IN DARKEST ENGLAND and THE WAY OUT
by GENERAL BOOTH
(this Etext comes from the 1890 1st ed. pub. The Salvation Army)
To the memory of the companion, counsellor, and comrade of nearly 40 years. The sharer of my every ambition for the welfare of mankind, my loving, faithful, and devoted wife this book is dedicated.
PREFACE
The progress of The Salvation Army in its work amongst the poor and lost of many lands has compelled me to face the problems which an more or less hopefully considered in the following pages. The grim necessities of a huge Campaign carried on for many years against the evils which lie at the root of all the miseries of modern life, attacked in a thousand and one forms by a thousand and one lieutenants, have led me step by step to contemplate as a possible solution of at least some of those problems the Scheme of social Selection and Salvation which I have here set forth.
When but a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life. A last I may be going to see my longings to help the workless realised. I think I am.
The commiseration then awakened by the misery of this class has been an impelling force which has never ceased to make itself felt during forty years of active service in the salvation of men. During this time I am thankful that I have been able, by the good hand of God upon me, to do something in mitigation of the miseries of this class, and to bring not only heavenly hopes and earthly gladness to the hearts of multitudes of these wretched crowds, but also many material blessings, including such commonplace things as food, raiment, home, and work, the parent of so many other temporal benefits. And thus many poor creatures have proved Godliness to be "profitable unto all things, having the promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come."
These results have been mainly attained by spiritual means. I have boldly asserted that whatever his peculiar character or circumstances might be, if the prodigal would come home to his Heavenly Father, he would find enough and to spare in the Father's house to supply all his need both for this world and the next; and I have known thousands nay, I can say tens of thousands, who have literally proved this to be true, having, with little or no temporal assistance, come out of the darkest depths of destitution, vice and crime, to be happy and honest citizens and true sons and servants of God.
And yet all the way through my career I have keenly felt the remedial measures usually enunciated in Christian programmes and ordinarily employed by Christian philanthropy to be lamentably inadequate for any effectual dealing with the despairing miseries of these outcast classes. The rescued are appallingly few—a ghastly minority compared with the multitudes who struggle and sink in the open-mouthed abyss. Alike, therefore, my humanity and my Christianity, if I may speak of them in any way as separate one from the other, have cried out for some more comprehensive method of reaching and saving the perishing crowds.
No doubt it is good for men to climb unaided out of the whirlpool on to the rock of deliverance in the very presence of the temptations which have hitherto mastered them, and to maintain a footing there with the same billows of temptation washing over them. But, alas! with many this seems to be literally impossible. That decisiveness of character, that moral nerve which takes hold of the rope thrown for the rescue and keeps its hold amidst all the resistances that have to be encountered, is wanting. It is gone. The general wreck has shattered and disorganised the whole man.
Alas, what multitudes there are around us everywhere, many known to my readers personally, and any number who may be known to them by a very short walk from their own dwellings, who are in this very plight! Their vicious habits and destitute circumstances make it certain that without some kind of extraordinary help, they must hunger and sin, and sin and hunger, until, having multiplied their kind, and filled up the measure of their miseries, the gaunt fingers of death will close upon then and terminate their wretchedness. And all this will happen this very winter in the midst of the unparalleled wealth, and civilisation, and philanthropy of this professedly most Christian land.
Now, I propose to go straight for these sinking classes, and in doing so shall continue to aim at the heart. I still prophesy the uttermost disappointment unless that citadel is reached. In proposing to add one more to the methods I have already put into operation to this end, do not let it be supposed that I am the less dependent upon the old plans or that I seek anything short of the old conquest. If we help the man it is in order that we may change him. The builder who should elaborate his design and erect his house and risk his reputation without burning his bricks would be pronounced a failure and a fool. Perfection of architectural beauty, unlimited expenditure of capital, unfailing watchfulness of his labourers, would avail him nothing if the bricks were merely unkilned clay. Let him kindle a fire. And so here I see the folly of hoping to accomplish anything abiding, either in the circumstances or the morals of these hopeless classes, except there be a change effected in the whole man as well as in his surroundings. To this everything I hope to attempt will tend. In many cases I shall succeed, in some I shall fail; but even in failing of this my ultimate design, I shall at least benefit the bodies, if not the souls, of men; and if I do not save the fathers, I shall make a better chance for the children.
It will be seen therefore that in this or in any other development that may follow I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That I have confidence in my proposals goes without saying. I believe they will work. In miniature many of them are working already. But I do not claim that my Scheme is either perfect in its details or complete in the sense of being adequate to combat all forms of the gigantic evils against which it is in the main directed. Like other human things it must be perfected through suffering. But it is a sincere endeavour to do something, and to do it on principles which can be instantly applied and universally developed. Time, experience, criticism, and, above all, the guidance of God will enable us, I hope, to advance on the lines here laid down to a true and practical application of the words of the Hebrew Prophet: "Loose the bands of wickedness; undo the heavy burdens; let the oppressed go free; break every yoke; deal thy bread to the hungry; bring the poor that are cast out to thy house. When thou seest the naked cover him and hide not thyself from thine own flesh. Draw out thy soul to the hungry— Then they that be of thee shall build the old waste places and Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations."
To one who has been for nearly forty years indissolubly associated with me in every undertaking I owe much of the inspiration which has found expression in this book. It is probably difficult for me to fully estimate the extent to which the splendid benevolence and unbounded sympathy of her character have pressed me forward in the life-long service of man, to which we have devoted both ourselves and our children. It will be an ever green and precious memory to me that amid the ceaseless suffering of a dreadful malady my dying wife found relief in considering and developing the suggestions for the moral and social and spiritual blessing of the people which are here set forth, and I do thank God she was taken from me only when the book was practically complete and the last chapters had been sent to the press.
In conclusion, I have to acknowledge the services rendered to me in preparing this book by Officers under my command. There could be no hope of carrying out any part of it, but for the fact that so many thousands are ready at my call and under my direction to labour to the very utmost of their strength for the salvation of others without the hope of earthly reward. Of the practical common sense, the resource, the readiness for every form of usefulness of those Officers and Soldiers, the world has no conception. Still less is it capable of understanding the height and depth of their self-sacrificing devotion to God and the poor.
I have also to acknowledge valuable literary help from a friend of the poor, who, though not in any way connected with the Salvation Army, has the deepest sympathy with its aims and is to a large extent in harmony with its principles. Without such assistance I should probably have found it—overwhelmed as I already am with the affairs of a world-wide enterprise—extremely difficult, if not impossible, to have presented these proposals for which I am alone responsible in so complete a form, at any rate at this time. I have no doubt that if any substantial part of my plan is successfully carried out he will consider himself more than repaid for the services so ably rendered.
WILLIAM BOOTH.
INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE SALVATION ARMY, LONDON, E.C.,
October, 1890.
CONTENTS
PART 1. THE DARKNESS.
CHAPTER 1. Why "Darkest England"?
CHAPTER 2. The Submerged Tenth
CHAPTER 3. The Homeless
CHAPTER 4. The Out-of-Works
CHAPTER 5. On the Verge of the Abyss
CHAPTER 6. The Vicious
CHAPTER 7. The Criminals
CHAPTER 8. The Children of the Lost
CHAPTER 9. Is there no Help?
PART 2. DELIVERANCE.
CHAPTER 1. A Stupendous Undertaking
Section 1. The Essentials to Success Section 2. My Scheme
CHAPTER 2. To the Rescue!—The City Colony
Section 1. Food and Shelter for Every Man Section 2. Work for the Out-of-Works—The Factory Section 3. The Regimentation of the Unemployed Section 4. The Household Salvage Brigade
CHAPTER 3. To the Country!—The Farm Colony
Section 1. The Farm Proper Section 2. The Industrial Village Section 3. Agricultural Villages Section 4. Co-operative Farm
CHAPTER 4. New Britain—The Colony Over Sea
Section 1. The Colony and the Colonists Section 2. Universal Emigration Section 3. The Salvation Ship
CHAPTER 5. More Crusades
Section 1. A Slum Crusade.—Our Slum Sisters Section 2. The Travelling Hospital Section 3. Regeneration of our Criminals—The Prison Gate Brigade Section 4. Effectual Deliverance for the Drunkard Section 5. A New Way of Escape for Lost Women—The Rescue Homes Section 6. A Preventive Home for Unfallen Girls when in Danger Section 7. Enquiry Office for Lost People Section 8. Refuges for the Children of the Streets Section 9. Industrial Schools Section 10. Asylums for Moral Lunatics
CHAPTER 6. Assistance in General
Section 1. Improved Lodgings Section 2. Model Suburban Villages Section 3. The Poor Man's Bank Section 4. The Poor Man's Lawyer Section 5. Intelligence Department Section 6. Co-operation in General Section 7. Matrimonial Bureau Section 8. Whitechapel-by-the-sea
CHAPTER 7. Can it be done, and how?
Section 1. The Credentials of the Salvation Army Section 2. How much will it cost? Section 3. Some advantages stated Section 4. Some objections met Section 5. Recapitulation
CHAPTER 8. A Pratical Conclusion
IN DARKEST ENGLAND
PART 1. THE DARKNESS.
CHAPTER 1. WHY "DARKEST ENGLAND"?
This summer the attention of the civilised world has been arrested by the story which Mr. Stanley has told of Darkest Africa and his journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent. In all that spirited narrative of heroic endeavour, nothing has so much impressed the imagination, as his description of the immense forest, which offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his advance. The intrepid explorer, in his own phrase, "marched, tore, ploughed, and cut his way for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring home to us the full horror of that awful gloom. He says:
Take a thick Scottish copse dripping with rain; imagine this to be mere undergrowth nourished under the impenetrable shade of ancient trees ranging from 100 to 180 feet high; briars and thorns abundant; lazy creeks meandering through the depths of the jungle, and sometimes a deep affluent of a great river. Imagine this forest and jungle in all stages of decay and growth, rain pattering on you every other day of the year; an impure atmosphere with its dread consequences, fever and dysentery; gloom throughout the day and darkness almost palpable throughout the night; and then if you can imagine such a forest extending the entire distance from Plymouth to Peterhead, you will have a fair idea of some of the inconveniences endured by us in the Congo forest.
The denizens of this region are filled with a conviction that the forest is endless—interminable. In vain did Mr. Stanley and his companions endeavour to convince them that outside the dreary wood were to be found sunlight, pasturage and peaceful meadows.
They replied in a manner that seemed to imply that we must be strange creatures to suppose that it would be possible for any world to exist save their illimitable forest. "No," they replied, shaking their heads compassionately, and pitying our absurd questions, "all like this," and they moved their hand sweepingly to illustrate that the world was all alike, nothing but trees, trees and trees—great trees rising as high as an arrow shot to the sky, lifting their crowns intertwining their branches, pressing and crowding one against the other, until neither the sunbeam nor shaft of light can penetrate it.
"We entered the forest," says Mr. Stanley, "with confidence; forty pioneers in front with axes and bill hooks to clear a path through the obstructions, praying that God and good fortune would lead us." But before the conviction of the forest dwellers that the forest was without end, hope faded out of the hearts of the natives of Stanley's company. The men became sodden with despair, preaching was useless to move their brooding sullenness, their morbid gloom.
The little religion they knew was nothing more than legendary lore, and in their memories there dimly floated a story of a land which grew darker and darker as one travelled towards the end of the earth and drew nearer to the place where a great serpent lay supine and coiled round the whole world. Ah! then the ancients must have referred to this, where the light is so ghastly, and the woods are endless, and are so still and solemn and grey; to this oppressive loneliness, amid so much life, which is so chilling to the poor distressed heart; and the horror grew darker with their fancies; the cold of early morning, the comfortless grey of dawn, the dead white mist, the ever-dripping tears of the dew, the deluging rains, the appalling thunder bursts and the echoes, and the wonderful play of the dazzling lightning. And when the night comes with its thick palpable darkness, and they lie huddled in their damp little huts, and they hear the tempest overhead, and the howling of the wild winds, the grinding an groaning of the storm-tost trees, and the dread sounds of the falling giants, and the shock of the trembling earth which sends their hearts with fitful leaps to their throats, and the roaring and a rushing as of a mad overwhelming sea— oh, then the horror is intensified! When the march has begun once again, and the files are slowly moving through the woods, they renew their morbid broodings, and ask themselves: How long is this to last? Is the joy of life to end thus? Must we jog on day after day in this cheerless gloom and this joyless duskiness, until we stagger and fall and rot among the toads? Then they disappear into the woods by twos, and threes, and sixes; and after the caravan has passed they return by the trail, some to reach Yambuya and upset the young officers with their tales of woe and war; some to fall sobbing under a spear-thrust; some to wander and stray in the dark mazes of the woods, hopelessly lost; and some to be carved for the cannibal feast. And those who remain compelled to it by fears of greater danger, mechanically march on, a prey to dread and weakness.
