UC-NRLF 
 
 713 
 
YOUR PART IN 
 POVERTY 
 
YOUR PART IN 
 POVERTY 
 
 By GEORGE LANSBURY 
 
 FOURTH PRINTING 
 
 New York B. W. HUEBSCH Mcmx 
 
My thanks to Gerald Gould for 
 his valued suggestions and his 
 help in the reading of the proofs. 
 
 G. L. 
 
 , ; Firsf< published . January 20, 1917. 
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 TO FOURTH IMPRESSION 
 
 THIS book was ^vr^tten at the time of the Church 
 of England Mission of Repentance and Hope 
 a fact which " dates " some of the references in 
 the text, but does not necessitate any modification in 
 the argument. In sending out a new edition of it, I 
 would like readers to remember that it was written 
 mainly to help Christian people to understand what a 
 Socialist member of the Church of England means by 
 Socialism, and also to explain why an agitator like 
 myself believes religion must play an important part 
 in the social and industrial redemption of the world. 
 It has been urged against me that I have produced no 
 statistics, evolved no scheme of reconstruction. This 
 is true. Of books of statistics and schemes of recon- 
 struction there are no end; they come pouring out 
 from the printing presses in a steady stream day after 
 day. My faith for the future is built on what I con- 
 ceive to be a surer foundation, which is what the 
 Churches call a change in heart and mind taking place 
 in each one of us, making us all understand that sal- 
 
 577045 
 
vi AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 vation is from within, that heaven is here or nowhere, 
 that hell and heaven on earth are of our own making 
 which in turn means that it is within the power of each 
 of us to help redeem mankind, and that without our* 
 effort, our work, the redemption of the world from 
 social and industrial evil zvill never take place. The 
 war has destroyed much, swept away many illusions, 
 but has left untouched the eternal truth that those 
 who sow selfishness reap what they sow, that nations 
 who base their power and might and majesty on 
 materialism and force reap also what they sozv, in the 
 ultimate ruin which inevitably follows injustice. As 
 the war draws to a close men are discussing what may 
 happen "when the boys come home." One thing is 
 certain: they will return with a bigger idea of their 
 own worth and the relative worthlessness of mere 
 property as against life and liberty. It will be the duty 
 of Christians to meet them with open arms, to join 
 with them in building our society on a surer foundation 
 than that of "class supremacy" a foundation of 
 brotherhood and love. Women and men have sacrificed 
 a great deal in the hope of winning the war; it is now 
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE vii 
 
 time to sacrifice everything in one supreme effort to 
 rid the whole world of the spirit of domination, 
 whether of class or race, and establishing the true 
 kingdom of the people, which is the kingdom of God. 
 If this little book succeeds in making ever so few 
 people think, it will have been worth while. If it 
 makes one young man or woman enlist in the great 
 silent army of the people, willing unselfishly to spend 
 and be spent for God and the people, I shall be glad to 
 have written it. Many thanks to all the friends who 
 have helped to make the book known. 
 
 GEORGE LANSBURY. 
 March, 1918. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE BY THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER, 7 
 INTRODUCTION, n 
 I. WORKMEN, 25 
 II. WOMEN AND CHILDREN, 45 
 
 III. BUSINESS, 73 
 
 IV. CHURCHES, 88 
 
 V. WHAT WE MUST DO, 105 
 
THE PREFACE 
 
 BY THE 
 
 BISHOP OF WINCHESTER 
 
 MR. LANSBURY has done me the 
 honour, for as such I feel it, of asking 
 me to put a few words before his book. 
 Under ordinary circumstances I should possibly 
 have declined, partly because (with the excep- 
 tion of one chapter) I have not read the book, 
 partly because there would be points in any writing 
 or action of Mr. Lansbury's with which I should 
 disagree, perhaps in some cases vehemently. 
 
 But the circumstances of to-day and to-morrow 
 as we all know are not ordinary but entirely extra- 
 ordinary. And, in these matters, one considera- 
 tion, to my thinking, outweighs all others. It is 
 that of the imperative need that the men and 
 women of organised religion and the men and 
 women of manual labour (thank God the division 
 between them is not mutually exclusive) should 
 understand one another. The degree of their 
 present aloofness and misunderstanding is easily 
 the most sinister fact in our present condition. 
 
 On the side of the Church we are in no mood of 
 complacency. The National Mission of Repent- 
 ance and Hope has been the sign on our part of 
 
8 rOVR 'PART 'IN POVERTY 
 
 readiness to take ourselves to task and to 
 acknowledge faults and mistakes. 
 
 Therefore when a man with the integrity and 
 enthusiasm of George Lansbury, who belongs to 
 both sorts, to whom the faith and worship of 
 Christendom mean what they do to his fellow- 
 Churchmen and who, as a popular leader, longs 
 with righteous passion in his heart for social 
 changes in the interests of manual labour when 
 he comes forward to tell us what Labour asks and 
 what, in his judgment on Christian principles 
 Labour ought to have, and why, then I think that 
 every motive should make us of the Church give 
 him not only a fair but a ready, open-hearted, and 
 brotherly hearing. He will probably ask more of 
 some of us than we can give. I myself, for 
 example, who have done the little I could in life 
 to prevent Churchmanship from being bound up 
 with Toryism, should have very likely to maintain 
 that it cannot be bound up with political Socialism. 
 But if we think, as I hope most thoughtful Chris- 
 tian people do, that the changes of the future will 
 and ought to be in the direction of giving more 
 status, security, and influence to those who work 
 with their hands, at the expense of those who have 
 had so much more, we shall want to get closer to 
 such a man as Mr. Lansbury, to understand his 
 position better, and to ask him to consider with us 
 our difficulties about accepting the Avhole of it. 
 Strong political differences up to the point 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 which each man's honest convictions allow, but 
 therewith a great unity of ultimate aim, and a 
 genuine desire to find agreement these, it seems 
 to me, should be the attitude for all of us. Mr. 
 Lansbury generously allows me to introduce his 
 book in what may well seem this half-hearted way ; 
 and I am able to ask for it the sympathetic and 
 respectful attention of my fellow-Churchmen and 
 fellow-citizens almost as warmly as if I were more 
 fully agreed than is likely to be the case. 
 
 EDW. WINTON. 
 
 Farnham, Nov. 20, 1916. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE National Mission organised by the 
 Church of England is an effort to arouse 
 men and women who care for religion 
 to a higher sense of their corporate responsibility 
 for the well-being of the nation. The old idea 
 that a man or woman should accept the teaching 
 and sacrifice of our Lord as a means of escape 
 from the torments of hell, or as an admission 
 to a future heaven beyond the clouds, has 
 proved quite futile as a force for regenerating 
 mankind. We all agree now that this life 
 is a much more serious thing, and that it cannot 
 be dismissed and put out of account by the very 
 comfortable belief that, no matter how wicked a 
 person may have been right up to the last hour of 
 life, if at that moment he accepts the sacrifice of 
 Christ's death all will be well with him throughout 
 eternity. I do not here discuss the theological 
 question, but I do insist that, in the ex- 
 perience of those of us who have lived 
 through the last half of the nineteenth 
 century, the doctrine of salvation, as taught 
 in almost all the Churches, has been, in its effect 
 
 n 
 
12 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 on life and conduct, a ghastly failure. This failure 
 of Christendom to redeem the world is writ large 
 on the blood-stained battlefields which to-day 
 stretch across Europe, Asia, and Africa. But it is 
 written still deeper on the social life of all those 
 nations who profess to serve God and to believe 
 in the teaching of His blessed Son. 
 
 It is this aspect of life I shall write about in this 
 book, because I am convinced it is the one thing 
 that matters in these days when millions of men and 
 women are called upon by their rulers to give up 
 everything that is valuable in life for the purpose 
 of winning the war. A victory over the Germans 
 will be but Dead Sea fruit indeed unless our nation 
 can overcome the preventable poverty and misery, 
 prostitution and destitution, which exist and 
 thrive all around us. We who remain at home, 
 rich and poor, old and young, must enlist in one 
 great army under Christ's banner, accepting His 
 teaching literally and in all its fulness, determined 
 in very deed to fight against the devil and all his 
 works, and by God's good grace to establish the 
 Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Never was the 
 need so great as now, never our opportunity so 
 great. People of every class have shown us of 
 what fine sacrifice humanity is capable against 
 what is conceived to be a foreign danger. We 
 must organise this enthusiasm, this selflessness, 
 for a greater and nobler fight. We can do this 
 all the more cheerfully because the warfare in 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 which we shall engage is one which will bring life 
 and hope to men and women of every race and 
 every clime. In our march forward we shall leave 
 no hosts of wounded, maimed, or dying; no 
 widows, orphans, or devastated homes; but in- 
 stead, as we succeed in destroying evil in our 
 own lives, and in calling men and women to re- 
 pentance and hope, we shall be bringing to others 
 life, and life more abundantly, for they will each 
 be brought to see the sacredness, the beauty and 
 nobility of all life, and made to understand that 
 personal salvation is of little worth unless it is 
 accompanied by the salvation of one's fellow men 
 and women. 
 
 We may disagree on methods, we may fall out 
 about theology, but we cannot disagree on the one 
 thing that matters: to believe in a God of Love, 
 to accept Love as the greatest factor in life, and 
 to translate into deeds of every day that belief and 
 that acceptance. " Little children, love one 
 another," is the teaching we must follow if we 
 would be saved. In that spirit I write this book 
 and send it out, mainly as an appeal to men and 
 women of the comfortable classes, in order to put 
 before them some of the difficulties which dog the 
 footsteps of the common people throughout life, 
 and also some ideas for establishing better rela- 
 tionship and a more lasting friendship amongst 
 all the people. Not that I imagine for one moment 
 that either rich or educated people can alone save 
 
i 4 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 the working classes. 1 know only too well from 
 my own experience that if mankind is to be saved 
 it must and can only be done by the individual 
 effort of every man and woman to work out his or 
 her own salvation. The rich and educated can only 
 help ; they, too, need salvation as much as any 
 section of the community. As Ruskin has well said, 
 the cruellest man living cannot sit at his feast 
 unless blind to the misery and evil which accom- 
 panies his wealth into the world, and as Tolstoy 
 well put it : " The rich will do anything for the 
 poor except get off their backs." Many good 
 people wish to help the poor, want to give them 
 something : I want such people to understand 
 that the one thing needed is that we should re- 
 cognise life as a unity, and realise how dependent 
 we all are upon each other. When we do this we 
 shall value work of every kind; the dull weary 
 drudgery of the home as much as the learning and 
 research of the student; the work of a sewer-man 
 as highly as the work of a doctor ; and we shall see 
 in all labour something to be esteemed and 
 honoured. I know that many people long to be 
 able to take this view. Then let those of us who 
 wish society to be organised in this way take 
 the veil of ignorance or of prejudice or of 
 class-pride from our eyes, let us cast away 
 fear and see life as it is, and, seeing it, 
 understand that each of us is dependent on the 
 others, and that those of us who control most 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 material wealth are in very deed the most 
 dependent of all. And let us keep in mind the fact 
 that people who are clever, people who can invent 
 and organise, can do so only by building on the 
 work of others : true social co-operation means 
 that we each give our very best, whether of brain 
 power or manual power, for the service of man- 
 kind, and thus by equal service make possible, 
 so far as material things are concerned, equality 
 of life for all. 
 
 No one will deny that under present conditions 
 relationships are artificial, and that for all prac- 
 tical purposes England is divided, not into two 
 nations only, as Disraeli said many years ago, but 
 into dozens of separate and distinct classes each 
 warring to supplant the others. When the class- 
 war is spoken of, many people shrug their 
 shoulders and refuse to acknowledge its existence ; 
 they bury their heads in the sands of make-believe. 
 But the war of classes is here ; it is a literal fact 
 in peace time and in war time ; it is the most soul- 
 destroying fact of modern life; and every reader 
 of this book (let him realise it !) is inevitably one 
 of the protagonists. 
 
 During the present war there has been a great 
 deal of Press talk about the breakdown of class dis- 
 tinctions ; the nation has been represented as show- 
 ing a united front, and ready to spend and to be 
 spent on behalf of the country. Those acquainted 
 with the facts of everyday life know that this unity 
 
1 6 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 has been to a very large extent quite superficial. It 
 is true that on the battlefield men of all classes have 
 sacrificed themselves with a heroism and devo- 
 tion unequalled in the history of the world. But 
 at home luxury and wealth, poverty and misery 
 still abound. High profits and dividends are still 
 being accumulated, and large numbers of people 
 owning shares in shipping companies, munition 
 works, and other industrial concerns have piled up 
 money to an ever-increasing extent. We read of 
 shipping companies whose profits have quad- 
 rupled, of coal-owners whose dividends have been 
 trebled, of monopolists who by control of our 
 food supplies and other necessaries of life have 
 piled up enormous profits, of Government con- 
 tractors who are patriotic enough to limit their 
 profits for a few months' work to the sum of 
 ,170,000, of owners of land who receive almost a 
 king's ransom as the purchase price of land which 
 the nation needs. Other owners of land keep so 
 selfish a hold on it that they refuse its use to the 
 poor for cultivation, preferring to hold it idle until 
 an altogether fabulous price is paid for its use. 
 And we also read of men discharged from the 
 Army without pensions, of others with a miser- 
 able dole of 43. 8d. or thereabouts. At the same 
 time we hear of national gifts to great generals of 
 ; 1 00,000, of pensions for judges of ,3,500 a 
 year, of Cabinet Ministers who retire on pensions 
 of ;i,2oo a year; and these men have all received 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 great salaries. The soldier in the Army is said to 
 cost ^250 a year. Out of the Army the same man 
 is expected to keep himself, wife, and family on 
 wages from i6s. to 405. a week. Not much 
 equality either of service or sacrifice is shown by 
 these facts from life to-day. 
 
 There is no comparison in the life conditions 
 which prevail amongst the wives and dependents 
 of soldiers and sailors and those which prevail 
 amongst the commercial and landed classes. The 
 soldier's wife has been plundered and robbed by 
 high prices, and some of the very people who have 
 obtained their money because of these high prices 
 have been good enough to establish Tipperary 
 and other clubs in order to provide some recrea- 
 tion and amenities of life for the soldier's and 
 sailor's folk. All the talk about the unity of the 
 nation comes not so much from actual life as from 
 the desire, which all decent people must share, 
 that the unity of life which is expressed in the 
 words " comradeship of the trenches" may find 
 expression in our own lives at home. This atti- 
 tude of mind is, however, quite oblivious of the 
 fact that under present industrial and commercial 
 conditions such comradeship is impossible of 
 realisation. The giving of doles, subscrip- 
 tion to charity, cannot make up to the workers 
 the robbery and exploitation from which they 
 suffer. 
 
 In saying this I do not forget that many well- 
 
 B 
 
1 8 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 to-do women and men have gone out with the Red 
 Cross, that others are serving in hospitals at 
 home, and some devoting their leisure time to 
 providing joy-rides in motor-cars for the wounded 
 soldiers and sailors, whilst others are working in 
 munition factories, Y.M.C.A. canteens, and so 
 on. Undoubtedly there is a good spirit abroad 
 amongst all classes, but the bedrock fact is that 
 even in war time wealth and poverty remain 
 contrasted throughout the land. Even the women 
 and girls who work in munition factories, if 
 they belong to the comfortable classes, never 
 dream of sharing the same kind of life as the 
 ordinary working-class women, and actually liv- 
 ing on the wages they earn. For these well-to-do 
 women the work is but a change; to some it is 
 recreation which may be taken up or dropped at 
 any time when some other rest or recreation is 
 needed. The story that is told of the lady 
 who entertained her co-workers from a munition 
 factory at a dinner party is typical of what I mean. 
 This lady means well, but how can she possibly be 
 a workmate in the full sense unless she is actually 
 living on the same wages as those who work by 
 her side, and who have no other means of support ? 
 If she is ill she has only to go home and receive 
 all the care, all the rest and change of air 
 she needs. Different indeed is the life of the 
 working-class girl who has no other income 
 but her earnings, and often lives in one or 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 two rooms on a beggarly wage of 125. to 205. 
 per week. 
 
 Even amongst most of those who earnestly de- 
 sire better times there appears to be no thought, so 
 far as I understand them, of securing equality of 
 opportunity for all men and all women, no sort of 
 demand that riches and poverty shall be swept 
 away and equal conditions of life and service estab- 
 lished. I do not mean "equality " in the sense 
 of everybody having to do the same kind of work, 
 but I do mean that men and women who toil 
 shall receive the full fruits of their toil ; that for 
 themselves there shall be secured good food, 
 good clothes, good houses, and for their children 
 the best education it is possible to give; and that 
 nobody who is willing to serve the nation shall be 
 obliged to live, as so many millions live to-day, 
 with no certainty as to whence to-morrow's daily 
 bread will come. There is always the horror of 
 sickness and the dread of physical breakdown, 
 which almost always means semi-starvation for 
 the whole family. The lot of the average working- 
 class family is one of respectable, precarious 
 poverty. Cloak it, gloss it over as we may, we 
 cannot get away from this fact, and all people who 
 want conditions to be changed must first of all 
 understand how people live, and what the condi- 
 tions of life are which it is desired to change. 
 They must also understand that it is impossible 
 to have the best of two worlds at one and the same 
 
20 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 time. The rich cannot hope to see the poor living 
 in comfortable surroundings until these condi- 
 tions are swept away. To improve conditions, 
 a thorough and radical change must take place. 
 Poverty cannot be destroyed unless the causes 
 which produce poverty are destroyed. These 
 causes are so apparent to any thoughtful person 
 that it is always a mystery to me why those who 
 are so anxious for a change do not attack the 
 root causes of poverty, rather than pour out so 
 much money and effort in an attempt to palliate 
 the ruin and disaster which come from evil social 
 conditions. 
 
