“Sapiens” should have been translated “sportsman,” for it is a synonym in this case.
I do not know whether one should say that drink or betting is the greatest menace to modern sport. The latter, at any rate, permeates it in an alarming degree.
Mealy generalities are of no use, and it is a mere derision to pretend that nearly every branch of sport is not imperilled and besmirched by betting.
Dumb protest is always going on, but sportsmen themselves hear very little of it. Papers devoted to sporting matters do not speak out, and the campaign against betting made by the layman only reaches the sportsman’s ears with a muffled sound—like a drum beaten under a blanket.
Moreover, if the general public desires anything it always declares solemnly that it is true, the only truth. If it does not, it bawls out that it does not exist and has never existed. The Christian Scientists, for instance, are beginning to say this of Death itself, and the non-sporting majority, who want to make money without earning it, most certainly desire the continuance of betting.
I am quite confident, therefore, that the second half of this essay will be assailed quite as widely as the first part was, when it appeared in a magazine. In the first part the facts are very carefully authenticated, as they are in this one. Yet the obvious retort was hunted out with all the enthusiasm of a short-sighted bloodhound, and in some quarters one was spoken of as a sensation-monger, who probably made a good thing out of his wares!
That, of course, is very easy to say, but it is not argument. It is nevertheless welcome, because the vigour of the attack always shows the strength of the position.
In connection with the Betting Question, the mind at once turns to horse-racing. There is much to be said in this regard, and I intend to treat of this branch of sport later on in my statement. But I propose to begin with other instances of the evil. Evil it undoubtedly is. The massive harmony which the body and mind sound in correlation under the influences of true sport, is made discordant by it.
Like the youth of a nation, sportsmen are, in a sense, the trustees of posterity, and we must unite not only to recognize the fact but to crush the evil.
No sportsman ever takes a puritanical view of betting. It is the sort of person who thinks vaccination immoral, and whose conversation is like a glass of still lemonade, who thinks that a wager is a sin. This is a fault. I believe that I am voicing the point of view of the sportsman—which is simply the conviction of the sensible man—when I say that there is absolutely no harm in an ordinary wager. You put what you can afford to lose upon the result of a horse-race or a football match. If you win you are rather pleased and you have hurt no one. If you lose you are not hurt in any way, and you have done no more than make a mistake in prescience.
It is necessary to define the difference between a bet which is harmless, and systematic betting which is eventually an attempt to obtain the emoluments of industry without the effort of toil, an attempt which—and here is the very essence of the matter—leads to an abominable dishonesty and the most scandalous abuse.
And now, by graduated steps, let us proceed to a definite presentment of the evil as it exists on the day when you read what I am saying. You will please observe that one begins upon the small organ and in the minor chord. The swell and the crescendo will start later on, until we have full pedal music and thunder of the big pipes!
It has always been the boast of Oxford and Cambridge men that the Boat-race was in its very nature an event which was utterly removed from the gambling evil. One had a wager on one crew or the other, perhaps—most people did not—but the great rowing match was at least pure of offence in this regard. No public harm was ever done. I do not for a moment say that the Boat-race is provocative of general gambling, or is injured by it, as so many other sports are injured. But the fact that I am going to relate is symptomatic. It shows how the gambling spirit is growing and radiating until, in one instance at any rate, the Boat-race itself became the incentive to dishonesty.
Upon a dull day on the Stock Exchange, a group of the younger members began to make wagers about this event. The race was known to be a near thing. The next day the wagers were continued until quite a little “market” was established. The prices fluctuated according as the reports of the training of the crews came to hand. The whole thing was but half serious, though in a day or two large sums of money became involved.
One member of this coterie, a man who was known to be a sportsman, and one whose word had influence, deliberately circulated a false report as to the time in which Oxford had rowed a course, queered the market, and made a considerable sum.
In regarding the gambling question the attention of the ordinary man is generally focussed upon the race-course and upon the bookmaker, as he squirms his careful way through life. People either forget or don’t realize that most of the minor sports are being utterly spoilt and ruined by betting.
Cycle-racing is still a sport which is keenly pursued, though perhaps it has declined somewhat in popularity of late years. In many of the suburban districts round London there are fine cycle tracks, built with all the last improvements which the track-architects of America have discovered. In the Midlands and North of England there are magnificent tracks in nearly all the principal towns.
Cycle-racing is popular, draws enormous crowds, and draws the small bookmaker also. It is a known fact that at any big cycle-race meetings bets are made with all the briskness and regularity possible.
Large sums do not change hands. Half-crowns, sovereigns and half-sovereigns represent the actual ready-money transactions, though in sporting public-houses, for days before a big local event, much greater amounts are wagered.
It is no use for any one to pretend that this is not so—I have innumerable facts. One instance, which may be interesting to set down here, was related to me by a friend who is a builder of scientific miniature rifle ranges. At one time he resided in Manchester, and frequently visited the great pleasure-gardens known as Belle Vue in that city. My informant used himself to make a book on the cycle track in this popular place of amusement.
“I used to make quite a lot of money,” he told me. “It was great fun.”
“But how did you do it?” I asked him. “Describe” ...
“Oh, it was quite easy. You waited till the one or two policemen who were strolling about were not near; they were never too anxious to bother one in any case. Then I used to jump up on the railing and say ‘I’ll take money!’ I used to get a lot of punters round in a minute by shouting the odds.”
How many readers will call out, “Much ado about nothing.” “What harm,” they will ask, “can the small wagers of a crowd at a Manchester cycle-race possibly do to Sport?”
I reply that these wagers do the very gravest harm, not perhaps to the wagerers, but to real Sport itself. The fact of so many hundreds of people having a financial interest in the success of this or that rider at once puts the rider—a sportsman—in a position of danger and temptation. The low class of person who has his being in the side-scenes, the tortuous coulisses of Sport, is always at hand to make a disgraceful bargain with the athlete. Men who are accustomed to regard life as no more than a game of cunning come with gold in their soiled hands. And if the sportsman succumbs, then not only is a bar sinister charged on his personal escutcheon, but the whole tone of Sport is lowered. Every single instance of this kind fosters a base and ignoble view of Sport, and it does matter very much indeed that Tom loses half-a-crown, Dick makes five shillings, and Harry comes out “even on the afternoon.”
If fools must gamble, why are they not allowed to do it apart from such a fine and splendid thing as Sport? I would far rather see a nasty little Casino established in every town, where fools might lose what they can’t afford in the hope of winning what they won’t work for, than see them tempting athletes and spoiling the game.
