He spoke of the land; he attacked the old monopoly, and visioned a time when a claim to individual ownerships of the earths surface would be as ludicrous as were now the assertion of title to a fee-simple somewhere in the moon. He mustered statistics; he adduced historic and contemporary example of the just and the unjust in land-holding; he gripped the throat of a certain English duke, and held him up for flagellation; he drifted into oceans of economic theory; he sat down by the waters of Babylon; he climbed Pisgah. Had he but spoken of backslidings in the wilderness! But for that fatal omission, the lecture was, of its kind, good. By degrees Richard forgot his pose and the carefully struck note of mellowness; he began to believe what he was saying, and to say it with the right vigour of popular oratory. Forget his struggles with the h-fiend; forget his syntactical lapses; you saw that after all the man had within him a clear flame of conscience; that he had felt before speaking that speech was one of the uses for which Nature had expressly framed him. His invective seldom degenerated into vulgar abuse; one discerned in him at least the elements of what we call good taste; of simple manliness he disclosed not a little; he had some command of pathos. In conclusion, he finished without reference to his personal concerns.
The chairman invited questions, preliminary to debate.
He rose half-way down the room,the man who invariably rises on these occasions. He was oldish, with bent shoulders, and wore spectaclesprobably a clerk of forty years standing. In his hand was a small note-book, which he consulted. He began with measured utterance, emphatic, loud.
I wish to propose to the lecturer seven questions. I will read them in order; I have taken some pains to word them clearly.
Richard has his scrap of paper on his knee. He jots a word or two after each deliberate interrogation, smiling.
Other questioners succeeded. Richard replies to them. He fails to satisfy the man of seven queries, who, after repeating this and the other of the seven, professes himself still unsatisfied, shakes his head indulgently, walks from the room.
The debate is opened. Behold a second inevitable man; he is not well-washed, his shirt-front shows a beer-stain; he is angry before he begins.
I dont know whether a man as doesnt old with these kind o theories ll be allowed a fair earin
Indignant interruption. Cries of Of course he will!Who ever refused to hear you?and the like.
He is that singular phenomenon, that self-contradiction, that expression insoluble into factors of common-sensethe Conservative working man. What do they want to be at? he demands. Do they suppose as this kind of talk ll make wages higher, or enable the poor man to get his beef and beer at a lower rate? Whats the dd good of it all? Figures, oh? He never heered yet as figures made a meal for a man as hadnt got one; nor yet as they provided shoes and stockings for his young uns at ome. It made him mad to listen, that it did! Do they suppose as the rich man ll give up the land, if they talk till alls blue? Wasnt it human natur to get all you can and stick to it?
Pigs nature! cries someone from the front benches.
There! comes the rejoinder. Didnt I say as there was no fair earing for a man as didnt say just what suits you?
The voice of Daniel Dabbs is loud in good-tempered mockery. Mockery comes from every side, an angry note here and there, for the most part tolerant, jovial.
Let him speak! Ear him! Hoy! Hoy!
The chairman interposes, but by the time that order is restored the Conservative working man has thrust his hat upon his head and is off to the nearest public-house, muttering oaths.
Mr. Cullen rises, at the same time rises Mr. Cowes. These two gentlemen are fated to rise simultaneously. They scowl at each other. Mr. Cullen begins to speak, and Mr. Cowes, after a circular glance of protest, resumes his seat. The echoes tell that we are in for oratory with a vengeance. Mr. Cullen is a short, stout man, very seedily habited, with a great rough head of hair, an aquiline nose, lungs of vast power. His vein is King Cambyses; he tears passion to tatters; he roars leonine; he is your man to have at the pamperd jades of Asia! He has got hold of a new word, and that the verb to exploit. I am exploited, thou art exploited,he exploits! Who? Why, such men as that English duke whom the lecturer gripped and flagellated. The English duke is Mr. Cullens bugbear; never a speech from Mr. Cullen but that duke is most horribly mauled. His ground rents,yah! Another word of which Mr. Cullen is fond is strattum,usually spelt and pronounced with but one t midway. You and I have the misfortune to belong to a social strattum which is trampled flat and hard beneath the feet of the landowners. Mr. Cullen rises to such a point of fury that one dreads the consequencesto himself. Already the chairman is on his feet, intimating in dumb show that the allowed ten minutes have elapsed; there is no making the orator hear. At length his friend who sits by him fairly grips his coat-tails and brings him to a sitting posture, amid mirthful tumult. Mr. Cullen joins in the mirth, looks as though he had never been angry in his life. And till next Sunday comes round he will neither speak nor think of the social question.
