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are no doubt thinking primarily of the wage-earning classes of this country, the conditions under which they work and live, and their annual incomes as compared with the cost of living and also with the position of those whose earnings or whose means are larger. Here no doubt are questions into which a Parliamentary inquiry is possible; but social unrest' is a phenomenon which is not by any means confined to those in whose case it can possibly be attributable to the pressure of economic want, or the anxieties incident to the avoidance of it. Under different forms it betrays itself in the lives of those whose means are far in excess of anything that could possibly be the lot of the majority of the human race under any social system whatsoever. One of its most remarkable manifestations is the frenzy of the hammer-bearing Maenads, who seek to enter paradise by assault, through the splinters of shop-windows. These women and their leaders for the most part belong to the affluent or comparatively affluent classes. Many of them are rich. Many of them, in addition to riches, enjoy all the advantages of position which are generally the sedatives of discontent. And yet the 'unrest' of these persons is in its essentials hardly distinguishable from that of the Welsh rioters who, by way of compelling the coalowners to revise their rates of wages, wrecked the premises of the tradesmen who supplied them with their tobacco and their daily bacon. It is evident, therefore, that the social unrest' of to-day has other causes behind it in addition to those associated with direct economic pressure. Economic pressure, as experienced by the poorer sections of the community, is one of the causes, and will presently be considered here, when it will be shown that its actual operation as a disturbing element differs widely from the popular conception of it; but those causes shall be considered first which are of a more general kind, and we will begin with one which is affecting all classes alike.

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UNREST AS A PRODUCT OF INCREASED FACILITIES OF TRAVEL

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The late Mr. Phelps, for many years American Ambassador in this country, when I was once walking with him on a lonely road in the neighbourhood of the Highland Railway, said suddenly after a long silence, The Devil never found a truer note for his voice than the railway whistle. There it goes, from one end of the country to the other, crying to all the boys and girls, Come away, come away, come away." And when they go, they find the place they have gone to better in no way than the place they have left behind.' In these few words we have a profound analysis of a large part of that contemporary unrest which is commonly supposed to be confined to the ranks of Labour. It is

not so confined. It affects all classes alike. As we know from Lucretius and from Horace, it was latent in the ancient world, ready to become acute under the stimulation of congenial circumstances. But such circumstances were then those of the fewest of the few only-of the few who possessed, in addition to their Roman palaces, villas so numerous that it was a labour to choose between them; and chariots which would whirl the owners from one of these to the other. But even so their unrest, if we may judge from the words of Lucretius, did not carry them outside what, in the language of the modern cabman, was a twelve-mile radius from the Charing Cross of Rome. The railway to-day has a similar and yet more disturbing influence on all classes alike. The humblest labourer can, for a penny or twopence, travel further in twenty minutes than the trampling team of Lucullus would have carried him between dawn and sunset; and he can do so in a vehicle, in comparison with the ease and comfort of which the humblest labourer would denounce the chariot of Lucullus as a 'bone-shaker.' Every Bank Holiday carries its millions of excursionists to seashores so remote that Horace would have called them 'fabulous'; whilst the effects on the rich of these increased facilities for travel have developed so rapidly, even during the last thirty years, that English watering-places which once were the haunts of fashion have witnessed the scattering of their patrons of the older class along the shores of the Mediterranean, the banks of the Nile and Ganges, the southern extremity of Africa, and the islands of the West Indies. Few things can render this change so vivid as do the parks and pleasure-grounds of such of our old country-houses as still preserve externally what was their aspect in the eighteenth century. The classical or the Chinese pavilions, which are one of their distinctive featuresoften within a stone's-throw of the house and rarely more than a mile from it--were the goals of excursions which, with the simple feast accompanying them, were the adventures and the excitements of a day. For Miss Austen's heroes and heroines a journey to Box Hill from the adjacent borders of Kent was the exploration of an unknown wonderland, to be anticipated and looked back upon for months.

How constantly is the remark heard from the lips even of seasoned travellers, 'I never can see a train without wishing that I was going by it.' For the rich this wish is charged with the subconscious feeling that any place would be more pleasurable than that in which they actually are. For the poor it is charged with a feeling of a like kind, that any change in the conditions under which they now work would be a change for conditions unimaginably different and unimaginably better for themselves. In their case this feeling achieves perhaps its most definite expression in

the tendency to leave the villages for the towns. So far as our own country is concerned, superficial observers are accustomed to represent this tendency as the result of our insular land-system, of the tyranny of great landlords, or at all events of the fact that the majority of our agricultural population are not themselves the owners of the land they till. In this contention there may, or again there may not be, a certain element of truth. But whatever truth there may be in it, it affords-and this is my sole point here a very partial explanation of the phenomenon here in question for precisely the same tendency is observable in other countries where the peculiarities of our own land-system are most conspicuous by their absence. That the magic of ownership will not anchor the small cultivator to the country is shown in Belgium by the fact that the number of peasant owners of from 2 to 12 acres decreased by 16 per cent. between the years 1880 and 1895. In France, which has been the classic home of peasant ownership for a century, the towns are now growing at the expense of the rural districts. Between the years 1900 and 1910 the working agricultural population had declined by nearly 70,000 persons. The attraction of the towns, even in Australia, is exerting a similar influence. A movement so general evidently cannot be due to economic conditions of any one particular kind. It is rather due to the disturbing effect on the imagination of an enlarged vision of conditions which are continually increasing in variety, any one of which our increased facilities of movement tend to present as possible, and which are bewildering by their competing promises-promises never fulfilled, or fulfilled but to some small degree.

