What can be expected of human beings, crowded in such miserable habitations, living in filth and squalor, and often pinched with hunger? Not only is refinement impossible, but comfort, or even decency. What manly courage would not give way, sapped by the deadly poison of such an air? Who wonders that so many rush to the gin-shop to snatch a moment of excitement or forgetfulness? What feminine delicacy could stand the foul and loathsome contact of such brutal degradation? Yet this is the way in which tens, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the population of London live.
But it is at night that these low quarters are most fearful. Then the population turns into the streets, which are brilliantly lighted up by the flaring gas-jets. Then the gin-shops are in their glory, crowded by the lowest and most wretched specimens of humanity—men and women in rags—old, gray-headed men and haggard women, and young girls,—and even children, learning to be imps of wickedness almost as soon as they are born. After a few hours of this excitement they reel home to their miserable dens. And then each wretched room becomes more hideous than before,—for drinking begets quarrelling; and, cursing and swearing and fighting, the wretched creatures at last sink exhausted on the floor, to forget their misery in a few hours of troubled sleep.
Such is a true, but most inadequate, picture of one side of London. Who that sees it, or even reads of it, can wonder that so many of these "victims of civilization," finding human hearts harder than the stones of the street, seek refuge in suicide? I never cross London Bridge without recalling Hood's "Bridge of Sighs," and stopping to lean over the parapet, thinking of the tragedies which those "dark arches" have witnessed, as poor, miserable creatures, mad with suffering, have rushed here and thrown themselves over into "the black-flowing river"[2] beneath, eager to escape
"Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of the world!"
Such is the dreadful cancer which is eating at the heart of London—poverty and misery, ending in vice and crime, in despair and death. It is a fearful spectacle. But is there any help for it? Can anything be done to relieve this gigantic human misery? Or is the case desperate, beyond all hope or remedy?
Of course there are many schemes of reformation and cure. Some think it must come by political instrumentality, by changes in the laws; others have no hope but in a social regeneration, or reconstruction of society, others still rely only on moral and religious influences.
There has arisen in Europe, within the last generation, a multitude of philosophers who have dreamed that it was possible so to reorganize or reconstruct society, to adjust the relations of labor and capital, as to extinguish poverty; so that there shall be no more poor, no more want. Sickness there may be, disease, accident, and pain, but the amount of suffering will be reduced to a minimum; so that at least there shall be no unnecessary pain, none which it is possible for human skill or science to relieve. Elaborate works have been written, in which the machinery is carefully adjusted, and the wheels so oiled that there is no jar or friction. These schemes are very beautiful; alas! that they should be mere creations of the fancy. The apparatus is too complicated and too delicate, and generally breaks to pieces in the very setting up. The fault of all these social philosophies is that they ignore the natural selfishness of man, his pride, avarice, and ambition. Every man wants the first place in the scale of eminence. If men were morally right—if they had Christian humility or self-abnegation, and each were willing to take the lowest place—then indeed might these things be. But until then, we fear that all such schemes will be splendid failures.
In France, where they have been most carefully elaborated, and in some instances tried, they have always resulted disastrously, sometimes ending in horrible scenes of blood, as in the Reign of Terror in the first Revolution, and recently in the massacres of the Commune. No government on earth can reconstruct society, so as to prevent all poverty and suffering. Still the State can do much by removing obstacles out of the way. It need not be itself the agent of oppression, and of inflicting needless suffering. This has been the vice of many governments—that they have kept down the poor by laying on them burdens too heavy to bear, and so crushing the life out of their exhausted frames. In England the State can remove disabilities from the working man; it can take away the exclusive privileges of rank and title, and place all classes on the same level before the law. Thus it can clear the field before every man, and give him a chance to rise, if he has it in him—if he has talent, energy, and perseverance.