“Why did you go on the tramp?” was asked of a man in the casual ward. “If yer takes to the road,” he said with perfect candour, “yer never knows what’s before yer. Yer may be in luck or yer mayn’t but it’s all on the chance.” The spirit of gambling had got the better of him and he had gone down a grade lower.
These examples illustrate the importance of the principles laid down. The help must be work and the work must be steady and continuous, and capable, by drawing forth each man’s best powers, to uplift him in character and maintain his own self-esteem. The work must be of many kinds. It is folly to expect the tailor, the cigarette-maker, the working jeweller, to do only road sweeping and that badly, and lastly the work, while always strengthening character, must be given only under such conditions as will not attract men to leave their regular calling, which makes demands on their powers of self-discipline, and throw themselves on what is charity, even though offered in the form of labour.
Last year the Mansion House Committee carried out on a small scale an experiment in relief, which in many ways followed these principles. It sent the men to Labour Colonies, where they had good food and honest work, away from the attractions of the streets, and while they were away it provided the women and children with sufficient money for the upkeep of health and home. It brought to individuals the care of individuals, as week by week superintendents reported on the workers’ work, and visitors carried the money to the families. It offered facilities for training men for emigration to the colonies, or for migration to the country. It provided employment which was not so attractive as to draw men from their regular work, nor the loafer from the streets, and it offered to every one hope and a way out in the future. The experiment has shown what is possible, and encourages those who worked it to believe that some year, if not this year, there will be humane and scientific dealing with the problem of unemployment.
“Oh, yes,” I was told by a young married woman the other day, “people talk so much of the unemployed now. It is all the fashion, but I think quite half of them could get work if they wanted to.”
“Really,” I said, recalling the hopeless eyes, gaunt figures, and worn boots of many an out-of-work friend, the pathetic patience of their women and white faces of the children, “Is that your experience?”
“Oh, no!” she replied, “but I am sure I have heard it said—and I expect it is true.”
I could have shaken her—but I did not—only that sort of thing is what discounts women’s opinion so often with the men (the governing sex), and as it is, I fear, not uncommon, it behoves us, the thinking, caring women, to think more clearly, and to care more deeply. If we bore more continuously this sad suffering in mind, if we studied, and read, and thought in the effort to probe its cause to its roots, if we resolved by personal effort to find or provide labour for at least one family during the winter, the problem would be nearer solution, but we must see to it that reforms go on lines which recognize that character is more important than comfort, and that a man is more wronged if Society steals his responsibility than if it steals his coat.
Henrietta O. Barnett.