It was like a Moslem call to prayer; but, alas! it was directed at a people who had sloughed all pretensions to be ranked among those who respond to such calls, to any calls which would distract them from their objective in the pelting pursuit of money and pleasure.
But I am digressing—the one vice which, unfortunately for us, we never indulged or condoned at the time of my arrival in London. I wanted to give an instance of that aspect of charity and attempted social reform which aroused the opposition of vested interests and chartered brigands in the great money hunt. It was this: A certain charitable lady gave some years of her life to the study of those conditions in which, as I have said, the criminally inactive, the hopelessly useless, were produced by authorized routine, at a ruinous cost in money and degeneracy, and to the great profit of an unscrupulous few.
This lady then gave some further years, not to mention money, influence, and energy, to the evolution of a scheme by which these pauper children could really be made good and independent citizens, and that at an all-round cost of about one-fifth of the price of the guardians' method for converting them into human wrecks and permanent charges upon the State. The wise practicability of this lady's system was admitted by independent experts, and denied by nobody. But it was swept aside and crushed, beaten down with vicious, angry thoroughness, in one quarter—the quarter of vested interest and authority; quietly, passively discouraged in various other quarters; and generally ignored, as another interrupting duty call, by the rushing public.
Here, then, were three kinds of opposition—the first active and deadly, the other two passive and fatal, because they withheld needed support. The reason of the first, the guardians' opposition, was frankly and shamelessly admitted in London at the time of my arrival there. The guardians said:
"This scheme would reduce the rates. We want more rates. It would reduce the amount of money at our disposal. We aim at increasing that. It would divert certain streams of cash from our own channel into other channels in other parts of the Empire. We won't have it." But their words were far less civil and more heated than these, though the sense of them was as I have said.
The quiet, passive opposition was that of other workers in charity and reform. They said in effect:
"Yes, the scheme is all right—an excellent scheme. But why do you take it upon yourself to bring it forward in this direct manner? Are you not aware of the existence of our B—— nostrum for pauper children, or our C—— specific for juvenile emigration? Your scheme, admirable as it is, ignores both these, and therefore you must really excuse us if we—— Quite so! But, of course, as co-workers in the good cause, we wish you well——", and so forth.
The opposition of the general public I have explained. It was not really opposition. It was simply a part of the disease of the period; the dropsical, fatty degeneration of a people. But the mere fact that the reformers sent forth their cries and still laboured beside the public's crowded race-course; that such people as the lady I have mentioned existed—and there were many like her—should show that London as I found it was not all shadow and gloom, as it seems when one looks back upon it from the clear light of better days.
The darkness, the confusion, and the din, were not easy to see and hear through then. From this distance they are more impenetrable; but I know the light did break through continually in places, and good men and women held wide the windows of their consciousness to welcome it, striving their utmost to carry it into the thick of the fight. Many broke their hearts in the effort; but there were others, and those who fell had successors. The heart of our race never was of the stuff that can be broken. It was the strongest thing in all that tumultuous world of my youth, and I recall now the outstanding figures of men already gray and bowed by long lives of strenuous endeavour, who yet fought without pause at this time on the side of those who strove to check the mad, blind flight of the people.
London, as I entered it, was a battle-field; the perverse waste of human energy and life was frightful; but it was not quite the unredeemed chaos which it seems as we look back upon it.