Labour-unions grown after the destruction of the guilds by the
State. -- Their struggles. -- Mutual Aid in strikes. --
Co-operation. -- Free associations for various purposes. --
Self-sacrifice. -- Countless societies for combined action under
all possible aspects. -- Mutual Aid in slum-life. -- Personal
aid.
When we examine the every-day life of the rural populations
of Europe, we find that, notwithstanding all that has been done
in modern States for the destruction of the village community,
the life of the peasants remains honeycombed with habits and
customs of mutual aid and support; that important vestiges of the
communal possession of the soil are still retained; and that, as
soon as the legal obstacles to rural association were lately
removed, a network of free unions for all sorts of economical
purposes rapidly spread among the peasants -- the tendency of
this young movement being to reconstitute some sort of union
similar to the village community of old. Such being the
conclusions arrived at in the preceding chapter, we have now to
consider, what institutions for mutual support can be found at
the present time amongst the industrial populations.
For the last three hundred years, the conditions for the
growth of such institutions have been as unfavourable in the
towns as they have been in the villages. It is well known,
indeed, that when the medieval cities were subdued in the
sixteenth century by growing military States, all institutions
which kept the artisans, the masters, and the merchants together
in the guilds and the cities were violently destroyed. The
self-government and the self-jurisdiction of both, the guild and
the city were abolished; the oath of allegiance between
guild-brothers became an act of felony towards the State; the
properties of the guilds were confiscated in the same way as the
lands of the village communities; and the inner and technical
organization of each trade was taken in hand by the State. Laws,
gradually growing in severity, were passed to prevent artisans
from combining in any way. For a time, some shadows of the old
guilds were tolerated: merchants' guilds were allowed to exist
under the condition of freely granting subsidies to the kings,
and some artisan guilds were kept in existence as organs of
administration. Some of them still drag on their meaningless
existence. But what formerly was the vital force of medieval life
and industry has long since disappeared under the crushing weight
of the centralized State.
In Great Britain, which may be taken as the best illustration
of the industrial policy of the modern States, we see the
Parliament beginning the destruction of the guilds as early as
the fifteenth century; but it was especially in the next century
that decisive measures were taken. Henry the Eighth not only
ruined the organization of the guilds, but also confiscated their
properties, with even less excuse and manners, as Toulmin Smith
wrote, than he had produced for confiscating the estates of the
monasteries.1 Edward the Sixth completed his work,2 and
already in the second part of the sixteenth century we find the
Parliament settling all the disputes between craftsmen and
merchants, which formerly were settled in each city separately.
The Parliament and the king not only legislated in all such
contests, but, keeping in view the interests of the Crown in the
exports, they soon began to determine the number of apprentices
in each trade and minutely to regulate the very technics of each
fabrication -- the weights of the stuffs, the number of threads
in the yard of cloth, and the like. With little success, it must
be said; because contests and technical difficulties which were
arranged for centuries in succession by agreement between
closely-interdependent guilds and federated cities lay entirely
beyond the powers of the centralized State. The continual
interference of its officials paralyzed the trades; bringing most
of them to a complete decay; and the last century economists,
when they rose against the State regulation of industries, only
ventilated a widely-felt discontent. The abolition of that
interference by the French Revolution was greeted as an act of
liberation, and the example of France was soon followed
elsewhere.
With the regulation of wages the State had no better success.
In the medieval cities, when the distinction between masters and
apprentices or journeymen became more and more apparent in the
fifteenth century, unions of apprentices (Gesellenverb?nde),
occasionally assuming an international character, were opposed to
the unions of masters and merchants. Now it was the State which
undertook to settle their griefs, and under the Elizabethan
Statute of 1563 the Justices of Peace had to settle the wages, so
as to guarantee a "convenient" livelihood to journeymen and
apprentices. The Justices, however, proved helpless to conciliate
the conflicting interests, and still less to compel the masters
to obey their decisions. The law gradually became a dead letter,
and was repealed by the end of the eighteenth century. But while
the State thus abandoned the function of regulating wages, it
continued severely to prohibit all combinations which were
entered upon by journeymen and workers in order to raise their
wages, or to keep them at a certain level. All through the
eighteenth century it legislated against the workers' unions, and
in 1799 it finally prohibited all sorts of combinations, under
the menace of severe punishments. In fact, the British Parliament
only followed in this case the example of the French
Revolutionary Convention, which had issued a draconic law against
coalitions of workers-coalitions between a number of citizens
being considered as attempts against the sovereignty of the
State, which was supposed equally to protect all its subjects.
The work of destruction of the medieval unions was thus
completed. Both in the town and in the village the State reigned
over loose aggregations of individuals, and was ready to prevent
by the most stringent measures the reconstitution of any sort of
separate unions among them. These were, then, the conditions
under which the mutual-aid tendency had to make its way in the
nineteenth century.
