the corners of the square. Something very sensational had been
flashed upon the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his
penniless condition, he made his way over a bridge to buy a
paper, for in those days the papers, which were printed upon thin
sheets of metallic foil, were sold at determinate points by
specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he stopped short at a
change in the traffic below; and was astonished to see that the
police signals were restricting vehicles to the half roadway.
When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that had
replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great
March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the
West End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand
what was coming.
He watched, and his book describes this procession which the
police had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been
spontaneously organised in imitation of the Unemployed
Processions of earlier times. He had expected a mob but there was
a kind of sullen discipline about the procession when at last it
arrived. What seemed for a time an unending column of men
marched wearily, marched with a kind of implacable futility,
along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says, moved to join
them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour.
They bore a few banners with the time-honoured inscription:
'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.
They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was
nothing truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no
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cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for evermore.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