This state of affairs, of course, does not help the genuine unemployed, the man who wants work and not charity. But it is a constant temptation to him to drop his self-respect and sink to the level of the men who, he finds, live just as comfortably without labour as he is able to do by steady industry.
The life of "toiling for leave to live," using up to-day for just as much reward as will allow you to be fit for work to-morrow—and that is the life of thousands—has, after all, not much attraction, considered dispassionately. The tramp in Mr. Wells's story who explained that it was followed only by people who had been "pithed"—i.e. had had their brains extracted while at school—had some grim reasonableness in his fancifulness. When honest work offers a hope of progressive betterment the enthusiasm for it is natural. When, as for too many, honest work offers nothing but a subsistence fractionally better than that of the dishonest loafer it is surprising not that there are so many but so few of the "cunning unemployed." Only a very strong innate sense of duty and self-respect can account for the fact that millions keep pressing desperately on in the ranks of the workers with no more real reward for their efforts than the pride that they have never been to the "workhouse" or taken alms from any one.
THE TOWER FROM THE TOWER BRIDGE, LOOKING WEST
Recognising that, it is possible to come away from a study even of the "submerged tenth" in England with some cheerfulness. The mistakes of the past which have allowed that inundation of misery can be rectified, and, serious as those mistakes have been, they have left the character of the English people in the main sturdy and self-respecting. Of the "submerged tenth" I think only a tenth, i.e. one per cent of the total population, is actually hopeless and helpless. The others will respond to a wiser organisation of the national life offering more opportunity and less charity. On this point I have sought the views of several clergymen working in the East End, the poor quarter of London. They were all proud, and justifiably so, of the various efforts made to salve the lot of the poor—the university settlements, the hospitals, infirmaries, nursing associations, charitable and semi-charitable dormitories, the associations for the supply of food, clothing, coal, and the like. But not one, challenged to it, could truthfully claim that the sum of all this work was remedial in any real sense of the word. Not one of them could deny that most of it directly attacked the principle of self-reliance. The wretched were kept alive, and that was all. No future was opened out for the great majority of them, and very very rarely did any future mean useful citizenship of Great Britain, but rather the export of the young citizen to some other land in the hope that it would give him a chance.
Yet all agreed that as a matter of reasonable probability most of the men who are down could be saved and are worth saving. The proportion that is absolutely hopeless was variously stated. It may be averaged, in their opinion, at 5 per cent. The other 95 per cent could be brought to useful lives, these clergymen who are close students of the matter agreed.
That leaves, in the opinion of the men who have made a life study of the subject, not my one per cent, but only one-half per cent of the total English population as hopelessly "down." It is a bad wastage when one thinks that every human creature is a temple of the Divine, but it is not so gloomy a position as most imagine. And it can, and it will be stopped.