SHOOTING    NIAGARA	221
be no liberty at all. The State, or rather the state official, was
to rule all things.
Such a paradise, at first sight, seemed to offer so many things
of which the English worker stood in need. It offered better
wages and conditions of labour, cleaner and more commodious
homes, social services and public amenities in place of the drab
negation of the utilitarian city, above all the end of the shameless
exploitation of poverty by wealth which robbed men and women
of their self-respect. Yet when the promised land was examined
more closely, it was seen to contain a presence which was not
acceptable to an Englishman. For there in the midst of the
garden stood Nosey Parker with the sword of the all-seeing
State. And of all men none was more temperamentally likely
to resent that presence than the rough and liberty-loving
workman of England.
The socialist thinkers could see no problem in this. The
dictatorship of the state would be exercised, they argued, on
behalf of the working classes. Being for the most part men
of the study, they failed to see how their republic would work
out in practice. They never realised how heavily in an over-
crowded country, in which the productive work and home life
of the million had been centred in great towns, the tyranny of
the official, if vested with absolute power, would press on the
working man. It is inevitably the poor not the rich who most
fed the humiliating effects of jack-in-office despotism, for as
individuals they have so much less power of appeal against it.
The Socialists in their passion for statistics—the instrument they
inherited from the utilitarians—forgot that the liberty of the
workers in the aggregate may bear little relation to the liberty of
the worker as an individual. They did not see how pathetically
helpless he might be against the pricks of petty tyranny.
The English working man, even after a century of factory
labour, did not take readily to aggregate conceptions of himself.
For all his exploitation he was the heir to the English ages: to
Simon de Montfort, John Hampden and old Kelly of Silverstone
who wanted nails over his coffin to stop his neighbours trampling
on him. He die. not want liberty as a member of a class: he
wanted it as a man. An official bossing him about was no less a
tyrant in his eyes because he was vested with popular authority.
The English proletarian was a contradiction in terms: economic-
ally a wage slave, he was still spiritually and in his own eyes a