Of two evils choose the least—a make-shift maxim, but sound in its way!
Very few dwellers in the South and West of England are aware of the extraordinary interest taken in the Midlands and the North in pigeon-flying. This is a good and fascinating pastime. It certainly interests me, and there is something very stimulating to the imagination in it. The careful breeding of strong-pinioned birds, the training of them, the vast distances they cover under changing skies and down the long invisible slants of the wind—it has an appeal, has it not? Certainly it requires real knowledge and care.
I don’t suppose that there is any minor sport so utterly spoilt and degraded by gambling as this sport is.
They tell a good story in the North which epitomizes the whole thing. It is a reprobate yarn, but it is funny.... An old pitman lay a-dying. He had been a worthy fellow, a very well-known breeder and flyer of pigeons, and his only fault had been that he wagered what, to him, were reckless sums upon the results of pigeon-flying matches.
He lay dying, and the Vicar of the parish sat by his bedside and tried to ease the fear of passing from one life to another by telling the man of what might well await him in the next world.
...“Did thee say as I should be a gradely angel, parson?” the old fellow said.
“You’ve lived a straight life, John.”
“Angels ‘as wings, don’t they?”
“The poets and painters have always imagined so, John.”
“Well, I’m goin’ first, and I’m reet sorry to say good-bye to thee, Vicar. But I make no doubt thee’ll be up there soon theeself. Now I’ll tell thee what I’ll do when thee arrives. I’ll fly thee for a quid!”
That makes one laugh—it makes me laugh at least—but it is merely one of those pleasant jests which divert the mind from the contemplation of an evil. Clergymen in the Midlands and the North have told me the saddest stories of humble homes ruined, broken and bankrupt, because of the gambling on pigeon-races. The moral fibre of many a collier and millhand is often destroyed by betting on this sport. Women and children suffer in consequence, rates are raised in the local commonwealth, and once more “sport”—that misunderstood word—is soiled and besmirched in the public mind. And those of us who are capable of taking a broad and comprehensive view of affairs must allow that the sport-hating Puritan has at least got some reason for his distorted point of view.
He can say, and with perfect justice, that betting has killed professional sculling.
He can point out, and no one can deny it, that even the quiet, but highly-skilled game of bowls is permeated with the gambling spirit, that owing to the large sums put up as prizes and wagered upon results, the temptation to players in a public contest is enormous.
“What is this sport you vaunt so loudly?” the Puritan said. “Surely it is a thing which is essentially bad and wrong, because of the evils it excites. When the American press accuses English oarsmen of ‘doping’ an American eight’s crew owing to heavy betting on the part of the other crew, when American athletes refuse to dress in the same room as a competing team of English athletes—is it not obvious that sport cannot be the worthy and fine thing you say it is?”
I have voiced the shrill cry of prejudice and exaggeration. But truth must always be the basis upon which exaggeration is built. No one, to my theory, can successfully exaggerate a lie. The result is redundant, and so, unconvincing, while the attempt itself is like trying to add four pounds of butter to four o’clock.
In the space of an article such as this, I must not unduly prolong the dismal story of how the minor sports are being injured by gambling.
Yet the whippet-racing of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland has degenerated, and the sport must be given a bad name—though it is the owners and not the dogs who ought to be hung!
Pigeon-shooting—if that is indeed a sport, which I personally beg leave to doubt—has become no trial of skill and readiness, but an occasion upon which, when the betting is in favour of a right-hand shot, a needle is sometimes put into the left eye of the bird so that it may swerve to the right upon its release from the trap and increase the difficulty of the aim.
I am informed that birds are frequently blinded in this abominable way at local English meetings, and also in Germany—in the interests of gambling. In this matter, however, it is only right to say that the Hon. E. S. Butler—one of the crack pigeon-shots of the day—tells me that the conditions at Monte Carlo are absolutely fair, though the betting is most heavy.
There is hardly any “gambling” in English golf. Private matches sometimes provoke a heavy wager between the players, but that is not gambling. In Scotland, however, where most towns have links which are open to everybody for a fee of threepence, there is an immense amount of gambling among the poorer classes. Now it is certainly far better that the Scotch mechanic should spend his Saturday afternoon playing at a fine game than in watching other people play it, as his English brother does at a football match. But it is an enormous pity that such facilities as the poorer folk enjoy for sport should be abused and spoilt. A well-known Scotch clergyman, a favourite preacher of the late Queen’s, tells me that the gambling at golf makes a constant watchfulness necessary on the part of players. “Many of them will cheat if they can,” he said; “and you’ll know how easy it is to cheat at golf? It’s just the money aspect of the question. It’s small wonder that a man will move his ball an inch from under a bunker, if it’s necessary and the other fellow isn’t looking, when perhaps a third of his week’s wages depends upon the lie.”
Again I would punctuate my instance with the moral it affords. Here also sport suffers. If I did not believe in the inherent nobility of sport, if I was not absolutely convinced of its supremely important place in the life of both soul and body, I should not be writing this. But as one goes on with this dismal catalogue—no very pleasant task, one gets into a fever of indignation. “Duo quum patiuntur idem, non est idem,” of course. No two men experience identical effects from identical causes. But true sportsmen will at least share something of my feeling. And it’s no use to set out alone to kick the world’s shins. The world has several million shins to your one. We must combine—we who love sport and realize what it means.
The Hermes of Praxiteles is a perfect type of all that is physically fit and fine—and so spiritually also—in man.
Take that statue and regard it for a moment as a concrete manifestation of all that is meant by the word “sport.”
And then, suppose that the Hermes of Praxiteles were your own possession, that you had it in your own house. Would you allow a crew of people who cared nothing for great art to cover it with mud?
......Now to gambling as it affects the major sports.
Cricket is fortunately untouched, save very occasionally in League cricket. It is pleasant to think of our national game as unsmirched.
But football, which we may well call our other national game, is most deeply and gravely involved.
Of the two games, rugby is cleanest in this regard. In the Northern Union District there is more gambling than elsewhere, but, take it all in all, rugby does not greatly suffer.
But what can one say of Association football?
......There are many quite well-known instances of goal-keepers being bribed. They are, indeed, so well known that people who are interested in the game, and know anything of its polity and ways need hardly be reminded of them.