Need it be said that no such measures could destroy that
tendency? Throughout the eighteenth century, the workers' unions
were continually reconstituted.3 Nor were they stopped by the
cruel prosecutions which took place under the laws of 1797 and
1799. Every flaw in supervision, every delay of the masters in
denouncing the unions was taken advantage of. Under the cover of
friendly societies, burial clubs, or secret brotherhoods, the
unions spread in the textile industries, among the Sheffield
cutlers, the miners, and vigorous federal organizations were
formed to support the branches during strikes and
prosecutions.4 The repeal of the Combination Laws in 1825 gave
a new impulse to the movement. Unions and national federations
were formed in all trades.5 and when Robert Owen started his
Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union, it mustered half a
million members in a few months. True that this period of
relative liberty did not last long. Prosecution began anew in the
thirties, and the well-known ferocious condemnations of 1832-1844
followed. The Grand National Union was disbanded, and all over
the country, both the private employers and the Government in its
own workshops began to compel the workers to resign all
connection with unions, and to sign "the Document" to that
effect. Unionists were prosecuted wholesale under the Master and
Servant Act -- workers being summarily arrested and condemned
upon a mere complaint of misbehaviour lodged by the master.6
Strikes were suppressed in an autocratic way, and the most
astounding condemnations took place for merely having announced a
strike or acted as a delegate in it -- to say nothing of the
military suppression of strike riots, nor of the condemnations
which followed the frequent outbursts of acts of violence. To
practise mutual support under such circumstances was anything but
an easy task. And yet, notwithstanding all obstacles, of which
our own generation hardly can have an idea, the revival of the
unions began again in 1841, and the amalgamation of the workers
has been steadily continued since. After a long fight, which
lasted for over a hundred years, the right of combining together
was conquered, and at the present time nearly one-fourth part of
the regularly-employed workers, i.e. about 1,500,000, belong to
trade unions.7
As to the other European States, sufficient to say that up to
a very recent date, all sorts of unions were prosecuted as
conspiracies; and that nevertheless they exist everywhere, even
though they must often take the form of secret societies; while
the extension and the force of labour organizations, and
especially of the Knights of Labour, in the United States and in
Belgium, have been sufficiently illustrated by strikes in the
nineties. It must, however, be borne in mind that, prosecution
apart, the mere fact of belonging to a labour union implies
considerable sacrifices in money, in time, and in unpaid work,
and continually implies the risk of losing employment for the
mere fact of being a unionist.8 There is, moreover, the
strike, which a unionist has continually to face; and the grim
reality of a strike is, that the limited credit of a worker's
family at the baker's and the pawnbroker's is soon exhausted, the
strike-pay goes not far even for food, and hunger is soon written
on the children's faces. For one who lives in close contact with
workers, a protracted strike is the most heartrending sight;
while what a strike meant forty years ago in this country, and
still means in all but the wealthiest parts of the continent, can
easily be conceived. Continually, even now, strikes will end with
the total ruin and the forced emigration of whole populations,
while the shooting down of strikers on the slightest provocation,
or even without any provocation,9 is quite habitual still on
the continent.
And yet, every year there are thousands of strikes and
lock-outs in Europe and America -- the most severe and protracted
contests being, as a rule, the so-called "sympathy strikes,"
which are entered upon to support locked-out comrades or to
maintain the rights of the unions. And while a portion of the
Press is prone to explain strikes by "intimidation," those who
have lived among strikers speak with admiration of the mutual aid
and support which are constantly practised by them. Every one has
heard of the colossal amount of work which was done by volunteer
workers for organizing relief during the London dock-labourers'
strike; of the miners who, after having themselves been idle for
many weeks, paid a levy of four shillings a week to the strike
fund when they resumed work; of the miner widow who, during the
Yorkshire labour war of 1894, brought her husband's life-savings
to the strike-fund; of the last loaf of bread being always shared
with neighbours; of the Radstock miners, favoured with larger
kitchen-gardens, who invited four hundred Bristol miners to take
their share of cabbage and potatoes, and so on. All newspaper
correspondents, during the great strike of miners in Yorkshire in
1894, knew heaps of such facts, although not all of them could
report such "irrelevant" matters to their respective papers.10
Unionism is not, however, the only form in which the worker's
need of mutual support finds its expression. There are, besides,
the political associations, whose activity many workers consider
as more conducive to general welfare than the trade-unions,
limited as they are now in their purposes. Of course the mere
fact of belonging to a political body cannot be taken as a
manifestation of the mutual-aid tendency. We all know that
politics are the field in which the purely egotistic elements of
society enter into the most entangled combinations with
altruistic aspirations. But every experienced politician knows
that all great political movements were fought upon large and
often distant issues, and that those of them were the strongest
which provoked most disinterested enthusiasm. All great
historical movements have had this character, and for our own
generation Socialism stands in that case. "Paid agitators" is, no
doubt, the favourite refrain of those who know nothing about it.
The truth, however, is that -- to speak only of what I know
personally -- if I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four
years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice
which I came across in the Socialist movement, the reader of such
a diary would have had the word "heroism" constantly on his lips.
But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes; they were
average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist newspaper
-- and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone -- has the same
history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in
the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal
ambition. I have seen families living without knowing what would
be their food to-morrow, the husband boycotted all round in his
little town for his part in the paper, and the wife supporting
the family by sewing, and such a situation lasting for years,
until the family would retire, without a word of reproach, simply
saying: "Continue; we can hold on no more!" I have seen men,
dying from consumption, and knowing it, and yet knocking about in
snow and fog to prepare meetings, speaking at meetings within a
few weeks from death, and only then retiring to the hospital with
the words: "Now, friends, I am done; the doctors say I have but a
few weeks to live. Tell the comrades that I shall be happy if
they come to see me." I have seen facts which would be described
as "idealization" if I told them in this place; and the very
names of these men, hardly known outside a narrow circle of
friends, will soon be forgotten when the friends, too, have
passed away. In fact, I don't know myself which most to admire,
the unbounded devotion of these few, or the sum total of petty
acts of devotion of the great number. Every quire of a penny
paper sold, every meeting, every hundred votes which are won at a
Socialist election, represent an amount of energy and sacrifices
of which no outsider has the faintest idea. And what is now done
by Socialists has been done in every popular and advanced party,
political and religious, in the past. All past progress has been
promoted by like men and by a like devotion.
