Title: This Misery of Boots
Author: Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "This Misery of Boots" ***


                           Transcriber Note:

 Obvious typos and punctuation errors corrected.
 Italic text is represented by underscores surrounding the _italic
   text_.
 Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
 A small decoration on the title page is represented by [Decoration].

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                                  THIS
                           MISERY _of_ BOOTS

                                   BY
                              H. G. WELLS

             _Author of “Socialism and the Family,” “In the
                     Days of the Comet,” “A Modern
                             Utopia,” etc._

                              [Decoration]


                                 BOSTON
                        THE BALL PUBLISHING CO.
                                  1908

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                             THIS MISERY OF
                                 BOOTS



                               CHAPTER I

                 THE WORLD AS BOOTS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE


“It does not do,” said a friend of mine, “to think about boots.” For my
own part, I have always been particularly inclined to look at boots, and
think about them. I have an odd idea that most general questions can be
expressed in terms of foot-wear—which is perhaps why cobblers are often
such philosophical men. Accident it may be, gave me this persuasion. A
very considerable part of my childhood was spent in an underground
kitchen; the window opened upon a bricked-in space, surmounted by a
grating before my father’s shop window. So that, when I looked out of
the window, instead of seeing—as children of a higher upbringing would
do—the heads and bodies of people, I saw their under side. I got
acquainted indeed with all sorts of social types as boots simply,
indeed, as the soles of boots; and only subsequently, and with care,
have I fitted heads, bodies, and legs to these pediments.

There would come boots and shoes (no doubt holding people) to stare at
the shop, finicking, neat little women’s boots, good sorts and bad
sorts, fresh and new, worn crooked in the tread, patched or needing
patching; men’s boots, clumsy and fine, rubber shoes, tennis shoes,
goloshes. Brown shoes I never beheld—it was before that time; but I have
seen pattens. Boots used to come and commune at the window, duets that
marked their emotional development by a restlessness or a kick.... But
anyhow, that explains my preoccupation with boots.

But my friend did not think it _did_, to think about boots.

My friend was a realistic novelist, and a man from whom hope had
departed. I cannot tell you how hope had gone out of his life; some
subtle disease of the soul had robbed him at last of any enterprise, or
belief in coming things; and he was trying to live the few declining
years that lay before him in a sort of bookish comfort, among
surroundings that seemed peaceful and beautiful, by not thinking of
things that were painful and cruel. And we met a tramp who limped along
the lane.

“Chafed heel,” I said, when we had parted from him again; “and on these
pebbly byways no man goes barefooted.” My friend winced; and a little
silence came between us. We were both recalling things; and then for a
time, when we began to talk again, until he would have no more of it, we
rehearsed the miseries of boots.

We agreed that to a very great majority of people in this country boots
are constantly a source of distress, giving pain and discomfort, causing
trouble, causing anxiety. We tried to present the thing in a concrete
form to our own minds by hazardous statistical inventions. “At the
present moment,” said I, “one person in ten in these islands is in
discomfort through boots.”

My friend thought it was nearer one in five.

“In the life of a poor man or a poor man’s wife, and still more in the
lives of their children, this misery of the boot occurs and recurs—every
year so many days.”

We made a sort of classification of these troubles.

There is the TROUBLE OF THE NEW BOOT.

(i) They are made of some bad, unventilated material; and “draw the
feet,” as people say.

(ii) They do not fit exactly. Most people have to buy ready-made boots;
they cannot afford others, and, in the submissive philosophy of poverty,
they wear them to “get used” to them. This gives you the little-toe
pinch, the big-toe pinch, the squeeze and swelling across the foot; and,
as a sort of chronic development of these pressures, come corns and all
the misery of corns. Children’s feet get distorted for good by this
method of fitting the human being to the thing; and a vast number of
people in the world are, as a consequence of this, ashamed to appear
barefooted. (I used to press people who came to see me in warm pleasant
weather to play Badminton barefooted on the grass—a delightful thing to
do—until I found out that many were embarrassed at the thought of
displaying twisted toes and corns, and such-like disfigurements.)

