CHAPTER II.
In a sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, the Rev. Prebendary Capel-Cure referred to the preceding article on 'Horrible London.' While insisting on the necessity for State interference, the preacher went on to say that he had read a series of papers on the 'Misery of Paris,' published in 1881, and that the unspeakable, the nameless horrors, the awful accumulation of guilt and filth and misery which the French writer had seen with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears, 'made even the dreadful revelation of the English writer seem almost trivial in comparison.' Now, as a matter of fact, no English writer conversant with the subject has dared to tell a plain unvarnished tale of London's guilt and woe. There are many of us who have seen with our own eyes, and heard with our own ears, things so revolting that we can only hint at them in vague and hesitating language. Were I, even now that public attention has been thoroughly aroused to a great danger, to go into the details of ordinary life in a London slum, the story would be one which no journal enjoying a general circulation could possibly print.
There is indeed a great danger that, in endeavouring to steer clear of loathsome details, writers dealing with the question of the amelioration of the condition of the poor may fail to bring home to the public the real nature of the ills that have to be remedied. It is to the general avoidance of offensive revelations that we owe most of the impracticable schemes of reform with which the Press all over the country is being flooded.
Let us 'rehouse' the poor by all means, but before we set about the task it is imperatively necessary that we should know what kind of people we are going to build for. Unless this is thoroughly understood, the result of the present agitation will be simply deplorable. We shall pull down slum after slum, not to rehouse the present inhabitants, but to drive them into still closer and closer contact, until we have massed together a huge army of famished and desperate men and women, ready, in the 'wild hour' that must sooner or later come, to burst their barriers at last, and to declare open and violent war against law and order and property.
The present terrible condition of affairs is mainly due to two causes—over-population and the small remuneration commanded by labour, and it is out of the former evil that the latter has grown. That drink is the curse of poverty-stricken districts no one wishes to deny, but it is a mistake to say that drink is the cause of poverty; as a matter of fact, poverty is equally the cause of drink. On this part of the question I may at some future time give the result of my experiences among the poor. For the present I want my readers to accompany me through a typical London slum, and to make a short study of the inhabitants, in order that they may form their own opinion of the remedies likely to be of permanent value.
One London slum is very like another, but for my purpose now I will select a district in Southwark, where the houses are in such a condition that they are bound to come down under any scheme of sanitary improvement, however halfhearted it may be.
We enter a narrow court, picking our way with caution over the nameless filth and garbage and the decaying vegetable matter that, flung originally in heaps outside the doors, has been trodden about by the feet of the inhabitants until the broken flags are almost undiscernible beneath a thick paste of indescribable filth. The outside of the houses prepares us for what is to come. Inside them we find the staircases rotten and breaking away. A greasy cord stretched from flight to flight is often the sole protection they possess. Wooden rails there may originally have been, but the landlord has not replaced them. He does not supply his tenants with firewood gratis. The windows are broken and patched with paper, or occasionally with a bit of board. The roofs are dilapidated, and the wet of a rainy season has soaked through the loose tiles, and saturated the walls and ceilings from attic to basement. And the rooms themselves! To describe them with anything like truth taxes my knowledge of euphemisms to the utmost. The rooms in these houses are pigsties, and nothing more, and in them men, women and children live and sleep and eat. More I cannot say, except that the stranger, entering one of these rooms for the first time, has every sense shocked, and finds it almost impossible to breathe the pestilent atmosphere without being instantly sick. And in such rooms as these there are men and women now living who never leave them for days and weeks together. They are sometimes discovered in an absolute state of nudity, having parted with every rag in their possession in order to keep body and soul together through times when no work is to be had.
So much for the district which is to be levelled, and the general habits of the inhabitants who are to be 'rehoused.' Let us take a few of the families who will have to be somebody's tenants under any scheme, and see what their circumstances are. The cases are all selected from the district I have endeavoured to hint at above. I will begin with the workers:
T. Harborne, stonemason, occupies two dilapidated rooms, which are in a filthy condition. Has five children. Total weekly income through slackness, 8s. Rent, 4s. 6d.
E. Williams, costermonger, two rooms in a court which is a hotbed of vice and disease. Has eight children. Total earnings, 17s. Rent, 5s. 6d.
T. Briggs, labourer, one room, four children. Rent, 4s. No furniture; all sleep on floor. Daughter answered knock, absolutely naked; ran in and covered herself with a sack.
Mrs. Johnson, widow, one room, three children. Earnings, 6s. Rent, 3s. 6d.
W. Leigh, fancy boxmaker, two awful rooms, four children. Earnings, 14s. Rent, 6s.
H. Walker, hawker, two rooms, seven children. Earnings, 10s. Rent, 5s. 6d.
E. Thompson, out of work, five children. Living by pawning goods and clothes. Wife drinks. Rent, 4s.
G. Garrard, labourer, out looking for work, eight children. No income. Rent, 5s. 6d. Pawning last rags. No parish relief. Starving. Declines to go into workhouse.
These people may fairly be described as workers. They will accept employment if they can get it, but they positively refuse to go into the workhouse when they cannot. If they fail to get the rent together, they will go into a furnished apartment, i.e., a frightful hovel, with an awful bed, a broken table, and one chair in it. These places can be had by the night, and vary in price from sixpence to a shilling. They are largely used by the criminal classes, who do not care to accumulate household goods, which their frequent temporary retirements from society would leave at the mercy of others.
In the same district and in the same houses, mixing freely with their more honest neighbours, and quarrelling, fighting, and drinking with them, we find another class whose earnings are also precarious. I will quote one or two cases, as these people must be dislodged when the present buildings come down:
Mrs. Smith. Husband in gaol. One room, three children. She earns 6s. a week, and pays 2s. 6d. rent. The man has been away fourteen years for burglary. The day of his release he came home. (The manner in which the men coming from long terms of imprisonment find their wives is marvellous.) The woman gave him what money she had, and he went out at once and got drunk. In the evening he came back, quarrelled with his neighbour, and stabbed a woman in a fight. He was taken to the police-station, tried, and sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment.
F. Barker. One dreadful room, three children; father and mother both criminals. Have been getting three and six months at intervals for years. Sometimes both in gaol together. Their neighbours take the children and mind them till parents come out.
W. Moggs, Raspberry Court—a sweet name for a hideous place—one room, four children. Rent, 4s. Father professional thief. Constantly in and out of prison.
These cases are fair samples of the class of people we call the abject poor, people who will not go to the workhouse under any circumstances, and who are at present herding together in the rookeries we are all agreed must be demolished and replaced by something better. Add to them the people carrying on objectionable trades in one or two rooms—and who must carry them on to live wherever they go—and the reformers will have a fair idea of the tenants for whom houses must be provided somewhere, if their present dwellings are to be pulled down. At the first glance it seems almost impossible to cater for them. Fancy turning these people into nice clean rooms and expecting five per cent, for your money! Besides, putting their habits on one side, they are never sure of regular work. They may pay the rent one week and be penniless the next. Then five per cent, philanthropy must turn them out, having given them a glimpse of Paradise which will make the return to Hades a terrible trial to those who have had their better instincts aroused.
Whichever way we look at the subject, it is fraught with difficulties, and if we are challenged to find a remedy, we have to go into a question which thousands of excellent people refuse altogether to discuss. The deserving poor could all be better housed now without a single brick being laid or a single Act of Parliament passed, if they had fewer children. Even in the slums the rents are lower and the rooms better for couples who have only two children. In dozens of instances where I have asked the denizens of these hovels why they pay four and five shillings for such vile accommodation, the answer is, 'They won't take us in a decent place because of the children.'
I know a case now of a man who took a house for himself and family, and found he had two rooms to spare. The house was clean and healthy, and he had dozens of applications from would-be lodgers. But, though he was poor—and the extra rent would have been a godsend to him—he remained unlet for four months because all the applicants had three or four children. His case is the case of hundreds of people who have decent rooms to let for the labouring poor.
The large families these people invariably have not only keep them in grinding poverty all their lives, but the overpopulation floods the labour market and keeps the scale of wages down to starvation point. While supply so enormously exceeds demand, how can any market be in a healthy condition?
Men and women, and boys and girls, all eager for something to do, are to be had by thousands, and labour is at a discount. If the supply diminished, and hands were more in proportion to the work to be done, labour would be at a premium.
We have reached a point when it is absolutely mischievous to ignore this side of the question. It is not only labour that is affected by the rapid increase in the population; half of the vice and half the crime we deplore in these districts is traceable to the same cause. Did I wish to imitate the French writer and plunge the reader to his eyes in horror, I might tell how the lack of employment brings mere children in these districts into the streets—how girls of eleven and twelve are forced into sin by their wretched parents as the last desperate means of that self-preservation which we are told is the first law of nature. And as the girls in evil times sin at first for bread to eat, so the boys begin to thieve; and we are brought face to face with the fact that we have in our midst vast human warrens, which are simply places where thieves and wantons are bred, and poverty and crime increase and multiply together.
I have no desire to argue a vexed question or engage in a controversy on a subject which requires the most delicate handling, but no one who has actual experience of outcast London can keep this one great cause of the teeming misery and vice entirely out of sight. What the remedy for it may be it is no part of my purpose to discuss, but here again I believe that the great hope is in the new race that is coming to replace the old. The next generation will be more cultured, more intellectual, and more refined; mental faculties will be exercised which have been dormant in the poor of to-day, and as we increase in civilization so shall we decrease in numbers. Education will make even the lowest of our citizens something better than they are at present—mere animal reproducers of their species.
In the meantime, while we are waiting for that good day to dawn, we can be helping it on. If we begin our task by catering at once for the most hopeful class we can find, we shall make a distinct step in advance. Weed out the slums by degrees—encourage the most decent among the workers first, and get down to the lower strata step by step. Leave the poor wretches who are impossible in any but rookeries a rookery or two to finish their careers in. Encourage everything that will keep their rents down, and encourage everything that will give labour a better return. If the process of elimination is gradual, we shall in time improve the condition of all who are not beyond help. As for the rest, they will solve the riddle in time for themselves by dying off, and leaving the ground free for the well-paid, well-educated, healthy labourer, with two little children and a contented mind, who is the dream of the modern social reformer.