PIERROT ABROAD.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 237, 3 October 1908, Page 14

PIERROT ABROAD.

THE CHAOS OF ENGLAND. It was the old fashion to talk of "the wonderful system" of English life, the orderliness of great cities, the perfect rhythm of business and common organisation. And were we gods, we might very well see things in that light—just as. were we gods, we might view earthquakes as a Aery proper and orderly settling down of geological strata. As it i is, and from a strictly human point of j view, it is easier to regard the existing state of things as chaotic and lacking in ordered control. I would go further. I Would say that a city like Loudon, with its incalculable waste of money, of health, of human life, will some day be regarded as a monstrous absurdity. The awful narrowness qjf the streets relative to the dense, incessant traffic; the reek of petrol and its gases, deadly in the extent to which they pollute the atmos- ! phere of London; the absence of all vast and complete provisions for living at a moderate rate; the number of cramped j little offices into which no direct sunlight ever enters—these are examples of the more obvious kind. But no less 1 I striking are the chaotic conditions of employment—the element of luck in even securing a hearing, uncertain payI ment. and insecurity of tenure. There is not only, as elsewhere, I am told, an intense competition to secure every j position, but the competition lasts in- | cessantly for the rest of your life between you and a hundred who are wait- | ing to fill your place. Strain every I nerve to do every bit of your work better than anyone else would be likely to do it, succeed in your straining—and then alone is your tenure assured. This is not the whine of the weakling and the incompetent; it is a commonplace with the most vigorous and the most apparently successful. And the competition makes for a hideous waste of the intellectual kind. The born physicist is eking out a miserable pittance in "wiring" a house; the born musician is setting songs for a problematic guinea; the book-lover is sub-editing sporting telegrams; and the clever man without an obvious and direct use is either starving or stealing. This is not an exaggeration; it is too much a commonplace to bear repetition in London—a city of cynical resignation to evils that are admitted on every hand To blame the capitalist directly and personally for this state of affairs'is not, always just; to blame a system of unchecked capitalism—a system with not one tenth of the checks obtaining in New Zealand—is justice itself. The rail- j ways, amongst the greatest obstacles to the general progress of the community, j are many of them paying peppercorn dividends. For a chaotic system allows nearly empty trains to be run simultaneously by two or three companies to one I place, and has to put up freights to' pay for the emptiness! Then comes the j combination, a euphemism for the Trust I —an institution which was never, no' never, to see the light of day in England! ' S I Everywhere I see pinched faces, faces I dogged against disappointment and suffering, faces innocent of hope of the promise of to-morrow. And in the windows of the sellers of office furniture, 1 see also nice little placards telling mc how I the dutiful young man is bound to rise, | how "loyalty" is the first principle of success in business, and how falthough in other words), if a boy is one out of a thousand, works nine-tenths of his. waking day and sells his individuality, his liberty, his everything to his employer,' there is some chance that he may die in considerable comfort. Multitudes may do good, honest, sufficiently clever work,! but they will have little to feed upon beyond the nice platitudes of smugminded professors of business. It is a struggle, then, and a life-long struggle. The question that remains to be asked is. "After all this struggle is it the best who wins?" Relatively, of course, the question answers itself. The type bestfitted for the particular struggle, granted a certain amount of luck (admittedly a tremendous factor at least at the beginning of the battle) must inevitably succeed. But then the very conditions under which the contest is maintained make absolute merit quite a secondary consideration. It is not the most beautiful, the most honestly-produced, or the most intrinsically valuable thing that sells the best. And since the most beautiful, the most honestly-produced and the most intrinsically valuable things are the dearest for the retailer to buy, it pays him to debase public taste as far as he possibly can, and to create an increasing demand for what he can buy cheaply. It is for this market, then, that the contestants have to fight; and it needs little thought to perceive how often the brutal and mediocre but persistent type must oust the sensitive and more gentle type which intellectually may be its superior. You will see, then, that my Utopianism is for the moment baffled in London. So much has to be undone, so much destroyed and built up again! Paris has at least a noble system of broad, treeshaded boulevards and ample streets, fit beginning for the evolution of a new and better social organisation; London, with a few conspicuous exceptions, is comparatively a wilderness of dingy, cramped, gloomy thoroughfares. Then the Londoner's temperament is so unpromising, with its intense individualism, its gloomy outlook only half obscured by an almost cynical cheerfulness, its business-like contraction and lack of imagination. I have said before that the Londoner is not an Englishman; in the bulk he is what every man in a commercially supreme country will become— an emotionless, nationless, efficient business machine. And the business machine will never help to a better social state. It is his hete-noir, the contemplative, emotional man of intellect to whom in all ages tfiis task has fallen. And such men in London are in the bulk too near the hunger-line to have much to say in the affairs either of the town or the nation! Practical legislative reform to mitigate many, though certainly far from all of these evils, is face to face with very real difficulties, of which I should bo only too glad to make light if I honestly could. In the colonies we often forget that Western Europe and England for commercial purposes form practically one vast country, competing not only directly in goods, but indirectly in wages and hours of labour. Colonial conditions jof work could probably only come by pretty nearly simultaneous legislation in England, France, Germany, and the United States—otherwise higher wages would be compensated for by a restricted market and consequent unemployment. This is not an argument of the ultraConservative party, but is well-enough recognised by the Labour leaders themselves, who ask rather for a removal of crying evils than the immediate realisation of Utopian ideals. Thus the problem is difficult, but in face of the dire needs of the case, it would be a crime to regard it as insuperable.