 I propose to divide this book into several parts. 
 I shall write, not as an economist (for that is the 
 last thing I would want to claim to be), certainly 
 not as any sort of philanthropist (because that, 
 too, is rather a weariness of the flesh), but just as 
 an ordinary person who sees a good deal of what 
 is evil in the world, not in others only, but in him- 
 self, and who is conscious that to many people 
 money and money's-worth is the alpha and omega 
 of life ; as one aware that for those who have 
 children to feed and clothe, and wives to maintain, 
 either on low wages or by an interminable struggle 
 in small businesses, life is one miserably mean, 
 sordid grind against poverty, in a world in which 
 men and women, boys and girls, are but pawns 
 in the struggle of mankind to heap up riches. I 
 write as one who knows that nothing divides 
 
INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 friends and relations so easily as love of money ; 
 that nothing causes so much hatred and contempt, 
 so much bitterness between families and friends, 
 between good people as well as what are called bad 
 people, as the loss of money. The poor, we must 
 all realise, so far as material wealth is concerned, 
 are always poor. Multitudes live in debt, through 
 no fault of their own, from one year's end to 
 another till they die. The West-End money- 
 lender is well known for his grasping demands 
 of usurious interest, but the poor are also victims 
 of the same kind of men and women of their own 
 class, and in many poor districts big incomes are 
 received from the business of money-lending. This 
 condition of things comes about mainly because 
 of low wages, times of sickness and periods of 
 unemployment, and often, too, because people 
 long for a fuller life than their ordinary means will 
 allow that is, they long for recreation and 
 pleasure, good clothes and food, all beyond the 
 reach of their scanty earnings. Even gambling 
 and betting are often due to the fact that by these 
 means men and women hope to secure more of the 
 good things of life. 
 
 Yet if I know these things, and understand 
 these aspects of life, I am nevertheless convinced 
 there is much more good-will than evil in the 
 world. But evil is organised, evil is strong, and 
 the good in many gets crushed beneath the heavy 
 load of unnecessary care which accompanies them 
 
22 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 through life. My object in life is to strive by 
 God's help to beat down selfishness and greed and 
 evil-doing in myself; and by every means in my 
 power to seek to remove from other people the 
 weights that hold them down from the poor the 
 burden of need, from the rich the burden of those 
 riches which make the poverty of the poor. The 
 first step towards this fuller life for the nation is 
 to cast out fear and have faith in our fellow-men. 
 We often deceive each other because we are afraid 
 of the truth. 
 
 The truth we have to face is that it is only by 
 basing our life and conduct on the teachings of 
 Christ to forgive all things, hope all things, en- 
 dure all things by faith and love for each other 
 that we can make a clean and wholesome place of 
 our country. This is the object we must set be- 
 fore ourselves if we would have a better England. 
 Governments and organisations may do much if 
 guided and directed by men and women imbued 
 with the spirit of love, but all legislation has^so 
 far failed to redeem mankind because there has 
 not been this dynamic force behind it. 
 
 All of us who are removed from the poverty 
 line are unless we have been fighting evil condi- 
 tions in order to pull others out of the whirlpool of 
 want and de# tution responsible for the 
 material miseries <nd horrors which the great pro- 
 portion of the people have perpetually to bear. 
 And there will be very little hope from the Na- 
 
INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 tional Mission, very little to hope from all this 
 religious effort, unless we get right down to the 
 root causes and conditions which produce poverty, 
 prostitution and destitution ; unless we realise that 
 humanity, while capable of very fine things, is 
 quite incapable of living a decent, wholesome life 
 while it is obliged to engage in a vicious scramble 
 for daily bread. We have, in some way, to de- 
 stroy the competitive system which puts us (in the 
 workshop, in the market-place, in the factory) one 
 against the other, which makes us struggle to rise 
 above our fellows in order to secure for ourselves 
 and dependents a decent standard of life and 
 comfort. 
 
 The only hope that can come to the world will 
 come when we have substituted co-operation for 
 competition. To effect this we need an entirely 
 new spirit, a spirit which shall be the complete 
 opposite of that which dominates commercial and 
 industrial life and conduct to-day. And it is in the 
 hope that this book will help in creating this spirit 
 that I am writing it. There is so much good in 
 men and women : there could be so much better. 
 It is only because we are so divided one from 
 another, only because we are so ignorant of each 
 other's lives, that we submit to these un-Christian 
 conditions. When we know, we shall all unite in 
 a supreme and practical effort to destroy the 
 man-made conditions which produce the evils 
 we have so genuinely but vaguely deplored. 
 
24 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 Then we shall, by united efforts, build a new 
 state based on the foundation, not of hatred, not 
 of competition, but of brotherhood, co-operation, 
 rtnd love. 
 
IN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 WORKMEN 
 
 A WORKMAN'S working life begins at a 
 very early age. In some places boys start 
 work at thirteen or fourteen years of 
 age n or even earlier, and set out to face the 
 world and all its hardships and dangers with 
 very little training, except such as may be 
 given them by mother and father. Once 
 they have started, there is seldom anything be- 
 tween them and the necessity for sticking at work, 
 except the Poor Law and its wretched institutions, 
 until earth covers them in the grave. On the boy's 
 ability to keep himself in health and strength 
 depends his ability to earn his bread and make a 
 place for himself in the world. Once having 
 attained the age of manhood, the average workman 
 reaches the highest point in material wealth that 
 he will ever reach. I do not believe this factor of 
 life is ever really grasped by most of those who 
 talk and write so glibly about the working classes. 
 The skilled artisan, who has served an apprentice- 
 ship in a given trade, knows that he will earn so 
 much an hour. As a rule he will marry on that 
 
 25 
 
26 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 wage, which often amounts to only 305. or 2 per 
 week, and this will be his standard for the re- 
 mainder of his working life. As things go, 
 considering the standard set for the working 
 class, this may appear a reasonable and satis- 
 factory condition of life. It is obvious, thougH, 
 that the coming of each new baby must 
 lower the standard of life, owing to the fact 
 that the family income is fixed. Even that is 
 not quite true, for the income is fixed only while 
 there is work for the man to do. Often there are 
 long periods of unemployment which bring down 
 the average of a man's earnings, and often long 
 periods of sickness when in the case of a work- 
 man wages stop altogether. This is the great 
 difference between the wage-earner and the salaried 
 person ; a clerk or manager generally continues to 
 draw salary if away from business owing to sick- 
 ness, but an engineer or labourer finds his wages 
 stopped the moment he leaves work, from what- 
 ever cause with the exception of absence due to 
 accident, in which case, under the Workmen's 
 Compensation Act, certain payments are made, 
 though even these are often evaded and the men 
 left penniless. 
 
 There are some few employers who treat their 
 workers a little better than this during times 
 of sickness; such are Government departments, 
 municipalities, and a few large employers; but 
 none of them treat the wage-earner on the same 
 
WORKMEN 27 
 
 terras as the salaried man or woman, and wherever 
 sick pay is granted it is granted for a strictly 
 limited period, and, after the first week or two, is 
 cut down to vanishing point. 
 
 It is the same with holidays. To many families 
 holidays mean a shortage of food, because there is 
 less money coming into the home. All that Bank 
 Holidays mean for the working-class mother is 
 more worry, more anxiety, more difficulty in 
 making ends meet. It is this which keeps people 
 who live in small houses and mean streets at home 
 when they should be out in the countryside enjoy- 
 ing the pure tresh air. It always appears to me 
 that those who manage our affairs for us imagine 
 that if workpeople were to enjoy holidays they 
 would never want to go back to work again. I am 
 not at all sure that, even were this the case, it 
 would be so unmixed an evil as some of my friends 
 think. It is sometimes said with a sneer that 
 working people do not know how to use leisure 
 and working-class children, too; and good people 
 like Mrs. Humphry Ward establish play centres 
 in order to teach the children of the masses how 
 to play. To my mind this is a most unnatural pro- 
 ceeding. Luckily for me I was brought up in a 
 home set in the midst of a great open space on 
 which I could play with my brothers and other 
 children. We were never trained to play, but just 
 played the same old games our fathers had played, 
 till we were old enough to join sports clubs. All 
 
28 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 children should have the chance of meeting in the 
 open air away from teachers, and be given the 
 opportunity for developing their own powers of 
 initiative. 
 
 The man who toils for his bread is taught in 
 the bitter school of experience that he must not 
 expect holidays except as expensive luxuries.' Even 
 in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where, because the 
 whole family works for wages, a holiday is pos- 
 sible, an annual week's holiday at Blackpool or 
 the Isle of Man is all that can be looked for- 
 ward to. 
 
 In this matter of holidays, contrast what I have 
 said about the workmen with what happens to the 
 other classes. The clerks and other salaried people 
 are paid full pay for all public holidays, and are 
 given a summer holiday which runs into one, two, 
 or even four weeks at full pay. Of course such 
 people know how to use their leisure; they have 
 plenty of opportunity to learn. Let me repeat that 
 the boy who goes to work in an office grows up 
 accustomed to holidays on full pay, but the boy 
 who goes into the workshop to hard manual labour 
 grows to manhood well drilled in the belief that 
 holidays are not for him unless he is prepared to 
 lose his wages. 
 
 The employers, the managers and directors can 
 and do take holiday when they so desire. The 
 well-to-do show us a splendid example of how to 
 get through life with a maximum of rest and 
 
WORKMEN 29 
 
 holiday-making. The shooting season, the 
 London season, the season on the Riviera, with 
 an occasional trip further afield, make up the 
 common round, the daily task of many of those 
 who are so fortunate as to find themselves able 
 to enjoy incomes derived from rent, profit, and 
 interest. Even in the midst of a great war we 
 read of Cabinet Ministers enjoying life on the golf 
 course and taking their rest by the sea. Many of 
 the clergy of all denominations take long holidays 
 away from their congregations not once a year, 
 but perhaps twice and sometimes even three times 
 in one year. Indeed, all the official classes reli- 
 gious, civil, and military feel the need for taking 
 holidays at frequent periods throughout the year, 
 and always on full pay. Perhaps judges are the 
 public men who most thoroughly understand and 
 enjoy the blessedness of rest and peace from 
 work. Their salaries vary from ,5,000 to ,6,500 
 a year, with the prospect of a comfortable pension 
 of .3,500 a year after a few years' service. They 
 also have their Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun 
 holidays, and then the Long Vacation run- 
 ning into several months; and all the time their 
 salaries run on. I must not be understood as ob- 
 jecting to these holidays. I am a firm believer in 
 holidays, though I get precious few. I call atten- 
 tion to these facts because I want to make rich 
 people understand that their comfortable holidays 
 are paid for by the people who get practically no 
 
30 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 holidays at all, and to point out how unjust it is 
 that those who work the hardest should be denied 
 all means of rest and recreation. 
 
 Many people discuss this question as if there 
 were some sort of virtue in work as a means of 
 keeping people in health and contentment. Work 
 is a benefit to mankind only when it is for some 
 given end. We are all acquainted with the words 
 14 change of work is rest." This is true, and those 
 of us who fill all our waking time with work of one 
 sort or another know quite well we are able to do 
 so only because our work is of a very varied char- 
 acter; not one of us, if given the choice, would 
 care to change places with the labourer or artisan 
 whose daily life, year after year, is the same piece 
 of dull, uninteresting toil, such as minding an 
 automatic machine or going to the pit to dig coal, 
 and who is able to find freedom and respite only at 
 the cost of loss of wages. No; those of us who 
 were brought up to manual labour and have 
 escaped from it never want to go back under the 
 same old bad conditions. We may dig a garden 
 for recreation ; to prove our patriotism in war time 
 we may go to work in a munition factory or other 
 Government works, but never again, if we have 
 our way, will one of us, man or woman, voluntarily 
 choose to become a day labourer with a labourer's 
 wages and conditions of service. 
 
 There is another aspect of the workers' life 
 which needs stressing now that the Church has 
 
WORKMEN 31 
 
 organised its National Mission. In every church 
 throughout the world the words " Remember the 
 Sabbath day to keep it holy " are said by the 
 minister, and yet all these ministers know that 
 hundreds of thousands of men and women, boys 
 and girls, are not allowed to rest from their 
 labours. There are multitudes who work every 
 Sunday of the year. For them there is not even 
 one day's rest in seven. This is true in normal 
 times as well as now. We are in the midst of a 
 great war. So destructive of mental and physical 
 force is this denial of one day's rest in seven that 
 the Ministry of Munitions now insists on a six 
 days' week, not for religious reasons, but in order 
 to secure a bigger output, and also because it has 
 been discovered that even machines must have 
 rest. For those who are given the day's rest 
 the day is made as miserable as possible. In 
 crowded towns the only places left open are the 
 public-houses and a few cinemas. There are 
 parks and open spaces, but girls and boys and 
 young people are not allowed to play the ordi- 
 nary games. Football, cricket, hockey, net- 
 ball, quoits, and bowls are all forbidden. (On the 
 rich man's golf course play is allowed, and tennis 
 and cricket may be enjoyed by those who can 
 afford them.) In some country places men are even 
 censured for working in their gardens and allot- 
 ments on Sundays. What a mad kind of world it 
 is in which all these contradictions in the name of 
 
32 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 religion exist ! If the Church has any message in 
 this respect, it should be to teach people that the 
 Sabbath was made for man, not man for the 
 Sabbath. The Church should bid people meet for 
 common worship, thanking and praising God with 
 hymns and psalms of thanksgiving for the loving- 
 kindness which has made so many things bright 
 and beautiful ; and after such a service as would 
 emphasise the true beauty and unity of life we 
 should all settle down to whatever joy or pleasure 
 we are able to secure from sports and games or 
 other means of recreation. 
 
 To come back to sickness. A man who is sick 
 may be getting los. a week sick pay, and in some 
 cases as much as iSs. ; but even so it is always less 
 money than when he is at work. Employers and 
 Friendly Societies argue that it is quite wrong for 
 the workman to get as much money when he is sick 
 as when he is in health, because, they say, unless 
 a man loses by not being at work he is likely to 
 malinger. This argument is one of those stupid, 
 ridiculous theories of life and conduct which in 
 practice work out very badly and very cruelly 
 indeed. For the man who is sick and at home is a 
 great burden on his wife, and every extra penny 
 that is spent on him means less food, less of the 
 necessities of life, for the rest of the family. It 
 means also that a decent man drags himself back 
 to work long before he has any business to do so, 
 and so risks early permanent disablement or the 
 
WORKMEN 33 
 
 bringing on of some chronic illness from which he 
 never properly recovers. 
 
 As a mere matter of expediency men who are 
 sick ought to get not only their normal wages, but 
 something extra, so that they could secure the 
 necessary means of recovery. 
 
 In periods of unemployment a workman may 
 also receive out-of-work pay under the National 
 Insurance Act at the rate of 75. to IDS. per week. 
 This, again, is fixed low, because the authorities 
 are afraid that if, while unemployed, men are able 
 to live decently and properly with their wives and 
 children, they will not be anxious to go to work 
 again. A more short-sighted policy it is impossible 
 to find. The few miserable shillings are only suffi- 
 cient to starve on, and in large numbers of cases 
 mean demoralisation, because want of food and 
 want of nourishment always make men despondent 
 and despairing, and often rob them of character 
 and morale. 
 
 How differently we treat soldiers ! These we 
 maintain on full pay in peace time in order to keep 
 them fit for the day when they may be needed. 
 The workman on whom we all depend is left to 
 starve, or given just enough to exist upon, and 
 then we wonder that he loses heart and dignity and 
 sometimes even honesty, and often becomes quite 
 unemployable. 
 
 Contrast all this with the conditions of life 
 enjoyed by the employer and the comfortable 
 
 C 
 
34 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 classes. First of all, there is no going to work at 
 thirteen years of age; no half-timers are found 
 amongst their children; no stoppage of income 
 takes place because of sickness ; even in times of 
 bad trade the majority of employers and the 
 majority of people who live on salaries are never 
 obliged to go short of the necessities of life. We 
 never expect Cabinet Ministers, whose wages 
 amount to .5,000 a year, to draw less during the 
 time they are off duty owing to sickness. It is 
 illustrative of the attitude of mind \ve have towards 
 each other that it was the Cabinet Minister in 
 charge of the National Insurance Bill who, having 
 laid down in Parliament the principle that workmen 
 must not be allowed a decent income when unem- 
 ployed or sick, was himself away from his duties 
 for many weeks at a time because of illness, during 
 which time he drew his wages at the rate of ,5,000 
 a year as usual. No one appeared to think it neces- 
 sary even to ask for a doctor's certificate to prove 
 that he was really ill. No one thought of accusing 
 him of malingering. No one imagined for a 
 moment that a Cabinet Minister would stop away 
 from work a minute longer than was necessary. 
 For the workman, it is another story. An alto- 
 gether different standard is set. He must be driven 
 back to work at the earliest possible moment ; and 
 the whip of starvation must be used to send him 
 back, irrespective of his condition of health. 
 
 These unequal conditions of service and unfair 
 
WORKMEN 35 
 
 relationships are the result of the outstanding fact 
 that labour is looked upon by society as something 
 to be bought and sold, and is treated like any other 
 piece of machinery which is needed for a certain 
 job. 
 
 When a worker becomes old and inefficient he 
 is sacked ; when profit can no longer be secured 
 from his labour he is sacked. If a machine will do 
 his work cheaper he is told to find some other job 
 or starve. Money-making is all that counts in the 
 Capitalist system, and unless it contributes to this 
 end the labour of the workers is not required. They 
 have no ownership, no control, either of their own 
 lives or of their industry. They are just items in 
 the machinery of production, and it is this fact 
 which separates them off from every other class 
 and makes them what, in fact, they are the de- 
 pendent wage-slaves of the possessing classes. 
 
 Since 1870 the nation has given a certain 
 amount of education to all children above five years 
 of age. Meagre as the education is, it has never- 
 theless been sufficient to make many workmen 
 understand their social and economic subjection, 
 and it is this realisation of their helpless subjection 
 to others which determines so many of them to 
 join the Trade Unionist and Socialist movements. 
 They want to share in the ownership of national 
 industries; they want to control and organise the 
 working of industries. Up to a few years ago the 
 workman only demanded better wages and shorter 
 
36 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 hours, but he has now discovered by actual experi- 
 ence that high prices and high rents continually 
 swallow up increases in wages. He has been 
 educated by Mr. Lloyd George to understand that 
 private ownership of land means that a landowner 
 can sit down and, by just doing nothing, actually 
 grow in riches because of the power which owner- 
 ship gives power which the owner can exercise 
 at an opportune moment in order to squeeze rack 
 rents from those who have created the values which 
 make such rack rents possible. In addition, the 
 workman understands that with the introduction 
 of labour-saving machinery the Capitalist has be- 
 come able to put a man's own children in compe- 
 tition with the man himself. The automatic 
 machine has made it possible for a man's economic 
 foes to be members of his own household ; and, 
 realising this, and understanding also that the 
 opportunities of rising in the social scale grow less 
 and less, men are now organising for a complete 
 change in the present system. Their work in 
 this direction has been very much hampered 
 because of the war, but there are groups of people 
 who are determined to keep together in order that 
 when the war is over they may once more take the 
 field and by united effort establish a co-operative 
 system of production and distribution to replace 
 the present unsound order, based as it is on the 
 subjection of the workers by means of the wages- 
 and profit-making system. We know that until 
 
WORKMEN 37 
 
 this fundamental change is made our labour is in 
 vain. 
 
