“Where are they going?” asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
the window of the fly, and then: “Where is it all going?”
And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked
and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised
extensively the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that
corrupted boys and girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted
meats....
The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
question, “Where is it all going?”
The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and
strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had
evoked.
The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but
it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute
as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great
river.
“There's an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and
the modern employed,” the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a
broad accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one
the fact that he was by far the best-read man of the party. “Disraeli
called them the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it's a case
of two species. Machinery has made them into different species. The
employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of
a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth
in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different for the two
species. They haven't even a common speech between them. One looks east
and the other looks west. How can you expect them to agree? Of course
they won't agree. We've got to fight it out. They say we're their
slaves for ever. Have you ever read Lady Bell's 'At the Works'? A
well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away. We say,
No! It's our sort and not your sort. We'll do without you. We'll get a
little more education and then we'll do without you. We're pressing for
all we can get, and when we've got that we'll take breath and press
for more. We're the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn't our fault that we've
differentiated.”
“But you haven't understood the drift of Christianity,” said the bishop.
“It's just to assert that men are One community and not two.”
“There's not much of that in the Creeds,” said a second labour leader
who was a rationalist. “There's not much of that in the services of the
church.”
The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time
to speak before his bishop. “Because you will not set yourselves to
understand the symbolism of her ritual,” he said.
“If the church chooses to speak in riddles,” said the rationalist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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