IV.
TOWN COUNCILS AND SOCIAL REFORM.[1]
[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Nineteenth Century of November 1883.
Mr. Bright has stated that in Glasgow 41,000 families occupy single rooms. The statement caused no surprise to those familiar with the poor quarters of our great towns; their surprise has been that the statement should cause surprise in any section of the community. It is, indeed, surprising that people should think so little about what they daily see, and should go on talking as if 20s. or 30s. a week were enough to satisfy the needs of a family’s life, and should be surprised that many persons still occupy one room, endure hardship and die, killed by the struggle to exist. It is surprising that reflection on such subjects is not more common because, when facts are stated, no defence is made for the present condition of the people.
Alongside of the growth of wealth during this age there has been growth of the belief in the powers of human nature, of the belief that in all men, independent of rank and birth, there exist great powers of being. ‘Nothing can breed such awe and fear as fall upon us when we look into our minds, into the mind of man,’ expresses the experience of many who do not use the poet’s words.
Those who are conscious of what men may be and do cannot be satisfied while the majority of Englishmen live, in the midst of wealthy England, stinted and joyless lives because they are poor.
When facts, therefore, such as that referred to by Mr. Bright are stated, no defence is made; and such facts are common. Here are some:—(1) The death-rate among the children of the poor is double that among the children of the rich. Born in some small room, which serves as the sleeping and living room of the family; hushed to sleep by discordant noises from neighbouring factories, refreshed by air laden with smoke and evil odours, forced to find their play in the streets; without country holiday or adequate medical skill, without sufficient air, space, or water, the children die, and the mothers among the poor are always weeping for their children and cannot be comforted. (2) The occupants of the prisons are mostly of one class—the poor. The fact for its explanation needs no assumption that ‘the poor in a lump are bad’; it is the natural result of their condition. It is because children are ill developed or unhealthily developed by life in the streets that they become idlers, sharpers, or thieves. It is because families are crowded together that quarrels begin and end in fights. It is because they have not the means to hide their vices under respectable forms that the poor go to prison and not the rich. (3) The lives of the people are joyless. The slaves of toil, worn by anxiety lest the slavery should end, they have not leisure nor calm for thought; they cannot therefore be happy, living in the thought of other times, as those are happy who, in reading or travel, have gathered memories to be the bliss of solitude, or as those who, ‘by discerning intellect,’ have found the best to be ‘the simple product of the common day.’ When work ceases, the one resource is excitement; and thus their lives are joyless. Anxiety consumes their powers in pleasure as in work, the faces of the women lose their beauty, and a woman of thirty looks old.
These are facts patent to those who know our great towns—the facts of life, not among a few of their degraded inhabitants, but facts of the life of the majority of the people. Let any one who does not know how his neighbours live set himself the following sum. Given 20s. or 40s. a week wages, how to keep a family, pay rent of 2s. 6d. a week for each room, and lay up an adequate amount for times of bad trade, sickness, and old age. As the sum is worked out, as it is seen how one after another the things which seem to make life worth living have to be given up, and as it is seen how many ‘necessaries’ are impossible, how many of the poor must put up with a diet more scanty than that allowed to paupers, how all must go without the leisure and the knowledge which transmute existence into life—faith will be shaken in many theories of social reform.
Teetotal advocates will preach in vain that drunkenness is the root of all evil, and that a nation of abstainers will be either a healthy, a happy, or a thoughtful nation. Thrift will be seen to be powerless to do more than to create a smug and transient respectability, and even those who are ‘converted’ will not claim to be raised by their faith out of the reach of early death and poverty into a life which belongs to their nature as members in the human family.