 People talk at large sometimes about the greed 
 and avarice of the working classes their unwil- 
 lingness to give service without payment and their 
 exorbitant demands in respect of wages and hours. 
 I have never been able to accept such a point of 
 view at all, for it seems to me all the old bad rules 
 which govern our industrial relationships are 
 inherent in the system. What I mean is that, 
 given a society where men and women are expected 
 to compete and scramble for a living, it is inevitable 
 that cheating and meanness should follow. Be- 
 sides, what sort of an example do the other classes 
 set the workers? Is not their law of life to buy in 
 the cheapest and sell in the dearest market ? And 
 do they not insist that cheapness, not worth, is the 
 governing factor in life ? 
 
 Just before the war, when the governing classes 
 wished to find some means for pacifying the 
 workers and soothing them to sleep, Liberal 
 capitalists organised deputations to Germany in 
 order to be able to prove what an awful place the 
 Prussianised German Empire was for a workman 
 to live in because of the evils of Protection. It 
 was the same set of capitalists who gave Mr. 
 Lloyd George the position which enabled him to 
 set the mark of servitude on the shoulders of 
 the workers by his German-inspired Insurance 
 Act, and it has been because of that Act and 
 
38 YOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 the accompanying Labour Exchange Acts that 
 the Government have been able, instead of rely- 
 ing on the workman's loyalty and patriotism to 
 organise and carry through all national work, to 
 arrange national industry during the war on 
 purely German lines by means of highly-paid 
 bureaucrats, without the workers having the least 
 say as to how their work should be done. 
 
 On the other side Tory capitalists organised 
 deputations to Germany, and to their own satisfac- 
 tion proved that life for the working people under 
 Kaiser Wilhelm II. was much more desirable than 
 under King George V. of England. 
 
 We can now place our own value on the reports 
 issued by both these deputations and on the one 
 issued by that other deputation organised by the 
 Labour Party. I recall these incidents of 1913-4 
 not to try and score off anyone, but to show that 
 those of the capitalist class who wish to preserve 
 and perpetuate the wages system are willing to 
 use every means to obtain their ends. It is beyond 
 dispute that Mr. Lloyd George, in passing Acts 
 establishing National Insurance, &c., and the Con- 
 servatives, in wishing to establish a system of 
 tariffs, had the same idea in mind : that is, they 
 wished to ease and palliate some of the evil effects 
 of industrial life. None of them wished to abolish 
 the causes which produce strife and want and 
 bitterness. 
 
 The class war which I mentioned earlier is a 
 
WORKMEN 39 
 
 very real thing in the life of the worker, and it 
 shows itself in various ways and under varying 
 conditions. Often we can see the war being waged 
 by means of unemployment, when, because of some 
 collapse in international organisation, trade breaks 
 down, and the first victims are the workers, who by 
 the hundred thousand are flung helpless on to the 
 streets. After the South African War such a con- 
 dition of things prevailed. In some industries this 
 dislocation was still further accentuated because of 
 the invention of machinery by the use of which 
 production was increased and labour was dis- 
 placed. The machine is always set against the 
 workman, and often brings starvation and misery 
 into thousands of working-class homes. 
 
 Is it not extraordinary that people should suffer 
 because there is power to produce more than we 
 need ? Yet unemployment is always the first 
 result of using what is known as labour-saving 
 machinery ; and, if we would understand the con- 
 flict of interests which exists between the employ- 
 ing and the working class, we must admit that the 
 owner of the machine (supported as he is by all the 
 power of the State) who drives out workmen and 
 refuses to allow them to work is acting in an anti- 
 social manner, even though he is but following law 
 and custom. There is a complete division of 
 interest here, which must be understood by all 
 those who wish to lend a hand in improving condi- 
 tions, for until this is overcome and machinery is 
 
40 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 
 made the servant of all men there will be no peace 
 
 in the world of industry. 
 
 Occasionally there are lock-outs and strikes. A 
 lock-out is a declaration of war by the employers, a 
 strike is a declaration of war by the workmen. In 
 both cases the employers' weapon is starvation. 
 The employers hope to beat the men by refusing to 
 allow them to earn \vages, and the workmen strive 
 to beat the employer by stopping profit and divi- 
 dends. During a lock-out or strike untold suffer- 
 ing and misery are endured by the women and 
 children, and it is this fact which the employers 
 rely upon to assist them in winning their fight, for, 
 although dividends may have stopped, it is very 
 seldom the case that an employer's wife and 
 children starve. In fact, some employers are able 
 to make a labour dispute pay, because they are 
 able, owing to the shortage produced by the dis- 
 pute, to make money out of old stocks. It is certain 
 that during the great coal dispute coal-owners, by 
 raising prices and selling off rubbish which was 
 otherwise unsaleable, more than recouped them- 
 selves for any shortage of profit the strike may 
 have occasioned. 
 
 Look where we may, in times of prosperity or 
 times of bad trade, there is this strife which 
 undermines confidence, destroys religion, and 
 makes us all warriors in a fight where all are 
 losers for we can all surely echo the words of our 
 Lord : " What shall it profit a man if he gain the 
 
WORKMEN 41 
 
 whole world and lose his own soul ? " There is no 
 soul in business to-day; it is just one wretched 
 struggle for pelf and place, and the working class 
 are pawns in the game. If it pays to employ them 
 they are given work; if it does not pay, out they 
 have to go, for business is business and business is 
 profit-making. Consequently the worker discovers 
 that as he grows older he is wanted less and less. 
 Before the war the cry was " too old at forty." 
 That state of things has changed for the time 
 being, but will come back again when what are 
 called peace conditions once more prevail, unless, 
 indeed, the war changes our whole attitude of mind 
 towards one another. How often I have seen the 
 aged worker sacked, with not a halfpenny of allow- 
 ance, and his son taken on in his stead ! I have 
 said there is no soul in business, and it is true. 
 Someone has traced all this down to the limited 
 liability companies, which have " no body to be 
 kicked and no soul to be damned." No doubt the 
 institution of such companies is to a large extent 
 responsible for modern relationships; but what I 
 want to emphasise is the point made a little way 
 back that if men are employed for wages, and 
 cannot get employment or earn their bread other- 
 wise, then they are living in subjection to other 
 people. We may endeavour to get round this as 
 we will, but it will remain the outstanding fact of 
 present-day conditions, making of life one long 
 struggle, not only for comparative comfort even, 
 
42 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 but for mere existence. It is true that classes 
 merge more and more into each other, but new 
 classes are continually being created : more divi- 
 sions, more ranks, in the perpetual warfare which 
 we make of life. For the multitude this strife and 
 struggle bring sorrow and sadness, the maiming 
 and wounding of body, of soul, of spirit. For us 
 all it produces meanness and sordidness, making 
 us capable of brutal and demoralising conduct 
 which stamps us with the mark not of men but of 
 beasts, turning us into liars and hypocrites, 
 destroying our faith and confidence in each other, 
 and leaving us all beggared and hopeless in the 
 right upward for a nobler life. 
 
 The sort of nonsense which tells us that there 
 is plenty of room at the top is only like a saying 
 attributed to Napoleon I. that every private 
 soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack. 
 That sort of statement treats people as if they were 
 destitute of intelligence. Under present conditions 
 we cannot all be employers or managers or 
 directors if, indeed, that were a desirable consum- 
 mation. For the vast majority society as at present 
 arranged allows no other means of living but the 
 kind of struggle I have been trying to describe, and 
 those who wish to see the world redeemed from sin 
 and vice and crime must start their work by rinding 
 out how to organise industry so as to ensure that 
 all useful labour shall be considered honourable 
 and of value. In other words, we must so raise the 
 
WORKMEN 43 
 
 status of the worker in our minds that he will at 
 last begin to realise that his labour and himself are 
 things of real worth and consequence to the whole 
 community. We must unite in preaching discon- 
 tent, and, in so preaching, emphasise the fact that 
 for the workers there is no chance of social redemp- 
 tion unless they all combine and, by using the 
 power which combination gives, alter the whole 
 basis of our social life. I do not ask that any of us 
 should preach or practise violence. I am more 
 convinced than ever that violence in any shape or 
 form is an evil, that " we cannot cast out devils 
 by devils," that the workers must discover some 
 more excellent way. Their greatest power is the 
 power of standing still and just doing nothing, but 
 they must all stand still together. Those of us who 
 wish to help them must teach them that they must 
 all stand together or else remain as they are, slaves 
 of the classes who own the land and all other means 
 of life. We who would help and stand by the 
 workers can do so in one way only, and that 
 is by using our powers to teach the lesson of 
 solidarity. Napoleon's motto in all his campaigns 
 was " Divide and Conquer." The capitalist and 
 commercial classes have learnt the same lesson, and 
 by very judicious and, at the same time, very 
 mean methods divide the working classes into 
 various camps some political, some religious : in 
 some places this result is attained by starting 
 competing Trade Unions. The employing classes 
 
44 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 do not scruple actually to buy the leaders of 
 the Trade Union movement by the gifts of 
 money, place, and power. A regular bureau- 
 cracy of ex-Labour leaders are in the em- 
 ploy of the Government as strike settlers, or, 
 as some of us think, as strike breakers. 
 Others are occasionally taken into partnership or 
 are appointed foremen and managers, and so 
 removed out of their class. When the working 
 class is organised and actuated by true comrade- 
 ship and brotherhood there will be no such " great 
 refusals " or betrayals, but, instead, all men 
 and women will stand as one great body, deter- 
 mined to rise together : and it is the duty of 
 Christians in fact, it is the duty of all good 
 citizens to assist in promoting this spirit, in 
 order that the working class may by its own efforts 
 win its own salvation. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 WOMEN AND CHILDREN 
 
 GOING through the London streets during 
 the last two years all of us have seen motor- 
 cars driven by ladies and loaded with 
 wounded soldiers. It is a great sight, which brings 
 home to all of us the fact that the woman who 
 drives the car and the woman who, in many cases, 
 accompanies her as a kind of general servant have, 
 for the time being, banished from their minds all 
 thought of class distinction ; they are publicly 
 demonstrating that, so far as the war is concerned, 
 there is an attempt at unity of aim among the rich 
 and wealthy in an effort to lighten the load of 
 suffering and pain endured by those men who, 
 propertyless and poor, possessing nothing of 
 material wealth, possessing not even a single yard 
 of the land millions of them are righting and dying 
 for, have proved they possess things of real 
 worth have demonstrated it by deeds of heroic 
 valour on the battlefields of Europe. 
 
 The spirit that has impelled rich people to do 
 this sort of thing is good and well worth preserv- 
 ing, but as I have looked at them in their comfort- 
 able cars, enjoying the pleasure of service, the 
 thought has always come into my mind : " Why 
 do not these people understand that in days of 
 
 45 
 
46 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 peace there is just as insistent a call to them for 
 this kind of service?" These soldiers are the 
 same men who till the fields, weave our raiment, 
 dig our coal, and, in fact, provide us with all 
 we need ; but when they are doing that no 
 rich women desire to give them joy rides. It 
 makes one ask : Are the favours poured out on 
 the soldier or the man? There are also tens of 
 thousands of mothers hidden away in the back 
 streets of our great cities who would be benefited 
 by the light and air and cheerful surroundings of a 
 motor drive in the country on a fine summer day 
 women who have risked no less than the men, 
 have suffered no less, and deserve no less, women 
 who have not killed but have borne. Hundreds 
 of thousands of these women never get a change of 
 scene or a real country holiday away from the 
 grinding poverty of their everyday life. These 
 mothers of England endure the trouble and agony 
 of giving birth to children without that comfort 
 and care of leisure, food, clothing, and surround- 
 ings which are at least palliatives for the comfort- 
 able classes. They lead lives which are simply one 
 long story of mean, sordid drudgery; their daily 
 life is the common round, the daily task of just 
 living, working, toiling for the bread that 
 perisheth, with very little of joy, and always with 
 a heavy load of care and anxiety. The soldier's 
 wife or mother has the added worry " Will he 
 come back? And, if he does return, in what con- 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 47 
 dition will he be brought home again?" Into 
 the lives of these women only occasionally comes 
 the delight of a trip in a crowded tramcar with 
 children, or perhaps a 'bus ride. Even on such 
 days the care and worry of the children mar the 
 whole pleasure of the day's holiday. There are 
 no nurses or governesses to relieve these mothers ; 
 they must just keep on at the same task, day after 
 day, with no chance of relief. I wonder how 
 many of the women who devote so much time to 
 the soldiers realise the cheerless, drab life endured 
 by these heroic mothers. 
 
 Writing these things down may seem a very 
 commonplace kind of start for my chapter, but I 
 start thus because I desire to make good 
 people, whose hearts are touched, and rightly 
 touched, by the spectacle presented to us all 
 of convalescent soldiers and sailors needing 
 fresh air and recreation, understand that in 
 days of peace, as in days of war, multitudes 
 of women need rest and comfort, sympathy and 
 love, just as much as the men we are all desirous 
 of honouring. The women of the industrial 
 centres under present circumstances need friends 
 who will be to them just the same kind of fairy god- 
 mothers as many rich women have proved to be to 
 the wounded men home from the war. Society 
 women must understand that a working-class 
 mother does need the same kind of health- 
 giving recreation as thev themselves need, and 
 
48 YOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 that the denial of this recreation, the thought- 
 less indifference to the needs of these mothers, 
 which are typical of the attitude of mind that 
 prevails among many sections of society, ought 
 to be swept away, and a true comradeship and 
 fellowship amongst men and women of all classes 
 established. It has needed a war to break down 
 the laws and customs of class with regard to sol- 
 diers. The rich and well-to-do take the labourer 
 and artisan as soldiers into their homes, and for a 
 brief period caste and class are abolished. I have 
 never heard that after a big industrial accident on 
 a railway or in a factory or mine anything of the 
 kind has ever been done ; but why not ? The 
 shareholders or proprietors of industrial concerns 
 ought to feel as much comradeship for the people 
 who earn their bread and luxuries for them as is 
 now felt for the men who fight for Britain. Surely 
 it is as honourable to be wounded or killed work- 
 ing for the health and well-being of a nation as it 
 is to fight for it ; and, if so, is it not time we gave 
 as much appreciation to the workers as to the 
 soldiers, and as much to the mothers of Britain 
 as to the sons they bear? Is it only the fighting 
 machine that moves you to compassion, or will it 
 be the human being? 
 
 The soldier wounded in the war needs attention, 
 needs all the care that can be bestowed upon him. 
 The mothers need attention just as much. With- 
 out them there would be no soldiers without 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 49 
 them there could be no nation ; and it is here that 
 I think the governing class makes its greatest 
 mistake. Its standard of values is so false that it 
 has needed a great war, a horrible catastrophe of 
 death and destruction, to make us understand how 
 valuable an able-bodied man is. The war has 
 made the worker appear to other classes as quite 
 a new sort of man. Men whom rich people would 
 never meet in private life are now in some ways 
 treated as human beings, to be made much of 
 and granted little attentions. It is not only 
 right, it is the duty, of us all to give all the 
 joy and happiness that is possible to the men 
 who have made so great a sacrifice ; but what I 
 am anxious to point out is that if the well-to-do 
 women who are so willing to give their services 
 for the soldiers would but think a little, they 
 would easily understand that it is of just as great 
 importance that their sisters in the slums should 
 receive some of this attention, some of this care. 
 They should strive to bridge the great gulf which 
 separates the condition of life enjoyed by the well- 
 to-do woman from the comfortless condition of life, 
 destitute of all the social amenities so necessary 
 for the well-to-do, which the working-class woman 
 must endure. 
 
 No one connected with the upper classes (ex- 
 cept that tiny handful of women who forsake their 
 class and live amongst the people in social settle- 
 ments) can have any idea of the very meagre com- 
 
 D 
 
50 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 forts of life that the working women enjoy. And 
 even the women who leave comfortable town and 
 country houses to dwell amongst the poor cannot 
 quite understand, because always their rooms are 
 nicely kept, and furnished at least with the 
 requisites of cleanliness and comfort. It is all so 
 different with the tiny homes of the workers. 
 We have got accustomed to thinking working 
 people do not need the same conveniences of life 
 as we do for ourselves. You may go through 
 the length and breadth of the land and find 
 that the vast majority of the homes in which 
 working-class women are expected to bring up 
 their children are just tiny congested places where 
 rich people could never exist. I have seen racing 
 stables and the homes of prize cattle nicely tiled, 
 warmed, and ventilated. It is a marvel that the 
 people who own these places do not understand 
 that on their own estates human beings need at least 
 the same amount of breathing space and sanitary 
 arrangements as prize animals. I wish the great 
 land-owners of Britain, the great merchant princes 
 and manufacturers, could, day by day, have placed 
 before their eyes pictures of the mean dwelling- 
 places thought good enough as homes for the 
 miners of Scotland the notorious Colliers' Rows. 
 These are tenements of one floor, sometimes just 
 two rooms for man, wife, and children, and in 
 these places all the bathing has to take place in 
 the living-rooms, and often the beds are slept in 
 
WOMEN 4ND CHILDREN 51 
 the twenty-four hours round because, in order to 
 find accommodation, father and sons work on 
 different shifts of eight hours each. On the 
 hillsides of Wales, made hideous by the grime 
 and filth of commercialism, I have seen whole dis- 
 tricts living under conditions which create nothing 
 but disease and death. In great cities in the 
 Potteries, in the Midlands, in parts of London, 
 the same thing applies. I once stood on top of 
 the kitchen and living-rooms of some houses in 
 Scotland, and alongside me were pig-styes which 
 meant that the pigs lived on top of the homes of 
 human beings : these working-class dwellings 
 were situated outside the palace of one of Scot- 
 land's ducal families ! I felt miserable and sick 
 as I stood there, because it seemed to me dis- 
 honouring to our whole conception of human 
 values. What impressed me most, and what im- 
 presses me to-day, is the fact that that Duke was a 
 really good man in his own way ; kind, and, in a 
 way, generous. It never struck him that he him- 
 self could not live with pigs, and that, therefore, 
 no other human being should be expected to do 
 so; neither did he realise that his lovely palaces 
 were the direct result of the outstanding fact that 
 all these tenants contributed to his income a por- 
 tion of each day's earnings; that no penny came to 
 them of which he did not exact his share; that it 
 was only of their deprivations, their dirt and 
 half-hunger and disease, that his palace walls 
 
52 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 were built. It is a saddening thought, too, 
 that the poor people themselves so humbly 
 accepted these conditions of life as a direct 
 ordinance from God. 
 
