THE PRIVILEGE OF PRIVACY.
THERE is a popular superstition current among us to the effect that an Englishman's house is his castle, and that he is free to live in it after any fashion that may please him beat, provided, of course, that he does not transgress against any of the laws of his country or trespass upon his neigh- bour's comfort or liberty. He may screen himself as much as he likes from the supervision of those neighbours, disre- gard all their overtures of friendship, withdraw from their converse, and live, if it pleases him, the life of a hermit in the midst of a crowd. That, at least, is the theory upon which is founded our boast that of all countries England is the most free,—the one country in which the individual is at perfect liberty to live his own life after his own pleasure, in which he owes nothing to his fellow-countrymen, not even his military services, and in which his religious, political, and personal opinions concern no one but himself. It may be the case among the rich—to a certain extent it undoubtedly is— but among the poorer classes it is to be feared that that liberty is very far to seek. A pitiful story was told the other day in a Coroner's Court of Bristol, which illus- trated in a very painful manner the utter want of freedom which the poor accord to each other, and the cruel oppression which is inflicted by the masses upon those unhappy in- dividuals who live with them but are not of them. A poor girl killed herself last Saturday by throwing herself from the top of the sea-wall into the Gorge of the Avon, a distance of more than 250 feet. The manner of her death and the letter which was found upon her showed clearly that she had com- mitted suicide in a fit of temporary insanity ; but the letter, in spite of its wild and incoherent language, was that of an educated person, and the passionate complaint of persecution that it contained seemed likely to have some foundation in fact. The coroner was moved to ask whether there was any reason to suppose that the girl's mind had become unhinged by such trouble, and was told by a witness, a clergyman, that it was only too probable. " Her family," said this gentleman, " had certainly been subjected to a great deal of personal annoyance. All the annoyance arose simply from the fact that the deceased and her family would not mix with the people of the neigh- bourhood. The family had known better days,"—a simple statement, which threw a piteous light upon the unhappy girl's letter. " I have done my best," she wrote, " to keep my home together, and to be at peace with my surroundings. I
have given my neighbours no wilful offence ; that is what they cannot truthfully say of their bearing towards me." The family had known better days. They felt themselves to be of different stamp to the people around them, and struggled " to keep to themselves." That is the unpardonable sin in a certain rank of life. The attitude betokens a certain pride, which is bitterly resented by those who possess it not. As this poor victim said, she had not wilfully given cause of offence ; but the offence of which she was unconsciously guilty was the one which, in her neighbours' eyes, it was impossible to forgive. To do them justice, it is most im- probable that they had the slightest idea that their persecution was hunting their victim to her death ; it is also more than possible that they were people who lived on friendly and kindly terms with each other, even while they were banding themselves together in this cowardly persecution, and that, in carrying it on, they were simply obeying the dictates of what was to them almost a natural law. The claws, in the fable, fell upon the unlucky daw who borrowed the peacock's plumes, and speedily stripped it of its finery. The instinct is certainly one that exists in animals, and is not unknown among men Let them only fancy that one of their own number rejoices in borrowed plumes, and in an instant all hands are raised to strip them off.
It is difficult to realise what this want of individual freedom means among the poor. They do not live as the richer classes do ; they are fenced in by no conventional guards to their privacy, and have no protection against intrusive curiosity. They need no formal introduction to give them the right of dropping into a neighbour's house and spying upon their neighbours' affairs. They need but little encourage. ment to gossip about those said affairs with another neighbour, and to spread their knowledge abroad. The poor have no privacy; that is the privilege of the rich and the well-to-do. It is, perhaps, a certain consciousness of the blessing which is denied to them that makes them so bitter in their resentment when any member of their own class arro- gates to himself a right to enjoy it. It is not only their wounded pride which is up in arms, nor their suspicious dis- trust of reserve and secrecy, but the angry conviction that this man is enjoying a right which they themselves have lost irrevocably. In the midst of neighbours who know every detail of their own family life, they could never assume the dignified position which a silent new-comer occupies. Should an attempt be made to force the new-comer down to the general level, it will be found that his most determined perse- cutors are those who have the best reasons to be discontented with the conformity which they wish to make his law. And yet they conform, and therefore are the more determined that all should conform with them. Philanthropists and others, who talk glibly of raising the tone of a certain class of their fellow-creatures by educating individuals of that class, are rather prone to leave this tendency out of account. The individual who has been raised, or has raised himself, above the level of his fellows, has no hope of raising them with him ; his only chance of preserving his new level is by going out from among them. The class jealousy of the poor is infinitely more watchful and aggres- sive than that of the rich ; and it is stirred into action by very little provocation. The tendency is best illustrated by a supposititious case. Let us suppose the case of a working man, living in the midst of other working men, labouring like himself for a daily wage, who has in some way or other bettered his circumstances, given his children a good education, and introduced into his home certain comforts and luxuries un- known to the neighbourhood. All this he may do with impunity, as long as his growing superiority shows itself by no outward sign. But let him hire a servant to help his wife in her work, and the whole of his relations with his neighbours are changed at once. He has passed from the state of a " man " to that of a master; never again can he talk or drink with his fellows on equal terms. The existence of that hired girl has put a gulf between them which cannot be crossed, for by that simple sign his claim to superiority stands confessed. He may be still working side by side with them at the same work ; to them, it matters not in the least : he is an employer of labour besides being an employe, and they cannot live upon equal terms with a man who has his own servant. And any other claim to superiority which is equally manifest will be equally resented. They will not object to his greater refinement and better education, as long as these do not obtrude themselves upon their notice ; but if they are displayed in an effort to maintain some form of reserve, to pick and choose friends, or to guard the privacy of his home, the conditions of that man's life are changed at once. His neighbours will not persecute him, or actively resent his presence among them, but they will expect him to remove himself, and relieve them from his presence as soon as possible. Far more uncomfortable is the case of the man or the family who has seen better days. Poverty has brought them down to the level of their neighbours in all outward cir- cumstances ; but they still make a melancholy struggle to remain superior to fortune and their surroundings, and, as in the case of this family at Bristol, they will not mix with the people of the neighbourhood. They are obliged to work with them, perforce, obliged, too, to live after the same fashion ; but they will not meet upon friendly terms, and still cling to the reserve under which they hope to hide their fallen for- tunes. But the class with which they are compelled to live takes no account of the past, and is only concerned with the present, condition of its members. It does not matter to them whether the bricklayer that they know was once a master builder or not : to-day he is a bricklayer, his wife a sempstress, and his children are as poorly fed and his home as bare as their own. Why should such a family give itself airs of superiority ? It is in such a case as this that the class jealousy takes the form of persecution.
Few of us, as we have said, can realise what that persecu- tion means, or the misery of the struggle upon which the unhappy family enters. Their shame may be a foolish one— for if their fall has come about through misfortune alone, why should they be ashamed of their fallen estate ?—still, it is a very real one to them, and the agony of having their garment of reserve slowly dragged from them is still more real. It is bad enough for them to suffer in secret, but it is intolerable to have to suffer openly and before the eyes of all the world. If their neighbours would only leave them alone, they might still cherish the illu- sion that, though they lived with them, they were not of them ; but their neighbours, suspecting that they harbour that illusion, will not suffer them to remain with it. They have their own ideas as to what makes a man one of them- selves : they have also their own ideas of what raises him above their level ; and though their ideas are based upon curiously wrong-headed reasoning, they are none the less fixed. A family which is not of them shall not live with them ; a family which is of them shall live with them, and upon equal terms, conforming to their way of life and to their code of manners, or they will know the reason why.
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