The Message. A. J. Dawson
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 class Mr. Wheeler belonged to was not almost the most dangerous class of all. The recent elections showed this class 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 rôle 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 sunshine, 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 tithe 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 shillings 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 shifts 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 class 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 class 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 class 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 mass. 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