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.
Pages:
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86