The standard of longevity has pitifully fallen in such places from that prevalent amongst the agricultural labourers. Workers formerly too old at sixty are now too old ten years earlier. The men are scourged by specific diseases; the mortality of the children is appalling. One is apt to be surprised, says Lady Bell, of the iron workers of Middlesborough, to find how many of the workmen are more or less ailing in different ways. “But we cease to be surprised when we realise how apt the conditions are to tell upon the health even of the strongest, and how many of the men engaged in it are spent by the time they are fifty. To say that this happens to half of them is probably a favourable estimate.” Of the women, Lady Bell brushes aside with a welcome contempt that newspaper and drawing-room cant which explains that a beneficent Providence has made the working classes insensible to pains and conditions which other classes would find intolerable. “It is not only bringing children into the world that affects the health of the working women. It is an entire delusion to believe that they are, as a rule, stronger, hardier, healthier, than the well-to-do. Their life is a continuous toil. They rarely go outside the doors of their houses, except for Saturday marketing and Sunday-evening exercise. Recreation, the stimulus of changed garments, rest during the day, or the other minor comforts which other classes find so necessary, are not for them. They are mostly convinced that it is wrong to sit down and read a book at any hour of the day. Their interests, not unnaturally, turn towards the stimulus of drinking, and of betting and gambling—two elements which at least can give colour in a life set in grey.”[3]

Every observer, in this and its hundred similar fellows, can see family affection, endurance, kindliness, and patience beyond all praise; a resistance (even in the last extremity) to the triumphant powers of darkness. What is more difficult to show is any interpretation of the whole business, an ideal which can illuminate the present disability, or a vision in which to-day’s efforts will appear intelligible in the light of an end. Lacking such vision, the verdict of a nineteenth-century prophet still sounds mournful over much of industrial England that abides unchanged. “The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life,” wrote Ruskin, “are the south-eastern suburbs of Bradford, and the scene from Wakefield Bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.”

Yet all England has not yet been roofed over and become subservient to furnace and factory: and there are other observers who find amongst the labouring populations, especially amongst those who are compelled to face danger and to cultivate endurance, an excellence denied to classes sometimes deemed more fortunate. We may pass from the blackness and almost uncouth violence of Middlesborough to the jolly fishermen of the South Coast: to find not the iron trade, but the ocean harvest, “translated into terms of human beings.” Mr. Reynolds, who has lived amongst such a fishermen’s colony in a Devonshire watering-place, can give encouraging testimony to the happiness found there, the generosity, the standards of the poor; to a definite and remote civilisation, which gazes out upon the activities of the wealthier classes above it, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with a little envy, certainly with no hatred or predatory aim.

Sixty years ago, Disraeli described the rich and poor of England as two nations. To-day, even national distinctions seem less estranging than the fissure between the summit and basis of society. “Their civilisations are not two stages of the same civilisation, but two civilisations, two traditions which have grown up concurrently.” And a similar testimony is expressed by many who have intimate and first-hand knowledge of the life of the hand worker. “The more one sees of the poor in their own homes,” is the verdict of Miss Loane, a witness of varied and peculiar experience, “the more one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole, can be more justly described as different from those of the upper classes than as better or worse.” Most present-day failures in legislation and social experiment are due to neglect of this fact. It has been assumed that the artisan is but a stunted or distorted specimen of the small tradesman; with the same ideals, the same aspirations, the same limitations: demanding the same moulding towards the fashioning of a completed product. We are gradually learning that “the people of England” are as different from, and as unknown to, the classes that investigate, observe, and record, as the people of China or Peru. Living amongst us and around us, never becoming articulate, finding even in their directly elected representatives types remote from their own, these people grow and flourish and die, with their own codes of honour, their special beliefs and moralities, their judgment and often their condemnation of the classes to whom has been given leisure and material advantage. The line is cut clean by both parties, neither desiring to occupy the territory of the other. “There is not one high wall, but two high walls, between the classes and the masses,” declares this witness; “and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb.”

