Sandwich-men.
A small contingent of the submerged is formed by the men who, not being habitual and hardened criminals, have been in prison and have not only found employment difficult and even impossible in consequence of a misfortune which many worse than themselves escape, but have returned to the world broken down by the terrible discipline of an English prison. The prison receives a man; it turns out a machine, an obedient machine, as obedient as the dog which follows at heel: it obeys cowering; the machine has no self-respect left, and no power of initiative; the prison bird can only henceforth live in a cage where he is not called upon to earn his livelihood or to carry on a trade. I know little about prisons in other countries, but I doubt whether any system has ever been invented more effective in destroying the manhood of the poor wretches who are subjected to its laws than the prison system of Great Britain. There is no sadder sight imaginable than the reception of a released prisoner by the Salvation Army Refuge for these unfortunate men. Every day their officer attends at the prison doors at the hour of discharge, and invites the men, as they come out, to the refuge. They come in dazed and pale; the light, the air, the freedom, the absence of the man of authority with the keys—all together make them giddy; they are received with a welcome and a handshake which make them suspicious; they are invited to sit down and take food; they obey with a shrinking readiness which brings a flush of shame to the spectator’s face. See; after a little they push the plate away; it is solid food—they cannot take it; they have been so long accustomed to gruel that a plate of meat is too much for them; they can neither eat nor talk; they cannot respond even to kindliness; they cannot understand it; the man—the lost manhood—has to be built up again. The Salvation Army’s Helping Hand rescues some; it fails with some; even where it fails, some good effect must be left in their minds by the show of friendliness and kindness.
The best place to find the submerged is at one of the shelters of the Salvation Army. Here they give for fourpence a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa, with a hunch of bread; it is probably the best meal that the men have had that day; the fourpence also entitles them to a warm and well-lighted room with benches and tables, the means of getting a good wash and a bed. For a smaller sum the accommodation is not so good. Every evening the shelters are quite full; every evening there is held that kind of service, with addresses, prayers, and the singing of hymns, which is called a Salvation Meeting. Well, the men feel, at last, that they are with friends; the lasses with the banjos and the tambourines, the men in the jerseys who speak to them—these are not making any money out of them, they are working for them, they are taking an immense amount of pains entirely on their behalf; I cannot but believe—indeed, I know—that among this poor wreckage of society their efforts meet with the kind of response that is most desired.
Or, if you can get so far out, there is Medland Hall by the riverside at Ratcliffe. It was formerly a Dissenting chapel; it is now a free lodging-house. No one pays anything; there are bunks ranged in lines over the floor—they are rather like coffins, it is true; these bunks are provided with mattresses, and for sheet and blanket with American cloth, which can be easily kept clean. I believe that bread is also provided. An effort is made to find out a way of helping the men to work; the likely young fellows are sent to the recruiting sergeants; some connection has been formed with the railway companies for men young and strong.
The casual ward is a place to which no one will go if he can possibly avoid it. This refuge will only receive the actual destitute, those who have no money at all; their rations of food are light, to say the least. The allowance for young and old, strong and weak, is the same—for breakfast, half a pound of gruel and eight ounces of bread; the same for supper; for dinner, eight ounces of bread and an ounce and a half of cheese; for drink, cold water. The casual is put into a cell by himself and there locked up; in the morning, when he ought to be out and looking for work, he is detained to do stone-breaking or oakum-picking—half a ton of stone-breaking or four pounds of oakum, a task so heavy that it takes him the best part of the day, and he is lucky if he is not detained as a punishment for another night and day, with a corresponding increase in the task imposed upon him.
One would like to take some of the permanent officials of the Local Government Board and set them to the same work on the same food. What is the man’s crime? Poverty. There may be other crimes which have reduced him to this condition of destitution, but no questions are asked. It is poverty, poverty, nothing but poverty, for which this treatment is the punishment. I once visited a casual ward; it was, I believe, Saturday afternoon. I was shown one cell occupied by a woe-begone young country lad; he was sitting alone; I think he had done his task; he was to be a prisoner till Monday morning—such was the infamy of his poverty. Lucky for him if he was not kept over Monday, to pick more oakum and to reduce his strength and impair his constitution by more starvation on gruel and bread weighed out by ounces. With refuges for the destitute where they are starved and made to work hard on insufficient food, with prisons for the criminal where manhood is crushed and strength is destroyed by feeding men on gruel, we support bravely the character of a country obedient to the laws of God and marching in the footsteps of Christ.
Such are the submerged—an army of brokendown gentlemen, ruined professional men, penniless clerks, bankrupt traders, working-men who are out of work through age or infirmity, victims of drink, ex-prisoners and convicts, but not habitual criminals. It is a helpless and a hopeless army; I have said already that this is the note of the submerged. We shall see presently what is done for this great body of misery. One thing must be remembered. There are lower levels than those reached by this army; physicians, clergymen, missionaries, journalists, whisper things far worse than can be alleged against the submerged. And we have not included among them the tramp, that class whose blood is charged with restlessness hereditary, who cannot remain long in any place, who cannot enter upon steady work, who are driven by their restlessness, as by a whip of scorpions, along the roads. Not the tramp, nor the sturdy rogue, nor the professional criminal, nor the vile wretches who live by the vilest trades, may be numbered among the submerged. They fall noiselessly from their place of honor, they live noiselessly in their place of dishonor; they might perhaps be brought back to work, but the cases of recovery must be very few in proportion, because the causes which dragged them down are those which prevent them from being dragged up. If any physician can give back to the submerged patience, resolution, will, courage, hope, he may reclaim them. If that cannot be done they must remain as they are.
My illustration of the submerged seems to have little to do with East London. As a fact, there is no respect paid to places. When a man has belonged to the West End his wandering feet, over which, as over his other actions, the patient has no control, carry him about the scenes of his former prosperity without his taking any steps to prevent it. Old acquaintances recognize him, and pass him by with a cold eye which denies the recognition and conceals the pity. He himself sees nobody and remembers nobody. In the same way a man who belongs by birth and habits to East London will remain there after he has come to grief. Or, if the former gentleman, for some reason, gets into East London and finds out its ways, with the cheap lodgings, the shelters, the “ha’penny” cups of cocoa, and the many helping hands from which he may get some kind of relief he will stay in East London. We need not hesitate about awarding the palm of nourishing or starving more or fewer of the submerged to East or West London. It is enough to know that they exist in both quarters, and that, according to statistics, there are over ten thousand of them in East London alone. If any help can be found for this mass of wreckage let us find that help and give it with full hands and in measure overflowing, for indeed of all those who are poor and distressed and unhappy the company of the submerged are the most wretched. Even if, as is almost always the case, they have brought their punishment upon themselves by the folly of the prodigal, the weakness of those who take the Easy Way, and the wickedness of those who indulge the natural inclination to vice, let us not inquire too closely into the record; let us still stretch out our hand of help; if we can restore some of them—even a few, even one here and there—to the life of honesty among folk of good repute, we must still leave them the shameful memory of the past. That punishment we cannot avert; we cannot remove it from them. The world will forgive them, but how shall we find that Lethe whose waters will enable them to forgive themselves? “Arise”—it is easy for the world to say—“thy sins shall no longer be imputed to thee for a reproach and a hissing.” Alas! When the better self returns, how shall that poor wretch cease to reproach himself?