Sir George Tressady, vol 2 | Page 7

a whirlpool of talk and movement. All the
approaches to the House were full of folk; everybody was either giving
news or getting it. For the excitement of a coming crisis was in the air.
This was Friday, and the division on the second reading was expected
on the following Monday.
"What a crowd, and what a temperature!" said Fontenoy. "Come on to
the Terrace a moment."
They made their way into the air, and as they walked up and down

Fontenoy talked in his hoarse, hurried voice of the latest aspect of
affairs. The Government would get their second reading, of course that
had never been really doubtful; though Fontenoy was certain that the
normal majority would be a good deal reduced. But all the hopes of the
heterogeneous coalition which had been slowly forming throughout the
spring hung upon the Committee stage, and Fontenoy's mind was now
full of the closest calculations as to the voting on particular
amendments.
For him the Bill fell into three parts. The first part, which was mainly
confined to small amendments and extensions of former Acts, would be
sharply criticised, but would probably pass without much change. The
second part contained the famous clause by which it became penal to
practise certain trades, such as tailoring, boot-finishing, and
shirt-making, in a man's or woman's own home--in the same place, that
is to say, as the worker uses for eating and sleeping. This clause, which
represented the climax of a long series of restrictions upon the right of a
man to stitch even his own life away, still more upon his right to force
his children or bribe his neighbour to a like waste of the nation's force,
was by now stirring the industrial mind of England far and wide.
And not the mind of England only. Ireland and Scotland, town and
country, talked of it, seethed with it. The new law, if it passed, was to
be tried, indeed, at first, in London only. But every provincial town and
every country district knew that, if it succeeded, there was not a corner
of the land that would not ultimately feel the yoke, or the deliverance,
of it Every workman's club, every trade-union meeting, every
mechanics' institute was ringing with it. Organised labour, dragged
down at every point--in London, at any rate--by the competition of the
starving and struggling crew of home-workers, clamoured for the Bill.
The starving and struggling crew themselves were partly voiceless,
partly bewildered; now drawn by the eloquence of their trade-union
fellows to shout for the revolution that threatened them, now surging
tumultuously against it.
On this vital clause, in Fontenoy's belief, the Government would go
down. But if, by amazing good-fortune and good generalship, they

should get through with it, then the fight would but rage the more
fiercely round the last two sections of the Bill.
The third section dealt with the hours of labour in the new workshops
that were to be. For the first time it became directly penal for a man, as
well as a woman, to work more than the accepted factory-day of ten
and a half hours, with a few exceptions and exemptions in the matter of
overtime. On this clause, if it were ever reached, the Socialist vote,
were it given solidly for the Government, might, no doubt, pull them
through. "But if we have any luck--damn it! they won't get the chance!"
Fontenoy would say, with that grim, sudden reddening which revealed
from moment to moment the feverish tension of the man.
In the last section of the Bill the Government, having made its
revolution, looked round for a class on which to lay the burden of
carrying it into action, and found it in the landlords. The landlords were
to be the policemen of the new Act. To every owner of every tenement
or other house in London the Bill said: You are responsible. If, after a
certain date, you allow certain trades to be carried on within your walls
at all, even by the single man or the single woman working in their own
room, penalty and punishment shall follow.
Of this clause in the Bill Fontenoy could never speak with calmness.
One might see his heart thumping in his breast as he denounced it. At
bottom it was to him the last and vilest step in a long and slanderous
campaign against the class to which he belonged, against
property,--against the existing social order. He fell upon the subject
to-night à propos of a Socialist letter in the morning papers; and
George, who was mostly conscious at the moment of a sick fatigue
with Fontenoy and Fontenoy's arguments, had to bear it as best he
might. Presently he interrupted:
"One assumption you make I should like to contest. You