That is the forest. But what of its denizens? They are comparatively few; only some hundreds of thousands living in small tribes from ten to thirty miles apart, scattered over an area on which ten thousand million trees put out the sun from a region four times as wide as Great Britain. Of these pygmies there are two kinds; one a very degraded specimen with ferretlike eyes, close-set nose, more nearly approaching the baboon than was supposed to be possible, but very human; the other very handsome, with frank open innocent features, very prepossessing. They are quick and intelligent, capable of deep affection and gratitude, showing remarkable industry and patience. A pygmy boy of eighteen worked with consuming zeal; time with him was too precious to waste in talk. His mind seemed ever concentrated on work. Mr. Stanley said: —
"When I once stopped him to ask him his name, his face seemed to say,
'Please don't stop me. I must finish my task.'
"All alike, the baboon variety and the handsome innocents, are cannibals. They are possessed with a perfect mania for meat. We were obliged to bury our dead in the river, lest the bodies should be exhumed and eaten, even when they had died from smallpox."
Upon the pygmies and all the dwellers of the forest has descended a devastating visitation in the shape of the ivory raiders of civilisation. The race that wrote the Arabian Nights, built Bagdad and Granada, and invented Algebra, sends forth men with the hunger for gold in their hearts, and Enfield muskets in their hands, to plunder and to slay. They exploit the domestic affections of the forest dwellers in order to strip them of all they possess in the world. That has been going on for years. It is going on to-day. It has come to be regarded as the natural and normal law of existence. Of the religion of these hunted pygmies Mr. Stanley tells us nothing, perhaps because there is nothing to tell. But an earlier traveller, Dr. Kraff, says that one of these tribes, by name Doko, had some notion of a Supreme Being, to whom, under the name of Yer, they sometimes addressed prayers in moments of sadness or terror. In these prayers they say; "Oh Yer, if Thou dost really exist why dost Thou let us be slaves? We ask not for food or clothing, for we live on snakes, ants, and mice. Thou hast made us, wherefore dost Thou let us be trodden down?"
It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved itself deep on the heart of civilisation. But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?
The more the mind dwells upon the subject, the closer the analogy appears. The ivory raiders who brutally traffic in the unfortunate denizens of the forest glades, what are they but the publicans who flourish on the weakness of our poor? The two tribes of savages the human baboon and the handsome dwarf, who will not speak lest it impede him in his task, may be accepted as the two varieties who are continually present with us—the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave. They, too, have lost all faith of life being other than it is and has been. As in Africa, it is all trees trees, trees with no other world conceivable; so is it here—it is all vice and poverty and crime. To many the world is all slum, with the Workhouse as an intermediate purgatory before the grave. And just as Mr. Stanley's Zanzibaris lost faith, and could only be induced to plod on in brooding sullenness of dull despair, so the most of our social reformers, no matter how cheerily they may have started off, with forty pioneers swinging blithely their axes as they force their way in to the wood, soon become depressed and despairing. Who can battle against the ten thousand million trees? Who can hope to make headway against the innumerable adverse conditions which doom the dweller in Darkest England to eternal and immutable misery? What wonder is it that many of the warmest hearts and enthusiastic workers feel disposed to repeat the lament of the old English chronicler, who, speaking of the evil days which fell upon our forefathers in the reign of Stephen, said "It seemed to them as if God and his Saints were dead."
An analogy is as good as a suggestion; it becomes wearisome when it is pressed too far. But before leaving it, think for a moment how close the parallel is, and how strange it is that so much interest should be excited by a narrative of human squalor and human heroism in a distant continent, while greater squalor and heroism not less magnificent may be observed at our very doors.
The Equatorial Forest traversed by Stanley resembles that Darkest England of which I have to speak, alike in its vast extent—both stretch, in Stanley's phrase, "as far as from Plymouth to Peterhead;" its monotonous darkness, its malaria and its gloom, its dwarfish de-humanized inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privations and their misery. That which sickens the stoutest heart, and causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in despair, is the apparent impossibility of doing more than merely to peck at the outside of the endless tangle of monotonous undergrowth; to let light into it, to make a road clear through it, that shall not be immediately choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant parasitical growth of the forest—who dare hope for that? At present, alas, it would seem as though no one dares even to hope! It is the great Slough of Despond of our time.
And what a slough it is no man can gauge who has not waded therein, as some of us have done, up to the very neck for long years. Talk about Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture-chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and with bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilisation needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror. Often and often, when I have seen the young and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the morass, trampled underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that haunt these regions, it seemed as if God were no longer in His world, but that in His stead reigned a fiend, merciless as Hell, ruthless as the grave. Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley's pages of the slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpselike, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilisation.
The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty orphan girl in our Christian capital? We talk about the brutalities of the dark ages, and we profess to shudder as we read in books of the shameful exaction of the rights of feudal superior. And yet here, beneath our very eyes, in our theatres, in our restaurants, and in many other places, unspeakable though it be but to name it, the same hideous abuse flourishes unchecked. A young penniless girl, if she be pretty, is often hunted from pillar to post by her employers, confronted always by the alternative—Starve or Sin. And when once the poor girl has consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men who have ruined her. Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an ignominy, and she is swept downward ever downward, into the bottomless perdition of prostitution. But there, even in the lowest depths, excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God, she is far nearer the pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced her down, aye, and than all the Pharisees and Scribes who stand silently by while these Fiendish wrongs are perpetrated before their very eyes.
The blood boils with impotent rage at the sight of these enormities, callously inflicted, and silently borne by these miserable victims. Nor is it only women who are the victims, although their fate is the most tragic. Those firms which reduce sweating to a fine art, who systematically and deliberately defraud the workman of his pay, who grind the faces of the poor, and who rob the widow and the orphan, and who for a pretence make great professions of public spirit and philanthropy, these men nowadays are sent to Parliament to make laws for the people. The old prophets sent them to Hell—but we have changed all that. They send their victims to Hell, and are rewarded by all that wealth can do to make their lives comfortable. Read the House of Lords' Report on the Sweating System, and ask if any African slave system, making due allowance for the superior civilisation, and therefore sensitiveness, of the victims, reveals more misery.
Darkest England, like Darkest Africa, reeks with malaria. The foul and fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp. Fever is almost as chronic there as on the Equator. Every year thousands of children are killed off by what is called defects of our sanitary system. They are in reality starved and poisoned, and all that can be said is that, in many cases, it is better for them that they were taken away from the trouble to come.
Just as in Darkest Africa it is only a part of the evil and misery that comes from the superior race who invade the forest to enslave and massacre its miserable inhabitants, so with us, much of the misery of those whose lot we are considering arises from their own habits. Drunkenness and all manner of uncleanness, moral and physical, abound. Have you ever watched by the bedside of a man in delirium tremens? Multiply the sufferings of that one drunkard by the hundred thousand, and you have some idea of what scenes are being witnessed in all our great cities at this moment. As in Africa streams intersect the forest in every direction, so the gin-shop stands at every corner with its River of the Water of Death flowing seventeen hours out of the twenty-four for the destruction of the people. A population sodden with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady, these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life has been spent, and to whose rescue I would now summon all that is best in the manhood and womanhood of our land.
But this book is no mere lamentation of despair. For Darkest England, as for Darkest Africa, there is a light beyond. I think I see my way out, a way by which these wretched ones may escape from the gloom of their miserable existence into a higher and happier life. Long wandering in the Forest of the Shadow of Death at out doors, has familiarised me with its horrors; but while the realisation is a vigorous spur to action it has never been so oppressive as to extinguish hope. Mr. Stanley never succumbed to the terrors which oppressed his followers. He had lived in a larger life, and knew that the forest, though long, was not interminable. Every step forward brought him nearer his destined goal, nearer to the light of the sun, the clear sky, and the rolling uplands of the grazing land. Therefore he did not despair. The Equatorial Forest was, after all, a mere corner of one quarter of the world. In the knowledge of the light outside, in the confidence begotten by past experience of successful endeavour, he pressed forward; and when the 160 days' struggle was over, he and his men came out into a pleasant place where the land smiled with peace and plenty, and their hardships and hunger were forgotten in the joy of a great deliverance.
So I venture to believe it will be with us. But the end is not yet. We are still in the depths of the depressing gloom. It is in no spirit of light-heartedness that this book is sent forth into the world as if it was written some ten years ago.
If this were the first time that this wail of hopeless misery had sounded on our ears the matter would have been less serious. It is because we have heard it so often that the case is so desperate. The exceeding bitter cry of the disinherited has become to be as familiar in the ears of men as the dull roar of the streets or as the moaning of the wind through the trees. And so it rises unceasing, year in and year out, and we are too busy or too idle, too indifferent or too selfish, to spare it a thought. Only now and then, on rare occasions, when some clear voice is heard giving more articulate utterance to the miseries of the miserable men, do we pause in the regular routine of our daily duties, and shudder as we realise for one brief moment what life means to the inmates of the Slums. But one of the grimmest social problems of our time should be sternly faced, not with a view to the generation of profitless emotion, but with a view to its solution.
Is it not time? There is, it is true, an audacity in the mere suggestion that the problem is not insoluble that is enough to take away the breath. But can nothing be done? If, after full and exhaustive consideration, we come to the deliberate conclusion that nothing can be done, and that it is the inevitable and inexorable destiny of thousands of Englishmen to be brutalised into worse than beasts by the condition of their environment, so be it. But if, on the contrary, we are unable to believe that this "awful slough," which engulfs the manhood and womanhood of generation after generation is incapable of removal; and if the heart and intellect of mankind alike revolt against the fatalism of despair, then, indeed, it is time, and high time, that the question were faced in no mere dilettante spirit, but with a resolute determination to make an end of the crying scandal of our age.
What a satire it is upon our Christianity and our civilisation that the existence of these colonies of heathens and savages in the heart of our capital should attract so little attention! It is no better than a ghastly mockery—theologians might use a stronger word—to call by the name of One who came to seek and to save that which was lost those Churches which in the midst of lost multitudes either sleep in apathy or display a fitful interest in a chasuble. Why all this apparatus of temples and meeting-houses to save men from perdition in a world which is to come, while never a helping hand is stretched out to save them from the inferno of their present life? Is it not time that, forgetting for a moment their wranglings about the infinitely little or infinitely obscure, they should concentrate all their energies on a united effort to break this terrible perpetuity of perdition, and to rescue some at least of those for whom they profess to believe their Founder came to die?
Before venturing to define the remedy, I begin by describing the malady. But even when presenting the dreary picture of our social ills, and describing the difficulties which confront us, I speak not in despondency but in hope. "I know in whom I have believed." I know, therefore do I speak. Darker England is but a fractional part of "Greater England." There is wealth enough abundantly to minister to its social regeneration so far as wealth can, if there be but heart enough to set about the work in earnest. And I hope and believe that the heart will not be lacking when once the problem is manfully faced, and the method of its solution plainly pointed out.
CHAPTER II. THE SUBMERGED TENTH.
In setting forth the difficulties which have to be grappled with, I shall endeavour in all things to understate rather than overstate my case. I do this for two reasons: first, any exaggeration would create a reaction; and secondly, as my object is to demonstrate the practicability of solving the problem, I do not wish to magnify its dimensions. In this and in subsequent chapters I hope to convince those who read them that there is no overstraining in the representation of the facts, and nothing Utopian in the presentation of remedies. I appeal neither to hysterical emotionalists nor headlong enthusiasts; but having tried to approach the examination of this question in a spirit of scientific investigation, I put forth my proposals with the view of securing the support and co-operation of the sober, serious, practical men and women who constitute the saving strength and moral backbone of the country. I fully admit that them is much that is lacking in the diagnosis of the disease, and, no doubt, in this first draft of the prescription there is much room for improvement, which will come when we have the light of fuller experience. But with all its drawbacks and defects, I do not hesitate to submit my proposals to the impartial judgment of all who are interested in the solution of the social question as an immediate and practical mode of dealing with this, the greatest problem of our time.
The first duty of an investigator in approaching the study of any question is to eliminate all that is foreign to the inquiry, and to concentrate his attention upon the subject to be dealt with. Here I may remark that I make no attempt in this book to deal with Society as a whole. I leave to others the formulation of ambitious programmes for the reconstruction of our entire social system; not because I may not desire its reconstruction, but because the elaboration of any plans which are more or less visionary and incapable of realisation for many years would stand in the way of the consideration of this Scheme for dealing with the most urgently pressing aspect of the question, which I hope may be put into operation at once.
