We, the students of the Royal Institute of Translation, demand Britain cease consideration of an unlawful war against China. Given this government’s determination to initiate hostilities and its brutal suppression of those working to expose its motives, we have no other option to make our voices heard than to cease all translation and silver-working services by the Institute, until such time as our demands are met. We henceforth declare our strike.
Such an interesting word, Robin thought, strike.* It brought to mind hammers against spikes, bodies throwing themselves against an immovable force. It contained in itself the paradox of the concept; that through nonaction, and nonviolence, one might prove the devastating consequences of refusing to accommodate those one relied upon.
Below them, Oxfordians were going about their merry way. No one glanced up; no one saw the two students leaning over the tallest point in the city. The exiled translators were nowhere in sight; if Playfair had sought the police, they had not yet chosen to act. The city remained serene, clueless as to what was coming.
Oxford, we ask you to stand with us. The strike will cause great hardships for the city in days to come. We ask you to direct your ire to the government that has made such a strike our only recourse. We ask you to stand on the side of justice and fairness.
From there the pamphlets articulated the clear dangers of an influx of silver to the British economy, not only for China and the colonies, but for the working class of England. Robin did not expect anyone to read that far. He did not expect the city to support their strike; to the contrary, once the silver-work began breaking down, he expected they would hate them.
But the tower was impenetrable, and their hate did not matter. All that mattered was that they understood the cause of their inconvenience.
‘How long do you think until they reach London?’ asked Victoire.
‘Hours,’ said Robin. ‘I think this reaches the first train headed from here to Paddington.’
They had chosen the unlikeliest of places for a revolution. Oxford was not the centre of activity, it was a refuge, decades behind the rest of England in every realm but the academic. The university was designed to be a bastion of antiquity, where scholars could fancy themselves in any of the past five centuries, where scandals and turmoil were so scarce that it made the University College newsletter if a red-breast began singing near the end of an exhaustingly long sermon at Christ Church.
But though Oxford was not the seat of power, it produced the occupants thereof. Its alumni ran the Empire. Someone, perhaps this moment, was rushing to Oxford Station with news of the occupation. Someone would recognize its significance, would see it was not a petty students’ game but a crisis of national importance. Someone would get this in front of the Cabinet and the House of Lords. Then Parliament would choose what happened next.
‘Go on.’ Robin nodded to Victoire. Her Classical pronunciation was better than his. ‘Let’s see them fly.’
‘Polemikós,’ she murmured, holding a bar over the stack. ‘Polemic. Discutere. Discuss.’
She pushed the stack off the ledge. The pamphlets took flight. The wind carried them soaring across the city; over spires and turrets down onto streets, yards, and gardens; flying down chimneys, darting through grates, slipping into open windows. They accosted everyone they came across, clinging to coats, flapping in faces, sticking persistently to satchels and briefcases. Most would bat them aside, irritated. But a few would pick them up, would read the strikers’ manifesto, would slowly register what this meant for Oxford, for London, and for the Empire. And then no one would be able to ignore them. Then the entire world would be forced to look.
‘Are you all right?’ Robin asked.
Victoire had gone as still as a statue, eyes fixed on the pamphlets as if she could will herself to become a bird, to fly among them. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘I – you know.’
‘It’s funny.’ She did not turn to meet his eye. ‘I’m waiting for it to hit, but it simply – it never does. Not like with you.’
‘It wasn’t the same.’ He tried to find words that would comfort, that would make it out to be anything other than it was. ‘It was self-defence. And he might still survive, it might – I mean, it won’t be—’
‘It was for Anthony,’ she said in a very hard voice. ‘And that’s the last I ever want to speak of it.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Song to the Men of England’
The mood that afternoon was one of nervous apprehension. Like children who had kicked over an ants’ nest, they now watched fearfully to see how awful the ramifications would be. Hours had passed. Surely the escaped professors had liaised with city policy-makers by now. Surely London had read those pamphlets by now. What form would the backlash take? They had all spent years trusting in the impenetrability of the tower; its wards, until now, had shielded them from everything. Still, it felt as if they were counting down the minutes to a vicious retaliation.
‘They have to send in the constables,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Even if they can’t get in. There will be some attempted arrest, surely. If not for the strike, then for—’ She glanced at Victoire, blinked, and trailed off.
There was a brief silence.
‘The strike is illegal too,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘The Combination of Workmen Act of 1825 suppresses the right to strike by trade unions and guilds.’
‘We’re not a guild, though,’ said Robin.
‘Actually, we are,’ said Yusuf, who worked in Legal. ‘It’s in the founding documents. Babel alums and students comprise the Translators’ Guild by virtue of their institutional affiliation, so by holding a strike we are in violation of the law, if you want to get technical about it.’
They looked round at each other, and then all at once burst out laughing.
But their good humour faded quickly. The association between their strike and the trade unions left a bad taste in all of their mouths, for the workers’ agitations of the 1830s – brought about directly as the result of the silver industrial revolution – had met with resounding failure. The Luddites had ended up either dead or exiled to Australia. The Lancashire spinners were forced back to work to avoid starvation within a year. The Swing Rioters, by smashing threshing machines and setting barns on fire, had secured a temporary improvement in wages and working conditions, but these were promptly reneged upon; more than a dozen rioters were hanged, and hundreds were sent to penal colonies in Australia.
Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. And why should the translators succeed where other strikers – white strikers, no less – had failed?
There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum. The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse. Silver-powered looms and spinning machines were getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, enriching none but factory owners and financiers. Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.