HOW THE POOR LIVE, AND HORRIBLE LONDON

The papers which form this volume appeared originally in The Pictorial World and The Daily News. The interest now evinced in the great question of Housing the Poor leads me to hope that they will be of assistance to many who are studying the subject, and would desire to have their information in a convenient form for reference. Much that I ventured to prognosticate when 'How the Poor Live' was written has happened since, and I have the permission of the author of 'The Bitter Cry of Outcast London' to say that from these articles he derived the greatest assistance while compiling his famous pamphlet. I have thought it well, all circumstances considered, to let the work stand in its original form, and have in no way added to it or altered it.

If an occasional lightness of treatment seems to the reader out of harmony with so grave a subject, I pray that he will remember the work was undertaken to enlist the sympathies of a class not generally given to the study of 'low life.'

GEORGE R. SIMS

HOW THE POOR LIVE.

CHAPTER I.

I commence, with the first of these chapters, a book of travel. An author and an artist have gone hand-in-hand into many a far-off region of the earth, and the result has been a volume eagerly studied by the stay-at-home public, anxious to know something of the world in which they live. In these pages I propose to record the result of a journey into a region which lies at our own doors—into a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office. This continent will, I hope, be found as interesting as any of those newly-explored lands which engage the attention of the Royal Geographical Society—the wild races who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as easily as those savage tribes for whose benefit the Missionary Societies never cease to appeal for funds.

I have no shipwrecks, no battles, no moving adventures by flood and field, to record. Such perils as I and my fellow-traveller have encountered on our journey are not of the order which lend themselves to stirring narrative. It is unpleasant to be mistaken, in underground cellars where the vilest outcasts hide from the light of day, for detectives in search of their prey—it is dangerous to breathe for some hours at a stretch an atmosphere charged with infection and poisoned with indescribable effluvia—it is hazardous to be hemmed in down a blind alley by a crowd of roughs who have had hereditarily transmitted to them the maxim of John Leech, that half-bricks were specially designed for the benefit of 'strangers;' but these are not adventures of the heroic order, and they will not be dwelt upon lovingly after the manner of travellers who go farther afield.

My task is perhaps too serious a one even for the light tone of these remarks. No man who has seen 'How the Poor Live' can return from the journey with aught but an aching heart. No man who recognises how serious is the social problem which lies before us can approach its consideration in any but the gravest mood. Let me, then, briefly place before the reader the serious purpose of these pages, and then I will ask him to set out with me on the journey and judge for himself whether there is no remedy for much that he will see. He will have to encounter misery that some good people think it best to leave undiscovered. He will be brought face to face with that dark side of life which the wearers of rose-coloured spectacles turn away from on principle. The worship of the beautiful is an excellent thing, but he who digs down deep in the mire to find the soul of goodness in things evil is a better man and a better Christian than he who shudders at the ugly and the unclean, and kicks it from his path, that it may not come between the wind and his nobility.

But let not the reader be alarmed, and imagine that I am about to take advantage of his good-nature in order to plunge him neck-high into a mud bath. He may be pained before we part company, but he shall not be disgusted. He may occasionally feel a choking in his throat, but he shall smile now and again. Among the poor there is humour as well as pathos, there is food for laughter as well as for tears, and the rays of God's sunshine lose their way now and again, and bring light and gladness into the vilest of the London slums.

His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, in his speech at the opening of the Royal College of Music some years ago, said: 'The time has come when class can no longer stand aloof from class, and that man does his duty best who works most earnestly in bridging over the gulf between different classes which it is the tendency of increased wealth and increased civilization to widen.' It is to increased wealth and to increased civilization that we owe the wide gulf which to-day separates well-to-do citizens from the masses. It is the increased wealth of this mighty city which has driven the poor back inch by inch, until we find them to-day herding together, packed like herrings in a barrel, neglected and despised, and left to endure wrongs and hardships which, if they were related of a far-off savage tribe, would cause Exeter Hall to shudder till its bricks fell down. It is the increased civilization of this marvellous age which has made life a victory only for the strong, the gifted, and the specially blest, and left the weak, the poor, and the ignorant to work out in their proper persons the theory of the survival of the fittest to its bitter end.

There are not wanting signs that the 'one-roomed helot' and his brood are about to receive a little scientific attention. They have become natural curiosities, and to this fact they may owe the honour in store for them, of dividing public attention with the Zenanas, the Aborigines, and the South Sea Islanders. The long-promised era of domestic legislation is said to be at hand, and prophets with powerful telescopes declare they can see the first faint signs of its dawn upon the political horizon. When that era has come within the range of the naked eye, it is probable that the Homes of the Poor will be one of its burning questions, and the strong arm of the law may be extended protectingly, even at the risk of showing the shortness of its sleeve, as far as the humble toilers who at the present moment suffer only its penalties and enjoy none of its advantages.

That there are remedies for the great evil which lies like a cankerworm in the heart of this fair city is certain. What those remedies are you will be better able to judge when you have seen the condition of the disease for which Dr. State is to be called in. Dr. State, alas! is as slow to put in an appearance as his parish confrère when the patient in need of his services is poor and friendless.

Forgive me this little discourse by the way. It has at any rate filled up the time as we walk along to the outskirts of the land through which we are to travel for a few weeks together. And now, turning out of the busy street alive with the roar of commerce, and where the great marts and warehouses tower stories high, and where Dives adds daily to his wealth, we turn up a narrow court, and find ourselves at once in the slum where Lazarus lays his head—even as he did in the sacred story—at the very gates of the mighty millionaire.

We walk along a narrow dirty passage, which would effectually have stopped the Claimant had he come to this neighbourhood in search of witnesses, and at the end we find ourselves in what we should call a back-yard, but which, in the language of the neighbourhood, is a square. The square is full of refuse; heaps of dust and decaying vegetable matter lie about here and there, under the windows and in front of the doors of the squalid tumble-down houses. The windows above and below are broken and patched; the roofs of these two-storied 'eligible residences' look as though Lord Alcester had been having some preliminary practice with his guns here before he set sail for Alexandria. All these places are let out in single rooms at prices varying from 2s. 6d to 4s. a week. We can see a good deal of the inside through the cracks and crevices and broken panes, but if we knock at the door we shall get a view of the inhabitants.

If you knew more of these Alsatias, you would be rather astonished that there was a door to knock at. Most of the houses are open day and night, and knockers and bells are things unknown. Here, however, the former luxuries exist; so we will not disdain them.

Knock, knock!

Hey, presto! what a change of scene! Sleepy Hollow has come to life. Every door flies open, and there is a cluster of human beings on the threshold. Heads of matted hair and faces that haven't seen soap for months come out of the broken windows above.

Our knock has alarmed the neighbourhood. Who are we? The police? No. Who are we? Now they recognise one of our number—our guide—with a growl. He and we with him can pass without let or hindrance where it would be dangerous for a policeman to go. We are supposed to be on business connected with the School Board, and we are armed with a password which the worst of these outcasts have grown at last sulkily to acknowledge.

This is a very respectable place, and we have taken it first to break the ground gently for an artist who has not hitherto studied 'character' on ground where I have had many wanderings.

To the particular door attacked there comes a poor woman, white and thin and sickly-looking; in her arms she carries a girl of eight or nine with a diseased spine; behind her, clutching at her scanty dress, are two or three other children. We put a statistical question, say a kind word to the little ones, and ask to see the room.

What a room! The poor woman apologizes for its condition, but the helpless child, always needing her care, and the other little ones to look after, and times being bad, etc. Poor creature, if she had ten pair of hands instead of one pair always full, she could not keep this room clean. The walls are damp and crumbling, the ceiling is black and peeling off, showing the laths above, the floor is rotten and broken away in places, and the wind and the rain sweep in through gaps that seem everywhere. The woman, her husband, and her six children live, eat, and sleep in this one room, and for this they pay three shillings a week. It is quite as much as they can afford. There has been no breakfast yet, and there won't be any till the husband (who has been out to try and get a job) comes in and reports progress. As to complaining of the dilapidated, filthy condition of the room, they know better. If they don't like it they can go. There are dozens of families who will jump at the accommodation, and the landlord is well aware of the fact.

