margaret steel has left school, and to-morrow morning she goes off at five o'clock to the factory.
to-day margaret is a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked lassie; in three years she will be hollow-eyed and pale-faced. never again will she know what it is to waken naturally after sleep; the factory syren will haunt her dreams always. she will rise at half-past four summer and winter; she will tramp the two mile road to the factory, and when six comes at night she will wearily tramp home again. possibly she will marry a factory worker and continue working in the factory, for his wage will not keep up a home. in the neighbouring town hundreds of homes are locked all day ... and bruce the manufacturer's daughters are in county society. heigh ho! it is a queer thing civilisation!
i wonder when the people will begin to[pg 162] realise what wagery means. when they do begin to realise they will commence the revolution by driving women out of industry. to-day the women are used by the profiteer as instruments to exploit the men. surely a factory worker has the right to earn enough to support a family on. the profiteer says "no! you must marry one of my hands, and then your combined wages will set up a home for you."
i spoke of this to the manager of bruce's factory once.
"but," he said, "if we did away with female labour we'd have to close down. we couldn't compete with other firms."
"not if they abolished female labour too?"
"i was thinking of the calcutta mills where labour is dirt cheap," he said.
"i see," i said, "so the scotch lassie is to compete with the native?"
"it comes to that," he admitted.
i think i see a very pretty problem awaiting labour in the near future. as the trade unions become more powerful and show their determination to take the mines and factories into their own hands, capitalists will turn[pg 163] to asia and africa. the exploitation of the native is just beginning. at a time when britain is a socialistic state all the evils of capitalism will be reproduced with ten-fold intensity in india and china and africa. i see an asia ruled by lash and revolver; the profiteer has a short way with the striker in eastern climes. the recent history of south africa is sinister. a few years ago our brothers died presumably that white men should have the rights of citizenship in the transvaal. what they seemed to have died for was the right of profiteers to shoot white strikers from the windows of the rand club. if white men are treated thus i tremble for the fate of the black man who strikes.
yes, the present profiteering system is a preparation for an exploited east. margaret steel and her fellows are slaving so that a persia may be "opened up," a mexico robbed of its oil wells.
* * *
to-day i gave a lesson on capital.
"if," i said, "i have a factory i have to pay out wages and money for machinery and raw material. when i sell my cloth i get[pg 164] more money than i paid out. this money is called profit, and with this money i can set up a new factory.
"now what i want you to understand is this:—unless work is done by someone there is no wealth. if i make a fortune out of linen i make it by using the labour of your fathers, and the machinery that was invented by clever men. of course, i have to work hard myself, but i am repaid for my work fully. margaret steel at this moment standing at a loom, is working hard too, but she is getting a wage that is miserable.
"note that the owner of the factory is getting an income of, say, ten thousand pounds a year. now, what does he do with the money?"
"spends it on motor cars," said a boy.
"buys cigarettes," said a girl.
"please, sir, mr. bruce gives money to the infirmary," said another girl.
"he keeps it in a box beneath the bed," said another, and i found that the majority in the room favoured this theory. this suggestion reminded me of the limitations of childhood, and i tried to talk more simply. i told them of banks and stocks, i talked of[pg 165] luxuries, and pointed out that a man who lived by selling expensive dresses to women was doing unnecessary labour.
tom macintosh showed signs of thinking deeply.
"please, sir, what would all the dressmakers and footmen do if there was no money to pay them?"
"they would do useful work, tom," i said. "your father works from six to six every day, but if all the footmen and chauffeurs and grooms and gamekeepers were doing useful work, your father would only need to work maybe seven hours a day. see? in britain there are forty millions of people, and the annual income of the country is twenty-four hundred million pounds. one million of people take half this sum, and the other thirty-nine millions have to take the other half."
"please, sir," said tom, "what half are you in?"
"tom," i said, "i am with the majority. for once the majority has right on its side."