 The simple thing always lacking in al- 
 most all working - class homes is the bath- 
 room. I lay stress on this because I have 
 experienced both the lack of a bath - room 
 and the joy and convenience of one. Some 
 rich people talk very glibly of the dirt and 
 want of general cleanliness amongst the working 
 class. Such people seem to forget that we all 
 need space for cleanliness; that in tiny poky 
 rooms, especially where there are children, it is 
 quite impossible to preserve anything like 
 healthy conditions. In many villages and in 
 parts of some towns people are obliged to pump 
 and carry every drop of water they use. I wonder 
 how many rich women could endure living, for a 
 single day, packed away in one room with two or 
 three children. I wonder what many of them 
 would do if they were obliged to live in the same 
 room with a husband and children while giving 
 birth to another child. There are multitudes of 
 people existing under such conditions. I called 
 the other day at a soldier's home. It was one of 
 those one-roomed places. A little child of four 
 years of age, a man and his wife lived in it. Two 
 days after I called another baby came. There was 
 nowhere for the man to live except in this room, so 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 53 
 the woman who nursed his wife just came in occa- 
 sionally and went away again. To me the marvel 
 is that people are able to breathe at all in such 
 places. It was not dirty in the ordinary sense, 
 but there was too much breathing in the one place, 
 too much furniture, too much of everything, and 
 as I sat there I felt I wanted to blow the windows 
 out in order to let in more light and air. And now 
 after a week or two of struggle the baby is dead. 
 It has joined the great multitude of children 
 murdered by bad social conditions. Poor mite, 
 it is happier now. For it there is no care or 
 poverty ; but we are all poorer, for it is one more 
 of God's good gifts to man slain and driven out 
 because of man's worship of Mammon, because of 
 man's inhumanity to man. 
 
 There is no reason except selfishness and in- 
 difference why little ones like this should perish. 
 Rents are so high and wages are so low that the 
 workers cannot live in better places. The man I 
 visited is invalided out of the Army, and just 
 exists on the very mean and paltry allowance 
 just enough to starve on granted him, partly 
 by the National Insurance Commissioners, and 
 partly by a grateful country which can no longer 
 use him as part of its fighting machine. The 
 man in his day has been a good worker, and would 
 still work if his health were not wrecked by ser- 
 vice in the Army. Even when working he would 
 not have been able to secure much more than one 
 
54 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 extra room, and according to the standard of the 
 district this would have been considered com- 
 parative comfort. 
 
 I do not understand how it is that the clergy 
 and social workers are so quiet on this question. 
 They always seem to me to have good homes for 
 themselves, even if sometimes small ; there is 
 always light and air for them ; yet many of them 
 teach contentment, and talk of present conditions 
 of life as if they were instituted by God for the 
 benefit of those who belong to that multitude 
 known by many pious people as God's poor. 
 
 Contrast the housing and home conditions I 
 have spoken of with the sort of attention the middle 
 or upper class woman receives at times of 
 maternity. Nothing is too good either for her or 
 for the new-born child ; night- and day-nurses, 
 skilled medical attendance, everything that can 
 lighten the burden of child-bearing. It is the same 
 all through ; and somehow each of us must under- 
 stand that the poverty-stricken condition in the 
 one case is under present social conditions the 
 necessary accompaniment of the comfortable, 
 luxurious surroundings in the other, and each one 
 of us is directly or indirectly responsible. To me 
 this is so obvious that I can hardly realise that 
 other people do not see it as clearly as I do. Let 
 any woman or man who doubts my statement sit 
 down for a few minutes and by hard thinking try 
 to discover where her or his money comes from. 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN $5 
 Money can come to any of us in only one of two 
 ways. Either we earn our own bread, or someone 
 else earns it for us; and people with only ordinary 
 intelligence can very soon decide which class they 
 represent. One quite simple test will tell you where 
 incomes come from. When a strike is on or a mill 
 is stopped, no wages are paid ; and neither are 
 dividends earned. Both are dependent on labour. 
 Only land grows in value when unused, and that 
 only because of pressure of labouring population. 
 
 None of us can free ourselves of responsibility. 
 Not one of us lives separate or apart from his 
 fellows. Our daily bread comes to us because of 
 long hours of heavy toil by old and young in many 
 parts of the world. Our luxuries come because of 
 our ability to use the labour power of others to 
 supply us with reservoirs of material wealth, 
 which they themselves never dream of demanding. 
 And so it all goes on, and produces a struggle 
 which as the years pass grows more and more 
 bitter. 
 
 A friend of mine in America who lakes a great 
 interest in social affairs was once very indignant 
 because a certain big railway company would not 
 pay proper wages to its employees, who had 
 struck work for better conditions. She joined the 
 agitation in support of the strikers. Having oc- 
 casion to see her lawyer on business she was 
 horrified to find that most of her income came 
 from shares in the very company she was de- 
 
56 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 nouncing. She was a sleeping partner in the 
 robbery and exploitation she had denounced. She 
 thought things out and decided to spend her life 
 with the workers in an effort to bring about a com- 
 plete change in the relationships between men and 
 women of all classes. 
 
 How many people realise the struggle to live 
 which children of the working classes are called 
 upon to endure ? Dr. Saleeby and other writers 
 have done a great work in calling public attention 
 to the wicked waste of child life, most of which is 
 preventable. Mr. Herbert Samuel, in his preface 
 to " Maternity " (letters from working women, 
 collected by the Women's Co-operative Guild), 
 says: " How quickly social evils will yield to 
 treatment is seen in the fact that in ten years the 
 campaign against infant mortality has reduced the 
 death rate among infants under one year of age 
 by nearly one third." How terrible conditions 
 were and how fearful they now are is proved by 
 statisticians, who tell us that we murder by our 
 foul social arrangements 100,000 babies in the first 
 year after birth, and that another 120,000 are killed 
 before birth because we neglect their mothers. In 
 fact, all poor children have but a precarious chance 
 of living. Many of those who manage to survive 
 are defective in one form or another; there are 
 now one million such children, Sir George New- 
 man tells us, attending the elementary day schools. 
 These children are not mentally but physically 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 57 
 
 defective, and in the main they are in that condi- 
 tion because of insufficient nourishment and bad 
 conditions of home life, both before and after birth. 
 When milk was 4d. per quart it was difficult 
 enough for the poor to obtain, but the present 
 price of 6d. per quart is a real prohibition. 
 Even when milk is bought it is not always 
 either clean or pure : this is so well known 
 that Parliament, in June, 1914, passed the 
 " Clean Milk Bill," which would have se- 
 cured that milk, so far as it was humanly 
 possible, should be free from disease and dirt. 
 This same Parliament, on the outbreak of war a 
 few weeks later, was so callously indifferent to 
 the welfare of mothers and children that it agreed 
 to postpone the operation of this beneficent law 
 till after the war. No madder thing could possibly 
 have been done by a Government composed of 
 lunatics. This and many similar incidents prove 
 that the Government is in the grip of those whose 
 sole thought in life is to get rich, even if little 
 children are murdered in order to satisfy their 
 greed. 
 
 During the war we have thought so little of 
 our children that we have tumbled them out to 
 work at the early age of twelve years in ever in- 
 creasing numbers, solely to enable employers and 
 others to get cheap labour. The Board of Agri- 
 culture has published figures which show that 300 
 boys and girls under twelve years of age, 6,400 
 
58 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 between twelve and thirteen, and 4,300 between 
 thirteen and fourteen have been thus robbed 
 of their education. In this, Great Britain 
 has shown herself less careful of her children than 
 France. In the very early days of the war the 
 French Minister of Education called upon the 
 local education authorities throughout France to 
 take extra care that the children of the soldiers 
 were properly cared for and educated, because, 
 as he said, while their fathers are righting it would 
 be a disgrace to France if the nation allowed the 
 children to suffer. Wealthy England, on the 
 other hand, has neglected her babies, has allowed 
 profiteers to plunder the mothers, has taken boys 
 and girls from school and thus robbed them of 
 their very birthright. This is only a little worse 
 than what we do in normal times, when through- 
 out Lancashire we allow children to become 
 " half-timers," and, in even our best education 
 districts, a child can go to full work at fourteen 
 years of age, and so little care is taken in the 
 choice of occupation that multitudes of boys and 
 girls, after a few years at work, find themselves 
 in a blind-alley that is, an occupation which 
 leads nowhere in after life, and which leaves 
 young people on the industrial scrap-heap just 
 when they arrive at years of maturity. 
 
 I should like well-to-do mothers to contrast this 
 with the training of their own children. First of 
 all the home life, the nurserv and the nurses, 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 59 
 governesses and assistants to take care of the 
 child and surround it with everything that it 
 needs for its bodily and mental development. 
 No care is too great for the child of a 
 great house. The boy or girl who is lucky 
 enough to be born of wealthy parents is 
 sent to school, then to college, or to some 
 institution where thorough training is given 
 in order that a future in life may be secured. 
 It is not expected that the boy or girl whose 
 parents have money should go to work at 
 fourteen years of age, and it is only sheer neces- 
 sity which drives the children of the working 
 classes into industrial and commercial life. Eton 
 and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, Oxford and 
 Cambridge, and the other great schools and Uni- 
 versities of the land, are filled up mainly by those 
 who can afford to pay to go there, and who are 
 kept there because it is considered that education 
 is of primary importance for these children of the 
 well-to-do. It is worthy of note that neither in 
 peace time nor in war time are the boys who at- 
 tend the great public schools expected to go to 
 work half-time. This patriotic privilege is reserved 
 for the children of the working classes. 
 
 I may be told that there are scholarships and 
 bursaries for the children of the working classes 
 who are clever enough to win them. This is true, 
 but only an infinitesimal fraction of these children 
 can secure them. The great bulk of them must 
 
60 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 just go through life with only a tiny scrap of 
 education, which to many of us appears to be no 
 education at all. 1 maintain that the nation has 
 adopted the wrong line in giving scholarships and 
 bursaries, and in establishing continuation schools, 
 for clever children only. I believe clever people 
 get through anyhow, and I never bother myself 
 much about them. In my opinion public money 
 would be much better spent in giving bursaries 
 and scholarships to the children who are not 
 clever, but to whom good food and healthy sur- 
 roundings would be of real service in enabling 
 them to develop their minds. 
 
 Let us then consider the difference in the up- 
 bringing of the children of well-to-do parents 
 and the children of a working man, and, when 
 we have done this, let us try and understand that 
 every privilege which can be paid for, and which 
 is the possession of the children of wealthy parents, 
 comes to them only because some other child is 
 robbed of its chance, because the fruits of its 
 parents' labour have been bestowed on the 
 children of other people instead of on their own. 
 
 This is the fact which I again ask my readers 
 to grasp and understand. I ask them to realise 
 that, if justice were done, it is the worker's child 
 who should attend school until eighteen or twenty 
 years of age, because it is the working classes who 
 make such education at all possible. But no 
 one wants to rob any child of its chance. 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 61 
 It is not a change of places which is de- 
 sired, but an equal chance for all. Much more 
 might be said, but I think I have said enough to 
 show that there is a very unequal condition of 
 life existing as between the mothers and children 
 of one class and those of another. And this in- 
 equality cannot be bridged by charitable doles, 
 cannot be bridged even by sympathy. It will only 
 be bridged when we each understand that the 
 things which are of essential importance for our- 
 selves are also needed by others, that for all of us 
 there is the same need for a full life, full in the 
 sense of containing leisure and opportunity to 
 think, to read, and to recreate. Without these 
 things life is a miserable, sordid make-believe. 
 We must understand that when Someone in 
 wisdom said : " Man does not live by bread 
 alone," He gave expression to an eternal truth. 
 The mass of the people are unable to live in the 
 best sense of the word because they are forced to 
 slave and toil for so meagre a reward and for such 
 long hours that they have neither the time nor the 
 energy for anything more than work and sleep. 
 In saying this I am not unmindful of the fact that 
 many workmen receive relatively high wages, but 
 at the outside these will in normal times seldom 
 exceed ^"200 a year, whereas the professional and 
 salaried classes consider such an income only a 
 very poor one indeed. Sometimes workmen spend 
 their monev away from their wives and families. 
 
62 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 I think this is mainly due to the hard, exhausting 
 nature of their work, which leaves them without 
 energy for anything but stupid excitement. Any- 
 one who has seen men stripped to the waist 
 working before the blast furnaces on the North- 
 East coast will readily understand what I mean. 
 But always remember that the one place provided 
 for the workman's recreation is the gin palace and 
 public-house, and quite nice people get very big 
 incomes from such places, which often bring ruin 
 to both men and women. 
 
 It is undeniable that for the average woman 
 in the working class, home life is represented by 
 small petty pieces of work which few outside the 
 poorer classes understand or appreciate. I have 
 already mentioned baths as being absent; how 
 many people understand that even the homes of 
 the men who make baths are not supplied with 
 this necessary equipment for a decent life ? 
 Electric light, although it is getting cheaper, costs 
 the workman, in the very few places where it is 
 installed, more than it costs other classes. But, of 
 course, it is denied to the great bulk of the workers. 
 If you go through the apartments or houses of the 
 working classes you will find that for them most 
 of the amenities of life are absent. I labour this 
 rather because it seems to me that it is just there 
 that the whole difference in our lives comes in. 
 Rich women imagine that working women do 
 not need the things they themselves need, and 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 63 
 it is this idea which I want to break down and 
 destroy. It is no use telling me that the working 
 women are content; that they do not want any- 
 thing more. If they are content, and if they have 
 not the spirit to desire better conditions, this fact 
 alone if it is a fact is the greatest condemnation 
 of the social conditions of our time. Normal people 
 ought to want better conditions, and I ask those 
 women who really desire to help their poorer 
 sisters to preach to the poor the glorious gospel 
 of discontent with dirt and insanitary surround- 
 ings; I ask them never to tell them to be 
 satisfied, but always to preach dissatisfaction with 
 bad social conditions. As a matter of fact the 
 well-to-do w r omen ought to preach the gospel of 
 discontent amongst their own class as well. There 
 should be no satisfaction in life for any of us 
 while the comforts we ourselves enjoy are not 
 shared by others. No woman ought to be content 
 to live and go through her life knowing that some 
 sisters of hers have not the means to live decently 
 as she herself would like to live, and yet making 
 no effort to get better conditions of life for those 
 who need them. Each of us is his brother's 
 keeper, and we are in our present plight because 
 we refuse to act and live up to our responsibilities. 
 What is wrong is that throughout the ages 
 poor mothers have been taught to endure hardships 
 and poverty as God-ordained institutions. 
 
 In the struggle for civil and political freedom 
 
64 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 rich women must understand that the possession 
 of these privileges will involve an entire revision 
 of our standard of relationships. A vote for a 
 working-class mother will be of value to her only 
 if it makes her understand her place in society as 
 an important human being who helps to give to 
 humanity the means to " carry on." I should like 
 to see a new sort of Mothers' Union formed, con- 
 sisting of women of all ranks, all classes, and all 
 creeds, who would meet together as equals and 
 together hammer out the problems of life. I have 
 always felt that this might have been done at the 
 beginning of the war, that officers' wives might 
 have met the wives of privates, and that together 
 they could have tried to discover how better to 
 live. The old Mothers' Meetings are played out. 
 Educated women who want true reform must give 
 up trying to buy the poor happiness by gifts of 
 blankets or bread, and must help the mothers of 
 the nation themselves to demand better conditions, 
 conditions which will bring freedom from worry, 
 not conditions which necessitate a whole crowd of 
 officials to teach people how to live. As a temporary 
 thing, those who have means may have to aid the 
 poor to get some relief from their sordid surround- 
 ings by giving help in various forms. We may 
 for some time yet be called upon to endure 
 officials and officialdom as a kind of purgatory, 
 but the schools for mothers the necessity for 
 which, I consider, is the greatest condemna- 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 65 
 
 tion of modern methods of living should not 
 much longer be tolerated as a necessity; 
 every girl should be so trained, have so 
 good a chance of acquiring knowledge, that 
 when she married she would refuse at any time to 
 submit to any condition of life which lowered 
 self-respect. In a word, it is a gospel of desire 
 and want which needs preaching to the mothers 
 of England. Divine discontent ! And the 
 women young or old who will embark on that 
 campaign will be doing a great and lasting service 
 to humanity. 
 
 Home - making, the rearing and care of 
 children, is work which has been slighted and 
 looked down upon. No wages are paid for it, and 
 people when speaking of house- work talk of it as 
 something menial. Married women with large 
 families have been made to feel the enormity of 
 their offence in following what we are told is the 
 Divine command, " Be fruitful and multiply,*' 
 until nowadays women are declining motherhood, 
 are refusing to be mere machines for producing 
 unwanted children ; and in consequence on all 
 sides we hear direful prophecies of the evil which 
 must befall the nation unless we mend our ways. 
 