Some landlords do repair their tenants' rooms. Why, cert'nly. Here is a sketch of one and of the repairs we saw the same day. Rent, 4s. a week; condition indescribable. But notice the repairs: a bit of a box-lid nailed across a hole in the wall big enough for a man's head to go through, a nail knocked into a window-frame beneath which still comes in a little fresh air, and a strip of new paper on a corner of the wall. You can't see the new paper because it is not up. The lady of the rooms holds it in her hand. The rent collector has just left it for her to put up herself. Its value, at a rough guess, is threepence. This landlord has executed repairs. Items: one piece of a broken soap-box, one yard and a half of paper, and one nail. And for these repairs he has raised the rent of the room threepence a week.

We are not in the square now, but in a long dirty street, full of lodging-houses from end to end, a perfect human warren, where every door stands open night and day—a state of things that shall be described and illustrated a little later on when we come to the ''appy dossers.' In this street, close to the repaired residence, we select at hazard an open doorway and plunge into it. We pass along a greasy, grimy passage, and turn a corner to ascend the stairs. Round the corner it is dark. There is no staircase light, and we can hardly distinguish in the gloom where we are going. A stumble causes us to strike a light.

That stumble was a lucky one. The staircase we were ascending, and which men and women and little children go up and down day after day and night after night, is a wonderful affair. The handrail is broken away, the stairs themselves are going—a heavy boot has been clean through one of them already, and it would need very little, one would think, for the whole lot to give way and fall with a crash. A sketch, taken at the time, by the light of successive vestas, fails to give the grim horror of that awful staircase. The surroundings, the ruin, the decay, and the dirt, could not be reproduced.

We are anxious to see what kind of people get safely up and down this staircase, and as we ascend we knock accidentally up against something; it is a door and a landing. The door is opened, and as the light is thrown on to where we stand we give an involuntary exclamation of horror; the door opens right on to the corner stair. The woman who comes out would, if she stepped incautiously, fall six feet, and nothing could save her. It is a tidy room this, for the neighbourhood. A good hardworking woman has kept her home neat, even in such surroundings. The rent is four and sixpence a week, and the family living in it numbers eight souls; their total earnings are twelve shillings. A hard lot, one would fancy; but in comparison to what we have to encounter presently it certainly is not. Asked about the stairs, the woman says, 'It is a little ockard-like for the young 'uns a-goin' up and down to school now the Board make 'em wear boots; but they don't often hurt themselves.' Minus the boots, the children had got used to the ascent and descent, I suppose, and were as much at home on the crazy staircase as a chamois on a precipice. Excelsior is our motto on this staircase. No maiden with blue eyes comes out to mention avalanches, but the woman herself suggests 'it's werry bad higher up.' We are as heedless of the warning as Longfellow's headstrong banner-bearer, for we go on.

It is 'werry bad' higher up, so bad that we begin to light some more matches and look round to see how we are to get down. But as we continue to ascend the darkness grows less and less. We go a step at a time, slowly and circumspectly, up, up to the light, and at last our heads are suddenly above a floor and looking straight into a room.

We have reached the attic, and in that attic we see a picture which will be engraven on our memory for many a month to come.

The attic is almost bare; in a broken fireplace are some smouldering embers; a log of wood lies in front like a fender. There is a broken chair trying to steady itself against a wall black with the dirt of ages. In one corner, on a shelf, is a battered saucepan and a piece of dry bread. On the scrap of mantel still remaining embedded in the wall is a rag; on a bit of cord hung across the room are more rags—garments of some sort, possibly; a broken flower-pot props open a crazy window-frame, possibly to let the smoke out, or in—looking at the chimney-pots below, it is difficult to say which; and at one side of the room is a sack of Heaven knows what—it is a dirty, filthy sack, greasy and black and evil-looking. I could not guess what was in it if I tried, but what was on it was a little child—a neglected, ragged, grimed, and bare-legged little baby-girl of four. There she sat, in the bare, squalid room, perched on the sack, erect, motionless, expressionless, on duty.

She was 'a little sentinel,' left to guard a baby that lay asleep on the bare boards behind her, its head on its arm, the ragged remains of what had been a shawl flung over its legs.

That baby needed a sentinel to guard it, indeed. Had it crawled a foot or two, it would have fallen head-foremost into that unprotected, yawning abyss of blackness below. In case of some such proceeding on its part, the child of four had been left 'on guard.'

The furniture of the attic, whatever it was like, had been seized the week before for rent. The little sentinel's papa—this we unearthed of the 'deputy' of the house later on—was a militiaman, and away; the little sentinel's mamma was gone out on 'a arrand,' which, if it was anything like her usual 'arrands,' the deputy below informed us, would bring her home about dark, very much the worse for it. Think of that little child keeping guard on that dirty sack for six or eight hours at a stretch—think of her utter loneliness in that bare, desolate room, every childish impulse checked, left with orders 'not to move, or I'll kill yer,' and sitting there often till night and darkness came on, hungry, thirsty, and tired herself, but faithful to her trust to the last minute of the drunken mother's absence! 'Bless yer! I've known that young'un sit there eight 'our at a stretch. I've seen her there of a mornin' when I've come up to see if I could git the rint, and I've seen her there when I've come agin at night,' says the deputy. 'Lor, that ain't nothing—that ain't.'

Nothing! It is one of the saddest pictures I have seen for many a day. Poor little baby-sentinel!—left with a human life in its sole charge at four—neglected and overlooked: what will its girl-life be, when it grows old enough to think? I should like some of the little ones whose every wish is gratified, who have but to whimper to have, and who live surrounded by loving, smiling faces, and tendered by gentle hands, to see the little child in the bare garret sitting sentinel over the sleeping baby on the floor, and budging never an inch throughout the weary day from the place that her mother had bidden her stay in.

With our minds full of this pathetic picture of child-life in the 'Homes of the Poor,' we descend the crazy staircase, and get out into as much light as can find its way down these narrow alleys.

Outside we see a portly gentleman with a big gold chain across his capacious form, and an air of wealth and good living all over him. He is the owner of a whole block of property such as this, and he waxes rich on his rents. Strange as it may seem, these one-roomed outcasts are the best paying tenants in London. They pay so much for so little, and almost fight to get it. That they should be left to be thus exploited is a disgrace to the Legislature, which is never tired of protecting the oppressed of 'all races that on earth do dwell,' except those of that particular race who have the honour to be free-born Englishmen.

CHAPTER II.

As I glance over the notes I have jotted down during my journey through Outcasts' Land, the delicacy of the task I have undertaken comes home to me more forcibly than ever. The housing of the poor and the remedy for the existing state of things are matters I have so much at heart, that I fear lest I should not make ample use of the golden opportunities here afforded me of ventilating the subject. On the other hand, I hesitate to repel the reader, and, unfortunately, the best illustrations of the evils of overcrowding are repulsive to a degree.

Perhaps if I hint at a few of the very bad cases, it will be sufficient. Men and women of the world will be able to supply the details and draw the correct deductions; and it is, after all, only men and women of the world whose practical sympathy is likely to be enlisted by a revelation of the truth about the poor of great cities.

Come with me down this court, where at eleven o'clock in the morning a dead silence reigns. Every house is tenanted, but the blinds of the windows are down and the doors are shut. Blinds and doors! Yes, these luxuries are visible here. This is an aristocratic street, and the rents are paid regularly. There is no grinding poverty, no starvation here, and no large families to drag at the bread-winner. There is hardly any child-life here at all, for the men are thieves and highway cheats, and the women are of the class which has furnished the companions of such men from the earliest annals of roguedom.

The colony sleeps though the sun is high. The day with them is the idle time, and they reap their harvest in the hours of darkness. Later in the day, towards two o'clock, there will be signs of life; oaths and shouts will issue from the now silent rooms, and there will be fierce wrangles and fights over the division of ill-gotten gains. The spirit of murder hovers over this spot, for life is held of little account. There is a Bill Sikes and Nancy in scores of these tenements, and the brutal blow is ever the accompaniment of the brutal oath.

These people, remember, rub elbows with the honest labouring poor; their lives are no mystery to the boys and girls in the neighbourhood; the little girls often fetch Nancy's gin, and stand in a gaping crowd while Nancy and Bill exchange compliments on the doorstep, drawn from the well of Saxon, impure and utterly defiled. The little boys look up half with awe and half with admiration at the burly Sikes with his flash style, and delight in gossip concerning his talents as a 'crib-cracker,' and his adventures as a pickpocket: The poor—the honest poor—have been driven by the working of the Artizans' Dwellings Acts, and the clearance of rookery after rookery, to come and herd with thieves and wantons, to bring up their children in the last Alsatias, where lawlessness and violence still reign supreme.

The constant association of the poor and the criminal class has deadened in the former nearly all sense of right and wrong. In the words of one of them, 'they can't afford to be particular about their choice of neighbours.' I was but the other day in a room in this district occupied by a widow woman, her daughters of seventeen and sixteen, her sons of fourteen and thirteen, and two younger children. Her wretched apartment was on the street level, and behind it was the common yard of the tenement. In this yard the previous night a drunken sailor had been desperately maltreated, and left for dead. I asked the woman if she had not heard the noise, and why she didn't interfere. 'Heard it?' was the reply; 'well, we ain't deaf, but they're a rum lot in this here house, and we're used to rows. There ain't a night passes as there ain't a fight in the passage or a drunken row; but why should I interfere?'Taint no business of mine.' As a matter of fact, this woman, her grown-up daughters, and her boys must have lain in that room night after night, hearing the most obscene language, having a perfect knowledge of the proceedings of the vilest and most depraved of profligate men and women forced upon them, hearing cries of murder and the sound of blows, knowing that almost every crime in the Decalogue was being committed in that awful back yard on which that broken casement looked, and yet not one of them had ever dreamed of stirring hand or foot. They were saturated with the spirit of the place, and though they were respectable people themselves, they saw nothing criminal in the behaviour of their neighbours.

For this room, with its advantages, the widow paid four and sixpence a week; the walls were mildewed and streaming with damp; the boards as you trod upon them made the slushing noise of a plank spread across a mud puddle in a brickfield; foul within and foul without, these people paid the rent of it gladly, and perhaps thanked God for the luck of having it. Rooms for the poor earning precarious livelihoods are too hard to get and too much in demand now for a widow woman to give up one just because of the trifling inconvenience of overhearing a few outrages and murders.

One word more on this shady subject and we will get out into the light again. I have spoken of the familiarity of the children of the poor with all manner of wickedness and crime. Of all the evils arising from this one-room system there is perhaps none greater than the utter destruction of innocence in the young. A moment's thought will enable the reader to appreciate the evils of it. But if it is bad in the case of a respectable family, how much more terrible is it when the children are familiarized with actual immorality!

Wait outside while we knock at this door.

Knock, knock!—No answer!

Knock, knock, knock!

A child's voice answers, 'What is it?'

We give the answer—the answer which has been our 'open, sesame' everywhere—and after a pause a woman opens a door a little and asks us to wait a moment. Presently we are admitted. A woman pleasing looking and with a certain refinement in her features holds the door open for us. She has evidently made a hurried toilet and put on an ulster over her night attire. She has also put a brass chain and locket round her neck. There is a little rouge left on her cheeks and a little of the burnt hairpin colour left under her eyes from overnight. At the table having their breakfast are two neat and clean little girls of seven and eight.

They rise and curtsey as we enter. We ask them a few questions, and they answer intelligently—they are at the Board School and are making admirable progress—charming children, interesting and well-behaved in every way. They have a perfect knowledge of good and evil—one of them has taken a Scripture prize—and yet these two charming and intelligent little girls live in that room night and day with their mother, and this is the den to which she snares her dissolute prey.

I would gladly have passed over this scene in silence, but it is one part of the question which directly bears on the theory of State interference. It is by shutting our eyes to evils that we allow them to continue unreformed so long. I maintain that such cases as these are fit ones for legislative protection. The State should have the power of rescuing its future citizens from such surroundings, and the law which protects young children from physical hurt should also be so framed as to shield them from moral destruction.

The worst effect of the present system of Packing the Poor is the moral destruction of the next generation.

Whatever it costs us to remedy the disease we shall gain in decreased crime and wickedness. It is better even that the ratepayers should bear a portion of the burthen of new homes for the respectable poor than that they should have to pay twice as much in the long-run for prisons, lunatic asylums, and workhouses.

Enough for the present of the criminal classes. Let us see some of the poor people who earn an honest living—well, 'living,' perhaps, is hardly the word—let us say, who can earn enough to pay their rent and keep body and soul together.

Here is a quaint scene, to begin with. When we open the door we start back half choked. The air is full of floating fluff, and some of it gets into our mouths and half chokes us. When we've coughed and wheezed a little we look about us and gradually take in the situation.

The room is about eight feet square. Seated on the floor is a white fairy—a dark-eyed girl who looks as though she had stepped straight off a twelfth cake. Her hair is powdered all over a la Pompadour, and the effect is bizarre. Seated beside her is an older woman, and she is white and twelfth-cakey too. Alas! their occupation is prosaic to a degree. They are simply pulling rabbit-skins—that is to say, they are pulling away all the loose fluff and down and preparing the skins for the furriers, who will use them for cheap goods, dye them into imitations of rarer skins, and practise upon them the various tricks of the trade.

Floor, walls, ceiling, every inch of the one room these people live and sleep in, is covered with fluff and hair. How they breathe in it is a mystery to me. I tried and failed, and sought refuge on the doorstep. The pair, working night and day at their trade, make, when business is good, about twelve shillings a week. Their rent is four. This leaves them four shillings a week each to live upon, and as there is no one else to share it with them, I suppose they are well-to-do folk.

The younger woman's appearance was striking. Seated on the floor in an Eastern attitude, and white from top to toe—the effect of her dark eyes heightened by the contrast—she was a picture for an artist, and my fellow-worker made excellent use of his pencil, while I engaged her and her mother in conversation.

These people complained bitterly of their surroundings, of the character of the people they had to live among, and of the summary proceedings of their landlord, who absolutely refused to repair their room or give them the slightest convenience.

'Then why not move?' I ventured to suggest. 'Four shillings a week—ten guineas a year for this pigsty—is'. an exorbitant rent: you might do better.'

The woman shook her head. 'There's lots o' better places we'd like to go to, but they won't have us. They object to our business. We must go where they'll take us.'

'But there are plenty of places a little way out where you can have two rooms for what you pay for this.'

'A little way out, yes; but how are we to get to and fro with the work when it's done? We must be near our work. We can't afford to ride.'

Exactly! And therein lies one of the things which reformers have to consider. There are thousands of these families who would go away into the suburbs, where we want to get them, if only the difficulty of travelling expenses to and fro could be conquered. They herd together all in closely packed quarters because they must be where they can get to the dock, the yard, the wharf, and the warehouses without expense. The highest earnings of this class is rarely above sixteen shillings a week, and that, with four or five shillings for rent, leaves very little margin where the family is large. The omnibus and the train are the magicians which will eventually bid the rookeries disappear, but the services of these magicians cost money, and there is none to spare in the pockets of the poor.

In another room close to these people, but if anything in a more wretched condition still, we come upon a black man sitting with his head buried in his hands. He is suffering with rheumatics, and has almost lost the use of his limbs. The reason is evident. His wife points to the bed in the corner against the wall; the damp is absolutely oozing through and trickling down the wall. The black man is loquacious. He is a hawker, and can't go out and lay in a stock, for he hasn't a penny in the world. He is stone broke. He is a Protestant darkie, he informs us, and is full of troubles. Two boys are lolling about on the floor. At our entrance a shock-headed, ragged girl of ten has crawled under the bed. The Protestant darkie drags her out and explains she is 'a-bringin' him to his grave with sorrer—she's a bad gel and slangs her mother.' The P. D. doesn't know how he's going to pay his rent or where the next meal's coming from. He stands outside 'a corffee shop' generally, when he can get about, and 'the lady as keeps it, bless her!—she's a rare good'un to me—she's a fallen angel, that's what she is;' but he can't go and hawk nothing, else he'd be took up. 'I ain't got no capital, and, faith of a Protestant darkie, I'm defunct.'

