A GENERATION OF PROGRESS
By R. C. K. ENSOR WHEN I was in my tenth year,-Queen Victoria's first Jubilee occurred, and there was a great deal of stock-taking in regard to different forms of social and national progress during the half-century. People of 6o had known'the conditions at her accession as well as I knew those at her Jubilee ; people of 70 had known them much better. I lived in a rural area, and I can remember now how the older working people expressed themselves. It was one long refrain of " How much better off we all are than we used to be ! " Farm labourers' wages in that district had rather more than doubled. In 1837 they had been about seven shillings a week. In 1887 they were about fifteen shillings. Let us add that in 1937 they were thirty-five shillings.
A critic might rejoin to this arithmetic that it depended on the value of money. But the country people of 1887 were jubilant about that too. They harped on the new things that money would buy. Bread, for instance, had been above their reach in 1837 ; they had lived on barley-cakes, unleavened and half-raw. Now the 4-lb. wheaten loaf had - become their staple food. Coal was another boon ; they could keep warmer in winter, and were no longer so dependent on scrounged wood. Clothes and furniture were decidedly better ; bedsteads became general in labourers' cottages, where earlier they had been unknown. Another boon much stressed was the fact of railway travelling. Not that many rustics rode often for pleasure. But it was felt as a great increase of liberty, a window .on the world, a means whereby sons and daughters might go to places where their services were wanted, instead of having to accept the lowest wages where they were not. Somewhat similar was the feeling about universal education and the (then recent) democratisation of the franchise. Even those who were too old to benefit by the one or to know much how to use the other felt that these were stepping-stones to greater freedom, doorways opening on a brighter age. I do not profess to remember these details direct from the age of to, but I do from not very long afterwards ; and I have a clear memory of the general -effect of what people were saying at the Jubilee itself.'
So much for the country ; I knew nothing then of the town. But while the country could feel like that, even in the depths of the agricultural depression, undoubtedly the towns felt more so. Soc'al progress in them had been greater. Indeed when mcd:rn statisticians have set- about .measuring it, an important factor for them to estimate has &ea not merely the rise of wages in particular occupations, but the transfer of workers from lower-paid to higher-paid ones ; which unhappily meant as a rule a transfer from. country to town.
My impression is that the improvement of working-class conditions in the half-century since 1887 has been much greater than that in the half-century before ; and I will shortly sketch some of the grounds for it. Yet there was no such jubilation in 1937 as in 1887 over the progress accom- plished. Why not ? Chiefly, for two reasons. First, be- cause the upper and the professional classes, which own and write books and newspapers and create opinion, had in 1887 progressed even more than the working class, but in 1937 altogether less. It may seem a paradox, yet I believe it true, that the shriller note in working-class agitation today is mainly motived by middle-class conditions. And secondly, there is the international outlook. In 1887 dangers of war were acute, but it was a different sort of war. No Passchen- daeles furnished- precedents of what would happen ; nor had the curse of the aeroplane yet blackened the blue sky.
Let us-cast then a few glances at progress in the later period. Without going back to 1887, take the picture from two. If some of the younger men today, who assure us that our democracy has done nothing for the people, could be taken back thirty-eight years and shown England as it was in istoo, they might fairly jump out of their skins for astonishment. Their first cause for surprise would be the clothes of the people. The English masses in z9oo were better clothed than they ever had been before ; actual rags were confined to a submerged tenth ; and feet shod in leather were universal, as in few, if any, other countries at that time. But between people of different classes the difference in clothes was enor- mous. Today if you see a picture of a countess shopping in Bond Street, you will notice that she does not vary from ordinary mortals. Your own cook on her afternoon out may dress better than her mistress. In daily ordinary apparel there are still differences of standard, distantly reflecting differences of means ; but, uniforms apart, you can seldom with any precision guess a man's income or a young woman's social status from the clothes that he or she wears. In 1900 you could read the story like an open book. On the top were the aristocracy, resplendent apparitions, at whose parades the populace assembled to gape, as on beings of another creation. At varying declensions from this altitude came the classes with more or less clean clothes ; with a pretty clear zoning, in clothes as in other things, between the gentry, who had had some higher education and went to church, and the tradesman-class, who had not such education and went to chapels.
Arrived at the working class, you found a clothes- stamp absolutely unmistakeable. Quite a large proportion were chronically dirty and malodorous (not a few even ver- minous), so that they were offensive to sit.near in a public vehicle. Trams were socially despised in London for that reason. The first important experiment in abolishing classes on railways was that made on the " Twopenny Tube " from the Bank to Holland Park. I remember a conversation between two of my elders, one of whom was horrified at the prospect of having this otherwise promising route made unusable by proletarianisation. The other comforted him by reflecting that the charge of twopence would be high enough to keep the labourers out. Dirt-stricken poverty like that scarcely exists in England today, though you can still see lots of it abroad.
