WORK IN LONDON
investigators with great names and no money—famous "benefactors of their kind". P., in fact, was making a large and romantic bid: he sacrificed the particular aroma of respectability of his business to a kind of large altruism: he sacrificed his great name in his trade organs, to the chance of gaining in the wider papers a considerable and undying fame. And this is very characteristic of the conditions of modern work in London. Our poets have to gain a daily bread in the public offices, our scientists in electric light works. We may all know an admirable critic of belles lettres: he gives eight hours of his day to checking the issue and return of dog licences at Somerset House, and there are many religious enthusiasts of the type of Swedenborg who spend even longer hours in measuring and selling cheap ribbons. They are doing it in order on Sundays to preach in the parks.
London, in fact, if it make men eminently materialist in their working hours (and that is the great cry of all idealists against the great place), makes them by reaction astonishingly idealist in their interior souls. I know a railway signalman. He spends dreadfully long hours, high up in a sort of cage of wood and glass, above the innumerable lines of shimmering rails just outside the dim cave of a London's terminus. He works himself dog-tired, pulling levers that are constantly bright with the friction of his hands; he listens to the drilling sounds of little bells, straining his eyes to catch the red and white placards on the breasts of distant engines. At night in a cottage "down the line" he
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