(iii) The third trouble of new boots is this: they are unseasoned and in
bad condition, and so they squeak and make themselves an insulting
commentary on one’s ways.

But these are but trifling troubles to what arises as the boots get into
wear. Then it is the pinch comes in earnest. Of these TROUBLES OF THE
WORN BOOT, I and my friend, before he desisted, reckoned up three
principal classes.

(i) There are the various sorts of chafe. Worst of the chafes is
certainly the heel chafe, when something goes wrong with the upright
support at the heel. This, as a boy, I have had to endure for days
together; because there were no other boots for me. Then there is the
chafe that comes when that inner lining of the boot rucks up—very like
the chafe it is that poor people are always getting from over-darned and
hastily-darned socks. And then there is the chafe that comes from
ready-made boots one has got a trifle too large or long, in order to
avoid the pinch and corns. After a little while, there comes a
transverse crease across the loose-fitting forepart; and, when the boot
stiffens from wet or any cause, it chafes across the base of the toes.
They have you all ways. And I have a very lively recollection too of the
chafe of the knots one made to mend broken laces—one cannot be always
buying new laces, and the knots used to work inward. And then the chafe
of the crumpled tongue.

(ii) Then there are the miseries that come from the wear of the sole.
There is the rick of ankle because the heel has gone over, and the sense
of insecurity; and there is the miserable sense of not looking well from
behind that many people must feel. It is almost always painful to me to
walk behind girls who work out, and go to and fro, consuming much
foot-wear, for this very reason, that their heels seem always to wear
askew. Girls ought always to be so beautiful, most girls could be so
beautiful, that to see their poor feet askew, the grace of their walk
gone, a sort of spinal curvature induced, makes me wretched, and angry
with a world that treats them so. And then there is the working through
of nails, nails in the shoe. One limps on manfully in the hope presently
of a quiet moment and a quiet corner in which one may hammer the thing
down again. Thirdly, under this heading I recall the flapping sole. My
boots always came to that stage at last; I wore the toes out first, and
then the sole split from before backwards. As one walked it began
catching the ground. One made fantastic paces to prevent it happening;
one was dreadfully ashamed. At last one was forced to sit by the wayside
frankly, and cut the flap away.

(iii) Our third class of miseries we made of splitting and leaks. These
are for the most part mental miseries, the feeling of shabbiness as one
sees the ugly yawn, for example, between toe cap and the main upper of
the boot; but they involve also chills, colds, and a long string of
disagreeable consequences. And we spoke too of the misery of sitting
down to work (as multitudes of London school children do every wet
morning) in boots with soles worn thin or into actual holes, that have
got wet and chilling on the way to the work-place....

From these instances my mind ran on to others. I made a discovery. I had
always despised the common run of poor Londoners for not spending their
Sundays and holidays in sturdy walks, the very best of exercise. I had
allowed myself to say when I found myself one summer day at Margate:
“What a soft lot all these young people must be who loaf about the
band-stand here, when they might be tramping over the Kentish hills
inland!” But now I repented me of that. Long tramps indeed! Their boots
would have hurt them. Their boots would not stand it. I saw it all.

And now my discourse was fairly under way. “_Ex pede Herculem_,” I said;
“these miseries of boots are no more than a sample. The clothes people
wear are no better than their boots; and the houses they live in far
worse. And think of the shoddy garment of ideas and misconceptions and
partial statements into which their poor minds have been jammed by way
of education! Think of the way _that_ pinches and chafes them! If one
expanded the miseries of these things.... Think, for example, of the
results of the poor, bad, unwise food, of badly-managed eyes and ears
and teeth! Think of the quantity of toothache.”

“I tell you, it does not _do_ to think of such things!” cried my friend,
in a sort of anguish; and would have no more of it at any price....

And yet in his time he had written books full of these very matters,
before despair overtook him.

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                               CHAPTER II

                   PEOPLE WHOSE BOOTS DON’T HURT THEM


Well, I did not talk merely to torment him; nor have I written this
merely to torment you. You see I have a persistent persuasion that all
these miseries are preventable miseries, which it lies in the power of
men to cure.

