4.1 KiB
CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
Section 8
A day or so later−−and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the roads may be taken as a mark of increasingsocial disorganisation and police embarrassment−−he wandered out into the open country. He speaks of the roadsof that plutocratic age as being 'fenced with barbed wire against unpropertied people,' of the high−walled gardensand trespass warnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In the air, happy rich people wereflying, heedless of the misfortunes about them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and along the roadswept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was rarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs andsiren cries even in the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the labour exchanges were everywhereoverworked and infuriated, the casual wards were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks undersheds or in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made a punishable offence there was no longerfriendship or help for a man from the rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage.... 'I wasn't angry,' said Barnet. 'I saw an immense selfishness, a monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure andpossession in all those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly if the richest hadchanged places with the poorest, that things would have been the same. What else can happen when men usescience and every new thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence and energy to manufacturewealth and appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago?Those traditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enough for every one, when life was a fiercestruggle that might be masked but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce dispossessionof others, must follow from such a disharmony between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar andthe poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and the poor less necessaryand less free. The men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking ofjustice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor in anything but patience....' But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method of social reconstruction was still a riddle, thatno effectual rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects was solved. 'I tried to talk tothose discontented men,' he wrote, 'but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of patienceand the larger scheme, they answered, "But then we shall all be dead"−−and I could not make them see, what is sosimple to my own mind, that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes are of no use tostatesmanship.' He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and a chance sight of the transparency of akiosk in the market−place at Bishop's Stortford announcing a 'Grave International Situation' did not excite himvery much. There had been so many grave international situations in recent years. This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking the Slav Confederacy, with France andEngland going to the help of the Slavs. But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants in the casual ward, and learnt from theworkhouse master that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their mobilisationcentres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, herecords, was one of extreme relief that his days of 'hopeless battering at the underside of civilisation' were at anend. Here was something definite to do, something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modifiedwhen he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so hastily and carelessly that for nearlythirty−six hours at the improvised depot at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but a cup of cold water.The depot was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one was free to leave it.