The countrysides have been laid waste, but what of the men and women who were thus driven from the wide, wind-swept spaces to stony streets and airless barracks? What did it mean of happiness and well-being to them? Let us try to present the contrast to ourselves.
I
In no sphere is there such an opportunity of happiness as that of work in the open air, when men have learned to love the sights and the sounds of the wide sky. The pleasantest sight in the world is to watch a ploughman driving straight his long furrow, or resting at the furrow end crooning to his well-groomed team, while the fresh air fans his face and the westering sun casts a mantle of loveliness around him. He may be a lover of nature, this man. He may watch the coming of the birds and the first white flashing of the swallows' wings. If he does not own the land there is no reason why he should not 'own the landscape.' At the close of the day he goes home and is met by the welcoming shout of his children, who, strong and sturdy, clamber on his knees.
But it was decreed that he be driven into a slum; and see what has been made of him! Walk through the East End of Glasgow on a Saturday night and mark the product of the 'highest civilisation' the world has ever known. Out of reeking public-houses men and women reel into the streets. Degradation and brutality have marked them for their own. Their diseased bodies witness to their lives of sensuality. They were children of the fresh air, now 133,000 of them in Glasgow live in one-room houses with the very decencies of life denied them; and 486,000 live in one-room and kitchen houses—a total population of 619,000, in the one city, doomed to live under conditions which render all privacy impossible. Often a father and mother and three or four children live in a single apartment. When that single apartment is at the top of the rookery, the pitiful spectacle is seen of little children with bowed or bent legs climbing painfully up the squalid stairs. The mothers of the race can be seen toiling up weary flights of stairs carrying a heavy basket on one arm and a child in the other. Once streams of purest water from the hillsides flowed day and night, singing to them, cleansing for them; now it is impossible to keep clean, for in these rookeries the washhouse is only available once every three weeks! Out of a million of a population, 60 per cent. live under conditions such as these. The Medical Officer of Health (an office that can be no sinecure in such a city) has declared that there are 10,000 houses in Glasgow absolutely unfit for human habitation, and which it is impossible to make fit. But a doomed population must go on living in them because there is no other accommodation to be found for them. In these places the children perish in the first year of life at a rate of 200 per thousand; but in the West End only 50 children die per thousand. Out of every thousand babies born in those parts of the city in which the poor are massed, 150 at least are destroyed by the social conditions which the highest modern civilisation has created.[[1]] After a day of nerve-racking toil the freeborn Scotsman comes home to his lair, the one-roomed house which can command the use of a wash-house once in three weeks, to the foulness and the squalor, and what is he to do? The State has provided. The whisky-shop is there, at the corner, with its brightness and its allurements and its forgetfulness of woe. The State says to him, you can escape out of your intolerable surroundings through the door of alcohol. And he escapes. There is no other course left for him, and only the Pharisee can blame him. Thus it comes that the State-regulated alcoholic manufactories of paupers and criminals pass the slum-dwellers through the mill, and they come forth moral refuse. Children with the faces of old men and women cry to each other the undertones of a babel of profanity. For weeks they never see the sun, moving under a pall of black smoke. They rise to toil in the dark, and all day they watch and feed clanking machinery, and they return home in the dark. The State has provided for them the narcotic of drunkenness. Vigour dies low in them. Out of every three one is rejected as physically unfit to bear arms. When stringency is exercised one out of two is rejected. In the process of transplantation and disinheritance the people have lost not only the land but their bodies. For them there has been yielded no profit. They have lost the world, but they have not gained their souls.
For the greatest of all their losses is this, that they have lost the sense of God. In the country they could not fall to those depths. There they were face to face with the Unseen.
'Who plants a seed beneath the sod
And waits to see it push away the clod—
He trusts in God.'
But in the East Ends of our cities no work of God is ever visible. And they were told by many wise men that God was superfluous. Everything could be explained without any God! There was nothing but sensations! Ah! who can blame him because he has sunk so low? They took the earth from him; they took the sunlight from him; they took the air from him; they darkened the moon and the stars for him—until at last they took God Himself from him. And it has all been so cunningly wrought that he is all unconscious that he has been driven out of Paradise. That is the essence of the grim tragedy.
II
In the countryside it was possible for men and women to live clean and decent lives, and those who are left there continue to do so. In proof of that it may be cited that the north-west districts of Scotland can still show a birthrate of 34.8. Were it not for the 'Celtic Fringe' and the country places, the birthrate of Scotland would be far lower than it is. For the country and the hillsides are the land of far vistas and empty spaces, so that the apostle of racial limitation could not there plead that there is no room for more. And life is natural; children, so far from being an endless burden to their parents, are looked upon as life's true riches, the helpers and the supporters of their parents. The crofter's house may be poor, but it rings with the shouting of children at play, and love spreads its endless feast. In these places, so unsophisticated and so 'uncivilised,' children are not a burden, and, however large the family, there is room in the heart for more.
But far different is it when the family is driven from the countryside into the slum. There the new civilisation decrees that men and women must no longer live natural lives. If they have children they must pay the penalty, and the penalty is that landlords refuse to accept them as tenants. Long, long ago a Child was born in a stable 'because there was no room for them in the inn.' There was room for tax-gatherers and soldiers and traders, but there was nobody found to make room for a woman in the hour of her direst need. The Child was shut out. But that was in a rude age and the door was shut by untutored men. The most startling of all the facts which leap to light as we consider the social and moral condition of our generation is the fact that after nineteen centuries of Christianity, in the heart of the most 'perfect' development of civilisation, the same tragedy is perpetrated—the child is shut out. There is room for everything but not for innocence. There is conclusive evidence to prove that the property owner in London has set his face against tenants who happen to be the unhappy parents of little children.[[2]] Childhood is that which nobody now desires except a few poor people whom the Malthusians have not yet instructed. 'A printer told me the other day,' says Monsignor Brown, '...he had five children; when he went to an agent the other day, the agent bowed him out and would not listen to him, though he wanted five rooms and was prepared to pay the rent.'[[3]] If a family exceeds four the position becomes acute. 'If a family consist of four or five children,' declared the Assistant Housing Manager of the London County Council, 'they would have a difficulty in obtaining accommodation.' All this is quite natural. The property owner wants his rent, and he wants it without his property suffering undue dilapidation. And the rent is more certain when there are not more than two or three children. He is not a philanthropist; he wants his money, the race must look after itself. Profits and not children—that is the rule of his life. In every city it is the same. The owner of house property will not have children in his houses, even as the London County Council will not have married women as teachers—for they might have children! This then is what we have done. We have deprived four-fifths of our population of their birthright in the air and the sunshine and the land, and we have decreed that they must live unnatural lives—otherwise we will allow them no place wherein to live! We have built up a civilisation in the midst of which childhood is anathema.