THE EXISTENCE OF CLASS-HATRED.
WE wonder what the precise truth is as regards the feeling entertained by the English Poor, and especially the employed poor, towards the rich. Is it less or more bitter than it was fifty years ago ? It is a fashion to give a favourable answer to that question, and to say that class-hatreds are dying out, but we do not feel sure that the sanguine view is altogether justified by the facts. That class-hatred has decreased is true, but then it takes two to make a quarrel, and there can be no doubt that the temper of the rich has greatly softened. They have been very prosperous, science has made life much easier to them, and they have ceased to live in that enforced intercourse with their inferiors which had so great an influence on our earlier society, and which, if it produced some benefits, produced also some evil effects. It is not on shipboard that the officers grow mildest, and fifty years ago every district was in many ways a ship. The " Haves " have less to do with the " Have-nots " than of old, and the separation, though it has possibly injured civilisation, has made the Havea much milder in opinion. They have become less suspicious, more tolerant of the poor as a body, and much more receptive of philanthropic doctrines. Very few now are ready to rely openly on force to keep down the people, and scarcely any defend injustice as essential to their own position. They judge resistance, too, more leniently, as something that must be, and make at least an effort to see the other side in a master-and- servant controversy. We are not, however, quite so certain as to the improvement on the other side. There has, no doubt, been some softening, more especially in forms of speech, and a greatly increased perception of the danger of violence, but many signs make us doubt whether the old bitterness is either dead or dying. It is, no doubt, changing its form. The hostility to the governing class, as a class that govern, or the Government itself quit Government, has declined to an extraordinary degree. The phil- anthropic legislation of the last forty years has had its effect, and the poor, relieved as they are of taxation, of fiscal oppression in the way of duties on food, and of all laws intended to compel work, see very clearly that when they suffer, legislation is not to blame. But then, as they still suffer, somebody must be to blame, and the only per- ceptible somebody is the employer or the rich man, upon whom, therefore, what of bitterness remains is apt to be concentrated. The Government has ceased to be a buffer between the poor and the rich, and the hatred, when it exists, falls on the latter, unstrained through any resisting medium. They are regarded not as part of an oppressive system which may be lifted off, but as individual enemies, who either deserve punish- ment, or at least would be the better for• a little correcting terror. The Labour War in America last year showed that this temper existed in large classes of the population, it breaks out constantly in " Socialist " meetings in Germany, and it has been perceptible throughout the recent Lancashire riots, which, accord- ing to many witnesses, have only been terminated—or rather brought to a pause—by the presence of military force. There is evidence in many of these riots of downright hatred felt against the comfortable, merely because they are comfortable when so many are in discomfort, and a savage delight in destroying their comfort, which is outside the regular course of a trade dispute. The people seem to feel that their poverty, even though momentary, is an oppression, and that the Magistrates who call in soldiers are maintaining not order, but a tyranny. This was undoubtedly the feeling at Pittsburgh, when property-owners were attacked last year not as employers, but as rich men ; and there are not wanting signs of the same temper in Lancashire, developed, no doubt, by a trade dispute, but not entirely produced by it. The bitterness felt by small tradesmen against the big associations called " Stores "—a bitterness of which we could give many half-grim, half-comic illustrations—is positively savage, and there is a distinct increase everywhere in unfairness on the subject of discharge. Your employes of all kinds discharge you without the smallest scruple for any reason or from mere caprice ; but if you discharge them, it is a reprehensible injustice, for which you deserve and obtain a degree of hatred, varying with temperament, but always more or less bitter. You Have, and they Have-not, and therefore your obligations to them are entirely different from theirs to you. We question, too, whether class- hatred has declined among agricultural labourers. On the con- trary, we should say that it had increased ; that whereas they formerly accepted suffering when they suffered as part of the order of things, like hail or floods, they now attribute the suffering distinctly to individuals, and detest them accordingly.
We are not attempting to dogmatise on an extremely difficult question, on which, as we frankly admit, certainty can only rest with the inarticulate classes, and shall be only too rejoiced to be convicted on evidence of error; but we dread optimist views on this subject, as leading to a relaxation of efforts, and can see reasons why great bitterness should still exist. Cultivation is extending rapidly downwards, and as it extends, there can be no doubt that the poor will feel more and more the comparative insecurity of their position, and fret more and more under the sense of social inequalities. The tendency of our time, as we have pointed out so often, is to make money powerful, and especially powerful in securing some of the true blessings of life,—health, leisure, pleasant occupation, and above all, security. The poor, with their new knowledge, begin to perceive 'that ; and perceiving it, to resent the fact that while other inequalities are disappearing, this inequality threatens to become greater than ever. It is easy to say rich and poor have equal pains, but the rich man need not work when he is in grief, he is not crushed by sickness, and the evils of old age are not to him aggravated by the poverty which with the poor so often accompanies it. Above all, he is not tormented as a poor man is by the sense of insecurity, by the feeling that he may be discharged to-morrow, or may be called upon by his sense of self-respect to discharge himself, and may then have no refuge but the workhouse. It is said that in the North, at least, the poor do not feel this, for if they did, they would save, but that is not altogether an accurate statement. It is quite possible, as professional men well know, for the sense of insecurity to be very keen and painful without producing much economy, especially where economy only results in the saving of apparently minute sums, which the man who saves them hardly thinks will do him any good. That an anxiety of this kind is very general is proved by the very great influence which a promise of pension always exercises ; and where it exists, there the sense of dependence must exist too, and dependence, in an age like ours, when social pride is so widely diffused, rapidly produces a bitterness which, when the crisis arrives, and the employe either is, or seems to himself to be, harshly thrown out of work by the employer, develops into an acrid spirit of revenge. A large proportion of all incendiary fires in England are caused by discharged " hands " of one kind or another, and the extraordinary case in which Lord Howard of Glossop, one of the most benevolent men in England, recently sought protection for his life against a gardener out of employ, is, in a less extreme form, of frequent occurrence. There is, we fear, an idea among the people that although they have no right to charity, they have a right to employ- meat, if they will work, and at rates to be settled in great measure by themselves. The upper class, when they depend on salaries, have just the same feeling, only where they spend their irritation on Providence, or on the Government, or on" society," or on themselves, the poor concentrate it directly on the employers, or the rich at large. Why should the • employers inflict with- out suffering such misery, and why should not all classes share ? The high, or at all events higher, wages pre- viously enjoyed only sharpen the pinch, by making the fall so much greater, both in reality and in its effect on the imagination. Well-to-do men constantly in such circumstances commit suicide ; and despair, when felt by a crowd, easily and quickly changes into rage. We see nothing in all the changes of late years to diminish the pang of poverty, and much to increase the fear of it, and the hatred which the individual who has caused it, howevernn justly, provokes. We suspect that of late years,instead of diminishing, it has increased, developing in a few intense thrift, but in the many a malignant dislike of those removed from this source of suffering, akin to the dislike born of envy and suffering which the deformed occasionally feel for the straight. It is a lament- able passion, but it is a strong one, and before it is spent, it will have altered, or at least affected, many institutions throughout the world. The root of socialism, communism, and revolts against political economy, is mainly this,—a dim sense that while so many inequalities have been removed, the inequality between poverty, however temporary, and comfort was never so immense. The temporary character of the poverty is no palliative, but only deepens the sense of wrong. Why should a month of idleness destroy me, when it destroys nobody else?'
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