There are not wanting signs that such decay is upon us. If side by side with large aggregations of men, living under insanitary and unnatural conditions, we allow the mixed common lodging-house—unclean in every sense of the word, what can we expect?
I do not mean to imply that it is impossible to live, even as a single woman, a moral life in a common lodging-house, or that many of the proprietors do not do their best to secure morality. But if, in any stratum of society, men and women herded together under such conditions, it would be only exceptional characters that could stand the strain. Young men and women can, and do, go and live together in common lodging-houses. You may go in on Sunday afternoons and find crowds of young people, not all inmates, but all imbibing the fatal atmosphere of unrestrained vile talk. In some of these lodging-houses older women live who make a practice of tempting in younger girls, who thus are lost. It would be much more easy to control many public evils if lodging-houses were provided, decent and sanitary, and the sexes kept distinct.[134] We exercise control over the inn, but the lodging-house, which is the hostel of the travelling working-man, is not even sanitary in many cases.
We did not feel able to eat breakfast under such conditions. I waited for my friend in the living-room, and an amusing incident occurred. One of my room-mates came down in a skirt—forgetting her top skirt. But she had not forgotten another adornment, namely, a huge pocket suspended round her waist behind, which proclaimed her as a "moucher"! She exclaimed:—
"Look what I've been and done! I've been over to the shop like this! Good job a 'bobby' didn't see me!"
There was room enough in this capacious pocket to "pinch" any number of articles, but we will write her down "beggar" not "thief"!
We left the children, undressed and unwashed, but some of them breakfasting, at nine o'clock, and found our way to a cheap restaurant where we got a good plain breakfast for fourpence each.
Then we returned home to sundry necessary ablutions, as prelude to a civilised existence. Alas! for those who cannot escape, but must needs drift. Whither?
It must be remembered that to a woman, for respectable existence, cleanliness is an absolute necessity. An unemployed man may obtain work at various occupations to which dirt is no hindrance. In fact, to some occupations, respectability would be a bar. But a woman must "look tidy," or no one will employ her. Therefore conditions destructive to cleanliness are for her equivalent to forcing her down lower and lower into beggary and vice. Once at a certain stage she cannot rise, "no one would have me in their house," say, rightly enough, poor miserable creatures "with scarcely a rag to their back." Those in this lodging-house were not so badly off, but why? Because they had learned to prey on society that rejected them. Each single woman was probably supported by that foolish "charity" that acts as a salve to the conscience of those who pity but do not bless the poor.
II. In a Northern City.
When shall we apply common sense to the daily matters of town life? Not till we recognise that a community is a unit, composed of many parts, but when one suffers, all suffer.