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[-353-]
CHAPTER XLVI
CONCLUSION
Education - Curtailed liberty - Englishmen abroad - Workers v. Shirkers - Old-time wisdom - Quo vadimus?
IN my first chapter I said that in many respects things are
not to-day what they were sixty years ago, and that it is open to doubt whether
all changes have been for the best.
The sun rose and set on each day of those six decades and
between each rising and setting it would usually have been difficult to perceive
any alteration on the previous twenty-four hours. But inappreciable differences
nevertheless occurred, and cumulatively they amount to-day to something very
formidable. In fact, one is tempted to suspect that the nation has changed
fundamentally.
Old fogies are reputed, and often justly, to be incapable of
recognising improvements and to think that the country must necessarily be going
to His Apollyonic Majesty when views and things they have been brought up to are
replaced by new-f angled notions and devices.
That may be my case. I may be wrong, and sincerely trust that
I am, but present-day developments and syznptoms seem to furnish forth no
inconsiderable causes for disquietude as to the future of England, Great Britain
and the Empire.
Let me, with many humble apologies to the genius of the
twentieth century, set down some of my misgivings. A few only, for a treatise
would be required to touch upon them all.
Item the Engishman's education is defective.
It will scarcely be denied that the mainspring of a modern [-354-]
civilisation is education. If that be weak or flawed development must be
arrested and distorted.
To those who remember with what joy and bright hopes free
education was looked forward to in the 1860s - what wonderful results were
predicted - how much nearer it was bound to bring us to the Millennium - the
results in 1924, after fifty-four years' application of the grand specific,
must, I fear, appear extremely inadequate if not entirely disappointing. In
modern phraseology, "the goods have not been delivered."
That is not, however, the fault of good Fairy Education, but
of the grotesque masks and faces in which she has been doomed to mum. The lamp
of knowledge has certainly been lighted, but its combustion is imperfect and it
gives off soot as well as light.
It must not be thought that there was no free education prior
to 1870. I have referred to National Schools and Ragged Schools at Greenwich,
but it was not there alone that they flourished. In 1858 there were 160 Ragged
Schools in London and very many more in the provinces-splendid monuments to the
good cobbler John Pound of Portsmouth who first devised and established them.
And there were free Church of England Schools also, and probably some maintained
by other denominations, but of this last item I will not be sure.
These free schools were supported by voluntary contributions
and collectively accommodated many thousands of scholars. The subjects taught
were not numerous, perhaps, but they were those really required by the future
pawns on the Chess-board of Life - the three Rs, with outlines of geography and
history. Singing of hymns and glees received attention and the whole flavoured
with a strong admixture of the Bible. And lectures on straightforward conduct in
life, fair play, etc., were not wanting. In addition, promising boys and girls
were often taught at least the smatterings of a trade, so that on leaving school
they might become something more than explorers of blind alleys. Free meals were
in many instances given to the poorer pupils and, in bad cases, free clothing.
[-355-] So, prior to the
inauguration of State Education, there was free schooling in England for all
willing to accept it, and parents unable to pay the charges of proprietary
schools had still a chance for their little ones. The efficiency of these
private establishments may not have been great, but the few subjects taught were
well rubbed in. Unfortunately, compulsory attendance not having been decreed,
many children were kept at home, and it was these unfortunates who later in life
figured in the statistics as unable to read and write. Had attendance at some
school or other been made obligatory, and moderate, not Draconic, supervision
set up a system giving good practical results might conceivably have been
evolved.
This old plan produced workers, and so responded to the needs
of Country and Empire; the existing system gives us every year a great army of
incipient ladies and gentlemen, too proud to perform their natural parts as
subordinates and yet, in great measure, too imperfectly educated to become
anything but mere hewers and drawers. Games of cards (or life) cannot be played
with packs that are all aces and kings, nor games of chess without pawns.
Strange as the fact may appear, workers are as indispensable as queens in every
bee-hive. A crew entirely of officers is a noble aspiration, no doubt, but it,
like the 1924 British bricklayer, won't work.