In taking this course I am aware that I cut myself off from a wide and attractive field; but as a practical man, dealing with sternly prosaic facts, I must confine my attention to that particular section of the problem which clamours most pressingly for a solution. Only one thing I may say in passing. Then is nothing in my scheme which will bring it into collision either with Socialists of the State, or Socialists of the Municipality, with Individualists or Nationalists, or any of the various schools of though in the great field of social economics— excepting only those anti-christian economists who hold that it is an offence against the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to try to save the weakest from going to the wall, and who believe that when once a man is down the supreme duty of a self-regarding Society is to jump upon him. Such economists will naturally be disappointed with this book I venture to believe that all others will find nothing in it to offend their favourite theories, but perhaps something of helpful suggestion which they may utilise hereafter. What, then, is Darkest England? For whom do we claim that "urgency" which gives their case priority over that of all other sections of their countrymen and countrywomen?
I claim it for the Lost, for the Outcast, for the Disinherited of the
World.
These, it may be said, are but phrases. Who are the Lost? reply, not in a religious, but in a social sense, the lost are those who have gone under, who have lost their foothold in Society, those to whom the prayer to our Heavenly Father, "Give us day by day our daily bread," is either unfulfilled, or only fulfilled by the Devil's agency: by the earnings of vice, the proceeds of crime, or the contribution enforced by the threat of the law.
But I will be more precise. The denizens in Darkest England; for whom I appeal, are (1) those who, having no capital or income of their own, would in a month be dead from sheer starvation were they exclusively dependent upon the money earned by their own work; and (2) those who by their utmost exertions are unable to attain the regulation allowance of food which the law prescribes as indispensable even for the worst criminals in our gaols.
I sorrowfully admit that it would be Utopian in our present social arrangements to dream of attaining for every honest Englishman a gaol standard of all the necessaries of life. Some time, perhaps, we may venture to hope that every honest worker on English soil will always be as warmly clad, as healthily housed, and as regularly fed as our criminal convicts—but that is not yet.
Neither is it possible to hope for many years to come that human beings generally will be as well cared for as horses. Mr. Carlyle long ago remarked that the four-footed worker has already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for: "There are not many horses in England, able and willing to work, which have not due food and lodging and go about sleek coated, satisfied in heart." You say it is impossible; but, said Carlyle, "The human brain, looking at these sleek English horses, refuses to believe in such impossibility for English men." Nevertheless, forty years have passed since Carlyle said that, and we seem to be no nearer the attainment of the four-footed standard for the two-handed worker. "Perhaps it might be nearer realisation," growls the cynic, "if we could only product men according to demand, as we do horses, and promptly send them to the slaughter-house when past their prime"—which, of course, is not to be thought of.
What, then, is the standard towards which we may venture to aim with some prospect of realisation in our time? It is a very humble one, but if realised it would solve the worst problems of modern Society. It is the standard of the London Cab Horse. When in the streets of London a Cab Horse, weary or careless or stupid, trips and falls and lies stretched out in the midst of the traffic there is no question of debating how he came to stumble before we try to get him on his legs again. The Cab Horse is a very real illustration of poor broken-down humanity; he usually falls down because of overwork and underfeeding. If you put him on his feet without altering his conditions, it would only be to give him another dose of agony; but first of all you'll have to pick him up again. It may have been through overwork or underfeeding, or it may have been all his own fault that he has broken his knees and smashed the shafts, but that does not matter. If not for his own sake, then merely in order to prevent an obstruction of the traffic, all attention is concentrated upon the question of how we are to get him on his legs again. Tin load is taken off, the harness is unbuckled, or, if need be, cut, and everything is done to help him up. Then he is put in the shafts again and once more restored to his regular round of work. That is the first point. The second is that every Cab Horse in London has three things; a shelter for the night, food for its stomach, and work allotted to it by which it can earn its corn.
These are the two points of the Cab Horse's Charter. When he is down he is helped up, and while he lives he has food, shelter and work. That, although a humble standard, is at present absolutely unattainable by millions—literally by millions—of our fellow-men and women in this country. Can the Cab Horse Charter be gained for human beings? I answer, yes. The Cab Horse standard can be attained on the Cab Horse terms. If you get your fallen fellow on his feet again, Docility and Discipline will enable you to reach the Cab Horse ideal, otherwise it will remain unattainable. But Docility seldom fails where Discipline is intelligently maintained. Intelligence is more frequently lacking to direct than obedience to follow direction. At any rate it is not for those who possess the intelligence to despair of obedience, until they have done their part. Some, no doubt, like the bucking horse that will never be broken in, will always refuse to submit to any guidance but their own lawless will. They will remain either the Ishmaels or the Sloths of Society. But man is naturally neither an Ishmael nor a Sloth.
The first question, then, which confronts us is, what are the dimensions of the Evil? How many of our fellow-men dwell in this Darkest England? How can we take the census of those who have fallen below the Cab Horse standard to which it is our aim to elevate the most wretched of our countrymen?
The moment you attempt to answer this question, you are confronted by the fact that the Social Problem has scarcely been studied at all scientifically. Go to Mudie's and ask for all the books that have been written on the subject, and you will be surprised to find how few there are. There are probably more scientific books treating of diabetes or of gout than there are dealing with the great social malady which eats out the vitals of such numbers of our people. Of late there has been a change for the better. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor, and the Report of the Committee of the House of Lords on Sweating, represent an attempt at least to ascertain the facts which bear upon the Condition of the People question. But, after all, more minute, patient, intelligent observation has been devoted to the study of Earthworms, than to the evolution, or rather the degradation, of the Sunken Section of our people. Here and there in the immense field individual workers make notes, and occasionally emit a wail of despair, but where is there any attempt even so much as to take the first preliminary step of counting those who have gone under? One book there is, and so far as I know at present, only one, which even attempts to enumerate the destitute. In his "Life and Labour in the East of London," Mr. Charles Booth attempts to form some kind of an idea as to the numbers of those with whom we have to deal. With a large staff of assistants, and provided with all the facts in possession of the School Board Visitors, Mr. Booth took an industrial census of East London. This district, which comprises Tower Hamlets, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney, contains a population of 908,000; that is to say, less than one-fourth of the population of London. How do his statistics work out? If we estimate the number of the poorest class in the rest of London as being twice as numerous as those in the Eastern District, instead of being thrice as numerous, as they would be if they were calculated according to the population in the same proportion, the following is the result:
PAUPERS
Inmates of Workhouses, Asylums,
and Hospitals .. .. .. 17,000 34,000 51,000
HOMELESS
Loafers, Casuals,
and some Criminals .. .. 11,000 22,000 33,000
STARVING
Casual earnings between
18s. per week and chronic want 100,000 200,000 300,000
THE VERY POOR.
Intermittent earnings
18s. to 21s. per week .. .. 74,000 148,000 222,000
Small regular earnings
18s.to 21s. per week .. .. 129,000 258,000 387,000
———- ———- ———-
331,000 662,000 993,000
Regular wages, artizans, etc.,
22s. to 30s. per week .. .. 337,000
Higher class labour,
30s. to 50s. per week .. .. 121,000
Lower middle class,
shopkeepers, clerks, etc. .. 34,000
Upper middle class (servant keepers) .. .. .. 45,000 ———- 908,000 It may be admitted that East London affords an exceptionally bad district from which to generalise for the rest of the country. Wages are higher in London than elsewhere, but so is rent, and the number of the homeless and starving is greater in the human warren at the East End. There are 31 millions of people in Great Britain, exclusive of Ireland. If destitution existed everywhere in East London proportions, there would be 31 times as many homeless and starving people as there are in the district round Bethnal Green.
But let us suppose that the East London rate is double the average for the rest of the country. That would bring out the following figures:
HOUSELESS
East London. United Kingdom.
Loafers, Casuals, and some Criminals 11,000 165,500
STARVING
Casual earnings or chronic want .. 100,000 1,550,000
Total Houseless and Starving .. 111,000 1,715,500
In Workhouses, Asylums, &c. .. 17,000 190,000
———— —————
128,000 1,905,500
Of those returned as homeless and starving, 870,000 were in receipt of outdoor relief. To these must be added the inmates of our prisons. In 1889 174,779 persons were received in the prisons, but the average number in prison at any one time did not exceed 60,000. The figures, as given in the Prison Returns, are as follows: —
In Convict Prisons .. .. .. .. .. 11,600
In Local Prisons.. .. .. .. .. .. 20,883
In Reformatories.. .. .. .. .. .. 1,270
In Industrial Schools .. .. .. .. 21,413
Criminal Lunatics .. .. .. .. .. 910
———-
56,136
Add to this the number of indoor paupers and lunatics (excluding criminals) 78,966—and we have an army of nearly two million: belonging to the submerged classes. To this there must be added at the very least, another million, representing those dependent upon the criminal, lunatic and other classes, not enumerated here, and the more or less helpless of the class immediately above the houseless and starving. This brings my total to three millions, or, to put it roughly to one-tenth of the population. According to Lord Brabazon and Mr. Samuel Smith, "between two and three millions of our population are always pauperised and degraded." Mr. Chamberlain says there is a "population equal to that of the metropolis,—that is, between four and five millions—"which has remained constantly in a state of abject destitution and misery." Mr. Giffen is more moderate. The submerged class, according to him, comprises one in five of manual labourers, six in 100 of the population. Mr. Giffen does not add the third million which is living on the border line. Between Mr Chamberlain's four millions and a half, and Mr. Giffen's 1,800,000 I am content to take three millions as representing the total strength of the destitute army.
Darkest England, then, may be said to have a population about equal to that of Scotland. Three million men, women, and children a vast despairing multitude in a condition nominally free, but really enslaved;—these it is whom we have to save.
It is a large order. England emancipated her negroes sixty years ago, at a cost of #40,000,000, and has never ceased boasting about it since. But at our own doors, from "Plymouth to Peterhead," stretches this waste Continent of humanity—three million human beings who are enslaved—some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian overseer, all of them to destitution and despair?
Is anything to be done with them? Can anything be done for them? Or is this million-headed mass to be regarded as offering a problem as insoluble as that of the London sewage, which, feculent and festering, swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and flow of the tide?
This Submerged Tenth—is it, then, beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will be some incurably diseased in morals and in body, some for whom nothing can be done, some of whom even the optimist must despair, and for whom he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of an asylum or a gaol.
But is not one in ten a proportion scandalously high?
The Israelites of old set apart one tribe in twelve to minister to
the Lord in the service of the Temple; but must we doom one in ten of
"God's Englishmen" to the service of the great Twin Devils—
Destitution and Despair?
CHAPTER 3. THE HOMELESS
Darkest England may be described as consisting broadly of three circles, one within the other. The outer and widest circle is inhabited by the starving and the homeless, but honest, Poor. The second by those who live by Vice; and the third and innermost region at the centre is peopled by those who exist by Crime. The whole of the three circles is sodden with Drink. Darkest England has many more public-houses than the Forest of the Aruwimi has rivers, of which Mr. Stanley sometimes had to cross three in half-an-hour.
The borders of this great lost land are not sharply defined. They are continually expanding or contracting. Whenever there is a period of depression in trade, they stretch; when prosperity returns, they contract. So far as individuals are concerned, there are none among the hundreds of thousands who live upon the outskirts of the dark forest who can truly say that they or their children are secure from being hopelessly entangled in its labyrinth. The death of the bread-winner, a long illness, a failure in the City, or any one of a thousand other causes which might be named, will bring within the first circle those who at present imagine themselves free from all danger of actual want. The death-rate in Darkest England is high. Death is the great gaol-deliverer of the captives. But the dead are hardly in the grave before their places are taken by others. Some escape, but the majority, their health sapped by their surroundings, become weaker and weaker, until at last they fall by the way, perishing without hope at the very doors of the palatial mansions which, maybe, some of them helped to build.
Some seven years ago a great outcry was made concerning the Housing of the Poor. Much was said, and rightly said—it could not be said too strongly—concerning the disease-breeding, manhood-destroying character of many of the tenements in which the poor herd in our large cities. But there is a depth below that of the dweller in the slums. It is that of the dweller in the street, who has not even a lair in the slums which he can call his own. The houseless Out-of-Work is in one respect at least like Him of whom it was said, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head."
The existence of these unfortunates was somewhat rudely forced upon the attention of Society in 1887, when Trafalgar Square became the camping ground of the Homeless Outcasts of London. Our Shelters have done something, but not enough, to provide for the outcasts, who this night and every night are walking about the streets, not knowing where they can find a spot on which to rest their weary frames.
Here is the return of one of my Officers who was told off this summer to report upon the actual condition of the Homeless who have no roof to shelter them in all London: —
There are still a large number of Londoners and a considerable percentage of wanderers from the country in search of work, who find themselves at nightfall destitute. These now betake themselves to the seats under the plane trees on the Embankment. Formerly they endeavoured to occupy all the seats, but the lynx-eyed Metropolitan Police declined to allow any such proceedings, and the dossers, knowing the invariable kindness of the City Police, made tracks for that portion of the Embankment which, lying east of the Temple, comes under the control of the Civic Fathers. Here, between the Temple and Blackfriars, I found the poor wretches by the score; almost every seat contained its full complement of six—some men, some women—all reclining in various postures and nearly all fast asleep. Just as Big Ben strikes two, the moon, flashing across the Thames and lighting up the stone work of the Embankment, brings into relief a pitiable spectacle. Here on the stone abutments, which afford a slight protection from the biting wind, are scores of men lying side by side, huddled together for warmth, and, of course, without any other covering than their ordinary clothing, which is scanty enough at the best. Some have laid down a few pieces of waste paper, by way of taking the chill off the stones, but the majority are too tired, even for that, and the nightly toilet of most consists of first removing the hat, swathing the head in whatever old rag may be doing duty as a handkerchief, and then replacing the hat.