Co-operation, especially in Britain, is often described as
"joint-stock individualism"; and such as it is now, it
undoubtedly tends to breed a co-operative egotism, not only
towards the community at large, but also among the co-operators
themselves. It is, nevertheless, certain that at its origin the
movement had an essentially mutual-aid character. Even now, its
most ardent promoters are persuaded that co-operation leads
mankind to a higher harmonic stage of economical relations, and
it is not possible to stay in some of the strongholds of
co-operation in the North without realizing that the great number
of the rank and file hold the same opinion. Most of them would
lose interest in the movement if that faith were gone; and it
must be owned that within the last few years broader ideals of
general welfare and of the producers' solidarity have begun to be
current among the co-operators. There is undoubtedly now a
tendency towards establishing better relations between the owners
of the co-operative workshops and the workers.
The importance of co-operation in this country, in Holland
and in Denmark is well known; while in Germany, and especially on
the Rhine, the co-operative societies are already an important
factor of industrial life.11 It is, however, Russia which
offers perhaps the best field for the study of cooperation under
an infinite variety of aspects. In Russia, it is a natural
growth, an inheritance from the middle ages; and while a formally
established co-operative society would have to cope with many
legal difficulties and official suspicion, the informal
co-operation -- the art?l -- makes the very substance of Russian
peasant life. The history of "the making of Russia," and of the
colonization of Siberia, is a history of the hunting and trading
art?ls or guilds, followed by village communities, and at the
present time we find the art?l everywhere; among each group of
ten to fifty peasants who come from the same village to work at a
factory, in all the building trades, among fishermen and hunters,
among convicts on their way to and in Siberia, among railway
porters, Exchange messengers, Customs House labourers, everywhere
in the village industries, which give occupation to 7,000,000 men
-- from top to bottom of the working world, permanent and
temporary, for production and consumption under all possible
aspects. Until now, many of the fishing-grounds on the
tributaries of the Caspian Sea are held by immense art?ls, the
Ural river belonging to the whole of the Ural Cossacks, who allot
and re-allot the fishing-grounds -- perhaps the richest in the
world -- among the villages, without any interference of the
authorities. Fishing is always made by art?ls in the Ural, the
Volga, and all the lakes of Northern Russia. Besides these
permanent organizations, there are the simply countless temporary
art?ls, constituted for each special purpose. When ten or twenty
peasants come from some locality to a big town, to work as
weavers, carpenters, masons, boat-builders, and so on, they
always constitute an art?l. They hire rooms, hire a cook (very
often the wife of one of them acts in this capacity), elect an
elder, and take their meals in common, each one paying his share
for food and lodging to the art?l. A party of convicts on its way
to Siberia always does the same, and its elected elder is the
officially-recognized intermediary between the convicts and the
military chief of the party. In the hard-labour prisons they have
the same organization. The railway porters, the messengers at the
Exchange, the workers at the Custom House, the town messengers in
the capitals, who are collectively responsible for each member,
enjoy such a reputation that any amount of money or bank-notes is
trusted to the art?l-member by the merchants. In the building
trades, art?ls of from 10 to 200 members are formed; and the
serious builders and railway contractors always prefer to deal
with an art?l than with separately-hired workers. The last
attempts of the Ministry of War to deal directly with productive
art?ls, formed ad hoc in the domestic trades, and to give them
orders for boots and all sorts of brass and iron goods, are
described as most satisfactory; while the renting of a Crown iron
work, (Votkinsk) to an art?l of workers, which took place seven
or eight years ago, has been a decided success.
We can thus see in Russia how the old medieval institution,
having not been interfered with by the State (in its informal
manifestations), has fully survived until now, and takes the
greatest variety of forms in accordance with the requirements of
modern industry and commerce. As to the Balkan peninsula, the
Turkish Empire and Caucasia, the old guilds are maintained there
in full. The esnafs of Servia have fully preserved their medieval
character; they include both masters and journeymen, regulate the
trades, and are institutions for mutual support in labour and
sickness;12 while the amkari of Caucasia, and especially at
Tiflis, add to these functions a considerable influence in
municipal life.13
In connection with co-operation, I ought perhaps to mention
also the friendly societies, the unities of oddfellows, the
village and town clubs organized for meeting the doctors' bills,
the dress and burial clubs, the small clubs very common among
factory girls, to which they contribute a few pence every week,
and afterwards draw by lot the sum of one pound, which can at
least be used for some substantial purchase, and many others. A
not inconsiderable amount of sociable or jovial spirit is alive
in all such societies and clubs, even though the "credit and
debit" of each member are closely watched over. But there are so
many associations based on the readiness to sacrifice time,
health, and life if required, that we can produce numbers of
illustrations of the best forms of mutual support.
The Lifeboat Association in this country, and similar
institutions on the Continent, must be mentioned in the first
place. The former has now over three hundred boats along the
coasts of these isles, and it would have twice as many were it
not for the poverty of the fisher men, who cannot afford to buy
lifeboats. The crews consist, however, of volunteers, whose
readiness to sacrifice their lives for the rescue of absolute
strangers to them is put every year to a severe test; every
winter the loss of several of the bravest among them stands on
record. And if we ask these men what moves them to risk their
lives, even when there is no reasonable chance of success, their
answer is something on the following lines. A fearful snowstorm,
blowing across the Channel, raged on the flat, sandy coast of a
tiny village in Kent, and a small smack, laden with oranges,
stranded on the sands near by. In these shallow waters only a
flat-bottomed lifeboat of a simplified type can be kept, and to
launch it during such a storm was to face an almost certain
disaster. And yet the men went out, fought for hours against the
wind, and the boat capsized twice. One man was drowned, the
others were cast ashore. One of these last, a refined coastguard,
was found next morning, badly bruised and half frozen in the
snow. I asked him, how they came to make that desperate attempt?"
