Britain for the British. Robert Blatchford

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СКАЧАТЬ honourable, and well-meaning folks. Doubtless they honestly believe they have a just claim to all their wealth and privileges. Doubtless they are no more selfish, no more arrogant, no more covetous nor idle than any working man would be in their place.

      What of that? It is nothing at all to you. They may be the finest people in the world. But does their fineness help you to pay your rent, or your wife to mend the clothes? or does it give you more wages, or her more rest? or does it in any way help to educate, and feed, and make happy your children?

      It does not. Nor do all the graces and superiorities of the West End make the lot of the East less bitter, less anxious, or more human.

      If self-interest be the ruling motive of mankind, why do not the working men transfer their honour and their service from the fine ladies and fine gentlemen to their own wives and children?

      These need every atom of love and respect the men can give them. Why should the many be poor, be ignorant, despised? Why should the rich monopolise the knowledge and the culture, the graces and elegancies of life, as well as the wealth?

      Ignorance is a curse: it is a deadlier curse than poverty. Indeed, but for ignorance, poverty and wealth could not continue to exist side by side; for only ignorance permits the rich to uphold and the poor to endure the injustices and the criminal follies of British society, as now to our shame and grief they environ us, like some loathly vision beheld with horror under nightmare.

      Is it needful to tell you more, Mr. Smith, you who are yourself a worker? Have you not witnessed, perhaps suffered, many of these evils?

      Yes; perhaps you yourself have smarted under "the insolence of office, and the spurns which patient merit of the unworthy takes"; perhaps you have borne the tortures of long suspense as one of the unemployed; perhaps on some weary tramp after work you have learned what it is to be a stranger in your own land; perhaps you have seen some old veteran worker, long known to you, now broken in health and stricken in years, compelled to seek the shameful shelter of a workhouse; perhaps you have had comrades of your own or other trades, who have been laid low by sickness, sickness caused by exposure or overstrain, and have died what coroners' juries call "natural deaths," or, in plain English, have been killed by overwork; perhaps you have known widows and little children, left behind by those unfortunate men, and can remember how much succour and compassion they received in this Christian country; perhaps as you think of the grim prophecy that one worker in four must die in a workhouse, you may yourself, despite your strength and your skill, glance anxiously towards the future, as a bold sailor glances towards a stormy horizon.

      Well, Mr. Smith, will you look through a book of mine called Dismal England, and there read how men and women and children of your class are treated in the workhouse, in the workhouse school, in the police court, in the chain works, on the canals, in the chemical hells, and in the poor and gloomy districts known as slums? I would quote some passages from Dismal England now, but space forbids.

      Or, maybe, you would prefer the evidence of men of wealth and eminence who are not Socialists. If so, please read the testimony given in the next section.

      Section C: Reliable Evidence

      The Salvation Army see a great deal of the poor. Here is the evidence of General Booth—

      444 persons are reported by the police to have attempted to commit suicide in London last year, and probably as many more succeeded in doing so. 200 persons died from starvation in the same period. We have in this one city about 100,000 paupers, 30,000 prostitutes, 33,000 homeless adults, and 35,000 wandering children of the slums. There is a standing army of out-of-works numbering 80,000, which is often increased in special periods of commercial depression or trade disputes to 100,000. 12,000 criminals are always inside Her Majesty's prisons, and about 15,000 are outside. 70,000 charges for petty offences are dealt with by the London magistrates every year. The best authorities estimate that 10,000 new criminals are manufactured per annum. We have tens of thousands of dwellings known to be overcrowded, unsanitary, or dangerous.

      Here is the evidence of a man of letters, Mr. Frederic Harrison—

      To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which we behold, that 90 per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind except as much old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages which barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed for the most part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution, that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism. … This is the normal state of the average workman in town or country.

      Here is the evidence of a man of science, Professor Huxley—

      Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme … that condition which the French call la misère, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave. … When the organisation of society, instead of mitigating this tendency, tends to continue and intensify it; when a given social order plainly makes for evil and not for good, men naturally enough begin to think it high time to try a fresh experiment. I take it to be a mere plain truth that throughout industrial Europe there is not a single large manufacturing city which is free from a vast mass of people whose condition is exactly that described, and from a still greater mass who, living just on the edge of the social swamp, are liable to be precipitated into it.

      Here is the evidence of a British peer, Lord Durham—

      There was still more sympathy and no reproach whatever to be bestowed upon the children—perhaps waifs and strays in their earliest days—of parents destitute, very likely deserving, possibly criminal, who had had to leave these poor children to fight their way in life alone. What did these children know or care for the civilisation or the wealth of their native land? What example, what incentive had they ever had to lead good and honest lives? Possibly from the moment of their birth they had never known contentment, what it had been to feel bodily comfort. They were cast into that world, and looked upon it as a cruel and heartless world, with no guidance, no benign influence to guide them in their way, and thus they were naturally prone to fall into any vicious or criminal habits which would procure them a bare subsistence.

      Here is the evidence of a Tory Minister, Sir John Gorst—

      I do not think there is any doubt as to the reality of the evil; that is to say, that there are in our civilisation men able and willing to work who can't find work to do. … Work will have to be found for them. … What are usually called relief works may be a palliative for acute temporary distress, but they are no remedy for the unemployed evil in the long-run. Not only so; they tend to aggravate it. … If you can set 100 unemployed men to produce food, they are not taking bread out of other people's mouths. Men so employed would be producing what is now imported from abroad and what they themselves would consume. An unemployed СКАЧАТЬ