Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure philanthropy. But with
the Hyde Park rioter how different!+ He is our own flesh and blood;
he is a Protestant; he is framed by nature to do as we do, hate what
we hate, love what we love; he is capable of feeling the symbolical
force of the Truss Manufactory; the question of questions, for him,
is a wages' question. That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch
quoted to the Swindon workmen, and which I treasure as Mrs. Gooch's
Golden Rule, or the Divine Injunction "Be ye Perfect" done into
British,--the sentence Sir Daniel Gooch's mother repeated to him
every morning when he was a boy going to work: "Ever remember, my
dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of
that concern!"--this fruitful maxim is perfectly fitted to shine
forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his
guiding-star through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution
and transformation, though of course he would like his class to rule,
as the aristocratic [65] class like their class to rule, and the
middle-class theirs. Meanwhile, our social machine is a little out
of order; there are a good many people in our paradisiacal centres of
industrialism and individualism taking the bread out of one another's
mouths; the rioter has not yet quite found his groove and settled
down to his work, and so he is just asserting his personal liberty a
little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as
he likes, hustling as he likes. Just as the rest of us,--as the
country squires in the aristocratic class, as the political
dissenters in the middle-class,--he has no idea of a State, of the
nation in its collective and corporate character controlling, as
government, the free swing of this or that one of its members in the
name of the higher reason of all of them, his own as well as that of
others. He sees the rich, the aristocratic class, in occupation of
the executive government, and so if he is stopped from making Hyde
Park a bear-garden or the streets impassable, he says he is being
butchered by the aristocracy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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