[-132-]
CHAPTER XII. [sic, ed.]
DOSS-'OUSE POLITICS.
MOST of the dossers talk politics - and such politics. They are, as a rule,
amazingly and amusingly ignorant of even notorious facts, and circumstances that
are in every one's mouth. They remind one of the famous epitaph on Sir Nathaniel
Wraxall, " Men, measures, seasons, scenes, and facts all, misquoting,
misstating, misplacing, misdating." The orator at Cooney's is a fair sample
of the man who discusses politics in a doss-'ouse, and if there could be
anything more remarkable than their ignorance, it is the strained attention with
which such oracles are listened to by their companions. The natural result of
the circumstances amidst which these men live is that they lose, to a large
extent, whatever intelligence they may once have possessed, that their faculties
become blunted, and that they arc far less able to express themselves on topics
of political or general interest than an ordinarily sharp fourth-standard boy in
a Board School. Blue-gown, for example, had only one idea in regard to what he
called "them bloomin' pollertics." He wanted to marry the Baroness
Burdett-Coutts, in [-133-] which event, he said, he
should be able to reform the common lodging-houses. He said this in all sober
seriousness, and he is not the only man I have met in these places with ideas so
childish. Those who do talk serious politics in a sensible fashion, generally
discuss the fair-trade heresy, and I am bound to say that I never, during all my
experience of the doss-'ouses, heard a single man who had a good word to say for
our system of free imports. This made a remarkable impression on me; for,
opposed to them as I was, I could not fail to notice that every man who had
formerly occupied a good position ascribed the stagnation in trade which had
ruined him to Free Trade as understood and practised in England. Even those most
strongly prejudiced in favour of our present fiscal system cannot but ponder
over the fact that so many of the poorer class attribute all their misfortunes
to it.
But the particular phase of doss-'ouse politics to which I
wish to call attention is one which I venture to believe constitutes a growing
danger to the State; namely, the strong predisposition of the vast majority of
the dossers in favour of that militant socialism which leads to revolution.
These men are discontented, and many of them have reason;
but, as is well known, for every discontented man in the country who has a real
grievance, there are a score who have none. And all are equally dissatisfied.
They pass their days in the streets, where they see wealth, property, and
accumulated treasure, which they may envy but dare not hope to
[-134-] share. They come home in the evening to the loathsome place in
which they are to spend the night, a den reeking with dirt, and breathing with
horrible mephitic odours. Then they ponder over social inequalities; they brood
upon their undoubted wrongs; they exaggerate their grievances; they forget or
condone their own misconduct or mistakes; and they become, not unnaturally
perhaps, enemies to a constitution under which they suffer such hardships, and
to which they mistakenly ascribe their evil lot. This accounts for the number of
men who sit apart from the rest of their companions in the lodging-houses,
silent, moody, discontented; pondering over their real grievances and
aggravating them by dreaming of imaginary wrongs. Draw one of these men into
conversation, and in all probability he will first declare that he is condemned
to live in squalor and misery because he has no vote, and then he will proceed
to inveigh against our present social system, and express a pious aspiration for
the advent of the day of reckoning between the "classes" and the
" masses."
The times are specially favourable to the growth of such a
spirit. If a man whose feelings have been wrought upon in the manner I suggest
goes out on a Sunday morning, he has dinned into his ears from the street
corners the pernicious doctrines of an impracticable Socialism. If he opens a
newspaper he reads of conspiracies against the existence of law and the
possession of property in every quarter of the globe. The Anarchists in America,
the Nihilists in Russia, the Socialists in Holland, Belgium, France, and
Germany, [-135-] and, nearer home, the Fenians in
Ireland, are all engaged in the same war. He hears dim and vague accounts of
what the Revolution in France was like, and how the sans cullotes endeavoured
to hasten the millenium there. And he is the sans cullotte of England.
His discontent grows, and determination to do something - it scarce matters to
him what - grows with it.
Of course there are a number of people who will pooh-pooh the
existence of this state of things. "No one would ever be so discontented or
fatuous as to attempt to cause a revolution in England. There is no danger, or,
at all events, not for our day." Ah, there it is "After us the
deluge." The old selfishness that allowed similar and greater evils to grow
in unhappy France until at last the deluge came roaring and rushing and sweeping
down with it all that was worthiest and best as well as all that was meanest and
worst.
But are we so secure? Does the position of affairs in
our own country and abroad justify such confidence. In America, those who know
assert that the industrial war - the struggle between capital and labour - has
only just commenced. In Germany, political passion is seething and hissing, and
may any day boil over. In France, financial difficulties may at any
moment precipitate a crisis. And here in England the terribly prolonged
industrial depression is our great foe, and should any of the other catastrophes
hinted at occur, that depression may be so far intensified as to constitute a
formidable danger.
[-136-] We have not been
without warnings. When last winter a brutal mob rushed through the streets and
looted the shops of the West-end, most people said it was the work of roughs and
larrikins whose only object was plunder. They grievously misunderstood the
facts. Many - nay most - of the men who took part in the riots of that day came
from the low lodging-houses, and though the majority perhaps were actuated
solely by cupidity and greed, there was many a stern, determined man there who
believed that in plundering and destroying he was merely executing the righteous
wrath of starved, oppressed, and discontented labour against harsh, bloated, and
unsympathetic capital.
Next winter the doss-'ouses will be fuller than ever, for
trade seems to be going to the bad faster than before, and men are thrown out of
work by scores every week. If the winter be long and hard, men will "clem,"
women will wail, and children cry for bread. If the winter be dark as well as
long and hard, men may try to avoid "clemming" as they did last year,
but on a larger scale. To wish that the men who dwell in common lodging-houses
might be contented, would be to wish them devoid of every quality, every
thought, every aspiration that raises them above the brutes. To deny the
existence of their grievance is to enhance its intensity. To admit its existence
and do nothing to remedy it, is to give just cause for the growth of discontent
and for any means that discontent may take to proclaim itself.
It may be - pray Heaven it may be - that something [-137-]
will be done, and speedily. If so, my object will be achieved, and I can
only trust that whatever means may be taken to secure the amelioration of the
condition of those unhappy ones whose lot I have endeavoured to depict, may be
successful.
It may be, on the other hand, that this terrible abuse may be
allowed to grow and spread like a foul, festering ulcer. What may happen then,
who knows? We can only be guided by what has happened in other lands where the
just complaints of the poor have been ignored, and their cry for justice and for
pity has been unheard. It may yet be so in England. Should we elect to go on in
the old rut, strong in the consciousness and the confidence of our own wealth
and power - wealth and power which in this connection constitute our
greatest danger, because they contrast so bitterly with the poverty and weakness
of those who plead for help unheard-it may be that we shall be harshly awakened
and cruelly disillusionized; that before very many years have flown we shall be
compelled to read in haggard, wolfish faces, robbed of every tender or human
expression, to hear in hoarse cries of menace, ay, even of lawless triumph, that
lesson that has been so sharply taught in other lands than ours-that what might
once, not long since, have been Reform, has grown and swelled and gathered force
and volume until the torrent can no longer be stemmed, and we are confronted by
REVOLUTION.