The intelligent-looking elderly man, who was just fixing himself up on a seat, informed me that he frequently made that his night's abode. "You see," quoth he, "there's nowhere else so comfortable. I was here last night, and Monday and Tuesday as well, that's four nights this week. I had no money for lodgings, couldn't earn any, try as I might. I've had one bit of bread to-day nothing else whatever, and I've earned nothing to-day or yesterday; I had threepence the day before. Gets my living by carrying parcels, or minding horses, or odd jobs of that sort. You see I haven't got my health, that's where it is. I used to work on the London General Omnibus Company and after that on the Road Car Company, but I had to go to the infirmary with bronchitis and couldn't get work after that. What's the good of a man what's got bronchitis and just left the infirmary? Who'll engage him, I'd like to know? Besides, it makes me short of breath at times, and I can't do much. I'm a widower; wife died long ago. I have one boy, abroad, a sailor, but he's only lately started and can't help me. Yes! its very fair out here of nights, seats rather hard, but a bit of waste paper makes it a lot softer. We have women sleep here often, and children, too. They're very well conducted, and there's seldom many rows here, you see, because everybody's tired out. We're too sleepy to make a row."
Another party, a tall, dull, helpless-looking individual, had walked up from the country; would prefer not to mention the place. He had hoped to have obtained a hospital letter at the Mansion House so as to obtain a truss for a bad rupture, but failing, had tried various other places, also in vain, win up minus money or food on the Embankment.
In addition to these sleepers, a considerable number walk about the streets up till the early hours of the morning to hunt up some job which will bring I copper into the empty exchequer, and save them from actual starvation. I had some conversation with one such, a stalwart youth lately discharged from the militia, and unable to get work.
"You see," said he, pitifully, "I don't know my way about like most of the London fellows. I'm so green, and don't know how to pick up jobs like they do. I've been walking the streets almost day and night these two weeks and can't get work. I've got the strength, though I shan't have it long at this rate. I only want a job. This is the third night running that I've walked the streets all night; the only money I get is by minding blacking-boys' boxes while they go into Lockhart's for their dinner. I got a penny yesterday at it, and twopence for carrying a parcel, and to-day I've had a penny. Bought a ha'porth of bread and a ha'penny mug of tea."
Poor lad! probably he would soon get into thieves' company, and sink into the depths, for there is no other means of living for many like him; it is starve or steal, even for the young. There are gangs of lad thieves in the low Whitechapel lodging-houses, varying in age from thirteen to fifteen, who live by thieving eatables and other easily obtained goods from shop fronts. In addition to the Embankment, al fresco lodgings are found in the seats outside Spitalfields Church, and many homeless wanderers have their own little nooks and corners of resort in many sheltered yards, vans, etc., all over London. Two poor women I observed making their home in a shop door-way in Liverpool Street. Thus they manage in the summer; what it's like in winter time is terrible to think of. In many cases it means the pauper's grave, as in the case of a young woman who was wont to sleep in a van in Bedfordbury. Some men who were aware of her practice surprised her by dashing a bucket of water on her. The blow to her weak system caused illness, and the inevitable sequel—a coroner's jury came to the conclusion that the water only hastened her death, which was due, in plain English, to starvation.
The following are some statements taken down by the same Officer from twelve men whom he found sleeping on the Embankment on the nights of June 13th and 14th, 1890:-
No. 1. "I've slept here two nights; I'm a confectioner by trade;
I come from Dartford. I got turned off because I'm getting elderly.
They can get young men cheaper, and I have the rheumatism so bad.
I've earned nothing these two days; I thought I could get a job at
Woolwich, so I walked there, but could get nothing. I found a bit of
bread in the road wrapped up in a bit of newspaper. That did me for
yesterday. I had a bit of bread and butter to-day. I'm 54 years old.
When it's wet we stand about all night under the arches.'
No. 2. "Been sleeping out three weeks all but one night; do odd jobs, mind horses, and that sort of thing. Earned nothing to-day, or shouldn't be here. Have had a pen'orth of bread to-day. That's all. Yesterday had some pieces given to me at a cook-shop. Two days last week had nothing at all from morning till night. By trade I'm a feather-bed dresser, but it's gone out of fashion, and besides that, I've a cataract in one eye, and have lost the sight of it completely. I'm a widower, have one child, a soldier, at Dover. My last regular work was eight months ago, but the firm broke. Been doing odd jobs Since."
No. 3. "I'm a tailor; have slept here four nights running. Can't get work. Been out of a job three weeks. If I can muster cash I sleep at a lodging-house in Vere Street, Glare Market. It was very wet last night. I left these seats and went to Covent Garden Market and slept under cover. There were about thirty of us. The police moved us on, but we went back as soon as they had gone. I've had a pen'orth of bread and pen'orth of soup during the last two days—often goes without altogether. There are women sleep out here. They are decent people, mostly charwomen and such like who can't get work."
No.4. Elderly man; trembles visibly with excitement at mention of work; produces a card carefully wrapped in old newspaper, to the effect that Mr. J.R. is a member of the Trade Protection League. He is a waterside labourer; last job at that was a fortnight since. Has earned nothing for five days. Had a bit of bread this morning, but not a scrap since. Had a cup of tea and two slices of bread yesterday, and the same the day before; the deputy at a lodging house gave it to him. He is fifty years old, and is still damp from sleeping out in the wet last night.
No. 5. Sawyer by trade, machinery cut him out. Had a job, haymaking near Uxbridge. Had been on same job lately for a month; got 2s. 6d a day. (Probably spent it in drink, seems a very doubtful worker.) Has been odd jobbing a long time, earned 2d. to-day, bought a pen'orth of tea and ditto of sugar (produces same from pocket) but can't get any place to make the tea; was hoping to get to a lodging house where he could borrow a teapot, but had no money. Earned nothing yesterday, slept at a casual ward; very poor place, get insufficient food, considering the labour. Six ounces of bread and a pint of skilly for breakfast, one ounce of cheese and six or seven ounces of bread for dinner (bread cut by guess). Tea same as breakfast,—no supper. For this you have to break 10 cwt. of stones, or pick 4 lbs. of oakum.
Number 6. Had slept out four nights running. Was a distiller by trade been out four months; unwilling to enter into details of leaving, but it was his own fault. (Very likely; a heavy, thick, stubborn, and senseless-looking fellow, six feet high, thick neck, strong limbs, evidently destitute of ability. Does odd jobs; earned 3d. for minding a horse, bought a cup of coffee and pen'orth of bread and butter. Has no money now. Slept under Waterloo Bridge last night.
No. 7. Good-natured looking man; one who would suffer and say nothing clothes shining with age, grease, and dirt; they hang on his joints as on pegs; awful rags! I saw him endeavouring to walk. He lifted his feet very slowly and put them down carefully in evident pain. His legs are bad; been in infirmary several times with them. His uncle and grandfather were clergymen; both dead now. He was once in a good position in a money office, and afterwards in the London and County Bank for nine years. Then he went with an auctioneer who broke, and he was left ill, old, and without any trade. "A clerk's place," says he, "is never worth having, because there are so many of them, and once out you can only get another place with difficulty. I have a brother-in-law on the Stock Exchange, but he won't own me. Look at my clothes? Is it likely?"
No. 8. Slept here four nights running. Is a builder's labourer by trade, that is, a handy-man. Had a settled job for a few weeks which expired three weeks since. Has earned nothing for nine days. Then helped wash down a shop front and got 2s. 6d. for it. Does anything he can get. Is 46 years old. Earns about 2d. or 3d. a day at horse minding. A cup of tea and a bit of bread yesterday, and same to-day, is all he has had.
No. 9. A plumber's labourer (all these men who are somebody's "labourers" are poor samples of humanity, evidently lacking in grit, and destitute of ability to do any work which would mean decent wages). Judging from appearances, they will do nothing well. They are a kind of automaton, with the machinery rusty; slow, dull, and incapable. The man of ordinary intelligence leaves them in the rear. They could doubtless earn more even at odd jobs, but lack the energy. Of course, this means little food, exposure to weather, and increased incapability day by day. ("From him that hath not," etc.) Out of work through slackness, does odd jobs; slept here three nights running. Is a dock labourer when he can get work. Has 6d. an hour; works so many hours, according as he is wanted. Gets 2s., 3s., or 4s. 6d. a day. Has to work very hard for it. Casual ward life is also very hard he says, for those who are not used to it, and there is not enough to eat. Has had to-day a pen'orth of bread, for minding a cab. Yesterday he spent 3 1/2d. on a breakfast, and that lasted him all day. Age 25.
No. 10. Been out of work a month. Carman by trade. Arm withered, and cannot do work properly. Has slept here all the week; got an awful cold through the wet. Lives at odd jobs (they all do). Got sixpence yesterday for minding a cab and carrying a couple of parcels. Earned nothing to-day, but had one good meal; a lady gave it him. Has been walking about all day looking for work, and is tired out.
No. 11. Youth, aged 16. Sad case; Londoner. Works at odd jobs and matches selling. Has taken 3d. to-day, i.e., net profit 1 1/2d. Has five boxes still. Has slept here every night for a month. Before that slept in Covent Garden Market or on doorsteps. Been sleeping out six months, since he left Feltham Industrial School. Was sent there for playing truant. Has had one bit of bread to-day; yesterday had only some gooseberries and cherries, i.e., bad ones that had been thrown away. Mother is alive. She "chucked him out" when he returned home on leaving Feltham because he could'nt find her money for drink.
No. 12. Old man, age 67. Seems to take rather a humorous view of the position. Kind of Mark Tapley. Says he can't say he does like it, but then he must like it! Ha, ha! Is a slater by trade. Been out of work some time; younger men naturally get the work. Gets a bit of bricklaying sometimes; can turn his hand to anything. Goes miles and gets nothing. Earned one and twopence this week at holding horses. Finds it hard, certainly. Used to care once, and get down-hearted, but that's no good; don't trouble now. Had a bit of bread and butter and cup of coffee to-day. Health is awful bad, not half the size he was; exposure and want of food is the cause; got wet last night, and is very stiff in consequence. Has been walking about since it was light, that is 3 a.m. Was so cold and wet and weak, scarcely knew what to do. Walked to Hyde Park, and got a little sleep there on a dry seat as soon as the park opened.
These are fairly typical cases of the men who are now wandering homeless through the streets. That is the way in which the nomads of civilization are constantly being recruited from above.
Such are the stories gathered at random one Midsummer night this year under the shade of the plane trees of the Embankment. A month later, when one of my staff took the census of the sleepers out of doors along the line of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster, he found three hundred and sixty-eight persons sleeping in the open air. Of these, two hundred and seventy were on the Embankment proper, and ninety-eight in and about Covent Garden Market, while the recesses of Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges were full of human misery.
This, be it remembered, was not during a season of bad trade. The revival of business has been attested on all hands, notably by the barometer of strong drink. England is prosperous enough to drink rum in quantities which appall the Chancellor of the Exchequer but she is not prosperous enough to provide other shelter than the midnight sky for these poor outcasts on the Embankment.
To very many even of those who live in London it may be news that there are so many hundreds who sleep out of doors every night. There are comparatively few people stirring after midnight, and when we are snugly tucked into our own beds we are apt to forget the multitude outside in the rain and the storm who are shivering the long hours through on the hard stone seats in the open or under the arches of the railway. These homeless, hungry people are, however there, but being broken-spirited folk for the most part they seldom make their voices audible in the ears of their neighbours. Now and again, however, a harsh cry from the depths is heard for a moment, jarring rudely upon the ear and then all is still. The inarticulate classes speak as seldom as Balaam's ass. But they sometimes find a voice. Here for instance is one such case which impressed me much. It was reported in one of the Liverpool papers some time back. The speaker was haranguing a small knot of twenty or thirty men: —
"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."
Who can express the feeling that comes over one when the fact begins to dawn that the search for work is a failure? All my hopes and prospects seemed to have turned out false. Helplessness, I had often heard of it, had often talked about it, thought I knew all about it. Yes! in others, but now began to understand it for myself. Gradually my personal appearance faded. My once faultless linen became unkempt and unclean. Down further and further went the heels of my shoes, and I drifted into that distressing condition "shabby gentility." If the odds were against me before, how much more so now, seeing that I was too shabby even to command attention, much less a reply to my enquiry for work.