Everybody does not suffer misery from boots.

One person I know, another friend of mine, who can testify to that; who
has tasted all the miseries of boots, and who now goes about the world
free of them, but not altogether forgetful of them. A stroke of luck,
aided perhaps by a certain alacrity on his own part, lifted him out of
the class in which one buys one’s boots and clothes out of what is left
over from a pound a week, into the class in which one spends seventy or
eighty pounds a year on clothing. Sometimes he buys shoes and boots at
very good shops; sometimes he has them made for him; he has them stored
in a proper cupboard, and great care is taken of them; and so his boots
and shoes and slippers never chafe, never pinch, never squeak, never
hurt nor worry him, never bother him; and, when he sticks out his toes
before the fire, they do not remind him that he is a shabby and
contemptible wretch, living meanly on the dust heaps of the world. You
might think from this he had every reason to congratulate himself and be
happy, seeing that he has had good follow after evil; but, such is the
oddness of the human heart, he isn’t contented at all. The thought of
the multitudes so much worse off than himself in this matter of
foot-wear, gives him no sort of satisfaction. Their boots pinch _him_
vicariously. The black rage with the scheme of things that once he felt
through suffering in his own person in the days when he limped shabbily
through gaily busy, fashionable London streets, in split boots that
chafed, he feels now just as badly as he goes about the world very
comfortably himself, but among people whom he knows with a pitiless
clearness to be almost intolerably uncomfortable. He has no optimistic
illusion that things are all right with them. Stupid people who have
always been well off, who have always had boots that fit, may think
that; but not so, he. In one respect the thought of boots makes him even
more viciously angry now, than it used to do. In the old days he was
savage with his luck, but hopelessly savage; he thought that bad boots,
ugly uncomfortable clothes, rotten houses, were in the very nature of
things. Now, when he sees a child sniffing and blubbering and halting
upon the pavement, or an old country-woman going painfully along a lane,
he no longer recognises the Pinch of Destiny. His rage is lit by the
thought, that there are fools in this world who ought to have foreseen
and prevented this. He no longer curses fate, but the dulness of
statesmen and powerful responsible people who have neither the heart,
nor courage, nor capacity, to change the state of mismanagement that
gives us these things.

Now do not think I am dwelling unduly upon my second friend’s good
fortune, when I tell you that once he was constantly getting pain and
miserable states of mind, colds for example, from the badness of his
clothing, shame from being shabby, pain from the neglected state of his
teeth, from the indigestion of unsuitable food eaten at unsuitable
hours, from the insanitary ugly house in which he lived and the bad air
of that part of London, from things indeed quite beyond the unaided
power of a poor over-worked man to remedy. And now all these
disagreeable things have gone out of his life; he has consulted dentists
and physicians, he has hardly any dull days from colds, no pain from
toothache at all, no gloom of indigestion....

I will not go on with the tale of good fortune of this lucky person. My
purpose is served if I have shown that this misery of boots is not an
unavoidable curse upon mankind. If one man can evade it, others can. By
good management it may be altogether escaped. If you, or what is more
important to most human beings, if any people dear to you, suffer from
painful or disfiguring boots or shoes, and you can do no better for
them, it is simply because you are getting the worse side of an
ill-managed world. It is not the universal lot.

And what I say of boots is true of all the other minor things of life.
If your wife catches a bad cold because her boots are too thin for the
time of the year, or dislikes going out because she cuts a shabby ugly
figure, if your children look painfully nasty because their faces are
swollen with toothache, or because their clothes are dirty, old, and
ill-fitting, if you are all dull and disposed to be cross with one
another for want of decent amusement and change of air—don’t submit,
don’t be humbugged for a moment into believing that this is the dingy
lot of all mankind. Those people you love are living in a badly-managed
world and on the wrong side of it; and such wretchednesses are the daily
demonstration of that.

