INTRODUCTION
THE National Mission organised by the Church of England is an effort to arouse men and women who care for religion to a higher sense of their corporate responsibility for the well-being of the nation. The old idea that a man or woman should accept the teaching and sacrifice of our Lord as a means of escape from the torments of hell, or as an admission to a future heaven beyond the clouds, has proved quite futile as a force for regenerating mankind. We all agree now that this life is a much more serious thing, and that it cannot be dismissed and put out of account by the very comfortable belief that, no matter how wicked a person may have been right up to the last hour of life, if at that moment he accepts the sacrifice of Christ’s death all will be well with him throughout eternity. I do not here discuss the theological question, but I do insist that, in the experience of those of us who have lived through the last half of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of salvation, as taught in almost all the Churches, has been, in its effect on life and conduct, a ghastly failure. This failure of Christendom to redeem the world is writ large on the blood-stained battlefields which to-day stretch across Europe, Asia, and Africa. But it is written still deeper on the social life of all those nations who profess to serve God and to believe in the teaching of His blessed Son.
It is this aspect of life I shall write about in this book, because I am convinced it is the one thing that matters in these days when millions of men and women are called upon by their rulers to give up everything that is valuable in life for the purpose of winning the war. A victory over the Germans will be but Dead Sea fruit indeed unless our nation can overcome the preventable poverty and misery, prostitution and destitution, which exist and thrive all around us. We who remain at home, rich and poor, old and young, must enlist in one great army under Christ’s banner, accepting His teaching literally and in all its fulness, determined in very deed to fight against the devil and all his works, and by God’s good grace to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Never was the need so great as now, never our opportunity so great. People of every class have shown us of what fine sacrifice humanity is capable against what is conceived to be a foreign danger. We must organise this enthusiasm, this selflessness, for a greater and nobler fight. We can do this all the more cheerfully because the warfare in which we shall engage is one which will bring life and hope to men and women of every race and every clime. In our march forward we shall leave no hosts of wounded, maimed, or dying; no widows, orphans, or devastated homes; but instead, as we succeed in destroying evil in our own lives, and in calling men and women to repentance and hope, we shall be bringing to others life, and life more abundantly, for they will each be brought to see the sacredness, the beauty and nobility of all life, and made to understand that personal salvation is of little worth unless it is accompanied by the salvation of one’s fellow men and women.
We may disagree on methods, we may fall out about theology, but we cannot disagree on the one thing that matters: to believe in a God of Love, to accept Love as the greatest factor in life, and to translate into deeds of every day that belief and that acceptance. “Little children, love one another,” is the teaching we must follow if we would be saved. In that spirit I write this book and send it out, mainly as an appeal to men and women of the comfortable classes, in order to put before them some of the difficulties which dog the footsteps of the common people throughout life, and also some ideas for establishing better relationship and a more lasting friendship amongst all the people. Not that I imagine for one moment that either rich or educated people can alone save the working classes. I know only too well from my own experience that if mankind is to be saved it must and can only be done by the individual effort of every man and woman to work out his or her own salvation. The rich and educated can only help; they, too, need salvation as much as any section of the community. As Ruskin has well said, the cruellest man living cannot sit at his feast unless blind to the misery and evil which accompanies his wealth into the world, and as Tolstoy well put it: “The rich will do anything for the poor except get off their backs.” Many good people wish to help the poor, want to give them something: I want such people to understand that the one thing needed is that we should recognise life as a unity, and realise how dependent we all are upon each other. When we do this we shall value work of every kind; the dull weary drudgery of the home as much as the learning and research of the student; the work of a sewer-man as highly as the work of a doctor; and we shall see in all labour something to be esteemed and honoured. I know that many people long to be able to take this view. Then let those of us who wish society to be organised in this way take the veil of ignorance or of prejudice or of class-pride from our eyes, let us cast away fear and see life as it is, and, seeing it, understand that each of us is dependent on the others, and that those of us who control most material wealth are in very deed the most dependent of all. And let us keep in mind the fact that people who are clever, people who can invent and organise, can do so only by building on the work of others: true social co-operation means that we each give our very best, whether of brain power or manual power, for the service of mankind, and thus by equal service make possible, so far as material things are concerned, equality of life for all.
No one will deny that under present conditions relationships are artificial, and that for all practical purposes England is divided, not into two nations only, as Disraeli said many years ago, but into dozens of separate and distinct classes each warring to supplant the others. When the class-war is spoken of, many people shrug their shoulders and refuse to acknowledge its existence; they bury their heads in the sands of make-believe. But the war of classes is here; it is a literal fact in peace time and in war time; it is the most soul-destroying fact of modern life; and every reader of this book (let him realise it!) is inevitably one of the protagonists.