Hunger now began to do its work, and I drifted to the dock gates, but what chance had I among the hungry giants there? And so down the stream drifted until "Grim Want" brought me to the last shilling, the last lodging, and the last meal. What shall I do? Where shall I go? I tried to think. Must I starve? Surely there must be some door still open for honest willing endeavour, but where? What can I do? "Drink," said the Tempter; but to drink to drunkenness needs cash, and oblivion by liquor demands an equivalent in the currency.
Starve or steal. "You must do one or the other," said the Tempter. But recoiled from being a Thief. "Why be so particular?" says the Tempter again "You are down now, who will trouble about you? Why trouble about yourself? The choice is between starving and stealing." And I struggled until hunger stole my judgment, and then I became a Thief.
No one can pretend that it was an idle fear of death by starvation which drove this poor fellow to steal. Deaths from actual hunger an more common than is generally supposed. Last year, a man, whose name was never known, was walking through St. James's Park, when three of our Shelter men saw him suddenly stumble and fall. They thought he was drunk, but found he had fainted. They carried him to the bridge and gave him to the police. They took him to St George's Hospital, where he died. It appeared that he had, according to his own tale, walked up from Liverpool, and had been without food for five days. The doctor, however, said he had gone longer than that. The jury returned a verdict of "Death from Starvation."
Without food for five days or longer! Who that has experienced the sinking sensation that is felt when even a single meal has been sacrificed may form some idea of what kind of slow torture killed that man!
In 1888 the average daily number of unemployed in London was estimated by the Mansion House Committee at 20,000. This vast reservoir of unemployed labour is the bane of all efforts to raise the scale of living, to improve the condition of labour. Men hungering to death for lack of opportunity to earn a crust are the materials from which "blacklegs" are made, by whose aid the labourer is constantly defeated in his attempts to improve his condition.
This is the problem that underlies all questions of Trades Unionism and all Schemes for the Improvement of the Condition of the Industrial Army. To rear any stable edifice that will not perish when the first storm rises and the first hurricane blows, it must be built not upon sand, but upon a rock. And the worst of all existing Schemes for social betterment by organisation of the skilled workers and the like is that they are founded, not upon "rock," nor even upon "sand," but upon the bottomless bog of the stratum of the Workless. It is here where we must begin. The regimentation of industrial workers who have got regular work is not so very difficult. That can be done, and is being done, by themselves. The problem that we have to face is the regimentation, the organisation, of those who have not got work, or who have only irregular work, and who from sheer pressure of absolute starvation are driven irresistibly into cut-throat competition with their better employed brothers and sisters. Skin for skin, all that a man hath, will he give for his life; much more, then, will those who experimentally know not God give all that they might hope hereafter to have—in this world or in the world to come.
There is no gainsaying the immensity of the problem. It is appalling enough to make us despair. But those who do not put their trust in man alone, but in One who is Almighty, have no right to despair. To despair is to lose faith; to despair is to forget God Without God we can do nothing in this frightful chaos of human misery. But with God we can do all things, and in the faith that He has made in His image all the children of men we face even this hideous wreckage of humanity with a cheerful confidence that if we are but faithful to our own high calling He will not fail to open up a way of deliverance.
I have nothing to say against those who are endeavouring to open up a way of escape without any consciousness of God's help. For them I feel only sympathy and compassion. In so far as they are endeavouring to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and above all, work to the workless, they are to that extent endeavouring to do the will of our Father which is in Heaven, and woe be unto all those who say them nay! But to be orphaned of all sense of the Fatherhood of God is surely not a secret source of strength. It is in most cases—it would be in my own—the secret of paralysis. If I did not feel my Father's hand in the darkness, and hear His voice in the silence of the night watches bidding me put my hand to this thing, I would shrink back dismayed;— but as it is I dare not.
How many are there who have made similar attempts and have failed, and we have heard of them no more! Yet none of them proposed to deal with more than the mere fringe of the evil which, God helping me, I will try to face in all its immensity. Most Schemes that are put forward for the Improvement of the Circumstances of the People are either avowedly or actually limited to those whose condition least needs amelioration. The Utopians, the economists, and most of the philanthropists propound remedies, which, if adopted to-morrow, would only affect the aristocracy of the miserable. It is the thrifty, the industrious, the sober, the thoughtful who can take advantage of these plans. But the thrifty, the industrious, the sober, and the thoughtful are already very well able for the most part to take care of themselves. No one will ever make even a visible dint on the Morass of Squalor who does not deal with the improvident, the lazy, the vicious, and the criminal. The Scheme of Social Salvation is not worth discussion which is not as wide as the Scheme of Eternal Salvation set forth in the Gospel. The Glad Tidings must be to every creature, not merely to an elect few who are to be saved while the mass of their fellow are predestined to a temporal damnation. We have had this doctrine of an inhuman cast-iron pseudo-political economy too long enthroned amongst us. It is now time to fling down the false idol and proclaim a Temporal Salvation as full, free, and universal, and with no other limitations than the "Whosoever will," of the Gospel.
To attempt to save the Lost, we must accept no Limitations to human brotherhood. If the Scheme which I set forth in these and the following pages is not applicable to the Thief, the Harlot, the Drunkard, and the Sluggard, it may as well be dismissed without ceremony. As Christ came to call not the saints but sinners to repentance, so the New Message of Temporal Salvation, of salvation from pinching poverty, from rags and misery, must be offered to all. They may reject it, of course. But we who call ourselves by the name of Christ are not worthy to profess to be His disciples until we have set an open door before the least and worst of these who are now apparently imprisoned for life in a horrible dungeon of misery and despair. The responsibility for its rejection must be theirs, not ours. We all know the prayer, "Give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with food convenient for me"—and for every child of man on this planet, thank God the prayer of Agur, the son of Jakeh, may be fulfilled.
At present how far it is from being realised may be seen by anyone who will take the trouble to go down to the docks and see the struggle for work. Here is a sketch of what was found there this summer: —
London Docks, 7.25 a.m. The three pairs of huge wooden doors are closed. Leaning against then, and standing about, there are perhaps a couple of hundred men. The public house opposite is full, doing a heavy trade. All along the road are groups of men, and from each direction a steady stream increases the crowd at the gate.
7.30 Doors open, there is a general rush to the interior. Everybody marches about a hundred yards along to the iron barrier—a temporary chair affair, guarded by the dock police. Those men who have previously (i.e., night before) been engaged, show their ticket and pass through, about six hundred. The rest—some five hundred stand behind the barrier, patiently waiting the chance of a job, but less than twenty of these get engaged. They are taken on by a foreman who appears next the barrier and proceeds to pick his men. No sooner is the foreman seen, than there is a wild rush to the spot and a sharp mad fight to "catch his eye." The men picked out, pass the barrier, and the excitement dies away until another lot of men are wanted.
They wait until eight o'clock strikes, which is the signal to withdraw. The barrier is taken down and all those hundreds of men, wearily disperse to "find a job." Five hundred applicants, twenty acceptances! No wonder one tired-out looking individual ejaculates, "Oh dear, Oh dear! Whatever shall I do?" A few hang about until mid-day on the slender chance of getting taken on then for half a day.
Ask the men and they will tell you something like the following story, which gives the simple experiences of a dock labourer.
R. P. said: —"I was in regular work at the South West India Dock before the strike. We got 5d. an hour. Start work 8 a.m. summer and 9 a.m winter. Often there would be five hundred go, and only twenty get taken on (that is besides those engaged the night previous.) The foreman stood in his box, and called out the men he wanted. He would know quite five hundred by name. It was a regular fight to get work, I have known nine hundred to be taken on, but there's always hundreds turned away. You see they get to know when ships come in, and when they're consequently likely to be wanted, and turn up then in greater numbers. I would earn 30s. a week sometimes and then perhaps nothing for a fortnight. That's what makes it so hard. You get nothing to eat for a week scarcely, and then when you get taken on, you are so weak that you can't do it properly. I've stood in the crowd at the gate and had to go away without work, hundreds of times. Still I should go at it again if I could. I got tired of the little work and went away into the country to get work on a farm, but couldn't get it, so I'm without the 10s. that it costs to join the Dockers' Union. I'm going to the country again in a day or two to try again. Expect to get 3s. a day perhaps. Shall come back to the docks again. Then is a chance of getting regular dock work, and that is, to lounge about the pubs where the foremen go, and treat them. Then they will very likely take you on next day."
R. P. was a non-Unionist. Henry F. is a Unionist. His history is much the same.
"I worked at St. Katherine's Docks five months ago. You have to get to the gates at 6 o'clock for the first call. There's generally about 400 waiting. They will take on one to two hundred. Then at 7 o'clock there's a second call. Another 400 will have gathered by then, and another hundred or so will be taken on. Also there will probably be calls at nine and one o'clock. About the same number turn up but there's no work for many hundreds of them. I was a Union man. That means 10s. a week sick pay, or 8s. a week for slight accidents; also some other advantages. The Docks won't take men on now unless they are Unionists. The point is that there's too many men. I would often be out of work a fortnight to three weeks at a time. Once earned #3 in a week, working day and night, but then had a fortnight out directly after. Especially when then don't happen to be any ships in for a few days, which means, of course, nothing to unload. That's the time; there's plenty of men almost starving then. They have no trade to go to, or can get no work at it, and they swoop down to the docks for work, when they had much better stay away."
But it is not only at the dock-gates that you come upon these unfortunates who spend their lives in the vain hunt for work. Here is the story of another man whose case has only too many parallels.
C. is a fine built man, standing nearly six feet. He has been in the Royal Artillery for eight years and held very good situations whilst in it. It seems that he was thrifty and consequently steady. He bought his discharge, and being an excellent cook opened a refreshment house, but at the end of five months he was compelled to close his shop on account of slackness in trade, which was brought about by the closing of a large factory in the locality.
After having worked in Scotland and Newcastle-on-Tyne for a few years, and through ill health having to give up his situation, he came to London with he hope that he might get something to do in his native town. He has had no regular employment for the past eight months. His wife and family are in a state of destitution, and he remarked, "We only had 1 lb. of bread between us yesterday." He is six weeks in arrears of rent, and is afraid that he will be ejected. The furniture which is in his home is not worth 3s. and the clothes of each member of his family are in a tattered state and hardly fit for the rag bag. He assured us he had tried every where to get employment and would be willing to take anything. His characters are very good indeed.
Now, it may seem a preposterous dream that any arrangement can be devised by which it may be possible, under all circumstances, to provide food, clothes, and shelter for all these Out-of-Works without any loss of self respect; but I am convinced that it can be done, providing only that they are willing to Work, and, God helping me, if the means are forthcoming, I mean to try to do it; how, and where, and when, I will explain in subsequent chapters.
All that I need say here is, that so long as a man or woman is willing to submit to the discipline indispensable in every campaign against any formidable foe, there appears to me nothing impossible about this ideal; and the great element of hope before us is that the majority are, beyond all gainsaying, eager for work. Most of them now do more exhausting work in seeking for employment than the regular toilers do in their workshops, and do it, too, under the darkness of hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.
CHAPTER 5. ON THE VERGE OF THE ABYSS.
There is, unfortunately, no need for me to attempt to set out, however imperfectly, any statement of the evil case of the sufferers what we wish to help. For years past the Press has been filled with echoes of the "Bitter Cry of Outcast London," with pictures of "Horrible Glasgow," and the like. We have had several volumes describing "How the Poor Live" and I may therefore assume that all my readers are more or less cognizant of the main outlines a "Darkest England." My slum officers are living in the midst of it their reports are before me, and one day I may publish some more detailed account of the actual facts of the social condition of the Sunken Millions. But not now. All that must be taken as read. I only glance at the subject in order to bring into clear relief the salient points of our new Enterprise.
I have spoken of the houseless poor. Each of these represents a point in the scale of human suffering below that of those who have still contrived to keep a shelter over their heads. A home is a home, be it ever so low; and the desperate tenacity with which the poor will cling to the last wretched semblance of one is very touching. There are vile dens, fever-haunted and stenchful crowded courts, where the return of summer is dreaded because it means the unloosing of myriads of vermin which render night unbearable, which, nevertheless, are regarded at this moment as havens of rest by their hard-working occupants. They can scarcely be said to be furnished. A chair, a mattress, and a few miserable sticks constitute all the furniture of the single room in which they have to sleep, and breed, and die; but they cling to it as a drowning man to a half-submerged raft. Every week they contrive by pinching and scheming to raise the rent, for with them it is pay or go and they struggle to meet the collector as the sailor nerves himself to avoid being sucked under by the foaming wave. If at any time work fails or sickness comes they are liable to drop helplessly into the ranks of the homeless. It is bad for a single man to have to confront the struggle for life in the streets and Casual Wards. But how much more terrible must it be for the married man with his wife and children to be turned out into the streets. So long as the family has a lair into which it can creep at night, he keeps his footing; but when he loses that solitary foothold then arrives the time if there be such a thing as Christian compassion, for the helping hand to be held out to save him from the vortex that sucks him downward—ay, downward to the hopeless under-strata of crime and despair.