The scene is laid in the huddled cottages of a fisher village of a South Coast watering-place. The observer penetrates behind the appearance—to the normal visitor—of a rather squalid fishing suburb, with swarms of untidy children, and the fishermen, deferential, seeking patronage of the brisk or bored holiday-maker. He has lived amongst them and loved them. He has convinced them that he has no desire to do them good. He comes to their life having “swallowed all the formulas” with a perhaps exaggerated contempt for the “intellectuals” and the upholders of the middle class moral code. He is enchanted by the life he finds there, despite all its discomforts. In the existence of the poor, in an experience fixed on the hard rind of life, tasting to the full its salt and bitter flavours, he finds a sincerity and an adventure denied to the more secure classes above. Always faced by elemental facts, and demanding a continuous courage for the maintenance of an unending struggle, these men and women exhibit clean-cut, simple qualities which vindicate their existence before any absolute standard of values.

The poor are inclined to suspect and dislike the classes just above them, the tradesmen. Nowhere is the moral standard more divergent than between the frugal, laborious, and rather timid assiduities of the lower middle class on the one hand, and on the other the reckless, generous, improvident life of the working peoples. To the “gentleman,” the attitude of the sea-folk is different. He is despised for his ignorance. He is sometimes regarded as fair game for deceit or extortion, outside the moral standard of the home community, just as the coloured peoples are regarded as outside the recognised codes of civilisation to-day. Yet there is little envy of his riches and enjoyments, and even a certain admiration, so long as he conforms to certain accepted laws of kindliness. “‘An ’orrible lie!’ between two poor people is fair play from a poor man to a wealthier, just as, for instance, the wealthy man considers himself at liberty to make speeches full of hypocritical untruth when he is seeking the suffrage of the free and independent electors, or is trying to teach the poor man how to make himself more profitable to his employer.” The “gentlemen” are permitted idleness, luxuriousness, and the freest self-indulgence without criticism; but anything from them in the nature of meanness is resented. Haggling, for example, over the hire of a boat, is an unpardonable offence. The fishermen, on their occasional holidays, spend their savings lavishly and without question; why should not the “gentlemen” do the same? “When Tony goes away himself, he pays what is asked; regrets it afterwards, if at all; and comes home when his money is done. ‘If a gen’leman,’ he says, ‘can’t afford to pay the rate, what du ’ee come on the beach to hire a boat for—an’ try to beat a fellow down? I reckon ’tis only a sort o’ gen’leman as does that!’”

And this, indeed, is only congruous with that changed estimate of moral values which prevails amongst the poor. Mr. Reynolds, amongst his Devon fishermen, finds the same general summing-up of moral guilt or excellence as Miss Loane has found in the mean streets of the great cities. “Generosity ranks far before justice, sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly honest one. In brief, the less admixture of intellect required for the practice of any virtue, the higher it stands in popular estimation.” It is the emotional, indeed, against the intellectual: to one point of view, life in an incomplete condition of development; to another, life lived nearer to its central heart. Certainly, in the combination of Christian and ethical dicta which make up the popular moral code of modern civilisation, the standard of the poor is nearer to the Christian standard. One can see how many of the New Testament assertions have been fashioned from the common democratic mind, as Socrates and Plato from the aristocratic. Yet religion counts for little in the scheme of human affairs. There is, indeed, nothing of a definite denial; the fishing village would be scandalised by any truculent disproof of Christianity. The children go regularly to Sunday school; their parents believe in God and in a better time coming. But the general spirit reveals that widespread and prevailing uncertainty, and conviction of uncertainty, which to-day is the most dominant attitude in face of ultimate problems. “Tony” the fisherman pronounces religion to be “the business of the clergy, who are paid for it, and of those who take it up as a hobby, including the impertinent persons who thrust hell-fire tracts upon the fisher-folk. ‘Us can’t ’spect to know nort about it,’ says Tony. ‘’Tain’t no business o’ ours. May be as they says; may be not. It don’t matter, that I sees. ’Twill be all the same in a hundred years’ time, when we’re a-grinning up at the daisy-roots.’”[4]