The buying and selling of players—for it is just that—and their transference from club to club, is responsible for much of the evil, as I see it. But in Association especially, not only does sport suffer from the occasional dishonesty of the players, but the game itself provides a constant incentive to the spectators to forget the beauty of its raison d’être and to regard it merely as an opportunity for speculation.
Is running untainted? Not a bit of it!
Professional running is in an even worse condition than when Wilkie Collins wrote his remarkable novel about it—though professional running no longer holds its old position or keeps its old importance. But the Sheffield handicaps, and the Scotch professional contests at Edinburgh, still exist as prominent features in the sporting life of our time. And as prominent scandals also.
Amateur running is far more widely entangled with betting than most people are aware.
Some time ago, on the County Ground at Bristol, there were six men in a heat for a 120 yards race. Five of these were friends and the sixth was almost a stranger, but one whose record, by comparison, would certainly have secured him the race in the opinion of experts.
This last gentleman was taken aside before the race and offered ten pounds “To let Bill win.”
Please remember that I am neither inventing nor exaggerating, that I have chapter and verse, that I have gone into the whole question most carefully, that I relate fact.
From the ancient times when gladiators fought with the brutal spiked cestus, until the present day, boxing has always been a fine sport. Among the Romans it was certainly brutally misused, and in our own time of the Prince Regent it was not free from the charge of brutality. To-day, in the humane progress of ideas, the ring cannot be assailed in this regard. We have refined this splendid sport until it stands purged of all imputations of savagery.
Of savagery, yes; of the far meaner vice of gambling, no! Who can say for certainty that any fight, in Bristol, Liverpool, Cumberland, at the N.S.C., “Wonderland,” or even at the Belsize, is absolutely a square fight? Who knows whether the blind old heathen goddess of chance has not been harnessed by the money-mongers and is waiting with malevolent intention at the ropes?
No one can say with certainty, outside the Army, Public Schools, and the ’Varsity contests.
The rascality of the ring would fill a number of a magazine. Boxing is no longer a national sport, which goes on everywhere and, as a matter of course, under the full sunlight. It has sunk into a local amusement or a located disgrace. And it has sunk simply and solely because of gambling.
Wrestling, that worthy and ancient English sport, has almost ceased to exist. I have had a cottage in Cornwall for some years and it is my privilege to know many of the champions of the past in this chief old home of the game.
I know what it was once, how splendid and stimulating to the life of the community. And what is wrestling to-day? It is a sporadic contest, between great players indeed, but one which is utterly spoilt and discredited, when looked upon from the true sportsman’s point of view. In the most cynical and open way many of the sporting newspapers discuss the probability of this or that bout being a “square” one or not. With the indifference with which one would discuss the chances of an egg proving to be fresh or stale, some journalists determine the pros and cons of honour and dishonour.
I have a friend who is a theatrical agent and entrepreneur. Among his various activities, he is the manager for the champion wrestler of the world. “You never know,” he said to me at dinner, “you never really know the truth about the bona fides of many wrestling bouts until the contest is over. Of course men like ’——’ and ’——’ are absolutely square. They are the haute noblesse of the game. They’ve got to be. But you may take it from me that dozens and dozens of contests are faked in the interests of the betting ring.”
After extreme youth is over, life mercifully dulls the hunger for perfection in all of us. There never was a time in the history of horse-racing when people did not bet. Nor does one expect the impossible. But while racing was never more popular and more strongly organized than it is to-day, it was never so provocative of evil, so manqué from the true sportsman’s point of view. The men of carrion passions, and the army of muddy knaves who live by the exploitation and bespatterment of the noblest of sports, are legion.
The smaller fry who make existence possible for the knaves—the ordinary men who bet regularly on races—are millions. There is no need to insist upon the fact, it is as dismal and obvious as a lump of clay. The whole atmosphere of the turf is like the degradation of the air in a close bedroom with the windows shut.
It is not my province or intention here to go very deeply into illustrative detail in the matter of the turf. It is better to be luminous than voluminous. But there are one or two points which may be new and instructive for the non-gambling sportsman.
Here is a recent quotation from a well-known English “sporting” paper—one of those, by the way, which conveys “humour” direct from the pit to the front page.
It is about some English jockeys in America—
“Our jockeys are having a hard time, in a way, inasmuch as they are being kept under the closest surveillance by Pinkerton detectives. They are practically caged off from the public, are escorted to the scales and paddock, are not allowed to speak to any one except an employer, and then only when mounting, and their valets must wear a distinctive uniform, with numbers on their sleeves. This is reform with a vengeance, and by no means agreeable to some of our young swells, who are also shadowed after the races.”
“By sports like these are all their cares beguiled!”
Was Goldsmith a prophet?
It is not always easy to remember that the professed aim of the Jockey Club is “the furtherance of the breeding and preservation of the English thoroughbred horse.”
Yet to-day the officers of foreign armies buy Australian walers. They won’t purchase English stallions. I belong to the “Cercle Privée civil et militaire” of Bruges, a great military centre. Every day the General commanding the district and his staff are in the Club. They tell me that English horses are no longer looked upon as they were upon the Continent.
Does not this “give one furiously to think,” as my friend the General said here the other morning? Doping in the interests of the gambling market seems to be beginning to tell!
The gambling industry is organized with consummate skill and great business capacity.
Gambling by post is almost incredibly upon the increase. In Middleburg and Flushing there are twelve huge betting firms. One person employs ninety people in his office, and has his own printing establishment, which is always glutted with work.
Often £1000 is received by one firm in a single day—nearly all in small bets, and all from England. The post-offices of Dutch towns of the size of Middleburg or Flushing normally keep in stock stamps which will supply the needs of a population of 20,000 persons. Now, these two towns are compelled to keep enough to supply a population of 200,000—all for the “furtherance of the breeding and preservation,” etc., etc.
Here is another significant fact which may possibly elucidate the recent and somewhat cryptic utterance, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton just as certainly as the battle of Spion Kop was lost upon the playing fields of Sandhurst.”
The fact is this ...
In the issue of The War Office Times, May 25, 1905, occurs a flagrant puff of a bookmaker, who without the humour of a less eminent confrère who described himself as a “brass finisher” in the census returns, calls himself a “high-class turf-accountant.”
“We strongly advise any of our readers who require a high-class Turf-accountant to send for Mr. ——’s book of rules, bound in leather, which will be sent post free to applicants. We have convinced ourselves that this is a thoroughly genuine business, and, as such, we have no hesitation in recommending it to our readers.”