"The heart knoweth its own bitterness and the stranger inter-meddleth not therewith." But now and then out of the depths there sounds a bitter wail as of some strong swimmer in his agony as he is drawn under by the current. A short time ago a respectable man, a chemist in Holloway, fifty years of age, driven hard to the wall, tried to end it all by cutting his throat. His wife also cut her throat, and at the same time they gave strychnine to their only child. The effort failed, and they were placed on trial for attempted murder. In the Court a letter was read which the poor wretch had written before attempting his life:-
MY DEAREST GEORGE,—Twelve months have I now passed of a most miserable and struggling existence, and I really cannot stand it any more. I am completely worn out, and relations who could assist me won't do any more, for such was uncle's last intimation. Never mind; he can't take his money and comfort with him, and in all probability will find himself in the same boat as myself. He never enquires whether I am starving or not. #3—a mere flea-bite to him—would have put us straight, and with his security and good interest might have obtained me a good situation long ago. I can face poverty and degradation no longer, and would sooner die than go to the workhouse, whatever may be the awful consequences of the steps we have taken. We have, God forgive us, taken our darling Arty with us out of pure love and affection, so that the darling should never be cuffed about, or reminded or taunted with his heartbroken parents' crime. My poor wife has done her best at needle-work, washing, house-minding, &c., in fact, anything and everything that would bring in a shilling; but it would only keep us in semi-starvation. I have now done six weeks' travelling from morning till night, and not received one farthing for it, If that is not enough to drive you mad—wickedly mad—I don't know what is. No bright prospect anywhere; no ray of hope.
May God Almighty forgive us for this heinous sin, and have mercy on our sinful souls, is the prayer of your miserable, broken-hearted, but loving brother, Arthur. We have now done everything that we can possibly think of to avert this wicked proceeding, but can discover no ray of hope. Fervent prayer has availed us nothing; our lot is cast, and we must abide by it. It must be God's will or He would have ordained it differently. Dearest Georgy, I am exceedingly sorry to leave you all, but I am mad—thoroughly mad. You, dear, must try and forget us, and, if possible, forgive us; for I do not consider it our own fault we have not succeeded. If you could get #3 for our bed it will pay our rent, and our scanty furniture may fetch enough to bury us in a cheap way. Don't grieve over us or follow us, for we shall not be worthy of such respect. Our clergyman has never called on us or given us the least consolation, though I called on him a month ago. He is paid to preach, and there he considers his responsibility ends, the rich excepted. We have only yourself and a very few others who care one pin what becomes of us, but you must try and forgive us, is the last fervent prayer of your devotedly fond and affectionate but broken-hearted and persecuted brother. (Signed) R. A. O——.
That is an authentic human document—a transcript from the life of one among thousands who go down inarticulate into the depths, They die and make no sign, or, worse still, they continue to exist, carrying about with them, year after year, the bitter ashes of a life from which the furnace of misfortune has burnt away all joy, and hope, and strength. Who is there who has not been confronted by many despairing ones, who come, as Richard O—— went, to the clergyman, crying for help, and how seldom have we been able to give it them? It is unjust, no doubt, for them to blame the clergy and the comfortable well-to-do —for what can they do but preach and offer good advice? To assist all the Richard O——s' by direct financial advance would drag even Rothschild into the gutter. And what else can be done? Yet something else must be done if Christianity is not to be a mockery to perishing men.
Here is another case, a very common case, which illustrates how the
Army of Despair is recruited.
Mr. T., Margaret Place, Gascoign Place, Bethnal Green, is a bootmaker by trade. Is a good hand, and has earned three shillings and sixpence to four shillings and sixpence a day. He was taken ill last Christmas, and went to the London Hospital; was there three months. A week after he had gone Mrs. T. had rheumatic fever, and was taken to Bethnal Green Infirmary, where she remained about three months. Directly after they had been taken ill, their furniture was seized for the three weeks' rent which was owing. Consequently, on becoming convalescent, they were homeless. They came out about the same time. He went out to a lodging-house for a night or two, until she came out. He then had twopence, and she had sixpence, which a nurse had given her. They went to a lodging-house together, but the society there was dreadful. Next day he had a day's work, and got two shillings and sixpence, and on the strength of this they took a furnished room at tenpence per day (payable nightly). His work lasted a few weeks, when he was again taken ill, lost his job, and spent all their money. Pawned a shirt and apron for a shilling; spent that, too. At last pawned their tools for three shillings, which got them a few days' food and lodging. He is now minus tools and cannot work at his own job, and does anything he can. Spent their last twopence on a pen'orth each of tea and sugar. In two days they had a slice of bread and butter each, that's all. They are both very weak through want of food.
"Let things alone," the laws of supply and demand, and all the rest of the excuses by which those who stand on firm ground salve their consciences when they leave their brother to sink, how do they look when we apply them to the actual loss of life at sea? Does "Let things alone" man the lifeboat? Will the inexorable laws of political economy save the shipwrecked sailor from the boiling surf? They often enough are responsible for his disaster. Coffin ships are a direct result of the wretched policy of non-interference with the legitimate operations of commerce, but no desire to make it pay created the National Lifeboat Institution, no law of supply and demand actuates the volunteers who risk their lives to bring the shipwrecked to shore.
What we have to do is to apply the same principle to society. We want a Social Lifeboat Institution, a Social Lifeboat Brigade, to snatch from the abyss those who, if left to themselves, will perish as miserably as the crew of a ship that founders in mid-ocean.
The moment that we take in hand this work we shall be compelled to turn our attention seriously to the question whether prevention is not better than cure. It is easier and cheaper, and in every way better, to prevent the loss of home than to have to re-create that home. It is better to keep a man out of the mire than to let him fall in first and then risk the chance of plucking him out. Any Scheme, therefore, that attempts to deal with the reclamation of the lost must tend to develop into an endless variety of ameliorative measures, of some of which I shall have somewhat to say hereafter. I only mention the subject here in order that no one may say I am blind to the necessity of going further and adopting wider plans of operation than those which I put forward in this book. The renovation of our Social System is a work so vast that no one of us, nor all of us put together, can define all the measures that will have to be taken before we attain even the Cab-Horse Ideal of existence for our children and children's children. All that we can do is to attack, in a serious, practical spirit the worst and most pressing evils, knowing that if we do our duty we obey the voice of God. He is the Captain of our Salvation. If we but follow where He leads we shall not want for marching orders, nor need we imagine that He will narrow the field of operations.
I am labouring under no delusions as to the possibility of inaugurating the Millennium by any social specific. In the struggle of life the weakest will go to the wall, and there are so many weak. The fittest, in tooth and claw, will survive. All that we can do is to soften the lot of the unfit and make their suffering less horrible than it is at present. No amount of assistance will give a jellyfish a backbone. No outside propping will make some men stand erect. All material help from without is useful only in so far as it develops moral strength within. And some men seem to have lost even the very faculty of self-help. There is an immense lack of common sense and of vital energy on the part of multitudes.
It is against Stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?
How can we marvel if, after leaving generation after generation to grow up uneducated and underfed, there should be developed a heredity of incapacity, and that thousands of dull-witted people should be born into the world, disinherited before their birth of their share in the average intelligence of mankind?
Besides those who are thus hereditarily wanting in the qualities necessary to enable them to hold their own, there are the weak, the disabled, the aged, and the unskilled; worse than all, there is the want of character. Those who have the best of reputation, if they lose their foothold on the ladder, find it difficult enough to regain their place. What, then, can men and women who have no character do? When a master has the choice of a hundred honest men, is it reasonable to expect that he will select a poor fellow with tarnished reputation? All this is true, and it is one of the things that makes the problem almost insoluble. And insoluble it is, I am absolutely convinced unless it is possible to bring new moral life into the soul of these people. This should be the first object of every social reformer, whose work will only last if it is built on the solid foundation of a new birth, to cry "You must be born again."
To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine. All that I propose in this book is governed by that principle.
The difference between the method which seeks to regenerate the man by ameliorating his circumstances and that which ameliorates his circumstances in order to get at the regeneration of his heart, is the difference between the method of the gardener who grafts a Ribstone Pippin on a crab-apple tree and one who merely ties apples with string upon the branches of the crab. To change the nature of the individual, to get at the heart, to save his soul is the only real, lasting method of doing him any good. In many modern schemes of social regeneration it is forgotten that "it takes a soul to move a body, e'en to a cleaner sty," and at the risk of being misunderstood and misrepresented, I must assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body.
But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive? You might as well give a tract to a shipwrecked sailor who is battling with the surf which has drowned his comrades and threatens to drown him. He will not listen to you. Nay, he cannot hear you any more than a man whose head is underwater can listen to a sermon. The first thing to do is to get him at least a footing on firm ground, and to give him room to live. Then you may have a chance. At present you have none. And you will have all the better opportunity to find a way to his heart, if he comes to know that it was you who pulled him out of the horrible pit and the miry clay in which he was sinking to perdition.
CHAPTER 6. THE VICIOUS.
There are many vices and seven deadly sins. But of late years many of the seven have contrived to pass themselves off as virtues. Avarice, for instance; and Pride, when re-baptised thrift and self-respect, have become the guardian angels of Christian civilisation; and as for Envy, it is the corner-stone upon which much of our competitive system is founded. There are still two vices which are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to remain undisguised, not even concealing from themselves the fact that they are vices and not virtues. One is drunkenness; the other fornication. The viciousness of these vices is so little disguised, even from those who habitually practise them, that there will be a protest against merely describing one of them by the right Biblical name. Why not say prostitution? For this reason: prostitution is a word applied to only one half of the vice, and that the most pitiable. Fornication hits both sinners alike. Prostitution applies only to the woman.
When, however, we cease to regard this vice from the point of view of morality and religion, and look at it solely as a factor in the social problem, the word prostitution is less objectionable. For the social burden of this vice is borne almost entirely by women. The male sinner does not, by the mere fact of his sin, find himself in a worse position in obtaining employment, in finding a home, or even in securing a wife. His wrong-doing only hits him in his purse, or, perhaps, in his health. His incontinence, excepting so far as it relates to the woman whose degradation it necessitates, does not add to the number of those for whom society has to provide. It is an immense addition to the infamy of this vice in man that its consequences have to be borne almost exclusively by woman. The difficulty of dealing with drunkards and harlots is almost insurmountable. Were it not that I utterly repudiate as a fundamental denial of the essential principle of the Christian religion the popular pseudo-scientific doctrine that any man or woman is past saving by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, I would sometimes be disposed to despair when contemplating these victims of the Devil. The doctrine of Heredity and the suggestion of Irresponsibility come perilously near re-establishing, on scientific bases, the awful dogma of Reprobation which has cast so terrible a shadow over the Christian Church. For thousands upon thousands of these poor wretches are, as Bishop South truly said, "not so much born into this world as damned into it." The bastard of a harlot, born in a brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all the bestialities of debauch, violated before she is twelve, and driven out into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is there for such a girl in this world—I say nothing about the next? Yet such a case is not exceptional. There are many such differing in detail, but in essentials the same. And with boys it is almost as bad. There are thousands who were begotten when both parents were besotted with drink, whose mothers saturated themselves with alcohol every day of their pregnancy, who may be said to have sucked in a taste for strong drink with their mothers' milk, and who were surrounded from childhood with opportunities and incitements to drink. How can we marvel that the constitution thus disposed to intemperance finds the stimulus of drink indispensable? Even if they make a stand against it, the increasing pressure of exhaustion and of scanty food drives them back to the cup. Of these poor wretches, born slaves of the bottle, predestined to drunkenness from their mother's womb, there are—who can say how many? Yet they are all men; all with what the Russian peasants call "a spark of God" in them, which can never be wholly obscured and destroyed while life exists, and if any social scheme is to be comprehensive and practical it must deal with these men. It must provide for the drunkard and the harlot as it provides for the improvident and the out-of-work. But who is sufficient for these things?
I will take the question of the drunkard, for the drink difficulty lies at the root of everything. Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice, and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root. Many of our social evils, which overshadow the land like so many upas trees, would dwindle away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink. There is universal agreement on that point; in fact, the agreement as to the evils of intemperance is almost as universal as the conviction that politicians will do nothing practical to interfere with them. In Ireland, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald says that intemperance leads to nineteen-twentieths of the crime in that country, but no one proposes a Coercion Act to deal with that evil. In England, the judges all say the same thing. Of course it is a mistake to assume that a murder, for instance, would never be committed by sober men, because murderers in most cases prime themselves for their deadly work by a glass of Dutch courage. But the facility of securing a reinforcement of passion undoubtedly tends to render always dangerous, and sometimes irresistible, the temptation to violate the laws of God and man.