Don’t say for a moment: “Such is life.” Don’t think their miseries are
part of some primordial curse there is no escaping. The disproof of that
is for any one to see. There are people, people no more deserving than
others, who suffer from none of these things. You may feel you merit no
better than to live so poorly and badly that your boots are always
hurting you; but do the little children, the girls, the mass of decent
hard-up people, deserve no better fate?

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                              CHAPTER III

                     AT THIS POINT A DISPUTE ARISES


Now let us imagine some one who will dispute what I am saying. I do not
suppose any one will dispute my argument that a large part of the misery
of civilised life—I do not say “all” but only a “large part”—arises out
of the network of squalid insufficiencies of which I have taken this
misery of boots as the simplest example. But I do believe quite a lot of
people will be prepared to deny that such miseries can be avoided. They
will say that every one cannot have the best of things, that of all
sorts of good things, including good leather and cobbling, there is not
enough to go round, that lower-class people ought not to mind being
shabby and uncomfortable, that they ought to be very glad to be able to
live at all, considering what they are, and that it is no good stirring
up discontent about things that cannot be altered or improved.

Such arguments are not to be swept aside with a wave of the hand. It is
perfectly true that every one cannot have the best of things; and it is
in the nature of things that some boots should be better and some worse.
To some people, either by sheer good luck, or through the strength of
their determination to have them, the exquisitely good boots, those of
the finest leather and the most artistic cut, will fall. I have never
denied that. Nobody dreams of a time when every one will have exactly as
good boots as every one else; I am not preaching any such childish and
impossible equality. But it is a long way from recognising that there
must be a certain picturesque and interesting variety in this matter of
foot-wear, to the admission that a large majority of people can never
hope for more than to be shod in a manner that is frequently painful,
uncomfortable, unhealthy, or unsightly. That admission I absolutely
refuse to make. There is enough good leather in the world to make good
sightly boots and shoes for all who need them, enough men at leisure and
enough power and machinery to do all the work required, enough
unemployed intelligence to organise the shoemaking and shoe distribution
for everybody. What stands in the way?

Let us put that question in a rather different form. Here on the one
hand—you can see for yourself in any unfashionable part of Great
Britain—are people badly, uncomfortably, painfully shod, in old boots,
rotten boots, sham boots; and on the other great stretches of land in
the world, with unlimited possibilities of cattle and leather and great
numbers of people, who, either through wealth or trade disorder, are
doing no work. And our question is: “Why cannot the latter set to work
and make and distribute boots?”

Imagine yourself trying to organise something of this kind of Free
Booting expedition; and consider the difficulties you would meet with.
You would begin by looking for a lot of leather. Imagine yourself
setting off to South America, for example, to get leather; beginning at
the very beginning by setting to work to kill and flay a herd of cattle.
You find at once you are interrupted. Along comes your first obstacle in
the shape of a man who tells you the cattle and the leather belong to
him. You explain that the leather is wanted for people who have no
decent boots in England. He says he does not care a rap what you want it
for; before you may take it from him you have to buy him off; it is his
private property, this leather, and the herd and the land over which the
herd ranges. You ask him how much he wants for his leather; and he tells
you frankly, just as much as he can induce you to give.

If he chanced to be a person of exceptional sweetness of disposition,
you might perhaps argue with him. You might point out to him that this
project of giving people splendid boots was a fine one that would put an
end to much human misery. He might even sympathise with your generous
enthusiasm; but you would, I think, find him adamantine in his resolve
to get just as much out of you for his leather as you could with the
utmost effort pay.

Suppose now you said to him: “But how did you come by this land and
these herds, so that you can stand between them and the people who have
need of them, exacting this profit?” He would probably either embark
upon a long rigmarole, or, what is much more probable, lose his temper
and decline to argue. Pursuing your doubt as to the rightfulness of his
property in these things, you might admit he deserved a certain
reasonable fee for the rough care he had taken of the land and herds.
But cattle breeders are a rude, violent race; and it is doubtful if you
would get far beyond your proposition of a reasonable fee. You would in
fact have to buy off this owner of the leather at a good thumping
price—he exacting just as much as he could get from you—if you wanted to
go on with your project.

