When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago,an ingenious writer,humorously describing himself as a Liberal,said that they were entirely due to the hot weather.The suggestion was eagerly taken up by other creatures of the same kind,and I really do not see why it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable uprisings in history.Thus,it is a remarkable fact that the weather is generally rather warm in Egypt;and this cannot but throw a light on the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from captivity.The English strikers used some barren republican formula (arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen),some academic shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for a wage accepted by them.Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt employed some dry scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of making bricks with nothing to make them of.But whatever fantastic intellectual excuses they may have put forward for their strange and unnatural conduct in walking out when the prison door was open,there can be no doubt that the real cause was the warm weather.Such a climate notoriously also produces delusions and horrible fancies,such as Mr.Kipling describes.
And it was while their brains were disordered by the heat that the Jews fancied that they were founding a nation,that they were led by a prophet,and,in short,that they were going to be of some importance in the affairs of the world.
Nor can the historical student fail to note that the French monarchy was pulled down in August;and that August is a month in summer.
In spite of all this,however,I have some little difficulty myself in accepting so simple a form of the Materialist Theory of History (at these words all Marxian Socialists will please bow their heads three times),and I rather think that exceptions might be found to the principle.Yet it is not chiefly such exceptions that embarrass my belief in it.
No;my difficulty is rather in accounting for the strange coincidence by which the shafts of Apollo split us exclusively along certain lines of class and of economics.I cannot understand why all solicitors did not leave off soliciting,all doctors leave off doctoring,all judges leave off judging,all benevolent bankers leave off lending money at high interest,and all rising politicians leave off having nothing to add to what their right honourable friend told the House about eight years ago.
The quaint theoretic plea of the workers,that they were striking because they were ill paid,seems to receive a sort of wild and hazy confirmation from the fact that,throughout the hottest weather,judges and other persons who are particularly well paid showed no disposition to strike.
I have to fall back therefore on metaphysical fancies of my own;and Icontinue to believe that the anger of the English poor (to steal a phrase from Sir Thomas Browne)came from something in man that is other than the elements and that owes no homage unto the sun.
When comfortable people come to talking stuff of that sort,it is really time that the comfortable classes made a short summary and confession of what they have really done with the very poor Englishman.The dawn of the mediaeval civilisation found him a serf;which is a different thing from a slave.He had security;although the man belonged to the land rather than the land to the man.He could not be evicted;his rent could not be raised.In practice,it came to something like this:that if the lord rode down his cabbages he had not much chance of redress;but he had the chance of growing more cabbages.He had direct access to the means of production.
Since then the centuries in England have achieved something different;and something which,fortunately,is perfectly easy to state.There is no doubt about what we have done.We have kept the inequality,but we have destroyed the security.The man is not tied to the land,as in serfdom;nor is the land tied to the man,as in a peasantry.The rich man has entered into an absolute ownership of farms and fields;and (in the modern industrial phrase)he has locked out the English people.They can only find an acre to dig or a house to sleep in by accepting such competitive and cruel terms as he chooses to impose.
Well,what would happen then,over the larger parts of the planet,parts inhabited by savages?Savages,of course,would hunt and fish.That retreat for the English poor was perceived;and that retreat was cut off.
Game laws were made to extend over districts like the Arctic snows or the Sahara.The rich man had property over animals he had no more dreamed of than a governor of Roman Africa had dreamed of a giraffe.He owned all the birds that passed over his land:he might as well have owned all the clouds that passed over it.If a rabbit ran from Smith's land to Brown's land,it belonged to Brown,as if it were his pet dog.
The logical answer to this would be simple:Any one stung on Brown's land ought to be able to prosecute Brown for keeping a dangerous wasp without a muzzle.
Thus the poor man was forced to be a tramp along the roads and to sleep in the open.That retreat was perceived;and that retreat was cut off.
A landless man in England can be punished for behaving in the only way that a landless man can behave:for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey or on a seat on the Embankment.His sin is described (with a hideous sense of fun)as that of having no visible means of subsistence.
The last possibility,of course,is that upon which all human beings would fall back if they were sinking in a swamp or impaled on a spike or deserted on an island.It is that of calling out for pity to the passer-by.That retreat was perceived;and that retreat was cut off.A man in England can be sent to prison for asking another man for help in the name of God.
You have done all these things,and by so doing you have forced the poor to serve the rich,and to serve them on the terms of the rich.They have still one weapon left against the extremes of insult and unfairness:that weapon is their numbers and the necessity of those numbers to the working of that vast and slavish machine.And because they still had this last retreat (which we call the Strike),because this retreat was also perceived,there was talk of this retreat being also cut off.Whereupon the workmen became suddenly and violently angry;and struck at your Boards and Committees here,there,and wherever they could.And you opened on them the eyes of owls,and said,"It must be the sunshine."You could only go on saying,"The sun,the sun."That was what the man in Ibsen said,when he had lost his wits.
