definite objective they were just marching and showing themselves
in the more prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of
that great mass of unskilled cheap labour which the now still
cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore. They were
being 'scrapped'-as horses had been 'scrapped.'
Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened
by his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt
nothing but despair at the sight; what should be done, what could
be done for this gathering surplus of humanity? They were so
manifestly useless-and incapable-and pitiful.
What were they asking for?
They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had
foreseen--
It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous
shambling enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the
unexpected, an appeal to those others who, more fortunate, seemed
wiser and more powerful, for something-for INTELLIGENCE. This
mute mass, weary footed, rank following rank, protested its
persuasion that some of these others must have foreseen these
dislocations-that anyhow they ought to have foreseen-and
arranged.
That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so
dumbly to assert.
'Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened
room,' he says. 'These men were praying to their fellow
creatures as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men
will realise about anything is that it is inanimate. They had
transferred their animation to mankind. They still believed
there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was careless or
malignant… It had only to be aroused to be
conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion… And I saw, too,
that as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for
intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will
for good and order has still to be gathered together, out of
scraps of impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever
is fine and creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It's
something still to come…'
It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that
this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might
well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own
individual necessities, should be able to stand there and
generalise about the needs of the race.
But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time
there was already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of
humanity was escaping, even then it was escaping, from its
extreme imprisonment in individuals. Salvation from the bitter
intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for
thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in
the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths,
was coming at last with the effect of naturalness into the talk
of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious
gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday
acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit
of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very
threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this
young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate
hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and
perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtlesspleasure that
blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.
'I saw life plain,' he wrote. 'I saw the gigantic task before
us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable
difficulty filled me with exaltation. I saw that we have still
to discover government, that we have still to discover education,
which is the necessary reciprocal of government, and that all
this-in which my own little speck of a life was so manifestly
overwhelmed-this and its yesterday in Greece and Rome and Egypt
were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of the beginning, the
movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will presently be
awake…'
Section 7
And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his
descent from this ecstatic vision of reality.
'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold
and a little hungry.'
He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood
upon the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the
galleries of the booksellers and the National Gallery, which had
been open continuously day and night to all decently dressed
people now for more than twelve years, and across the
rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the hotel colonnade
to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable offices,
which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he
would, as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for
food and a night's lodgings and some indication of possible
employment.
But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he
got to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested
and besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for
a time on the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and
dismayed, and then he became aware of a movement, a purposive
trickling away of people, up through the arches of the great
buildings that had arisen when all the railway stations were
removed to the south side of the river, and so to the covered
ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight, he
found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging
with astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging
from the small theatres and other such places of entertainment
which abounded in that thoroughfare.
This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no
begging in London streets for a quarter of a century. But that
night the police were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with
the destitute who were invading those well-kept quarters of the
town. They had become stonily blind to anything but manifest
disorder.
Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring