CHAPTER IV.
It has been asserted by several writers who have joined in the present controversy concerning the Housing of the Poor that drink and unthrift are the main causes of the existing distress, and some go so far as to say that the masses live to drink, and that consequently no legislation can improve their condition.
This is a pessimist view of the question which is by no means warranted by the facts. To deny that the poor in the rookeries drink and are unthrifty would be foolish. But I venture to assert, with a knowledge of the life-histories of hundreds of these 'outcasts,' that the drinking habits of a large percentage are due to the circumstances under which they are at present forced to live. Temptation surely enters as largely into drunkenness as into any other vice, and in the foul and fetid courts and alleys of London the temptation to every kind of vice is never absent. The complete lack of home-comforts, the necessity of dulling every finer sense in order to endure the surrounding horrors, the absence of anything to enter into competition with the light and glitter of the gin-palace, and the cheapness of drink in comparison with food—all these contribute to make the poor easy victims of intemperance. Thousands of people do undoubtedly drink for drinking's sake, but that is a phase of intemperance which is by no means confined to one class. Among the poor the constant war with fate, the harassing conditions of daily life, and the apparent hopelessness of trying to improve their conditions, do undoubtedly tend to make them 'drown their sorrows' and rush for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the publican dispenses at so much a glass. This is no general assertion; it is a conclusion arrived at with a knowledge of the circumstances which first led many of the most notorious drunkards of a slum to contract their evil habits.
Ask any of the temperance workers in the viler districts, and they will tell you how they have watched hundreds of decent folk come into a bad neighbourhood and gradually sink under the degrading influences of their surroundings. There are few men who have worked to keep their brethren from the clutches of the drink-fiend who would not gladly hail the advent of air and light and cleanliness, and the enforcement of sanitary laws, as the best weapons with which to do doughty deeds in their combats with intemperance among the poor.
Having said so much, I am prepared to admit that drink is a contributing cause to the present condition of the poor. It is even, in a certain degree, a cause of overcrowding.
The Bishop of Bedford, in a recent speech, expressed a desire to have the drink statistics of a slum. I cannot give figures, but I can give facts. The Bishop expressed a belief that the revelation would astonish the public. I am quite sure that it will.
More than one-fourth of the daily earnings of the denizens of the slums goes over the bars of the public-houses and gin-palaces. To study the drink phase of this burning question, let us take the districts from which I have drawn the facts and figures I have previously submitted.
On a Saturday night, in the great thoroughfare adjacent, there are three corner public-houses which take as much money as the whole of the other shops on both sides of the way put together. Butchers, bakers, greengrocers, clothiers, furniture dealers, all the caterers for the wants of the populace, are open till a late hour; there are hundreds of them trading round and about, but the whole lot do not take as much money as three publicans—that is a fact ghastly enough in all conscience. Enter the public-houses, and you will see them crammed. Here are artisans and labourers drinking away the wages that ought to clothe their little ones. Here are the women squandering the money that would purchase food, for the lack of which their children are dying. One group rivets the eye of an observer at once. It consists of an old gray-haired dame, a woman of forty, and a girl of about nineteen with a baby in her arms. All these are in a state which is best described as 'maudlin'—they have finished one lot of gin, and the youngest woman is ordering another round. It is a great-grandmother, grandmother, and a mother and her baby—four generations together—and they are all dirty and dishevelled and drunk except the baby, and even that poor little mite may have its first taste of alcohol presently. It is no uncommon sight in these places to see a mother wet a baby's lips with gin-and-water. The process is called 'giving the young'un a taste,' and the baby's father will look on sometimes and enjoy the joke immensely.
But the time to see the result of a Saturday night's heavy drinking in a low neighbourhood is after the houses are closed. Then you meet dozens of poor wretches reefing home to their miserable dens; some of them roll across the roadway and fall, cutting themselves till the blood flows. Every penny in some instances has gone in drink.
One dilapidated, ragged wretch I met last Saturday night was gnawing a baked potato. By his side stood a thinly-clad woman bearing a baby in her arms, and in hideous language she reproached him for his selfishness. She had fetched him out of a public-house with his last halfpenny in his pocket. With that halfpenny he had bought the potato, which he refused to share with her. At every corner the police are ordering or coaxing men and women to 'move on.'
Between twelve and one it is a long procession of drunken men and women, and the most drunken seem to be those whose outward appearance betokens the most abject poverty.
Turn out of the main thoroughfare and into the dimly-lighted back streets, and you come upon scene after scene to the grim, grotesque horror of which only the pencil of a Doré could do justice. Women, with hideous, distorted faces, are rolling from side to side, shrieking aloud snatches of popular songs, plentifully interlarded with the vilest expressions. Men as drunk as themselves meet them; there is a short interchange of ribald jests and foul oaths, then a quarrel and a shower of blows. Down from one dark court rings a cry of murder, and a woman, her face hideously gashed, makes across the narrow road, pursued by a howling madman. It is only a drunken husband having a row with his wife.
Far into the small hours such cries will ring here, now that of an injured wife, now that of a drunken fool trapped into a den of infamy to be robbed and hurled into the street by the professional bully who resides on the premises. As you pass the open doors of some of the houses, you may hear a heavy thud and a groan, and then stillness. It is only a drunken man who, staggering up the staircase to his attic, has missed his footing and fallen heavily.
Spend any Saturday night you like in a slum, and then say if one-tenth of the habitual horrors of the 'drunken night' have been catalogued here. And all these people who have spent so much in drink are undoubtedly among the class included in the description 'the abject poor.'
It is not fair to prove by facts and statistics the evil of over-population and the evil of low wages, and to shrink from revealing the evil of drink. That has to be removed as well as the others, and must be taken into account.
I have given here merely the experience of one Saturday night in the districts I have taken for a test in previous articles. It is in the same district I will find the facts to prove that the drink curse contributes to overcrowding as well as to poverty.
Hundreds of the people crowding into a slum have no business there at all. They should be in better neighbourhoods, inhabiting superior houses; but they are people who have fallen on evil times, and become gradually impoverished. People on a downward track filter through the slums en route for the workhouse.
Come to a common lodging-house, and see what class of people fill the beds at fourpence a night. Poor labourers? Yes. Loafers and criminals? Yes. But hundreds of men who have once been in first-class positions, and who have had every chance of doing well, are to be found there also.
For my purpose I will merely take the cases which have drifted to the slum lodging-house through drink.
The following have all passed recently through one common lodging-house in one of the most notorious slums of London:
A paymaster of the Royal Navy.
Two men who had been college chums at Cambridge, and met accidentally here one night, both in the last stage of poverty. One had kept a pack of hounds, and succeeded to a large fortune.
A physician's son, himself a doctor, when lodging here sold fusees in the Strand.
A clergyman who had taken high honours. Last seen in the Borough, drunk, followed by jeering boys.
A commercial traveller and superintendent of a Sunday-school.
A member of the Stock Exchange—found to be suffering from delirium tremens—removed to workhouse.
The brother of a clergyman and scholar of European repute died eventually in this slum. Friends had exhausted every effort to reclaim him. Left wife and three beautiful children living in a miserable den in the neighbourhood. Wife drinking herself to death. Children rescued by friends and provided for.
Brother of a vicar of large London parish—died in the slum.
These are all cases which have passed through one common lodging-house. What would the others show, had we the same opportunity of knowing their customers? These people have all been forced back on a rookery through drink—sober, they need never have sunk so low as that. Now come from the lodging-house into the hovels—the places where men, women, and children herd together like animals.
To one fearful court we trace a master in a celebrated college, a Fellow of the Royal Society. To another a lieutenant in the army, who ekes out a miserable drunken existence as a begging-letter impostor. Among the tenants of houses that are in the last stage of dilapidation and dirt, we find the sons of officers in the army and navy, of contractors and wealthy tradesmen. Some of them are waterside labourers, and one is the potman of a low beer-shop. Perhaps the most terrible case that has drifted to this slum is the wife of a West-End physician, who became one of the lowest outcasts of the neighbourhood, and died in the workhouse.
I could multiply instances like these, but there is no necessity. They will suffice to show that drunkenness is one of the causes of overcrowding in poor districts.
But drinking goes on among the natives as well as among the immigrants. It is only when one probes this wound that one finds how deep it is. Much as I have seen of the drink evil, it was not until I came to study one special district, with a view of ascertaining how far the charge of drunkenness could be maintained against the poor as a body, that I had any idea of the terrible extent to which this cause of poverty prevails.