I don't know myself," was his reply." There was the wreck; all
the people from the village stood on the beach, and all said it
would be foolish to go out; we never should work through the
surf. We saw five or six men clinging to the mast, making
desperate signals. We all felt that something must be done, but
what could we do? One hour passed, two hours, and we all stood
there. We all felt most uncomfortable. Then, all of a sudden,
through the storm, it seemed to us as if we heard their cries --
they had a boy with them. We could not stand that any longer. All
at once we said, "We must go!" The women said so too; they would
have treated us as cowards if we had not gone, although next day
they said we had been fools to go. As one man, we rushed to the
boat, and went. The boat capsized, but we took hold of it. The
worst was to see poor drowning by the side of the boat, and we
could do nothing to save him. Then came a fearful wave, the boat
capsized again, and we were cast ashore. The men were still
rescued by the D. boat, ours was caught miles away. I was found
next morning in the snow."
The same feeling moved also the miners of the Rhonda Valley,
when they worked for the rescue of their comrades from the
inundated mine. They had pierced through thirty-two yards of coal
in order to reach their entombed comrades; but when only three
yards more remained to be pierced, fire-damp enveloped them. The
lamps went out, and the rescue-men retired. To work in such
conditions was to risk being blown up at every moment. But the
raps of the entombed miners were still heard, the men were still
alive and appealed for help, and several miners volunteered to
work at any risk; and as they went down the mine, their wives had
only silent tears to follow them -- not one word to stop them.
There is the gist of human psychology. Unless men are
maddened in the battlefield, they "cannot stand it" to hear
appeals for help, and not to respond to them. The hero goes; and
what the hero does, all feel that they ought to have done as
well. The sophisms of the brain cannot resist the mutual-aid
feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by thousands of
years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of years of
pre-human life in societies.
"But what about those men who were drowned in the Serpentine
in the presence of a crowd, out of which no one moved for their
rescue?" it may be asked. "What about the child which fell into
the Regent's Park Canal -- also in the presence of a holiday
crowd -- and was only saved through the presence of mind of a
maid who let out a Newfoundland dog to the rescue?" The answer is
plain enough. Man is a result of both his inherited instincts and
his education. Among the miners and the seamen, their common
occupations and their every-day contact with one another create a
feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain
courage and pluck. In the cities, on the contrary, the absence of
common interest nurtures indifference, while courage and pluck,
which seldom find their opportunities, disappear, or take another
direction. Moreover, the tradition of the hero of the mine and
the sea lives in the miners' and fishermen's villages, adorned
with a poetical halo. But what are the traditions of a motley
London crowd? The only tradition they might have in common ought
to be created by literature, but a literature which would
correspond to the village epics hardly exists. The clergy are so
anxious to prove that all that comes from human nature is sin,
and that all good in man has a supernatural origin, that they
mostly ignore the facts which cannot be produced as an example of
higher inspiration or grace, coming from above. And as to the
lay-writers, their attention is chiefly directed towards one sort
of heroism, the heroism which promotes the idea of the State.
Therefore, they admire the Roman hero, or the soldier in the
battle, while they pass by the fisherman's heroism, hardly paying
attention to it. The poet and the painter might, of course, be
taken by the beauty of the human heart in itself; but both seldom
know the life of the poorer classes, and while they can sing or
paint the Roman or the military hero in conventional
surroundings, they can neither sing nor paint impressively the
hero who acts in those modest surroundings which they ignore. If
they venture to do so, they produce a mere piece of
rhetoric.14
The countless societies, clubs, and alliances, for the
enjoyment of life, for study and research, for education, and so
on, which have lately grown up in such numbers that it would
require many years to simply tabulate them, are another
manifestation of the same everworking tendency for association
and mutual support. Some of them, like the broods of young birds
of different species which come together in the autumn, are
entirely given to share in common the joys of life. Every village
in this country, in Switzerland, Germany, and so on, has its
cricket, football, tennis, nine-pins, pigeon, musical or singing
clubs. Other societies are much more numerous, and some of them,
like the Cyclists' Alliance, have suddenly taken a formidable
development. Although the members of this alliance have nothing
in common but the love of cycling, there is already among them a
sort of freemasonry for mutual help, especially in the remote
nooks and corners which are not flooded by cyclists; they look
upon the "C.A.C." -- the Cyclists' Alliance Club -- in a village
as a sort of home; and at the yearly Cyclists' Camp many a
standing friendship has been established. The Kegelbr?der, the
Brothers of the Nine Pins, in Germany, are a similar association;
so also the Gymnasts' Societies (300,000 members in Germany), the
informal brotherhood of paddlers in France, the yacht clubs, and
so on. Such associations certainly do not alter the economical
stratification of society, but, especially in the small towns,
they contribute to smooth social distinctions, and as they all
tend to join in large national and international federations,
they certainly aid the growth of personal friendly intercourse
between all sorts of men scattered in different parts of the
globe.
The Alpine Clubs, the Jagdschutzverein in Germany, which has
over 100,000 members -- hunters, educated foresters, zoologists,
and simple lovers of Nature -- and the International
Ornithological Society, which includes zoologists, breeders, and
simple peasants in Germany, have the same character. Not only
have they done in a few years a large amount of very useful work,
which large associations alone could do properly (maps, refuge
huts, mountain roads; studies of animal life, of noxious insects,
of migrations of birds, and so on), but they create new bonds
between men. Two Alpinists of different nationalities who meet in
a refuge hut in the Caucasus, or the professor and the peasant
ornithologist who stay in the same house, are no more strangers
to each other; while the Uncle Toby's Society at Newcastle, which
has already induced over 260,000 boys and girls never to destroy
birds' nests and to be kind to all animals, has certainly done
more for the development of human feelings and of taste in
natural science than lots of moralists and most of our schools.
