for the first time in my life i was really looking at the social fundamental of labor.
there is something astonishingly naïve in the unconsciousness with which people of our class float over the great economic realities. all my life i had been hearing of the working classes, of industrialism, of labor problems and the organization of labor; but it was only now in south africa, in this chaotic, crude illuminating period of putting a smashed and desolated social order together again, that i perceived these familiar phrases represented something—something stupendously real. there were, i began to recognize, two sides to civilization; one traditional, immemorial, universal, the side of the homestead, the side i had been seeing and restoring; and there was another, ancient, too, but never universal, as old at least as the mines of syracuse and the building of the pyramids, the side that came into view when i emerged from the dusty station and sighted the squat shanties and slender chimneys of johannesburg, that uprooted side of social life, that accumulation of toilers divorced from the soil, which is industrialism and labor and which carries such people as ourselves, and whatever significance and possibilities we have, as an elephant carries its rider.
now all johannesburg and pretoria were discussing labor and nothing but labor. bloemfontein was in conference thereon. our work of repatriation which had loomed so large on the southernward veld became here a business at once incidental and remote. one felt that a little sooner or a little later all that would resume and go on, as the rains would, and the veld-grass. but this was something less kindred to the succession of the seasons and the soil. this was a hitch in the upper fabric. here in the great ugly mine-scarred basin of the rand, with its bare hillsides, half the stamps were standing idle, machinery was eating its head off, time and water were running to waste amidst an immense exasperated disputation. something had given way. the war had spoilt the kaffir "boy," he was demanding enormous wages, he was away from johannesburg, and above all, he would no longer "go underground."
implicit in all the argument and suggestion about me was this profoundly suggestive fact that some people,[pg 121] quite a lot of people, scores of thousands, had to "go underground." implicit too always in the discourse was the assumption that the talker or writer in question wasn't for a moment to be expected to go there. those others, whoever they were, had to do that for us. before the war it had been the artless portuguese kaffir, but he alas! was being diverted to open-air employment at delagoa bay. should we raise wages and go on with the fatal process of "spoiling the workers," should we by imposing a tremendous hut-tax drive the kaffir into our toils, should we carry the labor hunt across the zambesi into central africa, should we follow the lead of lord kitchener and mr. creswell and employ the rather dangerous unskilled white labor (with "ideas" about strikes and socialism) that had drifted into johannesburg, should we do tremendous things with labor-saving machinery, or were we indeed (desperate yet tempting resort!) to bring in the cheap indian or chinese coolie?
steadily things were drifting towards that last tremendous experiment. there was a vigorous opposition in south africa and in england (growing there to an outcry), but behind that proposal was the one vitalizing conviction in modern initiative:—indisputably it would pay, it would pay!...
the human mind has a much more complex and fluctuating process than most of those explanatory people who write about psychology would have us believe. instead of that simple, direct movement, like the movement of a point, forward and from here to there, one's thoughts advance like an army, sometimes extended over an enormous front, sometimes in échelon, sometimes bunched in a column throwing out skirmishing clouds of emotion, some flying and soaring, some crawling, some stopping and dying.... in this matter of labor, for example, i have thought so much, thought over the ground again and again, come into it from this way and from that way, that for the life of me i find it impossible to state at all clearly how much i made of these questions during that johannesburg time. i cannot get back into those ancient ignorances, revive my old astonishments and discoveries. certainly i envisaged the whole process much less clearly than i do now, ignored difficulties that have since entangled me, regarded with a tremendous perplexity aspects that have now become lucidly plain. i came back to england confused, and doing what confused people are apt to do, clinging to an inadequate phrase that seemed at any rate to define a course of action. the word "efficiency" had got hold of me. all our troubles came, one assumed, from being "inefficient." one turned towards politics with a bustling air, and was all for fault-finding and renovation.
i sit here at my desk, pen in hand, and trace figures on the blotting-paper, and wonder how much i understood at that time. i came back to england to work on the side of "efficiency," that is quite certain. a little later i was writing articles and letters about it, so that much is documented. but i think i must have apprehended too by that time some vague outline at least of those wider issues in the sæcular conflict between the new forms of human association and the old, to which contemporary politics and our national fate are no more than transitory eddies and rufflings of the surface waters. it was all so nakedly plain there. on the one hand was the primordial, on the other the rankly new. the farm on the veld stood on the veld, a thing of the veld, a thing rooted and established there and nowhere else. the dusty, crude, brick-field desolation of the rand on the other hand did not really belong with any particularity to south africa at all. it was one with our camps and armies. it was part of something else, something still bigger: a monstrous shadowy arm had thrust out from europe and torn open this country, erected these chimneys, piled these heaps—and sent the ration-tins and cartridge-cases to follow them. it was gigantic kindred with that ancient predecessor which had built the walls of zimbabwe. and this hungry, impatient demand for myriads of toilers, this threatening inundation of black or brown or yellow bond-serfs was just the natural voice of this colossal system to which i belonged, which had brought me hither, and which i now perceived i did not even begin to understand....
one day when asking my way to some forgotten destination, i had pointed out to me the grey and roberts deep mine. some familiarity in the name set me thinking until i recalled that this was the mine in which i had once heard lady ladislaw confess large holdings, this mine in which gangs of indentured chinamen would presently be sweating to pay the wages of the game-keepers and roadmenders in burnmore park....
yes, this was what i was taking in at that time, but it found me—inexpressive; what i was saying on my return to england gave me no intimation of the broad conceptions growing in my mind. i came back to be one of the many scores of energetic and ambitious young men who were parroting "efficiency," stirring up people and more particularly stirring up themselves with the utmost vigor,—and all the time within their secret hearts more than a little at a loss....
