Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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answer came a few days later in the form of a mighty roar that seemed to come from society’s hidden depths. By noon on Monday, February 8, a crowd of ten thousand had braved fog and frost to assemble in Trafalgar Square. Some 2,500 police ringed the square’s perimeter. They estimated that two-thirds of the crowd consisted of unemployed workmen, the rest radicals of every conceivable stripe. A Socialist speaker, chased off the base of Admiral Nelson’s statue earlier that morning, clambered back up unhindered by the authorities. He waved a red flag defiantly and fired up the crowd with denunciations of “the authors of the present distress in England.”80 On behalf of his listeners, he demanded that Parliament provide public works jobs for “the tens of thousands of deserving men who were out of work through no fault of their own.”81 The audience cheered and swelled throughout the afternoon until it had grown fivefold.
The rally ended peaceably, but then the demonstrators began pouring into the main streets of the West End—Oxford Street, St. James Street, the Pall Mall—“cursing the authorities, attacking shops, sacking saloons, getting drunk, and smashing windows.” The police were not only caught off guard but grossly outnumbered. For three hours or more, a “hooting howling mob” ruled the West End. Hundreds of shops were looted, anyone who looked like a foreigner was beaten, a Lord Limerick was pinned to the railings of his club, and carriages in Hyde Park were overturned and robbed. In addition, all street traffic in central London came to a standstill, Charing Cross Station was completely paralyzed, and by nightfall, St. James Street and Piccadilly were rivers of broken glass in which bits of jewelry, boots, clothing, and bottles bobbed.82
The riot sent a shudder of fear through London’s wealthy West End. Though not a single life was lost in the riot and only a dozen rioters were arrested, most store owners complied with a police warning to keep their shops shuttered on Tuesday. A New York Times reporter derided the police’s lack of preparedness—by Wednesday they were in a position to stop further riots should they occur, “what the police in Boston or New York would have promptly done—Monday afternoon”—sympathetically noting that this was the worst rioting London had seen since the infamous anti-Catholic riots of 1780.83 Londoners agreed that there had not been looting on such a scale since Victoria took the throne nearly fifty years before, just after the first Reform Act passed.84 The queen pronounced the riot “monstrous.”85
The queen’s assertion that the riot constituted “a momentary triumph for socialism”was almost certainly untrue.86 But the episode did stimulate a good deal of activism and calls for action. Worried and conscience-stricken Londoners poured £79,000 into the Lord Mayor’s relief fund for the unemployed and demanded that the money be dispensed. Beatrice’s cousin Maggie Harkness began to plot a novel that she planned to call Out of Work.87 Joseph Chamberlain, now a member of Prime Minister William Gladstone’s new cabinet, set off a heated controversy by floating a public works scheme for the East End. Beatrice, exiled to the Potters’ country estate and responsible not only for her father’s care but also for a troubled younger sister and her father’s equally troubled business affairs, was jolted out of her depression long enough to fire off a letter to the editor of the Liberal Pall Mall Gazette challenging the prevailing view of the causes and likely remedies for the crisis.
Beatrice braced herself for polite rejection. A letter from the journal’s editor arrived by return post—too soon, she was sure, to contain any other message. But when she tore it open, she found a request for permission to publish “A Lady’s View of the Unemployed” as an article under her byline. Beatrice shouted for joy. Her first real “bid for publicity” was a success; her thoughts and words had been judged worth listening to.88 She had to believe that it was “a turning point in my life.”89
Ten days after the riot, Beatrice had the pleasure of reading her own words in print for the first time: “I am a rent collector on a large block of working-class dwellings situated near the London Docks, designed and adapted to house the lowest class of working poor.” She had tried to make just two points. Her first was that, contrary to what most philanthropists and politicians supposed, unemployment in the East End, “the great centre of odd jobs and indiscriminate charity,” was the result not of “the national depression of trade” but of a dysfunctional and lopsided labor market. As traditional London trades such as shipbuilding and manufacturing had moved away, record numbers of unskilled farm laborers and foreign immigrants had been attracted by false or exaggerated reports of sky-high wages and jobs going begging. Her second point followed from the first: advertising public works jobs would inevitably attract more unskilled newcomers to the already overcrowded labor market, swelling the ranks of the jobless and depressing the wages of those who had work.90
One week after her piece appeared, she was reading another letter that made her heart pound and her hands shake. Chamberlain complimented her article and wanted to solicit her advice. As president of the Local Government Board, he was now responsible for poor relief. Would she meet to advise him on how to modify his plan to eliminate its pitfalls?91 Her pride still hurt and fearing further humiliation, Beatrice refused to meet Chamberlain and instead sent him a critique of his plan. Chamberlain’s response was a repetition of his “ransom” argument. As he put it, “the rich must pay to keep the poor alive.”92 He had taken from his experiences as the employer of thousands of workers the belief that government inaction in the face of widespread distress was no longer an option. The rules of governing were changing, irrespective of which party was in power. As wealth grew in tandem with the political power of the impoverished majority, a moral and political imperative to act where none had existed previously had emerged. Once the means to alleviate distress were available—and, more important, once the electorate knew that such means existed—doing nothing was no longer an option. Laissez-faire might have defined the moral high ground in the poorer, agrarian England of Ricardo’s and Malthus’s day, but any attempt to follow the precepts articulated in The Man Versus the State in this day and age was immoral, not to mention politically suicidal. He wrote: “My Department knows all about Paupers . . . I am convinced however that the suffering of the industrious non-pauper class is very great . . . What is to be done for them?”93
Beatrice was unmoved. “I fail to grasp the principle that something must be done,” she persisted. Instead of proposing modifications, she advised him to do nothing. “I have no proposal to make except sternness from the state, and love and self-devotion from individuals,” she wrote. She could not resist adding, half mockingly, half flirtatiously, that
It is a ludicrous idea that an ordinary woman should be called upon to review the suggestion of her Majesty’s ablest Minister, . . . especially when I know he has a slight opinion of even a superior woman’s intelligence . . . and a dislike to any independence of thought.94
Chamberlain defended himself against her charges of misogyny and acknowledged that some of her objections were sound. Still, he did not disguise how repellent he found her underlying attitude:
On the main question your letter is discouraging; but I fear it is true. I shall go on, however, as if it were not true, for if we once admit the impossibility of remedying the evils of society, we shall all sink below the level of the brutes. Such a creed is the justification of absolute, unadulterated selfishness.95
Chamberlain did as he promised, ignoring Beatrice’s advice and embarking on one of the “gigantic experiments” of which Spencer so disapproved. The public works program that Chamberlain pushed through was relatively modest in scale and lasted only a few months, but some historians judge it to have been a major innovation.96 For the first time, government was treating unemployment as a social calamity rather than an individual failure and taking responsibility for aiding the victims.
When Chamberlain indicated that he was tired of their epistolary bickering, Beatrice impulsively fired off an angry confession that she loved him—to her instant and bitter regret. “I have been humbled as far down as a woman can be humbled,” she told herself.97 A doctor’s suggestion that she take her father to London during the season saved her life. Instead of slipping back into her old depression and reaching for the laudanum bottle, she moved her household to York House in Kensington. Toward the end of April 1886, Beatrice joined her cousin Charlie