I have the book “bound in leather,” and a good many others also, which I acquired for the purposes of this article.
And precious and elaborate productions they are! The ingenuity of red morocco and gilding, of alluring propositions and the suggestion of a bludgeon-sturdy honesty deserve the highest praise. I was especially delighted with the telegraphic code of one hero, which used the names of fish to symbolize the amount of “investments.” “Salmon,” for example, means “put me ten pounds on.”
All the denizens of ocean are used save one....
With commendable modesty, or possibly a fellow feeling, this worthy has omitted “shark.”
One has said enough to outline—I hope vividly and strongly—how Sport is being spoilt by gambling.
Sport, thank goodness, is not yet retrograde owing to this curse. But it may be. Let us all remember that progress is merely the power of seeing new beauties. The more Sport progresses unhindered by gambling, the sooner will it take its high place in life and fulfil its noble destiny.
And every sportsman can do something to help that progress.
The fiery Erasmus writes this of Sir Thomas More, who was a thorough sportsman, to his German friend, Ulrich von Hutten:—
“Gambling of all kinds, balls, dice and such like he detests. None of that sort are to be found about him. In short, he is the best type of sportsman.”
“Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.”
Note.—Since this essay was written, three short articles appeared in the sporting columns of the Daily Mail which are a striking corroboration of my contentions. All the articles appeared within a few days of each other, and I print parts of them as an appendix.
FOOTBALL AND ALCOHOL
HOW PLAYERS MAY LENGTHEN THEIR CAREERS
By William McGregor.
I dealt a few days ago with the question of what constituted a sensible diet for footballers, and hinted that the so-called special training which teams undergo on the eve of a great encounter was often prejudicial rather than beneficial.
Now, a well-known medical man, who fills the position of official doctor to one of our leading football clubs, met me on the evening of the day that the article appeared and said (excuse the apparent egotism, but it is necessary for the purpose of the article), “That was a really good article of yours in the London Daily Mail. You put the matter precisely as I should put it, as a medical man. You might follow it up with an article pointing out that there are two abuses which footballers suffer from, viz. errors in regard to eating, and errors in regard to drinking. If you can put in a strong plea for either the abolition of alcohol, or the sparing use of alcohol by footballers, you will be doing the game a good service, and you will be doing the players a good service.”
I then remembered a little incident which occurred at the Aston Villa ground early in the season. The occasion was a match played during that tropical weather, weather which was utterly unfit for football. Violent exercise such as football imposed a very severe strain upon the men that day.
As soon as the interval was over, a medical man came up to me, and in quite excited accents said, “I say, Mr. McGregor, do you know that they have been giving the visiting team spirits during the interval? I have never heard of such a foolish proceeding. Why, alcohol is the worst possible thing for footballers to have at any time, but more especially on a day like this. You could not have anything more heating than spirits.”
Speaking from a general rather than a professional or technical experience, I agreed with him. I asked him, as a medical man, what he would have given the men under such peculiar circumstances. His answer was, “At any rate, I should not have given them alcohol. I do not know that I should have given them anything. The best thing would have been for them to have rinsed their mouths out with cold water.”
CHAMPAGNE OR LEMONS?
In a match which took place in the Midlands last season, the home team gave a particularly poor display in the second half, and one of the directors said to me, “They have been behaving foolishly to our men. The trainer gave them champagne during the interval, and I do not think that is a good drink for them to have. The momentary feeling of exhilaration following a glass of champagne soon wears off.”
If the form manifested by the team which had the champagne that day may be taken as a criterion as to the merits of champagne as a stimulant for football purposes, then all I can say is, that I never want to see a team receive such a stimulant again. It may not have been the champagne that caused their poor form; but at any rate their play was poor.
I recall another interesting instance in which champagne played a part. I am going back a long time now, but the circumstances were exceptional.
Away in the remote eighties, Moseley (as they often were then) were in possession of the Midland Counties Rugby Challenge Cup, and one of their supporters was interested in Aston Villa. I do not know whether it was Kenneth Wilson or not, for Kenneth Wilson, I may say, was a Pollokshields man, who was in business in Birmingham. He was a splendid athlete, and played for Aston Villa, and also for Moseley under Rugby rules simultaneously. I expect he had something to do with the incident.
At any rate, the Cup made its appearance at Perry Barr on the day that Aston Villa were playing an English Cup tie with Darwen. Now the Aston Villa team of that period, captained by the great Archie Hunter, was as bonny a set in a social sense as I have ever known. They were grand footballers, and played the game for all they were worth when they were on the field. But it was a loose and lax age as compared with the present football era, and during the interval some one filled the Cup with champagne, and the Villa players drank to the prosperity of the Moseley Club—and very bad football they played after the interval, too.
I do not suppose for a moment that any one player had much champagne, but from what I could see of their demeanour, I came to the conclusion that champagne was a bad thing to play football on. At any rate, the Villa had the greatest difficulty in avoiding defeat at the hands of Darwen. If I remember aright, the great Hugh McIntyre, who died in London last year, and was better known as a Blackburn Rover, kept goal brilliantly for Darwen that day.
THE GREATEST ENEMY
You hear of well-known footballers kicking over the traces, passing from club to club, and marring what might have been great reputations. If you will look into the history of these men you will find that in nineteen cases out of twenty their bad relations with their employers are due to the fact that they are accustomed to imbibe too much alcohol. Alcohol is, indeed, the footballer’s greatest enemy; at any rate, to put it simply and straightforwardly, no man ever played football the better for taking alcohol, and many men have played it infinitely worse by reason of their indulgence therein.
Every football manager likes to get together a team of tee-totalers. If you take the records of the greatest players, or perhaps I might say the great players who have had phenomenally long and honourable careers, you will find that in nearly every case they were either life-long abstainers or rigidly moderate men. I could give many instances if space permitted.
FOOTBALL BOOKMAKERS
WHAT REALLY ATTRACTS LEAGUE CROWDS?
“The public are getting rather weary,” writes a correspondent, “of the professional football promoters’ periodical rigmarole under the heading of ‘Betting at Football Matches.’
“Why not make it ‘Betting on Football‘? Here he would have ‘copy’ for every day in the week, as long as professional football lasts.
“I cannot speak for the south, but, as for the north, it is a fact that football betting is rife in Newcastle, Sunderland, Middlesbrough—thanks to the professional football promoter. It is not done at the matches, but beforehand, on the combination football betting coupon system, but it is betting all the same.
