Plays Political

by Dan Laurence

  SIR ARTHUR. Thats right, Miss Brollikins: snub him. He is disgracing his class. As a humble representative of that class I apologize for him to the Isle of Cats. I apologize for his dress, for his manners, for his language. He must shock you every time he opens his mouth.

  BLEE. We working folks know too much of bad language and bad manners to see any fun in them or think they can do any good.

  THE MAYOR. Thats right.

  ALOYSIA. We are as tired of bad manners as Toffy is tired of good manners. We brought Toffy here, Sir Arthur, because we knew he’d speak to you as a dock laborer would speak to you if his good manners would let him. And he’s right, you know. He’s rude; but he’s right.

  OXFORD YOUTH. Yours devotedly, Brolly. And what has his Right Honorable nibs to say to that?

  SIR ARTHUR [concentrating himself on his adversary in the House of Commons manner] I will tell the noble lord what I have to say. He may marshal his friends the unemployed and break every window in the West End, beginning with every pane of glass in this house. What will he gain by it? Next day a score or so of his followers will be in prison with their heads broken. A few ignorant and cowardly people who have still any money to spare will send it to the funds for the relief of distress, imagining that they are ransoming their riches. You, ladies and gentlemen, will have to put your hands in your pockets to support the wives and children of the men in prison, and to pay cheap lawyers to put up perfectly useless defences for them in the police courts. And then, I suppose, the noble lord will boast that he has made me do something at last. What can I do? Do you suppose that I care less about the sufferings of the poor than you? Do you suppose I would not revive trade and put an end to it all tomorrow if I could? But I am like yourself: I am in the grip of economic forces that are beyond human control. What mortal men could do this Government has done. We have saved the people from starvation by stretching unemployment benefit to the utmost limit of our national resources. We—

  OXFORD YOUTH. You have cut it down to fifteen bob a week and shoved every man you could off it with your beastly means test.

  SIR ARTHUR [fiercely] What do you propose? Will you take my place and put the dole up to five pounds a week without any means test?

  THE MAYOR. Order! order! Why are we here? We are here because we are all sick of arguing and talking, and we want something doing. And here we are arguing and talking just as if it was an all night sitting of the Borough Council about an item of three-and-six for refreshments. If you, Sir Arthur, tell us that you cant find work for our people we are only wasting your time and our own, sitting here.

  He rises. The rest, except Hipney, follow his example. Sir Arthur is only too glad to rise too.

  SIR ARTHUR. At least I hope I have convinced you about the windows, Mr Mayor.

  THE MAYOR. We needed no convincing. More crockery than windows will have to be broken if you gentlemen can do nothing to get us out of our present mess. But some people will say that a few thousand more to the relief funds is better than nothing. And some of the unemployed are glaziers.

  SIR ARTHUR. Let us close our little talk on a more hopeful note. I assure you it has been intensely interesting to me; and I may tell you that signs of a revival of trade are not wholly wanting. Some of the best informed city authorities are of opinion that this year will see the end of the crisis. Some of them even hold that trade is already reviving. By the last returns the export of Spanish onions has again reached the 1913 level.

  OXFORD YOUTH. Holy Jerusalem! Spanish onions! Come on, Brolly. [He goes out].

  THE MAYOR. Weve got nothing out of this. We dont run to Spanish in the Isle. [Resignedly] Good morning. [He goes out].

  SIR ARTHUR [winningly] And do you, Miss Brollikins, feel that you have got nothing?

  ALOYSIA. I feel what they feel. And I dont believe you feel anything at all. [She goes out, followed by Blee].

  BLEE [turning at the door] The Mayor’s wrong. Weve got something all right.

  SIR ARTHUR [brightening] Indeed? What is it?

  BLEE [with intense contempt] Your measure. [He goes out].

  The Prime Minister, nettled by this gibe, resumes his seat angrily and pushes the bluebook out of his way. Then he notices that old Hipney has not budged from his seat at the secretary’s bureau.