* * *
bruce the manufacturer had an advertisement in to-day's local paper. "no [pg 166]encumbrances," says the ad. bruce has a family of at least a dozen, and he possibly thinks that he has earned the right to talk of "encumbrances." i sympathise with the old chap.
but i want to know why gardeners and chauffeurs must have no encumbrances. if the manorial system spreads, a day will come when the only children at this school will be the offspring of the parish minister. then, i suppose, dominies and ministers will be compelled to be polygamists by act of parliament.
i like the lord of the manor's damned impudence. he breeds cattle for showing, he breeds pheasants for slaughtering, he breeds children to heir his estates. then he sits down and pens an advertisement for a slave without "encumbrances." why he doesn't import a few harem attendants from turkey i don't know; possibly he is waiting till the dardanelles are opened up.
* * *
i have just been reading a few schoolboy howlers. i fancy that most of these howlers are manufactured. i cannot be persuaded that any boy ever defined a lie as "an[pg 167] abomination unto the lord but a very present help in time of trouble." howlers bore me; so do most school yarns. the only one worth remembering is the one about the inspector who was ratty.
"here, boy," he fired at a sleepy youth, "who wrote hamlet?"
the boy started violently.
"p—please, sir, it wasna me," he stammered.
that evening the inspector was dining with the local squire.
"very funny thing happened to-day," he said, as they lit their cigars.
"i was a little bit irritated, and i shouted at a boy, 'who wrote hamlet?' the little chap was flustered. 'p—please, sir, it wasna me!' he stuttered."
the squire guffawed loudly.
"and i suppose the little devil had done it after all!" he roared.
* * *
lawson came down to see me to-night, and as usual we talked shop.
"it's all very well," he said, "for you to talk about education being all wrong. any idiot can burn down a house that took many[pg 168] men to build. have you got a definite scheme to put in its place?"
the question was familiar to me. i had had it fired at me scores of times in the days when i talked socialism from a soap-box in hyde park.
"i think i have a scheme," i said modestly.
lawson lay back in his chair.
"good! cough it up, my son!"
i smoked hard for a minute.
"well, lawson, it's like this, my scheme could only be a success if the economic basis of society were altered. so long as one million people take half the national yearly income you can't have any decent scheme of education."
"right o!" said lawson cheerfully, "for the sake of argument, or rather peace, we'll give you a utopia where there are no idle rich. fire away!"
"good! i'll talk about the present day education first.
"twenty years ago education had one aim—to abolish illiteracy. in consequence the three r.'s were of supreme importance. nowadays they are held to be quite as important, but a dozen other things have been[pg 169] placed beside them on the pedestal. gradually education has come to aim at turning out a man or a woman capable of earning a living. cookery, woodwork, typing, bookkeeping, shorthand ... all these were introduced so that we should have better wives and joiners and clerks.
"lawson, i would chuck the whole blamed lot out of the elementary school. i don't want children to be trained to make pea-soup and picture frames, i want them to be trained to think. i would cut out history and geography as subjects."
"eh?" said lawson.
"they'd come in incidentally. for instance, i could teach for a week on the text of a newspaper report of a fire in new york."
"the fire would light up the whole world, so to speak," said lawson with a smile.
"under the present system the teacher never gets under way. he is just getting to the interesting part of his subject when maggie brown ups and says, 'please, sir, it's cookery now.' the chap who makes a religion of his teaching says 'damn!' very forcibly, and the girls troop out.
"i would keep composition and reading[pg 170] and arithmetic in the curriculum. drill and music would come into the play hours, and sketching would be an outside hobby for warm days."
"where would you bring in the technical subjects?"
"each school would have a workshop where boys could repair their bikes or make kites and arrows, but there would not be any formal instruction in woodwork or engineering. technical education would begin at the age of sixteen."
"six what?"
"sixteen. you see my pupils are to stay at school till they are twenty. you are providing the cash you know. well, at sixteen the child would be allowed to select any subject he liked. suppose he is keen on mechanics. he spends a good part of the day in the engineering shop and the drawing room—mechanical drawing i mean. but the thinking side of his education is still going on. he is studying political economy, eugenics, evolution, philosophy. by the time he is eighteen he has read nietzsche, ibsen, bjornson, shaw, galsworthy, wells, strindberg, tolstoi, that is if ideas appeal to him."
