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SFSFSFSF CHAPTER il. “Work, Not Charity.” B All NET wandered down into ; the thronging gayer parts of London in which a year or so ago lie had been numbered among the spenders. London, under the visible smoke law, by which any production of a visible ! smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a tine, had already ceased to be the somber, smoke dark ened city of the Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly be ing rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on those j characteristics that distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had I been banished from the roadway, which was now of a resilient, glasslike surface, spotlessly clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden, at the risk of a tine, if lie survived, to cross the roadway. People descended from their automobiles upon this pave ment and went through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways for pedestrians, the rows, that ran along the front of tlio houses at the level of the first story and, being joined by frequent bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian appearance. In some streets there were upper and even third story rows. For most of the day and all night the shop windows were lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order to increase tlieir window space. Barnet made his way along this night scene rather apprehensively, since the police had power to challenge and de mand the labor card of any indigent looking person, and if the record failed to show he was in employment dismiss him to the traffic pavement below. lint there was still enough of liis for mer gentility about Barnet's appear ance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too. had other things to think of that night and he was per mitted to reach the galleries about Leicester square—that great focus of London life and pleasure. Fie gives a vivid descripton of the scene that evening. In the center was a garden raised on a relies lit by fes toons of lights and connected with tln* rows by eight graceful bridges, be neath which .hummed the Interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating as the current alternated between east and west and north and south. Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than beautiful re-enforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by bold, il luminated advertisements and glowing with reflections. There were the two historical music halls of this place, the Shakespeare Memorial theater, in which the municipal players revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shake speare's plays, and four other great houses of refreshment and entertain ment. whose pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night. The south side of the square was in dark contrast to tlie others; it was still being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose over the exca vated sites of vanished Victorian build ings. This framework attracted Barnet’s attention for a time to the exclusion of other interests. It was absolutely still; it had a dead rigidity, a stricken inac tion; no one was at work upon it and all its machinery was quiet, but the contractors’ globes of vacuum light fill ed its every interstice with a quivering green moonshine and showed alert but motionless—soldier sentinels. He asked a passing stroller and was told that the men had struck that day against the use of an automatic riveter that would have doubled the individual efficiency and halved the number of steel workers. “Shouldn't wonder if they didn’t get chucking bombs.” said Barnet’s in formant, who hovered for a moment and then went on his way to the Al hambra Music hall. Barnet became aware of an excite ment in the newspaper kiosks at the corners of the square. Something very sensational had been flashed upon the transparencies. Forgetting for a mo ment his penniless condition, lie aaada pyright, 1914, by H. G. Well his way over a bridge to buy a paper, , for in those days the papers, which \ were printed upon thin sheets of me tallic foil, were sold at determinate ; points b.v specially licensed purveyors. ‘ Half over lie stopped short at a change J in the traffic below and wa§ astonished , to see that the police signals were re- ‘ strictlng vehicles to the half roadway. When presently he got within sight of . the transparencies that had replaced the placards of Victorian times lie read J of the great march of the unemployed that was already in progress through ( the west end. and so without expendi ture he was able to understand what j was coming. lie watched, and his book describes ( this procession which the police had considered it unwise to prevent and J which had been spontaneously organ I zed in imitation of the unemployed \ processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob, but there was a kind ( of sullen discipline about the proces sion w»en at last it arrived. What seemed for a time an unending column ' of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of implacable futility, along tin roadway •underneath him. He was, lie 1 says, moved to join them, but instead 1 lie remained watching. They were a ' dingy, shabby, ineffective looking mul titude, for the most part incapable of ' any but obsolete and superseded types of labor. They bore, a few banners with the time honored inscription “Work, Not Charity,” but otherwise their ranks were unadorned. 