THE EXISTENCE OF A CLASS HATRED.

Temuka Leader, Volume I, Issue 70, 17 August 1878, Page 3

THE EXISTENCE OF A CLASS HATRED.

(From the ‘ Spectator.’

We wonder what the precise truth is as regards the feeling entertained by the English poor, and especially the unemployed poor, towards the rich. Is it less or more bitter than it was fifty years ago? It is a fashion to give a favourable reply to that question, and to say that class hatreds are dying out, but we do not f ;e! sure that the sanguine view is altogether justified by the facts. .

Many signs make ns doubt whether the old bitterness is either dead or dying. It is, no doubt, changing its form. The hostility to the governing class, as a class that govern, or the Government itself qua Government, has declined to an extraordinary degi-ee. The pbiianthropical legislation of the last forty years has had its effect, and the poor, relieved as they are of taxation, of fisc d oppression in the way of duties on food, and of all laws intended to compel work, see very clearly that when they suffer, legislation is not to blame But then, as they still suffer - , somebody must he to blame, and the only perceptible somebody is the employer or the rich nun, upon whom, therefore, what of bitterness remains is apt to be concentrated . . . They are regarded not as part of an oppressive system which may be lifted off, but as individual enemies, who cither deserve punishment, or at lies! would be the hotter for a little correcting terror. The Labour War in America last year showed that this temper existed in largo classes of the population,-it breaks out constantly in “ Socialist ” meetings in German} - , and it has been perceptib e throughout the recent Lancashire riots, which, according to many witnesses, have only been termminated —or rather brought to a pause—by the presence of military force. There is evidence in many of those riots of downright hatred felt against the comfortable merely because they are comfortable, when so many are in discomfort, and a savage delight in destroying their comfort, which is outside the regular course of a trade dispute. The people seem to feci that their poverty, even though momentary, is an oppression, and that the magistrates who call in soldiers are maintaining not order, but a tyranny. This was undoubtedly the feeling at Pittsburgh, when property owneis were attacked last year - not as employers, but as rich men ; and there are not wanting signs of the same temper in Lancashire, developed, no doubt, by a trade dispute, but not entirely produced by it. . .

We question, too. whether c’ass-hatred has declined among agricultural laborers, on the contrary, we should say that it had increased ; that whereas they formerly accepted suffering - when they suffered as part of the order of things, like hail or floods, they now attribute the suffering distinctly to individuals, and detest them accordingly. . . The tendency of our time, as we have pointed out so often, is to make money powerful, and especially powerful in seeming some of the true blessings of life, —health, leisure, pleasant occupation, and above all, security. The poor, with their new knowledge, begin to perceive that; and perceiving - it, to resent the fact that while other inequalities are disappearing, this inequality threatens to become greater than ever. It is easy to say rich and poor have equal pains, but tiie rich man need not work when he is in grief, he is not crushed by sickness, and the evils of old age are not to him aggravated by the poverty which with the poor so often accompanies it. Above all, he is not tormented as a poor man is by the sense of insecurity, by the feeling that he may be discharged tomorrow, or may be called upon by his sense of self-respect to discharge himself, and may then Have no refuge but the workhouse. ... A large proportion of t-il incendiary fires in England are caused by discharged “hands” of one kind or another, and the extraordinary case in which Lord Howard, of Glossop, one of the most benevolent men in England, recently sought protection for his life against a gardener out of employ, is, in a less extreme form, of frequent occurrence. There is, we fear, an idea among the people that although they have no right to charity, they have a right to employment, if they will work, and at rates to be settled in great measure by themselves. . . . We see nothing in all

the changes of late years to diminish the pang of poverty, and much to increase the fear of it, and the hatred which the individual who has caused it, however unjustly, provokes. We suspect that of late years, that instead of diminishing, it has increased, developing in a few intense thrift, but in the many a malignant dislike of-those removed from this source of

suffering, akin to the dislike born of envy and suit; ring which the deformed occasionallv feel for the straight. It is a lamentable passion, but it is a strong one, and before it is spe : t it will have altered, or at h not affected, many institutions throughout the world. The root of socialism, communism, and revolts against political economy, is mainly this—a dim sense that while so many inequalities have been removed, the inequality between poverty, however temporary, and comfort, was never so immense. The temporary character of the poverty is no palliative, but only deepens the sense of wrong. £; Why should a month of idleness destroy me, when it destroys nobody else ?■’’