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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

London already has, for example, 327 night schools, with 127,130 pupils, in which young men and women who have left the day schools may continue their studies at night or perfect themselves in some branch of their trade.

Cooking, household management, laundry work, and iron work are taught in more than half the elementary schools of London. The London County Council supports fourteen schools which give instruction in the arts and crafts, and in the trades. In addition, the Government lends its aid to something like sixty-one other institutions, with an attendance of over 6,000, in which technical and trade education of some kind is given. A number of these schools, like the Shoreditch Technical Institute and the Brixton School of Building, are devoted to a single trade or group of allied trades. In the Shoreditch Institute boys are fitted for the furniture trade. Half their time is given to academic studies and half to work in the trade. At the Brixton School instruction is given in bricklaying and masonry, plumbing, painting, architecture, building, and surveying. In other schools pupils are given instruction in photo-engraving and lithographing, in fine needlework and engraving, bookbinding, and in many other crafts requiring a high grade of intelligence and skill.

With the growth of these schools the idea has been gaining ground that it is not sufficient to rescue those who, through misfortune or disease, are unable to support themselves; that on the contrary, instead of waiting until an individual has actually fallen a victim to what I have called the "city disease," measures of prevention be taken against pauperism as against other diseases.

Along with this changed point of view has come the insight that the efficiency of the nation as a whole depends upon its ability to make the most of the capacities of the whole population.

"Indeed," as Mr. Webb, the writer I have already quoted, says, "we now see with painful clearness that we have in the long run, for the maintenance of our preëminent industrial position in the world, nothing to depend on except the brains of our people. Public education has insensibly, therefore, come to be regarded, not as a matter of philanthropy, undertaken for the sake of the children benefited, but, as a matter of national concern, undertaken in the interest of the community as a whole."

After the schools, the next direction in which an attempt was made to improve the condition of the poor in London was in the matter of housing. The Board of Works first and the London County Council afterward began some forty years ago buying vast areas in the crowded parts of London, clearing them of the disreputable buildings, and then offering them for sale again to persons who would agree to erect on them sanitary dwellings for the working classes. The Metropolitan Board of Works, for example, purchased forty-two acres in different parts of the city for clearance. After the buildings had been torn down and the sites resold, it was estimated that the net cost would be about £1,320,619 or about $6,603,395. There lived on this area 22,872 persons, so that the net cost of cleaning up this area and moving the population into better quarters was something like $281 for each individual inhabitant.

Then the London County Council took up the work and it decided to begin building its own houses. Finally, a law was passed that the buildings so created should rent for more than the rents prevailing in the district and should pay the cost of maintenance, 3 per cent. on the capital invested.

On these terms the Metropolitan Board of Works and the London County Council have cleared in various parts of Central London an area of nearly eighty-six acres, containing a population of 41,584, at a cost which averages about $250 per person. On the property thus acquired the London County Council had in 1907 erected 8,223 tenements with 22,331 rooms. At this time, 1907, there were projected dwellings containing a total of 28,000 rooms, which, with those already erected, make a total of over 50,000 rooms. These tenements rent on an average of about 70 cents a week per room, so that the city of Greater London has an annual income of nearly $760,000 from its rents alone, on which the city earned in 1901, after all charges were paid, a profit of $10,000.

At first the County Council merely sought to replace the buildings which it removed, and the new buildings occupied the site of the older ones. On or near Boundary Street, in the neighbourhood of Bethnal Green, twenty-two acres were cleared of slums and covered with model dwellings, provided with wash houses, club rooms and every modern appliance for health and comfort. The sad thing about it was that after the buildings were completed and occupied it was found that only eleven of the former inhabitants remained. They had poured down into slums in the older part of the city and increased the population in those already overcrowded regions.