We cannot omit, even in this rapid review, the thousands of
scientific, literary, artistic, and educational societies. Up
till now, the scientific bodies, closely controlled and often
subsidized by the State, have generally moved in a very narrow
circle, and they often came to be looked upon as mere openings
for getting State appointments, while the very narrowness of
their circles undoubtedly bred petty jealousies. Still it is a
fact that the distinctions of birth, political parties and creeds
are smoothed to some extent by such associations; while in the
smaller and remote towns the scientific, geographical, or musical
societies, especially those of them which appeal to a larger
circle of amateurs, become small centres of intellectual life, a
sort of link between the little spot and the wide world, and a
place where men of very different conditions meet on a footing of
equality. To fully appreciate the value of such centres, one
ought to know them, say, in Siberia. As to the countless
educational societies which only now begin to break down the
State's and the Church's monopoly in education, they are sure to
become before long the leading power in that branch. To the
"Froebel Unions" we already owe the Kindergarten system; and to a
number of formal and informal educational associations we owe the
high standard of women's education in Russia, although all the
time these societies and groups had to act in strong opposition
to a powerful government.15 As to the various pedagogical
societies in Germany, it is well known that they have done the
best part in the working out of the modern methods of teaching
science in popular schools. In such associations the teacher
finds also his best support. How miserable the overworked and
under-paid village teacher would have been without their
aid!16
All these associations, societies, brotherhoods, alliances,
institutes, and so on, which must now be counted by the ten
thousand in Europe alone, and each of which represents an immense
amount of voluntary, unambitious, and unpaid or underpaid work --
what are they but so many manifestations, under an infinite
variety of aspects, of the same ever-living tendency of man
towards mutual aid and support? For nearly three centuries men
were prevented from joining hands even for literary, artistic,
and educational purposes. Societies could only be formed under
the protection of the State, or the Church, or as secret
brotherhoods, like free-masonry. But now that the resistance has
been broken, they swarm in all directions, they extend over all
multifarious branches of human activity, they become
international, and they undoubtedly contribute, to an extent
which cannot yet be fully appreciated, to break down the screens
erected by States between different nationalities.
Notwithstanding the jealousies which are bred by commercial
competition, and the provocations to hatred which are sounded by
the ghosts of a decaying past, there is a conscience of
international solidarity which is growing both among the leading
spirits of the world and the masses of the workers, since they
also have conquered the right of international intercourse; and
in the preventing of a European war during the last quarter of a
century, this spirit has undoubtedly had its share.
The religious charitable associations, which again represent
a whole world, certainly must be mentioned in this place. There
is not the slightest doubt that the great bulk of their members
are moved by the same mutual-aid feelings which are common to all
mankind. Unhappily the religious teachers of men prefer to
ascribe to such feelings a supernatural origin. Many of them
pretend that man does not consciously obey the mutual-aid
inspiration so long as he has not been enlightened by the
teachings of the special religion which they represent, and, with
St. Augustin, most of them do not recognize such feelings in the
"pagan savage." Moreover, while early Christianity, like all
other religions, was an appeal to the broadly human feelings of
mutual aid and sympathy, the Christian Church has aided the State
in wrecking all standing institutions of mutual aid and support
which were anterior to it, or developed outside of it; and,
instead of the mutual aid which every savage considers as due to
his kinsman, it has preached charity which bears a character of
inspiration from above, and, accordingly, implies a certain
superiority of the giver upon the receiver. With this limitation,
and without any intention to give offence to those who consider
themselves as a body elect when they accomplish acts simply
humane, we certainly may consider the immense numbers of
religious charitable associations as an outcome of the same
mutual-aid tendency.
All these facts show that a reckless prosecution of personal
interests, with no regard to other people's needs, is not the
only characteristic of modern life. By the side of this current
which so proudly claims leadership in human affairs, we perceive
a hard struggle sustained by both the rural and industrial
populations in order to reintroduce standing institutions of
mutual aid and support; and we discover, in all classes of
society, a widely-spread movement towards the establishment of an
infinite variety of more or less permanent institutions for the
same purpose. But when we pass from public life to the private
life of the modern individual, we discover another extremely wide
world of mutual aid and support, which only passes unnoticed by
most sociologists because it is limited to the narrow circle of
the family and personal friendship.17
Under the present social system, all bonds of union among the
inhabitants of the same street or neighbourhood have been
dissolved. In the richer parts of the large towns, people live
without knowing who are their next-door neighbours. But in the
crowded lanes people know each other perfectly, and are
continually brought into mutual contact. Of course, petty
quarrels go their course, in the lanes as elsewhere; but
groupings in accordance with personal affinities grow up, and
within their circle mutual aid is practised to an extent of which
the richer classes have no idea. If we take, for instance, the
children of a poor neighbourhood who play in a street or a
churchyard, or on a green, we notice at once that a close union
exists among them, notwithstanding the temporary fights, and that
that union protects them from all sorts of misfortunes. As soon
as a mite bends inquisitively over the opening of a drain --
"Don't stop there," another mite shouts out, "fever sits in the
hole!" "Don't climb over that wall, the train will kill you if
you tumble down! Don't come near to the ditch! Don't eat those
berries -- poison! you will die." Such are the first teachings
imparted to the urchin when he joins his mates out-doors. How
many of the children whose play-grounds are the pavements around
"model workers' dwellings," or the quays and bridges of the
canals, would be crushed to death by the carts or drowned in the
muddy waters, were it not for that sort of mutual support. And
when a fair Jack has made a slip into the unprotected ditch at
the back of the milkman's yard, or a cherry-cheeked Lizzie has,
after all, tumbled down into the canal, the young brood raises
such cries that all the neighbourhood is on the alert and rushes
to the rescue.