Mr. Cowes is unopposed. After the preceding enthusiast, the voice of Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather. He is tall, meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand saws up and down. Mr. Cowes tone is the quietly venomous; in a few minutes you believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr. Cullen. He makes a point and pauses to observe the effect upon his hearers. He prides himself upon his grammar, goes back to correct a concord, emphasises eccentricities of pronunciation; for instance, he accents capitalist on the second syllable, and repeats the words with grave challenge to all and sundry. Speaking of something which he wishes to stigmatise as a misnomer, he exclaims: Its what I call a misnomy! And he follows the assertion with an awful suspense of utterance. He brings his speech to a close exactly with the end of the tenth minute, and, on sitting down, eyes his unknown neighbour with wrathful intensity for several moments.
Who will follow? A sound comes from the very back of the room, such a sound that every head turns in astonished search for the source of it. Such voice has the wind in garret-chimneys on a winter night. It is a thin wail, a prelude of lamentation; it troubles the blood. The speaker no one seems to know; he is a man of yellow visage, with head sunk between pointed shoulders, on his crown a mere scalp-lock. He seems to be afflicted with a disease of the muscles; his malformed body quivers, the hand he raises shakes paralytic. His clothes are of the meanest; what his age may be it is impossible to judge. As his voice gathers strength, the hearers begin to feel the influence of a terrible earnestness. He does not rant, he does not weigh his phrases; the stream of bitter prophecy flows on smooth and dark. He is supplying the omission in Mutimers harangue, is bidding his class know itself and chasten itself, as an indispensable preliminary to any great change in the order of things. He cries vanity upon all these detailed schemes of social reconstruction. Are we ready for it? he wails. Could we bear it, if they granted it to us? It is all good and right, but hadnt we better first make ourselves worthy of such freedom? He begins a terrible arraignment of the People,then, of a sudden, his voice has ceased. You could hear a pin drop. It is seen that the man has fallen to the ground; there arises a low moaning; people press about him.
They carry him into the coffee-shop. It was a fit. In five minutes he is restored, but does not come back to finish his speech.
There is an interval of disorder. But surely we are not going to let the meeting end in this way. The chairman calls for the next speaker, and he stands forth in the person of a rather smug little shopkeeper, who declares that he knows of no single particular in which the working class needs correction. The speech undeniably falls fiat. Will no one restore the tone of the meeting?
Mr. Kitshaw is the man! Now we shall have broad grins. Mr. Kitshaw enjoys a reputation for mimicry; he takes off music-hall singers in the bar-parlour of a Saturday night. Observe, he rises, hems, pulls down his waistcoat; there is bubbling laughter. Mr. Kitshaw brings back the debate to its original subject; he talks of the Land. He is a little haphazard at first, but presently hits the mark in a fancy picture of a country still in the hands of aborigines, as yet unannexed by the capitalist nations, knowing not the meaning of the verb exploit.
Imagine such a happy land, my friends; a land, I say, which nobody hasnt ever thought of developing the resources of,thats the proper phrase, I believe. There are the people, with clothing enough for comfort andahem!good manners, but, mark you, no more. No manufacture of luxurious skirts and hulsters and togs o that kind by the exploited classes. No, for no exploited classes dont exist! All are equal, my friends. Up an down the fields they goes, all day long, arm-in-arm, Jack and Jerry, aye, and Liza an Sairey Ann; for they have equality of the sexes, mind you! Up an down the fields, I say, in a devil-may-care sort of way, with their sweethearts and their wives. No factory smoke, dear no! Theres the rivers, with tropical plants a-shading the banks, O my! There they goes up an down in their boats, devil-may-care, a-strumming on the banjo,he imitated such action,and a-singing their nigger minstrelsy with light earts. Why? Cause they aint got no work to get up to at arf-past five next morning. Their times their own! Thats the condition of an unexploited country, my friends!
Mr. Kitshaw had put everyone in vast good humour. You might wonder that his sweetly idyllic picture did not stir bitterness by contrast; it were to credit the English workman with too much imagination. Resonance of applause rewarded the sparkling rhetorician. A few of the audience availed themselves of the noise to withdraw, for the clock showed that it was close upon ten, and public-houses shut their doors early on Sunday.