And at what a cost is this delusion pursued? Of the bounding
school-rates, potent restrainers of trade and enterprise, a very large
proportion is expended on behalf of persons able - and often exceedingly well
able - to educate their offspring. A sensible community would not allow this:
such children should not be received at public schools except in return for fair
payment. The system is unjust to the deserving, for it results in classes of
unmanageable size and consequent poor and scamped instruction.
We have been trying to teach too much-more subjects than any
but the brightest could. hope to master, and to impart them to every grade of
intellect. And some of these subjects are such as cannot be of much practical
use to ordinary boys or girls about to earn their own living. If [-356-]
these things could be properly learned and retained the issue might be
different, but the vast majority of children acquire them so superficially that
six months after leaving school they remember nothing about them.
And for such subjects essentials are neglected. English is so
badly taught-if at all-that very many pupils, after passing all the standards,
can neither speak nor write with even an approximation to correctness. Yet they
are farcically taught French.
And tuition as to conduct in life; duty to country, society
and one's neighbour; what constitutes good and honourable conduct, would appear,
from my inquiries, to be entirely neglected. Such things in the modern
curriculum are re- placed by singing and dancing. And no teaching is forthcoming
on the organisation of modern civilised life-the constitution and functions of a
Parliament, a Government or a Town or County Council-so that boys and girls walk
about and grow up in a world of which they know nothing. A lad certified as
having passed all standards in a London Council School, applying for employment
as office boy, being asked if he knew who the Lord Mayor was, confidently
replied, "the gentleman who gives the big show." Not long since a
leading newspaper instanced girls leaving school with "excellent knowledge
of graphs and square roots, but unable to do housework." And what, in very
many cases, do these accomplishments lead up to and end in? Jazz.
Drastic reform is surely called for. Children of different
intellects should be sifted into their natural classes at a very early stage and
the curriculum adapted to their capacities. The bright ones should be led on and
no effort spared to develop their aptitudes. Let no George Stephenson be lost
through lack of encouragement. But attempt not to make a Stephenson out of a
Quasimodo.
The inferior grades of intelligence should only be taught the
most essential subjects - the old National School programme substantially - but
taught it well. Moral teaching and information about the world, the land and the
town they live in, should be given to all, preferably through the medium of
lectures conceived in an entertaining spirit.
[-357-] An engineer using the
same grade of iron or steel for all purposes would soon come to grief: yet that
is, in effect, what most School Authorities are doing; and, in my opinion, they
have come to grief. When their gentlemen graduates go to Canada or Australia -
colonies largely built up by the exertions of the men of the 1850-60s - they are
too soft or too lazy to work. They are not wanted on the farms, and are avoided
by the colonists. So they either loaf about the towns or come home - perchance
as stowaways - and take their unemployment doles. Only recently I heard that
English were avoided from such widely-separated places as Adelaide and Toronto.
It is very different, however, with boys and girls sent out
by Dr. Barnardo's and kindred institutions. But their education has been
practical, and not on County Council cum Oxford and Cambridge lines.
And the mountain of sins of commission and omission is now
liberally added to by the Proletarian Sunday-schools, in which religion,
patriotism, morality, everything rendered sacred by the practice of the last
2,000 years, is openly derided. Londoners have erected a statue to good Robert
Raikes, founder of Sunday-schools. Were it vocal, like that of Memnon, how it
would groan! "Lugubrious, at the setting of the sun!"
Item: Englishmen are not so free as they were.
Police regulations and offences have multiplied; new laws and
by-laws been enacted; tax-collectors given authority to conduct inquisitions
into a man's business and even private affairs; Trade Unions interfere with the
individual's right to work and the amount and manner of his work: so, in effect,
the Briton's "mean free path" - to use a technical expression - is
considerably more circumscribed and his factor of self-determination notably
reduced. The stage of the German Verboten has not been reached, but may
be discerned looming on the horizon.