 The Bishop of London denounces the checks 
 and preventive measures taken by women of all 
 classes, but especially the more comfortable 
 classes, for preventing child-birth. His Lordship 
 touches only the fringe of a great subject. Why 
 
 E 
 
66 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 does he not denounce great landlords who extract 
 huge ground rents from every district in every 
 great city, or those owners of houses who refuse 
 to let their premises to those who have children, 
 and in many instances stipulate there shall be no 
 children at all ? These are economic causes which 
 no amount of mere talking or preaching will put 
 right. The working-class mother bears children, 
 and as each one comes she dreads its coming. 
 I marvel that under present conditions there is 
 not much more prevention ; that is, I marvel 
 that women do not tell men that, until proper 
 means for maintaining and rearing children 
 under healthy conditions are organised, they 
 will refuse to bring children into the world. 
 The wife of the business man or Government 
 official is in another category. She refuses 
 motherhood because she dreads sinking lower 
 and lower in the social scale. The rich woman 
 refuses motherhood because it interferes with her 
 pleasures in society. There is no royal road out 
 of this. The population of England will go down 
 unless we are prepared to re-establish motherhood 
 and womanhood on a loftier plane, unless we are 
 willing to maintain that empire building shall 
 take a second place to home building. The pre- 
 valent idea that children are only a nuisance to 
 be tolerated must be superseded by a love and 
 reverence for mother and child as God's greatest 
 gift to mankind. The present system by which 
 
WOMEN 4ND CHILDREN 7 
 people with families are not allowed to live in 
 certain homes and flats, the restrictions which are 
 made in some of the great model dwellings for the 
 poor, controlled sometimes by philanthropists 
 and sometimes by municipalities, must be swept 
 away, and a woman, as her family grows, instead 
 of being driven out, must be given more and more 
 accommodation. In the case of a working-class 
 woman it must always be remembered that her 
 husband's wages are fixed, not according to his 
 family, but according to a particular rate set for 
 his job, and as each new baby comes his wife's 
 struggle to live grows harder and harder : it is 
 she who always is the worst sufferer; it is the 
 mother who is served last at the table and takes 
 what is left. Women who belong to the upper 
 classes get out of motherhood, as I say, because 
 they want a pleasure of another kind ; working- 
 class women or middle-class women because of 
 economic reasons. 
 
 So far I have been dealing with women in the 
 home. But there are many thousands of women 
 in our land for whom there is no chance of 
 marriage and to whom the joy of motherhood is 
 denied. Some day we shall be wiser in our sex 
 arrangements, because we shall discover that if 
 monogamy is to continue we must find a means 
 of stopping the slaughter of boy babies. It is these 
 which provide the greater part of the toll of death 
 which babies pay for the privilege of being born 
 
68 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 in Christian, monopolist-ridden Britain. We 
 must, however, think of the present, and, doing so, 
 shall soon discover that there exists not only a 
 class war but something like a sex war also, since 
 in every department of industry and commerce 
 women are being used to bring down wages, to 
 lower conditions, and to give to the possessing 
 classes an abundance of cheap labour. I am not 
 complaining of the fact that women are proving 
 themselves capable of doing men's work; I am 
 calling attention to the fact that women's labour 
 has been used, and in many instances is still 
 being used, and will be even more used after 
 the war, for the sole purpose of bringing down 
 wages. If anyone doubts this the evidence can 
 easily be supplied by the Board of Trade and 
 Ministry of Munitions. Apart from these, let any 
 of my readers who wish to know the facts go into 
 an industrial district and themselves inquire into 
 the wages and conditions of labour prevailing 
 amongst girls and women ; they will very soon dis- 
 cover what a very low standard of value is set on 
 female labour. 
 
 The cry of " equal pay for equal work " has 
 so far fallen on deaf ears, except in very excep- 
 tional cases; and this is true not only of trades 
 and callings followed by the working classes, but 
 in many professions also. The teaching profession 
 gives us one of the best examples of this 
 inequality of remuneration. Women teachers, 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 69 
 both head teachers and assistants, are always paid 
 much lower salaries than men. It is this kind of 
 thing which sets the standard of value. It is a 
 fact denied by no one with knowledge that low 
 wages for girls and women result in producing 
 the "social evil" of our time. Thousands of 
 women live their lives through in penury and 
 want, facing hardship and grinding poverty in a 
 heroic endeavour to preserve personal virtue and 
 honour. Others succumb to the call of the 
 streets, and either make up their scanty 
 wages to a living standard or give up the 
 struggle and sink down and down into the 
 whirlpool of vice which is to be found in all 
 great cities. I am told, by those who profess to 
 know, that some women prefer to live under such 
 conditions. It may be so, but I am not concerned 
 with that problem here. It is the vast army of 
 involuntary victims for whom I ask consideration 
 and compassion. When we read of women work- 
 ing long hours at hard laborious work for paltry 
 pittances of a few shillings a week, we need not 
 wonder that prostitution, the most ancient of 
 trades for women, thrives in our great cities, and 
 that its accompanying evils of venereal disease 
 become like an avenging scourge. It is strange 
 indeed that the splendid men and women who give 
 money and work to rescue women from the streets 
 do not understand that until the causes of prosti- 
 tution are tackled all their labour and effort is in 
 
7 o TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 vain ; and the causes are vouched for, in the main, 
 by the police authorities, and by all students of 
 industrial conditions. 
 
 In every garrison town, in most of our seaports 
 where the Navy has headquarters, low-paid in- 
 dustries are established for women. It is impos- 
 sible not to connect the two things. And even in 
 such a matter as this there is a great difference 
 between the poor and the rich the daughters of 
 the rich seldom endure the torment of the lock 
 hospital. These places are reserved for the 
 children of the workers. It is they who are be- 
 trayed when working under conditions which 
 make them easy victims of the lust of the rich, 
 or driven to sell their bodies because society 
 refuses them decent conditions of life and has 
 placed so low a value on woman's life and service. 
 
 It all seems to me to start in the home. 
 Woman's work there is not properly valued, and 
 this false standard of values goes right through 
 life. In addition, there is the double standard of 
 morals which prevails, and which allows a man to 
 commit adultery without any penalty, but punishes 
 a woman guilty of the same offence with relentless 
 severity. This question needs thinking out on 
 straight clear lines. If, as some people say, men 
 are so constructed that prostitution of women is 
 a necessity of modern life (which I do not for one 
 moment accept), it logically follows that the 
 society which accepts this must accept all the 
 
WOMEN AND CHILDREN 71 
 consequences of such an admission, and we must 
 all cheerfully allow our daughters to minister to 
 the common need of men by becoming members 
 of the great army of fallen women. If it is a 
 necessity for the man, it is a duty for the woman. 
 If it is a duty for the working-class woman, it is 
 a duty for the daughters and wives and sisters of 
 the comfortable classes. I am not now thinking 
 of the isolated sexual lapses of which any man or 
 woman may, under stress of temptation, be guilty, 
 but of the wretched victims of our social order, 
 who like dumb driven cattle earn their bread on 
 the streets of the great cities, and who, some 
 doctors tell us, are necessary in order to safe- 
 guard the honour and virtue of our wives and 
 daughters. 
 
 Honour bought and virtue maintained at such 
 a cost are not worth preserving. We must all 
 unite in protest against such a doctrine, must in- 
 sist on conditions of life for men and women which 
 will make the exercise of virtue, if not easy, at 
 any rate practicable and possible ; and a condition 
 precedent of all reform is for each of us to accept 
 the principle that each other man's daughter, wife, 
 and sister are as valuable as our own, and that the 
 dishonouring of either our own body or another's 
 is an outrage against God and humanity. 
 
 We must also set our faces against all theories of 
 inferiority where women are concerned : we must 
 declare with unceasing insistence that motherhood 
 
72 TOUR PART IN POVERTT 
 
 and home - making are great services; above 
 
 all, that woman's life and work together with 
 
 man's shall be recognised as of value to the 
 
 State, and organised in co-operation on lines of 
 
 equality and service for the good of the whole 
 
 community. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 BUSINESS 
 
 IN writing as I have done concerning the lives 
 of the common people, I do not wish to be 
 understood as thinking that the life of the 
 average business man is a very desirable one. I 
 know it is not ; the men who conduct large or small 
 businesses often endure all " the torments of the 
 damned " in their anxiety and worry to keep 
 things straight. The more good-hearted they are 
 and the more honest they strive to be, the more 
 difficult and stormy their path through life 
 becomes. There is very little mercy in business, 
 and precious little consideration for other people; 
 and this because men are fearful of to-morrow. 
 We all forget the beautiful saying of Jesus : 
 11 Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, 
 neither do they spin, yet I say unto you Solomon 
 in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.*' 
 Or that other great saying: " Seek ye first the 
 kingdom of God and His righteousness and all 
 these things shall be added unto you." 
 Those who have risen from the ranks of 
 the workers are most fearful. For them life is 
 usually one long determined fight against any 
 chance of falling back into the ranks of labour, 
 and an effort to save their children from ever 
 
 73 
 
74 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 becoming mere wage-earners. Consequently busi- 
 ness has become a sort of accentuated class war, 
 or, rather, a fight between warring sections of the 
 same class, each striving to supplant the other. 
 The shop-keepers of almost every class lead 
 the narrowest kind of lives. All their waking 
 hours are spent in an endeavour to find new 
 means by which they can induce people to 
 buy things (often things which the buyers do 
 not really want), and in a great effort, not only to 
 retain their position, but to improve it. 
 
 The mania for advertising, the craze for new 
 methods of boosting wares, gives rise to what 
 amounts to wholesale lying by means of specious 
 advertising. I once dined with a well-known 
 social worker who spent a huge fortune investigat- 
 ing social and industrial conditions. After dinner 
 we discussed at some length the question of com- 
 mercial morality. I rather hotly contended that 
 all modern business necessitated lying in one form 
 or another until the business became a first-class 
 monopoly, when, because of the power which 
 monopoly gives, it became unnecessary to do 
 more than just fling the goods on the market. 
 The lady of the house was much distressed, and 
 asked her husband if it was true that lying was a 
 necessary part of business. He hesitated, but at 
 last replied that when business was conducted men 
 did not tell all the truth, but that, as all business 
 men knew this, it was not really lying in the 
 
BUSINESS 75 
 
 ordinary sense. I could not answer except by 
 saying that the fact that we all tolerated such an 
 unreal and deceptive condition of affairs was, in 
 my opinion, the greatest condemnation of our 
 present commercial methods. And so it is, for it 
 stamps us all as deceivers, and makes of business 
 just a battle of wits in which cupidity stands the 
 best chance of success. 
 
 There are, no doubt, great businesses which, 
 as I have said, are so big, and have such huge 
 powers as the result of monopoly and vested in- 
 terest, that they need not resort to these means for 
 accumulating wealth. They succeed, however, by 
 the most merciless use of the powers which mono- 
 poly gives. This may, for instance, be a land 
 monopoly, which is the oldest and most anti-social 
 monopoly of all ; in fact, every other monopoly 
 has grown out of this power of controlling land ; 
 without such power it is very doubtful if 
 monopoly of other things could come into being 
 at all. It is land monopoly which has caused the 
 workers to be housed on swamps and marshes 
 around our great cities. I am told that in the 
 offices of the Local Government Board there are 
 huge maps of all the capital cities of Europe and 
 America, and that these all show how the working 
 classes are housed on the low-lying damp lands 
 or in the least healthy parts of these great 
 cities, where the rent of land is cheap. The 
 reason is that those whose business in life 
 
76 TOUR PART IN POFERTT 
 is to draw huge sums by the exercise of their 
 power to extract ground rent drive the poor to 
 crowd themselves together on the cheapest land, 
 and this results in over-crowding and so-called 
 over- population, in my own life-time, and within 
 ten minutes' walk of where I live, I have seen 
 huge tracts of marshland (previously filled up 
 with the sweepings and other refuse gathered from 
 the streets of London) converted into rows of 
 streets, now populated by the working classes. 
 Neither the landowner, nor the builder, nor the 
 present owners of these houses, would for one 
 moment d.rearn of living either in one of these 
 houses or even in a special house built on this 
 land. They know only too well what an un- 
 healthy district it is. Yet some of the land- 
 owners and house - owners are good, decent 
 men and women. They build chapels and 
 churches, and on Sundays believe that all men 
 are brothers and that God is the Father of us all. 
 But they do not mind growing rich at the cost 
 of the health and even the life of their poorer 
 brothers and sisters. The sacred right to make 
 money covers many more sins than does the virtue 
 of charity. It is the passive acquiescence of us all 
 in this sacred right of money-making which makes 
 good men and women content to draw incomes 
 from such sources. 
 
 Then there is the drink business. Volumes 
 have been written and thousands of sermons 
 
BUSINESS 77 
 
 preached to prove how drunken and dissolute the 
 workers are. Yet brewers and distillers through 
 their agents and managers seek out poor districts 
 where housing conditions are bad, and where in- 
 dustrial conditions keep the people poor, and in 
 these districts erect their gaudy gin palaces, with 
 garish light and colour, tempting the weary and 
 weak to enter and forget their misery, their sorrow 
 and their poverty. Is it a wonder that those who 
 are denied the pleasure and joy of real home life 
 fall easy victims to these allurements ? It is in- 
 deed no marvel they do so; the marvel is that 
 any resist. Yet few of the bishops or clergy of 
 any denomination dare attack these business men 
 and declare their trade to be an immoral one ; and 
 this is because the law has not merely allowed the 
 trade to grow up but has also by legislation 
 made of it a most powerful monopoly. Because of 
 this monopoly good people have invested many, 
 many millions of pounds in a business which 
 sends more people to perdition than almost any 
 other evil of our day. Whenever it is proposed 
 to tackle this evil it is Christians who at once 
 raise the question as to the moral right of the 
 nation to destroy so profitable a business, once it 
 has been established by law even if such a busi- 
 ness ruins the health and character of multitudes 
 of people ! There are many working people who 
 believe that this evil is not properly tackled because 
 those whose business it is to teach the nation its 
 
7 8 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 duty in a social and spiritual sense derive their 
 incomes from this traffic, as many good people in 
 former days opposed the abolition of slavery 
 because of their money investments in slaves. 
 
 We shall never settle this drink question till 
 we abolish all private monopoly or private gain 
 in the liquor trade. If there is to be a 
 monopoly of the kind it should be a State mono- 
 poly, from which every vestige of profit-making 
 should be taken away. There is little chance of 
 this happening until our whole conception of the 
 right of property is changed. There was a 
 chance at the beginning of the war when an effort 
 was made, but money interests were too strong, 
 and we can all see how in Parliament a small 
 group of determined men can keep back, and do 
 keep back, true reform on this and many other 
 social questions. 
 
 But the war has taught us better than anything 
 else could have done what the words " business is 
 business " really mean. Our nation for the past 
 two and a half years has been in the throes of 
 the most terrible struggle in all her varied 
 history. Millions of men have risked health 
 and life itself in what they believed to be 
 the defence of their Motherland. Boys and men 
 from every quarter of the globe have hurried home 
 to give all they have for the service of the land 
 they love. Those of us who hate and detest 
 this and every other kind of war, and who 
 
BUSINESS 79 
 
 refuse to take any part in it, equally with 
 those who support the war, must and do 
 respect and honour all those who give 
 themselves on behalf of the cause they love. 
 None of those who volunteered and they num- 
 bered millions haggled about pay or reward; 
 they simply gave themselves. Indeed, everywhere 
 people were found who felt impelled to offer ser- 
 vice. Only the business men refused to turn aside 
 from the one pervading occupation of their lives 
 money-making. In every direction business men 
 took advantage of the nation's difficulties to make 
 more and more money. Shipping companies 
 quadrupled their profits; corndealers and millers, 
 coal merchants and meat dealers in fact, every- 
 body with anything to sell scrambled in and 
 joined the gamble to make money out of 
 the war. Shipbuilding firms, armament manu- 
 facturers, Government contractors and others, 
 considered the opportunity was one which it 
 would be unbusinesslike and foolish to miss. 
 People who supplied stores were not ashamed in 
 public court to confess to a profit of 40 per cent. 
 Coal and iron corporations in Durham who 
 have managed to acquire huge properties con- 
 sisting of land and coal are paying dividends 
 of 45 per cent. In short, some business 
 men have had a glorious time since the war 
 began ; but their success has resulted in well-nigh 
 starving old-age pensioners to death, and has 
 
8o TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 brought the wives and dependents of soldiers and 
 sailors, in spite of increased allowances, to 
 the point of semi-starvation whilst their hus- 
 bands, brothers, and sons are righting to de- 
 fend a land of which they possess not a yard, and 
 within whose borders are these social enemies, 
 operating their profit-making business to the detri- 
 ment of the rest of the nation. Again, leaders of 
 religion, almost to a man, are silent (except for 
 the feeblest of feeble protests), whilst Ministers 
 in Parliament spend their time proving that high 
 prices and high profits have no connection with each 
 other, but that both are due, in some mysterious 
 manner, to the Germans and the war in general. 
 
 My object in calling attention to these matters 
 is to emphasise the point that there is no soul in 
 business. It is a thing apart, in the carrying on 
 of which people are expected to banish out of their 
 minds all ideas of human kindness. I am not un- 
 mindful of the fact that there are, relatively speak- 
 ing, many good business men and employers; if 
 there were not, the whole system would have 
 smashed up long ago. Men like the Cadburys, 
 Rowntrees, and Levers, with their garden 
 cities, strive to make life more tolerable for the 
 workers by gifts of a little more material comfort, 
 but even these do not concede freedom or true 
 equal partnership; the relationship all the time 
 is that of master and servant. Moreover, in such 
 cases it is the centralised power which enables 
 
BUSINESS 8 1 
 
 whatever is of value to be done. The great 
 mass of businesses are carried on by limited 
 companies or corporations, and the beneficiaries of 
 these businesses are shareholders who have not 
 the slightest idea of how their money is obtained, 
 or under what conditions. So wide-spread are 
 business organisations that a company interested 
 in motor-cars and tyres may also be interested in 
 the exploitation of the inhabitants of such places 
 as Putumayo, where, we know, the people were 
 horribly ill-used and murdered in order to secure 
 profits and dividends for Christian people. We 
 also know that many good Christians quite un- 
 knowingly participated in the slavery of San 
 Thome* and the Congo. 
 
