Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet Part 44

The reader shall hear. My story may be instructive, as a type of the feelings of thousands beside me.

It was the night after I had returned from D * * * *; sitting in Crossthwaite's little room, I had heard with mingled anxiety and delight the plans of my friends. They were about to present a monster pet.i.tion in favour of the Charter; to accompany it _en ma.s.se_ to the door of the House of Commons; and if it was refused admittance--why, then, ulterior measures were the only hope. "And they will refuse it," said Crossthwaite; "they're going, I hear, to revive some old law or other, that forbids processions within such and such a distance of the House of Commons. Let them forbid!

To carry arms, to go in public procession, to present pet.i.tions openly, instead of having them made a humbug of by being laid on the table unopened by some careless member--they're our rights, and we'll have them. There's no use mincing the matter: it's just like the old fable of the farmer and his wheat--if we want it reaped, we must reap it ourselves. Public opinion, and the pressure from without, are the only things which have carried any measure in England for the last twenty years. Neither Whigs nor Tories deny it: the governed govern their governors--that's the 'ordre du jour' just now--and we'll have our turn at it! We'll give those House of Commons oligarchs--those tools of the squires and shopkeepers--we'll give them a taste of pleasure from without, as shall make the bar of the house crack again. And then to be under arms, day and night, till the Charter's granted."

"And if it is refused?"

"Fight! that's the word, and no other. There's no other hope. No Charter,--No social reforms! We must give them ourselves, for no one else will. Look there, and judge for yourself!"

He pulled a letter out from among his papers, and threw it across to me.

"What's this?"

"That came while you were in gaol. There don't want many words about it.

We sent up a memorial to government about the army and police clothing. We told 'em how it was the lowest, most tyrannous, most ill-paid of all the branches of slop-making; how men took to it only when they were starved out of everything else. We entreated them to have mercy on us--entreated them to interfere between the merciless contractors and the poor wretches on whose flesh and blood contractors, sweaters, and colonels, were all fattening: and there's the answer we got. Look at it; read it! Again and again I've been minded to placard it on the walls, that all the world might see the might and the mercies of the government. Read it! 'Sorry to say that it is utterly out of the power of her Majesty's * * * *s to interfere--as the question of wages rests entirely between the contractor and the workmen.'"

"He lies!" I said. "If it did, the workmen might put a pistol to the contractor's head, and say--'You shall not tempt the poor, needy, greedy, starving workers to their own destruction, and the destruction of their cla.s.s; you shall not offer these murderous, poisonous prices. If we saw you offering our neighbour a gla.s.s of laudanum, we would stop you at all risks--and we will stop you now.' No! no! John, the question don't lie between workman and contractor, but between workman and contractor-plus-grape-and-bayonets!"

"Look again. There's worse comes after that. 'If government did interfere, it would not benefit the workman, as his rate of wages depends entirely on the amount of compet.i.tion between the workmen themselves.' Yes, my dear children, you must eat each other; we are far too fond parents to interfere with so delightful an amus.e.m.e.nt! Curse them--sleek, hard-hearted, impotent do-nothings! They confess themselves powerless against compet.i.tion--powerless against the very devil that is destroying us, faster and faster every year! They can't help us on a single point. They can't check population; and if they could, they can't get rid of the population which exists. They daren't give us a comprehensive emigration scheme. They daren't lift a finger to prevent gluts in the labour market. They daren't interfere between slave and slave, between slave and tyrant. They are cowards, and like cowards they shall fall!"

"Ay--like cowards they shall fall!" I answered; and from that moment I was a rebel and a conspirator.

"And will the country join us?"

"The cities will; never mind the country. They are too weak to resist their own tyrants--and they are too weak to resist us. The country's always drivelling in the background. A country-party's sure to be a party of imbecile bigots. n.o.body minds them."

I laughed. "It always was so, John. When Christianity first spread, it was in the cities--till a pagan, a villager, got to mean a heathen for ever and ever."

"And so it was in the French revolution; when Popery had died out of all the rest of France, the priests and the aristocrats still found their dupes in the remote provinces."

"The sign of a dying system that, to be sure. Woe to Toryism and the Church of England, and everything else, when it gets to boasting that its stronghold is still the hearts of the agricultural poor. It is the cities, John, the cities, where the light dawns first--where man meets man, and spirit quickens spirit, and intercourse breeds knowledge, and knowledge sympathy, and sympathy enthusiasm, combination, power irresistible; while the agriculturists remain ignorant, selfish, weak, because they are isolated from each other. Let the country go. The towns shall win the Charter for England! And then for social reform, sanitary reform, aedile reform, cheap food, interchange of free labour, liberty, equality, and brotherhood for ever!"

Such was our Babel-tower, whose top should reach to heaven. To understand the allurement of that dream, you must have lain, like us, for years in darkness and the pit. You must have struggled for bread, for lodging, for cleanliness, for water, for education--all that makes life worth living for--and found them becoming, year by year, more hopelessly impossible, if not to yourself, yet still to the millions less gifted than yourself; you must have sat in darkness and the shadow of death, till you are ready to welcome any ray of light, even though it should be the glare of a volcano.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

A PATRIOT'S REWARD.

I never shall forget one evening's walk, as Crossthwaite and I strode back together from the Convention. We had walked on some way arm in arm in silence, under the crus.h.i.+ng and embittering sense of having something to conceal--something, which if those who pa.s.sed us so carelessly in the street had known--! It makes a villain and a savage of a man, that consciousness of a dark, hateful secret. And it was a hateful one!--a dark and desperate necessity, which we tried to call by n.o.ble names, that faltered on our lips as we p.r.o.nounced them; for the spirit of G.o.d was not in us; and instead of bright hope, and the clear fixed lodestar of duty, weltered in our imaginations a wild possible future of tumult, and flame, and blood.

