The greatness of Mr. Crooks lies not in the fact that he expresses the claims of the populace, which twenty dons at Oxford would be ready to express; it is that he expresses the populace: its strong tragedy and its strong farce. He is not a demagogue. He is not even a democrat. He is a demos; he is the real King. And his chief characteristic, as I have suggested, is that he represents especially those popular good qualities which are unpopular in modern discussion. Will Crooks is to the ordinary London omnibus conductor or cabman exactly what Robert Burns was to the ordinary puritanical but passionate peasant of the Scotch Lowlands. He is the journeyman of genius. All that is good in them is better in him; but it is the same thing. Walt Whitman has perfectly expressed this attitude of the average towards the fine type. "They see themselves in him. They hardly know themselves, they are so grown."
In numberless points Mr. Crooks thus completes and glorifies the common character of the poor man. Take, for instance, the deep matter of humour: humour in which the English poor are certainly pre-eminent among all classes of the nation and all nations of the world. By all politicians, including Labour politicians, humour is only introduced exceptionally and elaborately; by all politicians the comic anecdote is led up to with dextrous prefaces and deep intonations, as if it were something altogether unique and separate. All politicians take their own humour very seriously. Mr. Crooks recalls the real life of the streets in nothing so much as in the fact that humour is a constant condition. He and the poor exist in a normal atmosphere of amiable irony. If anything, they have to make an effort to become verbally serious: something of the same kind of earnest that it costs an ordinary member of Parliament to become witty. Anyone who has heard Mr. Crooks talk knows that his permanent mood is humorous. He is never without a story, but his face and his mind are humorous before he has even thought of the story. He lives, so to speak, in a state of expectant reminiscence. The man who said that "brevity was the soul of wit" told a lie; nobody minds how long wit goes on so long as it is wit. Mr. Crooks belongs to that strong old school of English humour in which Dickens was supreme; that school which some moderns have called dull because it could go on for a long time being interesting.
I have merely taken this case of popular humour as one out of a hundred. A similar case of Mr. Crooks's popular sympathy might be found in his pathos, which is equally uncompromising and direct. Even his political faults, if they are faults, against which so much criticism has for a time been raised, have still this pervading quality, that they are essentially the popular faults. This instinct for a prompt and practical and hand-to-mouth benevolence, this instinct for giving a very good time to those who have had a very bad time, this is the very soul of that immense and astonishing altruism at which all social reformers have stood thunderstruck: the kindness of the poor to the poor. This attitude may or may not be the great vice of the governors; there is no doubt that it is the great virtue of the people. The charity of poor men to poor men has always been spontaneous, irregular, individual, liable therefore in its nature to some faults of confusion or of favouritism.
It is the misfortune of Mr. Crooks that alone among modern philanthropists and social reformers he has really been the typical poor man giving to poor men. This quality which has been seen and condemned in him is simply the quality which is the common and working morality of the London streets. You may like it; you may dislike it. But if you dislike it you are simply disliking the English people. You have seen English people perhaps for a moment in omnibuses, in streets on Saturday nights, in third-class carriages, or even in Bank Holiday waggonettes. You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not represent it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the family which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one figure, powerful, pathetic, humorous, and very humble, who bore in any way upon his face the sign and star of its authority.
G. K. Chesterton.
FROM WORKHOUSE TO
WESTMINSTER
CHAPTER I EARLIEST YEARS IN A ONE-ROOMED HOME
Difference between "Will" and "William"—Early Memories—Crying for Bread—An Aspersion Resented—A Prophecy that has been Fulfilled—Will earns his First Half-Sovereign.
Will Crooks!
In the little one-roomed home where he was born at No. 2, Shirbutt Street, down by the Docks at Poplar, it was the earnest desire of all whom it concerned that he should be known to the world as William Crooks. The desire found practical expression in the register of Trinity Congregational Church in East India Dock Road close by. Thither, within a few weeks of his birth, in the year 1852, he was carried with modest ceremony and solemnly christened by a name which everybody ever since has refused to give to him.
For somehow "William Crooks" does not sound like the man at all. Looking at it gives you no suggestion of the good-humoured, hard-headed Labour man, known as familiarly to his colleagues in the House of Commons as he is to the great world of wage-earners outside by the shorter and more expressive name of Will Crooks.
Born in poverty, the third of seven children, Will Crooks, who is blessed with keen powers of observation and a good memory, can carry his mind back to the days before he was put into breeches.
"I remember before my fourth year was out," I have heard him tell, "something of the public rejoicings on the declaration of peace after the Crimean War. The following year was also memorable to me as the time I witnessed troops of soldiers marching to the East India Docks on the outbreak of the Mutiny."
Those were days of want and sorrow, as were many days that followed, in the little one-roomed home in East London. His father was a ship's stoker, who lost an arm by the starting of the engines one day when he was oiling the machinery as his vessel lay in the Thames.
"My very earliest recollections are associated with mother dressing father's arm day after day. I was only three years old at the time, but I know that all our privations dated from the day of this accident to my father, because he was forced to give up his work.
"It must have been with the aid of some good friends that at last my father got an old horse, hoping to earn a little by leading and carting; but nothing came of this small venture, and in time the horse had to be sold to pay the rent. Almost the only work of any kind that father, being thus disabled, could get to do was an odd job as watchman.
"Those were very lean years indeed, and I don't know what we should have done but for mother. She used to toil with the needle far into the night and often all night long, slaving as hard as any poor sweated woman I have ever known, and I have known hundreds of such poor creatures. Many a time as a lad have I helped mother to carry the clothes she had made to Houndsditch. There were no trams running then, and the 'bus fare from Poplar to Aldgate was fourpence, a sum we never dared think of spending on a ride.
"My elder brother was as clever with the needle as many a woman, and often he would stay up all through the night with mother, helping her to make oil-skin coats."
One night, as the mother worked alone, young Will woke up in the little orange-box bedstead by the wall where he slept with a younger brother. Silently he watched her plying the needle at the table until he noticed tears trickling down her cheeks.
"What are you crying for, mother?"