The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

Follow to their homes these more pathetic figures of a London crowd. You need not do so literally, for more observant and sympathetic visitors have been there before you, and they told London long ago, as far as London was willing to hear, how the majority of its citizens live. Mr. Booth’s book, Life and Labour in London, had better be suppressed when its work is done, lest the men and women of a more humane age learn too much about us; also Mr. Rowntree’s book, which shows this same fetid poverty lying at the feet of a superb minster, the symbol of ages of ecclesiastical wealth and power; and many other books. Let me summarise the relevant record of the natural history of London.

We may begin with the lowest depth, with life as it is lived in some of the streets which still linger about Covent Garden, and in east and west and south. We are beginning to see the grim humour of tolerating the existence of these hotbeds of corruption under the very shadow of our marble palaces of justice and our marble hotels for millionaires, and we are destroying them; but the life remains still in sufficient quantity to fill a large town. In tenements of this order fifteen rooms out of twenty are indescribably filthy. Legions of bugs lurk by day behind the faded rags of ancient wallpaper or in the crevices of the unwashed floor, or even venture forth as securely as if they were conscious of free citizenship in these places. The “windows” are a rough mosaic of dirty glass and roughly plastered paper. The ceiling is pale black, the floor filthy. A table, one or two dilapidated chairs, a kind of bed—the “landlord” would, in most cases, not raise two shillings on the lot—and an entire family of ragged, vermin-eaten human beings fill this foul box, which is often only eight or ten feet square.

These people are thieves, cheap prostitutes, hawkers, porters, charwomen, flower-sellers, ragmen—the most pitiful of the irregulars which we suffer, age after age, to live and breed and die beyond the extreme fringe of our industrial army. Sometimes they have nearly as much food to eat as a workhouse-idler: generally not. Drink—the vile mixtures of the cheaper public-house—they have more constantly; and their children are not in their teens before they are familiar with all the vice and crime and brutality which seven out of ten of these rooms breed as naturally as they breed lice or bugs. In winter the doors and windows are sealed, and men, women, and children huddle together or, at times, crouch over a few lighted sticks. And year by year, century by century, babies are ushered into this underworld in edifying abundance, to live its ghastly life until the yellow frame and dull brain are worn out.

Shocking, you will say, but happily rare. Do you know that, according to the best authorities, 50,000 men, women, and children in London alone live in this atmosphere of squalor and brutality and chronic hunger?

Let us pass to the next higher circle of the modern Inferno—the category of casual or very badly paid labour and chronic poverty, the makers of your cheap furniture and clothes and brushes, your match-boxes and chocolate-boxes, the hawkers and costers and regular porters and dockers. Now there are generally two rooms to each family, but the vermin still thrive in more than half of them, and the rooms are filthy, and the children breathe an air that is foul with drink and cursing and the most open and gross sexuality: not now in fifteen cases out of twenty, it is true, but in ten cases out of twenty. Food is habitually insufficient, for labour is uncertain, and profit is infinitesimal; and, as a man must drink, there are constant disturbances to break the monotony and help one to forget the customary hunger. You may have at times noticed the dejected hawker returning, on a wet summer’s day, with his tomatoes unsold: or the children eager to collect fragments of the lids of orange-boxes in the winter. Countess Russell told me that she once visited, unexpectedly, a group of homes of this class, within a few minutes’ walk of Gordon Square, in the depth of winter. Hardly any had the material for a fire, and few had food in the house. So they live, year in, year out; and all that we propose to do is to give them five shillings a week each if they will sustain the burden honestly for six decades, or house and feed them in jail if they do not succeed in curbing their criminal impulses.

Once, in the Westminster Court, I saw a young and humane judge hand certain tickets to the jury, when they had established the guilt of two petty criminals of this class. “These, gentlemen,” he said, “are permits to inspect the jail; go some day and see the place to which you send criminals.” A very wise and benevolent innovation, but we still await the judge who will send the jury to inspect the homes in which these men conceive crime.

About 400,000 citizens of the greatest city in the world belong to this class. If 400,000 do not constitute a sufficiently important problem, let us see the homes of the next category. These are the irregularly employed and badly paid, though not the worst paid, workers: costers, labourers, dockers, etc. There are about a million of them in London alone. They know quite well what hunger is: for weeks together, sometimes, the wage does not suffice to buy that minimum quantity of nitrogen and carbon which men of science have declared to be necessary, and the money is ill expended. They know what cold is, for many a hard spell of winter finds them in want. They have two or three rooms to each family, but, as a rule, not much of that “Christian reticence” on which our clergy congratulate us.

To the great majority of these million and a half of London’s poor, sexual pleasure is the one cheap luxury; and we encourage them to breed industriously. My wife, with other ladies and gentlemen, addresses them on the subject from the tail of a cart in South London, and teaches the heavy-burdened mothers how to avoid having so many children; and the leader of this little group was sourly and menacingly (and quite falsely) told by a distinguished Churchman, sitting in a Royal Commission, that they were breaking the law of the land. A friend of mine has been hounded out of the United States by the police for attempting to give similar information to the poorer mothers of New York.

Even in this third and very large category of London homes there is much filth; and the windows, across which is drawn an odd cloth or a ragged and dirty curtain, abound in broken panes. They have periods of comparative plenty, when the children get boots and socks, and their elders soak in beer and may even venture to a cinematograph show, if the crude pictures on its garish façade promise a sufficiently silly or sufficiently bloody programme. All that the police and the clergy care about is that not more than an inch or two of underclothing are exhibited in these places. They have also periods of want, when the clothes go to the pawnshop, and life runs on the exasperating, brutalising lines of the lower class. The daily round of life is itself stupefying. At five or six they are dragged out of an insufficient sleep, and they dully take their tea (of a kind) and bread and margarine on a dirty table. After ten or twelve hours of anxious quest of minute profits they return home for a slightly better meal—a kipper, perhaps, or a few bits of cheap meat—too tired in mind and body to do more than smoke and drink. They have plenty of fun, of a sort, and take their tragedies lightly; but the angels, if there are any, must fold their wings over their faces at the aspect of these fellow-immortals. Even a politician might be expected to blush for this self-governing democracy. It is a squalid, degrading, stupefying life, below the level of civilisation.

Nearly one-third of the citizens of London do not rise above this level. The three classes that I have described, or the mass of people who spread continuously over these classes, were found by Mr. Booth to number 1,300,000 of the four and a half million inhabitants of the city. The figure for the Greater London of to-day is, of course, immensely higher. “The submerged tenth” is a most unfortunate phrase. It leads many, who know little of these matters, to suppose that only a tenth of the inhabitants of London are very poor. The truth is that a tenth live in a condition of misery, filth, and degradation of which the ordinary decent citizen can form no conception. They are the shirkers, the abnormal, and the worst casual workers. But the life of this further million—or nearly one-fourth of the total inhabitants of the Metropolis—the irregular or badly paid workers, is a grave and accusing problem to every man of decent sentiment. Their condition is not consistent with civilisation. Certainly large numbers of them live clean and cheerful lives, but even in these cases it is scandalous that sober and willing toil should receive wage enough only to secure cleanliness and the necessaries of life; while a far larger number sink under the burden, and are dirty, intemperate, gross, and improvident.