We have passed through the period in which it was necessary to arouse general attention, and no one who reads the public journals can be ignorant of the main facts of the case. The two great questions to which reformers have now to find a practical answer are these: What scheme will release this class of property from vestry control and compel a more efficient carrying out of the ample powers the authorities now possess? and in what way can we save the inhabitants of the scheduled areas from the loss, the misery, and the further degradation which have been the result of wholesale evictions hitherto?
CHAPTER IV.
It has been asserted by several writers who have joined in the present controversy concerning the Housing of the Poor that drink and unthrift are the main causes of the existing distress, and some go so far as to say that the masses live to drink, and that consequently no legislation can improve their condition.
This is a pessimist view of the question which is by no means warranted by the facts. To deny that the poor in the rookeries drink and are unthrifty would be foolish. But I venture to assert, with a knowledge of the life-histories of hundreds of these 'outcasts,' that the drinking habits of a large percentage are due to the circumstances under which they are at present forced to live. Temptation surely enters as largely into drunkenness as into any other vice, and in the foul and fetid courts and alleys of London the temptation to every kind of vice is never absent. The complete lack of home-comforts, the necessity of dulling every finer sense in order to endure the surrounding horrors, the absence of anything to enter into competition with the light and glitter of the gin-palace, and the cheapness of drink in comparison with food—all these contribute to make the poor easy victims of intemperance. Thousands of people do undoubtedly drink for drinking's sake, but that is a phase of intemperance which is by no means confined to one class. Among the poor the constant war with fate, the harassing conditions of daily life, and the apparent hopelessness of trying to improve their conditions, do undoubtedly tend to make them 'drown their sorrows' and rush for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the publican dispenses at so much a glass. This is no general assertion; it is a conclusion arrived at with a knowledge of the circumstances which first led many of the most notorious drunkards of a slum to contract their evil habits.
Ask any of the temperance workers in the viler districts, and they will tell you how they have watched hundreds of decent folk come into a bad neighbourhood and gradually sink under the degrading influences of their surroundings. There are few men who have worked to keep their brethren from the clutches of the drink-fiend who would not gladly hail the advent of air and light and cleanliness, and the enforcement of sanitary laws, as the best weapons with which to do doughty deeds in their combats with intemperance among the poor.
Having said so much, I am prepared to admit that drink is a contributing cause to the present condition of the poor. It is even, in a certain degree, a cause of overcrowding.
The Bishop of Bedford, in a recent speech, expressed a desire to have the drink statistics of a slum. I cannot give figures, but I can give facts. The Bishop expressed a belief that the revelation would astonish the public. I am quite sure that it will.
More than one-fourth of the daily earnings of the denizens of the slums goes over the bars of the public-houses and gin-palaces. To study the drink phase of this burning question, let us take the districts from which I have drawn the facts and figures I have previously submitted.