1 They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing 1 truculent nor aggressive in their bear lag. they had no definite objective, they were just inarching and showing them selves in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great maSs of unskilled, cheap i labor which the new. still cheaper me | chanical powers had superseded for ! evermore. They were being "scrap ped”—as horses had been “scrapped.” Barnet leaned over the parapet watch ing them, his mind quickened by his own precarious condition For a time, he says, he felt nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this gathering i surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless—and incapable— and pitiful. What were they asking for? They had been overtaken by unex pected tilings. Nobody had foreseen Tt Hashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling enigma below meant. It was an tip pen 1 against the unexpected—an .ap peal to those others who, more for- j Innate, seemed wiser and more power ful, for something—for intelligence This mute mass, weary footed, rank- I following tank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these dislocations—Unit any how they ought to have foreseen—and arranged That was what this crowd of wreck | age was feeling and seeking so dumbly to assert. 1 "Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room.” he says. “These men were praying te their fellow creatures as once they prayed to God The last thing that men will realize about anything is that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant. It had only to be aroused to be conscience stricken, to be moved to exertion. And I saw, too. that as yet there was no such intelligence The world yraits for intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good and order lias still to lie gathered together, out of scraps of im pulse and wandering seeds of benevo lence and whatever is tine and creative in our souls into a common purpose It’s something still to come.” It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that ibis not very Inimical young man who if) any previ ous age might well have been alto gather occupied with the problem of liis own individual necessities should be able to stand there and generalize about (he needs race. But upon all the stresses and eon fiicts of that chaotic time there was ai ready dawning the light of a new era The spirit of humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its ex iivnie imprisonment in individuals. Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had been a conscious reli gious end for thousands of years, which men had sought in mortification, in the wilderness, in meditation and by bum merable strange paths, was coming ai last with the effect of naturalness into the talk of man, into the books they read, into their unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily pur poses and everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities, that the spirit of the seeker had revealed to themwere charming them out of those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the presence of social disor ganization, distress and perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasures that blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought. “I saw life plain,” he wrote. “I saw the gigantic task before • us, and the very splendor of its intricate and im measurable difficulty tilled me with exultation. I saw that we have still to discover government, that we have ■still to discover education, which is the necessary reciprocal of government and that all this—in which my own little speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed—this and its yesterday in Greece and Borne and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the movements and dim mumiurings of a sleeper who will pres ently be awake.” And then the story tells, with an en gaging simplicity, of liis descent from this ecstatic vision of reality. “Presently 1 found myself again and i was beginning to fee! cold and a lit tie hungry.” He bethought himself of the John Burns relief offices which stood upon the Thames embankment * lie made his way through the galleries of the booksellers and the National gallery, which had been open continuously day and night to all decently dressed peo pie now for more than twelve years, and across the rose gardens of Trafal gar square, and so by the hotel colon nade to the embankment. He had long known of these admirable offices, which laid swept the last beggars and matchseilers and all the casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that lie would as a matter of course be able to procure a ticket for food and a night’s lodging and some indication' of possible employ ment. But he had not reckoned upon the new labor troubles, and when he got to the embankment lie found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. Ife hovered for a time on the outskirts of tlie waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then lie became aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of people, up through the arches of the great buildings that had arisen when ai! the railway stations were re moved to the south side of the river, and so to the covered ways of the Strand And here in the'open glare of midnight lie found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging with astonishing assurance, from the .people who were emerging from the small theaters and other such places of entertainment which abound ed in* that thorough t are. This was an altogther unexampled tiling. There had been no begging in London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were invading those well kept quarters of the town They had become stonily if ind to any thing but manifest disorder. Barnet walked through the crowd un able to bring himself to ask; indeed, his bearing must have been mote valiant than liis circumstances, for twice he says that he was begged from. Near tlie Trafalgar square gar dens. a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened ei*-brows, who was walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness. "I’m