“Thousands and thousands of football coupons are distributed weekly by bookmakers among the working men at the big factories, ship-yards, etc.
“This betting is the sole reason why many of these working men and others, who know practically nothing of football, take an interest in the League and attend matches in connection with the same.
“The betting is not on a particular match, but on a combination of matches.
“Football loafing and betting will always go hand in hand. There are none so blind as those who will not see. What is more, in this case it would not pay to see. Certainly, the professional football promoter has a great deal to answer for.”
DISHONESTY IN SPORT
STRONG EFFORTS TO BE MADE TO STOP IMPERSONATION
The recent case of a young Hereford sprinter who, by impersonating another runner, secured a prize of the value of £4, and who was ordered by the Bench to pay three guineas towards the cost of the prosecution and refund the prize or its equivalent value, shows that the justices are doing all they can to assist the Amateur Athletic Association in preserving amateur athletics for the pure sportsman.
It is to be regretted that such instances are by no means rare, and the Amateur Athletic Association has several cases in hand at the present time. The Association is, however, determined to put a stop to the practice.
The trick of impersonating amateurs and thereby winning prizes at athletic sports is, in fact, as old as the hills, and years ago used to be carried on unblushingly and free from detection.
One of the earliest cases on record was that of a man at Ashford. His head was as innocent of hair as a billiard ball, and to play the part properly it was necessary for him to wear a wig. He was winning his race easily enough, when his hirsute adornment was blown off by the wind, and the attempted fraud ended in failure.
Quite recently there were two brothers in the army, one an amateur and the other a professional. The latter impersonated the former with sufficient success as to secure the prize; but although the fraud was afterwards discovered, it was felt that the evidence was not strong enough to secure a conviction.
In a similar case in the Northampton district a couple of years ago, the judge took a serious view of the case, and the offender received exemplary punishment.
Strong action is undoubtedly needed to stamp out the practice, and the Amateur Athletic Association will leave no stone unturned in its endeavours to purify it.
VAGROM MEN
In the November of last year—1905—I was invited to consider the problem which is known as “The Unemployed Question,” and to write something about it in a London daily paper. In 1905 the subject was attracting the attention of every one, and it was thought that by means of my own method—the method of Fiction—I might possibly interest people.
I welcomed the opportunity, and wrote a story expressing my views, which was published among the news columns of the Daily Mail.
Before the tale began to appear I had several conferences with Lord Northcliffe, then Sir Alfred Harmsworth, the editor of the newspaper. Certain facts were told me; a mass of expert opinion and evidence was placed at my disposal, and I was enjoined to study my new material and write exactly as I felt about the question. No restrictions were placed upon my point of view. I suppose that very rarely indeed has it happened to an ordinary novelist that the ruling powers of a journal which has one of the largest circulations in the world have said, “Here are our columns; come and say what you think in them.”
It is, no doubt, good journalism to print a single article written by a man whose conviction on the subject of the article is diametrically opposed to that of the newspaper in which it is published. A standard of value is created by an exhibition of contrasts. It is good journalism also to print the views of experts such as Mr. Booth or Mr. McKenzie. Both these things are constantly done. But to give a novelist columns of enormously valuable space for some weeks—“news space,” not the space generally reserved for fiction—in order that he may express his own ideas, is very unusual. At the time when this was offered to me I thought it a very great compliment. I can hardly believe that I was mistaken, and I think so still.
I wrote the story, and called it, Made in His Image. When it had run through the newspaper it was published in book form. Fourteen months have gone by, and during them I have endeavoured to keep myself informed as to the position of affairs. With the additional knowledge that the past year and its inquiries have given me, I find myself still of precisely the same opinion as I was before. If anything, my conviction is stronger than before. What my opinions are, such conclusions as I have come to, I have been invited to tell you to-night.
I will get to the point at once without further preamble, save only to say how much I value the privilege of addressing you.
For a long time past every class of the community has been exercised by the problem of the unemployed. The question has steadily become more acute year by year, and at the present moment its solution is the most pressing and necessary of all that confront thinking men and women.
I propose to touch briefly upon the existing state of things, to explain what I conclude to be the cause of it, and to set before you my belief as to the only remedy.
In London, Manchester, Birmingham, and all the great cities of England, the streets are full of men with bright eyes, and faces cut and whittled to an edge by hunger. Men and women with kindly hearts and sympathetic natures cannot go abroad in winter unless they taste the bitterness of sights and sounds that tear the heart and lacerate the soul.
Dismal and terrible processions move throughout the streets of our capitals like spectres from the underworld. I have myself, in the course of my investigations, been packed tight among a crowd of tattered, coughing humans in London. I have walked with them, brethren of yours and mine, men who offended and distressed every sense, men who groaned and sighed because they had not eaten, men who exhaled an odour like the caged animals in a menagerie, men who fed, when they fed at all, upon garbage, men who could not wash.
I have seen faces all round me like the faces that the great Italian poet Dante describes as flitting through the gloom of hell. On one side is a face grown witless from hunger, sorrow, and foul environment. It is a horrible face, a face like a glass of dirty water. Another face is simply a grey drawn wedge of cunning; a third man has a face that might have been that of a saint, but the horror of his life has put its heel upon the countenance, and has ground the possibility to pulp. I have stood among living bodies which have no heat in them, a company of ghosts that cough and curse in bloodless voices. And among these gaunt, dismal, and hopeless men the one who can snarl and cry his sorrows loudly is the one who is envied by all the rest. He must have had a meal that day.
I expect many of you have seen something of what I describe, and those who have had this sad experience will bear witness that I am exaggerating nothing. This is not Fiction; it is melancholy Truth. In the opening chapter of the story I wrote on the Unemployed question, I described a meeting of the Unemployed in Trafalgar Square. In the course of the chapter I told how some charitable people drove up with a cart full of buns and bread and butter. Immediately there was a riot. The poor starving people fought with each other for the food like wolves. The scene was horrible. This first chapter appeared on November 18, in the Daily Mail. Two days afterwards I met a friend in my London Club who had read it. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you’ve let your imagination run away with you. A story is all very well, but it should closely follow the lines of fact. Don’t you tell me that English workmen are in such a pass that they will fight for a morsel of food in the heart of London. You’re coming it a bit too tall, my dear chap.”
