Mr Rudyard Kipling on the New Unionism.

Evening Star, Issue 8399, 27 December 1890, Page 1

Mr Rudyard Kipling on the New Unionism.

I cannot understand (remarks Mr Eudyard Kipling in a letter he contributes to the • Pioneer Mail') the white man at Home. They are so deathlily alike, specially the more educated. They all seem to read the same books and the same newspapers telling 'em what to admire in the same books, and they all quote the same passages from the same books, and they write books on books about somebody else's books, and they are penetrated to their boot heels with a sense of the awful seriousness of their own views of the moment. Above that, they seem to be, moßt curiously and beyond the right of ordinary people, divorced from the knowledge or fear of death. Of course, every man conceives that every man except himself is bound to die, but these men appear to be like children in that respect. I can't explain exactly, but it gives an air of unreality to their most earnest earnestnesses; and when a young gentleman of views and culture and aspirations is in earnest, the trumpets of Jericho are silent beside him. Because they have everything done for them, they know how everything ought to be done ; and they are perfectly certain that wood pavements, policemen, ehope, and gas light come in the regular course of Nature. You can guess, with these convictions, how thoroughly and cocksurely they handle little trifles like colonial administration, the wants of the army, municipal sewage, housing of the poor, and so forth. Every third common need of average men is, in their mouths, a tendency or a movement or a federation affecting the world. It never seems to occur to 'em that the human instinct of getting as much as possible for money paid —or, failing money, for threats and fawnings—is about as old as Cain; and the burden of their bdt is : "Me an' a few mates o' mine are going to make a new world." As long as men only write and talk they must think that way, I suppose. It's compensation for playing with little things. And that reminds me. Do you know the university smile ? You don't by that name, but sometimes young civilians wear it for a very short time when they first come out. Something—l wonder if it's our brutal chaff, or a billiard cue, or which ?—takes it out of their faces, and when they next differ with you they do so without smiling. But that smile flourishes in London. I've met it again and again. It expresses tempered grief, sorrow at your complete inability to march with the march of progress at the universities, and a chastened contempt, There is one man who wears it as a garment. He is frivolously young—not more than thirtyfive or forty—and all those years no one has removed that smile. He knows everything about everything on this earth, and above all he knows all about men under any and every condition of life. He knows all about the aggressive militarism of you and your friends; he isn't quite sure of the necessity of an army ; he is certain that colonial expansion is nonsense; and he is more than certain that the whole step of all our Empire must be regulated by the knowledge and foresight of the working man. Then he smiles—smiles like a seraph with an M.A. degree. What can you do with a man like that ? He has never seen an unmade road in his life. I think he believes that wheat grows on a tree and that beef is dug from a mine. He has never been forty miles from a railway, and he has never been called upon to iaeue an order to anybody except his well-fed servant. Isn't it wondrous ?

But the real fun begins much lower down the line. I've been asaooiating generally and very particularly with the men who say that they are the only men in the world who work—-and they oall themselves the working man. Now, the working man in America is a nice person. He says he is a man and behaves accordingly. That ib to say, he has aome notion that he is part and parcel of a great country. At least he talks that way. But in this town you can see thousands of men meeting publicly on Sundays to cry aloud that everybody may hear that they are poor down-trodden helots, in fact "the pore workin' man." At their clubs and pubs the talk is the same. It's the utter want of self-respect that revolts. My friend the tobacconist has a cousin who is apparently sound in mind and limb, aged twenty-three, clear-eyed, and upstanding. He is a " skibbo " by trade—a painter of sorts. He married at twenty, and he has two children. He can spend three quarters of an hour talking about his down-trodden condition. He works under another Rajmistri who has saved money, and started a little shop of his own. He hates that Ilaj-mistri ; he loathes the police; and his views on the lives and customs of the aristocracy are strange. He approves of every form of lawlessness, and he knows that anybody who holds authority is sure to be making a good thing out of it. Of himself as a citizen he never thinks ; of himself as an Ishmael he thinks a good deal. He is entitled to eight hours' work a day and some time off—said time to be paid for ; he is entitled to free education for his children, and he doesn't want no bloomin' clergymen to teach 'em; he is entitled to houses specially built for himself beoause he pays the bulk of the taxes of the country. He is not going to emigrate, not he; he reserves to himself the right of multiplying as much as he pleases ; the streets must be policed for him while he demonstrates—immediately under my window, by -the way—for ten consecutive hours, and / am probably a thief because my clothes are better than his. The proposition is a very simple one. He has no duties to the State, no personal responsibility of any kind, and he'd sooner see his children dead than soldiers of the Queen. The Government owes him everything beoause he is a pore working man. When the Guards tried their board school mutiny at the Wellington Barracks my friend was jubilant. " What did I tell you ?" he said. " You see the very soldiers won't stand it."

"What's it? " "Bern' treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. Course they won't."

The popular evening paper wrote that the Guards with perfect justice had rebelled against being treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. Then I thought of a certain regiment that lay in Mian Mir for three years and dropped 400 men out of 1,000. It died of fever and cholera. There were no pretty nursemaids to walk with it in the streets, because there were no streets. I saw how the Guards amused themselves, and how their sergeants smoked in uniform. I pitied the Guards with their cruel sentrygoes, their three nights out of bed, and their unlimited supply of love and liquor. Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the pore workin' man—the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the docks last winter—has discovered a real, fine, new, original notion, and be is working it for all he is worth. Be calls it the solidarity of labor bundobast—but it's caste—4,ooo years old, cast of Menu —with old sJietts, mahajum, guild-tolls, excommunication, and all the rest of it. All things considered, there isn't anything mnoh older than oaste—it began with the second generation of man on earth—but to read the "advance" papers on the subject you'd imagine it was a revelation from Heaven. The real fun will begin—as it has begun and ended many times before—when the castes of skilled labor (that's the pore workin* man) are pushed up and knocked about by the lower and unrecognised castes, who will form castes of their own, and outcaste on the decision of their own punchayats. How those castes will scuffle and fight among themselves, and how astonished the Englishman will be!