Men and women are making fortunes out of this state of things. To my knowledge, a man who was a barman is said now to own sixteen lodging-houses, and a cobbler has risen to be proprietor of lodgings for 600 and two public-houses. A man can rent a house at 4s., and get a little furniture in, and can then let each room for more than the house-rent per week. To places like this drift many young men or women who are stranded far away from home. A girl gets out of a situation; she seeks a women's lodging-house, and if she enters one where the management connives or winks at vice, in three weeks, or less, she may be manufactured into a full-blown prostitute. This state of things is such as should shock every right-thinking English man and woman. In one street in a northern town a young man of eighteen, fresh from home, who was with a companion who unfortunately "knew too much," passed in a short walk seventy-five prostitutes. With these problems on our hands in such magnitude, can we stop to tinker at our Tramp Ward and ask if we are to amend it by giving coffee instead of gruel? The wonder is that any one seeks it; that it is used at all shows the stern pressure of destitution more than anything else. For, as I have stated, and must state repeatedly, the Tramp Ward is itself a factor in national degradation, the mockery of a provision for need; meaning often semi-starvation, weary toil and unrest. A man or woman must emerge from it more unfit for toil, and learn to avoid such a place if possible in future. The tramp uses it as an occasional disinfectant; the genuine working man or woman who is stranded may be forced into it temporarily and learn to be a tramp. Mr. Long recently stated that not more than 25 per cent. of the vagrants of the country were in any way within reach of the Local Government Board. The remainder were not paupers, for somehow or other they got a living for themselves. I believe his percentage is too high, owing to the number who simply sample a Tramp Ward and never again enter it. A recent census in Lancashire revealed that out of 936 persons reported only thirty-three were habitual vagrants.[154] Why should they go there? A man who "keeps" (?) a woman can live in idleness on the produce of her industry or sin; a woman can live "on the streets." This has a great deal to do with two features of present-day life—the number of incorrigibly idle, worthless men, who apparently can exist to loaf and drink, side by side with the deplorable increase of drunkenness among women.
I am convinced that many of the lower public-houses simply play into the hands of the harlot, and that the marked development of the public-house is due to the homelessness of our people. Alderman Thompson has pointed out in "The Housing Handbook" the existence of a universal house famine. He says: "Putting the case in its simplest form, we find, in the first place, that if every room, good and bad, occupied or unoccupied, in all the workmen's dwellings in the country be reckoned as existing accommodation, there are not enough of any sort to house the working population without unhealthy overcrowding.... In the second place, we find that, so far from new rooms being built in sufficient quantities to make up the deficiency, there is a distinct lessening in the rate of increase" ("Housing Handbook," W. Thompson, pp. 1-2). This total overcrowding accounts for the pressure on Shelters and common lodging-houses and tramp wards. Numbers in London are refused admission to tramp wards; numbers sleep out.[155] Inevitably the class that can pay least, or cannot pay at all, will be crowded out, if house accommodation is scanty, and this will especially be the case with the migrating "out-of-work" who has no particular claim on any one. Even if he has money in his pocket, it is difficult to say whether he is not in as grave danger, moral and sanitary, if forced to be a lodger in some already overcrowded home, as if forced into the common lodging-house. Like a sponge, a slum neighbourhood sucks up by overcrowding in winter those who in summer obtain varied occupation far and wide. Is it any wonder that the children of such overcrowded homes, deprived of the joys of nature, succumb to the attractions of the brilliantly lighted street? If the predatory female nightly angles there, in all the attraction of her tawdry finery; if large numbers of men, divorced from home ties, are there to be angled for, and money can freely be obtained, the customary "drink" being proffered; what wonder if the home itself becomes insipid, if the husband seeks the flaring and enticing public-house or not less fatal club, and the wife seeks him—or some other man—in the same places, while the children, never at home if they can help it (for home means unpleasantness, or inconvenient toil), walk out with one another in the dangerous thoroughfare, and learn in mere boyhood and girlhood the fascination of passion without responsibility?
How must we face such grave national issues? The home must be made the centre of all our thought, the focus of national consciousness. We must educate each boy and girl to be primarily father and mother; we must worship at the cradle of the child. The community must assume fatherhood and motherhood, and enforce a right conception of their duties on its subsidiary units. To counteract the restlessness of modern life we must make of our Fatherland a Home, where every man, woman and child will be rightly cared for, disciplined if need be, but embraced in the wide brotherhood of Humanity.