He was a ruddy, prosperous friend. As he came into the Club smoking-room he gave a heavy fur coat, which probably cost him fifty guineas, to one of the waiters. He called for a whisky and soda, and sank into an arm-chair of red leather with a comfortable sigh of pleasure. He stretched out his legs towards a blazing fire of logs, and said again, “You novelist johnnies are always coming it a bit too thick, don’t you know!”
My worthy friend was one of those who have eyes but see not; because they won’t see, and don’t wish to see.
Now listen to the sequel—
Three days after this a procession of Unemployed marched along the Embankment in London. Some charitable people did actually bring down a cart of food. There was a riot and a fight for the food exactly as I had foreseen in my imaginary tale. It was reported in the newspaper. Five days after I had imagined that, under existing conditions, something might happen, that thing actually did happen—men came fighting for a scrap of bread in the heart of the Metropolis.
This is what we see in the great streets of London and other towns—the streets full of shops which are crammed with costly and beautiful things, thronged with prosperous people. What we see when we follow the procession of the Unemployed back to the awful dens in which they live is impossible to do more than hint at. To tell the absolute unvarnished truth in a public assembly, to publish a faithful description in a public print is an utter impossibility. These dreadful facts are those which despairing clergymen and ministers, doctors, nurses, would-be helpers, tell to each other in whispers.
I knew a lady whose husband had turned out worthless, and who finally deserted her. Her one source of income was a row of small houses in the East End of London, houses that were let out in rooms to the very poor. My friend was too poor to employ an agent to collect her rents and draw a commission for his work. Every week she did so herself, and one week she invited me to accompany her. I did so, and it was the most horrible day I ever spent. No working man in a district such as this can form any idea of the filth and misery in which the lost, degraded tenants of these houses lived. I shall not attempt to describe it, for it would be a poor return for your kindness in coming here to-night to rob you of your night’s rest!
I will merely quote some lines written by Mr. F. A. McKenzie, one of the foremost sociologists of the day. They deal with the lives of the Unemployed in the East End of London, and they are guarded, reticent words.
I read—
“To say that scores of thousands of them are facing the coming winter with fear and dread is but mildly to imply their situation. They are the derelicts of London, whom the changes in modern conditions have left hopelessly behind. Without crafts, without knowledge, many of them with hope dead, they face a future that good trade can do little to relieve, and bad trade must greatly darken.”
“The prodigal son” of to-day plays out the last act of his tragedy, not before a fatted calf, but in a Poplar back room. The shiftless and incapables, attracted by low rent, by the chance of casual work, and by the abundance of relief, drift here. To them are added the scores of thousands of locally born people who are trained in such a way that they cannot be anything else than casuals.
The very streets proclaim the lives of these people. Apart from the main thoroughfares and from certain more prosperous avenues, you are swallowed up in an endless succession of long roads of cheaply built houses. The walls are crumbling, and the bricks seem as though they would fall at a blow; many houses have broken, paper-stuffed windows; there are whole streets where the doors and windows have not seen paint for a generation. The children, babies with ophthalmic eyes, girls dirty beyond belief play in the gutters. The women gossip at the doors. The men, strong, yet none wanting their strength, lounge at street corners.
In home after home you will find that the sole regular wage earned is by a young son, who obtains ten shillings a week as errand boy in the City. On this, with occasional additions from the others, the whole family exists. The mother may obtain a few shillings a week at ‘charing,’ although such work is scarce in Poplar.
Twenty years ago the poverty of the East End was lessened by the home work which the women could obtain. It is one of the most serious, although often overlooked, factors of to-day that such home work cannot be had save by a few. The aliens in Whitechapel and in Stepney absorb almost all of it. The foreigners are more capable, more thrifty, and more sober, and, save where brute strength is required, our own derelicts stand no chance before them. The homes inside are often enough indescribable. Here and there you find the one room kept clean, but generally dirt is the outstanding feature. The beds are black masses of filth. The walls of the rooms prevent real cleanliness. I went into one two-roomed tenement inhabited by a man, wife and three children. The kitchen was overrun with rats, which had free entrance and exit through numerous holes in the wall. In the bedroom a large part of the lath and plaster wall underneath the window was torn away, leaving great gaps open to the yard. ‘Why doesn’t your landlord do some repairs here?’ my companion asked. ‘He won’t, sir; he says it is healthy for us to have holes in the walls,’ the woman replied. Many of these Poplar rooms urgently require the active intervention of the local sanitary officers.
In such fetid dens, badly built, ill kept, and furnished with the strangest of oddments, most of the Poplar poor live.”
If it were necessary and part of my scheme this evening, I could take up the whole of our time in telling the truth about the existing horrors. But I do not think that any one will deny them. They exist, and no one can disprove the fact. Let us rather consider why they exist, and what their existence means to the working man.
Stated in a few brief words, this is my theory and my unalterable belief.
IF THERE WERE NO UNEMPLOYABLES THERE WOULD BE NO UNEMPLOYED.
To amplify my statement I will say—and in a moment I will endeavour to prove—that if the idle, vicious, hopeless and sullen scoundrels who act as a drag upon the wheel of the Commonwealth, who have been allowed too long to clog social progress, were removed, the whole problem would be solved.
I beg you to listen carefully to me while I tell you how the Unemployables have created the problem of the Unemployed, how they are throttling charitable enterprise, how they are making economic methods of relief impossible, how they are destroying the present and the future of the honest working man. Who are the people I have called “The Unemployables”? What is their idea of work and what is the real ideal of work? I will answer these questions. I will show you who and what the Unemployables are. I will contrast their attitude towards honest toil with the attitude of honest men towards toil, and when I have done this I will try to explain how these people are injuring you and me, what a terrible burden they are upon our backs.
The month before my story dealing with the Unemployed appeared in the Daily Mail, a series of articles on the same subject was published. In some of them the Unemployables were painted with perfect fidelity and vividness. I take some paragraphs here and there to make a connected picture.
“Half-past eleven on Friday morning in a back street in the most poverty-stricken and most largely relieved district in Canning Town. A group of women wait around the gates of a chapel, from which doles are being issued. Dirty, ragged and untidy, they certainly are, but hunger-stricken—No! Their children playing in the roadway near by are ill-clad, filthy, and in many cases bare-footed, and do show signs of under-feeding, but not the mothers.
These are the wives of the habitual Unemployed seeking relief.