"It must be done!--it shall be done!--it will be done!" burst out John, at last, in that positive, excited tone, which indicated a half disbelief of his own words. "I've been reading Macerone on street-warfare; and I see the way as clear as day."

I felt nothing but the dogged determination of despair. "It must be tried, if the worst comes to the worst--but I have no hope. I read Somerville's answer to that Colonel Macerone. Ten years ago he showed it was impossible.

We cannot stand against artillery; we have no arms."

"I'll tell you where to buy plenty. There's a man, Power, or Bower, he's sold hundreds in the last few days; and he understands the matter. He tells us we're certain, safe. There are hundreds of young men in the government offices ready to join, if we do but succeed at first. It all depends on that. The first hour settles the fate of a revolution."

"If we succeed, yes--the cowardly world will always side with the conquering party; and we shall have every pickpocket and ruffian in our wake, plundering in the name of liberty and order."

"Then we'll shoot them like dogs, as the French did! 'Mort aux voleurs'

shall be the word!"

"Unless they shoot us. The French had a national guard, who had property to lose, and took care of it. The shopkeepers here will be all against us; they'll all be sworn in special constables, to a man; and between them and the soldiers, we shall have three to one upon us."

"Oh! that Power a.s.sures me the soldiers will fraternize. He says there are three regiments at least have promised solemnly to shoot their officers, and give up their arms to the mob."

"Very important, if true--and very scoundrelly, too, I'd sooner be shot myself by fair fighting, than see officers shot by cowardly treason."

"Well, it's ugly. I like fair play as well as any man. But it can't be done. There must be a surprise, a _coup de main_, as the French say" (poor Crossthwaite was always quoting French in those days). "Once show our strength--burst upon the tyrants like a thunderclap; and then!--

"Men of England, heirs of glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Rise, shake off the chains like dew Which in sleep have fallen on you!

Ye are many, they are few!"

"That's just what I am afraid they are not. Let's go and find out this man Power, and hear his authority for the soldier-story. Who knows him?"

"Why, Mike Kelly and he had been a deal together of late, Kelly's a true heart now--a true Irishman ready for anything. Those Irish are the boys, after all--though I don't deny they do bl.u.s.ter and have their way a little too much in the Convention. But still Ireland's wrongs are England's. We have the same oppressors. We must make common cause against the tyrants."

"I wish to Heaven they would just have stayed at home, and ranted on the other side of the water; they had their own way there, and no Mammonite middle-cla.s.s to keep them down; and yet they never did an atom of good.

Their eloquence is all bombast, and what's more, Crossthwaite, though there are some fine fellows among them, nine-tenths are liars--liars in grain, and you know it--"

Crossthwaite turned angrily to me. "Why, you are getting as reactionary as old Mackaye himself!"

"I am not--and he is not. I am ready to die on a barricade to-morrow, if it comes to that. I haven't six months' lease of life--I am going into consumption; and a bullet is as easy a death as spitting up my lungs piecemeal. But I despise these Irish, because I can't trust them--they can't trust each other--they can't trust themselves. You know as well as I that you can't get common justice done in Ireland, because you can depend upon no man's oath. You know as well as I, that in Parliament or out, nine out of ten of them will stick at no lie, even if it has been exposed and refuted fifty times over, provided it serves the purpose of the moment; and I often think that, after all, Mackaye's right, and what's the matter with Ireland is just that and nothing else--that from the n.o.bleman in his castle to the beggar on his dunghill, they are a nation of liars, John Crossthwaite!"

"Sandy's a prejudiced old Scotchman."

"Sandy's a wiser man than you or I, and you know it."

"Oh, I don't deny that; but he's getting old, and I think he has been failing in his mind of late."

"I'm afraid he's failing in his health; he has never been the same man since they hooted him down in John Street. But he hasn't altered in his opinions one jot; and I'll tell you what--I believe he's right. I'll die in this matter like a man, because it's the cause of liberty; but I've fearful misgivings about it, just because Irishmen are at the head of it."

"Of course they are--they have the deepest wrongs; and that makes them most earnest in the cause of right. The sympathy of suffering, as they say themselves, has bound them to the English working man against the same oppressors."

"Then let them fight those oppressors at home, and we'll do the same: that's the true way to show sympathy. Charity begins at home. They are always crying 'Ireland for the Irish'; why can't they leave England for the English?"

"You're envious of O'Connor's power!"

"Say that again, John Crossthwaite, and we part for ever!" And I threw off his arm indignantly.

"No--but--don't let's quarrel, my dear old fellow--now, that perhaps, perhaps we may never meet again--but I can't bear to hear the Irish abused.

They're n.o.ble, enthusiastic, generous fellows. If we English had half as warm hearts, we shouldn't be as we are now; and O'Connor's a glorious man, I tell you. Just think of him, the descendant of the ancient kings, throwing away his rank, his name, all he had in the world, for the cause of the suffering millions!"

"That's a most aristocratic speech, John," said I, smiling, in spite of my gloom. "So you keep a leader because he's descended from ancient kings, do you? I should prefer him just because he was not--just because he was a working man, and come of workmen's blood. We shall see whether he's stanch after all. To my mind, little Cuffy's worth a great deal more, as far as earnestness goes."

"Oh! Cuffy's a low-bred, uneducated fellow."