Then comes in the alliance of the mothers. "You could not
imagine" (a lady-doctor who lives in a poor neighbourhood told me
lately) "how much they help each other. If a woman has prepared
nothing, or could prepare nothing, for the baby which she
expected -- and how often that happens! -- all the neighbours
bring something for the new-comer. One of the neighbours always
takes care of the children, and some other always drops in to
take care of the household, so long as the mother is in bed."
This habit is general. It is mentioned by all those who have
lived among the poor. In a thousand small ways the mothers
support each other and bestow their care upon children that are
not their own. Some training -- good or bad, let them decide it
for themselves -- is required in a lady of the richer classes to
render her able to pass by a shivering and hungry child in the
street without noticing it. But the mothers of the poorer classes
have not that training. They cannot stand the sight of a hungry
child; they must feed it, and so they do. "When the school
children beg bread, they seldom or rather never meet with a
refusal" -- a lady-friend, who has worked several years in
Whitechapel in connection with a workers' club, writes to me. But
I may, perhaps, as well transcribe a few more passages from her
letter: --
"Nursing neighbours, in cases of illness, without any shade
of remuneration, is quite general among the workers. Also, when a
woman has little children, and goes out for work, another mother
always takes care of them.
"If, in the working classes, they would not help each other,
they could not exist. I know families which continually help each
other -- with money, with food, with fuel, for bringing up the
little children, in cases of illness, in cases of death.
"'The mine' and 'thine' is much less sharply observed among
the poor than among the rich. Shoes, dress, hats, and so on, --
what may be wanted on the spot -- are continually borrowed from
each other, also all sorts of household things.
"Last winter the members of the United Radical Club had
brought together some little money, and began after Christmas to
distribute free soup and bread to the children going to school.
Gradually they had 1,800 children to attend to. The money came
from outsiders, but all the work was done by the members of the
club. Some of them, who were out of work, came at four in the
morning to wash and to peel the vegetables; five women came at
nine or ten (after having done their own household work) for
cooking, and stayed till six or seven to wash the dishes. And at
meal time, between twelve and half-past one, twenty to thirty
workers came in to aid in serving the soup, each one staying what
he could spare of his meal time. This lasted for two months. No
one was paid."
My friend also mentions various individual cases, of which
the following are typical: --
"Annie W. was given by her mother to be boarded by an old
person in Wilmot Street. When her mother died, the old woman, who
herself was very poor, kept the child without being paid a penny
for that. When the old lady died too, the child, who was five
years old, was of course neglected during her illness, and was
ragged; but she was taken at once by Mrs. S., the wife of a
shoemaker, who herself has six children. Lately, when the husband
was ill, they had not much to eat, all of them.
"The other day, Mrs. M., mother of six children, attended
Mrs. M--g throughout her illness, and took to her own rooms the
elder child.... But do you need such facts? They are quite
general.... I know also Mrs. D. (Oval, Hackney Road), who has a
sewing machine and continually sews for others, without ever
accepting any remuneration, although she has herself five
children and her husband to look after.... And so on."
For every one who has any idea of the life of the labouring
classes it is evident that without mutual aid being practised
among them on a large scale they never could pull through all
their difficulties. It is only by chance that a worker's family
can live its lifetime without having to face such circumstances
as the crisis described by the ribbon weaver, Joseph Gutteridge,
in his autobiography.18 And if all do not go to the ground in
such cases, they owe it to mutual help. In Gutteridge's case it
was an old nurse, miserably poor herself, who turned up at the
moment when the family was slipping towards a final catastrophe,
and brought in some bread, coal, and bedding, which she had
obtained on credit. In other cases, it will be some one else, or
the neighbours will take steps to save the family. But without
some aid from other poor, how many more would be brought every
year to irreparable ruin!19
Mr. Plimsoll, after he had lived for some time among the
poor, on 7s. 6d. a week, was compelled to recognize that the
kindly feelings he took with him when he began this life "changed
into hearty respect and admiration" when he saw how the relations
between the poor are permeated with mutual aid and support, and
learned the simple ways in which that support is given. After a
many years' experience, his conclusion was that" when you come to
think of it, such as these men were, so were the vast majority of
the working classes."20 As to bringing up orphans, even by the
poorest families, it is so widely-spread a habit, that it may be
described as a general rule; thus among the miners it was found,
after the two explosions at Warren Vale and at Lund Hill, that
"nearly one-third of the men killed, as the respective committees
can testify, were thus supporting relations other than wife and
child." "Have you reflected," Mr. Plimsoll added, "what this is?
Rich men, even comfortably-to-do men do this, I don't doubt. But
consider the difference." Consider what a sum of one shilling,
subscribed by each worker to help a comrade's widow, or 6d. to
help a fellow-worker to defray the extra expense of a funeral,
means for one who earns 16s. a week and has a wife, and in some
cases five or six children to support.21 But such
subscriptions are a general practice among the workers all over
the world, even in much more ordinary cases than a death in the
family, while aid in work is the commonest thing in their lives.