It was thought, says Mr. Charles Booth, of a certain experiment in East London, that as the poor were not going to the churches, they would attend the Hall of Science. When the Hall of Science was opened, it was as deserted as the churches. The people wanted neither religion nor its antidote. All they wanted was to be left alone. All that the poor want, runs the popular Socialist declaration, is that the rich shall get off their backs. All that the poor want, would be a truer aphorism, is to be left alone. They don’t want to be cleaned, enlightened, inspected, drained. They don’t want regulations of the hours of their drinking. They assiduously avoid the hospitals and parish rooms. They don’t want compulsory thrift, elevation to remote standards of virtue and comfort, irritation into intellectual or moral progress. In that diverting novel, the Lord of Latimer Street, the peer who owns the neighbourhood, disguised as a lodger in a block of scandalous tenements in Bermondsey, announces with pride that the philanthropic landlord is going to pull them down and convert the site into a recreation-ground for the people. The result is an awakening of universal fury amongst the residents in these deplorable abodes. Why can’t he leave them alone? They pay their rents without complaining. They are not jealous of his enjoyments. They are not endeavouring to seize his money or despoil his goods. Why can’t he go and spend the money at Monte Carlo or Newmarket “as the other lords do,” as indeed they would like to do, if they were lords? Many who are conscious that the poor want to be left alone are not convinced that they ought to be left alone. Yet it is doubtful if much personal interference can be of any practical service. The effect of our meddling is similar to the effect of the preaching of Western morals in the East. The old faiths are destroyed. The new faiths are not assimilated. Mr. Reynolds, certainly, has no doubt on the matter. He is scornful concerning the boom of Elementary Education. He dislikes the preaching of thrift. Amongst the poor, “extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often a singular dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries, just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the spiritual squalor of the lower middle class.” He is willing to make almost any sacrifice for his friends, if only they can retain their chief vindicating quality—that insouciance or contempt for life’s ills and dangers which enables them ever to take the thunder and the sunshine with a frolic welcome. He finds this greatly characteristic of his fishermen: he probably would find less manifestation of it in the difficult darkness of the cities, where Fear, rather than Courage, is the driving force of common humanity. But, however much Churches may talk about sin and virtue, “we know well in our hearts,” says this observer, “that pluck and courage are the great twin virtues, and that cowardice is the fundamental sin.” He finds amongst the poor not only the “will to live,” but the “courage to live”; not only endurance of existence, but exultation in it. They are not afraid of life. They keep something of the adventure which takes all risks: the resolute action which cannot even see the risks it is taking. With Stevenson, they will have nothing to do with the negative virtues. With the original Christian axiom—as Renan saw it—they reveal that “the heart of the common people is the great reservoir of the self-devotion and resignation by which alone the world can be saved.”

II

This “daring and courage,” however, is the prerogative of individuals; specially equipped, or selected (as it seems) by a life trained from the earliest years to confront hostile forces in the open air and sunshine; skilled and heartened by combats with the sea. How far can such characters be identified in the Crowd: the special product of modern industrial civilisation? Those who would attempt a diagnosis of the present must find themselves more and more turning their attention from the individual to the aggregation: upon the individuals which act in an aggregation in a manner different from their action as isolated units of humanity. We have to deal, in fact, not only with the Crowd casually collected in sudden movement by persons accustomed to live alone, but with whole peoples which in London and the larger cities are reared in a Crowd, labour in a Crowd, in a Crowd take their enjoyments, die in a Crowd, and in a Crowd are buried at the end.

“Has there been a row?” asked a journalist of a gathering at Westminster summoned by “Suffragettes” and unemployed leaders. “No,” was the cheerful reply, “but we still ’ave ’opes.” It is a crowd which “still ’as ’opes” that forms the matrix or solid body of these agglomerations of humanity whose doings to-day excite some interest and some perplexity amongst observers of social change. In the midst are the criminal and the enthusiast, those who are openly at war with Society, those who are battered by its complications and troublous demands, those, again, in whom devotion to some ideal cause burns like a flame at the heart. But these are all encompassed and embedded in the multitude of the unimportant: gathered from nowhere, journeying nowhither, swaying and eddying, swept into random groups and whirlpools, choking for a moment all the city ways, and in a moment leaving them all silent and deserted; the city Crowd which has seen little that is encouraging at the present, but “has hopes” of something wonderful yet to be revealed.

