Crying for the Light Volume Iii Part 14

'By all means.'

'If in the mult.i.tude of counsellors there is safety, the England of to-day has little to fear, in spite of the undeniable facts that she is losing her trade and commerce, that her national debt seems impossible of payment, that her expenditure increases as her income declines, and that the unemployed and pauper cla.s.s threaten, like the lean kine Joseph saw in his dream, to swallow up all the rest. As long as I can remember I have heard statesmen, and clergymen of all denominations, and politicians of all creeds, say something must be done; and they are still saying it in the most hopeless of tones, and with air the most dejected. We have not had our French Revolution yet. At the worst, the hungry mobs have contented themselves with an occasional raid on an unfortunate butcher or baker, or on some imprudent jeweller, whose attractive windows have proved too strong a temptation for the h.o.r.n.y-handed. In the meanwhile, people of a hopeful turn of mind tell us-and truly-that the working cla.s.ses were never better off, better paid, or better fed. But still, somehow or other, it is apparent that outside of the hopeless pauperism which the idiotic legislation of our fathers has called into existence-outside the depraved, whom drink and dishonesty have removed from the ranks of labour, to swell the bitter cry which ever ascends from city slums, where all foul things congregate, and where decent life is impossible-there are hundreds, nay, thousands, who are ready to work, but for whom, though to seek it they rise early and sit up late, no work is to be had. Is there any hope for such? Are they to be uncared for till they have lost all heart, and sink down to the pit of misery and despair, never more, till death comes to them as a friend, to rise again? Is it not time that we think of them? In Ireland, a hundred patriots would have rent the air with the story of their wrongs. In England, we take small note of them. Yet they are our flesh and blood, with honest hearts and hands. A scheme has been devised for their benefit. That it is worth a trial, few who can examine it can doubt.

'The idea of this new remedy is that, now when agricultural land is to be had for next to nothing, farms should be bought on which home colonies may be planted, and labour provided sufficient for self-support.

'The fact is,' said Wentworth, 'we have rather a grand scheme in view. A gentleman is ready to purchase land in America or Canada or one of the Colonies; to plant it with poor people who can find no work at home, nor are likely to do so, if they stop here all their lives. And he wants me to go out as manager; I am quite ready to do so. And Rose is anxious for the experiment to be tried-indeed, far more so than myself.'

'That is a matter of course-novelty has always charms for woman.'

'And woman,' said Rose, 'is always ready to lend a helping hand to any philanthropic scheme.'

'Well, it requires a good deal of thinking about.'

'And we have thought about it long,' said Wentworth; 'and the more we think about it the better we like it. But we want you to accompany us.'

'In what capacity?'

'As medical man.'

'And you think I would turn my back on London, and give up my easy life, to undertake all this responsibility?'

'Well, I don't see why you should not,' said Wentworth. 'You are not doing much good here, you know.'

'And why should I, when everyone is fussing about doing good and in the meantime doing a great deal of mischief, interfering with the working of the unalterable laws of the universe, was.h.i.+ng blackamoors white, trying to make empty sacks stand upright?'

'Yes, but we are going to do nothing of the kind. We are only finding homes and work for men and women who can find in the old country neither the one nor the other-to save them from sinking into hopeless pauperism, to help them to live happy and healthful lives. What have you to say against our scheme?'

'Really, now I think about it, I can't say anything against it, supposing that you have a proper site for the experiment, that you take proper people, and that you have sufficient capital to make a fair start.'

'Oh, as to that, everything has been provided for. Each colonist will have a bit of ground, which he will pay for in time by his labour. We intend working on the old lines, not to be led away by communistic ideas.

Each man will do the best he can for himself, and in so doing will be best for all. What do you think, Buxton, of the scheme?'

'Why, like all her ladys.h.i.+p's ideas, it is excellent.'

'Pretty flatterer!' said Rose.

'He wants to cut me out,' said Wentworth. 'He was always envious of my superior abilities.'

'As he had every reason to be,' said Rose.

'Come, that's too bad,' said Buxton, turning to Rose, 'after the way in which I b.u.t.tered you up just now. Two to one ain't fair. But to return to business.'

'Hear, hear,' said Wentworth.

'If I had a family-which, thank Heaven, I have not-I would not stop in England a day. If I had a lad to plant out in the world as you have, I'd send him off to America or the Colonies to-morrow.'

'Because?'

'Because it's all up in old England in the first place; and in the second place, because if it were not so, the New World offers better opportunities for a young fellow than the old. May I dwell upon these topics?'

