FOR PESSIMISTS

Evening Star, Issue 18785, 8 November 1924, Page 16

FOR PESSIMISTS

A PICK-ME-UP. Recently (writes Joseph M'Cabe, In the ‘ Sunday Chronicle ’) I gave some salutary examples .to show the improvement in our economic conditions during the past 100 years. Now, there is not a single aspect of life which does not reflect an equal improvement. For instance, no particular event of the year 1824 looms so large in the Press as the prize fight of Langan v. Smith on Worcester racecourse on January 24. Five thousand of the gentry and their dependents went to Worcester, at a time when an average of eight miles an hour was called “ remarkable speed,” and watched two men batter each other with naked fists for two and a-half hours. There was an even greater crowd when, a few months later, they stood up to each other for seventy-six rounds, naked fists, and no rules worth speaking of. These people were the refined, the educated, the elite; and you know what to expect of the men and women who worked eightyfour hours a week, and lived in an unchanging atmosphere of brutality. THE FACTS. Now let us see what the facts say to two other types of modern pessimists. One is the “sport” who says that there was a great deal more fun In life in the good old times. The other is the superior person who frowns upon our football and kinema crowds, and is convinced that we are getting coarser and more frivolous. Well, the fact is that in 1824 ninetenths of our people had only nine or ten hours a day, six days a week, for leisure ami sleep, could not read a line of print, and had not one-tenth the recreation or sport we have to-day. Manchester was at that time an overgrown village—it had no municipal charter—of 240.000 bodies (and a few souls); a livid mushroom growth of tho grand new industrial era. Market! street was still a narrow lane, and very few of the squalid streets were cither lit or paved. There must have been 150,000 workers (“ \Ve never employ them under five,” one employer proudly said), and the great majority of these lived in cellars without windows or drains. Windows were heavily taxed, you see. So were candles. So was soap. In fact, everything was taxed except disease and death, which had a merry time, WHY I SMILED. Beer, fighting (dogs, cats, cocks, boys, men—it didn’t matter what), and sex were the recreations. There were no parks. There were only two holidays, Christmas and the King’s Birthday. Here and there was a good Wesleyan or a emod Owe.nite who might take his children to see a green field on a Sunday; but of this nine-tenths of our people in those days very few ever got. ten miles from homo, or ever saw the sea. Death was—well, an event. The Press describes a Lancashire woman (and women were no different in London) approaching her son who had just been sentenced to death. “ Now,’’ she says to him, “he a good" hoy, and don’t bo hanged in your best clothes, but let me have them. I had belter take your red waistcoat now.” Often have I sat at, tea with a Scottish, English, or Welsh worker, and been told, confidentially, that it is “nearly as bad now.” And, knowing social history, I looked at his bright little house (in one case only two-roomed) and his succulent tea, thought of the pipe that would follow and the tram to town, the show, or the reading room, and smiled.