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 himself to ask;
indeed his bearing must have been more valiant than his
circumstances, for twice he says that he was begged from. Near
the Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and
blackened eyebrows, who was walking alone, spoke to him with a
peculiar friendliness.
'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.
'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of
her kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his
hand…
It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey,
might under the repressive social legislation of those times,
have brought Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took
it, he confesses, and thanked her as well as he was able, and
went off very gladly to get food.
Section 8
A day or so later-and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon
the roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social
disorganisation and police embarrassment-he wandered out into
the open country. He speaks of the roads of that plutocratic age
as being 'fenced with barbed wire against unpropertied people,'
of the high-walled gardens and trespass warnings that kept him to
the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In the air, happy rich
people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes about them, as he
himself had been flying two years ago, and along the road swept
the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was rarely
out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even in
the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the
labour exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the
casual wards were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in
ranks under sheds or in the open air, and since giving to
wayfarers had been made a punishable offence there was no longer
friendship or help for a man from the rare foot passenger or the
wayside cottage…
'I wasn't angry,' said Barnet. 'I saw an immense selfishness, a
monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in
all those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how
certainly if the richest had changed places with the poorest,
that things would have been the same. What else can happen when
men use science and every new thing that science gives, and all
their available intelligence and energy to manufacture wealth and
appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling
traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those traditions come from
the dark ages when there was really not enough for every one,
when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but could
not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce
dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony
between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and
the poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made
the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The
men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all
smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and
revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor in anything but