Now if our School Authorities could be induced to issue some such notice as this, and to address it imperatively to parents of all classes alike, not only would much leather be saved, and with it much money, but many poor little children would have a much better chance than they have, of living and thriving, while many poor mothers would be able to face the world more cheerily. It is safer by far to go barefoot, as everyone who has ever tried it knows, than to wear shoes unless they be good; and in normal times, for every child who wears good shoes, shoes into which water cannot make its way, there are legions who wear shoes that leak, that have gaps through which toes poke out, soles that serve no purpose. And the end of this is wet stockings, entailing coughs and colds, croup, and even pneumonia. Really good shoes are expensive, it must be remembered: to keep a family of sturdy, active youngsters well shod costs more than to keep them well dressed. ‘We should get along fine if it was not for the shoes,’ I am always being told by working-class mothers. ‘It’s the shoes that take all the money.’
‘Not a week goes by but there’s mending to be done, even if there’s no shoes to be bought,’ a very trustworthy woman assures me. ‘Blakies, it’s true, are a help; but one must have something to fasten them on to.’
‘It’s just heart-breaking work trying to keep them all dry-shod,’ a mother of five children declares. ‘They have always, one or other of them, their toes or heels sticking out.’
‘One might think lads had hoofs instead of feet from the way their shoes go,’ another mother once informed me. ‘These were new a fortnight ago, and just see! There’s hardly a bit of sole left.’ Tears came into her eyes as she held the shoes up for me to look at.
Among the respectable poor, not only of the hand-working class, but of the lower-middle class, and this is the poorer of the two in these war days, the great trouble in life is the finding of shoes, the hopeless struggle to keep children’s feet well covered. Year by year, in every town in England, women are worried into their graves, because, let them do what they will, one pair of shoes wears out before they have the wherewithal to buy another. In every town, too, women lose their health and strength because, when they ought to be asleep, they will persist in working, that they may have the money to pay the cobbler. To see their boys and girls going about without even a patch to hide the holes in their shoes, seems to be more than most mothers can bear. And the saddest part of the business is they are sacrificing themselves quite uselessly, to a mere fetish. For very few of them have any thought of hygiene in their heads, when they toil and moil, pinch and save, that their children may have shoes: their thought is all of respectability. They are firmly convinced that to let them go barefoot would be to rob them of all claim to rank with the respectable, would be to dub them little ragamuffins in fact, and thus render them pariahs. And better than that work all night, no matter what it may lead to.
If these mothers were forced to let their children go barefoot, things would of course be otherwise; and they would be forced, practically, were they called upon to do so for patriotism’s sake, for the sake of saving leather that the soldiers might have plenty of good shoes. There would be no loss of caste then in banishing shoes and stockings; on the contrary, it would be the correct thing to do, the ‘just so’; and they would do it right gladly, thankful that they could do it without exciting comment. And by doing it, they would both lighten immeasurably the heavy burden they themselves bear, and add to their children’s chance of developing into sturdy men and women, men and women able to do good work for their country, securing for themselves a fair share of life’s comfort and pleasure the while. For there is proof and to spare that boys and girls alike are better off all round, stronger, more vigorous, more active, without shoes than with them, unless the shoes be of better quality than those most of the respectable poor can afford to buy. Never would the Strassburg Committee have ventured to call upon parents to let their offspring go barefoot had they not known that, even so far as health was concerned, quite apart from the saving of leather, good, not harm, would result. For in Germany, whoever else may go on short commons, children, the Fatherland’s future defenders, are always well cared for. One of the reasons, indeed, that the Committee give for issuing their notice is that going barefoot is not only economical, and therefore, as things are, patriotic, but also hygienic. And that it is, most of us can see for ourselves.
There are districts both in Scotland and Ireland, to say nothing of Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, where there is hardly a shoe to be found. Yet the people there are more stalwart than in any district in England where every foot has its shoe. The finest lads I have ever come across are certainly the Montenegrin; and not one in twenty of them has either a shoe or a stocking. The only reformatory I have known where the little inmates are physically quite on a par with other children, as strong, alert, and light-hearted as other children, is the Eggenburg Reformatory, in Lower Austria, where both boys and girls all go barefoot, in winter as well as in summer.
Eggenburg is the one public institution, so far as I know, where the going-barefoot experiment has been tried, on a large scale, for the express purpose of benefiting the health of the inmates. And it was tried there under conditions that were just about as unfavourable as any conditions the wit of man could have devised. For the Eggenburg children are for the most part of the poorest of the poor class, the most demoralised, the criminal or semi-criminal class; and such children almost always start life heavily handicapped physically, as well as morally. Everyone who goes to this Reformatory must have given proof, before he—or she—goes, that his natural bent is to do what is wrong; that he turns to the left rather than the right instinctively; that he takes to evil ways, in fact, just as a duckling takes to water. There were nearly 400 inmates the first time I was there; and among them, although the eldest was under sixteen, there were sixty convicted thieves, nine incendiaries, and a murderer. One boy had been forty times in the hands of the police before he went to Eggenburg; another, a tiny little fellow, was suffering from alcoholism when he arrived there. Nor was that all: very many of the children were being cruelly ill-treated, beaten, tortured, or starved, when the police took possession of them. Thus to try this experiment with such material as they were was to invite failure. And to try it in the Eggenburg district was certainly not to invite success. For the climate there is bitterly cold in winter. I have seen snow five feet deep around the Reformatory, and it lies there for months together. If folk can go barefoot there with impunity, they can assuredly go barefoot anywhere in England.
To make matters worse, the very officials who were told off to try the experiment were against it: they resented being called upon to try it, so sure were they that it was foredoomed. Not one among them was inclined, therefore, to do his best to render it a success. I very much doubt, indeed, judging by what they themselves told me later, whether anyone among them had even the wish that it should be a success. When Dr. Schöffel, the Provincial Home Minister, informed them that their charges were to go barefoot, every man in the institution, every woman too, rose up indignantly and denounced his project as quite wicked. The Directress of the girls’ wing stoutly refused to have lot or parcel with any such doings. If he chose to kill the boys, that was no concern of hers, but kill her girls he should not, she told him roundly. And to make them go barefoot would be to kill them, it would be downright murder, she declared; and she had never a doubt in her mind but that it would.
The storm spread from Eggenburg to Vienna, where public opinion was strongly on the side of the officials and against their Chief. The Viennese professed themselves quite shocked at his meanness. Questions were asked in the Landtag. ‘Is Lower Austria so poor that she cannot buy shoes for her own adopted children?’ member after member demanded indignantly. Dr. Schöffel stood his ground firmly, however. That the experiment should be tried, he was determined; and for the children’s sake, not the rate-payers’. He was responsible for the children; it was his duty to see that the best that could be done for them should be done; and the best was not being done, he declared. When they arrived at Eggenburg they were almost all physically below the average of children of their age; they were lacking in stamina even when not tainted with disease. That in itself was bad, he maintained; but, what was worse, most of them were still below the average when they left. These children must each one of them, while at the Reformatory, be put on a par so far as in them lay with other children, he insisted. Otherwise they would later, when out in the world, be handicapped in the struggle for life, unable, therefore, to hold their own and earn their daily bread. It was, as he told me himself, for the express purpose of trying to put them physically on a par with other children, and thus give them a fair chance of making their way in the world, that he had determined they should go barefoot.