'Certainly, by all means.'

'Well, I have met a good many Americans lately, and they have put new ideas into my head-'

'Not before they were wanted!' said Wentworth.

'Speak for yourself, sir, if you please,' said Buxton, with an a.s.sumed offended air.

'Oh, I beg pardon! Pray proceed.'

'I was going to say,' said Buxton, 'until interrupted in this unmannerly manner, you are enthusiasts, I am not. I doubt the dream of a new heaven and a new earth. It has done good in its time, I admit. It was the thought of the Messiah that was to come that nerved the heart of the Jew as he sat by the waters of Babylon and wept as he remembered Zion. Paul and the Apostles expected the new heaven and the new earth before they laid down their lives as martyrs for their inspiring faith. Upheld by the same living hope, tender and delicate maidens have gone to the grave exulting, and have glorified G.o.d at the stake or in the dungeon or on the scaffold. "The end of all things is at hand," is ever the cry of the churches. It was that of Luther in his day, and is that of the Evangelicals in ours, who, if an earthquake destroys a town, or a deluge sweeps over the land, or the cholera breaks out in the East, or there are wars and rumours of wars, tell us these are the dread signs to mark the coming of the Son of Man with His saints to judge the earth. I feel rather inclined to believe with old Swedenborg that that day is past.

The talk of a Millennium makes me sick. It is a delusion and a sham.

Such men as Dr. c.u.mming, with their long array of dates and their wild dreams of the fulfilment of prophecy, make men like myself sceptics. It is clear to us that the odds, at any rate, are against the Christian.'

'I don't know,' said Rose. 'But this is a business scheme. We are not in search of the Millennium.'

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

CHIEFLY ABOUT THE LAND.

For three months an Englishman sits in sackcloth and ashes. The matter-of-fact reviewer will tell me this is not so; and he is right and so am I.

London is not a place to live in in winter; there is, unfortunately, no place in England that is. People talk of the weather. They cannot help themselves. In his old age Dr. Johnson wrote, 'I am now reduced to think and am at last content to talk of the weather.' That was a sign that the Doctor at last had fallen low. As Burney writes: 'There was no information for which Dr. Johnson was less grateful than for that which concerned the weather.' If any one of his intimate companions told him it was hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm; he would stop them by saying: 'O-oh, O-oh! You are telling me of that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant. Let us bear with patience or enjoy in quiet elementary changes either for the better or the worse, as they are never secrets.' Nevertheless, the state of the weather continues in all circles an unfailing theme. Bad weather affects the spirits by depressing them, fine raises them. We are attuned to every action of the outer atmosphere. Our suicides in November are known all the world over.

It is scarcely possible to be cheerful on a dull, cold, raw, foggy day.

I wonder people who can afford to go away and have no pressing claims at home do not rush off to the Riviera in search of its blue sky, its summer suns, its wealth of flowers, its richer life for the delicate, or the infirm or old.

'We must get out of England,' said Wentworth to his wife, one dull wintry morn, when the raw cold seemed to fill every apartment in the house, and the outlook into the busy street only revealed half-starved figures in all their wretchedness. 'We must get out of England, and the sooner the better.'

'Yes, I've long been thinking so; but the question is, where to go. We have got to think of other people besides ourselves, and of other affairs than our own. But with our tastes and habits we can live cheaply anywhere, and I have no wish to go where we shall meet a lot of idle rich people only seeking to guard themselves from the English winter and spending life in frivolous indulgence. Let us take the question seriously.'

'That is just what I am trying to do,' was the reply. 'We are not too old for a grand experiment.'

'But are you prepared to give up journalism?'

'Yes, I am. I see a new spirit abroad, one which I detest.'

