PLUTOCRACY.

Everyone knows Pugsley, the great Pugsley, proprietor of Pugsley's Pure Piquant Pickles. You have seen his gracefully alliterative advertisements on the hoardings at the railway stations, and all down the Great Turnover Line, glaring at you in pastoral scenes, where Chloris led her lambkins in the pre-plutocratic days of "merrie England," and even obtruding their hideous drawing of the pickle bottles ("Ask for Pugsley's, Pure and Piquant") upon you in lonely mountain inns of the Grampians. There is no escaping the all-pervading Pugsley. Your grocer has foisted Pugsley's Pickles on you, and you have had to taste them, willy-nilly. He had a good reason for sending you Pugsley's Pickles. The firm are able to undersell all other competitors in the drysaltery interest, because they pay low wages to their workpeople.

But, though you are familiar with the name of the Great Pugsley, and know the flavour of his relishes and condiments, you have never troubled to learn how the man made his huge business. I will tell you his history. It is very instructive.

Pugsley's father was a village grocer at Hookham Nooton. He sold butter and cheese and tea for forty years, and left his son £500 at his demise. Young Pugsley early developed shrewd commercial instincts. At school he retailed his father's sugar to the boys, making a clear halfpenny profit on each penny; and when he had made a little capital by this huckstering, he launched out into bigger trading ventures, such as the vending of knives and cricket bats, and cheap magic lanterns, till he became a kind of "Universal Provider" at the select academy for young gentlemen. This was good training for his after career of buying, and selling, and exploiting. There is nothing like beginning these things when you are young.

At fifteen, Pugsley, junior, was installed behind the parental counter at Hookham Nooton, where he learned how to weigh tea with a bit of paper under the scale pan, and other recognised dodges of the trade, so that he soon became his father's right hand, and a great acquisition to the business. When Pugsley, senior, departed hence, his son took sole control of the shop. But the young man realised that he was born to be a great merchant, and not a petty trader in a remote village. One day he chanced upon an old book of practical recipes, which told you how to make ketchup and sauces, and, by dint of messing with vinegar and spices, he hit upon the famous blend that made his name as a sauce maker. Bottles of the stuff sold readily in the village and neighbouring small towns, for there is no denying that it was a tasty relish. Then came small wholesale orders, and trade began "to hum," as business slang has it. Five years later we find Pugsley the owner of a pickle factory in Spitalfields, and the employer of fifty hands, mostly girls and boys. Ten years after, his pickles are used in every Respectable family in the kingdom, and their repute has reached America and the Colonies; and so, before the prime of life, Pugsley is a pursy citizen, with a fine house at Richmond, a horse and chaise, a housekeeper, maidservants, and a gardener and coachman—all the proper rewards of industry.

At thirty-six, Pugsley married money, and further extended his business. His wife "received" local snobs, and gave "at homes," attended by inferior celebrities and "all the people who are likely to be of use to us." At forty Pugsley was a Constitutional candidate for Diddleham, the hope of the Respectables, the cynosure of the hide-bound conventionalists in politics. You may remember that he was returned by the imposing majority of six. Now came the zenith of his fame. Pugsley's politics like his pickles, are notoriously piquant. He has voted against every democratic measure, and prated about "the natural leaders of the working class."

See him now, in his honoured old age, hated of his workpeople, envied by Respectables, despised by the county gentry and feared by almost everyone, a millionaire to-day, with a seat in Clodshire, a house in Portland Terrace, a yacht at Brighton, and a deer forest in Inverness-shire. I have met his son, the Master of the Slowcomb Hounds, a good sort of Philistine, who would rather do his fellow-men a good turn than an ill one, but a terrible ignoramus and deadweight for all that; with far less real knowledge of men and books than my cobbler round the corner. There are three daughters. One of them, Miss Evelyn, is betrothed to Lord Durt, the young impoverished peer, who was lately earning thirty shillings a week as society reporter to the "Gadabout." I am glad for Durt. He has had a rough time, and Evelyn is an amiable, even hopeful specimen of the Respectable girl. She has lately talked about industrial questions, and I believe she is half ashamed already that papa has women in his employment earning nine shillings a week upon which to keep body and soul together.

