222	ENGLISH    SAGA
freeman. He was easily "put upon" but did not readily brook
interference. His fists and his tongue were always quick to assert
his independence.
The love of liberty came out in his phrases,-in his jokes, in his
invincible, half-blasphemous, ironical commentary on the ups
and downs of his harsh life. His " 'Ere, who d'yre think yre a'get-
ting at?" his "Tell us anuvor, guvnor," like his jokes about
mother-in-laws and old gentlemen slipping on banana skins,
were part of his protests against interference and pompous power.
He refused to part with his humour, his right to grumble, his
right to what little liberty the wage struggle left him to go
about his private business in his own way. Not.clearly under-
standing how he had been swindled out of his birthright—home,
status and privilege—he was yet aware of the dignity of his
descent. He knew himself to be as good as any man, and better.
Robbed by the machine of pride and pleasure in his work, he
still kept inviolate his right to take pleasure in his liberty. His
most precious possession was his right to enjoy himself in his
own way. On Hampstead Heath or Hackney Marshes on a bank
holiday one saw him at his most uproarious: expressing himself
in cockney carnival: costers in all their pride of pearls and
feathers, frolicsome young women with tambourines singing
and making unblushing advances to jolly strangers, old parties
with bottles of stout and jests for every passer-by, and young and
old pressing into the side-shows and booths where giants and
dwarfs, nigger minstrels and performing dogs and every
variety ,of freak and novelty made merry for the delight of the
disinherited son, returned for a glorious hour to his father's
kingdom of freedom. So in more normal times in the trains from
Stepney to Highbury one might in the course of half an hour's
journey encounter a lad playing airs on a fiddle, an old man
beguiling his journey with an accordion and a chorus of young
workmen singing in unison. By being jolly and having a good
time when the occasion offered,the English poor reminded them-
selves and the rich men they served that Jack was as good as his
master and that freedom was his birthright.
One saw industrial England at its roughest and freest in any
town where seamea congregated. In the Ratdiff Highway in the
'eighties and 'nineties almost every house was a tavern with a
dance hall at the back where a steam organ kept up perpetual
revelry. The whole jglace resounded with music, the-shouting of