Nor do the same practices of mutual aid and support fail
among the richer classes. Of course, when one thinks of the
harshness which is often shown by the richer employers towards
their employees, one feels inclined to take the most pessimist
view of human nature. Many must remember the indignation which
was aroused during the great Yorkshire strike of 1894, when old
miners who had picked coal from an abandoned pit were prosecuted
by the colliery owners. And, even if we leave aside the horrors
of the periods of struggle and social war, such as the
extermination of thousands of workers' prisoners after the fall
of the Paris Commune -- who can read, for instance, revelations
of the labour inquest which was made here in the forties, or what
Lord Shaftesbury wrote about "the frightful waste of human life
in the factories, to which the children taken from the
workhouses, or simply purchased all over this country to be sold
as factory slaves, were consigned"22 -- who can read that
without being vividly impressed by the baseness which is possible
in man when his greediness is at stake? But it must also be said
that all fault for such treatment must not be thrown entirely
upon the criminality of human nature. Were not the teachings of
men of science, and even of a notable portion of the clergy, up
to a quite recent time, teachings of distrust, despite and almost
hatred towards the poorer classes? Did not science teach that
since serfdom has been abolished, no one need be poor unless for
his own vices? And how few in the Church had the courage to blame
the children-killers, while the great numbers taught that the
sufferings of the poor, and even the slavery of the negroes, were
part of the Divine Plan! Was not Nonconformism itself largely a
popular protest against the harsh treatment of the poor at the
hand of the established Church?
With such spiritual leaders, the feelings of the richer
classes necessarily became, as Mr. Pimsoll remarked, not so much
blunted as "stratified." They seldom went downwards towards the
poor, from whom the well-to-do-people are separated by their
manner of life, and whom they do not know under their best
aspects, in their every-day life. But among themselves --
allowance being made for the effects of the wealth-accumulating
passions and the futile expenses imposed by wealth itself --
among themselves, in the circle of family and friends, the rich
practise the same mutual aid and support as the poor. Dr. Ihering
and L. Dargun are perfectly right in saying that if a statistical
record could be taken of all the money which passes from hand to
hand in the shape of friendly loans and aid, the sum total would
be enormous, even in comparison with the commercial transactions
of the world's trade. And if we could add to it, as we certainly
ought to, what is spent in hospitality, petty mutual services,
the management of other people's affairs, gifts and charities, we
certainly should be struck by the importance of such transfers in
national economy. Even in the world which is ruled by commercial
egotism, the current expression, "We have been harshly treated by
that firm," shows that there is also the friendly treatment, as
opposed to the harsh, i.e. the legal treatment; while every
commercial man knows how many firms are saved every year from
failure by the friendly support of other firms.
As to the charities and the amounts of work for general
well-being which are voluntarily done by so many well-to-do
persons, as well as by workers, and especially by professional
men, every one knows the part which is played by these two
categories of benevolence in modern life. If the desire of
acquiring notoriety, political power, or social distinction often
spoils the true character of that sort of benevolence, there is
no doubt possible as to the impulse coming in the majority of
cases from the same mutual-aid feelings. Men who have acquired
wealth very often do not find in it the expected satisfaction.
Others begin to feel that, whatever economists may say about
wealth being the reward of capacity, their own reward is
exaggerated. The conscience of human solidarity begins to tell;
and, although society life is so arranged as to stifle that
feeling by thousands of artful means, it often gets the upper
hand; and then they try to find an outcome for that deeply human
need by giving their fortune, or their forces, to something
which, in their opinion, will promote general welfare.
In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized
State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle
which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging
philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of
human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart,
because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution. What
was the outcome of evolution since its earliest stages cannot be
overpowered by one of the aspects of that same evolution. And the
need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken refuge in
the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in the
village, or the secret union of workers, re-asserts itself again,
even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it
always has been, the chief leader towards further progress. Such
are the conclusions which we are necessarily brought to when we
carefully ponder over each of the groups of facts briefly
enumerated in the last two chapters.
Footnotes
1 Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, London, 1870, Introd. p. xliii.
2 The Act of Edward the Sixth -- the first of his reign --
ordered to hand over to the Crown "all fraternities,
brotherhoods, and guilds being within the realm of England and
Wales and other of the king's dominions; and all manors, lands,
tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to them or any of
them" (English Guilds, Introd. p. xliii). See also Ockenkowski's
Englands wirtschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des
Mittelalters, Jena, 1879, chaps. ii-v.
3 See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade-Unionism,
London, 1894, pp. 21-38.
4 See in Sidney Webb's work the associations which existed at
that time. The London artisans are supposed to have never been
better organized than in 181O-20.
5 The National Association for the Protection of Labour included
about 150 separate unions, which paid high levies, and had a
membership of about 100,000. The Builders' Union and the Miners'
Unions also were big organizations (Webb, l.c. p. 107).
6 I follow in this Mr. Webb's work, which is replete with
documents to confirm his statements.
7 Great changes have taken place since the forties in the
attitude of the richer classes towards the unions. However, even
in the sixties, the employers made a formidable concerted attempt
to crush them by locking out whole populations. Up to 1869 the
simple agreement to strike, and the announcement of a strike by
placards, to say nothing of picketing, were often punished as
intimidation. Only in 1875 the Master and Servant Act was
repealed, peaceful picketing was permitted, and "violence and
intimidation" during strikes fell into the domain of common law.
Yet, even during the dock-labourers' strike in 1887, relief money
had to be spent for fighting before the Courts for the right of
picketing, while the prosecutions of the last few years menace
once more to render the conquered rights illusory.
8 A weekly contribution of 6d. out of an 18s. wage, or of 1s.
out of 25s., means much more than 9l. out of a 300l. income: it
is mostly taken upon food; and the levy is soon doubled when a
strike is declared in a brother union. The graphic description of
trade-union life, by a skilled craftsman, published by Mr. and
Mrs. Webb (pp. 431 seq.), gives an excellent idea of the amount
of work required from a unionist.