Yes, it is with the sweat of women and children that Pugsley has become a plutocrat. His wife is the Patroness of the Refuge for the Fallen. How many of Pugsley's women have been forced to supplement their wretched earnings by prostitution? Someone once put this question to the pickleman. "Really, Mrs. ——," he said, "I am not responsible for the morals of my working people." But I say that it is such fellows as Pugsley who force girls to sell themselves in the street. I ask you, my Respectable sister, could you live yourself and help to support your widowed mother and two young children on a wage of seven shillings a week? I have known one of Pugsley's women workers try to do this till death came with its eternity of rest for that poor, semi-starved, aching body. To me it is a constant source of wonder, and a matter of profound respect for woman's moral courage that more of Pugsley's ill-paid women helpers do not walk the streets for hire.

O! Great Pugsley, I would that I could be certain of a day of reckoning betwixt you and an Almighty Judge! Sometimes, in dreams, I hear the tramp, tramp, of thousands of feet, and see the white faces of toilers gleam in the murk of a London night, a night of violent retribution. Must we wait for this? Must hands be stained with men's blood ere the rich will bestir themselves to render justice to the poor? I pray the fates that it may not be so! But everywhere, in the great cities, and out in the fields, I hear the murmur of deep, sullen discontent.

Think what such a man as Pugsley has wrought in the name of Respectability. He has systematically lied, cheated, and crushed the weaker to the wall. He has piled up wealth by defrauding the widow and the orphan of bare human rights, turning them into worse than slaves by his thrice-accursed lust for money. I have heard of old servants being deposed in his warehouse, and put into subordinate positions to make way for the young; of men dismissed for the expression of Liberal political opinions; of hands threatened with discharge for professing trades union principles; of fines wrung from hungry children for trivial offences; and of bullying and insult and injustices without number.

I hear my cut-and-dried economist calling me to account with his formulas and expositions. Ah! I have listened to them; I have read them; but they never have, and never will, persuade me that Pugsley, the plutocrat, does what is right and humane and reasonable towards those who have built up his fortune, and bought his mansions and his yacht, and dowered his daughters. I know about competition, and the law of demand and supply, and I take my stand on sound social science. But no science that I have studied convinces me that this plutocracy and plunder and monopoly are good for anyone but the plutocrats and the plunderers. And not good for them, either, in any moral sense. Is it moral to kill the social affections? I say that the professional burglar is a model of virtue by the side of Pugsley. He does not pose as a Christian philanthropist and a friend of the people when he goes about his nefarious business. Pugsley, the great successful gambler, fines poor country louts for playing pitch and toss with halfpence. The next day he perpetrates a filthy fraud on 'Change. Shelley was right, the true ruffian of a community is not the cutpurse who knocks you down in the Gray's Inn Road, and gags you, while his accomplice grabs your watch and valuables, but the "Respectable man—the smooth, smiling villain whom all the City honours, whose very trade is lies and murder; who buys his daily bread with the blood and tears of men." I want to know why the big thief, Pugsley, is made a peer, and the man who steals a handful of turnips is sent to the County gaol?

The other day, a labourer, out of work, wired a rabbit on Pugsley's estate, and went to prison for a week for the misdemeanour. But Pugsley annexed the very land that the rabbit was on, a good wide strip of it, too, which belonged to the people. I used to walk on that same ground, looking for the first primroses. Now I must ask Pugsley's permission before I dare set a foot there, on this property which I own in common with my neighbours! And you tell me that this sort of "law and order" is good for my morals.

I am glad that my ethical-cum-philosophical friend is not at my elbow just now, to suggest that I ought to be kind to Pugsley. Why, in the name of reason, am I to flatter and applaud this commercial gamester? I look upon him as a victim of morbid acquisitiveness induced by Respectability. Pugsley thinks he must keep up his reputation among the Respectables of his set, and to do this he is urged to plunder the poor. He is a dangerous maniac; he ought to be detained and set to hard labour to cure him of his derangement.

The stupidest farce played by the Pugsleys is when one of the girls goes district visiting, and tells the wives of the peasants earning twelve shillings a week, that they "ought to put by for a rainy day." I wonder that the women can keep their patience with the ninny. If Miss Clara Pugsley were to use her atrophied brain for five minutes, she would know that no woman with a husband and five children to feed and clothe, and a rent of eighteenpence a week to pay, can save a farthing out of such wages. It is gross insolence of this over-fed, idle, ignorant girl to talk in this fashion to the poor. But this fatuous nonsense is preached all over the country every day in the week. Ladies call it "helping the poor to be thrifty," "elevating the workers," etc.

O, Great Pugsley, it is not envy of your possessions that makes me dip my pen in gall, though I know well that is what you will think should you read these words of mine. I would be well content with the income of your under-steward. You have measured human nature with your little foot-rule, and come to the opinion that all men are naturally greedy vampires like yourself. Believe me, Pugsley, you are sadly wrong in this view. I know men and women who would not stain their fingers with your wretched blood-money for their own usage, though they would gladly employ it for the benefit of those from whom you filched it, drib and drab, by underpayment of their hard, dull toil.

