The Message Part 2

"It all seems very mad and wrong, but--but I wish you would not take it so much to heart," said Sylvia.

"That is very sweet of you," I told her; "and, indeed, there is not so much real cause to be downhearted. The last elections showed clearly enough that the majority of our people are alive to all this. The leaven of enlightenment is working strongly among the people, and the old tyranny of Jingoism is dying fast. One sees it in a hundred ways. Boer independence has as warm friends in our Parliament as on the veld. The rising movements of internationalism, of Pan-Islam, the Swades.h.i.+ movement, the rising toward freedom in India; all these are largely directed from Westminster. The Jingo sentiment toward Germany, a really progressive nation, full of natural and healthy ambitions, is being swept away by our own statesmen; by their courteous and friendly att.i.tude toward the Kaiser, who delights to honour our present Minister of War. Also, the work of disarmament has begun. The naval estimates are being steadily pruned, and whole regiments have been finally disbanded.

And all this comes from within. So you see we have some grounds for hopefulness. It is a great step forward, for our own elected leaders to show the enthusiastic and determined opposition they are showing to the old brutal pretensions of England to sway the world by brute strength.

But, forgive me! Perhaps I tire you with all this--Sylvia."

"No, no, indeed you don't--d.i.c.k, I--I think it is beautiful. It--it seems to make everything bigger, more kind and good. It interests me, immensely."

And I knew perfectly well that I had not tired her--wearisome though the recital of it all may be now. For I knew instinctively how the personal note told in the whole matter. I had been really heated, and perfectly sincere, but a kind of subconscious cunning had led me to utilize the heat of the moment in introducing between us, for example, the use of first names. Well I knew that I was not wearying Sylvia. But coldly recited now, I admit the rhodomontade to be exceedingly tiresome. My excuse for it is that it serves to indicate the sort of ideas that were abroad at the time, the sort of sentiments which were shaping our destiny.

After all, I was an educated youth. Many of my hot statements, too, were of fact, and not merely of opinion and feeling. It is a fact that the sentiment called anti-British had come to be served more slavishly in England than in any foreign land. The duration of our disastrous war in South Africa was positively doubled, as the result of British influence, by Boer hopes pinned upon the deliberate utterances of British politicians. In Egypt, South Africa, India, and other parts of the Empire, all opposition to British rule, all risings, attacks upon our prestige, and the like, were aided, and in many cases fomented, steered, and brought to a successful issue--not by Germans or other foreigners, but by Englishmen, and by Englishmen who had sworn allegiance at St.

Stephens. It is no more than a bare statement of fact to say that, in the very year of my arrival in London, the party which ruled the State was a party whose members openly avowed and boasted of their opposition to British dominion, and that in terms, not less, but far more sweeping than mine in talking to Sylvia among the pines at Weybridge.

But if Sylvia appreciated and sympathized in the matter of my sermonizing, the rest of the family neither approved the sermons nor Sylvia's interest in them. I was made to feel in various ways that no import must be attached to my attentions to Sylvia. Marjory began to shadow her sister in the daytime, and, as she was frankly rather bored by me, I could not but detect the parental will in this.

Then with regard to my social and political views, Mr. Wheeler joined with his son in openly deriding them. In Leslie's case the thing never went beyond friendly banter. Leslie had no political opinions; he laughed joyously at the mere notion of bothering his head about such matters for a moment. And, in his way, he represented an enormous section of the younger generation of Englishmen in this. The father, on the other hand, was equally typical of his cla.s.s and generation. This was how he talked to me over his port:--

"I tell you what it is, you know, Mordan: you're a regular firebrand, you know; by Jove, you are; an out-and-out Socialistic Radical: that's what you are. By gad, sir, I don't mince my words. I consider that--er--opinions like yours are a danger to the country; I do, indeed; a danger to the country, and--er--to the--to the Empire. I do, by gad. And as for your notions about disarmament and that, why, even if our army reductions are justifiable, which, upon my word, I very much doubt, it's ridiculous to suppose we can afford to cut down our Navy.

No, sir, the British Navy is Britain's safeguard, and it ought not to be tampered with. I'm an out-and-out Imperialist myself, and--er--I can tell you I have no patience with your Little Englandism."

I am not at all sure whether the cla.s.s Mr. Wheeler belonged to was not almost the most dangerous cla.s.s of all. The recent elections showed this cla.s.s to be a minority. Of course, this section had its strong men, but that it also included a large number of men like Leslie's father was a fact--a fact which yielded pitiful evidence of its weakness. These men called themselves "out-and-out Imperialists," and had not a notion of even the meaning of the word they used. Still less had they any notion of accepting any role which involved the bearing of responsibilities, the discharge of civic and national duties.

Mr. Wheeler's aim in life was to make money and to enjoy himself. He would never have exercised his right to vote if voting had involved postponing dinner. He liked to talk of the British Empire, but he did not even know precisely of what countries it consisted, and I think he would cheerfully have handed Canada to France, Australia to Germany, India to Russia, and South Africa to the Boers, if by so doing he could have escaped the paying of income-tax.

On Sunday night, my last night at Weybridge, I walked home from church alone with Sylvia. Marjory was in bed with a sore throat, and whatever their notions as to my undesirability, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wheeler were inclined to attend evening service. Leslie was not home from golf at Byfleet. We were late for dinner, Sylvia and I, and during our walk she promised to write to me regularly, and I promised many things, and suggested many things, and was only deterred from actual declaration by the thought of the poor little sum which stood between me and actual want.

Next morning I went up to town with Leslie and his father to open my campaign in London. As a first step toward procuring work, I was to present a letter of introduction from a Cambridge friend to the editor of the _Daily Gazette_. After that, as Leslie said, I was to "reform England inside out."

IV

THE LAUNCHING

"O Friend! I know not which way I must look For comfort, being, as I am, opprest To think that now our life is only drest For show; mean handi-work of craftsman, cook, Or groom!--We must run glittering like a brook In the open suns.h.i.+ne, or we are unblest; The wealthiest man among us is the best; No grandeur now in Nature or in book Delight us...."

WORDSWORTH.

Looking back now upon that lonely launch of mine in London, I see a very curious and sombre picture. In the living I am sure there must have been mitigations, and light as well as shade. In the retrospect it seems one long disillusion. I see myself, and the few folk with whom my relations were intimate, struggling like ants across a grimy stage, in the midst of an inferno of noise, confusion, pointless turmoil, squalor, and ultimate cataclysm. The whole picture is lurid, superhuman in its chaotic gloom; but in the living, I know there were gleams of sunlight.

The tragic muddle of that period was so monstrous, that even we who lived through it are apt in retrospect to see only the gloom and confusion. It is natural, therefore, that those who did not live through it should be utterly unable to discern any glimpse of relief in the picture. And that leads to misconception.

As a fact, I found very much to admire in London when I sallied forth from the obscure lodging I had chosen in a Bloomsbury back street, on the morning which brought an end to my stay with the Wheelers at Weybridge. Also, it was not given to me at that time to recognize as such one t.i.the of the madness and badness of the state of affairs. Some wholly bad features were quite good in my eyes then.

London still clung to its "season," as it was called, though motor-cars and railway facilities had entirely robbed this of its sharply defined nineteenth-century limits. Very many people, even among the wealthy, lived entirely in London, spending their week-ends in this or that country or seaside resort, and devoting the last months of summer with, in many cases, the first months of autumn, to holiday-making on the Continent, or in Scotland, or on the English moors or coasts.

The London season was not over when I reached town, and in the western residential quarters the sun shone brightly upon many-coloured awnings and beautiful decorative plants and flowers. The annual rents paid by people who lived behind these flowers and awnings frequently ran into thousands of pounds, with ten s.h.i.+llings in each pound additional by way of rates and taxes. To live at all, in this strata, would cost a man and his wife perhaps eighty to a hundred pounds a week, without anything which would have been called extravagance.

Hundreds of people who lived in this way had neighbours within a hundred yards of their front doors who never had enough to eat. Even such people as these had to pay preposterous rents for the privilege of huddling together in a single wretched room. But many of their wealthy neighbours spent hundreds, and even thousands of pounds a year over securing comfort and happiness for such domestic animals as horses, dogs, cats, and the like. Amiable, kindly gentlefolk they were, with tender hearts and ready sympathies. Most of them were interested in some form of charity. Many of them specialized, and these would devote much energy to opposing the work of other charitable specialists. Lady So-and-so, who advocated this panacea, found herself bitterly opposed by Sir So-and-so, who wanted all sufferers to be made to take his nostrum in his special way. Then sometimes poor Lady So-and-so would throw up her panacea in a huff, and concentrate her energies upon the work of some society for converting Jews, who did not want to be converted, or for supplying red flannel petticoats for South Sea Island girls, who infinitely preferred cotton s.h.i.+fts and floral wreaths. Even these futile charities were permitted to overlap one another to a bewilderingly wasteful extent.

But the two saddest aspects of the whole gigantic muddle so far as charitable work went, were undoubtedly these: The fact that much of it went to produce a cla.s.s of men and women who would not do any kind of work because they found that by judicious sponging they could live and obtain alcohol and tobacco in idleness; and the fact that where charitable endeavour infringed upon vested interests, licit or illicit, it was savagely opposed by the persons interested.

The discipline of the national schools was slack, intermittent, and of short reach. There was positively no duty to the State which a youth was bound to observe. Broadly, it might be said that at that time discipline simply did not enter at all into the life of the poor of the towns, and charity of every conceivable and inconceivable kind did enter into it at every turn.

The police service was excellent and crime exceedingly difficult of accomplishment. The inevitable result was the evolution in the towns of a cla.s.s of men and women, but more especially of men, who, though compact of criminal instincts of every kind, yet committed no offence against criminal law. They committed nothing. They simply lived, drinking to excess when possible, determined upon one point only: that they never would do anything which could possibly be called work. It is obvious that among such people the sense of duty either to themselves, to each other, or to the State, was merely non-existent.

London had long since earned the reputation of being the most charitable city in the world. Its share in the production of an immense loafer cla.s.s formed one sad aspect of London's charity when I first came to know the city. Another was the opposition of vested interests--the opposition of the individual to the welfare of the ma.s.s. One found it everywhere. An instance I call to mind (it happened to be brought sharply home to me) struck at the root of the terribly rapid production of degenerates, by virtue of its relation to pauper children--that is, the children to whom the State, through its boards of guardians, stood in the light of parents, because their natural parents were dead, or in prison, or in lunatic asylums, or hopelessly far gone in the state of criminal inactivity which qualified so many for all three estates.

Huge inst.i.tutions were built at great expense for the accommodation of these little unfortunates. Here they were housed in the most costly manner, the whole work of the establishment being carried on by a highly paid staff of servants and officials. The children were not allowed to do anything at all, beyond the learning by rote of various theories which there was no likelihood of their ever being able to apply to any reality of life with which they would come in contact.

They listened to lectures on the making of dainty dishes in the best style of French cookery, and in many cases they never saw a box of matches. They learned to repeat poetry as parrots might, but did not know the difference between shavings and raw coffee. They learned vague smatterings of Roman history, but did not know how to clean their boots or brush their hair. It was as though experts had been called upon to devise a scheme whereby children might be reared into their teens without knowing that they were alive or where they lived, and this with the greatest possible outlay of money per child. Then, at a given age, these children were put outside the ma.s.sive gates of the inst.i.tutions and told to run away and become good citizens.

It followed as a matter of course that most of them fell steadily and rapidly into the pit; the place occupied by the criminally inactive, the "public-house props." So they returned poor, heavy-laden creatures, by way of charity, to the inst.i.tutions of the "rates," thus completing the vicious circle of life forced upon them by an incredibly wrong-headed, topsyturvy administration.

For the maintenance of this vicious circle enormous sums of public money were required. Failing such vast expenditure, Nature unaided would have righted matters to some extent, and the Poor Law guardians would have become by so much the less wielders of power and influence, dispensers of public money. Some of these Poor Law guardians gave up more or less honest trades to take to Poor Law guardians.h.i.+p as a business; and they waxed fat upon it.

