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Updated: June 7, 2025
Yet even with all those memories of tragic scenes which in this book are but lightly sketched, I hoped that the peace we should impose would not be one of vengeance, by which the innocent would pay for the sins of the guilty, the children for their fathers' lust, the women for their war lords, the soldiers who hated war for those who drove them to the shambles; but that this peace should in justice and mercy lead the working-people of Europe out of the misery in which all were plunged, and by a policy no higher than common sense, but as high as that, establish a new phase of civilization in which military force would be reduced to the limits of safety for European peoples eager to end the folly of war and get back to work.
But we were only in the early middle part of the century. A park had been opened on the east side, out of an old tract known as "Jones's Woods," and was quite a picnic-place for the working-people on a holiday. There was a talk about another, and, perhaps, the inspiration was evolved as the Fair grounds were being put in attractive order.
The writer specifies one of the greatest difficulties as existing in the working-people themselves: when provided with a variety of rooms for the separation of the various members of their families, they are very apt to defeat the whole plan by taking in lodgers, and contenting themselves with the filthy and depraving huddlement out of which their benevolent superiors endeavoured to rescue them.
It was there: an old weather-beaten house, with a narrow entrance and a corridor, in the middle of which flowed a dirty, foul-smelling stream of water; the room of the concierge looked like a black hole at the foot of the staircase, the balusters and walls of which were wet with moisture and streaked with dirt; a house of poor working-people, many stories high, and built in the time when this quarter of Paris was almost a suburb.
But our friend, Stanley Lake, was one of those persons who think that the course of the world's affairs should bend a good deal to their personal convenience, and he was not pleased with these unreasonable working-people who had gone to their beds, and brought him to this remote and grimy amphitheatre of black windows for nothing.
The administrative machinery is thus described: "All the confiscated land becomes the land capital of the nation. Its distribution among the working-people is to be in charge of the local and central authorities, beginning with the organized rural and urban communities and ending with the provincial central organs." Such is the irony of fate.
He sat and watched the working-people making their deposits, to which at intervals he signed his name. Before he left in the afternoon Downe put his head inside the door. 'Emily has seen Mrs. Barnet, he said, in a low voice. 'She has got Mrs. Barnet's promise to take her for a drive down to the shore to-morrow, if it is fine. Good afternoon!
How wretched and poor and neglected they seem, she said, as the cab rattled along the Mile End Road. 'They aren't slaves; they're working-people, said Jane. 'Of course they're working. That's what slaves are. Don't you tell me. Do you suppose I don't know a slave's face when I see it? Why don't their masters see that they're better fed and better clothed? Tell me in three words.
Where the working-people have a specific end in view, they show courage enough; as, for instance, in the attack upon Birley's mill, which had later to be protected by artillery. In this connection, a word or two as to the respect for the law in England. True, the law is sacred to the bourgeois, for it is his own composition, enacted with his consent, and for his benefit and protection.
It is not here claimed that any single panacea exists for all of the troubles of the working-people or of employers. As long as some people are born lazy or inefficient, and others are born greedy and brutal, as long as vice and crime are with us, just so long will a certain amount of poverty, misery, and unhappiness be with us Also.
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