The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The cry “Votes for Women!” promised further trouble and those who raised it frankly called themselves “militants.” They organized under the leadership of Mrs. Pankhurst in 1903 in opposition to the Suffrage group led by Mrs. Fawcett which believed in obtaining the vote by persuasion. Their first experiments in militancy, confined to heckling and unfurling banners at political meetings, while not yet serious, were one more evidence, as Lady Frances Balfour wrote, of “new winds blowing hard through society.”

  At the same time, mine-owners of the Rand were demanding license to import Chinese labour when African labour, finding enough work after the war to satisfy a low appetite, could not be obtained for the mines. Contract labour had horrid connotations from which the Government shrank, but the mine-owners were insistent, else they could not reopen, investments were tied up, Rand shares tumbled, and as the Economist frankly stated, it was a matter of £.s.d. “If the people of England and elsewhere who own Transvaal mining shares to the value of £200,000,000 want to get their money back with interest, then they will have to tackle this labour question in the right spirit.”

  The Government reluctantly consented, the Chinese were brought in and lodged in compounds; the Liberals, who had themselves introduced contract labour in British Guiana, now thundered in awful wrath. The Chinese compounds were no worse than England’s dark satanic slums, where one water faucet and one privy often served twenty-five families, where beds were rented for three and the space under them for two. But humanitarian instincts grow fiercer in proportion to the distance by which their causes are removed and it is always easier to build Jerusalem in Africa than at home. Moreover the Chinese labour issue carried the smell of money which had hung about the Boer War from the start. It devalued the moral content which the imperialists liked to attach to the cause of Empire.

  On top of these issues Joseph Chamberlain wrought havoc with Tariff Reform. When he launched his campaign for Protection he aroused against his party the fundamental British sentiment of laissez-faire, raised among the people old memories of hated Corn Laws and fears of a rise in food prices, handed the Liberals another issue in the cry “Free food!” and split his party between the old and the new Conservatives, between land and money. Manufacturers and businessmen, exponents of what H. G. Wells called “commercialized imperialism with all its push and energy,” favored Protection. As an imperialist and businessman himself, Chamberlain saw it as a means of drawing together the mother country and all its dependencies in a vast Imperial tariff system which would stimulate trade within the Empire and prosperity at home, strengthen Imperial bonds, increase revenues for social legislation, and, not least, provide an issue of which he would be the hero. In the British Cabinet he was what Germany was among the nations: dynamic, ambitious, conscious of power and ability, fitted in his own mind for the top place and galled that it was held by another. Tariff Reform was his usurpation of the office he had missed. It wrecked the Cabinet. Chamberlain himself resigned, the better to carry his campaign to the country. Five Free Traders, including the Duke of Devonshire and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also resigned. In the ranks a vigorous new M.P., Winston Churchill, waving the banner of Free Trade, crossed over to join the Liberals amid cries of “Rat!” from the Tories. Interminable debates raged over preferential duties, bounties, dumping, and other fiscal mysteries. The public, barely comprehending, took sides, Free Food leagues sprang up alongside the anti-school-tax leagues; the British people were rapidly becoming as contentious as the French.

  As Prime Minister, Mr. Balfour, still suave, effortless, unaddicted to political dogma, refused to take a firm position, partly because he saw no firm ground on which to take one and partly because he believed a strategy of steering between extremes was the best way to hold his party together and his Government in office. He saw no virtue in a doctrinaire persistence in Free Trade and he could see advantages to British industry in some form of selective tariff, although he had no wish to swallow Chamberlain’s program whole. The one thing he firmly believed was that continued direction of England’s affairs by the Conservative party was more important than either Free Trade or Protection and this he was determined to maintain. Amid quarreling colleagues, resigning ministers, party apostasies, he eluded all pressures and coolly told the House that he would be ill performing his duty “if I were to profess a settled conviction where no settled conviction exists.” He infused the issues with such philosophic doubt and infused his doubt with such authority as almost to mesmerize members on both sides. When called upon to explain his relations with Free Traders and Protectionists within his own party he “indulged the House with a brilliant display of disdainful banter.” Exploiting all his parliamentary dexterity, he maneuvered the Government through session after session for more than two years, seeming almost to find amusement in the difficulty of his task. But the performance left his followers uneasy. They wanted the leader of their party to lead and instead, as Harry Cust said, “he nailed his colors to the fence.”

  Balfour’s purpose, however, was serious. He wanted to retain office as long as he could in order to consolidate the Entente and the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence especially after the Tangier Crisis of 1905. He had given the order for rearming the artillery with a new quick-firing gun, the 18-pounder, and he was determined, as he explained later, “not to go out of office until we were so far committed to the expenditure that no Liberal Government could have withdrawn from that position.” Relentless, Chamberlain persisted in his campaign. Balfour’s dancing on eggs grew increasing difficult as the exasperation of his own party and the impatience for office of the Opposition mounted.

  Overshadowing all was the Social Problem. Investigations and reports appearing all at once after 1900 made harshly visible the fact and the consequences of extreme inequality in possession of material goods. In B. S. Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 1901, in the last volume of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London, 1903, in L. Chiozza Money’s Riches and Poverty, 1905, in reports of the Royal Commission on Labour and in the Fabian Society’s studies of the destitute, diseased and insane, evidence accumulated that the richest country in the world rested on a foundation of one-third of its population living “in chronic poverty, unable to satisfy the primal needs of animal life.” Chiozza Money showed that economic inequality was particularly wide in England. In France, whose population was about the same, there were twice as many small estates between £.500 and £ 10,000 as in England, but in the United Kingdom three times as many large estates over £50,000 and four times as many over £250,000 as in France.

  The investigators produced the facts: sleep, diet, sanitation, privacy, even respiratory air, were inadequate for basic human needs. Professor Huxley had calculated that 800 cubic feet of air space per person was the ideal. Even the Poor House provided 300. In the slums people lived three to a bedroom of 700 cubic feet or, with children, eight and nine in a space of 1,200 cubic feet. Vermin lived with them, a piece of paper on the floor served as a toilet, fish on Sundays was the weekly protein for a family of eight, at two and a half ounces per portion. Children were stunted and pale, with rotting teeth, and if they went to school, sat dully at their desks or fell asleep. Ignorance and apathy as much as ill health were poverty’s product; the slums were sloughs of wasted lives. Overcrowding in country villages was often as bad. In an Oxfordshire cottage a family of eight slept in two beds with a pair of thin blankets among them, in a Yorkshire cottage husband and wife and five daughters shared two beds and an attic floor, in Somerset a mother and three children slept in one room, five children of both sexes up to the age of nineteen in another.

  For unskilled and unorganized labour, working conditions matched the slums. At the Shawfield Chemical Works in Glasgow in 1897, year of the Diamond Jubilee, workmen received 3d. or 4d. an hour for a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, spent amid poisonous vapors without a lunch-hour rest. They ate lunch standing at the furnaces and if they took Sunday off were fined
the next day’s wages. Lord Overtoun, owner of the Works, a philanthropist who gave £10,000 a year to charity, was a leading member of the Sunday Observance and Sunday Rest Societies. In other industries workers could be arrested for taking a day off without permission. If they applied for it, the request could be refused; if they took it anyway they could be, and often were, hauled off to a day in gaol. Skilled workers organized in England’s craft unions, the oldest in Europe, were better off. Numbering about one-fifth of all adult male workers, a larger proportion than in any other country, they had their own insurance and pension systems backed by large funds and they benefited from lower prices in their own cooperatives. Nevertheless, vis-à-vis capital, they were still on the defensive and the dark persistent presence of unemployment at their backs made them vulnerable.

  England’s economy since 1900 had recovered from the depression of the nineties and was on the whole prosperous, active and expanding. Shippers and shipbuilders, bankers and millowners were busy, coal mines were operating to capacity, and although in chemical, electrical and other new industries the British were not as enterprising as some foreign competitors, most businesses, despite ups and downs, were doing well. Yet the gap in distribution of profits was growing not less but greater. While the rich lived at an acme of luxury and leisure, the purchasing power of wages was falling and human material deteriorating. The minimum height for recruits for the British Army was lowered from five feet three inches in 1883 to five feet in 1900.

  Something was wrong with the system. Somehow the great mechanical and material achievements of the recent past had twisted society out of shape. In the United States, where the process was accelerated, Thorstein Veblen was moved to make his inquiries into business enterprise and the Muckrakers to their searches in the slums and stockyards and the files of Standard Oil. In England, reformers, writers, crusading journalists, Fabians, Socialists, Radical Liberals were impatient for the remedy. The shrill cries of H. G. Wells warned that material progress without planning would lead to a future, as he depicted it in When the Sleeper Wakes in 1899, of higher buildings, bigger towns, wickeder capitalists, more downtrodden and desperate labour, a future where “everything was bigger, quicker, more crowded” … in short an “exaggeration of contemporary tendencies.” Like a blue jay incessantly pecking and cawing at the ills of civilization, he demanded in Anticipations in 1900 and A Modern Utopia in 1905 the New Republic of a planned society and fervently expounded the possibilities for improvement which science had put in the hands of man.

  Peace, Retrenchment and Reform which had satisfied as the Liberal creed for so long were no longer adequate. The optimistic Liberalism of the Nineteenth Century was past. An “indignant pessimism” inspired Charles Masterman’s From the Abyss in 1902 and In Peril of Change in 1905. A young Liberal journalist, literary editor of the Daily News, devoutly High Church in religion, married to a Lyttelton whose uncle was a member of Balfour’s cabinet, he was one of the new kind of Liberal, puzzled and disturbed by trends which betrayed the promise of the Nineteenth Century. Another was the lonely economist J. A. Hobson, author of The Social Problem, 1901. He saw the brilliant hopes of early Liberalism overcast by the doctrine of survival of the fittest and the energy for progress absorbed in material growth. Political Economy having failed to solve the Social Problem, he believed a new social science was needed to “furnish a satisfactory basis for the art of social progress.” Hobson fixed on unemployment as the crux of the matter. He saw it as a waste of human resources and included in that waste the idle rich, of whom 250,000 males between the ages of twenty and sixty-five, according to a census of 1891, were without trade or profession. Under-consumption, the corollary of unemployment, was the chief source of trouble and he saw imperialism, not as the white man’s burden nobly shouldered, but as the economy’s drive to compensate for markets missing at home. Hobson’s views, expressed in The Psychology of Jingoism in 1901 and Imperialism in 1902, were influential but offensive both to the imperialists and to the Fabians, who believed in imperialism. He was never offered a chair either by the major universities or by the London School of Economics, founded by the Fabians in 1894, to establish that new social science which was his goal.

