October i8, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
II 
children of the working class is opposed and discussed m 
certain circles. The greatness of England depends on the 
cotton industry ; the cotton industry depends on the long 
hours of children : therefore, we cannot afford to let these 
children have some of the daylight for their games or their 
books. A few years ago there was a Committee appointed 
to consider the employment of boys and girls at night, and 
some moderate reforms were recommended, reforms that have 
not yet been put into effect. What was the argument against 
forbidding this practice ? It was urged that the night labour 
of young boys and girls was necessary in certain industries 
because otherwise those industries would l)e at a disadvantage 
in competition with their rivals on the Continent. We still 
apply the same criticism : material wealth is the final standard 
and "the Board of Trade figures pronounce the verdict on our 
civilization. And tliis standard is not applied by one class 
only. It is applied often enough by men as well as by 
masters, by working class parents as well as by capitalist 
employers. 
Rediscovery of Power 
If construction is to mean 'any real vital rediscovery of power 
it will mean that we have found a new outlook, a new standard, 
a new conception of the purpose of all our toil and effort. 
That standard will be the scope that our institutions provide 
for the good life. We can appreciate the difference from this 
l)assage in " Cobbett's Rural Rides.'^ 
Mr. Curwen in his hints on agriculture observes that he saw, 
somewhere in Norfolk. I believe it was, two hundred farmers 
worth from £5,000 to /lo.ooo each : and exclaims " What a 
glorious sight." In commenting on this passage in the 
Kegister, in the year 1810. 1 observed " Mr. Curwen only saw 
the outside of the sepulchre ; if he had seen the two or tliree 
thousan<i half starved labourers of these two hundred farmers, 
and the five or six thousand ragged wives and children of those 
labourers, if the farmers had brought those with them, the 
sight would not have been so glorious." 
Cobbett was discussing the change that had come over th^ 
country in his lifetime, when three farms had been turned int" 
one and the old type of small farmer had disappeared together 
with the commoners and cottagers. If you take the one 
standard you can represent the changes of that time as a 
great advance in agriculture ; if you take the other they mark 
a deplorable catastrophe. In the one case you think of agri- 
culture as a purely industrial process ; in the other you think 
of it as a system of life. The farmers of 1830 were much more 
substantial men than the farmers of 1730 ; they made larger 
profits and their methods were more advanced. But of the 
persons actually engaged in agriculture, three out of four were 
in a much worse case in 1830 than in 1730 ; poorer, less happy 
and most essential of all, less free. 
If we want to decide how we are going to look at the future 
of our society, we can imagine ourselves in the position of a 
returning soldier. What is it that is being dinned into his 
ears ? Production ; production ; production. What is to 
l»e our output ? How are we going to stand against our 
trade rivals ? More energy, more drive, more concentration, 
these, it is urged, are the key to success and progress and 
expansion. We are to introduce scientific management 
and conquer the old world by the methods of the new. The 
returning soldier is to fit himself into this. He is to pass 
from one warfare to another ; from the warfare of the trenches 
to the warfare of the workshop. 
Does this offer what he wants ? 
The war has shaken some millions of men out of the state 
of mind in which they accept the world as they find it. 
This means that a state of things which they suffered with the 
patience on which, as Anatole France has said, society ultima- 
tely depends will now be unendurable. Let us suppose that 
Sears, now a private in the (Jxford and Bucks Light Infantry, 
was formerly an agricultural labourer, earning, say, fifteen 
shillings a week, working long hours with no Saturday after- 
noon, living in a tumble-down cottage which belonged to his 
employer, in a village with no kind of amusement or recrea- 
tion ; or that Garnett, now a Corporal in the Manchesters, 
was working in a factory, hot, ill ventilated, with no oppor- 
tunity of exercising his lungs and his limbs in the open air, 
his home in one of a great series of monotonous streets; or 
that Kirkland, now a driver in the Lowland Artillery was a 
Glasgow carter, whose whole life seemed to be spent in steer- 
ing heavy loads along dark and slippery streets amid angry 
traffic. In the course of the great strikes of the summer 
of ifjir, it came out that the carters employed by one railway 
company were not entitled to any holiday until they had 
served ten years with the company. During the summer in 
winch the war broke out labourers were on strike in the 
Norfolk villages for a half holiday once a week. 
