The Message. A. J. Dawson
for reforms in every direction. That attitude was justifiable enough in all conscience. The trouble was that I was at fault, first, in my diagnosis; second, in my notions as to what kind of remedies were required; and third, as to the application of those remedies.
Like the rest of the minority whose thoughts were not entirely occupied by the pursuit of pleasure and personal gain, I saw that the greatest obstacle in the path of the reformer was public indifference. But with regard to the causes of that indifference, I was entirely astray. I clung still to the nineteenth-century attitude, which had been justifiable enough during a good portion of that century, but had absolutely ceased to be justifiable before its end came. This was the attitude of demanding the introduction of reforms from above, from the State.
Though I fancied myself in advance of my time in thought, when I joined the staff of the Daily Gazette, I really was essentially of it. Even my obscure work as reporter very soon brought me into close contact with some of the dreadful sores which disfigured the body social and politic at that time. But do you think they taught me anything? No more than they taught the blindest racer after money in all London. They moved me, moved me deeply; they stirred the very foundations of my being; for I was far from being insensitive. But not even in the most glaringly obvious detail did they move me in the right direction. They merely filled me with resentment, and a passionate desire to bring improvement, aid, betterment; a desire to force the authorities into some action. Never once did it occur to me that the movement must come from the people themselves.
Poverty, though frequently a dreadful complication, was far from being at the root of all the sores. The average respectable working-class wage-earner with a wife and family, who earned from 25s. to 35s. or 40s. a week, would spend a quarter of that wage upon his own drinking; thereby not alone making saving for a rainy day impossible, but docking his family of some of the real necessities of life. But this was accepted as a matter of course. The man wanted the beer; he must have it. The State made absolutely no demand whatever upon such a man. But it did for him and his, more than he did for himself and his family. And, giving positively nothing to the State, he complainingly demanded yet more from it.
These were respectable men. A large number of men spent a half, and even three-quarters of their earnings in drink. The middle class spent proportionately far less on liquor, and far more upon display of one kind and another; they seldom denied themselves anything which they could possibly obtain. The rich, as a class, lived in and for indulgence, in some cases refined and subtle, in others gross; but always indulgence. The sense of duty to the State simply did not exist as an attribute of any class, but only here and there in individuals.
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, protégés of the Government, and readers of the Daily Gazette, upheld in all things by that organ. And I, the son of