PRECARIOUSNESS. T HE Bishop of London, whom we are greatly disposed
to respect for a certain masculineness of thought, said last week in an address to the Co-operative Congress at Peter- borough that he believed the first cause of discontent in this country—he meant, we fancy, the first cause of corroding care—was the precariousness of occupation. Men knew that their incomes might disappear from causes beyond their own control, and sometimes beyond their understanding, and their lives were poisoned by a care of which no efforts of their own - could make them clear. If Dr. Creighton was thinking, as he probably was thinking, of the kind of men who can appreciate co-operation, who invest in co-operative societies, and who understand all the benefits the system can confer, his remark was, we believe, entirely just. From the higher class of artisans, upwards almost to the top of the pro- fessions, among all kinds of business men, and, in fact, throughout all the grades of those whose incomes are not solid, this form of care is the grand disturbing force which im- pairs serenity and intercepts enjoyment. However prosperous they maybe, they all know that an attack of illness, a temporary loss of mental power, a fluctuation in popular taste, sometimes even an outside occurrence like a mercantile panic or a far distant war, may bring upon them what is practically ruin. The small shopkeepers, of whom there are such numbers, dread
• loss of business, the little people who live by salaries fear loss • of occupation, the struggling professionals shrink from those &calm which constantly recur in the work that flows to them, with a dread which hardly any other apprehension pro- duces in their minds. Indeed, they feel no other. They have in this country no fear of being wronged ; they never, as the clergy complain, think about death at all; and they are free from the terror of sickness, except as a pecuniary terror, to an extent which is often the despair of bygeists and sanitary reformers. These latter can frighten anybody more easily than hose who are earning livelihoods, finding their disciples, in fact most readily amang the idle and the well-to-do. The depth
of the feeling varies, of course, with individual temperament; but all until they are "safe" feel the pressure of pecuniary care to some extent, and with a considerable proportion it is the preoccupation of their lives. It is this which gives to every employment under the State a value which often sur- prises the dispensers of patronage, which induces lawyers apparently prosperous to accept County Court judgeships, and which develops such fierce rivalry for even poor "appoint.. ments " if only they are for life, or carry a right to pensions. "I should never sleep," said a poorly paid inspector of schools in our hearing, as he declined four thousand a year, dependent upon professional chances ; and he spoke the inner feeling of thousands, who would yet acknowledge that they were probably unreasonable. They have a sort of horror even of prosperity, if it seems to them "precarious," akin to the horror with which a whole class of educated men regard investments in which there is any element of uncertainty. Some of them are pessimists, others are aware of hidden weaknesses in their frames or their minds, and others, again, are shrewd calcu- lators, but they all long for a kind of tranquillity which while their pecuniary future is open to chance they can never enjoy. "What on earth," a leading professional man was recently asked, "should make you want that appointment? Tort must be making five times that salary." "So I am," was the reply, "bat I distrust my throat ; " and that is but one of a thousand distrusts which take from the educated who have to work the sense of calm, and often, especially if they are women, destroy half their capacity for exertion. It takes such a long time to save anything; the saved money nowa- days produces so little ; and the hostile chances are so many, so invisible, and so difficult to fend off.
If, however, Dr. Creighton intended his remarks to apply to the handworkers in this country, he was, we believe, only partially correct. It is true that as education advances, and consciousness is more fully developed, the form of care of which he was thinking tends to become much blacker and more acute. The best artisans often feel it like a confirmed melancholy, and at about fifty, the philanthropic societies tell us, it rages in grades of labour far below theirs. They know how the new demand for picked men threatens them, how reluctant employers are to give work to grey hairs, how nearly impossible it is for a mature man or woman, once thrown out of the groove, ever to get back into it again without accepting reductions which destroy the whole amenity of life. The little shopkeeper who once fails in his rent has for the rest of his life to live a shopman,—that is, in his own eyes, to be sent down the ladder. The clerk who is once dismissed has usually to regain a post by consenting to a reduction of one-third. Domestic ser- vants, who of all classes in the country are most the prey of poor relations, are often literally almost maddened by pecuniary care, which, according to temperament, makes them cantankerous, induces them to drink, or develops in them the apathetic doggedness which employers frequently set down to want of " willingness " in their work. The number who feel like this will, we believe, increase with in- telligence; education enlarging anything rather than the capacity of happiness ; but the majority in England are still free of this kind of care. "I'm a bolder man than you, Sir," said a labourer to his master; "1 dont spend my last farden, and you dursen't." He never looked forward at all, but went on from week to week quite content if he was three days ahead of the world, and not much troubled if he was three days behind it That is the permanent tone of millions in Great Britain, of three-fourths of all agricultural labourers, of two-thirds of all unskilled men, and of perhaps half of all artisans well under fifty years of age. Want of means may vex them, but true care, the care which has fox foundation a vague dread of the future, does not worry them at all. They think no more about possible pauperism than they think about death, regard extreme thrift, thrift like that of a French peasant, as a sign of a mean mind, and reject advice to save, not only as too difficult—which it often ia- but as having in it something akin to cowardice. The strong- bodied labourers, miners, navvies, sailors, and fishermen—though the last vary greatly with locality— look down on a man who saves as somehow wanting in a virtue, and much too unsocial for the best kind of charac- ter. They have a pluck about pecuniary things—courage is too big a word—which seems to philanthropists detest- able, but which has something fine about it too, and which certainly helps to keep energy alive. Discontent is not the vice of these men, but rather content, and a callous way of disregarding the suffering which their want of apprehension often brings upon their women and their children. They will never be helped by co-operation, nor, we fancy, with all respect for the Bishop of London, will the class which really feels pecuniary fear. Co-operation has many recommendations, it cheapens goods, and distributes profits fairly, but we do not know that it gives more security than any other form of invest- ment. The man with a good balance in the Savings Bank is as safe as the co-operator, and therefore as free from care. We should rather look for the removal of care to an increase of arithmetical intelligence, and a consequent spread over a broad area of the habit of insurance. It would not be impossible, if a whole town would accept the facts of insurance as a town sometimes accepts, say, anti-vaccination, to diminish greatly, or even abolish, pecuniary precariousness ; and we rather wonder that, with the existing rage for philanthropic work, no " Society " has yet tried to establish such a system. Its managers would have to employ lecturers in numbers, pre- ferentially women, and would find themselves constantly sus- pected of trying to rob the poor; but if they were coldly clear in their statements, and gifted with the untiring perseverance which is exhibited by the agents of some of the profit- seeking societies, they would succeed at last, and they might accomplish untold good. At least they would accomplish it, if indeed it be a good to diminish pecuniary fear, of which proposition, when in a meditative fit, we are not quite so sure as the Bishop of London. That fear is a very effective whip, and the majority of men, we fear, need whipping to make them do anything effectual. In that land of Cockaigne where roast chickens fly about crying "Come, eat me," there would be little industry ; and whether work is a curse or not, it strengthens character, as the habit of wearing clothes—which is equivalent to living in training to carry weight—strengthens the frame. We need not, how- ever, consider that doubt just now. It is a little too academic. Happiness and misery depend mainly upon our inner consciousness of gladness or of melancholy, and as things are now we agree with Dr. Creighton that there is not too much happiness in our English world, and that if we could diminish the general sense of pecuniary precarious- ness the quantity would be materially increased.
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