Well, then you would have to get your leather here; and, to do that, you
would have to bring it by railway and ship to this country. And here
again you would find people without any desire or intention of helping
your project, standing in your course, resolved to make every possible
penny out of you on your way to provide sound boots for every one. You
would find the railway was private property, and had an owner or owners;
you would find the ship was private property, with an owner or owners;
and that none of these would be satisfied for a moment with a mere fee
adequate to their services. They too would be resolved to make every
penny of profit out of you. If you made inquiries about the matter, you
would probably find the real owners of railway and ship were companies
of shareholders, and that the profit squeezed out of your poor people’s
boots at this stage went to fill the pockets of old ladies at Torquay,
spendthrifts in Paris, well-booted gentlemen in London clubs, all sorts
of glossy people....

Well, you get the leather to England at last; and now you want to make
it into boots. You take it to a centre of population, invite workers to
come to you, erect sheds and machinery upon a vacant piece of ground,
and start off in a sort of fury of generous industry, boot-making.... Do
you? There comes along an owner for that vacant piece of ground,
declares it is his property, demands an enormous sum for rent. And your
workers all round you, you find, cannot get house room until they too
have paid rent—every inch of the country is somebody’s property, and a
man may not shut his eyes for an hour without the consent of some owner
or other. And the food your shoemakers eat, the clothes they wear, have
all paid tribute and profit to land-owners, cart-owners, house-owners,
endless tribute over and over and above the fair pay for work that has
been done upon them....

So one might go on. But you begin to see now one set of reasons at least
why every one has not good comfortable boots. There could be plenty of
leather; and there is certainly plenty of labour and quite enough
intelligence in the world to manage that and a thousand other desirable
things. But this institution of Private Property in land and naturally
produced things, these obstructive claims that prevent you using ground,
or moving material, and that have to be bought out at exorbitant prices,
stand in the way. All these owners hang like parasites upon your
enterprise at its every stage; and, by the time you get your sound boots
well made in England, you will find them costing about a pound a
pair—high out of the reach of the general mass of people. And you will
perhaps not think me fanciful and extravagant when I confess that when I
realise this, and look at poor people’s boots in the street, and see
them cracked and misshapen and altogether nasty, I seem to see also a
lot of little phantom land-owners, cattle-owners, house-owners, owners
of all sorts, swarming over their pinched and weary feet like leeches,
taking much and giving nothing, and being the real cause of all such
miseries.

Now is this a necessary and unavoidable thing?—that is our question. Is
there no other way of managing things than to let these property-owners
exact their claims, and squeeze comfort, pride, happiness, out of the
lives of the common run of people? Because, of course, it is not only
the boots they squeeze into meanness and badness. It is the claim and
profit of the land-owner and house-owner that make our houses so ugly,
shabby, and dear, that make our roadways and railways so crowded and
inconvenient, that sweat our schools, our clothing, our food—boots we
took merely by way of one example of a universal trouble.

Well, there are a number of people who say there is a better way and
that the world could be made infinitely better in all these matters,
made happier and better than it ever has been in these respects, by
refusing to have private property in all these universally necessary
things. They say that it is possible to have the land administered, and
such common and needful things as leather produced, and boots
manufactured, and no end of other such generally necessary services
carried on, not for the private profit of individuals, but for the good
of all. They propose that the State should take away the land, and the
railways, and shipping, and many great organised enterprises from their
owners, who use them simply to squeeze the means for a wasteful private
expenditure out of the common mass of men, and should administer all
these things, generously and boldly, not for profit, but for service. It
is this idea of extracting _profit_ they hold which is the very root of
the evil. These are the Socialists; and they are the only people who do
hold out any hope of far-reaching change that will alter the present
dingy state of affairs, of which this painful wretchedness of boots is
only one typical symbol.

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                               CHAPTER IV

                         IS SOCIALISM POSSIBLE?