 Then there is the gambling in stocks and 
 shares on the Stock Exchanges of the world a 
 kind of business where no sort of useful work is 
 ever done ! This has always appeared to me to be 
 like gambling with the labour of the people, just 
 as other people gamble on the racing ability of 
 horses ; for no one will contend that passing paper 
 adds value to any mortal thing in the world. The 
 fact that I buy something to-day and, because of 
 market changes, can sell it at double price to- 
 morrow, may stamp me as a clear-headed business 
 man, but cannot possibly prove I have added a 
 single service of the slightest worth to the com- 
 munity. The hordes of men and women engaged 
 in so-called money-making industries which pro- 
 
 F 
 
82 TOUR PART IN POVERTT 
 duce nothing is simply appalling; and some day 
 \ve shall see much more clearly than we do now, 
 and shall realise how useless, so far as the com- 
 munity is concerned, all this gambling really is. 
 We should see it more clearly now were it not for 
 the fact that money obscures the issue. We are all 
 apt to think that the possession of money is the all- 
 important thing; but it is undeniable that if all 
 the gold in the world could be destroyed the 
 nations would be no poorer, so long as the land 
 remained to be tilled, and men and women were 
 willing to till it. 
 
 It is the business of business people and their 
 apologists to make believe that without money we 
 should all starve. That this is not so is so simple 
 a proposition that people refuse to believe it. Yet 
 no one will deny that if all the gold and diamonds 
 in the world could be gathered together with their 
 owners and placed on an uninhabited island, these 
 valuables would not produce a single atom of food. 
 Men and women will always, I imagine, desire to 
 possess rare and precious stones and minerals for 
 ornaments and personal adornment, but they will 
 not for ever allow the possession of these things to 
 be used as a means for impoverishing and starving 
 one another. 
 
 In addition to what I have already said, there is 
 the further fact that so much of our business to-day 
 is unnecessary. In every direction we can see over- 
 lapping and competition. Each new invention 
 
BUSINESS 83 
 
 appears to create an increasing number of those 
 who do not produce, and makes more of us mere 
 handlers of other people's labour. In almost every 
 village, certainly in every town, large and small, 
 there are people cutting each other's throats, often 
 in what appears to be a vain endeavour to grow 
 rich and prosperous. Every day of the week multi- 
 tudes of commercial travellers cover the country 
 striving to sell the same kind of goods in com- 
 petition with each other. All the great combina- 
 tions of capital strive to eliminate this kind of 
 waste, and the justification urged in defence of 
 great monopolies is that by combination economy 
 is effected. So it is; but those who benefit from 
 this economy are the owners of the combined con- 
 cern. They combine in order to make more money, 
 and it is worth while noticing that those who most 
 glibly denounce the workers because they com- 
 bine are the most ready themselves to enter into 
 a combination if by so doing they may amass more 
 money. The capitalist class is rapidly learning 
 that co-operation amongst themselves is much 
 more profitable than competition. The mass of the 
 people will one day discover that it is better for 
 them to co-operate, and, when they do make the 
 discovery, business, as we understand it to-day, 
 will be cast away into the limbo of forgotten 
 things. 
 
 In the meantime let us all strive to realise that 
 for all business men, except the very rich, life is 
 
84 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 one long weary fight against conditions which tend 
 to kill the good there is in us; that, just as the 
 poverty-stricken conditions of life under which the 
 poor are doomed to exist rob them of all the 
 beauty and joy of living, so the mad scramble to 
 get rich, the struggle to rise in the social scale by 
 means of money and money's worth, robs those 
 engaged in it of everything of real worth, and 
 makes them become just sordid and money- 
 grubbing beings, whose sole idea of value is 
 whether a thing will pay, not in service to the com- 
 munity, but in pounds, shillings, and pence. 
 
 There have, it is true, been splendid men and 
 women of the wealthy classes who, seeing the 
 misery and degradation of the people, have set to 
 work to collect facts and figures in order that 
 all the world may know " how the poor live." 
 One such was the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth; Mr. 
 Seebohm Rowntree is another ; and their works on 
 life and labour tell their own story, and in a very 
 real way show conditions as they are. But 
 no one has yet thought it worth while to 
 suggest a social investigation into the life and 
 labour of the business and possessing classes. I 
 wish the labour movement would appoint a special 
 commission, consisting of their best men and 
 women, thoroughly to investigate the conditions of 
 life prevailing in Belgravia and Mayfair and tell 
 the world " how the rich live " whence come 
 their means of life, and what they do to fill up 
 
BUSINESS 85 
 
 each day, whether with useful or useless work. 
 I am sure we should discover from such an inquiry 
 that the rich people are no more contented or 
 happy than the rest of us, that riches not 
 earned by actual productive labour are Dead 
 Sea fruit, and that life for the rich is one 
 long weary search for happiness which never 
 comes their way for any length of time. 
 We should discover, too, that more and 
 more people are becoming dissatisfied with their 
 lives, that scrambling for " wealth " (which is not 
 wealth in any good sense of the word) is a kind of 
 existence which takes the joy out of life. 
 
 The reason such a condition of things is 
 tolerated is, I believe, simply that we all fear each 
 other. We are afraid of the consequences of 
 " burning our boats," and we dare not cast our- 
 selves on the mercy of our fellow men and women, 
 for we have no faith either in them or in ourselves, 
 or in our religion which tells us to " Cast all your 
 care upon Him, for He careth for you." We are 
 surrounded by conventions and customs which few 
 of us dare to break, and which fewer still dare 
 publicly to call in question. Until we have faith and 
 hope and confidence in each other, we shall con- 
 tinue our business methods of buying cheap and 
 selling dear, nursing all the time the vain delusion 
 that if once we determine to do right, evil will 
 immediately prosper, instead of understanding 
 that righteousness, whether exercised by an 
 
86 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 
 individual or by a nation, is always more powerful 
 than evil. 
 
 We men who have been, and still are, in 
 business have to realise that money is not wealth, 
 that a nation may have great banks with huge 
 stores of gold, may have within its ranks men and 
 women who own great possessions of material 
 things, but may have also multitudes of those who 
 have nowhere to lay their heads. A nation in such 
 a plight is not rich, but very poor, for it has 
 not learnt the simple lesson that the true law of 
 life is to give, and that gold is not God. Going 
 about London, I often notice the manner in which 
 gold is splashed about in order to impress us with 
 its value. Our grand cathedral church has its cross 
 of gold and its towers gilded with the same metal ; 
 the new Courts of Justice at the Old Bailey are 
 crowned by a figure of gold, as if the one object 
 of adoration and power in the City of London were 
 gold. Business men must change all this if our 
 nation is to live. Their clever, ingenious brains 
 must be used to amass happiness for all, not gold 
 for themselves and misery for their neighbours. It 
 is a mistake to envy the business man. Stand, as I 
 have done, and see them rolling through the City 
 in their motor-cars, driving in one long line to 
 business every morning, and notice the tense look 
 of anxiety and worry stamped on most of their 
 faces; and, if you are fortunate enough to know 
 them, see, as the days pass, the hard sort of ex- 
 
BUSINESS 87 
 
 pression which comes over their faces, like a mask, 
 crushing out all the most beautiful expressions of 
 which the human face is capable. And, having 
 done this, ask yourself if, after all, the business 
 man's life is so desirable and the worship of gold 
 so profitable an occupation ! No; instead of envy- 
 ing them, we all should look on them with pity, 
 pity because they are doomed to appear as wealthy 
 and yet are amongst the poorest of all God's 
 creatures; because so often their whole lives are 
 one long fight against their fellow-men a fight 
 which leaves them friendless and lonely in the 
 world of men and women. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 CHURCHES 
 
 RELIGION plays but a small and insignifi- 
 cant part in the life of any commercial 
 nation. I have travelled all round the 
 world, have seen life under the Southern Cross 
 in Australia, in the United States of America, 
 in Canada, and on the Continent of Europe, 
 and what strikes me more than anything else 
 is the complete divorce between organised 
 religion and the people. The people are 
 not, and never have been, actively hostile to 
 religion, but the organisations for the spread of 
 religion have failed, and are still failing, to get 
 any sort of hold on the common people, who do not 
 oppose nor accept religion, but remain completely 
 indifferent. The reason for this is that religion, 
 like everything else in the world to-day, is looked 
 upon by most of us as a matter of business. 
 
 All through the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century we were brought up to believe that if we 
 made a bargain with God our past and future 
 sins would be forgiven and our place in Heaven 
 secure. We might be poor or rich as men count 
 poverty and riches in this life but a belief in the 
 sacrifice of our Lord would bring us safely to 
 Paradise at last. As a boy I grew up with the 
 
 88 
 
CHURCHES 89 
 
 most wonderful idea of Heaven. I imagined it a 
 place where in very deed we should see God and 
 Christ and the angels, with the whole company of 
 redeemed sitting on thrones beside the Jasper Sea. 
 My picture of Hell was that of a veritable lake into 
 which were cast all wicked men and women, and 
 little children who disobeyed their parents, told 
 lies, or stole. It was often a nightmare question 
 to me whether, after all, my place might not be 
 the lake of fire, eternal torment and damnation. 
 
 Though the Heaven and Hell of my childhood 
 have gone, it is true to say that, whatever else I 
 have lost hold of in this connection, I have lost 
 no shred of faith and hope in the continuance of 
 life after death. I am heir of all the ages, and am 
 also part of the life of the future. Somewhere in 
 that future there is a tiny corner for me which, by 
 the grace of God, I shall fill ; but as to a life of 
 indolent ease, it is all banished from my mind. I 
 know that for me all life will be one long struggle 
 upwards. It may be I shall not get, as it were, 
 one yard forward, but that does not matter; what 
 is important is that I should make the effort. 
 
 I say all this because in criticising the Churches 
 I do not want to be taken as a critic of religion in 
 its fullest and best sense; for it is an eternal truth, 
 " Man does not live by bread alone." Look where 
 you will, investigate as you may, you will find 
 how true a saying it is. Yet religion plays but a 
 small part in our national or private life. There 
 
90 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 are many thousands of good men and women who 
 toil and work for the " coming of the Kingdom " 
 with a courage and zeal beyond all praise; there 
 are priests who labour incessantly, striving to 
 bring the message of the gospel of peace into the 
 dark and squalid places of our great cities; yet 
 the common people pass by unheeding. Big- 
 hearted men and women, seeing into the great gulf 
 which divides the social life and conditions of the 
 rich and of the poor, create social and religious 
 centres where rich and poor may meet together. 
 Educated young men and women come East 
 to learn all about the poor, to investigate and 
 analyse conditions, and to look, as it were, at the 
 curious life and customs of those who work. 
 Clubs are formed, boys* brigades, companies of 
 boy scouts, girls' clubs, mothers' meetings, 
 fathers' meetings, and so on. At the last-men- 
 tioned tobacco is sometimes thrown in, and quite 
 occasionally something called religion is talked 
 about and discussed. Only a minute fraction of the 
 population surrounding any of these settlements 
 attends these meetings or clubs, and fewer people 
 still ever dream of attending the churches or 
 chapels attached to such places. 
 
 I think the workers owe an enormous debt to 
 Canon Barnett and his wife for their selfless work 
 in the establishment and organisation of the first 
 of these settlements at Toynbee Hall. They have 
 had many followers in many parts of the country, 
 
CHURCHES 91 
 
 but so far these settlements all fail to do more than 
 touch the outside fringe of the social life of the 
 people, and this because they all appear to accept 
 the present social order as a God-ordained institu- 
 tion, and are quite content to allow the struggle 
 for bread to remain as the recognised dominant 
 factor in the life of the people. 
 
 Many of the young men from Oxford and 
 Cambridge and the Public Schools manage, how- 
 ever, to do very well by themselves, in some cases 
 by means of debating clubs and classes. There 
 they gain knowledge and experience of the 
 Trade Union movement, which knowledge is 
 later on used to secure for them first-class 
 positions as Government or municipal servants. 
 Many of us have watched with interest the 
 careers of these young men, who, having come 
 to East London with what I am sure was a 
 genuine and generous interest in the working 
 class, and with a real desire to improve conditions, 
 have gradually discovered that the one royal road 
 out is a complete social revolution ; but (seeing the 
 difficulties, like the rich young man in the 
 parable) have turned back and found their way 
 into Government Departments and into the House 
 of Commons, and even on to the Treasury Bench, 
 where they have been engaged in the business of 
 making the present conditions more tolerable, with 
 no sort of idea of destroying evil conditions by 
 attacking root causes. 
 
92 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 
 It is the spirit which is all wrong; and to 
 make this plain 1 cannot do better than describe 
 an incident which happened at a meeting in 
 Oxford which Lord Hugh Cecil and myself 
 addressed. The meeting was organised for the 
 purpose of enlisting young men as residents for 
 Oxford House, Bethnal Green. There was a fine 
 attendance of healthy, vigorous young men, full 
 of enthusiasm and quite keen to hear us both. 
 Lord Hugh was the first speaker, and based his 
 appeal on the fact that those young men would 
 be the future law-makers and administrators of 
 Britain ; he urged that it was their bounden duty 
 to make themselves acquainted with the people 
 whom they would be called upon to govern and 
 whose public affairs they would be called upon to 
 administer. In saying this, he was summarising 
 what is to him the very highest conception of 
 public life and duty, so far as the great landed 
 class to which he belongs is concerned. He be- 
 lieves in a governing class whose duty it is to 
 govern wisely for the good of the nation and to 
 equip itself efficiently for the discharge of its 
 duties. This is the alleged justification for the 
 existence of the landed gentry ; and all who know 
 anything of the public life of the Cecils know how 
 well they try to live up to their conception of 
 public duty. But I was not convinced then, and 
 am not convinced now, that governing classes are 
 a necessity; and so, when it came to my turn, I 
 
CHURCHES 93 
 
 said something like this: 4t You young men have 
 great opportunities given you to educate your- 
 selves, to acquire knowledge; and it is your 
 bounden duty to give back all and more than you 
 receive to the service of the nation. Your educa- 
 tion, your culture, is all given at the expense of 
 the workers, who day and night toil that you and 
 your class may understand something of the joy 
 of living. I want you to come down to Bethnal 
 Green to teach the people all you know, teach them 
 to hate poverty and dirt and unwholesome condi- 
 tions, and organise them to control and manage 
 their own lives. Above all, teach them that poverty 
 is a result of man-made conditions, and that man- 
 kind, if it will, can as easily create better 
 conditions." 
 
 Both our speeches were, as usual, heartily 
 cheered, though for all practical purposes my 
 speech, so far as I know, fell on deaf ears, for I 
 have not yet discovered any rebels amongst the 
 Oxford House residents. I think there is a better 
 spirit growing up amongst all those who go to 
 live in these social settlements, but these social 
 efforts will continue to be worth very little until the 
 whole thing is founded on sounder lines. The 
 workers in great numbers will never respond to 
 their call until those who are responsible for this 
 kind of work go down to root causes, and declare 
 their faith in the principles of co-operation and 
 brotherhood, not those of competition and strife, 
 
94 TOUR PART IN POFERTI 
 as the right means of obtaining our daily bread. 
 There was a time when many hoped the Noncon- 
 formist Churches would fill up the gap left by the 
 established and older churches in the religious life 
 of the people. The coming of Wesley promised 
 great things, but alas ! dissenting chapels in large 
 centres fare little better than other religious efforts, 
 and often huge chapels and assembly halls will be 
 found on Sunday half-empty, whilst all around 
 them, living in squalor and want, are myriads of 
 men and women hungering and thirsting for the 
 message which Christians should have to give. 
 Look where we will, we shall find the same condi- 
 tions prevailing, and these may be practically 
 summed up in the statement that the nation has left 
 God and religion out of account. 
 
 Archbishops, bishops, presidents of the Free 
 Church Council, write excellent pastorals calling us 
 all to repentance and hope, and especially at this 
 crisis in our nation's history do we find them intent 
 on calling our attention to our national and per- 
 sonal aims. At the same time, though, most of 
 them refuse to give any sanction, any help, to the 
 young men who, rightly or wrongly, refuse to 
 take up arms. Some Church dignitaries have 
 scorned and ridiculed the conscientious objectors, 
 most of whom, whether we agree with them or 
 not, are undoubtedly standing out for the very 
 highest thing in life; that is, the right to follow 
 the light of one's own conscience. It is men and 
 
CHURCHES 95 
 
 women like these who in all ages have made 
 progress of any kind possible. It is a matter of 
 history that, because of their determination to 
 follow the light of their own consciences, the early 
 Christians were flung to the lions by Nero and 
 other Roman Imperialists. The young men who 
 just now are being flung into prison, and who are 
 enduring the obloquy and ridicule of religious and 
 irreligious men, are the true descendants of the 
 saints and martyrs of whom we sing : 
 
 They climbed the steep ascent to heaven 
 
 Mid sorrow, care, and pain ; 
 O God, to us may grace be given 
 
 To follow in their train. 
 
 And yet scarcely a voice is raised in Christendom 
 (outside the Society of Friends) on their behalf ; in 
 fact, the defence of the conscience has been left 
 largely to Quakers and Agnostics, whilst official 
 Christianity has declared on behalf of the war, as 
 it always has done on behalf of all war since that 
 fatal day in the history of Christianity when Con- 
 stantine established the Christian religion as part 
 of the State machinery of Government. 
 
 I have brought the war in here because it seems 
 to me important in this chapter to show the attitude 
 of the churches towards Ci force as a remedy for 
 international wrong,'* and to compare it with the 
 attitude taken up by those same churches toward 
 the great social class war which curses the whole 
 civilised world. During my life-time there have 
 
96 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 been innumerable labour disputes, lock-outs, and 
 strikes ; but on scarcely any occasion do I remember 
 the leaders of the churches coming out and defi- 
 nitely taking sides. It is true that in the first great 
 London dock strike, nearly twenty years ago, the 
 late Cardinal Manning and Bishop Temple, 
 together with some leading Nonconformists, came 
 out with a demand for a conference and arbitration, 
 and by the influence they exerted were able to 
 secure for the docker the 6d. per hour minimum ; 
 but, so far as I recollect, there was no great uprising 
 of Christians on the side of the worker, and this 
 has been true all through the railway, coal, and 
 transport strikes. All I remember of the ''Chris- 
 tian '" attitude towards these are sermons and 
 articles written by learned Divines telling the 
 workers to moderate their demands, and to give 
 up using such terrible methods as those of the 
 strike. When I appealed to the archbishops and 
 bishops during the Dublin strike, and during other 
 labour disputes, they always declared that the 
 business of the church was not to take sides, but to 
 remain neutral, because it was impossible for the 
 church to know which side was right. 
 