During the present war there has been a great deal of Press talk about the breakdown of class distinctions; the nation has been represented as showing a united front, and ready to spend and to be spent on behalf of the country. Those acquainted with the facts of everyday life know that this unity has been to a very large extent quite superficial. It is true that on the battlefield men of all classes have sacrificed themselves with a heroism and devotion unequalled in the history of the world. But at home luxury and wealth, poverty and misery still abound. High profits and dividends are still being accumulated, and large numbers of people owning shares in shipping companies, munition works, and other industrial concerns have piled up money to an ever-increasing extent. We read of shipping companies whose profits have quadrupled, of coal-owners whose dividends have been trebled, of monopolists who by control of our food supplies and other necessaries of life have piled up enormous profits, of Government contractors who are patriotic enough to limit their profits for a few months’ work to the sum of £170,000, of owners of land who receive almost a king’s ransom as the purchase price of land which the nation needs. Other owners of land keep so selfish a hold on it that they refuse its use to the poor for cultivation, preferring to hold it idle until an altogether fabulous price is paid for its use. And we also read of men discharged from the Army without pensions, of others with a miserable dole of 4s. 8d. or thereabouts. At the same time we hear of national gifts to great generals of £100,000, of pensions for judges of £3,500 a year, of Cabinet Ministers who retire on pensions of £1,200 a year; and these men have all received great salaries. The soldier in the Army is said to cost £250 a year. Out of the Army the same man is expected to keep himself, wife, and family on wages from 16s. to 40s. a week. Not much equality either of service or sacrifice is shown by these facts from life to-day.
There is no comparison in the life conditions which prevail amongst the wives and dependents of soldiers and sailors and those which prevail amongst the commercial and landed classes. The soldier’s wife has been plundered and robbed by high prices, and some of the very people who have obtained their money because of these high prices have been good enough to establish Tipperary and other clubs in order to provide some recreation and amenities of life for the soldier’s and sailor’s folk. All the talk about the unity of the nation comes not so much from actual life as from the desire, which all decent people must share, that the unity of life which is expressed in the words “comradeship of the trenches” may find expression in our own lives at home. This attitude of mind is, however, quite oblivious of the fact that under present industrial and commercial conditions such comradeship is impossible of realisation. The giving of doles, subscription to charity, cannot make up to the workers the robbery and exploitation from which they suffer.
In saying this I do not forget that many well-to-do women and men have gone out with the Red Cross, that others are serving in hospitals at home, and some devoting their leisure time to providing joy-rides in motor-cars for the wounded soldiers and sailors, whilst others are working in munition factories, Y.M.C.A. canteens, and so on. Undoubtedly there is a good spirit abroad amongst all classes, but the bedrock fact is that even in war time wealth and poverty remain contrasted throughout the land. Even the women and girls who work in munition factories, if they belong to the comfortable classes, never dream of sharing the same kind of life as the ordinary working-class women, and actually living on the wages they earn. For these well-to-do women the work is but a change; to some it is recreation which may be taken up or dropped at any time when some other rest or recreation is needed. The story that is told of the lady who entertained her co-workers from a munition factory at a dinner party is typical of what I mean. This lady means well, but how can she possibly be a workmate in the full sense unless she is actually living on the same wages as those who work by her side, and who have no other means of support? If she is ill she has only to go home and receive all the care, all the rest and change of air she needs. Different indeed is the life of the working-class girl who has no other income but her earnings, and often lives in one or two rooms on a beggarly wage of 12s. to 20s. per week.
Even amongst most of those who earnestly desire better times there appears to be no thought, so far as I understand them, of securing equality of opportunity for all men and all women, no sort of demand that riches and poverty shall be swept away and equal conditions of life and service established. I do not mean “equality” in the sense of everybody having to do the same kind of work, but I do mean that men and women who toil shall receive the full fruits of their toil; that for themselves there shall be secured good food, good clothes, good houses, and for their children the best education it is possible to give; and that nobody who is willing to serve the nation shall be obliged to live, as so many millions live to-day, with no certainty as to whence to-morrow’s daily bread will come. There is always the horror of sickness and the dread of physical breakdown, which almost always means semi-starvation for the whole family. The lot of the average working-class family is one of respectable, precarious poverty. Cloak it, gloss it over as we may, we cannot get away from this fact, and all people who want conditions to be changed must first of all understand how people live, and what the conditions of life are which it is desired to change. They must also understand that it is impossible to have the best of two worlds at one and the same time. The rich cannot hope to see the poor living in comfortable surroundings until these conditions are swept away. To improve conditions, a thorough and radical change must take place. Poverty cannot be destroyed unless the causes which produce poverty are destroyed. These causes are so apparent to any thoughtful person that it is always a mystery to me why those who are so anxious for a change do not attack the root causes of poverty, rather than pour out so much money and effort in an attempt to palliate the ruin and disaster which come from evil social conditions.