But one thing remained to Wentworth of the teaching of his early years: a love of Liberal principles; an enthusiasm for humanity; a deep yearning for the mental and moral elevation of the people-ideas deeply cherished in the Nonconformist families of the past generation. In every home the struggle for reform, the hatred of slavery, the desire to give the Roman Catholics fair play, the struggle for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the need of a national and unsectarian system of education, were held to be objects of paramount importance, and were the subjects of daily converse. In every rural village meetings were held at the chapels in their favour, and if there were no great orators to attend them, what was said at them sank into prepared soil, and bore a rich harvest. It was in East Anglia as it was all over England. The agitation went from one chapel to another. A line of communication was thus established, wrote William Hazlitt, whose father was a Unitarian minister in Shrops.h.i.+re, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fires, unquenchable like the fires in the Agamemnon of aeschylus, placed at different stations that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the destruction of Troy. It was from such centres came the soldiers who were to win the people's victories in spite of the nominees of Tory lords and rotten borough-mongers, of pensioners and place-men, of time-serving priests and fawning courtiers who then ruled the land, and who fattened on the taxes wrung from an unrepresented and oppressed and a discontented-and a justly discontented-nation. Young hearts burned within them as they listened to Liberal orators, or read the speeches of such men as Henry Brougham or Dan O'Connell, or studied Liberal newspapers; and they longed for the time when they, too, should gird on the s.h.i.+eld and buckler and do battle for the Right. In vain timid ministers and aged deacons uttered warning voices and shook their heads at the new spirit which was abroad, quoted Scripture about obeying them that have rule over you, hinted at the danger to spirituality of life and feeling by mixing in the rough warfare of the political world. As well might they scream to the stormy blast. The current was too strong: they had to swim with it or be drowned. It was a grand time of awakening.

The world has seen nothing like it since. To Wentworth it was a baptism, the effect of which was never to pa.s.s away. Buxton, as usual, continued his morning smoke.

'Hear me,' said Wentworth, as Rose rushed out of the room, declaring that she knew all he had to say. Wentworth continued: 'As long as I can remember, the "condition of England question," as Carlyle called it, or, as we term it, in more sensational phraseology, "the bitter cry of the outcast," has afforded painful matter of reflection to the statesman, the philanthropist, the philosopher, and the divine. It is always coming to the front, and it will always be coming to the front, even if you hang all the bad landlords and jerry-builders, get rid of the bloated capitalist, and divide the estates of the aristocracy and the millions of the capitalists among the poor of the East-end. The working cla.s.ses are not to be confounded with the men and women who herd like beasts in the wretched dens of the east. Underneath the lowest of them there is a conservative residuum whom it is impossible to get rid of, whose condition it is appalling to contemplate. They are the men who won't work; who won't go where work is to be had; who come to London when they should never have left their country home; who sell their manhood for a pot of beer: casuals who, born in a poor-house or a prison, children of shame from the first, mostly spend their lives alternately tramping the streets and in the workhouse or the gaol. As London increases in population, so do they. We have seen such men offered fair work by hundreds, but they prefer filth and laziness, with the chance of an appeal to the humane. "Pull down the rookery," and the rooks won't fly away. Burn all the fever and vice laden dens of the outcast, and there he is still, a disgrace and shame-not so much, as sensational writers pretend, to our civilization and religion as to our common manhood. Ever since we have known anything of the churches-whether Established or Free-it seems to us that they have aimed as much at the temporal as the spiritual improvement of the outcast. We have yet to learn that it is a disgrace to our civilization that it does not interfere with G.o.d's law, that the wrong-doer must pay for his wrong-doing, whatever that may be-that if you lose your chance, another will take it-that it is too late to go harvesting in winter; that the victory is to the strong, that he that will not work shall not eat-those who forget this, who idle away the precious moments, are soon sitting in the outer darkness of the outcast, where there is weeping, and wailing, and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth.

'It amuses us, or would, were not the subject so awful-for it may be taken as a sober truth that outside the bottomless pit there is no such utter d.a.m.nation as is to be found among the outcast-to find clever writers talking of the constant neglect of the last hundred years, and to ponder over the remedies. It is now the fas.h.i.+on to recommend better houses to be built at the expense of the community. If we were to get free trade in land, more will be done to remove the congestion in our great cities than by the erection of improved dwellings, which will rather intensify the evil. The more society does for the outcast the more will their number and their poverty alike increase. The remedy is worse than the disease. Every halfpenny you give to the undeserving is so much taken from the deserving. Every benefit you confer on the pauper is at the expense of the honest, respectable poor, who have a prior claim. Against State action the argument is still stronger. In the first place, the State cannot deal honestly and fairly by the people.

What it does is ill done, and at double expense. The people who pay the taxes are often as badly off as those for whose benefit they are spent.

A slight addition to the taxation of a wealthy peer or capitalist will not deprive him of a single luxury, but it may send a small, struggling tradesman into the _Gazette_. We are a nation of shopkeepers, and it is easy to perceive that a time may come when our heavy taxation may cripple us in our trade with foreign compet.i.tors, when they will supply the markets, on which we have hitherto depended, when, in fact, we shall have little left to us but our National Debt.'

'Go on,' said Buxton. 'You are getting rather prosy, but if it relieves your feelings, pray proceed.'