In Darkest England, and the Way Out

by William Booth

"My lads," he commenced, with one hand in the breast of his ragged vest, and the other, as usual, plucking nervously at his beard, "This kind o' work can't last for ever." (Deep and earnest exclamations, "It can't! It shan't") "Well, boys," continued the speaker, "Somebody'll have to find a road out o' this. What we want is work, not work'us bounty, though the parish has been busy enough amongst us lately, God knows! What we want is honest work, (Hear, hear.) Now, what I propose is that each of you gets fifty mates to join you; that'll make about 1,200 starving chaps—And then?" asked several very gaunt and hungry-looking men excitedly. "Why, then," continued the leader. "Why, then," interrupted a cadaverous-looking man from the farther and darkest end of the cellar, "of course we'll make a—London job of it, eh?" "No, no," hastily interposed my friend, and holding up his hands deprecatingly, "we'll go peaceably about it chaps; we'll go in a body to the Town Hall, and show our poverty, and ask for work. We'll take the women and children with us too." ("Too ragged! Too starved! They can't walk it!") "The women's rags is no disgrace, the staggerin' children 'll show what we come to. Let's go a thousand strong, and ask for work and bread!"

Three years ago, in London, there were some such processions. Church parades to the Abbey and St. Paul's, bivouacs in Trafalgar Square, etc. But Lazarus showed his rags and his sores too conspicuously for the convenience of Dives, and was summarily dealt with in the name of law and order. But as we have Lord Mayor's Days, when all the well-fed fur-clad City Fathers go in State Coaches through the town, why should we not have a Lazarus Day, in which the starving Out-of-Works, and the sweated half-starved "in-works" of London should crawl in their tattered raggedness, with their gaunt, hungry faces, and emaciated Wives and children, a Procession of Despair through the main thoroughfares past the massive houses and princely palaces of luxurious London?

For these men are gradually, but surely, being sucked down into the quicksand of modern life. They stretch out their grimy hands to us in vain appeal, not for charity, but for work.

Work, work! it is always work that they ask. The Divine curse is to them the most blessed of benedictions. "In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread," but alas for these forlorn sons of Adam, they fail to find the bread to eat, for Society has no work for them to do. They have not even leave to sweat. As well as discussing how these poor wanderers should in the second Adam "all be made alive," ought we not to put forth some effort to effect their restoration to that share in the heritage of lab our which is theirs by right of descent from the first Adam?

CHAPTER 4. THE OUT-OF-WORKS

There is hardly any more pathetic figure than that of the strong able worker crying plaintively in the midst of our palaces and churches not for charity, but for work, asking only to be allowed the privilege of perpetual hard labour, that thereby he may earn wherewith to fill his empty belly and silence the cry of his children for food. Crying for it and not getting it, seeking for labour as lost treasure and finding it not, until at last, all spirit and vigour worn out in the weary quest, the once willing worker becomes a broken-down drudge, sodden with wretchedness and despairing of all help in this world or in that which is to come. Our organisation of industry certainly leaves much to be desired. A problem which even slave owners have solved ought not to be abandoned as insoluble by the Christian civilisation of the Nineteenth Century.

I have already given a few life stories taken down from the lip: of those who were found homeless on the Embankment which suggest somewhat of the hardships and the misery of the fruitless search for work. But what a volume of dull, squalid horror—a horror of great darkness gradually obscuring all the light of day from the life of the sufferer might be written from the simple prosaic experiences of the ragged fellows whom you meet every day in the street. These men, whose labour is their only capital, are allowed, nay compelled to waste day after day by the want of any means of employment, and then when they have seen days and weeks roll by during which their capital has been wasted by pounds and pounds, they are lectured for not saving the pence. When a rich man cannot employ his capital he puts it out at interest, but the bank for the labour capital of the poor man has yet to be invented. Yet it might be worth while inventing one. A man's labour is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilisation.

Of all heart-breaking toil the hunt for work is surely the worst. Yet at any moment let a workman lose his present situation, and he is compelled to begin anew the dreary round of fruitless calls. Here is the story of one among thousands of the nomads, taken down from his own lips, of one who was driven by sheer hunger into crime.

A bright Spring morning found me landed from a western colony. Fourteen years had passed since I embarked from the same spot. They were fourteen years, as far as results were concerned, of non-success, and here I was again in my own land, a stranger, with anew career to carve for myself and the battle of life to fight over again.

My first thought was work. Never before had I felt more eager for a down right good chance to win my way by honest toil; but where was I to find work. With firm determination I started in search. One day passed without success and another, and another, but the thought cheered me, "Better luck to-morrow." It has been said, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." In my case it was to be severely tested. Days soon ran into weeks, and still I was on the trail patiently and hopefully. Courtesy and politeness so often met me in my enquiries for employment that I often wished they would kick me out, and so vary the monotony of the sickly veneer of consideration that so thinly overlaid the indifference and the absolute unconcern they had to my need. A few cut up rough and said, No; we don't want you. "Please don't trouble us again (this after the second visit). We have no vacancy; and if we had, we have plenty of people on hand to fill it."