But to return to that widow’s housekeeping account. A notable business man said to me: ‘Do you know what strikes me most about that widow’s housekeeping account?’ I supposed the poverty of it. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It is the horrible and senseless waste it tells of! Do you suppose she gets a halfpennyworth of tea or sugar, or a pennyworth of margarine for her money? No. She loses on every purchase; she is bound to. The shopkeeper can’t lose, so she must. Multiply the loss on that shilling by the number of shillings spent in a year. Why, it is frightful!’ He went to the root of the matter at once. The poorer people are, the greater the cost of living; the more abject their poverty, and the greater their need of nourishing food, the dearer they have to pay for the barest necessities. Come into a marketing street in a poor neighbourhood toward midnight on Saturday, watch the butchers’ shops, and you will see a poorly-clothed and miserable woman standing looking with wistful eyes at the meat. With a few hardly-earned coppers she has to provide some pretence of a Sunday dinner for her family. The joints are ticketed, and they are beyond even her dreams. She comes nearer and looks at the inferior pieces, and timidly inquires the price. Still too high. She looks again and again, until the butcher says, and not unkindly, ‘Buy some of those nice pieces, ma’am?’ Nice pieces! they have lain on the block all day, after being trimmed off foreign meat, ticketed English—bits of mutton and shreds of beef on which the wind has blown. On them the dust and dirt of the street has found a resting-place; flies have paid them a visit; dirty fingers of other speculative purchasers have turned them over again and again. She finds her coppers, gets one pound and a half of the pieces, and takes them to her own home—her one room, her larder and bedroom, workshop and kitchen, in which the whole family sleeps—and on the Sunday makes an inviting stew. But there are plenty who fare worse than this, and to whom even the ‘pieces’ would be a Godsend, to whom even a bit of ‘macadamized cheese’ would represent luxury, and whose children from very birth are fed with material that would test the stomach of a dog or an ostrich. Can this go on, and the nation be free from the penalty? Impossible! and the penalty is paid all round. Now, I have no wish for all difficulties to be removed from the lives even of the poor. Life without difficulty would be a poor thing, and hardly worth the living. But I do claim that the poorest, the hardest worked of all London’s toilers, should have the possibility of living in decency, cleanliness, and some degree of comfort, and be able to obtain clean and nourishing food. And it can be done—I know it can be done. But it can only be by organization and combination, without which it will be for ever impossible for the Home Workers to get value for their money. I have had glimpses of a promised land, and in my fancy have seen the Home Workers organized and living in sweet content—organized not for strikes or lock-outs, but for health, virtue, happiness; not in filthy slums enveloped with rank odours and moral and physical corruption; near the town, but a little way out, where the free air of heaven can enter their lungs and the silence of the country speak to them; in their communities, where each family had its suite of rooms, and each suite of rooms its bath-room; where children had rounded limbs and merry hearts; where brave boyhood and sweet girlhood ripened and matured; where poor women hovered not at midnight for scraps of dirty meat, and where the miserable items—tea, ½d.; sugar, ½d.—were no longer known, for they had their own stores. Some day we shall enter this promised land in which the jerry-builder shall not enter, and in which nothing that is unclean or maketh a lie shall be found. And when we enter it we shall hear the deep roar of the nation as it rolls its heavy curse on the buried past. We shall feel that the heart of England is lighter, the hand of the oppressor has been stayed. Then the mothers of England will buy clothing for their darlings without fear. No nameless terrors will haunt the dainty brush, neither will men or women’s clothing convey contagion, or the smart necktie disseminate the seeds of death.
For all these things will be made in light and cleanliness, and the brand of shame will be no longer upon them. Then the pioneers of the Empire at the ends of the earth will be no longer sad when their hearts, touched by remembrance, vibrate to the magnet of their soul, their old country and home. For in the circuit of the sun gladness and joy shall be felt in the knowledge that the poorest of the poor in the world’s greatest city have a chance for health and virtue, for peace and comfort.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
FOOTNOTES:
TOO OLD TO LIVE!
‘Aged forty-six, and out of work, a grocer’s assistant named Thomas Harvey hanged himself at a house in Euston Road.
‘On a piece of paper in the suicide’s pocket was written:
‘“I cannot get work, so have to die in a so-called Christian country. Young men only are employed, and the elders shoved aside when too old for the trade, to do what they can, no matter how meritorious their service to their employer may have been.”