In Darkest England and the Way Out Part 35

Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers thievish valets; an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came, by tap of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling them; and he and you have made them this! Most potent effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm, combining, and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who looks on these two sentries at the Horse Guards and our United Service clubs. I could conceive an Emigration Service, a Teaching Service, considerable varieties of United and Separate Services, of the due thousands strong, all effective as this Fighting Service is; all doing their work like it--which work, much more than fighting, is henceforth the necessity of these new ages we are got into! Much lies among us, convulsively, nigh desperately, struggling to be born."--("Past and Present," page 224.)

"It was well, all this, we know; and yet it was not well.

Forty soldiers, I am told, will disperse the largest Spitalfields mob; forty to ten thousand, that is the proportion between drilled and undrilled. Much there is which cannot yet be organised in this world, but somewhat also which can--somewhat also which must. When one thinks, for example, what books are become and becoming for us, what operative Lancas.h.i.+res are become; what a Fourth Estate and innumerable virtualities not yet got to be actualities are become and becoming, one sees organisms enough in the dim huge future, and 'United Services'

quite other than the redcoat one; and much, even in these years, struggling to be born!"--("Past and Present," page 226.)

"An effective 'Teaching Service,' I do consider that there must be; some education secretary, captain-general of teachers, who will actually contrive to get us taught. Then again, why should there not be an 'Emigration Service,' and secretary with adjuncts, with funds, forces, idle navy s.h.i.+ps, and ever-increasing apparatus, in fine an effective system of emigration, so that at length before our twenty years of respite ended, every honest willing workman who found England too strait, and the 'organisation of labour' not yet sufficiently advanced, might find likewise a bridge built to carry him into new western lands, there to 'organise' with more elbow room some labour for himself? There to be a real blessing, raising new corn for us, purchasing new webs and hatchets from us; leaving us at least in peace; instead of staying here to be a physical-force Chartist, unblessed and no blessing! Is it not scandalous to consider that a Prime Minister could raise within the year, as I have seen it done, a hundred and twenty millions sterling to shoot the French; and we are stopped short for want of the hundredth part of that to keep the English living?

The bodies of the English living, and the souls of the English living, these two 'Services,' an Education Service and an Emigration Service, these with others, will have actually to be organised.

"A free bridge for emigrants! Why, we should then be on a par with America itself, the most favoured of all lands that have no government; and we should have, besides, so many traditions and mementos of priceless things which America has cast away. We could proceed deliberately to organise labour not doomed to perish unless we effected it within year and day every willing worker that proved superfluous, finding a bridge ready for him. This verily will have to be done; the time is big with this. Our little Isle is grown too narrow for us; but the world is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.

England's sure markets will be among new colonies of Englishmen in all quarters of the Globe. All men trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do it by the Maker of Men.

Our friends of China, who guiltily refused to trade in these circ.u.mstances--had we not to argue with them, in cannon-shot at last, and convince them that they ought to trade? 'Hostile tariffs' will arise to shut us out, and then, again, will fall, to let us in; but the sons of England--speakers of the English language, were it nothing more--will in all times have the ineradicable predisposition to trade with England. Mycale was the Pan-Ionian--rendezvous of all the tribes of Ion--for old Greece; why should not London long continue the All Saxon Home, rendezvous of all the 'Children of the Harz-Rock,'

arriving, in select samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere by steam and otherwise, to the 'season' here? What a future! Wide as the world, if we have the heart and heroism for it, which, by Heaven's blessing, we shall.

"Keep not standing fixed and rooted, Briskly venture, briskly roam; Head and hand, where'er thou foot it, And stout heart are still at home.

In what land the sun does visit Brisk are we, what e'er betide; To give s.p.a.ce for wandering is it That the world was made so wide.

"Fourteen hundred years ago it was a considerable 'Emigration Service,'

never doubt it, by much enlistment, discussion, and apparatus that we ourselves arrived in this remarkable island, and got into our present difficulties among others."--("Past and Present," pages 228-230)

"The main substance of this immense problem of organising labour, and first of all of managing the working cla.s.ses, will, it is very clear, have to be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it, by those who themselves work and preside over work. Of all that can be enacted by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs must already lie potentially extant in those two cla.s.ses who are to obey such enactment.

A human chaos in which there is no light, you vainly attempt to irradiate by light shed on it; order never can arise there."

("Past and Present," pages 231-32.)

"Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, dest.i.tution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness. They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand principle: they will not; nor ought they; nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order; begin reducing them to order, to just subordination; n.o.ble loyalty in return for n.o.ble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered bewildering mob, but as a firm regimented ma.s.s, with real captains over them, will these men march any more. All human interests, combined human endeavours, and social growth in this world have, at a certain stage of their development, required organising and work, the grandest of human interests, does not require it.

"G.o.d knows the task will be hard, but no n.o.ble task was ever easy.

