I find, as most people do, I have no doubt, that it is very hard to realize the significance of a fact that is stated in mere abstract figures. It is only after I have translated these abstractions into terms of my own experience that I am able to grasp them. That must be my excuse here for what may seem a rather far-fetched comparison.
The Negro population of the Southern States is at present about nine million. In other words, the number of Negroes in the South is just about one fourth larger than the population of Greater London, which is something over seven million. Four fifths of this Southern Negro population still live on the plantations and in the small towns.
From time to time thoughtful and interested persons—some of them, by the way, Englishmen—have visited the Southern States, talked with the white people and looked at the Negroes. Then they have gone back and written despondently, sometimes pessimistically, about the Negro problem. I wish some of these writers might study the situation of the races in the South long enough to determine what it would be possible to do there, not with seventy nor even fifty, but with one million dollars a year, provided that money were used, not for the purpose of feeding, sheltering, or protecting the Negro population, for which it is not needed, but in educating them; in building up the public schools in the country districts; in providing a system of high schools, industrial and agricultural schools, such as exists, for example, in Denmark; in extending the demonstration farming to all the people on the land, and in encouraging the small colleges to adapt their teaching to the actual needs of the people so that in the course of time Negro education in the South could be gradually organized and coördinated into a single coherent system.
Perhaps I can illustrate in a broad way the difference in the situation of the poor man in the complex life of a great city like London and that of a similar class in the simpler conditions of a comparatively rural community, by a further comparison. The state of Alabama is nearly as large as England and Wales combined. It had, in 1900, a little more than one third the present population of what is known as "Administrative London," which means a city of 4,720,729. Of this population there were, on an average, 139,916 paupers. In Alabama, with a population in 1900 of 1,828,696, there were, in 1905, 771 paupers in almshouses, of whom 414 were white and 357 Negroes. In other words, while in London there were nearly three paupers for every one thousand of the population, in Alabama there were a little more than four paupers for every ten thousand of the population. This does not include the persons confined in asylums or those who are assisted in their homes. In Alabama the number of paupers cared for in this way is very small. As compared with the 2,000 charitable institutions in London, there were twenty such institutions in Alabama in 1904. Three of these, a hospital, an old folks' home and orphan asylum, and a school for the deaf and blind were for Negroes.
I have quoted these figures to show the contrast between conditions in a large city and a comparatively rural community. But Alabama contains three cities of considerable size, which may account for a fairly large number of its paupers, so that I suspect that if the comparison were strictly carried out it would be found that pauperism is a good deal more of a city disease than it seems.
The institutions in London to which I have referred, whether managed by private philanthropy or by the public, are mainly maintained for the sake of those who have already fallen in the struggle for existence. They are for the sick and wounded, so to speak. In recent years a movement has been steadily gaining ground which seeks to get at the source of this city disease, and by improving the conditions of city life do away to some extent with the causes of it.
The work of reorganizing the life of the poorer classes in London seems to have made a beginning some fifty or sixty years ago. The condition of the working population at that time has been described in the following words by Mr. Sidney Webb, who has made a profound study of the condition of the labouring classes in London:
Two thirds of the whole child population was growing up not only practically without schooling or religious influences of any kind, but also indescribably brutal and immoral; living amid the filth of vilely overcrowded courts, unprovided with water supply or sanitary conveniences, existing always at the lowest level of physical health, and constantly decimated by disease; incessantly under temptation by the flaring gin palaces which alone relieve the monotony of the mean streets to which they were doomed; graduating almost inevitably into vice and crime amid the now incredible street life of an unpoliced metropolis.[7]
The first thing attempted was to provide public education for those who were not able to attend private schools, and, as one writer says, "rescue the children of the abyss." It was in this rescue work that England's public schools had their origin. These schools, begun in this way, steadily gained and broadened until now London has an elaborate system of continuation, trade and technical schools, culminating in the reorganized University of London. This system is by no means perfected; it still is in process, but it gives the outlines of a broad and generous educational plan, equal in conception and organization at least to the needs of the largest city in the world.