  SIR ARTHUR. The deputation has withdrawn. Mr Hipney.

  HIPNEY [rising and coming to a chair at Sir Arthur’s elbow, in which he makes himself comfortable with a disarmingly pleasant air of beginning the business instead of ending it] Yes: now we can talk a bit. I been at this game now for fifty year.

  SIR ARTHUR [interested in spite of himself] What game? Deputations?

  HIPNEY. Unemployed deputations. This is my twelfth.

  SIR ARTHUR. As many as that! But these crises dont come oftener than every ten years, do they?

  HIPNEY. Not what you would call a crisis, perhaps. But unemployment is chronic.

  SIR ARTHUR. It always blows over, doesnt it? Trade revives.

  HIPNEY. It used to. We was the workshop of the world then. But you gentlemen went out of the workshop business to make a war. And while that was going on our customers had to find out how to make things for themselves. Now we shall have to be their customers when weve any money to buy with.

  SIR ARTHUR. No doubt that has occurred to some extent; but there is still an immense fringe of the human race growing up to a sense of the necessity for British goods.

  HIPNEY. All goods is alike to that lot provided theyre the cheapest. They tell me the Italians are tapping their volcanoes for cheap power. We dont seem able to tap nothing. The east is chock full of volcanoes: they think no more of an earthquake there than you would of a deputation. A Chinese coolie can live on a penny a day. What can we do against labor at a penny a day and power for next to nothing out of the burning bowels of the earth?

  SIR ARTHUR. Too true, Mr Hipney. Our workers must make sacrifices.

  HIPNEY. They will if you drive em to it, Srarthur. But it’s you theyll sacrifice.

  SIR ARTHUR. Oh come, Mr Hipney! you are a man of sense and experience. What good would it do them to sacrifice me?

  HIPNEY. Not a bit in the world, sir. But that wont stop them. Look at your self. Look at your conferences! Look at your debates! They dont do no good. But you keep on holding them. It’s a sort of satisfaction to you when you feel helpless. Well, sir, if you come to helplessness there isnt on God’s earth a creature more helpless than what our factories and machines have made of an English working man when nobody will give him a job and pay him to do it. And when he gets it what does he understand of it? Just nothing. Where did the material that he does his little bit of a job on come from? He dont know. What will happen to it when it goes out of the factory after he and his like have all done their little bits of jobs on it? He dont know. Where could he buy it if it stopped coming to him? He dont know. Where could he sell it if it was left on his hands? He dont know. He dont know nothing of the business that his life depends on. Turn a cat loose and itll feed itself. Turn an English working man loose and he’ll starve. You have to buy him off with a scrap of dole to prevent him saying “Well, if I’m to die I may as well have the satisfaction of seeing you die first.”

  SIR ARTHUR. But—I really must press the point—what good will that do him?

  HIPNEY. What good does backing horses do him? What good does drinking do him? What good does going to political meetings do him? What good does going to church do him? Not a scrap. But he keeps on doing them all the same.

  SIR ARTHUR. But surely you recognize, Mr Hipney, that all this is thoroughly wrong—wrong in feeling—contrary to English instincts—out of character, if I may put it that way.

  HIPNEY. Well, Srarthur, whatever’s wrong you and your like have taken on yourselves the job of setting it right. I havnt: I’m only a poor man: a nobody, as you might say.

  SIR ARTHUR. I have not taken anything on myself, Mr Hipney. I have chosen a parliamentary career, and found it, let me tell you, a very arduous an
d trying one: I might almost say a heartbreaking one. I have just had to promise my wife to see a doctor for brain fag. But that does not mean that I have taken it on myself to bring about the millennium.

  HIPNEY [soothingly] Just so, Srarthur: just so. It tries you and worries you, and breaks your heart and does no good; but you keep on doing it. Theyve often wanted me to go into Parliament. And I could win the seat. Put up old Hipney for the Isle of Cats and your best man wouldnt have a chance against him. But not me: I know too much. It would be the end of me, as it’s been the end of all the Labor men that have done it. The Cabinet is full of Labor men that started as red-hot Socialists; and what change has it made except that theyre in and out at Bucknam Palace like peers of the realm?