Tiiese men return from the front. Is Sears going to be told 
that he is to work harder and more incessantly for the farmer, 
or Gamett that the factory is going to rattle more harshly 
than ever about his ears, or Kirkland that he is to drive his 
load later into the drizzling night ? 
This is not what the soldier understands by reconstruction. 
For the way in which a man spends his life, which seemed so 
unimportant to the economist, seems to a man who has been 
three years in the trenches more important than anything 
else. Why is it that there is so much less panic than tedium 
on the fighting front unless the dread of death is a motive 
less powerful than the dread of a dreary life ? The old 
analysis made the desire of profit the one unfailing motive 
alike in capitalist and in workman, for industrial life was 
looked upon as a kind of goldfield in which men accept 
horrible conditions for the moment because they hope to 
become rich. It is not difficult to understand this view of 
life when we recall the days of the early industrial revolution, 
for they were , days in which men with enterprise and a little 
luck sprang quickly into prosperity and power from small 
beginnings. 
The description of the kind of life that the early employers 
led shows that they acted on the motive which some of the 
economists attributed to all mankind. So they' acted them- 
selves and so they believed the whole world acted. Many of 
the opponents of Factory Legislation were quite honestly 
of the opinion that the life which seemed so terrible was more 
eligible tha:n any other life that offered itself to the boy or 
girl in Lancashire or \'orkshire factories because it provided 
a means whereby some of them sought advance to a prosperous 
career. We get the other side in the evidence that some of 
these children gave when they had grown up before the Factory 
Commissioners. Here is a vivid description from one of 
them, " Thinks'they are no much better than the Israelites 
in Egypt and their life is no pleasure to them." This 
answer is an excellent summary of .the impression that the 
factory hours made on the victims. We have continued 
to believe that the desire of gain is the one constant motive 
in men's lives, and there is still a sort of legendary view that the 
sacrifices a man makes in order to become rich are a noble 
form of asceticism. But even if it were true that all effort 
in the workshop is rewarded by riches sooner or later, this 
analysis would give a very imperfect account of the springs 
and motives of human conduct. 
A Growing Revolt 
It is sometimes argued that the ponies taken from the free 
air on Dartmoor for the coal-mines of the north are reilly 
happier for the change, because though they lose their freedoni 
they are better fed, and the standard of good life for a pony 
is set by the manger. It is unfortunate that the days when a 
traveller in Thessaly could be changed into an ass with four 
legs are over, for there is no Lucius Apuleius to tell us how a 
pony feels. At present we have no evidence on the point 
that can be called first hand. It may be that those of us 
who think sadly of this change as we watch the gambols of 
the ponies round those bleak stretches of the moor where 
English gunners learn to blow German pill-boxes to pieces 
are wasting our sympathy. But for men and women, at any 
rate, it matters supremely how they spend their lives, and the 
growing sense of the quality of life, the growing revolt against 
the sacrifice of life to gain, however plausibly it is disguised, 
marks the progress of civilization, the advance of the human 
mind to a finer ideal for society, the escape from the moral 
avalanche of the Industrial Revolution. 
This sense has been immensely strengthened by the war. 
The man who thinks about his future in the face of death 
does not think of the riches he is going to acquire if he survives, 
he thinks of the happiness he is going to find in life. Not of 
course that he despises riches but he values them not as 
symbols of success but as a means to the kind of life that he 
desires. And when he thinks of his country he does not think 
of the iron or the cotton or the wool with which it is to flood 
the markets of the world. He resolves that its life and its 
power shall be devoted to repairing the moral ruin of the 
world and to securing to men and women a new freedom 
and a better kind of life. This will be the spirit of reconstruc- 
tion. A society living in this spirit will not prefer idleness to 
work, but it will work in a new and more bracing atmosphere 
than the old reluctant atmosphere of discipline. The pleasure 
of self-resf)ect, or the pain and damage that come from the 
loss of self-resiX!Ct, so intimately associated with work, is an 
all important element in liuman life, and this new ideal will 
demand that in this department as in others, and man's 
life shall be a pleasure to him. 
What is it that men and women need in order to make the 
most of their lives ? What are the conditions of human 
, freedom and happiness and development ? And how best 
can society secure those conditions to every class and every 
citizen ? We shall start from that principle, and to men who 
ask us to think first of industrial power or military power Or 
political power, we Shall reply that it is the first duty of a 
civilized state to see that no man's life is wasted. 
