The Message Part 4

I believe I am strictly correct in saying that in half a century, while the population increased by seventy-five per cent., lunacy had increased by two hundred and fifty per cent.

Yet the majority rushed blindly on, paying no heed to any other thing on earth than their own gratification, their own pursuit of the money for the purchase of pleasure. One of the tragic fallacies of the period was this crazy notion that not alone pleasure, but happiness, could be bought with money, and in no other way. And the few who were stung by the prevailing suffering and wretchedness into recognition of our parlous state, we, for the most part, cherished my wild delusion, and insisted that the trouble could be remedied if the State would contract and discharge new obligations. We clamoured for more rights, more help, more liberty, more freedom from this and that; never seeing that our trouble was our incomplete comprehension of the rights and privileges we had, with their corresponding obligations.

Though I knew them not, and as a _Daily Gazette_ reporter was little likely to meet them, there were men who strove to open the eyes of the people to the truth, and strove most valiantly. I call to mind a great statesman and a great general, both old men, a great pro-consul, a great poet and writer, a great editor, and here and there politicians with elements of greatness in them, who fought hard for the right. But these men were lonely figures as yet, and I am bound to say of the people's leaders generally, at the time of my journalistic enterprise, that they were a poor, truckling, uninspired lot of sheep, with a few clever wolves among them, who saw the people's madness and folly and preyed upon it masterfully by every trick within the scope of their ingenuity.

Even those who were honourable, disinterested, and, for such a period, unselfish, were for the most part the disciples of tradition and the slaves of that life-sapping curse of British politics: the party spirit, which led otherwise honourable men to oppose with all their strength the measures of their party opponents, even in the face of their country's dire need.

Then there was the anti-British faction, a party which spread fast-growing shoots from out the then Government's very heart and root.

The Government's half-hearted supporters were not anti-British, but they were not readers of the _Daily Gazette_; they were not, in short, whole-hearted Government supporters. They were Whigs, as the saying went. My party, the readers of the _Gazette_, the out-and-out Government party, to whom I looked for real progress, real social reform; they were unquestionably riddled through and through with this extraordinary sentiment which I call anti-British, a difficult thing to explain nowadays.

With the newly and too easily acquired rights and liberties of the nineteenth century, with its universal spread of education, cheap literature, and the like, there came, of course, increased knowledge, a wider outlook. No discipline came with it, and one of its earliest products was a nervous dread of being thought behind the time, of being called ignorant, narrow-minded, insular. People would do anything to avoid this. They went to the length of interlarding their speech and writings with foreign words often in ignorance of the meaning of those words. Broad-minded, catholic, tolerant, cosmopolitan--those were the descriptive adjectives which all desired to earn for themselves. It became a perfect mania, particularly with the young and clever, the half-educated, the would-be "smart" folk.

But it was also the honest ambition of many very worthy people, who truly desired broad-minded understanding and the avoidance of prejudice.

This sapped the bulldog qualities of British pluck and persistence terribly. You can see at a glance how it would shut out a budding Nelson or a Wellington. But its most notable effect was to be seen among politicians, who were able to claim Fox for a precedent.

To believe in the superiority of the British became vulgar, a proof of narrow-mindedness. But, by that token, to enlarge upon the inferiority of the British indicated a broad, tolerant spirit, and a wide outlook upon mankind and affairs. From that to the sentiment I have called anti-British was no more than a step. Many thoroughly good, honourable, benevolent people took that step unwittingly, and all unconsciously became permeated with the vicious, suicidal sentiment, while really seeking only good. Such people were saved by their natural goodness and sense from becoming actual and purposeful enemies of their country. But as "Little Englanders"--so they were called--they managed, with the best intentions, to do their country infinite harm.

But there were others, the naturally vicious and unscrupulous, the morbid, the craven, the ignorant, the self-seeking; these were the dangerous exponents of the sentiment. With them, Little Englandism progressed in this wise: "There are plenty of foreigners just as good as the British; their rule abroad is just as good as ours." Then: "There are plenty of foreigners far better than the British; their rule abroad is better than ours." Then: "Let the people of our Empire fend for themselves among other peoples; our business is to look after ourselves." Then: "We oppose the people of the Empire; we oppose British rule; we oppose the British." From that to "We befriend the enemies of the British" was less than a step. It was the position openly occupied by many, in and out of Parliament.

"We are for you, for the people; and devil take Flag, Empire, and Crown!" said these ranters; drunken upon liberties they never understood, freedom they never earned, privileges they were not qualified to hold.

There were persons among them who spat upon the Flag that protected their worthless lives, and cut it down; sworn servants of the State who openly proclaimed their sympathy with the State's enemies; carefully protected, highly privileged subjects of the Crown, who impishly slashed at England's robes, to show her nakedness to England's foes.