I propose to divide this book into several parts. I shall write, not as an economist (for that is the last thing I would want to claim to be), certainly not as any sort of philanthropist (because that, too, is rather a weariness of the flesh), but just as an ordinary person who sees a good deal of what is evil in the world, not in others only, but in himself, and who is conscious that to many people money and money’s-worth is the alpha and omega of life; as one aware that for those who have children to feed and clothe, and wives to maintain, either on low wages or by an interminable struggle in small businesses, life is one miserably mean, sordid grind against poverty, in a world in which men and women, boys and girls, are but pawns in the struggle of mankind to heap up riches. I write as one who knows that nothing divides friends and relations so easily as love of money; that nothing causes so much hatred and contempt, so much bitterness between families and friends, between good people as well as what are called bad people, as the loss of money. The poor, we must all realise, so far as material wealth is concerned, are always poor. Multitudes live in debt, through no fault of their own, from one year’s end to another till they die. The West-End money-lender is well known for his grasping demands of usurious interest, but the poor are also victims of the same kind of men and women of their own class, and in many poor districts big incomes are received from the business of money-lending. This condition of things comes about mainly because of low wages, times of sickness and periods of unemployment, and often, too, because people long for a fuller life than their ordinary means will allow—that is, they long for recreation and pleasure, good clothes and food, all beyond the reach of their scanty earnings. Even gambling and betting are often due to the fact that by these means men and women hope to secure more of the good things of life.
Yet if I know these things, and understand these aspects of life, I am nevertheless convinced there is much more good-will than evil in the world. But evil is organised, evil is strong, and the good in many gets crushed beneath the heavy load of unnecessary care which accompanies them through life. My object in life is to strive by God’s help to beat down selfishness and greed and evil-doing in myself; and by every means in my power to seek to remove from other people the weights that hold them down—from the poor the burden of need, from the rich the burden of those riches which make the poverty of the poor. The first step towards this fuller life for the nation is to cast out fear and have faith in our fellow-men. We often deceive each other because we are afraid of the truth.
The truth we have to face is that it is only by basing our life and conduct on the teachings of Christ—to forgive all things, hope all things, endure all things by faith and love for each other—that we can make a clean and wholesome place of our country. This is the object we must set before ourselves if we would have a better England. Governments and organisations may do much if guided and directed by men and women imbued with the spirit of love, but all legislation has so far failed to redeem mankind because there has not been this dynamic force behind it.
All of us who are removed from the poverty line are—unless we have been fighting evil conditions in order to pull others out of the whirlpool of want and destitution—responsible for the material miseries and horrors which the great proportion of the people have perpetually to bear. And there will be very little hope from the National Mission, very little to hope from all this religious effort, unless we get right down to the root causes and conditions which produce poverty, prostitution and destitution; unless we realise that humanity, while capable of very fine things, is quite incapable of living a decent, wholesome life while it is obliged to engage in a vicious scramble for daily bread. We have, in some way, to destroy the competitive system which puts us (in the workshop, in the market-place, in the factory) one against the other, which makes us struggle to rise above our fellows in order to secure for ourselves and dependents a decent standard of life and comfort.
The only hope that can come to the world will come when we have substituted co-operation for competition. To effect this we need an entirely new spirit, a spirit which shall be the complete opposite of that which dominates commercial and industrial life and conduct to-day. And it is in the hope that this book will help in creating this spirit that I am writing it. There is so much good in men and women: there could be so much better. It is only because we are so divided one from another, only because we are so ignorant of each other’s lives, that we submit to these un-Christian conditions. When we know, we shall all unite in a supreme and practical effort to destroy the man-made conditions which produce the evils we have so genuinely but vaguely deplored. Then we shall, by united efforts, build a new state based on the foundation, not of hatred, not of competition, but of brotherhood, co-operation, and love.