And this is no fancy picture. I have now in my mind one Wilkins, a steady, rough, honest, sober labourer, fairly intelligent, and the father of thirteen children. The two eldest, girls of fourteen and fifteen, are already out at service; but the eleven younger, being under age, are still kept at school and supported by their father. He earns 1l. regularly. They rent the whole house at 12s. a week, and, letting off part, stand themselves at a weekly rent of 5s. for three small rooms. Less than that, as the mother says, ‘I could not nohow do with, what with all the washing for such a heavy family, and bathing the little ones, and him coming home tired of an evening, and needing a place to sit down in.’ The wife is a decent body, but rough and uncultured; and as she is ignorant of the proper proportions of nitrogenous and carbonaceous substance necessary for the preservation of healthy life, as well as of the kinds of food in which they can be best found, she feeds her family even less nutritiously than she could do if she were better informed. Still the whole wage could only feed them if it were all expended ever so wisely, leaving no margin for the requirements already mentioned.
Take Mrs. Marshall’s family and circumstances. Mrs. Marshall is, to all intents and purposes, a widow, her husband being in an asylum. She herself is a superior woman, tall and handsome, and with clean dapper ways and a slight hardness of manner that comes from bitter disappointment and hopeless struggling. She has four children, two of whom have been taken by the Poor Law authorities into their district schools—a better plan than giving out-door relief, but, at the same time, one that has the disadvantage of removing the little ones from the home influence of a very good mother. Mrs. Marshall herself, after vainly trying to get work, was taken as a scrubber at a public institution, where she earns 9s. a week and her dinner. She works from six in the morning till five at night, and then returns to her fireless, cheerless room to find her two children back from school and ready for their chief meal; for during her absence their breakfast and dinner can only have consisted of bread and cold scraps. We will not dwell on the hardship of having to turn to and light the fire, tidy the room, and prepare the meal after having already done ten hours’ scrubbing or washing. The financial question is now before us, and to that we will confine our thoughts. Out of her 9s. a week Mrs. Marshall pays 3s. 3d. for rent; 2d. for schooling; 1s. for light and firing (and this does not allow of the children having a morning fire before they go to school); 9d. she puts by for boots and clothing; and imagine what it must be to dress, so as to keep warm, three people on 1l. 19s. a year! and 6d. she pays for her bits of washing, for she cannot do them herself after all her heavy daily work. (Pause, though, for a moment to consider how Mrs. Marshall’s washerwoman must work when she does three changes of linen, aprons, sheets, and a table-cloth for 6d. a week.)
Deduct from the 9s. weekly wage—
| s. d. | |
|---|---|
| Rent | 3 3 |
| Schooling | 2 |
| Firing | 1 0 |
| Clothes | 9 |
| Washing | 6 |
| 5 8 |
and 3s. 4d. is left with which to provide breakfast and tea for a hard-working woman for seven days in the week, dinner for Sunday, and three meals daily for two growing children of ten and eleven. We have seen how, even with economy, knowledge, strength, and time, proper food cannot be obtained for less than 1d. or 1¼d. a meal, and this would make a weekly total of 5s. 11¼d. 3s. 4d., with no time, with little knowledge, and only the remnants of strength, which has been used up in earning the 3s. 4d., is all Mrs. Marshall has with which to meet these requirements.
And how do the rich look on these facts? ‘Well! nine shillings a week is very fair wage for an unskilled working woman,’ was the remark I heard after I had told these facts to mine host at a country house, where we were eating the usual regulation dinner—soup, fish, entrée, joint, game, sweets, and hot-house fruits, said with the complacency of satisfaction which follows a glass of good wine. ‘Yes, about the cost of your one dinner’s wine!’ replied one of the guests; but then he was probably one of those ill-balanced people who judge people by what they are rather than by what they have, and he may have thought that the sad, lone woman, with her noble virtues of industry, patience, and self-sacrificing love, had, despite her hard manners, more right to the good things of this world than the suave old man owning fourteen acres of lawn on which no children ever played, and stating, without shame, first, the fact that he used eighty-two tons of coal yearly to warm his own sitting-rooms, and then the opinion that 9s. a week was fair wage on which to support a good woman and bring up two children.
While this wage is considered a ‘fair wage,’ the children must remain half-nourished, and grow up incapable of honest toil and valuable effort. While this wage is accepted as a right and normal thing, it is useless to think that the nation will be guided through dangers by means of heavy subscriptions to schools, to hospitals, and sick-asylums. Robust health is impossible; so disease easily finds a home, and teachers vainly try to develop brains ill supplied with blood. By the doorway of semi-starvation disease is invited to enter and find a home among the masses of our wage-earning people.
Before me are the dietary tables of the Whitechapel Workhouse—an institution which stands (thanks to the self-devotion of its able Clerk) high on the list for careful management and economical administration. There are congregated the aged and infirm paupers, and among them are some of Nature’s gentlefolk, the old and tired, who, having learnt a few of life’s greatest lessons in their long walk through life, ought to be giving them to the young and untried, instead of wearying out their last days in the dull monotony of a useless and regulated existence. Their dietary table allows them for breakfast and supper one pint of tea (made of one ounce to a gallon of water) and five ounces of bread and a tiny bit of butter. For dinner they have meat three times a week, pea-soup and bread twice, suet pudding once, and Irish stew on the other day. For the sake of comparison I will make a food table of this diet, based on the same calculations of food value as those that have been previously made for the family.
| Quantity of Food. | Carbon- aceous | Nitro- genous. |
|---|---|---|
| Breakfast and Supper—Tea, Bread, and Butter. | oz. | oz. |
| 10 oz. Bread | 5½ | ¾ |
| ½ oz. Butter | ½ | — |
| ½ oz. Sugar | ½ | — |
| ⅛ pint Milk | less than ¼ | — |
| Dinner—Meat and Potatoes. | ||
| 4 oz. Meat (cooked) | 1 | 1 |
| 8 oz. Potatoes | 1¼ | ¼ |
| 2 oz. Bread | 1 | ¼ |
| Total | 10½ | 2¼ |
Here we see that the total allowance comes only to 10½ oz. of carbonaceous food and 2¼ oz. of nitrogenous food, against the estimated quantity of 16 oz. carbonaceous and 4 oz. nitrogenous, which is the necessary allowance for ordinary people, and against the 25 oz. carbonaceous and 5 oz. nitrogenous, which is the regulation diet of the Royal Engineers during peace. It is true that these old folk do not need so much food, for their bodies have ceased to grow and develop, and in aged persons the wear of the frame does not require such replenishment as is the case with young and middle-aged people; but even with this partial diet we find that the cost of maintaining each of these old people is, for food alone, 3s. 11d. per head per week.