The man has a host of quaint sayings and plenty of the peculiar wit of the nigger breed, but his position is undoubtedly desperate.

The rent of the death-trap he lives in with his wife and family is four and sixpence, and his sole means of subsistence is hawking shrimps and winkles when they are cheap, or specked oranges and damaged fruit. He has at the best of times only a shilling or two to lay out in the wholesale market, and out of his profit he must pay his rent and keep his family. I suspect that the 'fallen angel' is often good for a meal to the poor darkie, and I learn that he is a most respectable, hardworking fellow. 'How do you do when you're stone broke?' I ask him. 'Well, sir, sometimes I comes across a gentleman as gives me a bob and starts me again.'

The shot hits the mark, and we leave the Protestant darkie grinning at his own success, and debating with his wife what will be the best article in which to invest for the day's market.

Honest folks enough in their way, these—keeping themselves to themselves and struggling on as best they can, now 'making a bit over,' and now wondering where on earth the next sixpence is to come from. Just up the street is a house with an inscription over it which tells us we can find within a very different class to study. This is a licensed lodging-house, where you can be accommodated for fourpence or sixpence a night. This payment gives you during the day the privilege of using the common kitchen, and it is into the common kitchen we are going. We walk into the passage, and are stopped by a strapping young woman of about eight-and-twenty. She is the deputy. 'What do we want?'

Once again the password is given, and the attitude of the lady changes. She formally conducts us into a large room, where the strangest collection of human beings are crowded together. It is sheet-washing day, and there is a great fire roaring up the chimney. Its ruddy glare gives a Rembrandtish tone to the picture. Tables and forms run round, the room, and there is not a vacant place.' Men, women, and children are lolling about, though it is mid-day, apparently with nothing to do but make themselves comfortable. The company is not a pleasant one. Many of the men and women and boys are thieves. Almost every form of disease, almost every kind of deformity, seems crowded into this Chamber of Horrors. The features are mostly repulsive; an attractive face there is not among the sixty or seventy human beings in the room. Some of them are tramps and hawkers, but most of them are professional loafers, picking up in any way that presents itself the price of a night's lodging. They are a shifting population, and rarely remain in one house long. Some of them only get a night in now and then as a luxury, and look upon it as a Grand Hotel episode. They sleep habitually in the open, on the staircases, or in the casual ward. The house we are in is one where Nancy and Sikes come often enough when they are down on their luck. Here is a true story of this very place, which will perhaps illustrate sufficiently the type of its frequenters.

Some time last year two men left the house one morning. They were going into the country on business. One, whom I will call John, kissed his mistress, a girl of twenty, and said 'Good-bye,' leaving her at the house; he wouldn't be away long, and he and Bill, his companion, set out on their travels.

A day or two after Bill returns alone; the girl asks him where her sweetheart is. 'He's lagged,' says Bill. But the girl has a bit of newspaper, and in it she reads that 'the body of a man has been found in some woods near London;' and she has an idea it may be John. 'Oh, nonsense,' says Bill—I quote the evidence—'he then lit his candle, and they retired to rest.' John, as a matter of fact, had been murdered by his companion, they having quarrelled over the division of the proceeds of the burglary; and eventually this young woman, who so readily transferred her affections from one lord to another, appeared in the witness-box and deposed to pawning boots and other things for Bill which were undoubtedly the proceeds of a robbery at a house close to where the body was found.

This is the house in which we stand where the burglary was planned—whence the murderer and the murdered set out together on their fatal journey. It was at one of these tables that the young girl discussed her absent lover's fate with her new lord, his murderer, and it was here that the police came to search for him and found the girl whose evidence helped to hang him.

Look at the people who sit there to-day—murderers and burglars some of them, cheats and pickpockets others, and a few respectable folks as far as their opportunities will allow. But remember that dozens of really respectable families do have to frequent these places now, and mix with malefactors day and night, because there are no other places open to them.

Among all the cruelties practised on the poor in the name of Metropolitan improvements this one deserves mentioning—that the labourer earning a precarious livelihood with his wife and his children have been driven at last to accept the shelter of a thieves' kitchen and to be thankful for it.

CHAPTER III.

I cannot help being struck, in my wanderings through Povertyopolis, with the extraordinary resemblance which Caesar bore to Pompey—especially Pompey. One room in this district is very like the other. The family likeness of the chairs and tables is truly remarkable, especially in the matter of legs. Most chairs are born with four legs, but the chairs one meets with here are a two-legged race—a four-legged chair is a rara avis, and when found should be made a note of. The tables, too, are of a type indigenous to the spot. The survival of the fittest does not obtain in these districts in the matter of tables. The most positively unfit are common, very common objects. What has become of the fittest I hesitate to conjecture. Possibly they have run away. I am quite sure that a table with legs would make use of them to escape from such surroundings.

As to the bedsteads, they are wretched, broken-down old things of wood and iron that look as though they had been rescued a little late from a fire, then used for a barricade, afterwards buried in volcanic eruption, and finally dug out of a dust-heap that had concealed them for a century. The bedding, a respectable coal-sack would blush to acknowledge even as a poor relation.

I have enumerated chairs, tables, and beds, not because they are found in every poor home—there are several rented rooms which can boast of nothing but four walls, a ceiling, and a floor—but because these articles placed in one of these dens constitute what are euphemistically called 'furnished apartments,' a species of accommodation with which all very poor neighbourhoods abound.

The 'furnished apartments' fetch as much as tenpence a day, and are sometimes occupied by three or four different tenants during a week.

The 'deputy' comes for the money every day, and it is pay or go with the occupants. If the man who has taken one of these furnished rooms for his 'home, sweet home,' does not get enough during the day to pay his rent, out he goes into the street with his wife and children, and enter another family forthwith.

The tenants have not, as a rule, much to be flung after them in the shape of goods and chattels. The clothes they stand upright in, a battered kettle, and, perhaps, a bundle, make up the catalogue of their worldly possessions.

This kind of rough-and-ready lodging is the resource of thousands of industrious people earning precarious livelihoods, and they rarely rise above it to the dignity of taking a room by the week. The great struggle is to get over Saturday, and thank God for Sunday. Sunday is a free day, and no deputy comes to disturb its peaceful calm. The Saturday's rent, according to the custom of the country, makes the tenant free of the apartments until Monday.

It is the custom to denounce the poor as thriftless, and that they are so I grant. The temptation to trust to luck and let every day take care of itself is, it must be remembered, great. Life with them is always a toss-up, a daily battle, an hourly struggle. Thousands of them can never hope to be five shillings ahead of the world if they keep honest. The utmost limit of their wage is reached when they have paid their rent, kept themselves and their horribly large families from starvation, and bought the few rags which keep their limbs decently covered. With them the object of life is attained when the night's rent is paid, and they do not have to hesitate between the workhouse or a corner of the staircase in some doorless house.

There is a legend in one street I know of—a man who once saved half a crown, and lost it through a hole in his pocket. The moral of that legend may have impressed itself upon the whole population and discouraged thrift for evermore; but be that as it may, the general rule is, 'what you make in a day spend in a day.' It is needless to add that this precept brings its practisers perpetually within measurable distance of absolute pennilessness. They live and die on the confines of it. I am wrong; they invariably die on the wrong side of the border, and are buried at somebody else's expense.

Drink is the curse of these communities; but how is it to be wondered at? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and fortunes are made out of men and women who seldom know where to-morrow's meal is coming from.

Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their light and their glitter, are crowded? Drink is sustenance to these people; drink gives them the Dutch courage necessary to go on living; drink dulls their senses and reduces them to the level of the brutes they must be to live in such sties.

The gin-palace is heaven to them compared to the hell of their pestilent homes. A copper or two, often obtained by pawning the last rag that covers the shivering children on the bare floor at home, will buy enough vitriol-madness to send a woman home so besotted that the wretchedness, the anguish, the degradation that await her there have lost their grip. To be drunk with these people means to be happy. Sober—God help them!—how could they be aught but wretched?

