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Page 31
As for the market-price of book-learning or clerkly skill, it is not
worth so much as naming. The clerk was held to be a wondrous person in
times when the "neck-verse" would save a man from the gallows; but
"clerk" has far altered its meaning, and the modern being of that name
is in sorrowful case. So contemptibly cheap are his poor services that
he in person is not looked upon as a man, but rather as a lump of raw
material which is at present on sale in a glutted market. All the
walks of life wherein men proceed as though they belonged to the
leisured class are becoming no fit places for self-respecting people.
Gradually the ornamental sort of workers are being displaced; the idle
rich are too plentiful, but I question whether even the idle rich have
done, so much harm as the genteel poor who are ashamed of labour. I do
not like to see wages going downward, but there are exceptions, and I
am almost disposed to feel glad that the searchers after "genteel"
employment are now very much like the birds during a long frost. The
enormous lounging class who earn nothing do not offer an agreeable
subject for contemplation, and their parasites are horrible--there is
no other word. Yet we may gather a little consolation when we think
that the tendency is to raise the earnings of those who do something
or produce something. It is not good to know that a dustman makes more
money than hundreds of hard-worked and well-educated men, for this is
a grotesque state of things brought about by imbecile Government
officials. Neither do I quite like to know that a lady whose education
occupied nine years of her life is offered less wages than a good
housemaid. But I do assuredly like to hear how the higher class of
manual labourers flourish; they are the salt of the earth, and I
rejoice that they are no longer held down and regarded as in some way
inferior to men who do nothing for two hundred pounds a year, except
try to look as if they had two thousand pounds. The quiet man who does
the delicate work on the monster engines of a great ocean steamer is
worthy of his hire, costly as his hire may be. On his eye, his
judgment of materials, his nerve, and his dexterity of hand depend
precious lives. For three thousand miles those vast masses of
machinery must force a huge hull through huge seas; the mighty and
shapely fabrics of metal must work with the ease of a child's toy
locomotive, and they must bear a strain that is never relaxed though
all the most tremendous forces of Nature may threaten. What a charge
for a man! His earnings could hardly be raised high enough if we
consider the momentous nature of the duty he fulfils; he is an
aristocrat of labour, and we do not know that there is not something
grotesque in measuring and arguing over the money-payment made to him.
Then there are the specially skilled hands who in their monkish
seclusion work at the instruments wherewith scientific wonders are
wrought. The rewards of their toil would have seemed fabulous to such
men as Harrison the watchmaker; but they also form an aristocracy, and
they win the aristocrat's guerdon without practising his idleness. The
mathematician who makes the calculations for a machine is not so well
paid as the man who finishes it; the observatory calculator who
calculates the time of occulation for a planet cannot earn so much as
the one who grinds a reflector. In all our life the same tendency is
to be seen: the work of the hand outdoes in value the work of the
brain.
XII.
THE HOPELESS POOR.
By fits and starts the public wake up and own with much clamour that
there is a great deal of poverty in our midst. While each new fit
lasts the enthusiasm of good people is quite impressive in its
intensity; all the old hackneyed signatures appear by scores in the
newspapers, and "Pro Bono Publico," "Audi Alteram Partem," "X.Y.Z.,"
"Paterfamilias," "An Inquirer," have their theories quite pat and
ready. Picturesque writers pile horror on horror, and strive, with the
delightful emulation of their class, to outdo each other; far-fetched
accounts of oppression, robbery, injustice, are framed, and the more
drastic reformers invariably conclude that "Somebody" must be hanged.
We never find out which "Somebody" we should suspend from the dismal
tree; but none the less the virtuous reformers go on claiming victims
for the sacrifice, while, as each discoverer solemnly proclaims his
bloodthirsty remedy, he looks round for applause, and seems to say,
"Did you ever hear of stern and audacious statesmanship like mine? Was
there ever such a practical man?"
The farce is supremely funny in essentials, and yet I cannot laugh at
it, for I know that the drolleries are played out amid sombre
surroundings that should make the heart quake. While the hysterical
newspaper people are venting abuse and coining theories, there are
quiet workers in thousands who go on in uncomplaining steadfastness
striving to remove a deadly shame from our civilisation, and smiling
softly at the furious cries of folk who know so little and vociferate
so much. After each whirlwind of sympathy has reached its full
strength, there is generally a strong disposition among the
sentimentalists to do something. No mere words for the genuine
sentimentalist; he packs his sentimental self into a cab, he engages
the services of a policeman, and he plunges into the nasty deeps of
the City's misery. He treats each court and alley as a department of a
menagerie, and he gazes with mild interest on the animals that he
views. To the sentimentalist they are only animals; and he is kind to
them as he would be to an ailing dog at home. If the sentimentalist's
womenfolk go with him, the tour is made still more pleasing. The
ladies shudder with terror as they trail their dainty skirts up
noisome stairs; but their genteel cackle never ceases. "And you earn
six shillings per week? How very surprising! And the landlord takes
four shillings for your one room? How very mean! And you have--let me
see--four from six leaves two--yes--you have two shillings a week to
keep you and your three children? How charmingly shocking!" The honest
poor go out to work; the wastrels stay at home and invent tales of
woe; then, when the dusk falls on the foul court and all the
sentimentalists have gone home to dinner, the woe-stricken tellers of
harrowing tales creep out to the grimy little public-house at the top
of the row; they spend the gifts of the sentimentalist; and, when the
landlord draws out his brimming tills at midnight, he blesses the kind
people who help to earn a snug income for him. I have seen forty-eight
drunken people come out of a tavern between half-past eleven and
half-past twelve in one night during the time when sentiment ran mad;
there never were such roaring times for lazy and dissolute scoundrels;
and nearly all the money given by the sentimentalists was spent in
sowing crops of liver complaint or _delirium tremens_, and in filling
the workhouses and the police-cells. Then the fit of charity died out;
the clergyman and the "sisters" went on as usual in their sacredly
secret fashion until a new outburst came. It seems strange to talk of
Charity "raging"--it reminds us of Mr. Mantalini's savage lamb--but I
can use no other word but "rage" to express these frantic gushes of
affection for the poor. During one October month I carefully preserved
and collated all the suggestions which were so liberally put forth in
various London and provincial newspapers; and I observed that
something like four hundred of these suggestions resolve themselves
into a very few definite classes. The most sensible of these follow
the lines laid down by Charles Dickens, and the writers say, "If you
do not want the poor to behave like hogs, why do you house them like
hogs? Clear away the rookeries; buy up the sites; pay reasonable
compensation to those now interested in the miserable buildings, and
then erect decent dwellings."
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