  SIR ARTHUR. You ought to be in Parliament, Mr Hipney. You have the making of a first-rate debater in you.

  HIPNEY. Psha! An old street corner speaker like me can debate the heads off you parliamentary gentlemen. You stick your thumbs in your waistcoat holes and wait half an hour between every sentence to think of what to say next; and you call that debating. If I did that in the Isle not a man would stop to listen to me. Mind you, I know you mean it as a compliment that I’d make a good parliamentary debater. I appreciate it. But people dont look to Parliament for talk nowadays: that game is up. Not like it was in old Gladstone’s time, eh?

  SIR ARTHUR. Parliament, Mr Hipney, is what the people of England have made it. For good or evil we have committed ourselves to democracy. I am here because the people have sent me here.

  HIPNEY. Just so. Thats all the use they could make of the vote when they got it. Their hopes was in you; and your hopes is in Spanish onions. What a world it is, aint it, Srarthur?

  SIR ARTHUR. We must educate our voters, Mr Hipney. Education will teach them to understand.

  HIPNEY. Dont deceive yourself, Srarthur: you cant teach people anything they dont want to know. Old Dr Marx—Karl Marx they call him now—my father knew him well—thought that when he’d explained the Capitalist System to the working classes of Europe theyd unite and overthrow it. Fifty years after he founded his Red International the working classes of Europe rose up and shot one another down and blew one another to bits, and turned millions and millions of their infant children out to starve in the snow or steal and beg in the sunshine, as if Dr Marx had never been born. And theyd do it again tomorrow if they was set on to do it. Why did you set them on? All they wanted was to be given their job, and fed and made comfortable according to their notion of comfort. If youd done that for them you wouldnt be having all this trouble. But you werent equal to it; and now the fat’s in the fire.

  SIR ARTHUR. But the Government is not responsible for that. The Government cannot compel traders to buy goods that they cannot sell. The Government cannot compel manufacturers to produce goods that the traders will not buy. Without demand there can be no supply.

  HIPNEY. Theres a powerful demand just now, if demand is what you are looking for.

  SIR ARTHUR. Can you point out exactly where, Mr Hipney ?

  HIPNEY. In our children’s bellies, Srarthur. And in our own.

  SIR ARTHUR. That is not an effective demand, Mr. Hipney. I wish I had time to explain to you the inexorable laws of political economy. I—

  HIPNEY [interrupting him confidentially] No use, Srarthur. That game is up. That stuff you learnt at college, that gave you such confidence in yourself, wont go down with my lot.

  SIR ARTHUR [smiling] What is the use of saying that economic science and natural laws wont go down, Mr Hipney ? You might as well say that the cold of winter wont go down.

  HIPNEY. You see, you havnt read Karl Marx, have you?

  SIR ARTHUR. Mr Hipney, when the Astronomer Royal tells me that it is twelve o’clock by Greenwich time I do not ask him whether he has read the nonsense of the latest flat earth man. I have something better to do with my time than to read the ravings of a half-educated German Communist. I am sorry you have wasted your own time reading such stuff.

  HIPNEY. Me read Marx! Bless you, Srarthur, I am like you: I talk about the old doctor without ever having read a word of him. But I know what that man did for them as did read him.

  SIR ARTHUR. Turned their heads, eh?