There is not only temptation to drink wrought by the fearful surroundings of the poor; a positive craving for it is engendered by the foul and foetid atmosphere they continually breathe. I have often wondered that the advocates of temperance, with the immense resources of wealth and organization they command, have not given more attention to the overcrowding and the unsanitary condition of the dwellings of the poor, as one of the great causes of the abuse of stimulants.

It is not only that crime and vice and disorder flourish luxuriantly in these colonies, through the dirt and discomfort bred of intemperance of the inhabitants, but the effect upon the children is terrible. The offspring of drunken fathers and mothers inherit not only a tendency to vice, but they come into the world physically and mentally unfit to conquer in life's battle. The wretched, stunted, misshapen child-object one comes upon in these localities is the most painful part of our explorers' experience. The county asylums are crowded with pauper idiots and lunatics, who owe their wretched condition to the sin of the parents, and the rates are heavily burthened with the maintenance of the idiot offspring of drunkenness.

The drink dulls every sense of shame, takes the sharp edge from sorrow, and leaves the drinker for awhile in a fools' paradise. Here is the home of the most notorious 'drunkardess'—if I may coin a work—in the neighbourhood. Mrs. O'Flannigan's room is easily entered, for it is on the street-level, and one step brings us into the presence of the lady herself. She is in bed, a dirty red flannel rag is wrapped about her shoulders, and her one arm is in a sling. She sits up in bed at the sight of visitors, and greets us in a gin and fog voice, slightly mellowed with the Irish brogue. Biddy has been charged at the police-courts seventy-five times with being drunk, and she is therefore a celebrated character. She is hardly sober now, though she has evidently had a shaking which would have sobered most people for a month. Her face is a mass of bruises and cuts, and every now and then a groan and a cry to certain Saints in her calendar tell of aches and pains in the limbs concealed under the dirty blanket that covers the bed.

'I'm a pretty sight now, ain't I, gintlemen dear?' she says, with a foolish laugh. 'Shure and I got blind drunk again last Saturday, and they run me in. The inspector let me out o' Sunday; God bless him for a rale gintleman! They carried me on a stretcher, bless yer hearts! and I kicked. Ha! ha! ha!'

The hag positively yelled with laughter as she thought of the scene she caused, and the trouble she gave the police.

Suddenly she looks round as if in search of something.

'Molly, ye young varmint, where are ye?' she shouts, and presently from under the bed, where the child lay crouching in fear, she drags a wretched little girl of seven or eight, with her face and head covered with sores, that make one shudder to look at them.

'There, Molly, ye young varmint, show yourself to their honours, will ye?'

The child begins to snivel. One of our number is the Board School officer of the district, and Molly has not been to school lately.

Mrs. O'Flannigan explains.

'Ye see, I can't use my limbs just yet, yer honour, and Molly—Lord love her!—she's just the only thing I got to look afther me. I might be burned in my blessed bed, yer honour, and not able to move.'

'You should give up getting drunk,' I ventured to suggest; 'then you wouldn't want a nurse.'

'You're right, your honour. It's the drink. Yer see, I can't help it. I ain't been sober for five years—ha! ha! ha!—and it's all thro' the trouble as come to me. My boy got into bad company and got lagged and put away for ten years, and I've never been the same since, and it broke my heart, and I took to the drink. And now my old man's took to drink thro' aggravation o' me, and he gets drunk every night of his blessed life. Ha! ha! ha!'

The woman's story is practically true. Before her trouble she and her husband were costermongers and hawkers of fruit. The first of the evils of the foul slums, where honest workers are forced to live, fell upon them in the ruin of the boy reared in a criminal atmosphere. The vicious surroundings were too strong for him, and he became a thief and paid the penalty.

The mother sees her son—idolized in her rough way—taken from her; the den of a home becomes doubly wretched, and the cursed drink-fiend is invoked to charm the sorrow away. That is the first step, 'to drown sorrow.' The steps after that are easy to count. The woman becomes an habitual drunkard, the rooms they live in get dirtier and smaller and fouler, and at last the husband drowns his sorrow too. 'Aggravation' and a constant association with a drunken woman turn the poor fellow to evil ways; himself and a whole family are wrecked, that under better circumstances might have been good and useful citizens. Had these people been able to get a decent room among decent people, the first misfortune that sent them wrong might never have happened. Their case is the case of hundreds.

Of drinking-shops there are plenty in these places; of eating-houses, or shops for the sale of food, very few. So rare are the latter that when we come to one in a dirty, tumble-down street, we stop and examine the contents of the window. I don't know whether to call it a tart-shop, a baker's, or a dripping emporium. There seems to be a little bit of each about it, and half a rice pudding, and a ham-bone, on which a bluebottle has gone to sleep—tired out, perhaps, with looking for the meat—give it the faintest suspicion of being an eating-house. There is also in the window a dilapidated bloater which looks as though it had been run over by an omnibus many years ago.

It is while taking notes of the contents of this tempting emporium of luxuries that we become aware of a very powerful perfume. It seems to rise from beneath where we are standing, and used as we are by this time to the bouquets of the East, we involuntarily step back and contort the muscles of our faces.

Then we see that we have been standing on a grating. Peering down, we can just see into a gloomy little room. To the opened window presently there comes a man in his shirt-sleeves, and looks up at us. His face is deadly white, the eyes are sunken, the cheek-bones hollow, and there is a look in his face that says more plainly than the big ticket of the blind impostor, 'I am starving.' Starving down below there, with only a thin floor between himself and the ham-bone, the ancient herring, the rice pudding, and the treacle tarts.

As the noisome effluvia rises and steams through the grating we begin to appreciate the situation. This food shop is directly over the cellar which gives the odour forth. Pleasant for the customers, certainly. We determine to push our investigation still further, and presently we are down in the cellar below.

The man in his shirt-sleeves—we can guess where the coat is—receives us courteously. His wife apologizes for the wretched condition of the room. Both of them speak with that unmistakable timbre of voice which betokens a smattering of education. In the corner of the room is a heap of rags. That is the bed. There are two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on a bare hearth, and gazing into the fast-dying embers of a wretched fire. Furniture the room has absolutely none, but a stool roughly constructed of three pieces of unplaned wood nailed together.

Four shillings a week is the rent of the cellar below the pie-shop; the foul smell arises from the gradual decay of the basement, and the utter neglect of all sanitary precautions.

The man (who has only one arm) is out of work this week, he tells us, but he is promised a job next. To tide over till then is a work of some difficulty, but the 'sticks' and the 'wardrobe' of the family have paid the rent up to now. As to meals—well, they hain't got much appetite. The stench in which they live effectually destroys that. In this instance even bad drainage has its advantages, you see.

Before the man lost his arm he was a clerk; without a right hand he is not much good as a penman in a competitive market. So he goes on as timekeeper in a builder's yard, as a messenger, or as anything by which he can get a few shillings for a living.

The children have not been to school. 'Why?' asks the officer who accompanies us. 'Because they've no boots, and they are both ill now.' It is true. The children, pale, emaciated little things, cough a hard, rasping cough from time to time. To show us how bad they are they set up a perfect paroxysm of coughing until the mother fetches them a smack, and inquires 'how they expect the gentleman to hear himself speak if they kick up that row?'

The children's boots have gone with the father's coat, and at present it does seem hard to say that the parents must be fined unless the children come barefooted through the sloppy streets to school.

Such, however, is the rule, and this boot question is an all-important one in the compulsory education of the children of the slums. How to get the boots for Tommy and Sarah to go their daily journey to the Board School is a problem which one or two unhappy fathers have settled by hanging themselves behind the domestic door.

The difficulties which the poor have in complying with the demands of the Education Act are quite unsuspected by the general public. They are so numerous, and the histories revealed by their investigation are so strange, that I propose in the next chapter to ask the reader to accompany me to a meeting at which the parental excuses for non-attendance are made. This is a meeting at which the parents who have been 'noticed' for the non-attendance of their children adduce what reasons they can why they should not be summoned before a magistrate.

