of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West End, and
so without expenditure he was able to understand what was coming.

He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police
had considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously
organised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times.
He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline about
the procession when at last it arrived. What seemed for a time
an unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of
implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says,
moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They were a dingy,
shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part incapable of
any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore a few banners
with the time-honoured inscription: 'Work, not Charity,' but otherwise
their ranks were unadorned.

They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing
truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite
objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more
prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of
unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers had
superseded for evermore. They were being 'scrapped'--as horses had been
'scrapped.'

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by
his own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but
despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this
gathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless--and
incapable--and pitiful.