gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are
rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches
weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them
are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles
on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging
at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey
moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger
calls them
bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees a
month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The
gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been
sold cheap as having a few years' work left in them.
Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food.
Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation-whip
plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per
cent. whip and forty per cent. food. Sometimes their
necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag
all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them
work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so
hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front.
After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the
pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of un-
necessary work, for there is no real need for gharries
and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals con-
sider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as any-
one who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries.
They afford a small amount of convenience, which
cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and
animals.
Similarly with the
plongeur. He is a king compared
with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is
analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant,
and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all,
where is the real need of big hotels and smart
restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but
in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of
it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are
better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a
meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same ex-
pense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restau-
rants must exist, but there is no need that they should
enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in
them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are sup-
posed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called,
means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and
the customers pay more; no one benefits except the
proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa
at Deauville. Essentially, a "smart" hotel is a place
where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two
hundred may pay through the nose for things they do
not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels
and restaurants, and the work done with simple
efficiency,
plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day
instead of ten or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a
plongeur's work is more
or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does any
one want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond
the immediate economic cause, and to consider what
pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing
dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people-
comfortably situated people-do find a pleasure in such
thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working
when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his
work is needed or not, he must work, because work in
itself is good-for slaves, at least. This sentiment still
survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless
drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work
is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the
thought runs) are such low animals that they would be
dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them
too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be
intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the
improvement of working conditions, usually says some-
thing like this:
"We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it
is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with
the thought of its unpleasantness. But don't expect us
to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower
classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange,
but we will fight like devils against any improvement of
your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you
are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not
going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an
extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you
must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be
damned to you."
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent,
cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a
hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less
than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally
they side with the rich, because they imagine that any
liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own
liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the
alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as
they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very
much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them
are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of
people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by
them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that
makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their
opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on
the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental
difference between rich and poor, as though they were
two different races, like negroes and white men. But in
reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich
and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and
nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the
average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change