WORK IN LONDON
through heredity, through "type", through temperament, for a hundred predestined and tragic reasons, are absolutely incapable of creating Movements.
Their whole nerve force, and nearly all their thoughts are given to their work. They are the dust filtered down from all the succeeding dominant types, they are the caput mortuum precisely because they are hopelessly old fashioned. They cannot combine, they have not any thoughts left for it; they could not strike because they have no means of communication; they are inarticulate.
They are forming, and they have been forming for years, an hereditary class. Education hardly touches their children. It means that for ten or eleven years the poor little things are made acquainted with facts, and are underfed, and that when they are fourteen they fall again to their parents. They learn no trade, they go apprentices to no craft. After a year or two of matchbox making the "facts" of their instruction are worn down out of their minds.
And that very virtue of their mothers, that fierce determination to keep the little things "respectable", means tying them more and more to their rooms. That particular striving, a fierce craze forkeeping the children straight, is an almost universal "note", a dominant passion among the mothers of the very poor.
These, then, are the obverse and the reverse of the medal of work in London that appears to be so much of a gamble, that is really so fierce and so logical a struggle. For if we take X. as paying too little atten-
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