Can one blame them if, knowing their hard lot and the little reward the most virtuous life can bring them, they sink into the temptations spread around them? Remember that, for half their miseries, half their illness and premature decay, and much of the disease which cripples and carries off their children, the shameful way in which they are housed, and the callous neglect of their rights as citizens by the governing class, is responsible.
They are handicapped in the race from start to finish. And, under these circumstance, such charity, such humanity, and such patience and long-suffering, as exist among them, are indeed worthy of admiration.
The natural instinct of man is to evil, and when I read in little tracts and clerical addresses of the awful depravity of the 'heathen in our midst,' I am tempted to ask what the reverend gentlemen and shocked philanthropists expect. I say, with a full knowledge of their surroundings, that the lower classes of our great cities are entitled to the highest credit for not being twenty times more depraved than they are.
They are a class which contains the germs of all that goes to make up good citizenship, and the best proof of it is the patience with which they endure the systematic neglect of their more fortunate fellow-countrymen. In any other land but ours, the mighty mass of helots would long ago have broken their bonds and swept over the land in vast revolutionary hordes. They did not always know their power, and had not enough knowledge to appreciate their wrongs. Education is opening their eyes, and their lips will not be slow to express their new-born sentiments. It will be well to meet the movement half-way, and yield to them that reform and humane recognition which some day they may all too noisily demand.
Here am I up on a platform and thumping away at the table and spouting what I have no doubt many excellent persons will think is rank communism, though it is nothing of the sort. Peccavi, I apologize. The fumes of the misery I have passed through the last two months have got into my head and made me talk wildly. Let me resume my labour more in the character of a missionary or special correspondent, and leave oratory and denunciation to the Sunday morning Wilkeses of Battersea Park.
We have no business out-of-doors at all—let us study another domestic interior. The scene, a street which lies cheek by jowl with the quarter where the world of fashion rolls nightly in comfortable carriages to enjoy theatrical and operatic performances in half-guinea stalls and three-guinea boxes, and where fabulous fortunes are made by those who can make Mr. and Mrs. Dives weep at imaginary woes or laugh at a merry jest or comic antic.
From such a scene as I am going to ask you to witness, thousands who crowd a theatre nightly to see a woman's head battered out against a sofa, or a young man suffocate himself with the fumes of charcoal, would shrink back in disgust. But you will not, for if you have gone so far with us as this journey, you are, I feel sure, convinced that no good can come of hiding the worst phase of a question which is only dragged forward here that it may, by the very horror of its surroundings, arrest attention and so secure that discussion which must always precede a great scheme of reformation.
Come with me to this place. Our way lies through Clare Market, so don't go alone, for it is a dangerous neighbourhood to strangers. Come with me through strange sights and sounds, past draggled, tipsy women crowding the footway, and hulking fellows whose blasphemies fill the tainted air; pick your way carefully through the garbage and filth that litter the streets, and stop in this narrow thoroughfare which is but a stone's-throw from many a stage that holds the mirror up to nature, and yet would shrink from holding such a scene as this.
We have stopped at a marine-store shop—we enter the passage and find our way up to the third floor. Here in a single room live a man, his wife, and three children. There has been an inquest on a baby who has died—poisoned by the awful atmosphere it breathed. We have stumbled up the dark crazy staircase at the risk of our limbs, to see this room in which the family live and sleep and eat, because in its way it is a curiosity. It has been the scene of an incident which one would hardly believe possible in this Christian country. For days in this foul room the body of a dead baby had to lie because the parish had no mortuary. Not only did the corpse have to lie here for days among the living, but on that little table, propped against the window, the surgeon had to perform a post-mortem examination.
Think of it, you who cry out that the sufferings of these people are sensationally exaggerated—the dead baby was cut open in the one room where the mother and the other little ones, its brothers and sisters, lived and ate and slept. And why?