20
WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT
YOU may ask why not only the rich but the poor put up with all this, and even passionately defend it as an entirely beneficial public morality. I can only say that the defence is not unanimous: it is always being attacked at one point or another by public-spirited reformers and by persons whose wrongs are unbearable. But taking it in the lump I should say that the evil of the corruption and falsification of law, religion, education, and public opinion is so enormous that the minds of ordinary people are unable to grasp it, whereas they easily and eagerly grasp the petty benefits with which it is associated. The rich are very charitable: they understand that they have to pay ransom for their riches. The simple and decent village woman whose husband is a woodman or gardener or gamekeeper, and whose daughters are being taught manners as domestic servants in the country house, sees in the lord of the manor only a kind gentleman who gives employment, and whose wife gives clothes and blankets and little comforts for the sick, and presides over the Cottage Hospital and all the little shows and sports and well-meant activities that relieve the monotony of toil, and rob illness of some of its terrors. Even in the towns, where the rich and poor do not know oneanother, the lavish expenditure of the rich is always popular. It provides much that people enjoy looking at and gossiping about. The tradesman is proud of having rich customers, and the servant of serving in a rich house. At the public entertainments of the rich there are cheap seats for the poor. Ordinary thoughtless people like all this finery. They will read eagerly about it, and look with interest at the pictures of it in the illustrated papers, whereas when they read that the percentage of children dying under the age of five years has risen or fallen, it means nothing to them but dry statistics which make the paper dull. It is only when people learn to ask “Is this good for all of us all the time as well as amusing to me for five minutes?” that they are on the way to understand how one fashionably dressed woman may cost the life of ten babies.
Even then it seems to them that the alternative to having the fashionably dressed rich ladies is that all women are to be dowdy. They need not be afraid. At present nine women out of ten are dowdy. With a reasonable distribution of income every one of the ten could afford to look her best. That no woman should have diamonds until all women have decent clothes is a sensible rule, though it may not appeal to a woman who would like to have diamonds herself and does not care a rap whether other women are well-dressed or not. She may even derive a certain gratification from seeing other women worse dressed than herself. But the inevitable end of that littleness of mind, that secret satisfaction in the misfortunes of others which the Germans call Schadenfreude (we have no word for it), is that sooner or later a revolution breaks out as it did in Russia; the diamonds go to the pawnbroker, who refuses to advance any money on them because nobody can afford diamonds any longer; and the fine ladies have to wear old clothes and cheaper and worse readymades until there is nothing left for them to wear. Only, as this does not happen all at once, the thoughtless do not believe that the police will ever let it come; and the littlehearted do not care whether it comes or not, provided it does not come until they are dead.
Another thing that makes us cling to this lottery with huge money prizes is the dream that we may become rich by some chance. We read of uncles in Australia dying and leaving £100,000 to a laborer or a charwoman who never knew of his existence. We hear of somebody no better off than ourselves winning the Calcutta Sweep. Such dreams would be destroyed by an equal distribution of income. And people cling all the more to dreams when they are too poor even to back horses! They forget the million losses in their longing for the one gain that the million unlucky ones have to pay for.
Poor women who have too much natural good sense to indulge in these gambler’s dreams often make sacrifices in the hope that education will enable their sons to rise from the slough of poverty; and some men with an exceptional degree of the particular sort of cleverness that wins scholarships owe their promotion to their mothers. But exceptional cases, dazzling as some of them are, hold out no hope to ordinary people; for the world consists of ordinary people: indeed that is the meaning of the word ordinary. The ordinary rich woman’s child and the ordinary poor woman’s child may be born with equally able brains; but by the time they begin life as grown men the rich woman’s son has acquired the speech, manners, personal habits, culture, and instruction without which all the higher employments are closed to him; whilst the poor woman’s son is not presentable enough to get any job which brings him into contact with refined people. In this way a great deal of the brain power of the country is wasted and spoiled; for Nature does not care a rap for rich and poor. For instance, she does not give everybody the ability to do managing work. Perhaps one in twenty is as far as she goes. But she does not pick out the children of the rich to receive her capricious gifts. If in every two hundred people there are only twenty rich, her gift of management will fall to nine poor children and one rich one. But if the rich can cultivate the gift and the poor cannot, then nine-tenths of the nation’s natural supply of managing ability will be lost to it; and to make up the deficiency many of the managing posts will be filled up by pigheaded people only because they happen to have the habit of ordering poor people about.