Mere lectures against the evil habit are, however, of no avail. We have to recognise, that the gin-palace, like many other evils, although a poisonous, is still a natural outgrowth of our social conditions. The tap-room in many cases is the poor man's only parlour. Many a man takes to beer, not from the love of beer, but from a natural craving for the light, warmth, company, and comfort which is thrown in along with the beer, and which he cannot get excepting by buying beer. Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers. Then, again, let us never forget that the temptation to drink is strongest when want is sharpest and misery the most acute. A well-fed man is not driven to drink by the craving that torments the hungry; and the comfortable do not crave for the boon of forgetfulness. Gin is the only Lethe of the miserable. The foul and poisoned air of the dens in which thousands live predisposes to a longing for stimulant. Fresh air, with its oxygen and its ozone, being lacking, a man supplies the want with spirit. After a time the longing for drink becomes a mania. Life seems as insupportable without alcohol as without food. It is a disease often inherited, always developed by indulgence, but as clearly a disease as ophthalmia or stone.
All this should predispose us to charity and sympathy. While recognising that the primary responsibility must always rest upon the individual, we may fairly insist that society, which, by its habits, its customs, and its laws, has greased the slope down which these poor creatures slide to perdition, shall seriously take in hand their salvation. How many are there who are, more or less, under the dominion of strong drink? Statistics abound, but they seldom tell us what we want to know. We know how many public-houses there are in the land, and how many arrests for drunkenness the police make in a year; but beyond that we know little. Everyone knows that for one man who is arrested for drunkenness there are at least ten and often twenty—who go home intoxicated. In London, for instance, there are 14,000 drink shops, and every year 20,000 persons are arrested for drunkenness. But who can for a moment believe that there are only 20,000, more or less, habitual drunkards in London? By habitual drunkard I do not mean one who is always drunk, but one who is so much under the dominion of the evil habit that he cannot be depended upon not to get drunk whenever the opportunity offers.
In the United Kingdom there are 190,000 public-houses, and every year there are 200,000 arrests for drunkenness. Of course, several of these arrests refer to the same person, who is locked up again and again. Were this not so, if we allowed six drunkards to each house as an average, or five habitual drunkards for one arrested for drunkenness, we should arrive at a total of a million adults who are more or less prisoners of the publican—as a matter of fact, Isaac Hoyle gives 1 in 12 of the adult population. This may be an excessive estimate, but, if we take half of a million, we shall not be accused of exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of confirmed dipsomania; others are but over the verge; but the procession tends ever downwards.
The loss which the maintenance of this huge standing army of a half of a million of men who are more or less always besotted men whose intemperance impairs their working power, consumes their earnings, and renders their homes wretched, has long been a familiar theme of the platform. But what can be done for them? Total abstinence is no doubt admirable, but how are you to get them to be totally abstinent? When a man is drowning in mid-ocean the one thing that is needful, no doubt, is that he should plant his feet firmly on terra firma. But how is he to get there? It is just what he cannot do. And so it is with the drunkards. If they are to be rescued there must be something more done for them than at present is attempted, unless, of course, we decide definitely to allow the iron laws of nature to work themselves out in their destruction. In that case it might be more merciful to facilitate the slow workings of natural law. There is no need of establishing a lethal chamber for drunkards like that into which the lost dogs of London are driven, to die in peaceful sleep under the influence of carbonic oxide. The State would only need to go a little further than it goes at present in the way of supplying poison to the community. If, in addition to planting a flaming gin palace at each corner, free to all who enter, it were to supply free gin to all who have attained a certain recognised standard of inebriety, delirium tremens would soon reduce our drunken population to manageable proportions. I can imagine a cynical millionaire of the scientific philanthropic school making a clearance of all the drunkards in a district by the simple expedient of an unlimited allowance of alcohol. But that for us is out of the question. The problem of what to do with our half of a million drunkards remains to be solved, and few more difficult questions confront the social reformer.
The question of the harlots is, however, quite as insoluble by the ordinary methods. For these unfortunates no one who looks below the surface can fail to have the deepest sympathy. Some there are, no doubt, perhaps many, who—whether from inherited passion or from evil education—have deliberately embarked upon a life of vice, but with the majority it is not so. Even those who deliberately and of free choice adopt the profession of a prostitute, do so under the stress of temptations which few moralists seem to realise. Terrible as the fact is, there is no doubt it is a fact that there is no industrial career in which for a short time a beautiful girl can make as much money with as little trouble as the profession of a courtesan. The case recently tried at the Lewes assizes, in which the wife of an officer in the army admitted that while living as a kept mistress she had received as much as #4,000 a year, was no doubt very exceptional. Even the most successful adventuresses seldom make the income of a Cabinet Minister. But take women in professions and in businesses all round, and the number of young women who have received #500 in one year for the sale of their person is larger than the number of women of all ages who make a similar sum by honest industry. It is only the very few who draw these gilded prizes, and they only do it for a very short time. But it is the few prizes in every profession which allure the multitude, who think little of the many blanks. And speaking broadly, vice offers to every good-looking girl during the first bloom of her youth and beauty more money than she can earn by labour in any field of industry open to her sex. The penalty exacted afterwards is disease, degradation and death, but these things at first are hidden from her sight.
The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence; all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing. Human nature, however, is short-sighted. Giddy girls, chafing against the restraints of uncongenial industry, see the glittering bait continually before them. They are told that if they will but "do as others do" they will make more in a night, if they are lucky, than they can make in a week at their sewing; and who can wonder that in many cases the irrevocable step is taken before they realise that it is irrevocable, and that they have bartered away the future of their lives for the paltry chance of a year's ill-gotten gains?
Of the severity of the punishment there can be no question. If the premium is high at the beginning, the penalty is terrible at the close. And this penalty is exacted equally from those who have deliberately said, "Evil, be thou my Good," and for those who have been decoyed, snared, trapped into the life which is a living death. When you see a girl on the street you can never say without enquiry whether she is one of the most-to-be condemned, or the most-to-be pitied of her sex. Many of them find themselves where they are because of a too trusting disposition, confidence born of innocence being often the unsuspecting ally of the procuress and seducer. Others are as much the innocent victims of crime as if they had been stabbed or maimed by the dagger of the assassin. The records of our Rescue Homes abound with life-stories, some of which we have been able to verify to the letter —which prove only too conclusively the existence of numbers of innocent victims whose entry upon this dismal life can in no way be attributed to any act of their own will. Many are orphans or the children of depraved mothers, whose one idea of a daughter is to make money out of her prostitution. Here are a few cases on our register: —
E. C., aged 18, a soldier's child, born on the sea. Her father died, and her mother, a thoroughly depraved woman, assisted to secure her daughter's prostitution.
P. S., aged 20, illegitimate child. Went to consult a doctor one time about some ailment. The doctor abused his position and took advantage of his patient, and when she complained, gave her #4 as compensation. When that was spent, having lost her character, she came on the town. We looked the doctor up, and he fled.
E. A., aged 17, was left an orphan very early in life, and adopted by her godfather, who himself was the means of her ruin at the age of 10.
A girl in her teens lived with her mother in the "Dusthole," the lowest part of Woolwich. This woman forced her out upon the streets, and profited by her prostitution up to the very night of her confinement. The mother had all the time been the receiver of the gains.
E., neither father nor mother, was taken care of by a grandmother till, at an early age, accounted old enough. Married a soldier; but shortly before the birth of her first child, found that her deceiver had a wife and family in a distant part of the country, and she was soon left friendless and alone. She sought an asylum in the Workhouse for a few weeks' after which she vainly tried to get honest employment. Failing that, and being on the very verge of starvation, she entered a lodging-house in Westminster and "did as other girls." Here our lieutenant found and persuaded her to leave and enter one of our Homes, where she soon gave abundant proof of her conversion by a thoroughly changed life. She is now a faithful and trusted servant in a clergyman's family.
A girl was some time ago discharged from a city hospital after an illness. She was homeless and friendless, an orphan, and obliged to work for her living. Walking down the street and wondering what she should do next, she met a girl, who came up to her in a most friendly fashion and speedily won her confidence.
"Discharged ill, and nowhere to go, are you?" said her new friend. "Well, come home to my mother's; she will lodge you, and we'll go to work together, when you are quite strong."
The girl consented gladly, but found herself conducted to the very lowest part of Woolwich and ushered into a brothel; there was no mother in the case. She was hoaxed, and powerless to resist. Her protestations were too late to save her, and having had her character forced from her she became hopeless, and stayed on to live the life of her false friend.
There is no need for me to go into the details of the way in which men and women, whose whole livelihood depends upon their success in disarming the suspicions of their victims and luring them to their doom, contrive to overcome the reluctance of the young girl without parents, friends, or helpers to enter their toils. What fraud fails to accomplish, a little force succeeds in effecting; and a girl who has been guilty of nothing but imprudence finds herself an outcast for life. The very innocence of a girl tells against her. A woman of the world, once entrapped, would have all her wits about her to extricate herself from the position in which she found herself. A perfectly virtuous girl is often so overcome with shame and horror that there seems nothing in life worth struggling for. She accepts her doom without further struggle, and treads the long and torturing path-way of "the streets" to the grave.
"Judge not, that ye be not judged" is a saying that applies most appropriately of all to these unfortunates. Many of them would have escaped their evil fate had they been less innocent. They are where they are because they loved too utterly to calculate consequences, and trusted too absolutely to dare to suspect evil. And others are there because of the false education which confounds ignorance with virtue, and throws our young people into the midst of a great city, with all its excitements and all its temptations, without more preparation or warning than if they were going to live in the Garden of Eden.
Whatever sin they have committed, a terrible penalty is exacted. While the man who caused their ruin passes as a respectable member of society, to whom virtuous matrons gladly marry—if he is rich— their maiden daughters, they are crushed beneath the millstone of social excommunication. Here let me quote from a report made to me by the head of our Rescue Homes as to the actual life of these unfortunates.
The following hundred cases are taken as they come from our Rescue Register. The statements are those of the girls themselves. They are certainly frank, and it will be noticed that only two out of the hundred allege that they took to the life out of poverty: —
CAUSE OF FALL.
Drink .. .. .. 14
Seduction .. .. 33
Wilful choice .. .. 24
Bad company .. .. 27
Poverty .. .. .. 2
——
Total 100
CONDITION WHEN APPLYING.
Rags.. .. .. 25
Destitution .. 27
Decently dressed 48
——
Total 100
Out of these girls twenty-three have been in prison. The girls suffer so much that the shortness of their miserable life is the only redeeming feature. Whether we look at the wretchedness of the life itself; their perpetual intoxication; the cruel treatment to which they are subjected by their task-masters and mistresses or bullies; the hopelessness, suffering and despair induced by their circumstances and surroundings; the depths of misery, degradation and poverty to which they eventually descend; or their treatment in sickness, their friendlessness and loneliness in death, it must be admitted that a more dismal lot seldom falls to the fate of a human being. I will take each of these in turn.
HEALTH.—This life induces insanity, rheumatism, consumption, and all forms of syphilis. Rheumatism and gout are the commonest of these evils. Some were quite crippled by both—young though they were. Consumption sows its seeds broadcast. The life is a hot-bed for the development of any constitutional and hereditary germs of the disease. We have found girls in Piccadilly at midnight who are continually prostrated by haemorrhage, yet who have no other way of life open, so struggle on in this awful manner between whiles.
DRINK.—This is an inevitable part of the business. All Confess that they could never lead their miserable lives if it were not for its influence.
A girl, who was educated at college, and who had a home in which was every comfort, but who, when ruined, had fallen even to the depth of Woolwich "Dusthole," exclaimed to us indignantly—"Do you think I could ever, ever do this if it weren't for the drink? I always have to be in drink if I want to sin." No girl has ever come into our Homes front street-life but has been more or less a prey to drink.
CRUEL TREATMENT.—The devotion of these women to their bullies is as remarkable as the brutality of their bullies is abominable. Probably the primary cause of the fall of numberless girls of the lower class, is their great aspiration to the dignity of wifehood;—they are never "somebody" until they are married, and will link themselves to any creature, no matter how debased, in the hope of being ultimately married by him. This consideration, in addition to their helpless condition when once character has gone, makes them suffer cruelties which they would never otherwise endure from the men with whom large numbers of them live.
One case in illustration of this is that of a girl who was once a respectable servant, the daughter of a police sergeant. She was ruined, and shame led her to leave home. At length she drifted to Woolwich, where she came across a man who persuaded her to live with him, and for a considerable length of time she kept him, although his conduct to her was brutal in the extreme.
The girl living in the next room to her has frequently heard him knock her head against the wall, and pound it, when he was out of temper, through her gains of prostitution being less than usual. He lavished upon her every sort of cruelty and abuse, and at length she grew so wretched, and was reduced to so dreadful a plight, that she ceased to attract. At this he became furious, and pawned all her clothing but one thin garment of rags. The week before her first confinement he kicked her black and blue from neck to knees, and she was carried to the police station in a pool of blood, but; she was so loyal to the wretch that she refused to appear against him.