The curious stranger notices that some of the women go from the relief station to the public-houses. Let us look inside a few of these establishments. In a side bar of the first place we enter, we find eleven women, exactly of the same type as those soliciting charity without. One of them carries a recently-born baby in her arms, and another has a little girl two years old clinging to her apron. Each woman has a glass in front of her. Some of them have been here since half-past nine in the morning, and will stay for hours yet. In the next drinking shop is a party of nine, in the next but two, while in the last of all we find seven. Now one rises to go out, for her hour has come to beg for aid from school or parson or Unemployed fund.
An hour later we can see the husbands of these women amusing themselves at the street corner higher up. Five bookmakers’ touts are busy among them at one cross roads alone.
At this time, when we are threatened with a new Unemployed agitation, it is as well that the causes of much of the distress in some of the Unemployed areas should be understood. For several years the public has tried to deal with the sufferings of the very poor by sentimental means. Each winter has brought increase of relief, and each increase of relief has helped to render more permanent the problem it has set about to cure.
We have now in one district alone, a large number of people, totalling many thousands, incapable of regular work and unwilling to attempt it. They have been taught to lean on charity to aid them, and they have proved themselves apt pupils. Their homes will, as a rule, for sheer uncleanliness, bear comparison with the dwelling of an Australian aborigine. Their children are systematically made untidy, and are given a neglected air in order more successfully to extort outside aid. Parental love is so dead that, in very many cases, the mothers will sell the boots given to their children in order to buy gin.
This is no vague, general charge. Three years ago the readers of the Daily Mail entrusted the writer with a sum of money to spend on meals and shoes for needy children in this district. Teachers from many schools assured me that such effort would be wasted. ‘Buy the shoes and give them to the children to-day,’ they said; ‘and to-morrow the shoes will be in the pawnshops, and the mothers will have drunk the proceeds.’ It was necessary for us to construct a careful system of guard checks to save the children from their own mothers.
Last year four separate general funds were distributing doles and aid among these people in one district. A fund for the children, the best of all, kept them from starvation. Two outside agencies collected many thousands of pounds and scattered them about. The West Ham Corporation spent over £26,000 on relief works. What has been the result? The first outcome was to draw to this district many of the loafers from other parts, who saw the chance to obtain something for nothing. The more money that came, the more the number of Unemployed grew.
There is, without question, an amount of perfectly genuine distress, distress that should be relieved. But it is not, as a rule, found in the ‘Unemployed’ processions. The men who are making the most noise could not work properly if they would, and would not if they could.
This is a hard saying. Some facts may help to prove it. Many employers of labour around the docks agree in testifying that their difficulty is to induce casual men to remain long at their work. A man will take on a job for a couple of hours, and then ask for his 1s. 2d. (7d. an hour) and go. ‘Look here, guv’nor, I’ve had enough of this,’ he exclaims, with perfect truthfulness. He has secured enough to see him through the day—why should he trouble after more?
The labourer of the casual loafing type who works for two days a week thinks that he has done all his duty. His work is worth comparatively little when it is done. The municipal relief work at West Ham last winter spent £14,000 on material and £12,000 on labour. On the most liberal estimate, the labour value obtained was worth not more than £4500, and the tasks would have been done by any contractor for that amount. Many whose names were down on the Unemployed Register refused work when offered to them.
Last winter the workhouse authorities began to distribute relief on a more liberal scale. A number of distressed cases were taken in without labour. The number increased until it reached 473. Then the guardians resolved to re-establish the labour test, and to make the applicants do some work for the aid they had. The numbers at once fell to 119.
The people have been taught to look upon the outside public as a milch cow, and the guardians and municipal authorities as officials from whom everything possible is to be extorted. The members of an ‘unofficial’ relief committee invited me last week to one of their meetings. A bloated woman came asking them for aid. They gave her a small dole, with repeated injunctions that she was to lie to the relieving officer if he asked her if she had had anything. ‘Take care that your fire is out and your cupboard is bare when the relieving officer comes,’ one member added.
Here, then, is the problem to be solved. A great army of habitual loafers and incapables live off the woes of the genuine Unemployed. The latter, too, often suffer in silence. The spongers, hardened by long experience, adepts in every trick to impress a generous public, ply their calling more boldly each year.
Such are the men who will not work—the ‘work-shy’ men, the ‘bone-idle’ men, the ‘wasters,’ the scoundrels who turn the holy virtue of charity into a foolishness, and who recruit the ranks of those who keep society in a state of siege.
These people form the majority of the Unemployables. Please remember that I am not talking of the Unemployed, but of the Unemployables. The men who won’t work form the majority, but the hopeless herd of Unemployables is also swelled by those who can’t work. They can’t work because their life has never taught them how to work. From infancy they have been trained to depend upon charity, from childhood they have been denied an education which will enable them to earn a living.
Their very birth has been charitably conducted. The parish doctor has given free aid, the blankets have come from a local fund, and probably there has been a Salvation lass scrubbing the room for the mother. From infancy they are accustomed to look to charity for their very comfort. A boots fund supplies them with shoes, free meals are their main sustenance, and if they are very fortunate a holiday fund gives them a week in the country. Their first lessons are in begging, and they are taught to lie and to cringe to the givers of doles.
When such children leave their slum schools, what awaits them? There is little or no possibility of the slum boy learning a trade, while the girl finds it impossible, even if she desires, to learn housewifery by going to service. The factory awaits the girl, and odd jobs, as potboy, errand boy, runner for bookmakers, or the like, await the lad. At seventeen or so the youth becomes a man, and applies for casual labour at the docks or elsewhere. About the same time he mates with a girl who has been working at the factory.
By this time he has forgotten nearly all he learned at school. What can reasonably be expected of him?
It is impossible to condemn this second class of Unemployable. If you and I had been brought up in the same way, we should live as they do and behave as they do, in all probability. If a child has seen his father and mother, his grandfather and grandmother, his uncles, aunts and all the friends of the family habitually go to bed in their boots, he will sleep in his boots too. If he lives in a village where every one goes to bed in boots, and has never been out of that village nor witnessed the customs of any other village, who is to tell him that sleeping in boots is an unpleasant trick which spoils the sheets? A stranger who came upon a child of this village and told him that he was a dirty little boy who ought to be punished, would be an idiot who understood nothing of the power of environment, the truth of education or the facts of life.
But the first, and largest, class of Unemployables who have worked, can work, know how to work, but won’t work, is in a very different case, and is formed of very different people.
These are the men who are lost.
