第34章 IS THERE NO HELP?(5)

At last,about midnight,an idea seized him.Grasping a brick,he deliberately walked up to a jeweller's window,and smashed a hole through the glass.He made no attempt to steal anything:He merely smashed the pane and then sat down on the pavement beneath the window,waiting for the arrival of the policeman.He waited some hours;but at last the constable arrived.He gave himself up,and was marched off to the lock-up."I shall at least have something to eat now,"was the reflection.He was right.He was sentenced to one year's imprisonment,and he is in gaol at this hour.This very morning he received his rations,and at this very moment he is dodged,and clothed and cared for at the cost of the rates and taxes.He has become the child of the State,and,therefore,one of the socially damned.

Thus emigration itself,instead of being an invariable specific,sometimes brings us back again to the gaol door.

Emigration,by all means.But whom are you to emigrate?These girls who do not know how to bake?These lads who never handled a spade?

And where are you to emigrate them?Are you going to make the Colonies the dumping ground of your human refuse?On that the colonists will have something decisive to say,where there are colonists;and where there are not,how are you to feed,clothe,and employ your emigrants in the uninhabited wilderness?Immigration,no doubt,is the making of a colony,just as bread is the staff of life.But if you were to cram a stomach with wheat by a force-pump you would bring on such a fit of indigestion that unless your victim threw up the indigestible mass of unground,uncooked,unmasticated grain he would never want another meal.So it is with the new colonies and the surplus labour of other countries.

Emigration is in itself not a panacea.Is Education?In one sense it may be,for Education,the developing in a man of all his latent capacities for improvement,may cure anything and everything.But the Education of which men speak when they use the term,is mere schooling.

No one but a fool would say a word against school teaching.By all means let us have our children educated.But when we have passed them through the Board School Mill we have enough experience to see that they do not emerge the renovated and regenerated beings whose advent was expected by those who passed the Education Act.The "scuttlers"who knife inoffensive persons in Lancashire,the fighting gangs of the West of London,belong to the generation that has enjoyed the advantage of Compulsory Education.Education,book-learning and schooling will not solve the difficulty.It helps,no doubt.But in some ways it aggravates it.The common school to which the children of thieves and harlots and drunkards are driven,to sit side by side with our little ones,is often by no means a temple of all the virtues.

It is sometimes a university of all the vices.The bad infect the good,and your boy and girl come back reeking with the contamination of bad associates,and familiar with the coarsest obscenity of the slum.

Another great evil is the extent to which our Education tends to overstock the labour market with material for quill-drivers and shopmen,and gives our youth a distaste for sturdy labour.Many of the most hopeless cases in our Shelters are men of considerable education.

Our schools help to enable a starving man to tell his story in more grammatical language than that which his father could have employed,but they do not feed him,or teach him where to go to get fed.So far from doing this they increase the tendency to drift into those channels where food is least secure,because employment is most uncertain,and the market most overstocked.

"Try Trades Unionism,"say some,and their advice is being widely followed.There are many and great advantages in Trades Unionism.

The fable of the bundle of sticks is good for all time.The more the working people can be banded together in voluntary organisations,created and administered by themselves for the protection of their own interests,the better--at any rate for this world--and not only for their own interests,but for those of every other section of the community.But can we rely upon this agency as a means of solving the problems which confront us?Trades Unionism has had the field to itself for a generation.It is twenty years since it was set free from all the legal disabilities under which it laboured.But it has not covered the land.It has not organised all skilled labour.Unskilled labour is almost untouched.At the Congress at Liverpool only one and a half million workmen were represented.Women are almost entirely outside the pale.Trade Unions not only represent a fraction of the labouring classes,but they are,by their constitution,unable to deal with those who do not belong to their body.What ground can there be,then,for hoping that Trades Unionism will by itself solve the difficulty?The most experienced Trades Unionists will be the first to admit that any scheme which could deal adequately with the out-of-works and others who hang on to their skirts and form the recruiting ground of blacklegs and embarrass them in ever way,would be,of all others that which would be most beneficial to Trades Unionism.The same may be said about Co-operation.Personally,I am a strong believer in Co-operation,but it must be Co-operation based on the spirit of benevolence.I don't see how any pacific re-adjustment of the social and economic relations between classes in this country can be effected except by the gradual substitution of cooperative associations for the present wages system.

As you will see in subsequent chapters,so far from there being anything in my proposals that would militate in any way against the ultimate adoption of the co-operative solution of the question,I look to Co-operation as one of the chief elements of hope in the future.