I will let the mothers and fathers tell their own tale, and give a few statistics which I fancy will be a revelation to many who are at present in sublime ignorance of how the poor live.

CHAPTER IV.

In the remote age when I was a good little boy I remember being induced to join a Dorcas meeting. Don't imagine that I ever so far forgot the dignity of my sex as to sew or make little flannel petticoats and baby-linen for the poor of the parish. The young ladies did that, and we—myself and about ten other good little boys—were inveigled into joining on the plea that while our sisters plied needle and thread we could stick scraps into books and colour them, make toys, and perform various other little feats of usefulness which would eventually benefit the benighted Hottentots.

I know that when I had consented to join I was in agonies till the first day of meeting arrived, and wondered to what I had committed myself; and I remember to this day how very red I blushed when I arrived late and found fifty other good little boys and girls assembled, all of whom looked up and eyed me as though I was a natural curiosity, when the good lady who directed the society said, 'This is little Master So-and-so, who has come to help us in our good work.'

How I got past all those little girls I don't know, but I kept my eyes fixed modestly on the ground, and at last found myself seated at a table with about a dozen young gentlemen of my own age.

The elderly, good-hearted spinster who presided instantly deposited in front of me a huge pot of paste, an empty book, and some old illustrated papers. I guessed what she intended me to do, and I made wild efforts to do it. I was informed that this book, when I had completed it, would be sold at a bazaar for the benefit of the heathen.

I never ascertained what that book did fetch, but I know that it never paid expenses. The mess that I got into with that paste, the way it would get all over my fingers and on to my coat-sleeve, and all down me and all over me—why, I wrecked a whole suit, which in my vanity I put on new, at a single sitting. That was my first introduction to scissors and paste, and I took an intense dislike to them..

I quote the reminiscence because this article is to be all about a 'B' meeting; and when I first heard of a 'B' meeting I made sure it must be something like a Dorcas meeting, where everybody was a busy bee, and did work for the poor.

I had not had a very long experience before I found out that it was something not half so pleasant as the scrap-book and flannel petticoat society of my youth.

A 'B' meeting is held under the auspices of the School Board, to hear the reasons parents may have to give why they should not be summoned to appear before a magistrate for neglecting to send their children to school.

Here is an exact reproduction of the Notice B left with the parents, which brings them to the meeting I am about to describe:

[By-laws.] [Form No. 13.]

NOTICE.—FORM B.

The Elementary Education Acts, 1870, 1873, and 1876.

SCHOOL BOARD FOR LONDON.

Notice to attend before Divisional Committee.

...........Division.

May 30, 1883.

To Mr. Bridge, 2, Smith's Court.

Take Notice, that you have been guilty of a breach of the law in that your child Robert has not duly attended school, and you are hereby invited to attend at George Street School on Wednesday, the 6th day of June, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon precisely, to state any excuse you may have, and to show cause why you should not be summoned before a magistrate and fined.

Dated this 31st day of May, 1883.

(Signed)...............

Officer of the School Board for London.

Few persons who have not actual experience of the lives of the poorest classes can have any conception of the serious import to them of the Education Act. Compulsory education is a national benefit. I am one of its stoutest defenders, but it is idle to deny that it is an Act which has gravely increased the burthens of the poor earning precarious livelihoods; and as self-preservation is the first law of nature, there is small wonder that every dodge that craft and cunning can suggest is practised to evade it.

In many cases the payment of the fees is a most serious difficulty. Twopence or a penny a week for each of four children is not much, you may say; but where the difference between the weekly income and the rent is only a couple of shillings or so, I assure you the coppers represent so many meals. The Board now allows the members to remit fees in cases of absolute inability to pay them, and the remission of fees is one of the principal items of business at a 'B' meeting.

Again, many of the children who are of school age are of a wage-earning age also, and their enforced 'idleness,' as their parents call it, means a very serious blow to the family exchequer. Many a lad whose thick skull keeps him from passing the standard which would leave him free to go to work, has a deft hand, strong arms, and a broad back—three things which fetch a fair price in the labour market. As I will show you presently, from the actual cases which come before the 'B' meeting, the hardship of making boys and girls stop at school who might be earning good money towards their support is terrible. Often these children are the sole bread-winners, and then the position is indeed a hard nut for the kind-hearted official to crack.

After the children have passed a certain standard the officials have the power of granting 'half-time'; that is to say, the boys and girls can earn money so many days a week, and come to school for the remainder. 'The halftime grant' is another feature of the 'B' meeting.

The worst duty of the official who presides is to authorize the summoning before a magistrate of the parents who cannot or will not send their children regularly. The law leaves him no option. All children must come unless illness or some equally potent excuse can be urged, and if they don't the parent must appear before a magistrate, who, if the case is made out, is bound by the law to impose a fine. I will endeavour to show you, as the meeting progresses, a few of the parents who thoroughly deserve the penalty.

A 'B' meeting is held in the upstairs room of one of the Board Schools. The summoned parents wait in a huge crowd outside. They come in one by one to be disposed of. The president of the meeting sits with the book before him, in which the cases to be heard are fully entered up. Beside him sits the Board official, the inspector of officers, who advises him on little points of School Board law, and who marks the papers which are to be returned to the School Board officer 'in charge of the case' to be acted upon.

Standing round the room are the School Board officers of the different divisions in the district. They are familiar with the history and circumstances of every one who comes into the little room, and they supply confirmation or contradiction as the necessity arises.

Somewhere or other in the scene my friend and I stand. We are accepted by the parents who come and go as part and parcel of the 'Inquisition,' and some care is necessary in executing our descriptive task, for this class is very great on the rights of property; and more than one energetic dame, if she knew she was being 'noted' by an unauthorized interloper, would return the compliment with interest.

'The short and simple annals of the poor, here related in their own words, will induct the reader into the mysteries of 'How they live' far more thoroughly than I could do did I fill pages with my own composition; so, silence, pray, and let the 'B' meeting commence.

Here is a lady who very much objects to being summoned.

'What bizerness 'as he to summings me,' she says, pointing to the officer, 'just cus my boy ain't bin fur a week? He's 'arsh and harbitury, that's what he is.'Arsh and harbitury! D'ye think I ain't got anything to do without a-trapesin' down here a-losin' my work? I tell ye what it is——'

The chairman mildly interposes: 'My good lady——'

'Don't good lady me. I ain't a lady. If I was you daren't treat me like it, you daren't; it's only because I'm——'

'My good woman, will you allow me to say one word?'

'Oh—yes—certainly—if you've got anything to say—go on.'

Thus encouraged, the chairman points out to the voluble lady that her son has not been to school for a fortnight.

'Well, it's all through the boots.'

'Boots!' says the chairman; 'why, that was what you said last time, and we gave you an order on a shoemaker for a pair.'

The woman acknowledges this is so. Some charitable people have started a fund to let a few bad cases have boots, and this truant has been one of the first recipients.

'I know you was kind enough to do that,' says the mother, 'but they 'urt him, and he can't wear 'em.'

Here the officer who has brought the lady up before the Board tells his story.

'The boy had a decent pair of boots supplied him, sir; but Mrs. Dash went back to the shop with him, and said they weren't good enough—she wanted a pair of the best the man had in stock, and made such a noise she had to be put out.'

'Which, beggin' your pardon,' strikes in the angry lady, 'it's like your imperence to say so. They 'urt the boy, they 'did, and he haves tender feet, through his father, as is dead, being a shoemaker hisself.'

The officer chimes in again, 'If he can play about the streets all day in the boots, Mrs. Dash, they can't hurt him very much.'

'My boy play about the streets! Well, of all the oudacious things as ever I' erd! And as to his comin' to school, he's a beautiful little scholard now, and he ain't got no more to learn.'

Eventually the 'beautiful little scholard,' who was waiting outside, was sent for.

He confessed that the boots didn't hurt him, and Mrs. Dash was informed that if he didn't forthwith attend she would be summoned.

With much difficulty Mrs. Dash was induced to retire, and her place was taken by a burly man covered with grime from a forge, or something of the sort, who looked the personification of fierceness and stony-heartedness. His daughter had not been to school lately, and he was asked to account for her absence.