[pg 171]
"ah!"
"of course, i don't say that one man in a hundred will read ibsen. you will always have the majority who are averse to thinking if they can get out of it. these will be good mechanics and typists and joiners in many cases. my point is that every boy or girl has the chance to absorb ideas during their teens."
"would you make it compulsory? for instance, that boy willie smith in your school; do you think that he would learn much more if he had to stay at school till he was twenty?"
"no," i said, "i wouldn't force anyone to stay at school, but to-day boys quite as stupid naturally as smith stay at the university and love it. a few years' rubbing shoulders with other men is bound to make a man more alert. take away, as you have done for argument's sake, the necessity of a boy's leaving school at fourteen to earn a living and you simply make every school a university."
"and it isn't three weeks since i heard you curse universities!" said lawson with a grin.
[pg 172]
"i'm thinking of the social side of a university," i explained. "that is good. the educational side of our universities is bad because it is mostly cram. i crammed botany and zoo for my degree and i know nothing about either; i was too busy trying to remember words like caryophylacia, or whatever it is, to ask why flowers droop their heads at night. so in english i had to cram up what hazlitt and coleridge said about shakespeare when i should have been reading othello. the university fails because it refuses to connect education with contemporary life. you go there and you learn a lot of rot about syllogisms and pentameters, and nothing is done to explain to you the meaning of the life in the streets outside. no wonder that oxford and cambridge dons write to the papers saying that life has no opening for a university man."
"but i thought that you didn't want education to produce a practical man. you wanted a theoretical chimney-sweep, didn't you?" said lawson smiling.
"the present university turns out men who are neither practical nor theoretical. i want a university that will turn out thinkers.[pg 173] the men who have done most to stimulate thought these past few years are men like wells and shaw and chesterton; and i don't think that one of them is a 'varsity man.'"
"you can't run a world on thought," said he.
"i don't know," i said, "we seem to run this old state of ours without thought. the truth is that there will always be more workers than thinkers. while one chap is planning a new heaven on earth, the other ninety-nine are working hard at motors and benches.
"h. g. wells is always asking for better technical schools, more research, more invention. all these are absolutely necessary, but i want more than that; along with science and art i want the thinking part of education to go on."
"it goes on now."
"no," i said, "it doesn't. your so-called educated man is often a stupid fellow. doctors have a good specialist education, yet i know a score of doctors who think that socialism means 'the great divide.' when osteopathy came over from america a few years ago thousands of medical men pronounced it 'damned quackery' at once; only a few were[pg 174] wide enough to study the thing to see what it was worth. so with inoculation; the doctors follow the antitoxin authority like sheep. at the university i once saw a raid on an anti-vivisection shop, and i'm sure that not one medical student in the crowd had ever thought about vivisection. mention women's freedom to the average lawyer, and he will think you a madman.
"don't you see what i am driving at? i want first-class doctors and engineers and chemists, but i want them to think also, to think about things outside their immediate interests. this is the age of the specialist. that's what's wrong with it. somebody, matthew arnold, i think, wanted a man who knew everything of something and something of everything. it's a jolly good definition of education."
"that is the idea of the scotch code," said lawson.
"yes, perhaps it is. they want our bairns to learn tons of somethings about everything that doesn't matter a damn in life."
* * *
my talk with lawson last night makes me realise again how hopeless it is to plan a[pg 175] system of education when the economic system is all out of joint. i believe that this nation has the wealth to educate its children properly. i wonder what the conscriptionists would say if i hinted to them that if a state can afford to take its youth away from industry to do unprofitable labour in the army and navy it can afford to educate its youth till the age of twenty is reached.
the stuff we teach in school leads nowhere; the code subjects simply lull a child to sleep. how the devil is a lad to build a utopia on geography and nature study and woodwork? education should prove that the world is out of joint, and it should point a kitchener finger at each child and say, "your country needs you ... to set it right."