UNREST AND MODERN POPULAR EDUCATION

Causes of unrest such as these may be called the automatic education of circumstances. But there is a further cause of a more specific kind, the operation of which is less general but more definitely disturbing in proportion to the limitations of the area of its influence. This is the development of education in the narrower sense of the word. Throughout the civilised world for more than two generations, an education in many respects novel has been inflicted on classes a large portion of whom, even fifty years ago, were innocent of the art of reading; and a change has consequently been brought about in the mental conditions of the majority to which there has been no parallel in the mental conditions of the few. For the few, from time immemorial, there has been a continuous congruity between their education and their general circumstances, which has rendered the one as much a matter of course as the other. They have been educated up to a standard of expectations and appreciations which, from

their youth up, have been satisfied in the persons of those around them, and which in the natural course of things would presumably be satisfied in their own. For them education, as such, has never possessed any of the excitements of novelty. It has never disturbed them, as a class, with a sense of new and untried powers. It has come to them merely as the ordinary and indispensable equipment for any kind of life amongst their equals, let the talents and career of the individual prove to be what they may.

But with the masses-and more particularly with that section of the masses which, under any social system, must always be the most numerous-namely, those engaged in the exercise of manual labour-the case has been widely different. The whole idea of education for the people, ever since such an idea began to be practically popularised, has been derived from the kind of education traditional amongst a limited class, and devised with a view to circumstances peculiar to such a class only-circumstances which may, indeed, be rendered impossible for anybody, but can never be common to all, or even the majority of the human race. Whatever may be the merits or demerits of the kind of education in question, it has had for its object and result the equipment of those receiving it for the positions they have been destined to occupy, or for the class of occupations by means of which they have been destined to support themselves. The future diplomat, for example, has been grounded in the classical, and made proficient in modern languages, with a view to endowing him with those cosmopolitan accomplishments in the absence of which no diplomat can be a successful citizen of the world; but in so far as an education devised after this model is inflicted on that majority of the human race whose livelihood depends on those tasks which are commonly called labour,' education becomes in one respect a radically different thing. Between it and their practical circumstances there is no similar connexion. In the case of an Ambassador a knowledge of French has a direct bearing on the performance by him of his distinctive functions. But a similar knowledge would have no similar effect in the case of a coalhewer, a tiller of the soil, or a dairymaid. Of course it may be argued that any kind of general culture, by widening the minds of such persons, increases their capacities of enjoyment; but it would do nothing towards so developing the coalhewer's special efficiency that from earning seven shillings a day he may rise to earning fourteen; nor would it render the dairymaid a better maker of butter, or the husbandman a more productive cultivator. Instead of being aids to work, it would constitute a distraction from it.

The general fact here indicated is, indeed, widely recognised, and especially by many who claim, in the extremest sense, to

be the mouthpieces of popular aspiration. Thus the Labour Member, Mr. Lansbury, declared not long ago that much of the modern unrest' in the labour world is due to the fact that education has made the labourer impatient of such tasks as 'the hewing of wood, the drawing of water,' and so forth. But what Mr. Lansbury and others omit to notice is this-that education, in the sense of general culture, whilst rendering such tasks distasteful does nothing to diminish their necessity, or in any way to alter their character, by enabling those who perform them to perform them with greater ease. Without imputing to Mr. Lansbury unduly luxurious tastes, we may assume that when the weather is cold one of his normal requirements is a fire; and that a pork chop, a herring, a slice of cod, form no infrequent articles of his diet. But in order that Mr. Lansbury may be warm whilst he elaborates expositions of Socialism, somebody must be a hewer of wood, or-more literally-of coal; in order that he may eat his chop the hands of some of his comrades must be red with the blood of pigs; and in order that by his morning fire he may have a bit of fish' for his breakfast, other comrades must toil all night amongst the tempests of the North Sea. Does education, in the sense of general culture, make fire and food less necessary for Mr. Lansbury himself? Or does it in any way modify the circumstances under which they are obtainable for him by the efforts of others? Does it make coal-getting a process as easy as the picking of buttercups? Would it enable the sticker of pigs to substitute for his customary bloodshed some 'death by a rose in aromatic pain'? Would any amount of general culture enable the North Sea fisherman to calm the waves at his will, and reduce his calling to a pastime like that of catching carp in a marble basin at Versailles?

So far as labour in general is concerned, the only kind of education which equips the labourer for the performance of it is purely technical, and consists mainly of the performance of such labour itself and the knowledge and dexterities thereby acquired. It often does not even require any mastery of the art of reading. But although education, in the more general sense of the word, results in no such enlargement of the labourer's productive efficiency, it tends to produce in his mind an illusory consciousness that it does so that hence he deserves a correspondingly increased reward, and that, failing to get it, he suffers some correspondingly increasing wrong.

In other words, the modern experiment of applying to the masses at large a system of education modelled, so far as its general character goes, on that which had previously been applied to a limited class only, has had on the majority thus far, all over the world, the effect of increasing their expectations without

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