London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

And here lies the great wrong of pauper labour. It saddles the poor with the maintenance of their poorer brethren, while the rich not only contribute nothing to their support, but are made still richer by the increased cheapness resulting from the depreciation of labour and their consequent ability to obtain a greater quantity of commodities for the same amount of money.

In illustration of this argument let us say the wages of 600 independent scavagers amount, at 15s. a week each the year through, to 23,400l. per annum; and let us say, moreover, that the keep of 400 paupers amounts, at 5s. a week each, to, altogether, 5200l.; hence the total annual expense to the several metropolitan parishes for cleansing the streets and maintaining 400 paupers would be 23,400l. + 5200l. = 28,600l.

If, however, the 400 paupers be set to scavaging work, and made to do something for their keep, one of two things must follow: (1) either the 400 extra hands will receive their share of the 23,400l. devoted to the payment of the operative scavagers, in which case the wages of each of the regular hands will be reduced from 15s. to 9s. a week; hence the maintenance of the paupers will be saddled upon the 600 independent operatives, who will lose no less than 9360l. per annum, while the ratepayers will be saved the maintenance of the 400 paupers and so gain 5200l. per annum by the change; (2) or else 400 of the self-supporting operatives must be thrown out of work, in which case the displaced labourers will lose no less than 15,600l., while the ratepayers will gain upwards of 5000l.

The reader is now, I believe, in a position to comprehend the wrong done to the self-supporting scavagers by the employment of pauper labour in the cleansing of the streets.

The preparation of the material of the roads of a parish seems, as far as the metropolis is concerned, at one time to have supplied the chief “test,” to which parishes have resorted, as regards the willingness to labour on the part of the able-bodied applicants for relief. When the casual wards of the workhouses were open for the reception of all vagrants who sought a night’s shelter, each tramper was required to break so many stones in the morning before receiving a certain allowance of bread, soup, or what not for his breakfast; and he then might be received again into the shelter of this casual asylum. In some parishes the wards were open without the test of stone-breaking, and there was a crowded resort to them, especially during the prevalence of the famine in Ireland and the immigration of the Irish peasants to England. The favourite resort of the vagrants was Marylebone workhouse, and Irish immigrants very frequently presented slips of paper on which some tramper whom they had met with on their way had written “Marylebone workhouse,” as the best place at which they could apply, and these the simple Irish offered as passports for admission!

Gradually, the asylum of these wards, with or without labour tests, was discontinued, and in one where the labour test used to be strongly insisted upon—in St. Pancras—a school for pauper children has been erected on the site of the stone-yard.

This labour test was unequal when applied to all comers; for what was easy work to an agricultural labourer, a railway excavator, a quarryman, or to any one used to wield a hammer, was painful and blistering to a starving tailor. Nor was the test enforced by the overseers or regarded by the paupers as a proof of willingness to work, but simply as a punishment for poverty, and as a means of deterring the needy from applying for relief. To make labour a punishment, however, is not to destroy, but really to confirm, idle habits; it is to give a deeper root to the vagrant’s settled aversion to work. “Well, I always thought it was unpleasant,” the vagabond will say to himself “that working for one’s bread, and now I’m convinced of it!” Again, in many of the workhouses the labour to which the paupers were set was of a manifestly unremunerative character, being work for mere work’s sake; and to apply people to unproductive labour is to destroy all the ordinary motives to toil—to take away the only stimulus to industry, and remove the very will to work which the labour test was supposed to discover[22].

The labour test, then, or setting the poor to work as a proof of their willingness to labour, appears to be as foolish as it is vicious; the objections to it being—(1) the inequality of the test applied to different kinds of work-people; (2) the tendency of it to confirm rather than weaken idle habits by making labour inordinately repulsive; (3) the removal of the ordinary stimulus to industry by the unproductiveness of the work to which the poor are generally applied.

And now, having dealt with the subject of parish labour as a test of the willingness to work on the part of the applicants for relief, I will proceed to deal with that portion of the work itself which is connected with the cleansing of the streets.

And first as to the employment of paupers at all in the streets. If pauperism be a disgrace, then it is unjust to turn a man into the public thoroughfares, wearing the badge of beggary, to be pointed at and scorned for his poverty, especially when we are growing so particularly studious of our criminals that we make them wear masks to prevent even their faces being seen[23]. Nor is it consistent with the principles of an enlightened national morality that we should force a body of honest men to labour upon the highways, branded with a degrading garb, like convicts. Neither is it wise to do so, for the shame of poverty soon becomes deadened by the repeated exposure to public scorn; and thus the occasional recipient of parish relief is ultimately converted into the hardened and habitual pauper. “Once a pauper always a pauper,” I was assured was the parish rule; and here lies the rationale of the fact. Not long ago this system of employing badged paupers to labour in the public thoroughfares was carried to a much more offensive extent than it is even at present. At one time the pauper labourers of a certain parish had the attention of every passer-by attracted to them while at their work, for on the back of each man’s garb—a sort of smock-frock—was marked, with sufficient prominence, “Clerkenwell. Stop it!” This public intimation that the labourers were not only paupers, but regarded as thieves, and expected to purloin the parish dress they wore, attracted public attention, and was severely commented upon at a meeting. The “Stop it!” therefore was cancelled, and the frocks are now merely lettered “Clerkenwell.” Before the alteration the men very generally wore the garment inside out.