There was a moment's pause. We expected an oath or a volley of abuse. Instead of that the man's lips trembled a moment, then his eyes filled with tears, and one rolled slowly down each grimy cheek.

In a choking voice he gasped out, 'I am very sorry, sir, but I've had a little trouble.'

'Dear me!' says the chairman, slightly staggered at the unusual display of emotion; 'I am sorry for that. What sort of trouble?'

'Well, sir, it ain't a pleasant thing to talk about'—sob—'but my wife'—sob—'she's left me, sir'—sob—'gone away with another man.'

Here the poor fellow broke down utterly and sobbed like a child. Then he drew a dirty rag from his pocket, and rubbed and rubbed it round his eyes till there was a white ring about them that looked like a pair of spectacles.

The effect was ludicrous, but no one smiled. The audience, as they say in theatrical notices, was visibly affected.

The man stammered out his tale bit by bit. His wife had left him with four little children. He had to go out to work, and his daughter he had to keep away from school to look after them. She had to be 'little mother' in the deserted home.

I wondered what the woman was like, and if she had any idea of the genuine love for her that welled up in this honest fellow's heart. As I watched the tears flow down his grimy face, I couldn't help thinking how many a noble dame would like to know that her absence from the domestic hearth would cause grief as genuine as this.

Under the painful circumstances the excuse was accepted; the 'little mother' was allowed a short holiday till the betrayed husband had time to make other arrangements, and he left the room murmuring his thanks and mopping his eyes.

'Mrs. Smith,' calls out the Board official, taking the next case down on the list for hearing, and a young girl of about fifteen, with a baby in her arms and a child of five clinging to her skirts, enters the room and seats herself nervously on the extreme edge of the chair.

'You're not Mrs. Smith, my dear,' says the chairman, with a smile.

'No, sir; that's mother.'

'Oh, you've come for her, eh? These boys, Thomas and Charles, who have been absent for three weeks, are your brothers, I suppose?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well, my dear, they ought to come, you know. What's the reason?'

'Please, sir, they're at work.'

'But they've not passed the Fourth Standard.'

'I know, sir; but they've got a job, and it's four shillings a week each, and that's all I've got to keep us.'

'All you've got, my dear? Where's your father?'

The girl colours a little and hesitates. The School Board officer steps forward to the table and helps her.

'It's a very painful case, sir,' he says. 'The father's been living with another woman—left his family. A fortnight ago the mother met him and asked him for some money. He knocked her down, and she fell and cut her head open. She's in St. Thomas's Hospital—not expected to live. The man was taken up, and he's under remand now, and this girl has to look after the entire family.'

'I see,' says the chairman; 'and Thomas and Charles are giving you their money, eh? and that's all you've got?'

'Yes, sir. I can't work myself, because I've got the baby and the others to look after.'

'Well, my dear,' says the chairman, 'I am very sorry for you, but your brothers can only have half-time or come back to school.'

The girl says nothing, she is only fifteen, and can't argue it out with the gentleman—so she curtseys and is ushered out. I wonder, if the mother dies and the father gets a long term of imprisonment, what the fate of the family will be?

I have said that the hardships entailed upon the poor by the Education Act are numerous. Let me quote a few statistics gleaned from the papers which I turn over on the chairman's desk by his kind permission.

They are cases in which the parents apply to have the fees remitted because they cannot afford to pay them.

1. Mrs. Walker. 7 children of school age; fee 2d. a week each. Total earnings of entire family, 10s. Rent, 5s. 6d. Husband once good mechanic, lost employment through illness and deafness. Parish relief none. Character good. Is now a hawker—sells oranges and fish. Children half-starved. When an orange is too bad to sell they have it for breakfast, with a piece of bread.

2. Mr. Thompson. 5 children of school age. Out of work. No income but pawning clothes and goods. Rent, 4s. Wife drinks surreptitiously. Husband, good character.

3. Mrs.——-. 5 children of school age; widow. Earnings, 6s. Rent, 3s. Her husband when alive was a Drury Lane clown. Respectable woman; feels her poverty very keenly.

4. Mr. Garrard. 8 children of school age; two always under doctor. No income. Pawning last rags. Rent, 5s. 6d. No parish relief. Starving. Declines to go into workhouse.

I could multiply such instances by hundreds. These, however, will suffice to show how serious a burden is added to the lives of the very poor by the enforced payment of school fees. As a rule they are remitted for very good and sufficient reasons.

How these people live is a mystery. It is a wonder that they are not found dead in their wretched dens, for which they pay a rent out of all proportion to their value, by dozens daily. But they live on, and the starving children come day after day to school with feeble frames and bloodless bodies, and the law expects them to learn as readily as well-fed, healthy children, and to attain the same standard of proficiency in a given time.

It is these starving children who are not allowed to earn money towards their support until they are thirteen, and in many cases fourteen. Less necessitous children, as a rule, pass out of school earlier, for reasons which will be obvious to anyone who reflects for a moment upon the relationship of a healthy brain to a healthy body.

In another chapter we shall hear a few more personal narrations at a 'B' meeting. I will conclude this one with a story of a young gentleman whose excuse for non-attendance is at least dramatic. He has been absent for six weeks, and his mother explains, 'It's all along of 'is aven a reg'lar engagement at the Surrey Pantermine, and there hev been so many matynees.'

'He's on the Surrey, is he?' says the chairman.

'Perhaps that's the reason he can't pass the Standard!'

We see the joke and chuckle, but the boy doesn't. Evidently his pantomime training has been thrown away upon him.

CHAPTER V.

The ladies and gentlemen whom I had the pleasure of introducing to you in the last chapter had, most of them, some good and sufficient excuse for the non-attendance of their children at school. Before the 'B' meeting at which we assisted was over, more than one case was examined which left the official no option but to take out a summons and run the risk of one of those amiable lectures which unthinking magistrates now and again see fit to bestow upon the luckless officer of the Board who has done what the law compels him to do, and no more.

The parents summoned are in many instances dissolute or careless people, who utterly neglect their offspring, and take no pains to ensure their attending school, or they are crafty, cunning wretches, who see in the law a means of attaining a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Here is a woman who, when asked why her boy of nine has not been to school for a month, declares that he plays truant, and that he is quite beyond her control. Now, the result of such a complaint is, that the young gentleman will, if the parent reiterates in court her statement, be sent to a reformatory for five years.

That is just what the good lady wants. Her story is one that may be instructive if not edifying.

Two years ago her husband got ten years' penal servitude for a heavy fracture of his country's laws, leaving her with three children, two boys and a girl. There is a custom in such districts as that of which I write which shortens the period of mourning for a lost mate very considerably: Directly husband 'No. 1' gets forcibly removed from the domestic hearth, his place is almost invariably taken by another gentleman, who is 'master of the situation,' and locum tenons with full family honours.

I cannot resist telling a little story apropos of this domestic phase of slum life, which illustrates it rather forcibly. A little girl of eight at one of the schools near the Mint came one morning with a pair of boots on her little feet. This was the first pair of boots she had ever been seen in, and the unwonted magnificence naturally attracted attention.

'Why, Annie, you've got a pair of boots at last, then!' exclaimed the governess.

'Yes, mistress,' the child replied, glancing proudly at the battered, second-hand shoes, three times too large for her.

'And where did you get them?'

'One of my fathers gave 'em to me, mistress—the one what's at home this week.'

This 'father' was evidently a better fellow than most of the nomadic husbands who wander about from family circle to family circle, ready to replace its absent head at a moment's notice. He must have been more generous to another man's child than the 'husband' of the lady whose history I have so unceremoniously interrupted, and who wants her boy put away in a reformatory.

Husband 'No. 2,' I gather from one who knows the history of the case, is a young fellow who objects to 'brats,' and the 'brats' are being got out of the way one by one. The eldest boy was put to thieving, and he is being kept now by the State; the girl took to something worse, and a benevolent society relieved the mother of any future liability on her behalf. And now the good lady comes to the 'B' meeting and declares the youngest boy is incorrigible, and hints as broadly as she dare that she should be glad to have him put away as well. She will have her wish, and the boy, whom in all probability she has wilfully kept away and encouraged in his incorrigibleness, will be sent to a reformatory within a fortnight.