For my own part, I believe that idleness is the greatest of all sins, the chief of all crimes. It is not those offences against the law of God and the ordinance of man that we punish which are always the worst. I may be wrong, but I give it as my opinion that sloth is the prime sin of all those lusts and iniquities that war against the soul and destroy manhood. I believe that the thief who works, the drunkard who works, the liar who works, the adulterer who works, may often be a better man than the boneless, bloodless idler who is neither thief, drunkard, liar, or adulterer.
Work—all work—has in it a fine spiritual element, just as the smallest and meanest thing in the world has a divine side, inasmuch as God made it and saw that it was good. All temporary forms, it has been said, include essences that are eternal. Whatever be the meanness and loneliness of a man’s occupation, he may discharge it on principles common to himself and the Archangel Gabriel. The man who spends his whole life in cleaning codfish in Leadenhall Market is a better and finer man in the eye of God, a worthier and more valuable man to the Commonwealth, than the poor man who loafs away his life in a four-ale bar, or the rich one who lounges through his existence in a palace.
However far I may go in my belief that idleness is the greatest vice of all, hardly any one here would attempt to combat the general view that it is a vice and a very bad one.
But leaving the purely moral standpoint for a moment, let me point out to you the value of work as an aid to material success and happiness.
For a moment we will put aside the fact that toil is a virtue and laziness a sin. Let me briefly repeat what has been said a thousand times by far abler and more important lips than mine—
Work pays.
In the spring of this year I was staying in the South of France with a friend who is a great employer of labour. He employs nearly 16,000 men. He told me that, quite unknown to every one, he has established a system of reports upon the work and ability of each separate man. His agents inform him that Jack Smith, whom he has never met and will never meet in this world, is a hard worker. The next promotion goes to Jack Smith.
Genius, the highest and rarest attribute of the human being, has been said to be “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” A capacity for work which is not infinite but finite, yet which is still strong and vigorous, ought always and in all circumstances to secure a livelihood and ensure respect. This is the very least that it should do. It may do much more. It may command success.
What was it but work that enabled Heyne of Gottingen, the son of a poor weaver, to become one of the greatest classical scholars; that enabled Akenside, the son of a butcher, to write The Pleasures of the Imagination; Arkwright, the barber, to become Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning-jenny; Beattie, the school-master, to become Professor of Moral Philosophy; Prideaux to become the Bishop of Winchester from being the assistant in the kitchen at Exeter College; Edmund Saunders, the errand lad, to become Sir Edmund Saunders, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench; Jonson, the common bricklayer, to become Ben Jonson the famous? Adrian VI. rose to his great fame as a scholar from being a poor lad in the streets, who, for want of other convenience, had to read by the lamps in the church porches; Parkes, the grocer’s, and Davy, the apothecary’s apprentice, became the two greatest chemical investigators of their age. What enabled Dr. Isaac Milner, Dean of Carlisle and Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, to rise from the humble position of a weaver; and White, who was also a weaver, to become Professor of Arabic at Oxford; Hunter, the cabinet-maker, to attain the first rank among anatomists? Incredible labour enabled Demosthenes to become the greatest orator of antiquity. The Economy of Human Life and The Annual Register were the production of Dodsley, who by labour raised himself from the position of a weaver and a footman. Labour enabled Falconer, the barber’s son, to write his celebrated poem of The Shipwreck. The editor of The Quarterly Review, Gifford, somehow acquired the needed capability from being a cabin-boy and shoemaker’s apprentice. Haydn, the son of a poor cartwright, became the eminent composer; Johnson, through sickness and poverty, rose to be the immortal linguist; Jeremy Taylor, a barber’s son, ended as theologian and bishop; Barry, from a working mason, became the renowned painter. Dr. Livingstone attained his celebrity from being a “piecer” in a factory. Indeed, if we read the lives of distinguished men in any department, we find them celebrated for the amount of labour they could perform. There is no exception to this rule even in the military profession. Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, Washington, Napoleon, and Wellington, were all renowned as hard workers. We read how many days they could support the fatigues of a march; how many hours they spent in the field, in the cabinet, in the court; how many secretaries they kept employed; in short, how hard they worked. Superficial thinkers are ready to cry out, “Miracles!” Yes! but they are miracles of industry and of labour.
Great success came to these great workers I have enumerated, people who started life as working men. If they had lived to-day they would have achieved the same, though the task would have been a more difficult one. Men of this stamp cannot be crushed. But more ordinary men who have the capacity for hard work and are willing to do it, what shall we say of many of them in the year 1906? What shall we say of the thousands who want work and can’t get it, of the Unemployed?
We must say just this—the Unemployed are the victims of the Unemployable, and all working men suffer to support the idle and worthless classes of the community.
Every one suffers, every one has to pay for the maintenance of the Unemployable. But the working man pays most and suffers most. Let me put it to the working men here to-night.
Out of every pound I earn I have to pay a shilling to the Government in income-tax. I call this hard, because every penny of my income is made by hard mental work. The parson and the doctor, the farmer, the lawyer, the author, are taxed exactly the same as the man who has not earned his income, but who has been left land or other property by his father. I work ten hours a day nearly every day of my life, and I only make nineteen shillings out of every pound I earn, while the man who has an income without working for it pays not a penny more. You are probably wondering what this has to do with your side of the question. You do not pay income-tax, you may say, it is only the people who make more than three pounds odd a week who have to pay this tax.
You are quite wrong if you think this. In proportion to your earnings, you pay, even here in this country, more than I do, more than the doctor, more than the farmer—more than almost any one, except the parson, who is always the most heavily taxed man in proportion to his means and his duties in the community. It is true that you don’t get yellow papers “On His Majesty’s Service” by the post demanding this or that sum. You don’t get polite gentlemen calling for money, and backed up by the whole force of the British Constitution. You pay in other ways. Take the case of a farm labourer. The farmer rents his land from the original owner, and he makes as much as he can out of it. The farmer has to pay the Government a proportion of every shilling he makes. It stands to reason, therefore, that he can’t afford to pay his labourers as much as he would were he himself less heavily taxed. And there are other ways in which the working man pays out of all proportion to his earnings. The working man who buys a pound of tea, a glass of beer, or an ounce of tobacco, pays exactly the same duty on these articles as people with ten times his income. I may buy a pound of tea at two shillings and the working man may not be able to pay more than a shilling. But that is merely a question of quality, and does not affect the argument. The working man with a very small income pays the same duty as the man with a much larger one.
The working man also pays other taxes, called rates, in his house-rent. They are not collected direct from him, they are collected from the landlord, who puts up the rent accordingly.