This task will wear away your lives and the lives of your sons and grandsons; but for what purpose, if not for tasks like this, were lives given to men? Ye shall cease to count your thousand-pound scalps; the n.o.ble of you shall cease! Nay, the very scalps, as I say, will not long be left, if you count only these. Ye shall cease wholly to be barbarous vulturous Chactaws, and become n.o.ble European nineteenth-century men. Ye shall know that Mammon, in never such gigs and flunky 'respectabilities' in not the alone G.o.d; that of himself he is but a devil and even a brute-G.o.d.

"Difficult? Yes, it will be difficult. The short-fibre cotton; that, too, was difficult. The waste-cotton shrub, long useless, disobedient as the thistle by the wayside; have ye not conquered it, made it into beautiful bandana webs, white woven s.h.i.+rts for men, bright tinted air garments wherein flit G.o.ddesses? Ye have s.h.i.+vered mountains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty; the forest-giants-- marsh-jotuns--bear sheaves of golden grain; AEgir--the Sea-Demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses and Windhorses ye career. Ye are most strong.

Thor, red-bearded, with his blue sun-eyes, with his cheery heart and strong thunder-hammer, he and you have prevailed. Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hitherward from the gray dawn of Time!

Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered.

Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jotuns, Tailor-G.o.ds, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!"--("Past and Present," pages 236-37.)

"A question arises here: Whether, in some ulterior, perhaps not far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labour,' your Master-Worker may not find it possible, and needful, to grant his Workers permanent interest in his enterprise and theirs? So that it become, in practical result, what in essential fact and justice it ever is, a joint enterprise; all men, from the Chief Master down to the lowest Overseer and Operative, economically as well as loyally concerned for it?

Which question I do not answer. The answer, near or else far, is perhaps, Yes; and yet one knows the difficulties. Despotism is essential in most enterprises; I am told they do not tolerate 'freedom of debate' on board a seventy-four. Republican senate and plebiscite would not answer well in cotton mills. And yet, observe there too, Freedom--not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom; this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it! To reconcile Despotism with Freedom--well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny, but just, too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of G.o.d; all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them.

The way is already known, part of the way; and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it."

("Past and Present ," pages 241-42)

"Not a May-game is this man's life, but a battle and a march, a warfare with princ.i.p.alities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery s.p.a.ces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men, loves men, with inexpressible soft pity, as they cannot love him, but his soul dwells in solitude in the uttermost parts of creation.

In green oases by the palm-tree wells he rests a s.p.a.ce, but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort.

The stars keen-glancing from the Immensities send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities.

Deep calls for him unto Deep."--("Past and Present," page 249.)

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION.

The Rev. Dr. Barry read a paper at the Catholic Conference on June 30th, 1890, from which I take the following extracts as ill.u.s.trative of the rising feeling of this subject in the Catholic Church. The Rev. Dr. Barry began by defining the proletariat as those who have only one possession--their labour. Those who have no land, and no stake in the land, no house, and no home except the few sticks of furniture they significantly call by the name, no right to employment, but at the most a right to poor relief; and who, until the last 20 years, had not even a right to be educated unless by the charity of their "betters." The cla.s.s which, without figure of speech or flights of rhetoric, is homeless, landless, property less in our chief cities-- that I call the proletariat. Of the proletariat he declared there were hundreds of thousands growing up outside the pale of all churches.

He continued: For it is frightfully evident that Christianity has not kept pace with the population; that it has lagged terribly behind; that, in plain words, we have in our midst a nation of heathens to whom the ideals, the practices, and the commandments of religion are things unknown--as little realised in the miles on miles of tenement-houses, and the factories which have produced them, as though Christ had never lived or never died. How could it be otherwise? The great ma.s.s of men and women have never had time for religion. You cannot expect them to work double-tides. With hard physical labour, from morning till night in the surroundings we know and see, how much mind and leisure is left for higher things on six days of the week? ... We must look this matter in the face. I do not pretend to establish the proportion between different sections in which these things happen. Still less am I willing to lay the blame on those who are houseless, landless, and property less. What I say is that if the Government of a country allows millions of human beings to be thrown into such conditions of living and working as we have seen, these are the consequences that must be looked for. "A child," said the Anglican Bishop South, "has a right to be born, and not to be d.a.m.ned into the world." Here have been millions of children literally "d.a.m.ned into the world," neither their heads nor their hands trained to anything useful, their miserable subsistence a thing to be fought and scrambled for, their homes reeking dens under the law of lease-holding which has produced outcast London and horrible Glasgow, their right to a playground and amus.e.m.e.nt curtailed to the running gutter, and their great "object-lesson" in life the drunken parents who end so often in the prison, the hospital, and the workhouse. We need not be astonished if these not only are not Christians, but have never understood why they should be....

The social condition has created this domestic heathenism.

Then the social condition must be changed. We stand in need of a public creed--of a social, and if you will understand the word, of a lay Christianity. This work cannot be done by the clergy, nor within the four walls of a church. The field of battle lies in the school, the home, the street, the tavern, the market, and wherever men come together. To make the people Christian they must be restored to their homes, and their homes to them.