Thus you see a wholesale clearance has been made of one family, and the room they took up at home will soon be utilized by new-comers, in the shape of family number two.

A more charming and ingenious way of disposing of incumbrances it is difficult to imagine. It is not, however, by any means uncommon.

Marriage, as an institution, is not fashionable in these districts. Yet so long as cohabitation is possible—that is to say, so long as neither the hospital, the prison, nor the churchyard effects a separation—the couples are fairly faithful, and look upon themselves as man and wife, with the usual marital obligations.

Both parties to the arrangement exhibit great reluctance to 'break' of their own free will, and it is marvellous to see the tenacity with which a decent hard-working woman will cling to a ruffian who spends her earnings and blackens her eye, as regularly as Saturday night comes round, although he has not the slightest legal claim on her allegiance.

If you ask the couples who live happily together why they don't get married, some will tell you frankly that they never gave it a thought, others that it's a lot of trouble and they haven't had time. A clergyman's wife who took intense interest in a young couple living together in a room in the Mint determined to make them get married. The young fellow earned fair wages, and was sober and steady; the girl kept her room and her two little children clean and decent, and was always civil-spoken and pleasant. The good lady who had the entrée of the place talked to the young man whenever she saw him, and he admitted at last that, perhaps, the union might as well be made a legal one: 'Not that me and Sall 'ull get on any better, you know, mum—we couldn't; but since you've been on at her she seems to have a bit o' fancy like for to have the marridge lines, and if you'll tell us how, we'll get it done and over, missis.'

Delighted with the promise, the lady set to work and prepared everything. She gave the bride a new gown to be married in, and made frocks for the two little ones to come and see their father married; she arranged with her husband to perform the ceremony; and last, but most important, she got the young man a day's holiday without loss of pay from his employers.

The eventful day arrived; the good soul beaming and elated, waited, with a few friends invited to see the interesting ceremony, at the church. The clergyman stood with his book at the altar, but no young couple. Twelve o'clock struck, the clergyman went into the vestry, and put his coat on; and bitterly disappointed at the failure of her little scheme, the good lady sat on for an hour, thinking some delay might have occurred; but after awhile she gave it up as a bad job, and departed also.

That evening, in as towering a rage as a clergyman's wife could decently be, she marched off to the Mint, and tackled the delinquents at once.

What did they mean by it?

The young man was very civil and very apologetic.

'He didn't mean to be rude, but the fact was, a mate hearin' he'd got a day off offered him a job at carting as was worth five bob; and, you know, mum, I couldn't lose five bob just for the sake o' getting married.'

I am happy to say that the energetic lady set to work again, got another holiday for the man a week after, and this time 'personally conducted' the wedding-party to the church, which they did not leave till the young woman was the proud possessor of that by no means common property in the locality—a marriage certificate.

But to return to the 'B' meeting. The lady who wants her little boy put away having been disposed of, a decent-looking woman takes her place. She is nursing a baby, and by her side stands a small boy, with staring eyes that seem fixed upon nothing in particular—a strange, uncanny, big-headed child, who attracts attention directly.

Mrs. Jones, the mother, is called upon to say why this lad's sister, aged ten, has been absent three weeks.

'Well, I'm very sorry, gen'lemen, but I've had to keep her at home. Ye see, gen'lemen, I haves ruematics, which takes me all of a nunplush in the joints o' the knees and the ankles of the feet, and then I can't move.'

'Yes, but that needn't keep the girl at home. You can nurse the baby even if you have rheumatics.'

'Yes, sir, I know; but it's that boy as is the trouble. Ye see, sir, he can't be lef' not a minnit without somebody as can get after him quick. He 's allers settin' hisself afire. He gets the matches wherever we 'ides 'em, and he lights anything he sees—the bed, the baby, hisself. Bless you, gen'lemen, it's orful; he can't be off settin' somethin' alight not five minnits together. He ain't right in 'is 'ed, sir.'

The idiot incendiary paid not the slightest attention; his wild, strange eyes were wandering about the room, probably for a box of matches with which to set us alight, and make one big blaze of the 'B' meeting, chairman, officers, himself, and all.

'And that ain't all, sir. My 'usband's dead, sir; and all we've got for a livin's a little shop, sir, where we sells drippin', and matches, and candles, and odds and ends; and I can't run in and out when I'm so queer, and the gal's all I've got to do things. I wish you would give her half-time, sir.' The poor woman certainly had her work cut out, with the rheumatics, the baby, the shop, and the idiot incendiary; and the chairman, after a little consultation with the officer, finding the case was a deserving one, granted the half-time; and the woman left evidently considerably relieved, dragging the young gentleman with a tendency to commit hourly arson after her.

The next to put in an appearance was a lady with a wretched-looking face, and a shabby, draggled, out-all-night and drunk-in-the-morning appearance generally. Her profession was stated with official bluntness in the paper handed to the chairman. It is generally translated 'street-walker' in family circles.

But, whatever she might be, she had children, and the law required them to come to school. Instead of making their attendances, learning to read and write, the children were street Arabs. The woman was meek and quiet enough. She promised 'she'd see to it,' and was reminded that she had made the same promise before. This time it was not accepted, and the woman was informed that she would have to appear before a magistrate.

Meekly and quietly she said, 'Thank you, sir,' as if the chairman had presented her with a medal or a pound of tea, and went out.

The women poured in one after the other—-there were very few men, most of them, I suppose, being 'at work,' whatever that term might imply in their particular case—and they were of all sizes, sorts and conditions. There were respectable, decent, motherly-looking souls, drunken outcasts, slatternly trollops, half-starved and sickly-looking women, and fat, overwhelming women, who came not to be crushed, but to crush.

One gaunt, fierce-looking lady, with the voice of a man and the fist of a prize-fighter, gave the company a bit of her mind. 'Her "gal" warn't a-coming to be worrited with a lot o' stuff. She was delikit, her gal was, and the School Board was murderin' of her.'

'What's the matter with her?' asked the chairman.

'Well, it's nervis system, and her teeth growin' out.'

'Where's the doctor's certificate that she's too ill to attend?'

'Sitifkit? d'ye think I've got time to go a-gettin' sitifkits—not me—ain't my word good ernuff?'

The School Board officer knows this lady's circumstances, and he whispers something to the chairman. The girl's 'nervis system' and dental eccentricities have not prevented her affectionate mother from sending her out hawking every day while she stops at home and drinks.

'Where's your husband?' asked the officer. 'I haven't seen him lately. He'll have to be summoned, you know, as you can't get a certificate.'

The officer in question has good reason to ask affectionately after the husband. Last year the worthy gentleman got a month for playfully tossing the officer down a flight of stairs on to his head.

'Where's my husband? Ah!' says she, purple with passion, 'you want to summon him, do you? Well, then, you jolly well carn't. Gord's got him.'

'Dead?' asked the chairman.

'Yes—didn't I say so?'

'Then you will be summoned instead.'

The lady didn't retire—she had to be diplomatically crowded out, and the last sounds that reached the room as she receded along the corridor, under gentle pressure, were wishes that the chairman and all concerned might go where—at least, if her estimate of his whereabouts was correct—they would not have the pleasure of meeting her late lamented consort.

There are some rough customers to deal with in this district—so rough that it is a wonder the Act works so smoothly as it does. The fiercest and most reckless of the lawless classes have to be bearded in their dens by the devoted, ill-paid officers, who ferret out the children and insist upon their coming to school. Up to the topmost garret and down to the lowest cellar, in dens and hovels given over to thieves and wantons, I have accompanied a School Board officer on his rounds, and I frankly confess that I have passed a few bad quarters of an hour.

There are dozens of these places where the blow follows the word in a moment, where life is held of the least account, and where assaults are so common that the victims would as soon think of asking the police to notice their broken windows as to take cognizance of their broken heads.

There is a legend that in one of these cellars in the Mint—it fetches three shillings a week rent, by-the-bye—a man killed a woman and left her; and that nobody took any notice until the body got unpleasant, and then they threw it out into the street.