In the street I saw evidence enough. From a common lodging-house and from the tenement houses I have quoted the cases given above. Come to the school and see how the drink affects the future of the children of whom we have such hopes. Let them tell their own stories:
M. L. Father drunk; struck mother and hurt her skull. Mother went raving mad, and has been in a lunatic asylum ever since. Father slipped off a barge when he was drunk and was drowned. Poor old grandmother has to keep the children.
E. S. Father gets drunk and beats mother. Is in prison now for assaulting her. Children dread his coming back, he is so cruel to them when he's drunk.
S. H. Has a fearful black eye. Mother and father both drink, and hurl things at each other. Missiles often bruise and injure the children.
C. S. Mother drinks 'awful.' Dropped baby on pavement; baby so injured it died. This is the second baby she has killed accidentally.
M. A. H. Came to school with arm broken. 'Father didn't mean no harm, but he was tight.'
S. S. Bright, lively girl of seven. Mother drinks. Shoulders and neck black with bruises. There is a curious domestic arrangement in this case which is worth recording. S.'s mother lived with a man, and had several children. The man deserted her. Mrs. S.'s sister was married to a man named D., and had also several children. One day Mrs. D. gets eighteen months for assaulting the police. Then D. takes compassion on his wife's sister, and has her to live with him, and the children of both families herd together. How the family will rearrange itself when the legitimate Mrs. D. comes out remains to be seen.
These stories, told by the lips of little children, are terrible enough; but the authorities of the district and those whose business takes them constantly into the wretched homes can tell you worse.
A friend of mine, who is never tired of trying to urge the people of this district to temperance, not long since found a man sitting up naked on a heap of rags, shivering with the death throes on him, and crying for water for his parched throat. His wife, in a maudlin state of intoxication, was staring helplessly at her dying husband. A coat was given to wrap round the poor fellow. At night, when my friend returned, he found the man cold and dead and naked, and the woman in a state of mad intoxication. She had torn the coat from the body of the dying man and pawned it for drink. In these districts men and women who are starving will get grants of bread, and some of them ask for the bread to be wrapped in clean paper. Do you know why? That they may sell the loaf to someone for a copper or two, and get drunk with the money. Men will come and buy a pair of boots in the morning out of their earnings, and pay seven shillings for them. At night they will return to the same shop and offer to sell them back for four shillings. They have started drinking, and want the money to finish the carouse with.
Such are a few of the facts connected with the drink phase of one London slum. They might easily be multiplied and intensified did we pass from the slum to the workhouse, and then to the County Lunatic Asylum; but for my present purpose I have given the reader sufficient evidence already. I have endeavoured to prove that drink is one cause of the existing misery and overcrowding. But is it a cause which is more beyond remedy than are any of the others? All honour to the brave temperance workers who have already done so much to diminish the evil. In this district such men are labouring night and day. No one now disputes the good which temperate temperance can accomplish. It will strengthen the hands of those who are trying to wean the thriftless poor from drink, if we give the people better homes and enforce sanitary laws. The very extent of the evil shows the necessity for immediate action. Signing the pledge is a very good thing for drunkards to do, but in this very neighbourhood a woman signed it twenty-three times and died drunk. Again, all alcohol may be poison in some good people's estimation, but there are degrees of poison. It is the vile nature of the stuff now allowed to be sold to the poor which increases the effect of drink upon them and makes their reclamation more difficult. And, having seen all I have seen, and heard all I have heard, I return to my original statement, that much of the intemperance of these people is due to their wretched surroundings. Remedy that, and you give them a chance to be sober. You pave the way for the brave soldiers of a good cause to fight under more favourable circumstances. The temperance advocates have accomplished much—they will accomplish more; but if they wish to check the evil in its hotbed, they must be among the strongest advocates of the proper Housing of the Poor. To say, because a certain proportion of the poor are drunkards, it is useless to try and improve the social condition of the masses, is like refusing to send the lifeboat to a sinking ship because half the crew are already known to be drowned.
There are drunkards, there are criminals, there are poor labourers in these districts who will never be 'improved.' No one who knows them has the slightest hope for them. But Sodom was to be spared for the sake of ten just persons; in the City of Dreadful Night, where our poor herd together, there are hundreds of just persons. For their sakes the city must be saved.