And these were supporters, members, proteges of the Government, and readers of the _Daily Gazette_, upheld in all things by that organ. And I, the son of an English gentleman and clergyman, graduate of an English university, I looked to this party, the Liberal Government of England, as the leaders of reform, of progress, of social betterment. And so did the country; the British public. Errors of taste and judgment we regretted. That was how we described the most ribald outbursts of the anti-British sentiment.

It is hard to find excuse or palliation. Instinct must have told us that the demands, the programme, of such diseased creatures, could only aggravate the national ills instead of healing them. Yes, it would seem so. I can only say that comparatively few among us did see it. Perhaps disease was too general among us for the recognition of symptoms.

This then was the mental att.i.tude with which I approached my duties as a reporter on the staff of a London daily newspaper of old standing and good progressive traditions. And my notion was that in every line written for publication, the end of social reform should be served, directly or indirectly. My idea of attaining social reformation was that the people must be taught, urged, spurred into extracting further gifts from the State; that the public must be shown how to make their lives easier by getting the State to do more for them. That was as much as my education and my expansive theorizing had done for me. a.s.suredly I was a product of my age.

I had forgotten one thing, however, and that was the thing which Mr.

Charles N. Pierce began now to drill into me, by a.n.a.logy, and with a good deal more precision and directness than I had ever seen used at Rugby or Cambridge. This one thing was that the _Daily Gazette_ was not a philanthropic organ, but a people's paper; and that the people did not want instructing but interesting.

"But," I pleaded, "surely, for their own sakes, in their own interests----"

"d.a.m.n their own sakes!"

"Well, but----"

"There's no 'but' about it. The public is an aggregation of individuals.

This paper must interest the individual. The individual doesn't care a d.a.m.n about the people. He cares about himself. He is very busy making money, and when he opens his paper he wants to be amused and interested; and he is not either interested or amused by any instruction as to how the people may be served. He doesn't want 'em served. He wants himself served and amused. That's your job."

I believe I had faint inclinations just then to wonder whether, after all, there might not be something to be said for the bloated Tories: the opponents of progress, as I always considered them. My thoughts ran on parties, in the old-fas.h.i.+oned style, you see. Also I was thinking, as a journalist, of the characteristics which distinguished different newspapers.

I cordially hated Mr. Charles N. Pierce, but he really had more discernment than I had, for he said:

"Don't you worry about teaching the people to grab more from the State.

They'll take fast enough; they'll take quite as much as is good for 'em, without your a.s.sistance. But, for giving, the angel Gabriel and two advertis.e.m.e.nt canva.s.sers wouldn't make 'em give a cent more than they're obliged."

VI

A JOURNALIST'S SURROUNDINGS

"Religion crowns the statesman and the man, Sole source of public and of private peace."

YOUNG.

I am bound to suppose that I must have been a tolerably tiring person to have to do with during my first year in London. The reason of this was that I could never concentrate my thoughts upon intimate, personal interests, either my own or those of the people I met. My thoughts were never of persons, but always of the people; never of affairs, but always of tendencies, movements, issues, ultimate ends. Probably my crude unrest would have made me tiresome to any people. It must have been peculiarly irritating to my contemporaries at that period, who, whatever they may have lacked, a.s.suredly possessed in a remarkable degree the faculty of concentration upon their own individual affairs, their personal part in the race for personal gain.

I remember that I talked, even to the poor, overworked servant at my lodging, rather of the prospects of her cla.s.s and order than of anything more intimate or within her narrow scope. Poor Bessie! She was of the callously named tribe of lodging-house "slaveys"; and what gave me some interest in her personality, apart from the type she represented, was the fact that she had come from the Vale of Blackmore, a part of Dorset which I knew very well. I even remembered, for its exceptional picturesqueness and beauty of situation, the cottage in which Bessie had pa.s.sed her life until one year before my arrival at the fourth-rate Bloomsbury "apartments" house in which she now toiled for a living.

There was little enough of the sap of her native valley left in Bessie's cheeks now. She had acquired the London muddiness of complexion quickly, poor child, in the semi-subterranean life she led.

I was moved to inquire as to what had led her to come to London, and gathered that she had been anxious to "see a bit o' life." Certainly she saw life, of a kind, when she entered her horrible underground kitchen of a morning, for, as a chance errand once showed me, its floor was a moving carpet of black-beetles until after the gas was lighted. In Bloomsbury, Bessie's daily work began about six o'clock--there were four stories in the house, and coals and food and water required upon every floor--and ended some seventeen hours later. Occasionally, an exacting lodger would make it eighteen hours--the number of Bessie's years in the world--but seventeen was the normal.

The trains which every day came rus.h.i.+ng in from the country to the various railway termini of London were almost past counting. The "rural exodus," as it was called, was a sadly real movement then. Every one of them brought at least one Bessie, and one of her male counterparts, with ruddy cheeks, a tin box, and bright eyes straining to "see life."

Insatiable London drew them all into its maw, and, while sapping the roses from their cheeks, enslaved many of them under one of the greatest curses of that day: the fascination of the streets.

So terrible a power was exercised by this unwholesome pa.s.sion that men and women became paralyzed by it, and incapable of plucking up courage enough to enable them to leave the streets. I talked with men--poor, sodden creatures, whose greasy black coats were b.u.t.toned to their stubbly chins to hide the absence of collar and waistcoat--who supported a wretched existence in the streets, between begging, stealing, opening cab-doors, and the like, in constant dread of police attention. Among these I found many who had refused again and again offers of help to lead an honest, self-dependent life, for the sole reason that these offers involved quitting the streets.

The same creeping paralysis of the streets kept men from emigration to parts of the Empire in which independent prosperity was a.s.sured for the willing worker. They would not leave the hiving streets, with their chances, their flaunting vice, their incessant bustle, and their innumerable drinking bars.

The disease did not stop at endowing the streets with fascination for these poor, undisciplined, unmanned creatures; it implanted in them a lively fear, hard to comprehend, but very real to them, of all places outside the streets, with their familiar, pent noises and enclosed strife.

I met one old gentleman, the head of an important firm of printers, who, being impressed with the squalid wretchedness of the surroundings in which his work-people lived, decided to s.h.i.+ft his works into the country. He chose the outskirts of a charmingly situated garden city, then in course of formation. He gave his people a holiday and entertained them at a picnic party upon the site of his proposed new works. He set before them plans and details of pleasant cottages he meant to build for them, with good gardens, and scores of conveniences which they could never know in the dingy, grimy tenements for which they paid extortionate rents in London.

There were four hundred and thirty-eight of these work-people.

Twenty-seven of them, with some hesitation, expressed their willingness to enter into the new scheme for their benefit. The remaining four hundred and eleven refused positively to leave their warrens in London for this garden city, situated within an hour's run of the metropolis.

Figure to yourself the att.i.tude of such people, where the great open uplands of the Empire were concerned: the prairie, the veld, the bush.

Consider their relation to the elements, or to things elemental. We went farther than "Little Englandism" in those days; we produced little street and alley men by the hundred thousand; and then we bade them exercise their rights, their imperial heritage, and rule an Empire. As for me, I was busy in my newspaper work trying to secure more rights for them; for men whose present freedom from all discipline and control was their curse.

The reporters' room at the office of the _Daily Gazette_ was the working headquarters of five other men besides myself. One was a Cambridge man, one had been at Oxford, one came from Cork, and the other two were products of Scotch schools. Two of the five would have been called gentlemen; four of them were good fellows; the fifth had his good points, but perhaps he had been soured by a hard upbringing. One felt that the desire for money--advancement, success, or whatever you chose to call it; it all meant the one thing to Dunbar--mastered every feeling, every instinct even, in this young man, and made him about as safe and agreeable a neighbour as a wolf might be for a kennel of dogs.

A certain part of our time was devoted to waiting in the reporters' room for what Mr. Pierce called our "a.s.signments," to this or that reporting task. Also, we did our writing here, and a prodigious amount of talking.

The talk was largely of Fleet Street, the ruffianism of Mr. Pierce, the fortunes of our own and other journals, the poorness of our pay, the arduousness of our labours, the affairs of other newspaper offices, and the like. But at other times we turned to politics, and over our pipes and copy paper would readjust the concert of Europe and the balance of world power. More often we dealt with local politics, party intrigue, and scandals of Parliament; and sometimes--more frequently since my advent, it may be--we entered gaily upon large abstractions, and ventilated our little philosophies and views of the eternal verities.

By my recollection of those queer confused days, my colleagues were cynically anarchical in their political views, unconvinced and unconvincing Socialists, and indifferent Agnostics. I am not quite sure that we believed in anything very thoroughly--except that things were in a pretty bad way. Earnest belief in anything was not a feature of the period. I recall one occasion when consideration of some tyrannical act of our immediate chief, the news-editor, led our talk by way of character and morality to questions of religion. The _Daily Gazette_, I should mention, was a favourite organ with the most powerful religious community--the Nonconformists. Campbell, one of the two Scotch reporters, hazarded the first remark about religion, if I remember aright: something it was to the effect that men like Pierce had neither religion nor manners. Brown, the Cambridge man, took this up.

"Well now," he said, "that's a queer thing about religion. I'd like you to tell me what anybody's religion is in London."

"It's the capital of a Christian country, isn't it?" said Dunbar.

"Yes," admitted Brown. "That's just it. We're officially and politically Christian. It's a national affair. We're a Christian people; but who knows a Christian individual? Ours is a Christian newspaper, Christian city, Christian country, and all the rest of it. There's no doubt about it. All England believes; but no single man I ever meet admits that he believes. I suppose it's different up your way, Campbell. One gathers the Scotch are religious?"

"H'm! I won't answer for that," growled Campbell. "As a people, yes, as you say; but as individuals--well, I don't know. But my father's a believer; I could swear to it."