starving,” he said to her ab ruptly. “Oil, poor dear!” she said, and with the Impulsive generosity of her kind •C Hmio; p,y. it, t* ti t-iAi.g glanced round and slipped a silver piece into liis hand. < It was a gift that, in spite of tlie precedent of De Quiueey, might under the repressive social legislation of those times have brought Barnet with in reach of the prison lash. But he took it. he confesses, and thanked her j as w. 1 as he was able, and went otf gladly to g- t food. A day or so later—and again his free- j dom to go a ■ he {(leased upon the roads I may be taken as a mark of increasing | . social disorganization and police em- j , barrassment —he wandered out into the ! ! country. He speaks of the roads of that pinto- j I cratic age as being “fenced with barb- : I ed wire against uhpropertied people,” ! of the high walled gardens and tres ! pass warnings that kept him to the | dusty narrowness of the public ways. ! In the air happy rich people were fly j iug. heedless of the misfortunes about | | them, ns he himself had been flying ; two years ago, and along tlie road 11 ! swept the new traffic, light and swift i i and wonderful. One was rarely out of ; ! I earshot of its whistles and gongs and ! siren cries even in the field paths or I I ' over the open downs. The officials of | j the labor exchanges were everywhere j i I overworked and infuriated, the casual ! i wards were so crowded that the sur- I f>l us wanderers slept in ranks under sheds or in tin* ojien air, and since giv ! i iug to wayfarers had been made a pun | ishable offense there was no longer 1 friendship or help for a man from the I rare foot passenger or the wayside cot tage. “I wasn’t angry,” said Barnet. “1 saw an immense selfishness, a mon j strous disregard for anything but j pleasure and possession, in all those i people above us, but I saw how inevi j table that was. how certainly if the j richest had changed places with tlie ! poorest that things would have been I the same. What else can happen when i men use science and every new tiling ! that science gives and ail their avail ! able intelligence and energy to mauu j facture wealth and appliances and leave government and education to the rusting 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 fierce struggle that might be masked, but could not be escaped. Os course i this famine grabbing, this fierce dis possession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between material and training. Os course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew savage and every added power that came to, men made the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The men 1 met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all smoldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and re | venge. I saw no hope in that talk nor iu anything but patience.”. But he did not mean a passive pa tience. He meant that tlie method of social reconstruction was still a riddle; that no effectual rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tan gled aspects was solved. “I tried to talk to those discontented men,” he wrote, “but it was hard for them to see tilings as I saw them. When I talked of patience and the larger scheme they answered, ‘But then we shall all be dead,’ and I could not make them see what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the ques tion. Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.” lie does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and the chance sight of the transpar ency of ii kiosk in the market place at Bishop Stortford announcing a “Grave International Situation” did not excite him very 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 and England going to the help of the Slavs But the next night he found a toler ; able meal awaiting the vagrants in the casual ward and learned from the workhouse master that all serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their mobilization cen ters. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, lie records, | was one of extreme relief that his j days of “hopeless battering at tlie un j derside of civilization” were at an end. Here was something definite to do, something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modified when tie found that the mobilization arrange ments had boon made so hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the improvised depot at Ep som lie 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. CHAPTER 111. The Last War. ■fT* T* IEWED from the standpoint of % / a sane and ambitious social W order it is difficult to under stand and it would be tedious | to follow the motives that plunged ; mankind into the war that tills the ; histories of the middle decades of the : twentieth century. It must always be remembered that *' tlie political structure of the world at I that time was everywhere extraor : itinarily behind the collective intel ligence. That is tlie central fact of that history. For 200 years there : had been no great changes in po ' litieal or legal methods and preten ! sions; the utmost change had been a certain shifting of boundaries and . slight readjustments of procedure, ; while in nearly every other aspect of ■ life there had been fundamental revo lutions. gigantic releases and an enor mous enlargement of scope and out look. Tin- absurdities of courts and the indignities of representative parlia , mentary government, coupled with tlie opening of vast fields of opportunity in , (continued on page 5} + , t , +,., , t , +, : , # ,♦, + , t , , t . # rI , ! OLD TRAILS GARAGE i t | J. E. KLEINDIENST, Prop. 1 ♦ ♦ ♦ Open Day and Night. A Trial is all We Ask For 1 * > X QuickJService and a Square Deal to All Our Motto + t - X * ' £ * Agent for Buick Cars. 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