Another curtailment of liberty is involved in the destruction
of individuality due to the extension of large companies and businesses. Instead
of striking out independent careers, beginners now have to become clerks,
shopmen, or what not [-358-] in some colossal
establishment where they obey orders and have no opportunity to originate or
improve. A vast fund of that initiative for which our race is famed and which
founded our Colonies and Empire thereby becomes submerged and lost.
For this reason railway grouping is much to be deplored, for
it extinguishes the efforts of many able men to solve transport problems,
engineering and otherwise, for the benefit of their companies and their own
credit. Most of these officials now become subordinates, existing only to carry
out the plans of the few high chiefs whose jobs will probably prove too big to
be attended to properly. Much talent hitherto exercised to good purpose will be
sent to sleep. Standardisation - itself a fetter on invention - will be applied
as a specific but in an ever-progressive art like the railway service cannot
attain any permanent success, for after a time improvements will have to be
neglected because the mass of the stock will have become old-fashioned and yet
be of too much value to be scrapped.
Item: Englishmen, instead of being respected in foreign
countries, are generally contemned.
In the 1850-60s an Englishman abroad was somebody. I
can scarcely contend that every man-Jack of them was born with a patent of
nobility as a cad, but certainly at that period, and considerably later,
Englishmen enjoyed a prestige amongst foreigners unequalled by any other
nationality. "Natives"of every clime - from Germany to Java or Japan -
hastened to accord him the status of a gentleman, in the best meaning of the
term. His word was accepted as current cash and justice was supposed to haunt
his Dundreary whiskers. This was occasionally embarrassing. As a lad I was
sometimes put out by the deference shown as soon as my nationality became known.
Even in France, where, as I have noted, England, her army and politics, were not
popular with the masses, individuals were always polite and often more. In 1869
I inquired of a fat Frenchman in Marseilles the way to the Post Office. As I
spoke he took off his tall hat (the charm of my accent probably!) and with it in
his hand walked to the corner of the next [-359-]
street and profusely indicated the route, afterwards bowing himself out of
sight. And in 1866, at Ghent, a Belgian, learning I was English, forced me to
accept a cigar, nipped and lighted and all. I shall never forget that!
In 1870 I used to be touched by the confidence expressed by
Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Persians, Beloochees and what not, in the Burra Raj
- Great Government. The Crimean War was still green and Englishmen in Turkey
were everywhere respected. Had not our Government rejected the Euphrates Valley
Railway concession which the Turks literally threw at their heads, Mesopotamia
would have become a British preserve automatically and willingly many years ago.
Even Greeks, Rumanians and Hungarians of those days considered it an honour to
be noticed by a Briton. And now!
The Euphrates Valley Railway scheme to connect the
Mediterranean with the Persian Gull was investigated and reported favourably
upon by a Select Committee in 1872. Many distinguished men sat on the Committee
and appeared as witnesses before it. The Turks offered the necessary land for
the line gratis and to grant free transit for all British mails and troops:
likewise to assign us a half share in the management. Allowing £75,000 as
yearly value of services to be received, the maximum liability for the British
Exchequer according to the plan recommended a 3% guarantee on the capital of the
projected Railway Company - was estimated at £225,000 per annum. Although the
Indian authorities strongly pressed for the railway, Mr. Gladstone's Government
pigeon-holed the Report, and thereby wrote themselves down moles for ever. A
disastrous mistake which was a factor in bringing about, and extending the area
of, the Great War and caused us dreadful sacrifices in vain efforts to redeem
it. And the end is not yet.
The mid-Victorian had his faults, and not a few, but it is to
be feared that it fell to him to see the British Empire at its zenith.
Item: Englishmen are not so earnest.
Sixty years ago life and work were taken more seriously. Men
shouldered their burdens energetically, not always [-360-]
without grumbling perhaps, but generally with the wish and will to
perform creditably and do both themselves and their employers justice. Skulkers
were apt to be ostracised by their mates. A bricklayer restricting himself to
300 bricks per day would have been tolerated by neither master nor man. Although
things have improved vastly for the working classes, their progress has not kept
pace with the growth of their murmuring. If content be a measure of happiness,
then were the people of sixty years since far better off than those of to-day.
