‘Sir,
‘Pardon the liberty I am taking, but having read what you said about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per week, I beg to state my case. I am a tie-maker who, after working all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn’t earned a penny for more than ten years.’
Curiosity led me to that room, and though I had some difficulty in squeezing myself into it, I was very soon glad to get out of it. There he lay on a miserable bed, by no means clean. I had to sit on the side of that bed, and I felt uneasy. It was partially covered with ties or silk for making them, and he lay there with his decaying lungs, every few minutes his cough troubling him. I did not stay long, but long enough to see his wife three times put down her work to raise his head that he might with difficulty expectorate.
Again:
‘Sir,
‘I see you are going to help Women Home Workers. I have begged two shillings from poor friends, and send it to you, for my wife is one of them. I have been ill for two years, and as I watch my wife at her work night and day, and know how little she gets for it, I feel more than I can tell.’
No address was given, so I never saw the room, but the fact remains that for two years he had lain there ill, while ‘home work’ was continually around him.
I have been in rooms and seen sometimes sick or dying children, sometimes a dead child, where clothing for other children was being made night and day; I have breathed, or, rather, swallowed, the close, heavy, sickening atmosphere, and come away feeling faint, but wondering into what homes the garments being made would go, and how the children would fare that wore them. Ay, I thought, too, of the old words, ‘Rachel weeping for her children because they are not.’ The bodies of the poor folk who are engaged in these ‘home industries’ are of necessity but poor bodies, so frightfully ill-nourished that they fall an easy prey to all kinds of disease—not only to chest complaints and fevers, but to all forms of disease; skin diseases especially abound. The ill-nourished and sickly plant develops parasites; the ill-nourished human does precisely the same. The weaker the animal life, the more it becomes the prey of the myriads of relentless foes, seen and unseen, that are greedily waiting for it; while filthy air and water, vile rooms and insanitary accommodation, dirty bodies, endless work, and hopeless apathy all combine to make Home Workers a danger to the community.
I have no wish to raise any feelings of disgust; I am but stating bare truths that might be enlarged upon, but I forbear. Far be it from me to say one word that might divert an atom of sympathy from the poor; my heart is with them, and I know, as few can know, the difficulties that environ their lives. I know that it is impossible for them under their present conditions to be clean, decent, and healthy. None the less, I repeat that their dirt and misery are a national danger. But see how this question appeals to the two primal instincts of humanity: First to that touch of nature that makes all men kin, that leads men and women to sacrifice themselves that they may save others; and, secondly, to that instinct for self-preservation that is said to be Nature’s first law. I would that we were true to either.
But I believe in the application of common-sense when difficulties are to be solved, and I love justice. So I want my last words to be practical. Why should this evil and danger exist at all? Its very presence proclaims our lack of thought. It need not exist. It ought not to exist. Consider the lives of these people. Do they work hard enough and hours enough? Far too hard and far too many hours everyone admits. Do they pay rent enough for the accommodation called their home? Most people will say far, far too much. Do they pay highly enough for their meagre quantities of wretched food? I may be told that the poor can get things very cheap nowadays. Can they? Come and see.
I was visiting in the home of a widowed match-box maker. Her sister, who had a crippled husband, lived with her, and was also a match-box maker. This sister had gone with her broken-down perambulator to take a shilling’s worth of finished boxes to the factory—the everlasting baby underneath, the boxes on top. A lady friend was with me. While she essayed to learn the art of box-making, I stood looking on till the sister match-box maker returned. Evidently there had been something wrong, for the woman was breathless, and when she recovered was a bit hysterical. ‘What is the matter?’ her sister asked. ‘They gave me a bad shilling at the factory, and I did not find it out till I got half-way home.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘I gave a boy a penny to mind the baby, and ran all the way back.’ ‘Did they change it for you?’ In reply a genuine shilling was shown. But it was a near thing—a hair’s-breadth escape from financial ruin.
How are those shillings spent? Again I say, come and see; for here is the housekeeping account of another widow living in the same neighbourhood, a blouse-maker. She had four children—a girl of twelve, a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a younger child. The girl, who was, of course, deputy mother, had been charged with stealing some food, which undoubtedly she took to give to her younger brothers. In my visitations I came across the widow’s rent-book—five shillings weekly. Paid up to date. I found her wage-book with its pitiful tale of hard work and poor pay. I saw also the widow’s housekeeping account and her expenditure of her last shilling. Here it is: ‘Tea, ½d.; sugar, ½d.; bread, 1¼d.; margarine, 1d.; oil, 1d.; firewood, ½d.; and a bit of bacon.’ When this story appeared in the press, I received 1,600 letters in a few days about the widow and her children, and England seemed to weep over them. By the aid of the Daily Telegraph we were enabled to open five banking accounts, and place them above the fear of poverty. But when that fear was gone, when the cupboard was full of good food for which the children no longer cried, the youngest boy died, for even a banking account could not save him. And so it happened that a kind-hearted public clothed the family in mourning, paid the undertaker’s bill and cemetery fees. Will the dark path of the destroyer ever prove a way of light to a social heaven? Some day, perhaps, when we have suffered more.