I will not pretend to be impartial in this matter, and to discuss as
though I had an undecided mind, whether the world would be better if we
could abolish private property in land and in many things of general
utility; because I have no doubt left in the matter. I believe that
private property in these things is no more necessary and unavoidable
than private property in our fellow-creatures, or private property in
bridges and roads. The idea that anything and everything may be claimed
as private property belongs to the dark ages of the world; and it is not
only a monstrous injustice, but a still more monstrous inconvenience.
Suppose we still admitted private property in high roads, and let every
man who had a scrap of high road haggle a bargain with us before we
could drive by in a cab! You say life would be unendurable. But indeed
it amounts to something a little like that if we use a railway now; and
it is quite like that if one wants a spot of ground somewhere upon which
one may live. I see no more difficulty in managing land, factories, and
the like, publicly for the general good, than there is in managing roads
and bridges, and the post office and the police. So far I see no
impossibility whatever in Socialism. To abolish private property in
these things would be to abolish all that swarm of parasites, whose
greed for profit and dividend hampers and makes a thousand useful and
delightful enterprises costly or hopeless. It would abolish them; but is
that any objection whatever?

And as for taking such property from the owners; why shouldn’t we? The
world has not only in the past taken slaves from their owners, with no
compensation or with a meagre compensation; but in the history of
mankind, dark as it is, there are innumerable cases of slave-owners
resigning their inhuman rights. You may say that to take away property
from people is unjust and robbery; but is that really so? Suppose you
found a number of children in a nursery all very dull and unhappy
because one of them, who had been badly spoilt, had got all the toys
together and claimed them all, and refused to let the others have any.
Would you not dispossess the child, however honest its illusion that it
was right to be greedy? That is practically the position of the
property-owner to-day. You may say, if you choose, that property-owners,
land-owners for example, must be bought out and not robbed; but since
getting the money to buy them out involves taxing the property of some
one else, who may possibly have a better claim to it than the land-owner
to his, I don’t quite see where the honesty of that course comes in. You
can only give property for property in buying and selling; and if
private property is not robbery, then not only Socialism but ordinary
taxation must be. But if taxation is a justifiable proceeding, if you
can tax me (as I am taxed) for public services, a shilling and more out
of every twenty shillings I earn, then I do not see why you should not
put a tax upon the land-owner if you want to do so, of a half or two
thirds or all his land, or upon the railway share-holder of ten or
fifteen or twenty shillings in the pound on his shares. In every change
some one has to bear the brunt; every improvement in machinery and
industrial organisation deprives some poor people of an income; and I do
not see why we should be so extraordinarily tender to the rich, to those
who have been unproductive all their lives, when they stand in the way
of the general happiness. And though I deny the right to compensation I
do not deny its probable advisability. So far as the question of method
goes it is quite conceivable that we may partially compensate the
property owners and make all sorts of mitigating arrangements to avoid
cruelty to them in our attempt to end the wider cruelties of to-day.

But, apart from the justice of the case, many people seem to regard
Socialism as a hopeless dream, because, as they put it, “it is against
human nature.” Every one with any scrap of property in land, or shares,
or what not, they tell us, will be bitterly opposed to the coming of
Socialism; and, as such people have all the leisure and influence in the
world, and as all able and energetic people tend naturally to join that
class, there never can be any effectual force to bring Socialism about.
But that seems to me to confess a very base estimate of human nature.
There are, no doubt, a number of dull, base, rich people who hate and
dread Socialism for purely selfish reasons; but it is quite possible to
be a property owner and yet be anxious to see Socialism come to its own.

For example, the man whose private affairs I know best in the world, the
second friend I named, the owner of all those comfortable boots, gives
time and energy and money to further this hope of Socialism, although he
pays income tax on twelve hundred a year, and has shares and property to
the value of some thousands of pounds. And that he does out of no
instinct of sacrifice. He believes he would be happier and more
comfortable in a Socialistic state of affairs, when it would not be
necessary for him to hold on to that life-belt of invested property. He
finds it—and quite a lot of well-off people are quite of his way of
thinking—a constant flaw upon a life of comfort and pleasant interests
to see so many people, who might be his agreeable friends and
associates, detestably under-educated, detestably housed, in the most
detestable clothes and boots, and so detestably broken in spirit that
they will not treat him as an equal. It makes him feel he is like that
spoilt child in the nursery; he feels ashamed and contemptible; and,
since individual charity only seems in the long run to make matters
worse, he is ready to give a great deal of his life, and lose his entire
little heap of possessions if need be, very gladly lose it, to change
the present order of things in a comprehensive manner.