In the Life of Thomas Brassey, the great contractor,
we read of the great pride taken by the English navvy in his work, and how it
paid to employ him in France and Italy at twice the remuneration of the native
worker. An observer in France wrote: "I think as fine a spectacle as any
man could witness is to see the digging of a cutting in full operation, with
about twenty wagons being filled, every man at his post, and every man with his
shirt open, working in the heat of the day, the gangers looking about and
everything going like clockwork."
Frenchmen who came to the railway cuttings in course of
excavation attracted by the reputation the navvies had won for themselves, cried
"Mon Dieu! Les Anglais, comme ils travaillent!" Alas! in
1924 the position is quite reversed, and it is the Frenchman who scores.
I have referred to the refusal of the London, Brighton and
South Coast Railway directors, on the occasion of the strike of 1867, to concede
the men's demands that engine-men, once appointed, should obtain the maximum pay
of their grade. The directors pointed out that that would place all, whatever
their capacity, on the same level and ultimately be bad for the men themselves,
and for that reason the demand was rejected.
But the maleficent concession was granted a few years back,
and in 1922, at a discussion of experts at the Institution of Locomotive
Engineers, it was declared that the evils foreseen have duly come to pass.
Most railway companies provide classes for the training,
instruction and improvement of their engine-men, but it is [-361-]
now found that, since all must be treated alike, only a few care to
attend them. One speaker said, "Since the new conditions of service came
in, that in six years the men automatically attain the highest rate, they just
sit tight until they get it." Thus the duller obtains the highest pay and
the cleverest can do no more. When the men get off their engines they want to go
to football matches, not classes, and, what is perhaps worse, are not ashamed to
say so.
The effect in the long run cannot but be disastrous from the
efficiency point of view, and signs are not lacking that the spell is already
working.
During the last few years there have been several bad
accidents in which, reading between the lines of the Government Inspectors'
Reports, there were indications of either gross incompetence or very complete
indifference on the part of the engine-men, running-shed mechanics and others.
Brassey's navvies belonged to the race of Empire Builders;
the latter-day workmen rather to that of Empire smashers. As I write Essex
farmers and others are complaining that they cannot obtain labourers, as men who
work get less than the unemployment dole paid to those who do not.
Item: Luxury and laziness succeed thrift and industry.
Sixty years ago, and indeed for long afterwards, ideas of
thrift, diligence, application, were inculcated everywhere and the wisdom of
putting by for a rainy day enjoined. Every child was familiar with Dr. Watts's
couplet-
"How doth the little busy bee
Improve each
shining hour?"
and -
"'Twas the voice of the
sluggard!
I heard him complain-
'You have waked me too soon,
I must slumber again.'"
And the texts these afforded were used to good purpose in forming children's
minds.
Such teachings produced the artless folk who took pleasure in
fountains and fireworks and Lord Mayors' shows; crowded in tens of thousands to
hear a preacher and were ever ready [-362-] to
fight three Frenchmen. No doubt the maxims were right enough for the period, but
we have got far ahead of such simplicity. Legislation and thrift now repel each
other.
Item: Quo vadimus?
I am not complaining that things are no longer what they were.
That would indeed be in vain. Change is the unvarying law of all human kind,
human institutions, as well as of the globe which constitutes their theatre and
the "galaxy of heaven" through which it whirls. And empires are no
more exempt from its operation than other works of the human ant.
There were features that no one wants restored. Sixty years
ago hours of work were long, factories often insanitary, safety of toilers
disregarded, employers exacting, remuneration inadequate: evils that cried for
remedy and against which Trade Unions were entitled to fight strenuously and
prevail and good men to protest, as Charles Dickens did in his Hard Times.
These unfavourable conditions nevertheless had their uses.
They brought good men to the front-men bred to hardship and against hardship and
odds prepared to battle.
