Some inquiries from Mr. Liddle, the medical officer of the Whitechapel union, as to the condition of the workpeople he visited in such places as he has described, brought to notice another indirect effect of the external as well as the internal condition of the dwelling on their domestic economy and general condition.
It appeared that the persons whom he visited for the purpose of administering medical relief, were men earning, when in work, from 16s. to 20s. per week, the women earning proportionably. Yet whenever they were subjected to the frequent attacks of sickness which prevailed amongst them, they were in the most, wretched destitution: the house was bare of everything; they had no provisions and no credit, and their need for relief was most imminent. In answer to the inquiry how this was to be accounted for, inasmuch as with agricultural labourers who earned little more than half that sum, and paid nearly as much for their food, in visiting their cottages with their ministers, I had commonly observed some store of provisions; Mr. Liddle stated that in such places as those in his district, in such atmospheres, a store of provisions would not keep: everything decayed rapidly, and the workpeople consequently lived “from hand to mouth.” On inquiring as to this fact from a respectable butcher, accustomed to sell meat to persons living in such situations, he stated that—
“Meat sold on a Saturday night, in hot weather, to poor people, who have only one close room, in which they sleep, and live, and cook, will certainly turn before the Sunday morning; when, if it were kept in the butcher’s shop, or in a well-ventilated place, it would be in as good a condition on the Monday morning. There is a great deal of loss of meat in consequence of the want of ventilation and bad condition of the dwellings of the poorer classes. The butter kept in such places sooner becomes rancid, and the bread dry and disagreeable.”
Here, then, we have from the one agent, a close and polluted atmosphere, two different sets of effects; the one set here noticed engendering improvidence, expense, and waste,—the other, the depressing effects of external and internal miasma on the nervous system, tending to incite the habitual use of ardent spirits; both tending to precipitate this population into disease and misery.
The familiarity with the sickness and death constantly present in the crowded and unwholesome districts, appears to re-act as another concurrent, cause in aggravation of the wretchedness and vice in which they are plunged. Seeing the apparent uncertainty of the morrow, the inhabitants really take no heed of it, and abandon themselves with the recklessness and avidity of common soldiers in a war to whatever gross enjoyment comes within their reach. All the districts I visited, where the rate of sickness and mortality was high, presented, as might be expected, a proportionate amount of severe cases of destitute orphanage and widowhood; and the same places were marked by excessive recklessness of the labouring population. In Dumfries, for example, it is estimated, that the cholera, swept away one-eleventh part of the population. Until recently, the town had not recovered the severe effects of the visitation, and the condition of the orphans was most deplorable. Amongst young artisans who were earning from 16s. to 18s. a-week, I was informed that there were very few who made any reserves against the casualties of sickness. I was led to ask the provost what number of bakers’ shops there were? “Twelve,” was his answer. And what number of whiskey-shops may the town possess? “Seventy-nine” was the reply. If we might rely on the inquiries made of working-men when Dr. Arnott and I went through the wynds of Edinburgh, their consumption of spirits bore almost the like proportion to the consumption of wholesome food. We observed to Captain Stuart, the superintendent of the police at Edinburgh, in our inspection of the wynds, that life appeared to be of little value, and was likely to be held cheap in such spots. He stated, in answer, that a short time ago a man had been executed for the murder of his wife in a fit of passion in the very room we had accidentally entered, and where we were led to make the observation. At a short distance from that spot, and amidst others of this class of habitation, were those which had been the scenes of the murders by Burke and Hare. Yet amidst these were the residences of working men engaged in regular industry. The indiscriminate mixture of workpeople and their children in the immediate vicinity, and often in the same rooms with persons whose character was denoted by the question and answer more than once exchanged, “When were you last washed?” “When I was last in prison,” was only one mark of the entire degradation to which they had been brought. The working-classes living in these districts were equally marked by the abandonment, of every civil or social regulation. Asking some children in one of the rooms of the wynds in which they swarmed in Glasgow what were their names, they hesitated to answer, when one of the inmates said, they called them ——, mentioning some nicknames. “The fact is,” observed Captain Miller, the superintendent of the police, “they really have no names. Within this range of buildings I have no doubt I should be able to find a thousand children who have no names whatever, or only nicknames, like dogs.” There were found amidst the occupants, labourers earning wages undoubtedly sufficient to have paid for comfortable tenements, men and women who were intelligent, and so far as could be ascertained, had received the ordinary education which should have given better tastes and led to better habits. My own observations have been confirmed by the statement of Mr. Sheriff Alison, of Glasgow, that