Part 15 (2/2)
Under the present social system, all bonds of union among the inhabitants of the same street or neighbourhood have been dissolved. In the richer parts of the large towns, people live without knowing who are their next-door neighbours. But in the crowded lanes people know each other perfectly, and are continually brought into mutual contact. Of course, petty quarrels go their course, in the lanes as elsewhere; but groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and within their circle mutual aid is practised to an extent of which the richer cla.s.ses have no idea. If we take, for instance, the children of a poor neighbourhood who play in a street or a churchyard, or on a green, we notice at once that a close union exists among them, notwithstanding the temporary fights, and that that union protects them from all sorts of misfortunes. As soon as a mite bends inquisitively over the opening of a drain--”Don't stop there,” another mite shouts out, ”fever sits in the hole!” ”Don't climb over that wall, the train will kill you if you tumble down! Don't come near to the ditch! Don't eat those berries--poison! you will die.” Such are the first teachings imparted to the urchin when he joins his mates out-doors. How many of the children whose play-grounds are the pavements around ”model workers' dwellings,”
or the quays and bridges of the ca.n.a.ls, would be crushed to death by the carts or drowned in the muddy waters, were it not for that sort of mutual support. And when a fair Jack has made a slip into the unprotected ditch at the back of the milkman's yard, or a cherry-cheeked Lizzie has, after all, tumbled down into the ca.n.a.l, the young brood raises such cries that all the neighbourhood is on the alert and rushes to the rescue.
Then comes in the alliance of the mothers. ”You could not imagine” (a lady-doctor who lives in a poor neighbourhood told me lately) ”how much they help each other. If a woman has prepared nothing, or could prepare nothing, for the baby which she expected--and how often that happens!--all the neighbours bring something for the new-comer. One of the neighbours always takes care of the children, and some other always drops in to take care of the household, so long as the mother is in bed.” This habit is general. It is mentioned by all those who have lived among the poor. In a thousand small ways the mothers support each other and bestow their care upon children that are not their own. Some training--good or bad, let them decide it for themselves--is required in a lady of the richer cla.s.ses to render her able to pa.s.s by a s.h.i.+vering and hungry child in the street without noticing it. But the mothers of the poorer cla.s.ses have not that training. They cannot stand the sight of a hungry child; they must feed it, and so they do. ”When the school children beg bread, they seldom or rather never meet with a refusal”--a lady-friend, who has worked several years in Whitechapel in connection with a workers' club, writes to me. But I may, perhaps, as well transcribe a few more pa.s.sages from her letter:--
”Nursing neighbours, in cases of illness, without any shade of remuneration, is quite general among the workers. Also, when a woman has little children, and goes out for work, another mother always takes care of them.
”If, in the working cla.s.ses, they would not help each other, they could not exist. I know families which continually help each other--with money, with food, with fuel, for bringing up the little children, in cases of illness, in cases of death.
”'The mine' and 'thine' is much less sharply observed among the poor than among the rich. Shoes, dress, hats, and so on,--what may be wanted on the spot--are continually borrowed from each other, also all sorts of household things.
”Last winter the members of the United Radical Club had brought together some little money, and began after Christmas to distribute free soup and bread to the children going to school. Gradually they had 1,800 children to attend to. The money came from outsiders, but all the work was done by the members of the club. Some of them, who were out of work, came at four in the morning to wash and to peel the vegetables; five women came at nine or ten (after having done their own household work) for cooking, and stayed till six or seven to wash the dishes. And at meal time, between twelve and half-past one, twenty to thirty workers came in to aid in serving the soup, each one staying what he could spare of his meal time. This lasted for two months. No one was paid.”
My friend also mentions various individual cases, of which the following are typical:--
”Annie W. was given by her mother to be boarded by an old person in Wilmot Street. When her mother died, the old woman, who herself was very poor, kept the child without being paid a penny for that. When the old lady died too, the child, who was five years old, was of course neglected during her illness, and was ragged; but she was taken at once by Mrs. S., the wife of a shoemaker, who herself has six children.
Lately, when the husband was ill, they had not much to eat, all of them.
”The other day, Mrs. M., mother of six children, attended Mrs. M--g throughout her illness, and took to her own rooms the elder child....
But do you need such facts? They are quite general.... I know also Mrs.
D. (Oval, Hackney Road), who has a sewing machine and continually sews for others, without ever accepting any remuneration, although she has herself five children and her husband to look after.... And so on.”
For every one who has any idea of the life of the labouring cla.s.ses it is evident that without mutual aid being practised among them on a large scale they never could pull through all their difficulties. It is only by chance that a worker's family can live its lifetime without having to face such circ.u.mstances as the crisis described by the ribbon weaver, Joseph Gutteridge, in his autobiography.(18) And if all do not go to the ground in such cases, they owe it to mutual help. In Gutteridge's case it was an old nurse, miserably poor herself, who turned up at the moment when the family was slipping towards a final catastrophe, and brought in some bread, coal, and bedding, which she had obtained on credit. In other cases, it will be some one else, or the neighbours will take steps to save the family. But without some aid from other poor, how many more would be brought every year to irreparable ruin!(19)
Mr. Plimsoll, after he had lived for some time among the poor, on 7s.