Prairie dwellers cannot be expected to become good climbers.
It requires obstacles, and formidable ones, to foster a race of mountaineers.
In all ages conquerors have emerged from places where the
natives, after prolonged war with Nature, have ended by turning their
poverty-tempered arms against peoples effeminated by civilisation or climate.
Hannibal and his hordes, after subduing the Alps, succumbed to the enervations
of Italy; Byzantium yielded to the desert Arab; Rome itself to the Gaul, the
Goth, the Vandal and the Hun.
Consider the case of the pushful Scotsman, product of a
country poor in itself, harried for centuries by foreign foes. He had to fight
whether he would or not. Chronic penury in time evolved the corrective habits of
earnestness, thrift and diligence, the impulse of which still persistent,
although showing pregnant signs of exhaustion, enables him to score plentifully
off the softer and more careless Southron. We laugh at his "bawbees"
and " saxpences" oblivious [-363-] of the
stern lesson they carry with them; but had he been blessed (?) with a rich and
fertile country and the Englishman inconvenienced by a sterile one, conditions
would have been considerably reversed. Very conceivably Alec and Angus would be
contemned to-day as sybarites and ne'er-doweels, and the natives of Kent and
Devon notorious for close-fistedness and dourness. There is some advantage in
being born close neighbours to an Ice Age.
Spain furnishes another example. For 700 years the Moors had
to be faced and fought; the Prince and the peasant equally trained to arms. When
at last the barren mountains of Castile and Aragon prevailed over the enchanting
plains of Andalusia, and the Moors were defeated and removed, the Spanish nation
was a camp of gallant and toughened soldiers under dauntless chiefs. Cortez and
Pizarro conquered the Americas; then gold flowed up the Guadalquivir, and soon
the phase of fighting-to-live was succeeded by one of living-to-dally: result,
the degenerate Spain of the last 300 years.
All of which is in harmony with Charles Darwin's portrait of
Dame Nature - Cruel, ruthless, effective, decreeing the Survival of the Fittest,
and seeing that she gets it. And the law is as true of nations and kingdoms as
of Nature.
Empires cannot go on for ever, nor, having reached their
limit, stand still at that point. Perpetual motion is their doom - upwards or
downwards!
At what point in the flight, then, stand we of Britain?
I cannot say. There have been so many occasions when England
has been brought up standing and yet ultimately forged ahead again as if nothing
particular had happened that one is encouraged to believe that danger is her
element, and that fortune will again mend when apparently at its worst. We have
ever excelled as back-to-the-wall fighters, and mayhap some great chief will
arise and retrieve the position. That is what we must earnestly hope.
That there will be plenty of retrieving to do seems
abundantly evident. We find ourselves much in the position of decadent Rome.
Indeed, in some respects, the parallel is surprising. The Caesars carried on by
free doles of grain [-364-] (John Bull gives hard
cash) and other necessaries; by hocussing the people with games (we substitute
votes) and gladiators (our people are encouraged to waste their time watching
football). Ultimately the Romans could not be induced to submit to military
service; the eagles had to be withdrawn from distant territories and resort made
to the ruinous device of placating the Empire's enemies while deserting and
sacrificing its own loyalists and friends.
All this is happening with us to-day.
We are no longer the earnest England of the Great Exhibitions
of 1851 and 1862. And beyond everything lies the fact that many nations will in
the future be our keen competitors in production of every kind, so that, even
should a great revival of patriotism and common sense occur, and all classes
combine to reassert the national position, the effort will have to be made in a
world of bitter commercial rivalry and price-cutting in which there will be no
room for short hours, high wages, ca'canny and doles of the merry-go-round
order.
Meanwhile, the good ship Britannia, with helm adrift
surges amongst the rocks, the officers engaged chiefly in scheming to displace
their rivals; the crew one hail on strike and the other hail thinking they ought
to be; the passengers mostly dancing the hornpipe; the few who refrain, well,
what can they do? Only doubt and hope.