fortunes have been made; luxury has redoubled; the standard of living
among the rich has risen high. The working people know all this; they
can see it with their eyes, and they refuse to be satisfied with the
rich man's blessing on the poor. What concerns them more than the
increase in the quantity of gold is the natural result in the shrinkage
of the penny. It is no good getting sevenpence an hour for your work if
it does not buy so much as the "full, round orb of the docker's
tanner," which Mr. John Burns saw rising over the dock gates more than
twenty years ago, when he stood side by side with Ben Tillett and Tom
Mann, and when Sir H. Llewellyn Smith and Mr. Vaughan Nash wrote the
story of the contest. If prosperity has increased, so have prices, and
what cost a tanner then costs eightpence now, or more than that. To keep
pace with such a change is well worth a strike, since nothing but
strikes can avail. So vital is the worth of a penny; so natural is it to
kick against the nature of things, when their nature takes the form of
steady poverty amid expanding wealth. That is the simultaneous discovery
which raised the ridicule of the _Times_--that, and the further
discovery that, in Carlyle's phrase, "the Empire of old Mammon is
everywhere breaking up." The intangible walls that resisted so
obstinately are fading away. The power of wealth is suspected. Strike
after strike secures its triumphant penny, and no return of Peterloo, or
baton charges on the Liverpool St. George's Hall, driving the silent
crowd over the edge of its steep basis "as rapidly and continually as
water down a steep rock," as was seen during the strikes of August 1911,
can now check the infection of such a hope. It was an old saying of the
men who won our political liberties that the redress of grievances must
precede supply. The working people are standing now for a different
phase of liberty, but their work is their supply, and having
simultaneously discovered their grievances to be intolerable, they are
making the same old use of the ancient precept.