9 See the debates upon the strikes of Falkenau in Austria before
the Austrian Reichstag on the 10th of May, 1894, in which debates
the fact is fully recognized by the Ministry and the owner of the
colliery. Also the English Press of that time.
10 Many such facts will be found in the Daily Chronicle and
partly the Daily News for October and November 1894.
11 The 31,473 productive and consumers' associations on the
Middle Rhine showed, about 1890, a yearly expenditure of
18,437,500l.; 3,675,000l. were granted during the year in loans.
12 British Consular Report, April 1889.
13 A capital research on this subject has been published in
Russian in the Zapiski (Memoirs) of the Caucasian Geographical
Society, vol. vi. 2, Tiflis, 1891, by C. Egiazaroff.
14 Escape from a French prison is extremely difficult;
nevertheless a prisoner escaped from one of the French prisons in
1884 or 1885. He even managed to conceal himself during the whole
day, although the alarm was given and the peasants in the
neighbourhood were on the look-out for him. Next morning found
him concealed in a ditch, close by a small village. Perhaps he
intended to steal some food, or some clothes in order to take off
his prison uniform. As he was lying in the ditch a fire broke out
in the village. He saw a woman running out of one of the burning
houses, and heard her desperate appeals to rescue a child in the
upper storey of the burning house. No one moved to do so. Then
the escaped prisoner dashed out of his retreat, made his way
through the fire, and, with a scalded face and burning clothes,
brought the child safe out of the fire, and handed it to its
mother. Of course he was arrested on the spot by the village
gendarme, who now made his appearance. He was taken back to the
prison. The fact was reported in all French papers, but none of
them bestirred itself to obtain his release. If he had shielded a
warder from a comrade's blow. he would have been made a hero of.
But his act was simply humane, it did not promote the State's
ideal; he himself did not attribute it to a sudden inspiration of
divine grace; and that was enough to let the man fall into
oblivion. Perhaps, six or twelve months were added to his
sentence for having stolen -- "the State's property" -- the
prison's dress.
15 The medical Academy for Women (which has given to Russia a
large portion of her 700 graduated lady doctors), the four
Ladies' Universities (about 1,000 pupils in 1887; closed that
year, and reopened in 1895), and the High Commercial School for
Women are entirely the work of such private societies. To the
same societies we owe the high standard which the girls' gymnasia
attained since they were opened in the sixties. The 100 gymnasia
now scattered over the Empire (over 70,000 pupils), correspond to
the High Schools for Girls in this country; all teachers are,
however, graduates of the universities.
16 The Verein f?r Verbreitung gemeinn?tslicher Kenntnisse,
although it has only 5,500 members, has already opened more than
1,000 public and school libraries, organized thousands of
lectures, and published most valuable books.
17 Very few writers in sociology have paid attention to it. Dr.
Ihering is one of them, and his case is very instructive. When
the great German writer on law began his philosophical work, Der
Zweck im Rechte ("Purpose in Law"), he intended to analyze "the
active forces which call forth the advance of society and
maintain it," and to thus give "the theory of the sociable man."
He analyzed, first, the egotistic forces at work, including the
present wage-system and coercion in its variety of political and
social laws; and in a carefully worked-out scheme of his work he
intended to give the last paragraph to the ethical forces -- the
sense of duty and mutual love -- which contribute to the same
aim. When he came, however, to discuss the social functions of
these two factors, he had to write a second volume, twice as big
as the first; and yet he treated only of the personal factors
which will take in the following pages only a few lines. L.
Dargun took up the same idea in Egoismus und Altruismus in der
National?konomie, Leipzig, 1885, adding some new facts. B?chner's
Love, and the several paraphrases of it published here and in
Germany, deal with the same subject.
18 Light and Shadows in the Life of an Artisan. Coventry, 1893.
19 Many rich people cannot understand how the very poor can help
each other, because they do not realize upon what infinitesimal
amounts of food or money often hangs the life of one of the
poorest cLasses. Lord Shaftesbury had understood this terribLe
truth when he started his Flowers and Watercress Girls' Fund, out
of which loans of one pound, and only occasionally two pounds,
were granted, to enable the girls to buy a basket and flowers
when the winter sets in and they are in dire distress. The loans
were given to girls who had "not a sixpence," but never failed to
find some other poor to go bail for them. "Of all the movements I
have ever been connected with," Lord Shaftesbury wrote, "I look
upon this Watercress Girls' movement as the most successful....
It was begun in 1872, and we have had out 800 to 1,000 loans, and
have not lost 50l. during the whole period.... What has been lost
-- and it has been very little, under the circumstances -- has
been by reason of death or sickness, not by fraud" (The Life and
Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol.
iii. p. 322. London, 1885-86). Several more facts in point in Ch.
Booth's Life and Labour in London, vol. i; in Miss Beatrice
Potter's "Pages from a Work Girl's Diary" (Nineteenth Century,
September 1888, p. 310); and so on.
20 Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen, cheap edition, London, 1870, p.
110.
21 Our Seamen, u.s., p. 110. Mr. Plimsoll added: "I don't wish
to disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted
whether these qualities are so fully developed in them; for,
notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with
the claims, reasonable or unreasonable, of poor relatives, these
qualities are not in such constant exercise. Riches seem in so
many cases to smother the manliness of their possessors, and
their sympathies become, not so much narrowed as -- so to speak
-- stratified: they are reserved for the sufferings of their own
class, and also the woes of those above them. They seldom tend
downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of
courage... than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and
the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British
workman's life" -- and of the workmen all over the world as well.
22 Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder,
vol. i. pp. 137-138.
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