A year or two ago, some wondered why strike had arisen out of strike; why the whole world of British labour had suddenly and all at once begun to heave restlessly as though with earthquake; why the streams of workpeople had in quick succession left the grooves along which they usually ran from childhood to the grave. "It is entirely ridiculous," said the _Times_, with the sneer of educated scorn, "it is entirely ridiculous to suppose that the whole industrial community has been patiently enduring real grievances which are simultaneously discovered to be intolerable." But to all outside the circle of the _Times_, the only ridiculous part of the situation was that the industrial community should patiently have endured their grievances so long.
That working people should simultaneously discover them to be intolerable, is nothing strange. It is all very well to lie in gaol, from which there seems no chance of escape. Treadmill, oakum, skilly, and the rest--one may as well go through with them quietly, for fear of something worse. But if word goes round that one or two prisoners have crept out of gaol, who would not burn to follow? Would not grievances then be simultaneously discovered to be intolerable? The seamen were but a feeble lot; their union was poor, their combination loose. They were cooped up within the walls of a great Employers' Federation, which laughed at their efforts to scramble out. Yet they escaped; the walls were found to be not so very high and strong; in one place or another they crumbled away, and the prisoners escaped. They gained what they wanted; their grievances were no longer intolerable. What working man or woman on hearing of it did not burn to follow, and did not feel the grievances of life harder to be tolerated than before? If that feeble lot could win their pennyworth of freedom, who might not expect deliverance? People talk of "strike fever" as though it were an infection; and so it is. It is the infection of a sudden hope.
After the sneer, the _Times_ proceeded to attribute the strikes to a natural desire for idleness during the hot weather. Seldom has so base an accusation been brought against our country, even by her worst enemies. The country consists almost entirely of working people, the other classes being a nearly negligible fraction in point of numbers. The restlessness and discontent were felt far and wide among nearly all the working people, and to suggest that hundreds of thousands contemplated all the risks and miseries of stopping work because they wanted to be idle in the shade displayed the ignorance our educated classes often display in speaking of the poor. For I suppose the thing was too cruel for a joke.
Hardly less pitiable than such ignorance was the nonchalant excuse of those who pleaded: "We have our grievances too. We all want something that we haven't got. We should all like our incomes raised. But we don't go about striking and rioting." It reminds one of Lord Rosebery's contention, some fifteen years ago, that in point of pleasure all men are fairly equal, and the rich no happier than the poor. It sounds very pretty and philosophic, but those who know what poverty is know it to be absolutely untrue. If Lord Rosebery had ever tried poverty, he would have known it was untrue. All the working people know it, and they know that the grievances in which one can talk about income are never to be compared with the grievances which hang on the turn of a penny, or the chance of a shilling more or a shilling less per week.
To a man receiving L20 a week the difference of L2 one way or other is important, but it is not vital. If his income drops to L18 a week he and his family have just as much to eat and drink and wear; probably they live in the same house as before; the only change is a different place for the summer holiday, and, perhaps, the dress-circle instead of the stalls at a theatre. To a man with L200 a week the loss of L20 a week hardly makes any difference at all. He may grumble; he may drop a motor, or a yacht, but in his ordinary daily life he feels no change. To a docker making twenty shillings a week the difference of two shillings is not merely important, it is vital. The addition of it may mean three rooms for the family instead of two; it may mean nine shillings a week instead of seven to feed five mouths; it may mean meat twice a week, or half as much more bread and margarine than before, or a saving for second-hand clothes, and perhaps threepenn'orth of pleasure. In full work a docker at the old 7d. an hour would make more than twenty shillings a week; but the full weeks are rare, and about eighteen shillings would be all he could get on an average. The extra penny an hour for three days' work might bring him in about half a crown. To him and to his wife and children the difference was not merely important, it was vital.
Or take the case of the 15,000 women who struck for a rise in South London, and got it. We may put their average wage at nine shillings a week. In the accounts of a woman who is keeping a family of three, including herself, on that wage, a third of the money goes to the rent of one room. Two shillings of the rest go for light, fuel, and soda. That leaves four shillings a week to feed and clothe three people. Even Lord Rosebery could hardly maintain that the opportunities for pleasure on that amount were equal to his own. But the women jam-makers won an advance of two shillings by their strike; the box-makers from 1_s_. 3_d_. to three shillings; even the glue and size workers got a shilling rise. It was hardly up to Lord Rosebery's standard yet. It did not represent the _Times_ paradise of sitting idle in the shade. But think what it means when week by week you have jealously watched nine solid pennies going in bread, nine more in meat, and another six in tea! Or think what such an addition means to those working-women from the North, who at the same time protested in Trafalgar Square against the compulsory insurance because the payment of threepence a week would lose them two of their dinners--twice the penn'orth of bread and ha'porth of cheese that they always enjoyed for dinner!
When I was assisting in an inquiry into wages and expenditure some years ago, one head of a family added as a note at the foot of his budget: "I see that we always spend more than we earn, but as we are never in debt I attribute this result to the thriftiness of my wife." Behind that sentence a history of grievances patiently endured is written, but only the _Times_ would wonder that such grievances are discovered to be intolerable the moment a gleam of hope appears. When the _Times_, in the same article, went on to protest that if the railwaymen struck, they would be kicking not only against the Companies but "against the nature of things," I have no clear idea of the meaning. The nature of things is no doubt very terrible and strong, but for working people the most terrible and strongest part of it is poverty. All else is sophisticated; here is the thing itself. One remembers two sentences in Mr. Shaw's preface to _Major Barbara_:
"The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love, and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty." Strikes are the children of Poverty by Hope. For a long time past the wealth of the country has rapidly increased. Gold has poured into it from South Africa, dividends from all the world; trade has boomed, great fortunes have been made; luxury has redoubled; the standard of living among the rich has risen high. The working people know all this; they can see it with their eyes, and they refuse to be satisfied with the rich man's blessing on the poor. What concerns them more than the increase in the quantity of gold is the natural result in the shrinkage of the penny. It is no good getting sevenpence an hour for your work if it does not buy so much as the "full, round orb of the docker's tanner," which Mr. John Burns saw rising over the dock gates more than twenty years ago, when he stood side by side with Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, and when Sir H. Llewellyn Smith and Mr. Vaughan Nash wrote the story of the contest. If prosperity has increased, so have prices, and what cost a tanner then costs eightpence now, or more than that. To keep pace with such a change is well worth a strike, since nothing but strikes can avail. So vital is the worth of a penny; so natural is it to kick against the nature of things, when their nature takes the form of steady poverty amid expanding wealth. That is the simultaneous discovery which raised the ridicule of the _Times_--that, and the further discovery that, in Carlyle's phrase, "the Empire of old Mammon is everywhere breaking up." The intangible walls that resisted so obstinately are fading away. The power of wealth is suspected. Strike after strike secures its triumphant penny, and no return of Peterloo, or baton charges on the Liverpool St. George's Hall, driving the silent crowd over the edge of its steep basis "as rapidly and continually as water down a steep rock," as was seen during the strikes of August 1911, can now check the infection of such a hope. It was an old saying of the men who won our political liberties that the redress of grievances must precede supply. The working people are standing now for a different phase of liberty, but their work is their supply, and having simultaneously discovered their grievances to be intolerable, they are making the same old use of the ancient precept.
[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: The Worth Of A Penny