You may see it in the dim morning of every London day, struggling from the outskirts of the city into tramcars and trains which are dragging it to its centres of labour: numberless shabby figures hurrying over the bridges or pouring out of the exits of the central railway stations. You may discern in places the very pavements torn apart, and tunnels burrowed in the bowels of the earth, so that the astonished visitor from afar beholds a perpetual stream of people emerging from the middle of the street, seemingly manufactured in some laboratory below. It flows always along the high road of the huge town in the daytime, like a liquid unprecipitated, or a river in even stream carrying down dust to the sea. But at any moment an unexpected incident, tragic or trivial, may change the liquid from clear to cloudy, or reveal, like the river suddenly banked in obstruction, the debris and turgid elements which it has hitherto borne along so buoyantly. A motor omnibus stands still, a cab horse collapses, men’s voices are raised in altercation, an itinerant agitator demands work for all, or announces the day of judgment. Immediately a knot appears in the texture of the wood, a whirlpool in the water. The multitude of the unimportant gather together, “having hopes.” With incredible rapidity appear amongst them the criminal, the loafer, the enthusiast; the stream of busy persons has become transferred into the city Crowd.

There is a note of menace in it, in the mixed clamour which rises from its humours and angers, like the voice of the sea in gathering storm. There is the evidence of possibilities of violence in its waywardness, its caprice, its always incalculable mettle and temper, forming in the aggregate a personality differing altogether from the personalities of its component atoms. Satisfied, curious, eager only for laughter and emotion, it will cheer the police which is scattering it like chaff and spray, mock openly at those who have come with set purposes, idle and sprawl on a summer afternoon at Hyde Park or an autumn evening in Parliament Square. But one feels that the smile might turn suddenly into fierce snarl or savagery, and that panic and wild fury are concealed in its recesses, no less than happiness and foolish praise. But more than the menace, the overwhelming impression is one of ineptitude; a kind of life grotesque and meaningless. It is in the city Crowd, where the traits of individual distinction have become merged in the aggregate, and the impression (from a distance) is of little white blobs of faces borne upon little black twisted or misshapen bodies, that the scorn of the philosopher for the mob, the cynic for humanity, becomes for the first time intelligible. Separate the drops and particles of it, follow each man homeward through the various ways of the city labyrinth—at the end you will find Humanity in its unchangeable and abiding existence: a tiny suburban home with cottage and garden, a tenement in a cliff of workmen’s dwellings, a “child’s white face to kiss at night,” a “woman’s smile by candle light.” In each individual is resistance, courage, aspiration; a persistence which carries through the daily task with some energy and some enjoyment, and not entire discredit at the end. But immediately the mass of separate persons has become welded into the aggregate, this note of distinction vanishes. Humanity has become the Mob, pitifully ineffective before the organised resistance of police and military, and almost indecently naked of discipline or volition in the comparison; gaping open-mouthed, jeering at devotions which it cannot understand, like some uncouth monster which can be cajoled and flattered into imprisonment or ignoble action; like the Crowd which in all ages has rejoiced, one day at the crowning, the next at the crucifixion, of its King.

Why is it that this writing down of values takes place when mankind is thus collected into aggregations: that the spirit of the mob is so much less reputable than the spirit of its separate components? In part, perhaps, because the trivial and vacant elements are uppermost amongst a city race whose aspirations and purposes are independent of organised collective energies and aims. They have gathered for recreation, to be amused; for curiosity, to be surprised; for companionship, in a region where night has its empire, not without its terrors, just beyond the boundaries of their limited experience. The tragedy of common life is apparent, a modern philosopher has declared, not where poverty is the heritage of all but the few, or because existence offers at best a struggle uncertain and austere; but whenever that life is closed within limited horizons, and moved by no ideal springs. The visionary who cherishes the hope of a renovated society in which all shall be satisfied, the woman who flings herself into prison in the expectation that through her sacrifice the freedom of women will be attained, is a figure to the outward eye, indistinguishable in its obscurity from the multitude around who jeer and wonder and applaud. But these visionaries and enthusiasts possess a secret denied to their fellows, which gives their little lives a significance absent from the encompassing multitude; in the sense of consecration to a purpose, a meaning, and a goal.

