Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, black-
haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary
barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound.
Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and
were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.
They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish
like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise,
giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of
Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a
Perfectly Splendid Time.
I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of
Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with
ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings,
titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties
we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they
were "all wrong." The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and
princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors
in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on
the part of the few to expropriate the many. We went about feeling
scornful of all the current forms of life, forms that esteemed
themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on
a curtain that was presently to be torn aside…
It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things,
I think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm.
Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I
forget the circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness
with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the
material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic
interpretation of human affairs.
I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working
man I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change,
and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to
change, into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely
as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at
first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete
misrepresentation of the quality and possibilities of things.
I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at
Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the world as a great
contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that
multitudinous majority of people who toil continually, who are for
ever anxious about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed,
ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and continually
suffer misadventures, hardships and distresses through the want of
money. My lot had fallen upon the fringe of the possessing
minority; if I did not know the want of necessities I knew
shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university
education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond
the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand that
it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive
radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost
naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself
at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs
that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor
did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of
poverty. It was a personal independent thing. The dingier people
one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and
Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old women, street
loafers, grimy workers that made the social background of London,
the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very
slowly with the general propositions I was making about life. We
could become splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the
triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a
sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous
old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an
ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed
her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the
streets, were really material to such questions.
Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in
immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or
plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became
unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our
gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or
poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as
we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor
quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and
very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!-
if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming
that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember,
who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish
fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we
ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the
Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and
because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow…
And also I had never been in Lancashire.
By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder
verities of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very
much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss
my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley
Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at
close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid
Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and
presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system
of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a
limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of
people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should
be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of