Bread and circus

Bread and circus

‘No,’ he said. There will be no more strikes, if the thing is properly managed.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because strikes will be made as good as impossible.’

‘But will the men let you?’ she asked.

‘We shan’t ask them. We shall do it while they aren’t looking: for their own good, to save the industry.’

‘For your own good too,’ she said.

‘Naturally! For the good everybody. But for their good even more than mine. I can live without the pits. They can’t. They’ll starve if there are not pits. I’ve other provision.’

They looked up the shallow valley[…]

‘But will the men let you dictate terms?’ she said.

‘My dear, they will have to: if one does it gently.’

‘But mightn’t there be a mutual understanding?’

‘Absolutely: when they realize that the industry comes before the individual.’

‘But must you own the industry?’ she said.

‘I don’t. But to the extent I do own it, yes, most decidedly. The ownership of property has now become a religious question: as it has been since Jesus and St. Francis. The point is not: take all thou hast and give to the poor, but use all thou hast to encourage the industry and give work to the poor. It’s the only way to feed all the mouths and clothe all the bodies. Giving away all we have to the poor spells starvation for the poor just as much as for us. And universal starvation is no high aim. Even general poverty is no lovely thing. Poverty is ugly.’

‘But the disparity?’

‘That is fate. Why is the star Jupiter bigger than the star Neptune? You can’t start altering the make-up of things!’

‘But when this envy and jealousy and discontent has once started,’ she began.

‘Do your best to stop it. Somebody’s got to be boss of the show.’

‘But who is boss of the show?’ she asked.

‘The men who own and run the industries.’

There was a long silence.

‘It seems to me they’re a bad boss,’ she said.

‘Then you suggest what they should do.’

‘They don’t take their boss-ship seriously enough,’ she said.

‘They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship,’ he said.

‘That’s thrust upon me. I don’t really want it,’ she blurted out.
He stopped the chair and looked at her.

‘Who’s shirking responsibility now!’ he said. […]

…

Connie listened, and flushed very red.

‘I’d like to give something,’ she said. ‘But I’m not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley sells them to the people, at a good profit. Everything is sold. You don’t give one heart-beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?’

‘And what must I do?’ he asked, green. ‘Ask them to come and pillage me?’

‘Why is Tevershall so ugly, so hideous? Why are their lives so hopeless?’

They built their own Tevershall, that’s part of their display of freedom. They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live their own pretty lives. I can’t live their lives for them. Every beetle must live its own life.’

‘But you make them work for you. They live the life of your coal-mine.’

‘Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to work for me.’

‘Their lives are industrialized and hopeless, and so are ours,’ she cried.

‘I don’t think they are. That’s just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism. You don’t look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.’

…

‘No wonder the men hate you,’ she said.

‘They don’t,’ he replied. And don’t fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don’t understand, and never could. Don’t thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero’s slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motor-car workmen. I mean Nero’s mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we’ve made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.’

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.

pp. 187-189


Masters and slaves

“…He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked, bare-headed, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks, with Connie down the gate, talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood and started without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean, well-bred old man winced, winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage winces from the vulgar stare. The colliers were not personally hostile: not at all. But their spirit was cold, and shoving him out. And, deep down, there was a profound grudge. They ‘worked for him’. And in their ugliness, they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. ‘Who’s he!’ It was the difference they resented.

“And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless he represented a system, and he would not be shoved.

“Except by death.”

pp. 164-165

From Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence