who were drowned?  Shall we give him an hour or so among the portraits at the Royal Academy, or shall we make an enthusiastic tour of London sculpture and architecture and saturate his soul with the beauty he makes possible?  The new Automobile Club, for example.  “Without you and your subordination we could not have had that.”  Or suppose we took him the round of the West-End clubs and restaurants and made him estimate how many dinners London can produce at a pinch at the price of his local daily minimum, say, and upward; or borrow an aeroplane at Hendon and soar about counting all the golfers in the Home Counties on any week-day afternoon.  “You suffer at the roots of things, far below there, but see all this nobility and splendour, these sweet, bright flowers to which your rootlet life contributes.”  Or we might spend a pleasant morning trying to get a passable woman’s hat for the price of his average weekly wages in some West-End shop....

But indeed this thing is actually happening.  The older type of miner was illiterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if he had any intellectual and spiritual urgencies in him beyond eating and drinking and dog-fighting, the local little Bethel shunted them away from any effective social criticism.  The new generation of miners is on an altogether different basis.  It is at once less brutal and less spiritual; it is alert, informed, sceptical, and the Press, with photographic illustrations, the cinema, and a score of collateral forces, are giving it precisely that spectacular view of luxury, amusement, aimlessness and excitement, taunting it with just that suggestion that it is for that, and that alone, that the worker’s back aches and his muscles strain.  Whatever gravity and spaciousness of aim there may be in our prosperous social life does not appear to him.  He sees, and he sees all the more brightly because he is looking at it out of toil and darkness, the glitter, the delight for delight’s sake, the show and the pride and the folly.  Cannot you understand how it is that these young men down there in the hot and dangerous and toilsome and inglorious places of life are beginning to cry out, “We are being made fools of,” and to fling down their tools, and cannot you see how futile it is to dream that Mr. Asquith or some other politician by some trick of a Conciliation Act or some claptrap of Compulsory Arbitration, or that any belated suppression of discussion and strike organisations by the law, will avert this gathering storm?  The Spectacle of Pleasure, the parade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and vanity in the sight of the workers is the culminating irritant of Labour.  So long as that goes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombre resolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently at work, will gather strength.  It does not matter that such a resolve is hopeless and unseasonable; we are dealing here with the profounder impulses that underlie reason.  Crush this resentment; it will recur with accumulated strength.