  HIPNEY. Just that, Srarthur. Turned their heads. Turned them right round the other way to yours. I dont know whether what Marx said was right or wrong, because I dont know what he said. But I know that he puts into every man and woman that does read him a conceit that they know all about political economy and can look down on the stuff you were taught at college as ignorant oldfashioned trash. Look at that girl Aloysia Brollikins! Her father was a basket maker in Spitalfields. She’s full of Marx. And as to examinations and scholarships and certificates and gold medals and the like, she’s won enough of them to last your whole family for two generations. She can win them in her sleep. Look at Blee! His father was a cooper. But he managed to go through Ruskin College. You start him paying out Marx, and proving by the materialist theory of history that Capitalism is bound to develop into Communism, and that whoever doesnt know it is an ignorant nobody or a half-educated college fool; and youll realize that your college conceit is up against a Marxist conceit that beats anything you ever felt for cocksureness and despising the people that havnt got it. Look across Europe if you dont believe me. It was that conceit, sir, that nerved them Russians to go through with their Communism in 1917.

  SIR ARTHUR. I must read Marx, Mr Hipney. I knew I had to deal with a sentimental revolt against unemployment. I had no idea that it had academic pretensions.

  HIPNEY. Lord bless you, Srarthur, the Labor movement is rotten with book learning; and your people dont seem ever to read anything. When did an undersecretary ever sit up half the night after a hard day’s work to read Karl Marx or anyone else? No fear. Your hearts are not in your education; but our young people lift themselves out of the gutter with it. Thats how you can shoot and you can ride and you can play golf; and some of you can talk the hind leg off a donkey; but when it comes to book learning Aloysia and Blee can wipe the floor with you.

  SIR ARTHUR. I find it hard to believe that the Mayor ever burnt the midnight oil reading Marx.

  HIPNEY. No more he didnt. But he has to pretend to, same as your people have to pretend to understand the gold standard.

  SIR ARTHUR [laughing frankly] You have us there, Mr Hipney. I can make neither head nor tail of it; and I dont pretend to.

  HIPNEY. Did you know the Mayor well, Srarthur? You called him your old friend Tom.

  SIR ARTHUR. He took the chair for me once at an election meeting. He has an artificial tooth that looks as if it were made of zinc. I remembered him by that. [Genially—rising]. What humbugs we Prime Ministers have to be, Mr Hipney! You know: dont you? [He offers his hand to signify that the conversation is over].

  MR HIPNEY [rising and taking it rather pityingly] Bless your innocence, Srarthur, you dont know what humbug is yet. Wait til youre a Labor leader. [He winks at his host and makes for the door].

  SIR ARTHUR. Ha ha! Ha haha! Goodbye, Mr Hipney: goodbye. Very good of you to have given me so much of your time.

  HIPNEY. Youre welcome to it, Srarthur. Goodbye. [He goes out].

  Sir Arthur presses a button to summon Hilda. Then he looks at his watch, and whistles, startled to find how late it is. Hilda comes in quickly through the masked door.

  SIR ARTHUR. Do you know how late it is? To work! work! work! work! Come along.

  HILDA. I am afraid you cant do any work before you start for the Church House lunch. The whole morning is gone with those people from the Isle of Cats.

  SIR ARTHUR. But I have mountains of work to get through. With one thing and another I havnt been able to do a thing for the last three weeks; and it accumulates and accumulates. It will crush me if I dont clear it off before it becomes impossible.

  HILDA. But I keep telling you, Sir Arthur, that if you will talk to everybody for half an hour instead of letting me get rid of them for you in two minutes, what can you expect ? You
say you havent attended to anything for three weeks; but really you havnt attended to anything since the session began. I hate to say anything; but really, when those Isle of Cats people took themselves off your hands almost providentially, to let that ridiculous old man talk to you for an hour—! [She sits down angrily].

  SIR ARTHUR. Nonsense! he didnt stay two minutes; and I got a lot out of him. What about the letters this morning?

  HILDA. I have dealt with them: you neednt bother. There are two or three important ones that you ought to answer: I have put them aside for you when you have time.

  Flavia and David dash into the room through the masked door even more excited and obstreperous than before, Flavia to her father’s right, David to his left.

  FLAVIA. Papa: weve been to a meeting of the unemployed with Aloysia and Toffy.

  DAVID. Such a lark!