Meantime that spirit abides but in the few; and the Crowd remains, to-day as yesterday, an instrument which the strong man has always used and always despised in the using. The new features of it come from the change that has gathered men from the countryside and the tiny town and hurried them into the streets of an immense city; henceforth always to move in a company, each tied as with a chain to his fellows, never to stand alone. In such a transformation there would seem some danger of the normal life of man becoming the life of the Crowd, with features intensified and distorted when collected in tumult or demonstration. We seem to see in the experience of a generation an increasing tendency thus to merge the individual in the mass, more frequent and unfailing response to the demand for agitation, which, in fact, is an excuse for absurdity or violence. Man, always seeking to escape from himself, found various channels of egress; in drink, in religious emotion, in political energy. He has now found that he can escape from himself by merely linking up with others like himself to become units in a Crowd. The secret is perhaps most clearly apprehended in America, where the Crowd consciousness is excited as deliberately as the religious emotion of a revivalist meeting; and after due preparation an aggregate of human beings suddenly breaks into carefully fermented lunacy. So that selected delegates of the political parties—men, being selected, it would seem, for special calculation, intelligence, and prudence—will shout at Denver or Chicago meaningless cacophinations for an hour and a half on end, march round and round the hall playing instruments and singing discordant songs, or suddenly take off their coats, or stand on their heads, or beat each other with bits of board. It is the experience of the flagellants and pilgrims of medieval times, with hysteria no longer left to chance, but organised as a fine art. In our own “mafficking,” in the tearing to pieces of the City Volunteers, in unemployed demonstrations, even in a spectacle so diverting and yet so foreboding as the “sieges of St. Stephen’s” by the “Suffragettes,” there are traces of similar if less exaggerated emotion: as man, communicating the infection of the Crowd consciousness to his fellow-men, suddenly abandons his individual volitions and restraints, and loses himself in the volition of the Crowd. A note of hysteria may seem to be an inevitable accompaniment of a city life so divorced from the earth’s ancient tranquillity as never to appear entirely sane. And the future of the city populations, ever “speeded up” by more insistent bustles and noises and nervous explosions, takes upon itself, in its normal activities, something hitherto abnormal to humanity. We shall probably encounter more appeals to the multiplied power of assembly, more determination to find a short cut in lawlessness towards attainment, more passive and active resistance in attempts at government by violence rather than government by reason. Others, besides the unemployed or the women, will make this visible protest before all men by exhibition of their willingness to face ridicule, discomfort, physical injury, and even martyrdom in their ardour for the triumph of their cause. In a vision across the centuries, with time foreshortened, even material things take upon themselves the quality of motion: and the cities may be seen rising and falling, in growth, in triumph, and decay, like the fire that flares and in a moment fades. In similar vision the streets of those cities are always filled with this tumultuous and curious Crowd: restless, leaderless, astonished at itself and at the world, finding little intelligible either in the universe without or the universe within. Before which assembly in perpetual session there pass the phantom figures of those who appeal for its favour and its judgment: at first to a Crowd contemptuous, then to a Crowd acquiescent and astonished, ultimately to a Crowd applauding: themselves members of it, yet standing always separate and apart; because they alone are working towards an end.

The definite excitement, and the deflection of that excitement into certain prepared channels, seems likely to become one of the arts of the political game. It is only in the last few months that those who have been studying the latest methods of electioneering have elaborated a new system of appeal to a new race of men. The old discussion by argument, commonplace posters, and literature, even the cheery riotings of rival mobs, is already voted as a thing stale and outworn. Instead, we are to see an effort to capture, not individuals as individuals, but the Crowd as a Crowd. It is the first noteworthy recognition in politics that this creature has a personality—a personality altogether different from the personalities of its independent members. The first successful start was effected in the spring of 1908 in the Crowd, at its very centre and crown, in a bye-election in the heart of London. A particular segment of its grey streets, in no way different from its half-century of neighbours, had been chalked round with entirely artificial boundaries, and labelled the Parliamentary constituency of Peckham. And it was in this forbidding and desolate neighbourhood that the new electioneering set itself the high test of hypnotising, not each single Imperial citizen who happened to live in Peckham, but Peckham itself—the very heart of it—the Peckham Crowd.