The levelling-up of clothes-standards, with all that it implies for the sense of social equality, is, in its significant extent, post-1914. (Contrast the process in Russia, where clothing has been levelled down and everyone goes shabby.) You may call -clothes a symptom only, though really it is more. But if you ask for operative causes, here are six which may be thought cardinal : (t) Higher wages, and especially the abolition of sweating, together with an appreciable 'shortening of hours ; (2) Better universal education, and enormously more higher education, made available through • scholarships and bursaries to virtually all working-class children in whom any special ability can be detected ; (3) Un- employment insurance, which has averted from the entire working class the nightmare of physical starvation and the broken-up home, to which in the old days any of them were exposed after a comparatively short spell of unemploy- ment ; (4) Children's welfare, in its successive forms from the ante-natal clinic to the choice-of-employment committee ; (5) Health insurance, and the consequent vast increase in effective medical treatment ; (6) Old Age Pensions.
That is a bare list, but behind each item lies a world of change. Take even the last and simplest of them. Can the clever modern young man, whose conceptions of working-class life are based almost entirely on books, form any idea of the addition to human happiness, in the Benthamite sense, which was made by Old Age Pensions ? Or take the first. The rise of wages in any grade is a fundamental boon ; but is it easy for young people today to realise what the rise from the lower levels meant ? Those farm labourers earning from 13 to 17 shillings ; those town labourers with from 16 shillings to a pound, and that amazing multitude of sweated workers submerged below either ? (And with neither (3), (4), (5), nor (6) to mitigate the pressure at any point !) Unless you have been personally in contact with people like that, you can scarcely conceive how dehumanising is poverty when carried below a certain degree. People chronically hungry are nerve-starved ; they become suspicious, quarrelsome, brutal, spiteful, perverse to a pitch bordering on insanity ; you can do nothing useful with them. Today such people are exceptional ; in 1900 they were still a large fraction of the nation.
I have said nothing about the purging of slums and over- crowding, because that work is still going on. But there, too, the progress has been enormous, and no large country in Europe comes within a very long distance of it. Nor have I said anything about drunkenness, because that, like clothes, may be called a symptom ; though it also, like clothes, is much more. I recall that at 8 p.m. on a Bank Holiday in 1904 I counted in an ordinary and representative quarter of a mile of Ancoats, Manchester, 43 people lying or sitting on the pavement too drunk to rise. No one sees such sights today ; it is a vanished world.
But what it is important to seize is not merely the scale of this progress—far greater than any other large nation in Europe can show—but how it came about. We had no dictatorship, no revolution, no very spectacular " planning " And yet every one of these changes was at its root political, and grew from definite Acts being passed by Parliament and implemented by Whitehall, or the local governing authorities, or the trade unions. The main political battles were fought in the ten years before the War, and the school of thought and action which won them, whether you call it Liberal Socialism or Socialistic Liberialism, was a pretty definite and very English thing. It was not dogmatic about policies ; it copied good models where it could find them— health insurance and school medical care from Germany, trade boards from Australia, old age pensions from New Zealand. But it was very firm about its principles. It aimed to abolish poverty, but not on any terms that would abolish liberty also. Every ounce of freedom that the people of Great Britain had evolved, they were to hold fast and develop. It would be propter vitam vivendi perdere causas, if in order to enrich people you enslaved them. This way of thinking did, in fact, enrich the British proletariat far more than any dictatorship has enriched any other ; and at the same time it so buttressed British political freedom that it seems now to have got round the most dangerous rock ever interposed in its course, viz. the happy-go-lucky extension of the franchise (far too wide to be wisely attempted in one instalment) in 1918.
That doctrine 3o years ago commanded the enthusiasm of young men, Socialists and Liberals both, and Conservatives too, like the associates of Lord Henry Bentinck. It triumphed not a little through young men's exertions. Some found careers in it ; some sacrificed careers to it ; some, quite literally, died for it. There was—perhaps on a wider scale —an outpouring of generous spirit, such as youth has mani- fested at different times since the War for the League of Nations, the Soviet, the distressed areas, or the Spanish conflict. The motives are probably as good in one such case as another. But the fruits in the earlier case were much greater. And I think the younger men today would gain by understanding and appreciating it more than they usually do.
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