I wish, how I wish in malignant moments, that I had assurance of a hereafter for Pugsley in a dark, noisome factory, where he would have to work for ten hours a day on skilly. The parson tells me that there is a mansion in the skies prepared for Pugsley. And another equally sumptuous residence for the more honest Bill Brown, the poacher? Why not?

London, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield—these are the paradises of the Pugsleys; they batten in the rechy air of these gambling centres. How do these dismal, over-crowded, smoke-blackened haunts of Respectability impress "the intelligent foreigner?" "Send a philosopher to London, but no poet," says Heine. "Everywhere we are stared down on by wealth and Respectability, while, crammed away in retired lanes and damp alleys, poverty dwells, with her rags and her tears." Heine, like many another thinker, was struck by the wretchedness and poverty of London, hiding away behind the mansions of plutocrats and Respectables. He saw "gaunt hunger staring beseechingly at the rich merchant who hurries along, busy and jingling gold, or at the lazy lord who, like the surfeited god, rides by on his high horse, casting now and then an aristocratically indifferent glance at the mob below, as though they were swarming ants, or, at all events, a mass of baser beings, whose joys and sorrows have nothing in common with his feelings;" and the poet cried to poor Poverty, "Well art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to vice and crime. Outlawed criminals often bear more humanity in their hearts than those cold, blameless citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts the power of evil is quenched, but also the power of good."

Mr. Grant White has written a book entitled "England Within and Without," a very pungent and witty delineation of the English character from an American point of view. He tells us that the British Philistine is "perfect of his kind;" that "Philistinism pervades the whole society of Great Britain south of the Tweed." Mr. Grant says that this Philistinism is of late growth in England, a phenomenon of the last hundred and fifty years. We cannot find traces of it in the "spacious days," in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Massinger, nor in all the comedies of Shakspere. Master Ford and Master Page, the townsmen of Windsor, are neither snobs nor Philistines. But now, in this wonderful nineteenth century, the Philistines are as obvious as the poor; they swarm and teem everywhere. The dense-minded middle-class man, rich, purse-proud, vulgar, incapable of apprehending anything beyond the range of his own personal experience, comes upon the stage. Enter Pugsley, with a capacious abdomen, a red beef face, set off with cropped side whiskers, a shiny pow, a big voice, and an imposing cough. "He is the butt, it is true, of the courtier and of the travelled man; nevertheless, he is represented as the type of a large class, and as one who is becoming a power in the land, and who is recognised as one of the characteristic elements of its society. He is conscious at once of his importance, and of his social inferiority, and he submits, although with surliness, to the snubbing of his superiors, which sometimes takes a very active and aggressive shape."

One day they will be coming round to me for a subscription towards erecting a statue of the Great Pugsley. You know the kind of effigy—Pugsley in a pot-hat, beaming benevolence, on a granite pedestal, that all who pass by may behold and envy the glory of this apotheosis of the Successful Man. But why should not Pugsley have his monument? Could one devise a better way of advertising his Piquant Pickles? Yes, let us have a colossal bronze figure of Peter Pugsley, M.P., in the market place of Diddleham, with raised pickle-bottles in metal festooned around the pedestal, and the words, "Ask for Pugsley's" graven in the polished stone. There is not much artistic beauty in Diddleham in the way of statuary. The statue will supply a long-felt want. Besides, there is a purely utilitarian aspect to the question (they are very utilitarian at Diddleham). At six meetings of the Town Council, the question of where to put the public fire-escape has been discussed with great heat. Let me suggest that it should be stood against the memorial to Pugsley.

If I had a son who began to develop the faculty of "getting on" upon the Pugsley lines, I would do all I could to encourage the youngster. He would earn success so easily that he would not care a rap for it. I would go, unbeknown to him, and scatter pins on the ground in front of the office where he intended to apply for a clerkship, so that he might stoop to pick them up, thereby, like the youth in the story, convincing the employer of his thrifty and methodical qualities. His library should be stocked with the lives of self-made men, the biographies of smart bagmen, and works on how to grow money. Portraits of successful merchants should deck the walls of his bedroom, and he should be taught to revere them as patron saints. I warrant such methods of fostering the love of commercial success would have the desired effect. The boy would run away to "a hollow tree, a crust of bread, and liberty."