I know no class among the Negroes in America, however, with whom I could compare the man at the bottom in England. Whatever one may say of the Negro in America, he is not, as a rule, a beggar. It is very rarely that any one sees a black hand stretched out for alms. One does see, to be sure, too many idle and loafing Negroes standing on the street corners and around the railway stations in the South, but the Negro is not, as a rule, a degenerate. If he is at the bottom in America, it is not because he has gone backward and sunk down, but because he has never risen.
Another thing in regard to the Negro: although he is frequently poor, he is never without hope and a certain joy in living. No hardship he has yet encountered, either in slavery or in freedom, has robbed the Negro of the desire to live. The race constantly grew and increased in slavery, and it has considerably more than doubled in freedom. There are some people among the members of my race who complain about the hardships which the Negro suffers, but none of them yet, so far as I know, has ever recommended "race suicide" as a solution of the race problem.
I mention this because I found just the contrary to be the case in England. I do not think that anything I saw or heard while I was in England gave me a more poignant impression of the hardships of the labouring man in England than the discovery that one of the most widely read weekly papers in England, under the caption of "The White Slaves of Morality," was making a public campaign in favour of reducing the size of the families among the working classes.
The articles I refer to, which were written by a woman, were a protest, on the one hand, against the clergy because they taught that it would be immoral for women to refuse to have children, and, on the other hand, against the physicians who withheld from these women the knowledge by which they might be able to limit the size of their families. These articles were followed from week to week by letters purporting to come from working men and women telling of the heartbreaking struggle they were making to support their children on the wages they were able to earn.
What made these articles the more startling was the fact that, at the very time when they were proposing to the English labourer what ex-President Roosevelt has defined as "race suicide," thousands of immigrants from the south of Europe were pouring into London every year to take the places left vacant by the recession of the native Anglo-Saxon.
On my previous visit to England I had been struck by what seemed to me the cold and formal character of the English newspapers. It seemed to me that they were wholly lacking in human interest. Upon my last visit my opinion in regard to the London newspapers was considerably altered. A careful study of the daily newspaper, I found, will repay any one who wants to get an insight into social conditions in England.
I had not been in London more than a day or two, for example, when my attention was attracted to the following item in one of the morning papers:
STARVING FAMILY
CORONER'S APPEAL TO THE PUBLIC FOR AID
Telling of a terrible case of starvation in the Stoke Newington Coroner's Court, Dr. Wynn Westcott, the coroner, asked the press to bring a deserving case before the notice of the charitable public.
He said that he had held an inquest upon a three-weeks-old baby which had died of starvation. Its father had had no regular work for three years, and only a little casual work in that time. There was so little money that the mother, Mrs. Attewell, of White Hart Street, Stoke Newington, was half starved too. She had only had a crust of bread to sustain her on the day her child died, although she had done nine and a half hours' washing to assist the home.
The home was perfectly clean, although practically destitute of furniture. It was a most deserving case.
After reading this item I began studying the papers more closely, and I was surprised at the frequency with which items of this kind occurred. I learned that the Local Government Board, which is represented in the English Cabinet by Mr. John Burns, has issued since 1871 an annual report, or return, as it is called, of the cases in which, upon formal investigation by a coroner's jury, it appears that the persons came to their death in London as a result of starvation. I obtained a copy of the return for 1908, in which are included the statistics on starvation not merely for London but for the rest of England and Wales.
The forms issued to coroners were explicit. They provided that the return should include only cases in which the jury found that death was brought about by starvation or privation due to destitution. Cases in which death was caused by cold, starvation, exposure, etc., unconnected with destitution, were not entered in this return. Of the one hundred and twenty-five cases of starvation reported, fifty-two occurred in London. In eleven cases death was described as due to starvation in conjunction with some other cause—that is to say, disease, drink, exposure, or self-neglect. In eighty of the one hundred and twenty-five cases no application was made for poor relief, or application was made only when the deceased had been in a dying condition.