As to the alleged dislike of the very poor to the use of soap and water, it is chiefly because the privacy essential for tubbing is simply non-existent.
Probably the lowest depth is attained, as I have said, in the common lodging-house, where all kinds of characters assemble under conditions which make innocence and decency impossible, children looking without any emotion upon sights they ought never to see, and listening to language they ought never to hear.
The victims of this result of overcrowding are human beings like ourselves, “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.”
It is not from choice that men, women, and children are thus herded worse than cattle. Necessity compels them to dwell within a certain area, especially the “docker,” who cannot afford to take a journey in search of work, while the smallness and uncertainty of their earnings, together with the high rent they pay, deprive them of the power to exist otherwise.
Figures prove little, but it is a fact that for all London the average population per acre is fifty-seven; and an idea of the extent of overcrowding in certain localities may be gathered by comparing this with that of St. George the Martyr, Southwark, which is 210; with Whitechapel, 225; and with Spitalfields, 330; the latter equivalent to crowding into the area of Grosvenor Square (six acres), tenements containing 1,980 souls, instead of 342! On the other hand, in the wealthy parts of London there is far too much room, great mansions that could comfortably accommodate scores of people being habitually left almost empty.
The moral effect of it all is terrible. Thousands of infants, ill-born, tainted, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, are growing up under conditions where purity of thought is impossible, growing up to taint future generations and undo the good work effected elsewhere in social regeneration. Why keep the main stream pure if foul rivulets be allowed to arise and pollute it again? Why make clean the outside only of the cup and platter?
But, as Cervantes says, “there is a remedy for everything but death.” And for the “submerged tenth,” who cannot move away to the suburbs, no doubt in time vast barracks built of steel with garden roofs, unsightly but utilitarian, will be created in every poor quarter, resembling the Park Row Buildings in New York, 380 feet in height, and consisting of thirty stories; or the Fisher, the Marquette, and the Champlain blocks in Chicago, of seventeen stories each.
These buildings would accommodate thousands of lodgers—British subjects only—at low rentals, under decent and sanitary conditions. While for workmen and others in receipt of fair wages cheap electric traction, enabling them to go to and from their daily task, will solve the problem of overcrowding so far as they are concerned.
Overcrowding, however, is only one out of a host of problems and questions that characterised the closing decades of the last century, and beset the opening of the present one.
We are haunted with problems, and if none existed we should probably regret it, and try to invent them. There are endless political and economic problems, the naval and military, the religious and educational, the national food supply, and with it the land and agricultural question, the labour question, and the relief of the poor, who are always with us.