We cannot turn back the hour-glass of time and stay the new-born activity, but we can utilise the new energy of Humanity as we have learned to utilise steam and electricity. The units divorced from true use in our social system may, nay must, become a desolating flood, unless we dig channels and build reservoirs, and so direct the living stream back to the formation of true homes, utilising the resources of the smiling acres of our native land, spreading out our cities, and afforesting our barren moors.
The Fluidity of Labour is a fact that has come to stay. Modern subdivided employment depends on the ready supply at particular places of necessary workmen. If a man is destitute through remaining too long where work is not to be had, he must travel, and we need to facilitate, not to hinder, his rapid transit to the right place, and to furnish him with all information as to whither he should go. We need to provide him, in fair return for a moderate task of work, with bed and board on the journey. Except in exchange for work we should give neither State aid nor charity to the traveller, since, if he cannot work enough to find bed and board, he belongs to the incapable, for whom a special provision is required, or the "won't work" for whom compulsion is best. The universal provision of a proper remedy for migrating destitution would soon avail to sort men into the three classes of refractory, incapable, or simply "unemployed." The Relief station method of Germany is the key to the situation.
But the Relief station alone will not cope with the evil unless the common lodging-house is reformed from top to bottom. It is necessary to recognise the existence not only of destitute homelessness, but of migratory homelessness. It is necessary to get into safe and sanitary surroundings the whole of the outcasts who sleep out, and to purify our parks and streets. One thousand four hundred and sixty-three men walking London streets in one night constitute a social danger. In addition to this we have on the same night 21,058 single men under the undesirable conditions of the common lodging-house. London common lodging-houses are only required to find 240 cubic feet of air for each lodger, as against 300 cubic feet in the provinces, and 350 cubic feet in an ordinary dwelling house. Alderman Thompson says (p. 22): "Anything less than 350 cubic feet per head ought to result in a conviction before the most reactionary justices." Add the number crowded into London slums, what an army of homelessness!
The one thing in the finding of the Vagrancy Committee with which the author does not agree is the stricture on Shelters. The Shelter reveals the magnitude of the problem that is upon us. It is the provision that has arisen over against this grave national danger. It is insufficient, it is not always well managed. But it is seldom less sanitary and well managed than the common lodging-house. The dangers it replaces are largely out of sight, but they are none the less real. It is true that the lowest class gravitate to the Shelter. Let us be thankful that it is so. "Out of sight is out of mind," but not out of existence. How real and keen the competition for bed and board is, is demonstrated by the pressure on prisons. It has come to something serious in our national history when the last social deterrent to crime has been removed and men seek prison as their only home. Even girls "do not mind being pinched," it "gives them a rest."[156]
It is absolutely necessary that good and sufficient Workmen's Homes, municipal or State, should supersede the common lodging-house. Glasgow has been able to make its seven lodging-houses, accommodating 2,166 men and 248 women, pay a reasonable interest on capital. London has only one, and accommodates but 324.[157] The cost per head of 68l. per bed, as against 39l. per bed in Glasgow, militates against financial success, though the charge is 6d. per night as against 3½d. and 4½d. Nevertheless receipts appear to more than cover expenditure (2,942l. against 2,844l.), and the benefit to the community must be reckoned an asset. London has 611 common lodging-houses, Manchester 268. In Glasgow the provision of municipal lodging-houses has reduced the total to 81; most of the old insanitary ones have disappeared, and those newly built are superior even to the municipal ones. Thus Glasgow has demonstrated the way out. The Glasgow Women's Lodging-house pays 5 per cent., is orderly, closes at a decent hour, and is well managed and sanitary. The pressure on its accommodation shows that another is required, as women are turned away for want of room. Where do they sleep?
It is not enough to receive destitute women into the workhouse. In every town there is needed some safe place for a working woman to sleep, and some provision of employment that will just earn bed and board to stand between a struggling woman and vice. In every town there should be some co-ordinating charitable institution, like the Citizens' Guild of Help, or the Charity Organisation Society at its best, to link together the benevolence of the district, to pass persons on to employment or to the Poor-law authorities. It is necessary to sound the depths of our poverty problems, or our charity is unavailing. It is necessary to have compulsion at the bottom of our social system and apply it to the wastrel.