6d. a week, was compelled to recognize that the kindly feelings he took with him when he began this life ”changed into hearty respect and admiration” when he saw how the relations between the poor are permeated with mutual aid and support, and learned the simple ways in which that support is given. After a many years' experience, his conclusion was that ”when you come to think of it, such as these men were, so were the vast majority of the working cla.s.ses.”(20) As to bringing up orphans, even by the poorest families, it is so widely-spread a habit, that it may be described as a general rule; thus among the miners it was found, after the two explosions at Warren Vale and at Lund Hill, that ”nearly one-third of the men killed, as the respective committees can testify, were thus supporting relations other than wife and child.” ”Have you reflected,” Mr. Plimsoll added, ”what this is? Rich men, even comfortably-to-do men do this, I don't doubt. But consider the difference.” Consider what a sum of one s.h.i.+lling, subscribed by each worker to help a comrade's widow, or 6d. to help a fellow-worker to defray the extra expense of a funeral, means for one who earns 16s. a week and has a wife, and in some cases five or six children to support.(21) But such subscriptions are a general practice among the workers all over the world, even in much more ordinary cases than a death in the family, while aid in work is the commonest thing in their lives.
Nor do the same practices of mutual aid and support fail among the richer cla.s.ses. Of course, when one thinks of the harshness which is often shown by the richer employers towards their employees, one feels inclined to take the most pessimist view of human nature. Many must remember the indignation which was aroused during the great Yorks.h.i.+re strike of 1894, when old miners who had picked coal from an abandoned pit were prosecuted by the colliery owners. And, even if we leave aside the horrors of the periods of struggle and social war, such as the extermination of thousands of workers' prisoners after the fall of the Paris Commune--who can read, for instance, revelations of the labour inquest which was made here in the forties, or what Lord Shaftesbury wrote about ”the frightful waste of human life in the factories, to which the children taken from the workhouses, or simply purchased all over this country to be sold as factory slaves, were consigned”(22)--who can read that without being vividly impressed by the baseness which is possible in man when his greediness is at stake? But it must also be said that all fault for such treatment must not be thrown entirely upon the criminality of human nature. Were not the teachings of men of science, and even of a notable portion of the clergy, up to a quite recent time, teachings of distrust, despite and almost hatred towards the poorer cla.s.ses? Did not science teach that since serfdom has been abolished, no one need be poor unless for his own vices? And how few in the Church had the courage to blame the children-killers, while the great numbers taught that the sufferings of the poor, and even the slavery of the negroes, were part of the Divine Plan! Was not Nonconformism itself largely a popular protest against the harsh treatment of the poor at the hand of the established Church?
With such spiritual leaders, the feelings of the richer cla.s.ses necessarily became, as Mr. Pimsoll remarked, not so much blunted as ”stratified.” They seldom went downwards towards the poor, from whom the well-to-do-people are separated by their manner of life, and whom they do not know under their best aspects, in their every-day life. But among themselves--allowance being made for the effects of the wealth-acc.u.mulating pa.s.sions and the futile expenses imposed by wealth itself--among themselves, in the circle of family and friends, the rich practise the same mutual aid and support as the poor. Dr. Ihering and L.
Dargun are perfectly right in saying that if a statistical record could be taken of all the money which pa.s.ses from hand to hand in the shape of friendly loans and aid, the sum total would be enormous, even in comparison with the commercial transactions of the world's trade. And if we could add to it, as we certainly ought to, what is spent in hospitality, petty mutual services, the management of other people's affairs, gifts and charities, we certainly should be struck by the importance of such transfers in national economy. Even in the world which is ruled by commercial egotism, the current expression, ”We have been harshly treated by that firm,” shows that there is also the friendly treatment, as opposed to the harsh, i.e. the legal treatment; while every commercial man knows how many firms are saved every year from failure by the friendly support of other firms.
As to the charities and the amounts of work for general well-being which are voluntarily done by so many well-to-do persons, as well as by workers, and especially by professional men, every one knows the part which is played by these two categories of benevolence in modern life.
If the desire of acquiring notoriety, political power, or social distinction often spoils the true character of that sort of benevolence, there is no doubt possible as to the impulse coming in the majority of cases from the same mutual-aid feelings. Men who have acquired wealth very often do not find in it the expected satisfaction. Others begin to feel that, whatever economists may say about wealth being the reward of capacity, their own reward is exaggerated. The conscience of human solidarity begins to tell; and, although society life is so arranged as to stifle that feeling by thousands of artful means, it often gets the upper hand; and then they try to find an outcome for that deeply human need by giving their fortune, or their forces, to something which, in their opinion, will promote general welfare.
In short, neither the crus.h.i.+ng powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution. What was the outcome of evolution since its earliest stages cannot be overpowered by one of the aspects of that same evolution. And the need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in the village, or the secret union of workers, re-a.s.serts itself again, even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it always has been, the chief leader towards further progress. Such are the conclusions which we are necessarily brought to when we carefully ponder over each of the groups of facts briefly enumerated in the last two chapters.
NOTES:
1. Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, London, 1870, Introd. p. xliii.
2. The Act of Edward the Sixth--the first of his reign--ordered to hand over to the Crown ”all fraternities, brotherhoods, and guilds being within the realm of England and Wales and other of the king's dominions; and all manors, lands, tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to them or any of them” (English Guilds, Introd. p. xliii). See also Ockenkowski's Englands wirtschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des Mittelalters, Jena, 1879, chaps. ii-v.
3. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade-Unionism, London, 1894, pp. 21-38.
4. See in Sidney Webb's work the a.s.sociations which existed at that time. The London artisans are supposed to have never been better organized than in 1810-20.
5. The National a.s.sociation for the Protection of Labour included about 150 separate unions, which paid high levies, and had a members.h.i.+p of about 100,000. The Builders' Union and the Miners' Unions also were big organizations (Webb, l.c. p. 107).
6. I follow in this Mr. Webb's work, which is replete with doc.u.ments to confirm his statements.
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