I am quite convinced that there are numbers of much richer and more
influential people who are of his way of thinking. Much more likely to
obstruct the way to Socialism is the ignorance, the want of courage, the
stupid want of imagination of the very poor, too shy and timid and
clumsy to face any change they can evade! But, even with them, popular
education is doing its work; and I do not fear but that in the next
generation we shall find Socialists even in the slums. The unimaginative
person who owns some little bit of property, an acre or so of freehold
land, or a hundred pounds in the savings bank, will no doubt be the most
tenacious passive resister to Socialistic ideas; and such, I fear, we
must reckon, together with the insensitive rich, as our irreconcilable
enemies, as irremovable pillars of the present order. The mean and timid
elements in “human nature” are, and will be, I admit, against Socialism;
but they are not all “human nature,” not half human nature. And when, in
the whole history of the world, have meanness and timidity won a
struggle? It is passion, it is enthusiasm, and indignation that mould
the world to their will—and I cannot see how any one can go into the
back streets of London, or any large British town, and not be filled up
with shame, and passionate resolve to end so grubby and mean a state of
affairs as is displayed there.

I don’t think the “human nature” argument against the possibility of
Socialism will hold water.

------------------------------------------------------------------------



                               CHAPTER V

                       SOCIALISM MEANS REVOLUTION


Let us be clear about one thing: that Socialism means revolution, that
it means a change in the every-day texture of life. It may be a very
gradual change, but it will be a very complete one. You cannot change
the world, and at the same time not change the world. You will find
Socialists about, or at any rate men calling themselves Socialists, who
will pretend that this is not so, who will assure you that some odd
little jobbing about municipal gas and water is Socialism, and
back-stairs intervention between Conservative and Liberal the way to the
millennium. You might as well call a gas jet in the lobby of a
meeting-house, the glory of God in Heaven!

Socialism aims to change, not only the boots on people’s feet, but the
clothes they wear, the houses they inhabit, the work they do, the
education they get, their places, their honours, and all their
possessions. Socialism aims to make a new world out of the old. It can
only be attained by the intelligent, outspoken, courageous resolve of a
great multitude of men and women. You must get absolutely clear in your
mind that Socialism means a complete change, a break with history, with
much that is picturesque; whole classes will vanish. The world will be
vastly different, with a different sort of houses, different sorts of
people. All the different trades and industries will be changed, the
medical profession will be carried on under different conditions,
engineering, science, the theatrical trade, the clerical trade, schools,
hotels, almost every trade, will have to undergo as complete an internal
change as a caterpillar does when it becomes a moth. If you are afraid
of so much change as that, it is better you should funk about it now
than later. The whole system has to be changed, if we are to get rid of
the masses of dull poverty that render our present state detestable to
any sensitive man or woman. That, and no less, is the aim of all sincere
Socialists: the establishment of a new and better order of society by
the abolition of private property in land, in natural productions, and
in their exploitation—a change as profound as the abolition of private
property in slaves would have been in ancient Rome or Athens. If you
demand less than that, if you are not prepared to struggle for that, you
are not really a Socialist. If you funk that, then you must make up your
mind to square your life to a sort of personal and private happiness
with things as they are, and decide with my other friend that “it
doesn’t do to think about boots.”

It is well to insist upon one central idea. Socialism is a common-sense,
matter-of-fact proposal to change our conventional admission of what is
or is not property, and to re-arrange the world according to these
revised conceptions. A certain number of clever people, dissatisfied
with the straightforwardness of this, have set themselves to put it in
some brilliant obscure way; they will tell you that Socialism is based
on the philosophy of Hegel, or that it turns on a theory of Rent, or
that it is somehow muddled up with a sort of white Bogey called the
Overman, and all sorts of brilliant, nonsensical, unappetising things.
The theory of Socialism, so far as English people are concerned, seems
to have got up into the clouds, and its practice down into the drains;
and it is well to warn inquiring men, that neither the epigram above nor
the job beneath are more than the accidental accompaniments of
Socialism. Socialism is a very large, but a plain, honest, and human
enterprise; its ends are to be obtained neither by wit nor cunning, but
by outspoken resolve, by the self-abnegation, the enthusiasm, and the
loyal cooperation of great masses of people.

