That all the luxury and congestion of wealth in the head of the body corporate, while its lowest limbs are in rags and pallid mortification, should be permitted by the head, blinded by plethora, and peacefully endured by the limbs, dispirited by inanition, is an astounding marvel. But there are twinges of pain now and then. The very quiet is only that of syncope, and any day it may be broken by a wild and furious paroxysm. Unless the permission of this evil by the head ceases, then the endurance of it by the limbs will cease.
If the rich are not mingled with the wretched, they are at least entangled with them, and by knots that cannot be untied, and will not be cut. The thief indeed, and the burglar, and more lately the lazy vagabond, and now the assassin, have forced us to consider them; and we even attend to the drunkard, provided he pleads for notice by rolling in our path.
Perhaps at last the wretched also will arrest us.
Is not the time come yet to rouse up head, and heart, and hand, to do more than we have even attempted, and to raise at the least the appearance of our lowest classes to the respectability now attained in countries we are apt to despise?
What is the specific? I have no new one, and no new reason for the old one, but it is easy enough to find tools to work with in this field, if only we are persuaded that work has to be done and we are willing to take our share. Numbers do this, and nobly, but far too few, and much is done, but not half enough. Thousands are yet idle here, who will not listen to God or their conscience or even their instinct in the matter, who live comfortably apart from the evil places, and so hear only now and then a message from the dying wafted on the sable wings of cholera or typhus. Is it not shabby this, to shirk their share of the work and the trouble, and to leave it to be done by softer hearts and a national purse?
It is these, who are moved neither by religion, nor humanity, nor self-respect, that a downright scolding may perhaps stir up; and if we can show them that the state of our lowest classes is a national shame, that we are beaten as in a battle and distanced in a race, then they will soon find the means by which national honour is to be retrieved. Half-a-dozen Englishmen are in danger of death in Africa, and we spend millions of money because they are Britons, and to sustain the British name; but thousands of Britons are living in wretchedness or dying in misery just far enough from our doors not to be seen, and less heard of than if they were in Zululand—to leave them as they now are is a scandalous national disgrace which every true Englishman who knows the facts is ashamed of and which, even if he ignores them at home, he is forced to feel abroad by the taunts of strangers.
Already we wonder that we ever kept the Thames as a common sewer; our sons will wonder, some day, that their fathers had a great human sink in every great town reeking out crime, disease, and disloyalty on the whole nation. I have seen the serfs in Russia, the slaves in Africa, the Jews in Asia, and the negroes in America; but there are crowds of people in England in a far worse plight than these—their very nearness to light, and happiness, and comfort, makes their misery more disgraceful.
National honour may be a lower motive to work with than love to Christ or love to man; but it moves more minds than either of these, and on a scale large enough to relieve us from a national disgrace which will cling to the nation until the nation rises in shamed earnest to shake it off.
CHAPTER V.
Cool—Fishwives—Iron-bound coast—Etretat—Ripples—Pilot-book—Hollow water—Undecided—Stomach law—Becalmed—Cape la Hève—The breeze—Havre de Grâce—Crazy.