"About My Father's Business": Work Amidst the Sick, the Sad, and the Sorrowing

by Thomas Archer

There is something pleasant indeed in letters like these; and I for one am not surprised that the boys should go to their musical practice with a will.

They are just preparing to play something for our especial delight now, and so burst out, in a grand triumphant blast, with "Let the Hills Resound," after which we will take our leave, and, we hope, not without melody in our hearts. Just one word as we go through this kitchen again. Two West End clubs supply the Newport Market Refuge with the remnants of their well-stocked larders. Did it ever occur to you how many hungry children and poor men and women could be fed on the actual waste that goes on in hotels, clubs, inns, dining-rooms, and large and ordinary households every day? M. Alexis Soyer used to say that he could feed ten thousand people with the food that was wasted in London every day; and I am inclined to think he was not far wrong. At all events, an enormous salvage of humanity might be effected if only the one meal daily which might be made of "refuse" pieces of meat and bread, bones, cuttings of vegetables, cold potatoes, and general pieces—was secured to the thousands to whom "enough" would often indeed be "as good as a feast." To people who know how much that is really good for food—not the plate-scrapings and leavings, but sound and useful reversions of meat and bread and vegetables, bones, and unsightly corners of joints—is either suffered to spoil or is thrown at once into the waste-tub, both in hotels and private houses, the additional knowledge that there are hungry children in every district in London to whom a bowl of nourishing soup or a plate of minced meat and vegetables would be a boon, may easily be a pain, because of the inability to suggest how to organise the means of utilising what one is tempted to call undeserved plenty.

FEEDING THE MULTITUDE.

I suppose there are people still to be found who have but a vague notion of what it is to be really hungry. They may be conscious of possessing a good appetite now and then, and having the means of obtaining food, and to a certain extent of choosing what they will eat, regard being rather "sharp set" as a luxury which gives additional zest to a dinner, enabling them to take off the edge of their craving with a plate of warm soup, and to consider what they would like "to follow."

Of course we most of us read in the papers of the distress of the poor during the winter, of the number of children for whom appeals are made that they may have a meal of meat and vegetables once or twice a week, of the aggregate of casual paupers during a given period, and of cases where "death accelerated by want and exposure" is the verdict of a coroner's jury; but we do not very easily realise what it is to be famished; have perhaps never experienced that stage beyond hunger—beyond even the faintness and giddiness that makes us doubt whether we could swallow anything solid, and would cause us to turn hopelessly from dry bread. There is no need here to detail the sufferings that come of starvation. They are dreadful enough; but if our charity needs the stimulus of such descriptions we are in a bad way, and are ourselves in danger of perishing for want of moral sustenance.

Those who need assurance of the hunger of hundreds of their poor neighbours need not go very far to obtain it. A quarter of an hour at the window of any common cook-shop in a "low neighbourhood," at about seven o'clock in the evening, when the steam of unctuous puddings is blurring the glass, and the odour of leg-of-beef soup and pease-pudding comes in gusts to the chilly street, should suffice. There is pretty sure to be a group of poor little eager-eyed pinch-nosed boys and girls peering wistfully in to watch the fortunate possessor of two-pence who comes out with something smoking hot on a cabbage-leaf, and begins to bite at it furtively before he crosses the threshold.

Of course, according to modern social political economy, it would be encouraging mendicity, and sapping the foundations of an independent character, to distribute sixpenny pieces amongst the juvenile committee of taste who are muttering what they would buy if only somebody could be found to advance "a copper." But it is to be hoped or feared (which?) that a good many people yet live who would instinctively feel in their pockets for a stray coin to expend on a warm greasy slab of baked or boiled, or on half a dozen squares of that peculiarly dense pie-crust which is sold in ha'porths. This is a vulgar detail; but somehow poverty and hunger are vulgar, and we should find it difficult to get away from them if we tried ever so hard. Even School Boards, peeping out upon the children perishing for lack of knowledge, find themselves in a difficulty, because there is no provision under the compulsory or any other clause for the children who are also perishing for lack of food. The Board beadle does not at present go about with soup-tickets in his pockets; and for the poor shivering shoeless urchins who are mustered in the big brick-built room where they assemble according to law there is no free breakfast-class.

It must one day become a question how they are to learn till they are filled. Grown people find it hard enough to fix their attention on the best advice or the most saving doctrine while they suffer involuntary hunger. The multitude must mostly be fed before they are taught. Even disciples have had a revelation of the Bread of Life in the breaking of bread that perishes. Do we still need a miracle to teach us that?