The main thing, therefore, is the creation of these great masses of
people out of the intellectual confusion and vagueness of the present
time. Let me suppose that you find yourself in sympathy with this tract,
that you, like my second friend, find the shabby dullness, the positive
misery of a large proportion of the population of our world, make life
under its present conditions almost intolerable, and that it is in the
direction of Socialism that the only hope of a permanent remedy lies.
What are we to do? Obviously to give our best energies to making other
people Socialists, to organising ourselves with all other Socialists,
irrespective of class or the minor details of creed, and to making
ourselves audible, visible, effectual as Socialists, wherever and
whenever we can.

We have to think about Socialism, read about it, discuss it; so that we
may be assured and clear and persuasive about it. We have to confess our
faith openly and frequently. We must refuse to be called Liberal or
Conservative, Republican or Democrat, or any of those ambiguous things.
Everywhere we must make or join a Socialist organisation, a club or
association or what not, so that we may “count.” For us, as for the
early Christians, preaching our gospel is the supreme duty. Until
Socialists can be counted, and counted upon by the million, little will
be done. When they are—a new world will be ours.

Above all, if I may offer advice to a fellow-Socialist, I would say:
Cling to the simple essential idea of Socialism, which is the abolition
of private property in anything but what a man has earned or made. Do
not complicate your cause with elaborations. And keep in your mind, if
you can, some sort of talisman to bring you back to that essential
gospel, out of the confusions and warring suggestions of every-day
discussion.

For my own part, I have, as I said at the beginning, a prepossession
with boots; and my talisman is this:—The figure of a badly fed but
rather pretty little girl of ten or eleven, dirty, and her hands coarse
with rough usage, her poor pretty child’s body in ungainly rags, and, on
her feet, big broken-down boots that hurt her. And particularly I think
of her wretched sticks of legs and the limp of her feet; and all those
phantom owners and profit-takers I spoke of, they are there about her
martyrdom, leech-like, clinging to her as she goes....

I want to change everything in the world that made that; and I do not
greatly care what has to go in the process. Do you?

                                                           H. G. WELLS

                  *       *       *       *       *

[Here is just a bit of hard fact to carry out what I say. It is a
quotation from a letter from a workman to my friend Mr. Chiozza Money,
one of the best informed writers upon labour questions in England:

  “I am a railway man, in constant work at 30s. per week. I am the
  happy, or otherwise, father of six healthy children. Last year I
  bought twenty pairs of boots. This year, up to date, I have bought
  ten pairs, costing £2; and yet, at the present time, my wife and
  five of the children have only one pair each. I have two pairs, both
  of which let in the water; but I see no prospect at present of
  getting new ones. I ought to say, of course, that my wife is a
  thoroughly domesticated woman, and I am one of the most temperate of
  men. So much so, that if all I spend in luxuries was saved it would
  not buy a pair of boots once a year. But this is the point I want to
  mention. During 1903 my wages were 25s. 6d. per week; and I then had
  the six children. My next-door neighbour was a boot-maker and
  repairer. He fell out of work, and was out for months. During that
  time, of course, my children’s boots needed repairing as at other
  times. I had not the money to pay for them being repaired, so had to
  do what repairing I could myself. One day I found out that I was
  repairing boots on one side of the wall, and my neighbour on the
  other side out of work, and longing to do the work I was compelled
  to do myself....”

The wall was a commercial organisation of society based on private
property in land and natural productions. These two men must work for
the owners or not at all; they cannot work for one another. Food first,
then rent; and boots, if you can, when all the owners are paid.]





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "This Misery of Boots" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.