  What the Fabian Society wanted was Socialism without Marx or revolution, something like Macbeth without murder—an intellectual, respectable, gradual, factual, practical, “gas and water” English Socialism powered by the brains, hard work and infinite attention to detail of the Webbs and the brilliant common sense of Shaw. Founded in the eighties, expounding plans and arguments through the Fabian Tracts, it was an intellectual lobby bent on guiding existing political institutions toward the ultimate goals of Socialism. Fabians were the B’s in Beatrice Webb’s division of people into A’s (aristocrats, artists and anarchists) and B’s (benevolents, bourgeois and bureaucrats). They sought no working-class base but preferred to operate, as William Morris said, by “gradually permeating cultivated people with our own aspirations” and gradually influencing government toward their goals. They made splendid progress among those of their own kind but remained a scholastic regiment of seven or eight hundred, aloof from the people for whom they toiled. In England persons of the educated classes did not and could not penetrate the unions. Discrediting the Marxian dogma of mandatory class war, the Fabians believed that labourers and employees must gain their ends within the capitalist system because it was the employers’ surplus capital which gave them work. In his lectures “disproving” Marx, Shaw, a tall, reedy, red-haired figure, emphatic, provocative and bold, held listeners spellbound as he poured out ideas in crisp, sharp sentences, unfaltering for an hour and a half. In Major Barbara, which opened in December, 1905, with Mr. Balfour in the audience, Shaw spoke through the mouth of the munitions magnate, Undershaft, on “the crime of poverty.” “What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there. What do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.”

  The Webbs attacked the crime with mountainous reports and the English lubricant of social intercourse and conversation. Coldly bent on improving society, they were essentially authoritarians, impatient with the democratic process. They favored Protection, Joseph Chamberlain (with whom Beatrice had once contemplated marriage) and anything which strengthened the State and brought in revenue for more sewers, soup kitchens and unemployment insurance. They had no use for the Liberals, who understood neither the imperial nor Socialist demands of the new age, and had little faith in a Labour party of the untutored which would be incapable of imposing its will. What was needed was a strong party with no nonsense and a business-like understanding of national needs which would take hold of the future like a governess, slap it into clean clothes, wash its face, blow its nose, make it sit up straight at table and eat a proper diet. This could only be the Conservative party, regenerated by Chamberlain, advised by Mr. and Mrs. Webb, bestowing upon England the iron blessings of Tory Socialism.

  Orthodox Socialism was represented by the Socialist Democratic Federation led by H. M. Hyndman, a wealthy product of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he had attended in the same year as the Prince of Wales. As devout in Marxism as it was detached from the working class, the SDF expressed all the fiercest revolutionary doctrines of continental Socialism, but, lacking followers, remained a voice without a body. “I could not carry on,” said Hyndman, “unless I expected the revolution at ten o’clock next Monday morning.” Presumably it was to drop from the sky, because in Hyndman’s scheme the workers did not figure as initiators. “A slave class cannot be freed by the slaves themselves,” he pronounced. “The leadership, th
e initiative, the teaching, the organization, must come from those who are born into a different position and are trained to use their faculties in early life.” He complained of the peculiarly British technique by which the ruling class absorbed rising labour leaders who proved only too willing to sell out to the dominant minority (that is, the Liberals) after they had “obtained their education from well-to-do Socialists who have been sacrificing themselves for their sake.” The tone suggests some justification for the friends who said that Hyndman, a cricketer, had adopted Socialism out of spite against the world because he was not included in the Cambridge eleven. Along with Robert Blatchford, editor of the Clarion, and other earnest spirits, Hyndman in meetings, articles, journalism and oratory, relentlessly pursued that Monday morning which he could not have survived and the British working class did not want.

  In 1901 occurred a decisive moment in the shifting balance of political power. The Taff Vale judgment by the House of Lords, acting in its capacity as a court of appeal, held trade unions liable for the damage caused by strikes, thus putting in jeopardy their pension and benefit funds. It proved to be that act of the ruling class which convinced the English working class of the need for political representation. Until then English labour believed in fighting its battles against employers by direct action through trade unions rather than by political action through Parliament. Giving its political allegiance to the Liberals, English labour could not be drawn into support of a Socialist party and disapproved of class war. “The English working class,” said Clemenceau, “is a bourgeois class.” Continental comrades found the English Trade Union Congresses dull and uninspired because the members were not interested in debating ideas but only in immediate gains. To the French, said one visitor, such gains were the gathering of strength for the social revolution; to the British worker they were ends in themselves while “fundamental principles and eternal verities irritate him.” He was not interested in a new social system, as Morley said, “but of having a fairer treatment in this one.”