A Prefect's Uncle by P. G. Wodehouse (A & C Black 1903)

 

Gethryn strolled to the gate, where the station-master’s son stood at the receipt of custom to collect the tickets.  His uncle was to arrive by this train, and if he did so arrive, must of necessity pass this way before leaving the platform.  The train panted in, pulled up, whistled, and puffed out again, leaving three people behind it.  One of these was a woman of sixty (approximately), the second a small girl of ten, the third a young gentleman in a top hat and Etons, who carried a bag, and looked as if he had seen the hollowness of things, for his face wore a bored, supercilious look.  His uncle had evidently not arrived, unless he had come disguised as an old woman, an act of which Gethryn refused to believe him capable.

He enquired as to the next train that was expected to arrive from London.  The station-master’s son was not sure, but would ask the porter, whose name it appeared was Johnny.  Johnny gave the correct answer without an effort.  ’Seven-thirty it was, sir, except on Saturdays, when it was eight o’clock.’

‘Thanks,’ said the Bishop.  ’Dash the man, he might at least have wired.’

He registered a silent wish concerning the uncle who had brought him a long three miles out of his way with nothing to show at the end of it, and was just turning to leave the station, when the top-hatted small boy, who had been hovering round the group during the conversation, addressed winged words to him.  These were the winged words—

‘I say, are you looking for somebody?’ The Bishop stared at him as a naturalist stares at a novel species of insect.

'Yes,’ he said.  ‘Why?’

‘Is your name Gethryn?’

This affair, thought the Bishop, was beginning to assume an uncanny aspect.

‘How the dickens did you know that?’ he said.

’Oh, then you are Gethryn?  That’s all right.  I was told you were going to be here to meet this train.  Glad to make your acquaintance.  My name’s Farnie.  I’m your uncle, you know.’

‘My what?’ gurgled the Bishop.

‘Your uncle.  U-n, un; c-l-e—kul.  Uncle.  Fact, I assure you.' 

The People of the Abyss by Jack London (Journeymen Press 1903)

These people who try to help!  Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures.  In the nature of things they cannot but be failures.  They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.  They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.  They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants.  They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers.  They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs.  The very money they dribble out in their child’s schemes has been wrung from the poor.  They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.  Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along?  This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of ninepence.  She is being robbed.  Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.  They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day.

And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie.  They do not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.  And the lie they preach is “thrift.”  An instant will demonstrate it.  In overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.  To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income—in other words, to live on less.  This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living.  In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard.  And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry.  And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure.