"You suffer at the roots of things, far below
there, but see all this nobility and splendour, these sweet, bright
flowers to which your rootlet life contributes." Or we might spend a
pleasant morning trying to get a passable woman's hat for the price of
his average weekly wages in some West-End shop....
But indeed this thing is actually happening. The older type of miner was
illiterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if he
had any intellectual and spiritual urgencies in him beyond eating and
drinking and dog-fighting, the local little Bethel shunted them away
from any effective social criticism. The new generation of miners is on
an altogether different basis. It is at once less brutal and less
spiritual; it is alert, informed, sceptical, and the Press, with
photographic illustrations, the cinema, and a score of collateral
forces, are giving it precisely that spectacular view of luxury,
amusement, aimlessness and excitement, taunting it with just that
suggestion that it is for that, and that alone, that the worker's back
aches and his muscles strain. Whatever gravity and spaciousness of aim
there may be in our prosperous social life does not appear to him. He
sees, and he sees all the more brightly because he is looking at it out
of toil and darkness, the glitter, the delight for delight's sake, the
show and the pride and the folly.
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