For this room, with its advantages, the widow paid four and sixpence a week; the walls were mildewed and streaming with damp; the boards as you trod upon them made the slushing noise of a plank spread across a mud puddle in a brickfield; foul within and foul without, these people paid the rent of it gladly, and perhaps thanked God for the luck of having it. Rooms for the poor earning precarious livelihoods are too hard to get and too much in demand now for a widow woman to give up one just because of the trifling inconvenience of overhearing a few outrages and murders.
One word more on this shady subject and we will get out into the light again. I have spoken of the familiarity of the children of the poor with all manner of wickedness and crime. Of all the evils arising from this one-room system there is perhaps none greater than the utter destruction of innocence in the young. A moment's thought will enable the reader to appreciate the evils of it. But if it is bad in the case of a respectable family, how much more terrible is it when the children are familiarized with actual immorality!
Wait outside while we knock at this door.
Knock, knock!—No answer!
Knock, knock, knock!
A child's voice answers, 'What is it?'
We give the answer—the answer which has been our 'open, sesame' everywhere—and after a pause a woman opens a door a little and asks us to wait a moment. Presently we are admitted. A woman pleasing looking and with a certain refinement in her features holds the door open for us. She has evidently made a hurried toilet and put on an ulster over her night attire. She has also put a brass chain and locket round her neck. There is a little rouge left on her cheeks and a little of the burnt hairpin colour left under her eyes from overnight. At the table having their breakfast are two neat and clean little girls of seven and eight.
They rise and curtsey as we enter. We ask them a few questions, and they answer intelligently—they are at the Board School and are making admirable progress—charming children, interesting and well-behaved in every way. They have a perfect knowledge of good and evil—one of them has taken a Scripture prize—and yet these two charming and intelligent little girls live in that room night and day with their mother, and this is the den to which she snares her dissolute prey.
I would gladly have passed over this scene in silence, but it is one part of the question which directly bears on the theory of State interference. It is by shutting our eyes to evils that we allow them to continue unreformed so long. I maintain that such cases as these are fit ones for legislative protection. The State should have the power of rescuing its future citizens from such surroundings, and the law which protects young children from physical hurt should also be so framed as to shield them from moral destruction.
The worst effect of the present system of Packing the Poor is the moral destruction of the next generation.