The report of this novel and entertaining crusade soon spread from Peckham to its neighbours: what would appeal to Peckham would also appeal to them; and every evening an appreciable percentage of the four millions which lie around Peckham, and in whose streets Peckham is embedded, poured into the centre of disturbance. There they soon fell under the spell so sedulously prepared for them. They surged up and down the narrow ways, chaffing each other, cheering the candidates, keen, alert, glad each to find himself in the heart of a London Crowd. Any man or woman upon whom fell the itch of speech secured a box, mounted on it, held forth to those who would listen, on teetotalism, or vaccination, or the wickedness of the Government, or the variable price of beer. And the Crowd listened, as it may be seen listening to any distorted nonsense in the public parks on Sunday afternoons: with an aspect of intense seriousness, the respect which the inarticulate Englishman instinctively feels for the voluble. Party feeling was supposed to run high, the newspapers on each side called shrilly for the defeat of plunderers and miscreants: “‘Thou shalt not steal,’ there is no time limit to that,” in huge letters stretched across the street, challenged the cries from Liberal placards that unless the people strangled the drink monopoly they would be strangled by it. Yet it seemed that the great mass of this astonishing multitude—the good-tempered, short-sighted, happy-go-lucky London citizen—regarded all such fiery invective with fortitude, if not with indifference. He was out for fun: to hear a little politics, though not too much; speakers who attempted argument or quotation were speedily deserted; what he liked was noisy rhetoric and denunciation. “Give it ’em hot!” was his favourite advice to any orator of either colour. He delighted in quick repartee, the ready scoring off an interrupter, the good telling of some story with a very obvious point at the end. He liked to see the coal-carts wading through the crowded streets, with the big and little sacks of coal; and the so-called procession of the unemployed from Woolwich, actual, tangible figures, visible before his very eyes; and the huge painted donkey, half as high again as himself, bearing the legend, “My brother is going to vote for Gautrey” (the Government candidate); and the Suffragettes there in person, the very women (some of them agreeable to look at) who have been carried out of Parliament by the police, and done their “time” in Holloway Gaol. He sought, above all, a new sensation: cheering, now a man who, from the summit of a soap-box proclaimed the approaching end of the world; now “Mr. Hunnable,” as he surmised that in the coming University boat race both Oxford and Cambridge would be found among the first three; now a sad-faced woman, whose contribution to the discussion consisted in ringing a huge dinner-bell for half-an-hour without stopping; whose thoughts, like the thoughts of the Turk who followed Anacharsis Clootz in the French Convention, “remain conjectural to this hour.”

Upon such material clever men set themselves to work with commendable zeal: knowing that the Crowd may be stampeded by constant repetition of the same thing, by pictorial illustration from which it cannot escape, and by the excitement of the appeal flashed upon it seemingly from a variety of different sources that it should advance along a particular road. So a “Coal Consumers’ Defence League” asserted, with monotonous insistence, that coal would rise in price if the Government candidate were elected; and attained the hypnotic success which always recompenses a monotonous insistence sufficiently prolonged. And the “Brewery Debenture Shareholders’ League” announced the approaching misery of the widow and the orphan. And long lines of street bookmakers, in tall white hats and genial, vacant, or bibulous faces, inquired of the passing mob why they should not be allowed to bet in the streets if they wished. And every public-house became a Tory committee room, with all its windows plastered with Tory bills and cartoons, and the evidence of a brisk trade and many conversions within its walls. Outside the Metropolitan Gasworks at the dinner-hour, and in Peckham High Street after nightfall, a cloud of mingled, confused oratory and invective rose to the unconscious stars; as six or seven meetings, each within easy earshot of each other, shouted in hoarse accents for women’s votes or cheaper food or the rights of the publican. Wagon-loads of pictorial illustration wedged their way through the coagulated masses of South London, now lit with fierce glare of torches, now disguised as an illuminated fire-engine pumping truth upon the Liberal mendacities; now loaded with slum children, looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly happy and healthy, but dolorously labelled “Victims of the Public-house Monopoly.” Hysteria, as in all such deliriums, was never far away; women shrieked aloud at meetings, and had to be removed; madness fell upon a boy of twelve, and he stood on the top of a barrel, talking Tariff Reform. The extraordinary good humour, the extraordinary stupidity, and the extraordinary latent forces, so concealed as to be unknown even to themselves, in these shabby, cheery, inefficient multitudes of bewildered and contented men and women, were the dominant impressions of this gigantic entertainment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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