In the case of another family, where the wage is regular—the income is 1l. a week—the outlook is not much brighter. Here there is the same crowded room, for which 3s. a week is paid, the same weary, half-starved faces, the same want of air and water. Here, too, the parents dare not look forwards, because even if the income remains permanent, it cannot secure necessaries for sickness, it cannot educate or apprentice the children, and it cannot provide for their own old age. No income, however, does remain permanent, and the regular hand is always anxious lest a change in trade, or in his employer’s temper, may send him adrift.
In the cases where there is drink, carelessness, or idleness everything of course looks worse. The room is poorer and dirtier, the faces more shrunken, and the clothes thinner. Indignation against sin does not settle the matter. The poverty is manifest, and if the cause be in the weakness of human nature, then the greater and the harder is the duty of effecting its cure.
Cases of poverty such as these are common; they who by business, duty, or affection go among the poor know of their existence; but if those who hire a servant, employ workpeople, or buy cheap articles would think about what they talk, they could not longer content themselves with phrases about thrift as almighty for good, and intemperance as almighty for evil. Fourteen pounds a year, if a domestic servant has unfailing health and unbroken work from the age of twenty to fifty-five, will only enable her to save enough for her old age by giving up all pleasure, by neglecting her own family duties, and by impoverishing her life to make a livelihood. Very sad is it to meet in some back-room the living remains of an old servant. Mrs. Smith is sixty-five years old; she has been all her life in service, and saved over 100l. She has had but little joy in her youth, and now in her old age she is lonely. Her fear is lest, spending only 7s. a week, her savings may not last her life. She could hardly have done more, and what she did was not enough. A wage of 20s. or 25s. a week is called good wages, yet it leaves the earners unable to buy sufficient food or to procure any means of recreation. The following table[2] represents the necessary weekly expenditure of a family of eight persons, of whom six are children. It allows for each day no cheering luxuries, but only the bare amount of carbonaceous and nitrogenous foods which are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the body.
| £ | s. | d. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food, i.e. oatmeal, 1¼ lb. of meat a day among eight persons, cocoa and bread | 0 | 14 | 0 |
| Rent for two small rooms | 0 | 5 | 0 |
| Schooling for four children | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Washing | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Firing and light | 0 | 2 | 6 |
| Total | 1 | 2 | 10 |
[2] This table is taken from a paper written by my wife in the National Review, July 1886, in which she illustrates by many examples that the average wage is insufficient to support life.
If to this 2s. a week be added for clothes (and what woman dressing on 100l. or 80l. a year could allow less than 5l. a year to clothe a working man, his wife, and six children) then the necessary weekly expenditure of the family is 1l. 4s. 10d. Few fathers or mothers are able to resist, or ought to resist, the temptation of taking or giving some pleasure; so even where work is regular, and paid at 1l. 5s. a week, there must be in the home want of food as well as of the luxuries which gladden life.
Those dwellers in pleasant places, without experience of the homes of the poor, who will resolutely set themselves to think about what they do know must realise that those who make cheap goods are too poor to do their duty to themselves, their neighbours, and their country. The mystery, indeed, remains, how many manage to live at all.
One solution is that there exists among these irregular workers a kind of communism. They prefer to occupy the same neighbourhood and make long journeys to work rather than go to live among strangers. They easily borrow and easily lend. The women spend much time in gossiping, know intimately one another’s affairs, and in times of trouble help willingly. One couple, whose united earnings have never reached 15s. a week, whose home has never been more than one small room, has brought up in succession three orphans. The old man, at seventy years of age, just earns a living by running messages or by selling wirework; but even now he spends many a night in hushing a baby whose desertion he pities, and whom he has taken to his care.
The poverty of the poor is understood by the poor, and their charity is according to the measure of Christ’s. The charity of the rich is according to another measure, because they do not know of poverty, and they do not know because they do not think. Only the self-satisfied Pharisee and the proud Roman could pass Calvary unmoved, and only the self-absorbed can be ignorant that every day the innocent and helpless are crucified. The selfishness of modern life is shown most clearly in this absence of thought. Absorbed in their own concerns, kindly people carelessly hear statements, see prices, and face sights which imply the ruin of their fellow-creatures. The rich would not be so cruel if they would think. Thought about the amount of food which ‘good wages’ can buy, about the hours spent in making matches or coats, about the sorrows behind the faces of those who serve them in shops or pass them in the streets; thought would make the rich ready to help; and the fact that there are among the 500,000 inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets 86,920 too poor to live is enough to make them think.
The failure of the relief fund is the other fact of the winter to stir thought.