Every now and again came disclosures. Guardians were shown to have paid ten s.h.i.+llings a score for such and such a commodity this year, and next year to have refused a tender for the supply of the same article at 9s.

8d. a score, in favour of the tender of a relative or protege of one of their number at 109s. 8d. a score. I remember the newspapers showing up such cases as these during the week of my arrival in London. The public read and shrugged shoulders.

"Rascally thieves, these guardians," said the Public; and straightway forgot the whole business in the rush of its own crazy race for money.

"But," cried the Reformer to the Public, "this is really your business.

It is your duty as citizens to stop this infamous traffic. Don't you see how you yourselves are being robbed?"

You must picture our British Public of the day as a flushed, excited man, hurrying wildly along in pursuit of two phantoms--money and pleasure. These he desired to grasp for himself, and he was being furiously jostled by millions of his fellows, each one of whom desired just the same thing, and nothing else. Faintly, amidst the frantic turmoil, came the warning voices in the wilderness:

"This is your business. It is your duty as citizens," etc.

Over his shoulder, our poor possessed Public would fling his answer:

"Leave me alone. I haven't time to attend to it. I'm too busy. You mustn't interrupt me. Why the deuce don't the Government see to it? Lot of rascals! Don't bother me. I represent commerce, and, whatever you do, you must not in any way interfere with the Freedom of Trade."

The band of the reformers was considerable, embracing as it did the better, braver sort of statesmen, soldiers, sailors, clergy, authors, journalists, sociologists, and the whole brotherhood of earnest thinkers. But the din and confusion was frightful, the pace at which the million lived was terrific; and, after all, the cries of the reformers all meant the same thing, the one thing the great, sweating public was determined not to hear, and not to act on. They all meant:

"Step out from your race a moment. Your duties are here. You are pa.s.sing them all by. Come to your duties."

It was like a Moslem call to prayer; but, alas! it was directed at a people who had sloughed all pretensions to be ranked among those who respond to such calls, to any calls which would distract them from their objective in the pelting pursuit of money and pleasure.

But I am digressing--the one vice which, unfortunately for us, we never indulged or condoned at the time of my arrival in London. I wanted to give an instance of that aspect of charity and attempted social reform which aroused the opposition of vested interests and chartered brigands in the great money hunt. It was this: A certain charitable lady gave some years of her life to the study of those conditions in which, as I have said, the criminally inactive, the hopelessly useless, were produced by authorized routine, at a ruinous cost in money and degeneracy, and to the great profit of an unscrupulous few.

This lady then gave some further years, not to mention money, influence, and energy, to the evolution of a scheme by which these pauper children could really be made good and independent citizens, and that at an all-round cost of about one-fifth of the price of the guardians' method for converting them into human wrecks and permanent charges upon the State. The wise practicability of this lady's system was admitted by independent experts, and denied by n.o.body. But it was swept aside and crushed, beaten down with vicious, angry thoroughness, in one quarter--the quarter of vested interest and authority; quietly, pa.s.sively discouraged in various other quarters; and generally ignored, as another interrupting duty call, by the rus.h.i.+ng public.

Here, then, were three kinds of opposition--the first active and deadly, the other two pa.s.sive and fatal, because they withheld needed support. The reason of the first, the guardians' opposition, was frankly and shamelessly admitted in London at the time of my arrival there. The guardians said:

"This scheme would reduce the rates. We want more rates. It would reduce the amount of money at our disposal. We aim at increasing that. It would divert certain streams of cash from our own channel into other channels in other parts of the Empire. We won't have it." But their words were far less civil and more heated than these, though the sense of them was as I have said.

The quiet, pa.s.sive opposition was that of other workers in charity and reform. They said in effect:

"Yes, the scheme is all right--an excellent scheme. But why do you take it upon yourself to bring it forward in this direct manner? Are you not aware of the existence of our B---- nostrum for pauper children, or our C---- specific for juvenile emigration? Your scheme, admirable as it is, ignores both these, and therefore you must really excuse us if we---- Quite so! But, of course, as co-workers in the good cause, we wish you well----", and so forth.