George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of un-

necessary work, for there is no real need for gharries

and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals con-

sider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as any-

one who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries.

They afford a small amount of convenience, which

cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and

animals.

Similarly with the

plongeur . He is a king compared

with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is

analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant,

and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all,

where is the real need of big hotels and smart

restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but

in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of

it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are

better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a

meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same ex-

pense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restau-

rants must exist, but there is no need that they should

enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in

them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are sup-

posed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called,

means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and

the customers pay more; no one benefits except the

proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa

at Deauville. Essentially, a "smart" hotel is a place

where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two

hundred may pay through the nose for things they do

not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels

and restaurants, and the work done with simple

efficiency,

plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day

instead of ten or fifteen.

Suppose it is granted that a

plongeur's work is more

or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does any

one want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond

the immediate economic cause, and to consider what

pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing

dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people-

comfortably situated people-do find a pleasure in such

thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working

when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his

work is needed or not, he must work, because work in

itself is good-for slaves, at least. This sentiment still

survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless

drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work

is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the

thought runs) are such low animals that they would be

dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them

too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be

intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the

improvement of working conditions, usually says some-

thing like this:

"We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it

is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with

the thought of its unpleasantness. But don't expect us

to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower

classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange,

but we will fight like devils against any improvement of

your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you

are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not

going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an

extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you

must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be

damned to you."

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent,

cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a

hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less

than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally

they side with the rich, because they imagine that any

liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own

liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the

alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as

they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very

much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them

are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of

people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by

them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that

makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their

opinions.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on

the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental

difference between rich and poor, as though they were

two different races, like negroes and white men. But in

reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich

and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and

nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the

average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change

places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is

the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with

the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that

intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might

be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with

the poor. For what do the majority of educated people

know about poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the

editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the

line «

Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres" by a footnote; so

remote is even hunger from the educated man's

experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of

the mob results quite naturally. The educated man

pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty

to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work

minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.

"Anything," he thinks, "any injustice,

sooner than let that mob loose." He does not see that

since there is no difference between the mass of rich and

poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The

mob is in fact loose now, and-in the shape of rich men-is

using its power to set up enormous treadmills of

boredom, such as "smart" hotels.

To sum up. A

plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave,

doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at

work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he

would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated

people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the

process, because they know nothing about him and

consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the

plongeur

because it is his case I have been considering; it would

apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These

are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a

plongeur's

life, made without reference to immediate economic

questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present

them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's

head by working in a hotel.

XXIII

As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to

bed and slept the clock round, all but one hour. Then I

washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed

and had my hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I

had two glorious days of loafing. I even went in my best

suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five

francs on a bottle of English beer. It is a curious

sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave's

slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at

the moment when we were lancés and there was a. chance