 In the case of international war it is different. 
 When Protestant is killing Protestant, and 
 Catholic killing Catholic, the religious leaders of 
 Europe, with the exception of His Holiness 
 the Pope and some leading Quakers, do 
 take sides, and each claims that God is on 
 
CHURCHES 97 
 
 the side of his particular nation in the terrible 
 struggle. It may be that people who are 
 against all war are wrong, but the leaders 
 of Christendom cannot have the best of both 
 worlds. They cannot teach the workers to 
 love their masters, to put their trust in religion 
 as a means for fighting social wrong; they cannot 
 deprecate the use of force and violence by the 
 workers against their masters, and then defend 
 bloodshed and violence when these are undertaken 
 at the bidding of Governments against each other. 
 Besides this, during time of strike, children, 
 women, and men are killed by order of the Execu- 
 tive. Hull, Liverpool, Featherstone, Dublin, 
 Belfast, Llanelly, and Tonypandy, to say nothing 
 of Johannesburg, are all places which labour will 
 remember, while memory remains, as the towns 
 and cities where unarmed people were shot down 
 by order of the Government when striving for 
 freedom. 
 
 It may be said in reply to me that religious 
 organisations which oppose the present war 
 have mostly been indifferent to labour's fight 
 for better conditions. I quite agree that this is 
 so, and I want to urge the Society of Friends and 
 other pacifists to remember that social conditions 
 create social and class wars, and working for peace 
 must mean not only international peace but peace 
 at home in our ordinary and everyday life. All 
 Christendom is guilty in so far as it tolerates evil 
 
98 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 conditions and does little or nothing to try and 
 improve them. The point is that the Church can- 
 not have it both ways. If it is right in taking sides 
 in war, it cannot be right in refusing to take sides 
 in labour conflicts : let it take sides in war by all 
 means if it really feels that compatible with the 
 teaching of Christ, but then let it be logical and 
 take sides in labour conflicts too. 
 
 There may be special circumstances about the 
 present war which make it different from all others, 
 but the organised exponents of religion have sup- 
 ported all wars within my memory. A faint voice, 
 here and there, as now, has feebly protested; but 
 in the main the wars of the past sixty years have 
 all been blessed by the followers of the Prince of 
 Peace, and all the strikes, all the efforts of labour 
 to organise itself, have been opposed. The labour 
 struggles have been, if not frowned upon, at least 
 left alone. The churches, when not hostile, have 
 been benevolently neutral towards the employer. 
 A bishop whom I respect very much said the other 
 day that there were some disputes in which it was 
 a sin to be neutral, in which Christians must take 
 sides. He was speaking of the attitude of neutral 
 nations, particularly of America, towards Germany 
 in the present war. When I read the report of this 
 speech I could not help wishing it had been pos- 
 sible to tell him that practically all Christendom 
 had for centuries been either neutral or hostile to 
 the workers in their great struggles for freedom, 
 
CHURCHES 99 
 
 and that the failure of the churches \vas entirely 
 due to this one fact. Indeed there has been no 
 great popular movement for social equality which 
 has not been bitterly opposed by the organised 
 churches. The churches profess to believe 
 in and to teach brotherhood, love, and co- 
 operation. The mass of humanity pays little or 
 no heed to their message, because it believes the 
 leaders of the churches do not believe what they 
 say they believe. I spoke recently at a great 
 National Mission meeting in the North of Eng- 
 land, where I tried to express the thought that our 
 Lord intended His teaching to be acted upon, to be 
 lived up to, and that we who profess to be 
 Christians must find some means of bringing this 
 about. A clergyman followed me with a witty, 
 clever speech in which he tried to drive home the 
 fact that in his opinion the church could and should 
 lay down great principles, but must never attempt 
 to say how these principles should be put into prac- 
 tice. In the same speech he defended the war as a 
 war of righteousness. This speech distressed me, 
 not because of the support given to war, for I think 
 I do understand the point of view of Christians 
 who support the war; but it seemed to me such 
 an extraordinary theory that the church should 
 be considered worthy to lay down great principles 
 of life and conduct, but should not be considered 
 worthy to tell us how to apply these principles. 
 It is sheer cowardice and fear which make the 
 
ioo TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 church, in its corporate capacity, such a helpless 
 organisation when social questions have to be dealt 
 with. Drunkenness is a terrible scourge, brought 
 about by a variety of conditions, but made possible 
 because some people want to make money out of 
 the trade. Prostitution is a social evil, bringing 
 in its train mental, moral, and physical death; it 
 is aggravated by the double standard of morals 
 as shown in the divorce laws, by sweating and bad 
 housing. All these are things which the church 
 never attacks in anything like a determined 
 manner. Occasionally a bishop or a clergyman, 
 more daring than his colleagues, will speak out 
 against these evils; but in the main the church is 
 silent. The reason is not far to seek. The money 
 for maintaining churches and chapels comes very 
 largely from rich men and women who benefit 
 materially because of bad social conditions. The 
 church I was married in was paid for by money 
 given by a brewer. A few months later it was 
 burned to the ground, having been opened for 
 service less than two years. I stood in the crowd 
 that watched its destruction, and people were say- 
 ing it was a just retribution on the church for 
 taking money from such a trade for the purpose of 
 church-building. 
 
 It is very well known to the clergy how money 
 is made, how fortunes are amassed, and how their 
 own positions are maintained, and it is this which 
 makes them hesitate to take sides. Yet if they 
 
CHURCHES 101 
 
 would but follow the example of Christ, they 
 would denounce all of us who are whited 
 sepulchres, destroyers of widows' houses, spoilers 
 of the people. It is courage they lack, and there 
 is no hope for them, no likelihood of their message 
 being accepted, until in the strength of their 
 Master they do take sides on the great moral issues 
 involved in the social class war. It is impossible 
 that the people should believe in the sincerity of 
 those who are only able to see the justice of a great 
 international war, who can see the wickedness of 
 the Germans in sinking unarmed ships and 
 destroying thousands of innocent men and women, 
 but who cannot take sides in the great social war 
 against destitution and prostitution, sweating and 
 all the other evils of our day. Germany may slay 
 her thousands of innocent victims, but the com- 
 petitive system, the get-rich-quick race for wealth, 
 the " buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest " 
 theories of life, all find expression in a national life 
 which can count its victims by the million. And 
 yet the church dare not take sides ! Do you, 
 reader, understand that in a strike the women and 
 children of the workers are starved just as surely 
 as if they were inhabitants of a beleaguered city; 
 that their cries often fall on deaf ears, because, 
 forsooth, the church must not take sides, must not 
 have an opinion of the great moral issue involved 
 in all labour disputes? My contention is that if 
 organised Christianity can take sides on such 
 
102 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 questions as those involved in a great war it must 
 also be able and willing to understand and take 
 sides on these great questions of life and conduct. 
 What a travesty of true religion all this 
 clerical cowardice and apathy is! But, alas! 
 how in keeping with the official traditions of 
 that organised religion which refused to help 
 Wilberforce in his struggle to free the slaves nay, 
 which, in many cases, actively opposed his cam- 
 paign and which, in our day, has stood passively 
 by whilst men and women have been thrown into 
 prison and tortured by forcible feeding and other 
 brutal means of persecution ! Facts like these 
 stamp the church and its work with ghastly 
 failure. It would not be right for me not to 
 acknowledge the splendid work which rebels 
 within the churches have done on behalf of God 
 and the people, from the days of the early fathers 
 until now, but the work of men like John Ball has 
 been crushed by the dead weight of the episcopacy. 
 A generation ago Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes, 
 and others made a great effort to stir the con- 
 science of the church. In our own day, Stewart 
 Headlam, Conrad Noel, Lewis Donaldson, and 
 their fellow-priests of the Church Socialist League 
 have done magnificent work, striving to make men 
 and women realise that serving God and belong- 
 ing to the society of Christ's people on earth in- 
 volves something more than the repetition of 
 words and phrases and lip-service. In other 
 
CHURCHES 103 
 
 churches, too, individual men and women have 
 upheld the literal truth of the teaching of Christ, 
 and have pleaded for its practical application to 
 the problems of life only to find themselves 
 isolated and alone. 
 
 Yet they have never really been alone, for to 
 them, as to every true disciple of Christ, the 
 promise of the Master is true : " Lo, I am with 
 you alway, even unto the end of the World." 
 And that is the message and promise for us all. 
 Leaders may fail us, the churches may fail in 
 carrying the gospel message in all its fulness to the 
 h arts of the people, but the message is finding 
 its way home in other ways. The common people 
 through their own efforts are finding their way 
 back to God, and are realising every day what are 
 the things in life that really matter. And all 
 those who love England, who love Humanity, 
 should range themselves alongside the great army 
 of labour, that army of men and women who are 
 marching towards the light, who gain inspiration, 
 courage, and hope from a firm and unswerving 
 faith in the solidarity and brotherhood of all man- 
 kind, and who to-day are hungering and thirsting 
 for a fuller life. It is said that on the scaffold Sir 
 Harry Vane declared : " The people of England 
 have long been asleep ; when they waken they will 
 be hungry." We might well say the same thing 
 to-day. Our people have again been asleep for a 
 long time, and they are once more waking to find 
 
ic 4 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 themselves hungry. They will not find their food 
 and their satisfaction in the worn-out theories of 
 competition and beggar-my-neighbour commer- 
 cialism ; but, instead, they will discover their 
 greatest incentive to life and effort in the teachings 
 of the great masters of religion. They are dis- 
 covering that religion is not merely a matter of 
 creed, but a matter of life and conduct also, and 
 that though churches have failed, science and 
 scientific men have failed also. Some day 
 there will be a great revival, w r hen all the 
 religious leaders of the world will come to- 
 gether and proclaim the unity of all life, of 
 all religions that have a message of brotherhood 
 and goodwill. When that day comes we shall 
 learn that we cannot serve God by means of strife, 
 that we cannot establish God's Kingdom on earth 
 by mutual slaughter. We shall, indeed, discover 
 the utter impossibility of serving God and the 
 Devil, and the futility of trying to cast out evil by 
 evil. Chief of all, \ve shall realise that love and 
 love only is the thing that matters; that perfect 
 love to God and man will enable us to cast out 
 fear, and will give us courage to fight the good 
 fight, will give us faith and confidence in the ulti- 
 mate triumph of right over wrong; and this, after 
 all, is the true work of all the churches. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 WHAT WE MUST DO 
 
 WHAT then must we all do in order 
 that we may take our part in abolish- 
 ing the evil conditions of life which 
 surround us, and establishing a saner and more 
 honest state of society ? There is no royal 
 road or short cut to social salvation. Neither 
 will Governmental machinery and organisation of 
 itself accomplish our purpose. What we must 
 first decide is our own attitude towards life. Do 
 we wish that other men and women should enjoy 
 the same opportunities that we desire for ourselves 
 and those belonging to us, and, if so, are we of 
 opinion that it is our duty to work in order that this 
 may be secured ? In the old-fashioned orthodox 
 Christian religion great stress is laid on the neces- 
 sity of " conviction of sin "; that is to say, on 
 the necessity for men and women to con- 
 vince themselves of their own wrong-doing. 
 I think that in some ways this is an 
 excellent doctrine, and I should like to see it 
 expressed in regard to social and industrial 
 matters. We must all clear our own minds of cant 
 and be quite honest with ourselves as to the means 
 whereby we secure our daily bread. None of us 
 should be content until we know the why and the 
 
 105 
 
106 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 wherefore of our incomes, until we have traced 
 them right back to their sources and convinced 
 ourselves of the rightfulness or wrongfulness of 
 our money-getting. No one can manage this for 
 us. We can take advice from people, and can 
 try to get knowledge from others, but once the 
 facts are before us, it must be our own judgment 
 that decides what is right or what is wrong for 
 each individual man and woman. If we are con- 
 vinced that the means whereby we live come to us 
 in an honest and straightforward manner, and 
 that taking usury and profit-making are true and 
 right methods of living, there is not much more 
 to be said. But if we decide for ourselves that profit- 
 making and usury are evils which enable some of 
 us to live at the expense of others, then our duty is 
 quite plain : that is, to assist by every means in our 
 power in destroying the system which gives to us 
 so great a material advantage over our fellows. 
 
 There is a school of people who say that we 
 ought to go on making money because, unless we 
 do, others will make it, and that if we beggar our- 
 selves we do not improve the social position at all. 
 This may be true to some extent, but, all the same, 
 it is also true that if men and women fill up their 
 time simply money-making, no matter what they 
 may call themselves, or what opinions they may 
 hold, they are exactly in the same position as 
 people who support the present order. Therefore, 
 those who are convinced the present methods of 
 
WHAT WE MUST DO 107 
 
 money-making are wrong are called upon to live 
 in the simplest manner, and to devote every hour 
 of leisure and every penny of money they can 
 spare to assisting the workers in their task of 
 organising the transformation of the present social 
 order from competition to co-operation. 1 say this 
 because so many people imagine that they have 
 really done their duty when they have denounced 
 the present order as iniquitous, while others think 
 they have fulfilled their duty when they have dis- 
 tributed large sums of money, either in charity 
 or for similar purposes. It may still be that for 
 many years to come the victims of our cruel social 
 life will need to be tended by those whose minis- 
 trations are paid for out of funds provided by the 
 rich ; but this, after all, is only palliating evil, 
 and not abolishing it. To-day, those workmen who 
 are thinking are determined to abolish the causes 
 of poverty, and wish to establish an entirely new 
 social order. This may be accomplished by a 
 violent and bloody revolution (or, at least, men 
 may attempt this), though I do not believe the 
 use of force will accomplish the social salvation 
 of mankind. It is so true " Force is no remedy ' 
 that I cannot help believing that with the spread 
 of education and the growth of religion we shall 
 cease to rely on the mailed fist in both social and 
 national affairs. Men and women belonging to 
 the landed and capitalist classes who really care 
 for their fellows must join hands with the workers, 
 
io8 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 and by united effort establish the kingdom of 
 brotherhood and of co-operation. Those who are 
 convinced that the present order is unchristian 
 and, in fact, unnatural must take their place in 
 the great working-class movement. 
 
 This movement does many things that we all 
 feel are hurtful both to itself and to society. That 
 is only because the working class does not, as a 
 class, yet know either its strength or what it wants. 
 In the vast majority of cases working-class dis- 
 content is quite unorganised, and is but the ex- 
 pression of a righteous wrath against conditions 
 which often are well-nigh intolerable. All the 
 same, though, it is a good rule to remember that 
 the workers are so often right and so seldom wrong 
 as to make it, on the average, quite the wisest thing 
 to stand by them all the time. Their enemies are 
 never slow to put them down, and, consequently, 
 I would urge every man and woman who wants 
 really to change things to get into the working- 
 class movement. At first people of a different 
 class may be received with suspicion and distrust, 
 but if they are not self-seekers, if they go into the 
 movement asking for nothing, but willing to give 
 all they have to give, whether it is brain power or 
 merely material resources, they will very soon find 
 that a place will be made for them and their help 
 cordially welcomed. 
 
 But what the working-class movement less and 
 less will tolerate is patronage from anyone. So 
 
WHAT: WE MUST DO 109 
 
 many superior young men and women try to join 
 it in order to direct and control it. These usually 
 end by becoming Government bosses in one form 
 or another. The main thing for us all to bear in 
 mind is that, in joining the labour movement or 
 in supporting it, we must be prepared to become 
 just one of the people. This necessity always 
 reminds me of the saying that unless we become 
 as little children we cannot enter the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. Such is the attitude of mind which 
 should dominate our relationships with one 
 another ; that is to say, we must have the mind of 
 little children in that our words and actions must 
 carry conviction because people understand that 
 there is nothing more behind them than they 
 are intended to convey. This is true of little 
 children ; we know what they mean because of 
 what they say ; and it must also be true of men 
 and women who want to be in the labour 
 movement. There have been too many men 
 and women who have used the movement to 
 become what are called leaders and so on, and 
 that is not what middle-class people should go 
 into the movement for. They should join in 
 order to be part of it, all the time keeping steadily 
 in mind the fact that true democracy means people 
 thinking and doing things for themselves, and 
 that the word democracy does not always 
 guarantee that those who use it are themselves 
 true democrats. Any who join or who are willing 
 
no TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 to support the labour movement must be pre- 
 pared for disappointments and disillusionment. 
 The working classes are just like the rest of the 
 people, liable to fits of depression and fits of 
 elation. All the same, the salvation of humanity 
 must come by and through them. The better 
 educated, the more moneyed, can help to stimu- 
 late and train them, but this must all be on im- 
 personal lines. The labour movement must stand 
 for the whole of the people ; and the present 
 method, by which social settlements, workers' 
 educational societies, labour colleges, no matter 
 who controls them, select out and train just a few 
 of the working class, can only be regarded as quite 
 temporary measures. Meanwhile, even to the men 
 and women who are educated and trained in these 
 establishments, the object of such education and 
 training must always be that they may be better 
 servants of the working classes, not better masters, 
 not even better leaders in the sense of desiring to 
 be something more than the rest of their class. In 
 fact, we have all to take the workers as human 
 beings, and those who have the best kind of brains 
 must be content to give their brains for the service 
 of the others. 
 