in the great manufacturing towns of Scotland, “in the contest with whiskey, in their crowded population, education has been entirely overthrown.” The ministers, it will be seen, make similar reports from the rural districts. On the observation of other districts, and the comparison of the habits of the same workmen in town and country, it will be seen that I consider that the use of the whiskey and the prostration of the education and moral habits for which the Scottish labourers have been distinguished is, to a considerable extent, attributable to the surrounding physical circumstances, including the effects of the bad ventilation. The labourers presented to our notice in the condition described, in the crowded districts, were almost all Scotch. It is common to ascribe the extreme of misery and vice wholly to the Irish portion of the population of the towns in Scotland. A short inspection on the spot would correct this error. Mr. Baird, in his report on the sanitary condition of the poor of Glasgow, observes that “the bad name of the poor Irish had been too long attached to them.” Dr. Cowan, of Glasgow, stated that “From ample opportunities of observation, they appeared to him to exhibit much less of that squalid misery and addiction to the use of ardent spirits than the Scotch of the same grade.” Instances were indeed stated to us, where the Irish were preferred for employment from their superior steadiness and docility; and Mr. Stuart, the Factory Inspector for Scotland, states, that “instances are now occurring of a preference being given to them as workers in the flax factories on account of their regular habits, and that very significant hints have been given by extensive factory owners, that Irish workmen will be selected unless the natives of the place, and other persons employed by them, relinquish the prevailing habits of intemperance.” Dr. Scott Alison, in his report on Tranent, has described the population in receipt of high wages, but living under similar influences, as prone to passionate excitement, and as apt instruments for political discontents; their moral perceptions appeared to have been obliterated, and they might be said to be characterised by a “ferocious indocility which makes them prompt to wrong and violence, destroys their social nature, and transforms them into something little better than wild beasts.”
It is to be regretted that the coincidence of pestilence and moral disorder is not confined to one part of the island, nor to any one race of the population. The overcrowding and the removal of what may be termed the architectural barriers or protections of decency and propriety, and the causes of physical deterioration in connexion with the moral deterioration, are also fearfully manifest in the districts in England, which, at the time to which the evidence refers, were in a state of prosperity.
Mr. Baker, in his report on the condition of the population, after giving an instance of the contrast presented by the working people living in better dwellings, situated in better cleansed neighbourhoods (to which I shall advert when submitting the evidence in respect to preventive measures), describes the population living in houses—
“With broken panes in every window-frame, and filth and vermin in every nook. With the walls unwhitewashed for years, black with the smoke of foul chimneys, without water, with corded bed-stocks for beds, and sacking for bed-clothing, with floors unwashed from year to year, without out-offices, * * * * while without, there are streets, elevated a foot, sometimes two, above the level of the causeway, by the accumulation of years, and stagnant puddles here and there, with their fœtid exhalations, causeways broken and dangerous, ash-places choked up with filth, and excrementitious deposits on all sides as a consequence, undrained, unpaved, unventilated, uncared-for by any authority but the landlord, who weekly collects his miserable rents from his miserable tenants.
“Can we wonder that such places are the hot-beds of disease, or that it obtains, upon constitutions thus liberally predisposed to receive it, and forms the mortality which Leeds exhibits. Adult life, exposed to such miasmata, gives way. How much more then infant life, when ushered into, and attempted to be reared in, such obnoxious atmospheres. On the moral habits similar effects are produced. An inattention on the part of the local authorities to the state of the streets diminishes year by year the respectability of their occupiers. None dwell in such localities but to whom propinquity to employment is absolutely essential. Those who might advocate a better state of things, depart; and of those who remain, the one-half, by repeated exhibitions of indecency and vulgarity, and indeed by the mere fact of neighbourship, sink into the moral degradation which is natural to the other, and vicious habits and criminal propensities precede the death which these combinations prepare.”
No education as yet commonly given appears to have availed against such demoralizing circumstances as those described; but the cases of moral improvement of a population, by cleansing, draining, and the improvement of the internal and external conditions of the dwellings, of which instances will be presented, are more numerous and decided, though there still occur instances of persons in whom the love of ardent spirits has gained such entire possession as to have withstood all such means of retrieving them. The most experienced public officers acquainted with the condition of the inferior population of the towns would agree in giving the first place in efficiency and importance to the removal of what may be termed the physical barriers to improvement, and that as against such barriers moral agencies have but a remote chance of success.