TALK IN A FACTORY

By CONSTANCE REAVELEY

HAVE just had an interesting talk with a friend. He is a plan- ning engineer in a factory in the Midlands, a man about 36. has an acute inquiring mind and a very kind heart. More than t he sees factory affairs against the background of the cultivated e of his youth, and has a strong interest in history. He complains t his school did not teach him enough history.

said: " I have just seen some very good articles in the New tesman; an article by a miner, telling how he had been required undertake work 'of special responsibility, which should have ied a bonus ; at the same time instructing a novice, for which also re should have been a bonus ; this entailed borrowing some tools, the re-sharpening of them left him out of pocket. He got no us and no reimbursement. The next week there was an article someone on the other side, who said: 'Just like these miners ; never think of anything but money.' Very revealing."

Nothing revealing about that," said my friend, "we all know sort of thing is very common all through industry. And the agement always takes the line that it's very degraded of the men interested in money, though they are interested in nothing else selves."

said: "It's known to all of you who have spent your lives in try, but not to those who are outside. That's just the sort of g they need to be told. It's part of the general business of ghtening public opinion." It's no good trying to enlighten public opinion," he said, "it t that people don't know, they know and don't care. Look at the People in safe places so often refuse to give shelter to those who 11 been blitzed. There are lots of people like that. They don't If enlightenment does no good, what does?" said I. Force," said he. "Violence. I don't like violence, but I'm ea 10 believe it's the only thing that does any good." "I believe in force," said I. "I don't think weakness gets much done in this world. But not in violence. What you need is force directed by insight, and public opinion can be a force of that kind. Take myself. I've always been sorry about the lives of the poor, but I have been awfully puzzled to know what you could do about them. I need enlightenment!'

"I don't see how that can be true," he said. "How could anybody travel to Liverpool Street, for instance, and not see that something needs to be done about housing?"

"Well, take housing," said I. "The person who originally did most to start a movement to improve housing was Octavio Hill." "Never heard of her," said he.

"She invented scientific house property management. More than that, she did a great deal to influence public opinion. There was great concern about social progress a generation ago ; all the best people used to go and live in settlements when they went down from the university. That was why Lloyd George was able to carry his revolutionary Budget to tax the well-to-do to pay for social services ; it cost a first-class constitutional crisis, but he carried it ; simply because he had the backing of massive public opinion."

"Don't know anything about Lloyd George," said he.

I went on: "As for housing, public opinion did more than induce the Government to do something about it (not enough) after the last war, it induced people to put their money into housing schemes like the Paddington Housing Estate. They didn't get much interest on their money, but they did clear some slums."

"Don't know anything about all that," said he. "I have to judge by my own experience. When I decided to be an engineer in 1928 I had no idea what I was in for. I have worked in many factories since then, and I am more and more appalled at the injustice that goes on and the wretched lives people have to lead. At first, like you, I thought everybody ought to know about this, and I started to tell my friends, my uncle in the Treasury, for instance. It did no good. They just thought I was an awful Red. I didn't persuade anybody ; I just lost my friends. People don't care ; wouldn't spend two or three millions to relieve unemployment. By the way, do you know what they did about unemployment in New Zealand?"

"No, I don't," I said.

'Well, I do," he said. "I gave a New Zealander a lift in the car the other day and we got talking. They rioted. The unemployed broke shop windows and looted shops. The result was they got a Labour Government which introduced social security. He says their scheme is the model on which the Beveridge plan is based. And it worked, although they started it in the middle of a depres- sion. Nothing comparable got done in England. He told me that most New Zealanders come over here full of love for England, and then they get to be ashamed of belonging to a country that cares so little for right and wrong and so much for money. He was right. People don't care."

I said : "You are judging on too narrow a basis. One man's life is far too narrow a basis. In the 19305 we were under a terrible cloud of apathy ; something was psychologically wrong with us. I belong to the lost generation myself, and I know that what we chiefly lost was nerve. At first I thought the despair I sensed around me simply meant that I had grown up. It wasn't so. Before the last war grown-up people had confidence that they could get things done and they did, What we need is recovery Of nerve. If people have courage, public opinion can be effective. We mustn't judge by the 1930s ; that was a timenf illness."

He smiled. He thinks I could argue the hind leg off a donkey and at the end of the argument the beast would walk away on four legs. But if a man of uncommon intelligence, who is interested in history and politics, who has friends and relations outside the factory, who is always greedy for books, does not know that public opinion has ever been an effective force for good, nor anything about England's progress towards a better isocial order before 1914, if, as be says, he is compelled to judge by the facts that have come within his own experience in the last sixteen years ; why should unlearned and ignorant men, colliers and machine-minders, who have no contacts outside the factory world, no habit of reading, no back- ground of cultivated family life, be expected to have patience, to see that the moral paralysis of the inter-war years was not normal. to/ have confidence in constitutional methods? And does this con- versation throw any light on what education ought to be doing for 'us and is not? I think it does.

Those of us who are comfortable grow up in complete ignorance of the experience of life which produces dangerous but not un- reasonable anger among the less comfortable ; and all of us grow up in ignorance of the achievements in the last generation, and the ways in which they were won. At a time when the currents of human life are changing as quickly and as violently as they are today, it is necessary for us to understand our own most recent past more truly and sensitively than would be needful if the tempo of change were more moderate. We need an education adjusted to our own lives, not to the Renaissance gentleman's conception of what he wanted to enable him to enjoy Ms leisure. We have to take hold of our own destinies and exert control over affairs on this planet in a way which would have appalled. the men of the Renaissance. The beginning of self-control is self-knowledge, and this is some- thing our society has not got. It is for this that education should prepare us.