well, i did not talk merely to torment him; nor have i written this merely to torment you. you see i have a persistent persuasion that all these miseries are preventable miseries, which it lies in the power of men to cure.
everybody does not suffer misery from boots.
one person i know, another friend of mine, who can testify to that; who has tasted all the miseries of boots, and who now goes about the world free of them, but not altogether forgetful of them. a stroke of luck, aided perhaps by a certain alacrity on his own part, lifted him out of the class in which one buys one’s boots and clothes out of what is left over from a pound a week, into the class in which one spends seventy or eighty pounds a year on clothing. sometimes he buys shoes and boots at very good shops; sometimes he has them made for him; he has them stored in a proper cupboard, and great care is taken of them; and so his boots and shoes and slippers never chafe, never pinch, never squeak, never hurt nor worry him, never bother him; and, when he sticks out his toes before the fire, they do not remind him that he is a shabby and contemptible wretch, living meanly on the dust heaps of the world. you might think from this he had every reason to congratulate himself and be happy, seeing that he has had good follow after evil; but, such is the oddness of the human heart, he isn’t contented at all. the thought of the multitudes so much worse off than himself in this matter of foot-wear, gives him no sort of satisfaction. their boots pinch him vicariously. the black rage with the scheme of things that once he felt through suffering in his own person in the days when he limped shabbily through gaily busy, fashionable london streets, in split boots that chafed, he feels now just as badly as he goes about the world very comfortably himself, but among people whom he knows with a pitiless clearness to be almost intolerably uncomfortable. he has no optimistic illusion that things are all right with them. stupid people who have always been well off, who have always had boots that fit, may think that; but not so, he. in one respect the thought of boots makes him even more viciously angry now, than it used to do. in the old days he was savage with his luck, but hopelessly savage; he thought that bad boots, ugly uncomfortable clothes, rotten houses, were in the very nature of things. now, when he sees a child sniffing and blubbering and halting upon the pavement, or an old country-woman going painfully along a lane, he no longer recognises the pinch of destiny. his rage is lit by the thought, that there are fools in this world who ought to have foreseen and prevented this. he no longer curses fate, but the dulness of statesmen and powerful responsible people who have neither the heart, nor courage, nor capacity, to change the state of mismanagement that gives us these things.
now do not think i am dwelling unduly upon my second friend’s good fortune, when i tell you that once he was constantly getting pain and miserable states of mind, colds for example, from the badness of his clothing, shame from being shabby, pain from the neglected state of his teeth, from the indigestion of unsuitable food eaten at unsuitable hours, from the insanitary ugly house in which he lived and the bad air of that part of london, from things indeed quite beyond the unaided power of a poor over-worked man to remedy. and now all these disagreeable things have gone out of his life; he has consulted dentists and physicians, he has hardly any dull days from colds, no pain from toothache at all, no gloom of indigestion....
i will not go on with the tale of good fortune of this lucky person. my purpose is served if i have shown that this misery of boots is not an unavoidable curse upon mankind. if one man can evade it, others can. by good management it may be altogether escaped. if you, or what is more important to most human beings, if any people dear to you, suffer from painful or disfiguring boots or shoes, and you can do no better for them, it is simply because you are getting the worse side of an ill-managed world. it is not the universal lot.
and what i say of boots is true of all the other minor things of life. if your wife catches a bad cold because her boots are too thin for the time of the year, or dislikes going out because she cuts a shabby ugly figure, if your children look painfully nasty because their faces are swollen with toothache, or because their clothes are dirty, old, and ill-fitting, if you are all dull and disposed to be cross with one another for want of decent amusement and change of air—don’t submit, don’t be humbugged for a moment into believing that this is the dingy lot of all mankind. those people you love are living in a badly-managed world and on the wrong side of it; and such wretchednesses are the daily demonstration of that.
don’t say for a moment: “such is life.” don’t think their miseries are part of some primordial curse there is no escaping. the disproof of that is for any one to see. there are people, people no more deserving than others, who suffer from none of these things. you may feel you merit no better than to live so poorly and badly that your boots are always hurting you; but do the little children, the girls, the mass of decent hard-up people, deserve no better fate?