But Richard Mutimer was on his feet again, and this time without regard to effect; there was a word in him strongly demanding utterance. It was to the speech of the unfortunate prophet that he desired to reply. He began with sorrowful admissions. No one speaking honestly could deny thatthat the working class had its faults; they came out plainly enough now and then. Drink, for instance (Mr. Cullen gave a resounding Hear, hear! and a stamp on the boards). What sort of a spectacle would be exhibited by the public-houses in Hoxton and Islington at closing time to-night? (True! from Mr. Cowes, who also stamped on the boards.) Yes, butRichard used the device of aposiopesis; Daniel Dabbs took it for a humorous effect and began a roar, which was summarily interdicted. But, pursued Richard with emphasis, what is the meaning of these vices? What do they come of? Whos to blame for them? Not the working classnever tell me! What drives a man to drink in his spare hours? What about the poisonous air of garrets and cellars? What about excessive toil and inability to procure healthy recreation? What about defects of education, due to poverty? What about diseased bodies inherited from over-slaved parents? Messrs. Cowes and Cullen had accompanied these queries with a climax of vociferous approval; when Richard paused, they led the tumult of hands and heels. Look at that poor man who spoke to us! cried Mutimer. Hes gone, so I shant hurt him by speaking plainly. He spoke well, mind you, and he spoke from his heart; but what sort of a life has his been, do you think? A wretched cripple, a miserable weakling no doubt from the day of his birth, cursed in having ever seen the daylight, and, such as he is, called upon to fight for his bread. Much of it he gets! Who would blame that man if he drank himself into unconsciousness every time he picked up a sixpence? Cowes and Cullen bellowed their delight. Well, he doesnt do it; so much you can be sure of. In some vile hole here in this great city of ours he drags on a life worseaye, a thousand times worse!than that of the horses in the West-end mews. Dont clap your hands so much, fellow-workers. Just think about it on your way home; talk about it to your wives and your children. Its the sight of objects like that that makes my blood boil, and thats set me in earnest at this work of ours. I feel for that man and all like him as if they were my brothers. And I take you all to witness, all you present and all you repeat my words to, that Ill work on as long as I have life in me, that Ill use every opportunity thats given me to uphold the cause of the poor and down-trodden against the rich and selfish and luxurious, that if I live another fifty years I shall still be of the people and with the people, that no man shall ever have it in his power to say that Richard Mutimer misused his chances and was only a new burden to them whose load he might have lightened!
There was nothing for it but to leap on to the very benches and yell as long as your voice would hold out.
After that the meeting was mere exuberance of mutual congratulations. Mr. Cullen was understood to be moving the usual vote of thanks, but even his vocal organs strove hard for little purpose. Daniel Dabbs had never made a speech in his life, but excitement drove him on the honourable post of seconder. The chairman endeavoured to make certain announcements; then the assembly broke up. The estrade was invaded; everybody wished to shake hands with Mutimer. Mr. Cullen tried to obtain Richards attention to certain remarks of value; failing, he went off with a scowl. Mr. Cowes attempted to button-hole the popular hero; finding Richard conversing with someone else at the same time, he turned away with a covert sneer. The former of the two worthies had desired to insist upon every member of the Union becoming a teetotaller; the latter wished to say that he thought it would be well if a badge of temperance were henceforth worn by Unionists. On turning away, each glanced at the clock and hurried his step.
In a certain dark street not very far from the lecture-room Mr. Cullen rose on tip-toe at the windows of a dull little public-house. A Unionist was standing at the bar; Mr. Cullen hurried on, into a street yet darker. Again he tip-toed at a window. The glimpse reassured him; he passed quickly through the doorway, stepped to the bar, gave an order. Then he turned, and behold, on a seat just under the window sat Mr. Cowes, & short pipe in his mouth, a smoking tumbler held on his knee. The supporters of total abstinence nodded to each other, with a slight lack of spontaneity. Mr. Cullen, having secured his own tumbler, came by his comrades side.
Deal o fine talk to wind up with, he remarked tentatively.
He means what he says, returned the other gravely.
Oh yes, Mr. Cullen hastened to admit. Mutimer means what he says! Only the way of saying it, I meantIve got a bit of a sore throat.
So have I. After that there hot room.
They nodded at each other sympathetically. Mr. Cullen filled a little black pipe.
Got alight?