The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

At the end of my long journey across Europe I returned to London. I had seen, during my visit to Denmark, some results of the reorganization of country life. In this chapter I want to tell something of what I saw and learned in London of the efforts to reconstruct the life of the Underman in the more complex conditions of a great city.

In the course of my travels through various parts of the United States, in the effort to arouse public interest in the work we are trying to do for the Negro at Tuskegee, I have frequently met persons who have inquired of me, with some anxiety, as to what, in my opinion, could be done for the city Negroes, especially that class which is entering in considerable numbers every year into the life of the larger cities in the Northern and Southern States. The people who asked this question assumed, apparently because the great majority of the Negro population lives on the plantations and in the small towns of the South, that the work of a school like the Tuskegee Institute, which is located in the centre of a large Negro farming population, must be confined to the rural Negro and the South.

In reply to these inquiries I have sometimes tried to point out that a good many of the problems of the city have their sources in the country and that, perhaps, the best way to better the situation of the city Negro is to improve the condition of the masses of the race in the country. To do this, I explained, would be to attack the evil at its root, since if country life were made more attractive, the flow of population to the city would largely cease.

What is true in this respect of the masses of the Negroes in America is equally true, as I discovered, of similar classes in Europe. Any one who will take the trouble to look into the cause of European emigration will certainly be struck with the fact that the conditions of agriculture in Europe have had a marked effect on the growth and character of American cities.

This fact suggests the close connection between country conditions and the city problem, but there is still another side to the matter. The thing that was mainly impressed upon me by my observation of the lower strata of London life and the efforts that have been made to improve it was this: That it is a great deal simpler and, in the long run, a great deal cheaper to build up and develop a people who have grown up in the wholesome air of the open country than it is to regenerate a people who have lived all or most of their lives in the fetid atmosphere of a city slum. In other words, it is easier to deal with people who are physically and morally sound than with people who, by reason of their unhealthy and immoral surroundings, have become demoralized and degenerate. The first is a problem of education; the second, one of reconstruction and regeneration.

I think the thing that helped me most to realize the extent and the difficulty of this work of regeneration in London was the knowledge that I gained while there of the multitude of institutions and agencies, of various kinds, which are engaged in this work.

I had been impressed, during my visits to Whitechapel and other portions of the East End of London, with the number of shelters, homes, refuges, and missions of all kinds which I saw advertised as I passed along Whitechapel Road. When I inquired of Rev. John Harris, organizing secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, who had at one time himself been engaged in mission work in that part of the city, whether it were possible to obtain a complete list of all the different types of charities and institutions of social betterment in London, he placed in my hands a volume of nearly seven hundred pages devoted entirely to the classification and description of the various charities, most of which were located in London.

This book, which was called the "Annual Charities Register and Digest," I have read and studied with the greatest interest. I confess that I was amazed as well at the number and variety of the different charities as at the amount of time, energy, and money necessary to keep up and maintain them.

In another volume, "London Statistics," published by the London County Council, I found the facts about London charities concisely summarized. From these books I learned that there are something like 2,035 charitable institutions of various kinds in London alone. Perhaps I can best give some idea of the character of these institutions, a number of which date back to the eighteenth century and perhaps to still earlier periods, by giving some details from these two volumes.

There are in London, for example, 112 institutions for the blind, and 143 institutions which give medical aid in one form or another, for which the total amount of money expended is about five million seven hundred thousand dollars annually. There are 214 institutions for the care of convalescents, for which the annual expenditure amounts to nearly a million and three quarters; 220 homes for children and training homes for servants, which are maintained at an annual expense of over four million dollars annually; 257 institutions for "general and specific relief," which are supported at an annual cost of nearly six millions.