 No one to-day considers it right that because 
 a man is physically stronger than his neighbours 
 he should be allowed to rob or ill-use them. 
 Physical force used in that way has long been 
 looked upon as something anti-social and evil, but 
 
WHAT WE MUST DO in 
 
 we have not yet reached the point when we can 
 say that brain-power shall not be exercised for 
 personal gain only, and this is just what I think 
 we have to get to. We have to make clever people 
 understand that their brains should be used im- 
 personally, and for the service of the whole com- 
 munity, and to create such a public opinion as will 
 make us all realise that it is just as dishonourable 
 to exploit our neighbours by the use of our brain- 
 power as it would be to exploit them by use of our 
 physical power. Further, those who want to help 
 the labour movement must come into it in the 
 spirit of comradeship, and without expecting to 
 do more than give themselves to its service ; and 
 in doing so they must strive to understand how 
 the labour movement proposes to work out its 
 salvation. It is impossible for me to do more than 
 just to indicate a few of the things which labour 
 needs to get done now ; none of us expect that by 
 a stroke of the pen or by some sudden action we 
 shall change from a competitive to a co-operative 
 State. And in judging what I propose I would 
 urge my readers to bear in mind that often the 
 most simple things are the most important and 
 the most far-reaching in their effects. People often 
 * refuse to take part in simple movements because 
 these are apparently dull and uninteresting. The 
 business of a Trade Union branch meeting or of 
 any labour organisation is sometimes very unin- 
 teresting; but it is in these meetings that the best 
 
ii2 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 
 work can be carried through, because in them men 
 and women get to understand one another's point 
 of view, and are also able to think out and organise 
 their plans of campaign. I say this because I 
 think it is so important that we should get out 
 of our minds the idea that mere law-making, or 
 even administration of law, is an effective means 
 of bringing about great changes. It is, as I said 
 a little way back, a change of mind that is so 
 much needed. To explain what I mean I would 
 call attention to the old story to be found in 
 the Old Testament about Naaman the leper. 
 This man, suffering from leprosy, went to a 
 prophet of Israel to find out a cure, and was told, 
 in effect, to go and wash himself, to cleanse his 
 sores. It was a perfectly sane and sensible sug- 
 gestion, but it was so simple and so obvious that 
 the great Captain of Syria was inclined to feel him- 
 self too big and mighty a personage for it. And 
 this often happens in modern life : distrusting the 
 simple and obvious, we rush off with our 
 apparently big ventures, and are disappointed at 
 the end to find they have led nowhere. It is 
 because of this that to-day the workers have 
 decided (at least those of them who are thinking 
 about vital things) that their first aim and object 
 in life should be to educate themselves, not that 
 they may the more easily compete with one 
 another, but that they may use their education and 
 brain power in order to establish a truly co- 
 
WHAT: WE MUST DO 113 
 
 operative system. They are demanding the full 
 control and ownership of their life and work. 
 They desire that the nation shall own land and 
 other means of life, and that these shall be used 
 by the workmen in partnership with the State. In 
 effect, the workers must, if they are to get any kind 
 of control of their lives, join together in great in- 
 dustrial unions or guilds, representative of par- 
 ticular industries, within which guilds a brain- 
 worker and a hand-worker shall organise side by 
 side and, in contract or partnership with the 
 nation, carry on the work of supplying the nation's 
 needs. 
 
 I can only give one instance of how I think 
 this would work in practice, and I do so, not be- 
 cause I shall be able to fill in all the details even 
 in one instance, but because I want to express in a 
 rough sort of way what I mean by national owner- 
 ship and organisation and control by the workers. 
 Those who wish to know more about this cannot 
 do better than read " National Guilds," by 
 A. R. Orage, or " The World of Labour," by 
 G. D. H. Cole; or they might write to the hon. 
 sec. of the National Guilds League, Mrs. 
 Ewer, 17, Acacia Road, N.W. For my 
 purpose I would ask you to consider what 
 would happen if the mines of Britain were 
 owned by the nation. These mines would 
 have to be worked. The proposal is to form a 
 miners' guild, or a guild of coal-workers, including 
 
n 4 YOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 all persons engaged in the industry, and these 
 would determine, through delegates or by any 
 other means they might choose, the rates of pay 
 which the community should pay for the getting 
 of coal. But all the workers within this industry 
 would share and share alike in the product. There 
 would be no such thing as salaried persons and 
 wage-earners. The total reward of the labour 
 engaged in the production of coal would belong 
 to the whole of those who assist in whatever way 
 in that production. They would elect their own 
 organisers and determine their own hours and fix 
 their own holidays, and so on. No one would be 
 allowed to work in this industry who was not a 
 member of the guild, and the whole organisation 
 from beginning to end would be under the control 
 of the guild. It will be at once noticed that equality 
 in the sharing of the wealth produced would 
 abolish once and for all the present practice 
 of giving huge salaries and profits to a few 
 and a mere subsistence wage to the mass 
 of the workers. In addition, the guild being 
 " blackleg "-proof, there would never be any 
 " blacklegs " to undersell or undercut the price of 
 labour. 
 
 It is argued against this that the miners would 
 be able to dictate their own terms to the rest of the 
 community, but this difficulty is more apparent 
 than real, because each industry is really dependent 
 on the others, and that fact would prevent the one 
 
WHAT WE MUST DO 115 
 
 industry from striving to exploit the others. 
 Exploitation, moreover, would not enter in, 
 because, once industry was organised on these 
 lines, there would be more than sufficient for all. 
 We must all realise that the nineteenth century, 
 with its enormous development of machinery and 
 scientific invention, has settled the question of 
 production. We can produce all we desire. It 
 remains for the twentieth century to find an 
 equitable method of distribution. Incident- 
 ally, in the case of mines, another question 
 would be settled. Coal-mining is an industry in 
 which the wages of those engaged vary consider- 
 ably. It is true that a minimum wage of a sort has 
 been fixed for the whole country, but there is great 
 discrepancy in the maximum amounts that miners 
 can earn. Coal-mining is coal-mining wherever it 
 is carried on, but the fact that there are thick seams 
 in some parts of the country and thin seams in 
 others, added to the fact that there are different 
 methods of working, tends to bring about varia- 
 tions of remuneration. Now, in the guild system, 
 when all share alike, methods would be improved, 
 and the natural value of one mine would be 
 matched against the lesser value of another mine, 
 and the workers and the community between them 
 would thus secure all the advantages which the pos- 
 session of minerals gives to the land. 
 
 There is the further fact that in this particular 
 industry, as is well known, many more labour- 
 
n6 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 saving devices would be employed and better 
 arrangements for preventing accidents would be 
 adopted if the industry were organised as a social 
 service on co-operative lines. It is the profit- and 
 dividend-making business which prevents these 
 matters from being dealt with. It may be urged 
 that labour-saving machinery introduced into the 
 mines would necessitate people being discharged, 
 but this would not be so. Instead of discharging 
 workpeople the guild would reduce the hours of 
 labour of all the workers in the industry which is 
 the true use to which machinery should be put. 
 Machinery is only of service to the community 
 when it is used to lessen labour or to give a better 
 supply of the things needed by the nation. 
 
 This, then, is what the forward school of Trade 
 Unionists are demanding for all industries. It is, 
 in effect, the abolition of the wages and profit 
 system ; and it is this proposal that I earnestly beg 
 those who desire to bring about a complete change 
 in our spiritual and social life to support. I trust 
 no one will allow personal interests to blur his or 
 her mind and conscience. We do wish to get rid 
 of rich monopolists because we also want to get 
 rid of the poor, but no one will suffer. The nation 
 can, if it will, effect this great change in our 
 social relationship without hurting any one. Al- 
 ready we are, as a nation, organising great in- 
 dustries for purposes of war, have destroyed busi- 
 nesses, broken up and ruined homes, wiped out 
 
WHAT WE MUST DO 117 
 
 in many cases the whole life's savings of men and 
 women. All this in order to win the war against 
 Germany. No sacrifice, we are told, is, or will be, 
 too great. Surely we will all make an effort to de- 
 stroy social evil, surely we are able to see that co- 
 operative production and distribution is a finer, 
 nobler, and more Christian social order than the 
 present chaotic competitive struggle which robs 
 children of life and well nigh destroys the morale 
 of us all. To change our present methods means 
 injury for none, but a better life for all. There 
 are many other things that we can help forward in 
 the labour movement. There is the whole great 
 question of what we are to do with our land. All 
 through my public life I have felt the sinful- 
 ness, the crime against society, which the mere 
 fact of landlordism entails. Men of my age who 
 have seen great areas of London cleared at the 
 public expense, who have seen parks and open 
 spaces created and paid for by the people, and 
 even in this process used for the enrichment 
 of those who own land, cannot but be struck with 
 the fact that so far the great land monopoly has 
 gone untouched. I see no means for dealing 
 effectually with the land question as a whole except 
 by making all those who wish to use land pay, not 
 to private individuals, but to the State, for the 
 use of such land. Some places are more desir- 
 able to live in than others, some pieces of land 
 will give a better return than others, and this ex- 
 
n8 TOUR PART IN POFERTT 
 cess value indeed, all forms of " site values" 
 should always come into the national exchequer 
 in one form or another. 
 
 The only proposal at present for dealing with 
 this problem is the taxation of land values, and 
 that appears to me to be a perfectly legitimate 
 means of raising revenue. Whatever system we 
 are living under, if any of us wish to enjoy some- 
 thing which it is impossible for others to enjoy, 
 we ought to pay either in extra service or in some 
 other \vay for the privilege. Henry George, when 
 he called attention to the land question thirty 
 years ago, was on perfectly sound ground. We 
 cannot hope for a reformed society if land remains 
 private property and all the value which the pres- 
 sure of population gives it goes into the pockets of 
 private people. This is another form of profit- 
 making which has to be somehow put right. To 
 travel through the United Kingdom these days 
 and to use one's eyes is to become aware that to 
 a large extent our country is unpopulated. The 
 war is making us understand this and is making 
 us also understand how dependent we are on other 
 nations for our food and other things needed for 
 our subsistence. The progressive workman is 
 asking himself with a very bitter insistence how 
 it is that he and his should be cooped up, in the 
 great cities (yes, and in the tiny villages too), in 
 little bits of houses \vith scarcely room to breathe, 
 whilst all around him are hundreds of thousands 
 
WHAT: WE MUST DO 119 
 
 of acres of land practically unused, and great 
 parks, with walls and railings surrounding them, 
 used only for the pleasure and convenience of just 
 a handful of people. 
 
 Therefore on this question we should all unite, 
 and push forward the solution of it with all the 
 force of which we are capable. 
 
 There are two other questions with which I wish 
 to deal in this chapter. The first is that of political 
 power. I am convinced that the first thing for 
 the workers is to recognise their economic power, 
 and for this reason. All forms of production have 
 changed; individual production is practically non- 
 existent, and co-operative production is now an 
 absolute necessity; but at present that which is 
 co-operatively produced is privately owned, and 
 the object of the workers is to substitute co-opera- 
 tion both in production and in distribution, and 
 to establish the right of those who produce to own 
 everything they produce. Therefore, I have put 
 economic questions first, but, to obtain possession 
 of the land and to obtain possession of the rail- 
 ways and other means of life, we shall need 
 political power, and this political power should be 
 in the hands of women as well as men. 
 
 I believe that the grant of citizenship to all 
 adults, men and women, from the age of twenty- 
 one, would be one of the most far-reaching reforms 
 possible, and would establish the working class 
 with a status that would enable them to take a 
 
120 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 much more intelligent interest in their affairs than 
 now. The difficulty that we are in with regard to 
 this question is the fact that for so long sex 
 domination has been rampant in the civilised 
 world ; but this is slowly being overcome. Some 
 millions of women now have the vote for the elec- 
 tion of the President of the American Republic; 
 many thousands of women voted in the Australian 
 Commonwealth on the question of conscription ; 
 so the enfranchisement of w r omen to the extent of 
 allowing them a voice in what are called Imperial 
 and international affairs is not a novel proposal, 
 but is actually in operation. 
 
 Our country cannot for much longer lag 
 behind. When it is remembered that men and 
 women are equally interested in the organisation 
 of society and industry, there seems no reason for 
 denying women equal status as citizens. On 
 international questions and questions relating to 
 war no argument is needed. It is the women of 
 Europe in every belligerent country who, in their 
 breasts, are bearing the main burden of sorrow 
 and suffering entailed by the frightful slaughter 
 and loss on every battlefield. Those women who. 
 in Belgium, Poland, Serbia, and now 7 Roumania, 
 have seen their homes and their belongings de- 
 stroyed by the devilish business of blasting a way 
 through any of the parts of Europe cursed by the 
 presence of war, have clearly established the right 
 of women to vote as to whether such things shall 
 
WHAT WE MUST DO 121 
 
 or shall not be. Besides, if anything else is needed 
 to convince anyone of the justice of women's 
 claims, you have only to remember that, as in 
 international affairs, so in national affairs, women 
 are the biggest sufferers from our unchristian 
 and devilish form of society. They suffer most 
 from unemployment, sweating, low wages from 
 all the social evils which afflict our land. Those 
 who seek to redeem humanity and intend to use 
 political machinery must support in every way 
 possible the claim of women to political enfran- 
 chisement and citizenship. 
 
 The other, the last thing of all, that I wish to 
 mention is the matter of children. Long ere this 
 our children should have been freed from work of 
 any kind. In a civilised nation a child's playtime 
 ought to be its best time. The driving of 
 children to work half-time in mills and factories 
 is acknowledged by all thinking persons as a 
 great social evil. I suppose all my readers will 
 have heard that the Bantam Battalions are mainly 
 recruited from Lancashire, where women work in 
 the factories and children work half-time. There 
 must be some connection between the low stan- 
 dard of physique and conditions of child life. 
 We must abolish the half-time system and tell 
 the capitalists, and those who support the system, 
 that any business which depends on the robbery 
 of our children's birthright is not worth preserv- 
 ing. We must insist that the age for leaving 
 
122 YOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 school shall be raised to sixteen, and that from 
 sixteen to eighteen every child shall be trained 
 for such work as he or she appears most fitted for, 
 whether it be hand or brain work. What this 
 will cost we need not stop to consider. The war 
 has demonstrated our ability to raise and spend 
 money for destruction ; we must not be put off by 
 any thought as to the money -cost of construction. 
 The one chief thing to do is to insist that children 
 shall not be used as machines for mere money- 
 making, but shall be taken out of the competitive 
 labour market, where so very often they are used to 
 bring down the standard of life and destroy not 
 only their own future but the whole standard of 
 living for their parents. 
 
 There is much more to be said on these and 
 kindred subjects, but I have written, I hope, 
 enough to stimulate thought amongst those who 
 desire to help in the work of social reconstruction. 
 In conclusion, may I ask all my readers to keep 
 in mind the one central thing I have tried to insist 
 upon all through this book? It is just this, that 
 we all need a complete change of heart. I do not 
 mean this only in the old religious sense, though T 
 think the expression is quite the soundest that 
 can be used. We have all been so accustomed 
 to think along personal lines, so accustomed to 
 imagine that our own good could not at the same 
 time be our neighbour's good, that we have 
 drifted into the position we are in to-day. When 
 
WHAT WE MUST DO 123 
 
 I say that it is a change of heart that we need, I 
 mean an entire change of outlook. We must get 
 it out of our heads that there is not enough wealth 
 for all men, women, and children. We must get 
 rid of the idea that either an individual or a 
 nation can be benefited by using its power 
 to dominate others. The futility of this has 
 been proved beyond dispute; the class war and 
 the great international war both demonstrate the 
 fact. For all this we must not be discouraged. 
 None of us are able to see all the good or all the 
 evil there is in the world. We can see what 
 appears on the surface, but all down the ages 
 men and women have been striving to reach 
 forward to the day when, the world over, we 
 all shall live in peace and harmony with one 
 another. Through all time there have been those 
 who have dreamed dreams and seen visions, who, 
 because of their visions, have given hope and 
 courage to the common people. We, too, must 
 dream our dreams and see our visions of a nobler 
 order yet to be : we must look beyond to-day 
 and see the future. This humanity, of which 
 we are part, is capable of fine and noble things. 
 The records of history are full of the stories of 
 what men and women have done, and what has 
 been done in the past can certainly be done over 
 again. 
 
 Just now we can see around us how much 
 sacrifice people are making, how much they nre 
 
i2 4 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 giving up, in the great effort to destroy the 
 Germans. It is the spirit behind this effort which 
 we want to put into the work of destroying evil in 
 our midst. We need all the enthusiasm, all the 
 sacrifice, all the grit and determination that the 
 men who are fighting in Europe have shown, 
 but we shall have this satisfaction all the time, 
 that the things w y e are striving to destroy are evil 
 conditions, not human life. 
 
 The war on the Continent and the class war at 
 home are horrible, and they are unnatural and in- 
 human, and the very fact that we are all ashamed 
 of the conditions which cause them, and excuse 
 and seek to palliate them, proves that this is so. 
 Mankind has turned its face from God, says a 
 Hindu writer: and this, of course, is true, just 
 as it is untrue to say that God has turned His face 
 from the world. 
 
 I have faith in the common people. There has 
 been plenty of disillusionment in my lifetime, 
 but, in the main, I, like every other man and 
 woman who is working amongst the people, 
 know quite well that, given the chance, the mass 
 of people always respond to the best that is put 
 before them. It is not a bit true that human nature 
 is necessarily ugly or brutal or destitute of 
 idealism. Just before the war multitudes of 
 young men and women were engaged in the 
 labour and suffrage movements. These two 
 movements were working to a large extent hand- 
 
WHAT WE MUST DO 125 
 
 in-hand, and the enthusiasm which both called 
 forth came from the young people. Those with 
 whom I came in contact and who formed the 
 *' Herald League " were just young rebels fighting 
 for a great impersonal ideal. Few of them had a 
 clear-cut scheme for social salvation, but all of them 
 had a very clear-cut idea of what they wanted to 
 accomplish. It was liberty, fraternity, comrade- 
 ship which they were setting before themselves. 
 Some of these men you will find on the battle- 
 fields of France, called there by the cry of 
 Belgium ; others you will find, equally honourable, 
 in the prisons of our country, flung there be- 
 cause some of the older men who rule us do not 
 understand what the word conscience means. 
 And it is these who will come back when the war 
 is over and form the vanguard of the great army 
 of men and women who are going out in another 
 kind of war the war against poverty, crime, and 
 sorrow. Comfortable, well-to-do people may 
 stand aloof, may refuse to assist or take part, but 
 the truly religious men and women, those men 
 and women who believe in the unity of life and 
 the one-ness of the great human family, the old 
 and the young, the rich and the poor, w r ill step 
 into the ranks, and will take their place as soldiers 
 in this great army, and will be content to work 
 and organise and to give all they have to give, 
 in order that the end may be reached. To some 
 this will mean sacrifice of material things, to 
 
126 TOUR PART IN POVERTY 
 others it will mean the sacrifice of place, of privilege 
 and power; but to the true man and woman that 
 will not count as of any importance if by their 
 sacrifices the great movement of human solidarity 
 may be helped forward. 
 
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