LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MR. GREG AND "THE MASSES."
(TO MB EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:1
SIR,—Mr. Greg says :—" I cannot quite gather from the letters of your correspondent, the Rev. G. D. Snow, wherein I have 'made
unfair attacks upon "the masses," or deviated from the doctrines of sound political economy, nor do I care much to defend myself against such charges. I only feel clear that he has misunderstood, and therefore misrepresented me, and I am pretty sure that he can- not have read me with much care." He says that I have misrepre- sented him, in accusing him of having made unfair attacks upon "the masses," and that he cannot gather from my letters wherein he has done so.
He has unfairly attacked the advocates of "the masses," first, in his "Obligations of the Soil" (Contemporary, January, 1875),
because he has alleged that their aim has been to make the land support the greatest possible numbers, instead of to increase the comfort of those who live on the soil, even at the cost of diminishing their numbers, pp. 189, 190, 191. I have said in
answer to that, that the practical aim of the advocates of the masses generally, and I can affirm it notably of Canon Girdlestone,
Henry Taylor, and Howard Evans—to say nothing of Joseph Arch—has been to improve the condition of the labourers by dimishing their numbers. I say, never mind what their talk may have been, this is what they are doing. They and they alone are doing what Carlyle talked of as most desirable thirty-two years ago, organising a national emigration service. This is the true organisa- tion of labour, to send each labourer to the place where he is most wanted ; and one use of this is to get more room, and to improve the quality of human existence by diminishing its quantity on a given
limited space. This—which Mr. Greg talks of in the last para- graph of his "Obligations of the Soil —the much-abused advo- cates of the masses" are not talking about, but doing.
If Mr. Greg accuses me of misunderstanding him, I may cer- tainly rejoin that he misunderstands me. He says of me, "Ills chief aim seems to be to advocate strikes." The only thing I can find in my letters on which he can base this most damning accusation is that I have said in my letter of January 30, "The only interest or power that is at work to avert pauperism lies in the proletariat. Its power may be simply described as the power of striking."
Similarly I might say that the strength of a nation lay in its power of making war. True or false, this affirmation could not be construed into advocating war. A strike, like a war, is a great misfortune, arising from mutual misunderstanding, but such misunderstandings are occasionally unavoidable.
To say that the men are always wrong in striking, as Mr. Greg certainly says in his last letter, amounts practically to saying that they are always wrong in insisting on higher wages ; in other words, that they must always be at the mercy of their employers. Men cannot insist on higher wages without running some risk of getting their demand refused, for men can only get wisdom-by experience and preliminary failures. Nations have to go through the terrible ordeal of wars, and contracting parties the less terrible but still terrible ordeal of strikes, before they can ascertain their re- spective strength. Mr. Greg compels me to repeat these platitudes, which I should otherwise apoloaise for troubling you with. The advocates of the masses are already refining them and raising them and already diminishing pauperism by means of a nascent but very promising migration and emigration service, which, as I showed in my letter of January 30, the protelariat alone can see their account in promoting, and which is needed to protect emigrants from being taken advantage of on their first arrival, and also from being deluded by the misrepresentations, on the one hand, of farmers who want to keep them at home, and on the other hand, of colonial touters whose representations cannot be relied on.
It is only by independent, self-reliant action that the proletariat can save itself, and it is, as I have shown in former letters, only the proletariat that by saving itself can save the nation from pauperism. It can only get strength or light to do this by getting able advocates of its own, who can tell labourers what they may ask for at home, by finding out for them what alternative openings there are for them abroad. From this process mistakes, that is, disputes culminating in strikes, are unhappily not wholly unavoidable, but to rob the proletariat of its power of striking would be to reduce it to slavery at once. Our labourers would become Helots, and in process of time need to have their numbers kept down the same way, in order that a select few, Mr. Greg's ideal men, might develope themselves, "by adding to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye also, and the pride of life." (See Obligations of the Soil," pp. 193-4).—I am, Sir, &c., G. D. Sow.
Previous page