She was going to drown herself in desperation, when our Rescue Officers spoke to her, wrapped their own shawl around her shivering shoulders, took her home with them, and cared for her. The baby was born dead— a tiny, shapeless mass. This state of things is all too common.
HOPELESSNESS—SURROUNDINGS.—The state of hopelessness and despair in which these girls live continually, makes them reckless of consequences, and large numbers commit suicide who are never heard of. A West End policeman assured us that the number of prostitute-suicides was terribly in advance of anything guessed at by the public.
DEPTHS TO WHICH THEY SINK.—There is Scarcely a lower class of girls to be found than the girls of Woolwich "Dusthole"—where one of our Rescue Slum Homes is established. The women living and following their dreadful business in this neighbourhood are so degraded that even abandoned men will refuse to accompany them home. Soldiers are forbidden to enter the place, or to go down the street, on pain of twenty-five days' imprisonment; pickets are stationed at either end to prevent this. The streets are much cleaner than many of the rooms we have seen.
One public house there is shut up three or four times in a day sometimes for fear of losing the licence through the terrible brawls which take place within. A policeman never goes down this street alone at night—one having died not long ago from injuries received there —but our two lasses go unharmed and loved at all hours, spending every other night always upon the streets.
The girls sink to the "Dusthole" after coming down several grades. There is but one on record who came there with beautiful clothes, and this poor girl, when last seen by the officers, was a pauper in the workhouse infirmary in a wretched condition. The lowest class of all is the girls who stand at the pier-head—these sell themselves literally for a bare crust of bread and sleep in the streets. Filth and vermin abound to an extent to which no one who has not seen it can have any idea. The "Dusthole" is only one, alas of many similar districts in this highly civilised land.
SICKNESS, FRIENDLESSNESS—DEATH.—In hospitals it is a known fact that these girls are not treated at all like other cases; they inspire disgust, and are most frequently discharged before being really cured. Scorned by their relations, and ashamed to make their case known even to those who would help them, unable longer to struggle out on the streets to earn the bread of shame, there are girls lying in many a dark hole in this big city positively rotting away, and maintained by their old companions on the streets. Many are totally friendless, utterly cast out and left to perish by relatives and friends. One of this class came to us, sickened and died, and we buried her, being her only followers to the grave.
It is a sad story, but one that must not be forgotten, for these women constitute a large standing army whose numbers no one can calculate. All estimates that I have seem purely imaginary. The ordinary figure given for London is from 60,000 to 80,000. This maybe true if it is meant to include all habitually unchaste women. It is a monstrous exaggeration if it is meant to apply to those who make their living solely and habitually by prostitution. These figures, however, only confuse. We shall have to deal with hundreds every month, whatever estimate we take. How utterly unprepared society is for any such systematic reformation may be seen from the fact that even now at our Homes we are unable to take in all the girls who apply. They cannot escape, even if they would, for want of funds whereby to provide them a way of release.
CHAPTER 7. THE CRIMINALS.
One very important section of the denizens of Darkest England are the criminals and the semi-criminals. They are more or less predatory, and are at present shepherded by the police and punished by the gaoler. Their numbers cannot be ascertained with very great precision, but the following figures are taken from the prison returns of 1889: —
The criminal classes of Great Britain, in round figures, sum up a total of no less than 90,000 persons, made up as follows: —
Convict prisons contain.. .. .. .. .. .. 11,660 persons
Local prisons contain.. .. .. .. .. .. 20,883 ,,
Reformatories for children convicted of crime .. 1,270 ,,
Industrial schools for vagrant
and refractory children .. .. .. .. .. 21,413 ,,
Criminal lunatics under restraint.. .. .. .. 910 ,,
Known thieves at large .. .. .. .. .. .. 14,747 ,,
Known receivers of stolen goods .. .. .. .. 1,121 ,,
Suspected persons .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 17,042 ,,
———-
Total 89,046
———-
The above does not include the great army of known prostitutes, nor the keepers and owners of brothels and disorderly houses, as to whose numbers Government is rigidly silent. These figures are, however, misleading. They only represent the criminals actually in gaol on a given day. The average gaol population in England and Wales, excluding the convict establishments, was, in 1889, 15,119 but the total number actually sentenced and imprisoned in local prisons was 153,000, of whom 25,000 only came on first term sentences; 76,300 of them had been convicted at least 10 times. But even if we suppose that the criminal class numbers no more than 90,000, of whom only 35,000 persons are at large, it is still a large enough section of humanity to compel attention. 90,000 criminals represents a wreckage whose cost to the community is very imperfectly estimated when we add up the cost of the prisons, even if we add to them the whole cost of the police. The police have so many other duties besides the shepherding of criminals that it is unfair to saddle the latter with the whole of the cost of the constabulary. The cost of prosecution and maintenance of criminals, and the expense of the police involves an annual outlay of #4,437,000. This, however, is small compared with the tax and toll which this predatory horde inflicts upon the community on which it is quartered. To the loss caused by the actual picking and stealing must be added that of the unproductive labour of nearly 65,000 adults. Dependent upon these criminal adults must be at least twice as many women and children, so that it is probably an under-estimate to say that this list of criminals and semi-criminals represents a population of at least 200,000, who all live more or less at the expense of society.
Every year, in the Metropolitan district alone, 66,100 persons are arrested, of whom 444 are arrested for trying to commit suicide—life having become too unbearable a burden. This immense population is partially, no doubt, bred to prison, the same as other people are bred to the army and to the bar. The hereditary criminal is by no means confined to India, although it is only in that country that they have the engaging simplicity to describe themselves frankly in the census returns. But it is recruited constantly from the outside. In many cases this is due to sheer starvation. Fathers of the Church have laid down the law that a man who is in peril of death from hunger is entitled to take bread wherever he can find it to keep body and soul together. That proposition is not embodied in our jurisprudence. Absolute despair drives many a man into the ranks of the criminal class, who would never have fallen into the category of criminal convicts if adequate provision had been made for the rescue of those drifting to doom. When once he has fallen, circumstances seem to combine to keep him there. As wounded and sickly stags are gored to death by their fellows, so the unfortunate who bears the prison brand is hunted from pillar to post, until he despairs of ever regaining his position, and oscillates between one prison and another for the rest of his days. I gave in a preceding page an account of how a man, after trying in vain to get work, fell before the temptation to steal in order to escape starvation. Here is the sequel of that man's story. After he had stolen he ran away, and thus describes his experiences: —
"To fly was easy. To get away from the scene required very little ingenuity, but the getting away from one suffering brought another. A straight look from a stranger; a quick step behind me, sent a chill through every nerve. The cravings of hunger had been satisfied, but it was the cravings of conscience that were clamorous now. It was easy to get away from the earthly consequences of sin, but from the fact— never. And yet it was the compulsion of circumstances that made me a criminal. It was neither from inward viciousness or choice, and how bitterly did I cast reproach on society for allowing such an alternative to offer itself—'to Steal or Starve,' but there was another alternative that here offered itself—either give myself up, or go on with the life of crime. I chose the former. I had travelled over 100 miles to get away from the scene of my theft, and I now find myself outside the station house at a place where I had put in my boyhood days.
"How many times when a lad, with wondering eyes, and a heart stirred with childhood's pure sympathy, I had watched the poor waifs from time to time led within its doors. It was my turn now. I entered the charge room, and with business-like precision disclosed my errand, viz. that I wished to surrender myself for having committed a felony. My story was doubted. Question followed question, and confirmation must be waited. 'Why had I surrendered?' 'I was a rum'un.' 'Cracked.' 'More fool than rogue.' 'He will be sorry when he mounts the wheel.' These and such like remarks were handed round concerning me. An hour passed by. An inspector enters, and announces the receipt of a telegram. 'It is all right. You can put him down.' And turning to me, he said, 'They will send for you on Monday,' and then I passed into the inner ward, and a cell. The door closed with a harsh, grating clang, and I was left to face the most clamorous accuser of all— my own interior self'
"Monday morning, the door opened, and a complacent detective stood before me. Who can tell the feeling as the handcuffs closed round my wrists, and we started for town. As again the charge was entered, and the passing of another night in the cell; then the morning of the day arrived. The gruff, harsh 'Come on' of the gaoler roused me, and the next moment I found myself in the prison van, gazing through the crevices of the floor, watching the stones flying as it were from beneath our feet. Soon the court-house was reached, and hustled into a common cell, I found myself amongst a crowd of boys and men, all bound for the 'dock.' One by one the names are called, and the crowd is gradually thinning down, when the announcement of my own name fell on my startled ear, and I found myself stumbling up the stairs, and finding myself in daylight and the 'dock.' What a terrible ordeal it was. The ceremony was brief enough; 'Have you anything to say?' 'Don't interrupt his Worship; prisoner!' 'Give over talking!' 'A month's hard labour.' This is about all I heard, or at any rate realised, until a vigorous push landed me into the presence of the officer who booked the sentence, and then off I went to gaol. I need not linger over the formalities of the reception. A nightmare seemed to have settled upon me as I passed into the interior of the correctional.
"I resigned my name, and I seemed to die to myself for henceforth. 332B disclosed my identity to myself and others.
"Through all the weeks that followed I was like one in a dream. Meal times, resting hours, as did every other thing, came with clock-like precision. At times I thought my mind had gone—so dull, so callous, so weary appeared the organs of the brain. The harsh orders of the gaolers; the droning of the chaplain in the chapel; the enquiries of the chief warder or the governor in their periodical visits,—all seemed so meaningless.
"As the day of my liberation drew near, the horrid conviction that circumstances would perhaps compel me to return to prison haunted me, and so helpless did I feel at the prospects that awaited me outside, that I dreaded release, which seemed but the facing of an unsympathetic world. The day arrived, and, strange as it may sound, it was with regret that I left my cell. It had become my home, and no home waited me outside.
"How utterly crushed I felt; feelings of companionship had gone out to my unfortunate fellow-prisoners, whom I had seen daily, but the sound of whose voices I had never heard, whilst outside friendships were dead, and companionships were for ever broken, and I felt as an outcast of society, with the mark of 'gaol bird' upon me, that I must cover my face, and stand aside and cry 'unclean.' Such were my feelings.
"The morning of discharge came, and I am once more on the streets. My scanty means scarcely sufficient for two days' least needs. Could I brace myself to make another honest endeavour to start afresh? Try, indeed, I did. I fell back upon my antecedents, and tried to cut the dark passage out of my life, but straight came the questions to me at each application for employment, 'What have you been doing lately?' 'Where have you been living?' If I evaded the question it caused doubt; if I answered, the only answer I could give was 'in gaol,' and that settled my chances.
"What a comedy, after all, it appeared. I remember the last words of the chaplain before leaving the prison, cold and precise in their officialism: 'Mind you never come back here again, young man.' And now, as though in response to my earnest effort to keep from going to prison, society, by its actions, cried out, 'Go back to gaol. There are honest men enough to do our work without such as you.' "Imagine, if you can, my condition. At the end of a few days, black despair had wrapt itself around every faculty of mind and body. Then followed several days and nights with scarcely a bit of food or a resting-place. I prowled the streets like a dog, with this difference, that the dog has the chance of helping himself, and I had not. I tried to forecast how long starvation's fingers would be in closing round the throat they already gripped. So indifferent was I alike to man or God, as I waited for the end."
In this dire extremity the writer found his way to one of our Shelters, and there found God and friends and hope, and once more got his feet on to the ladder which leads upward from the black gulf of starvation to competence and character, and usefulness and heaven.
As he was then, however, there are hundreds—nay, thousands—now. Who will give these men a helping hand? What is to be done with them? Would it not be more merciful to kill them off at once instead of sternly crushing them out of all semblance of honest manhood? Society recoils from such a short cut. Her virtuous scruples reminds me of the subterfuge by which English law evaded the veto on torture. Torture was forbidden, but the custom of placing an obstinate witness under a press and slowly crushing him within a hairbreadth of death was legalised and practised. So it is to-day. When the criminal comes out of gaol the whole world is often but a press whose punishment is sharp and cruel indeed. Nor can the victim escape even if he opens his mouth and speaks.
CHAPTER 8. THE CHILDREN OF THE LOST.
Whatever may be thought of the possibility of doing anything with the adults, it is universally admitted that there is hope for the children. "I regard the existing generation as lost," said a leading Liberal statesman. "Nothing can be done with men and women who have grown up under the present demoralising conditions. My only hope is that the children may have a better chance. Education will do much." But unfortunately the demoralising circumstances of the children are not being improved—are, indeed, rather, in many respects, being made worse. The deterioration of our population in large towns is one of the most undisputed facts of social economics. The country is the breeding ground of healthy citizens. But for the constant influx of Countrydom, Cockneydom would long ere this have perished. But unfortunately the country is being depopulated. The towns, London especially, are being gorged with undigested and indigestible masses of labour, and, as the result, the children suffer grievously.
The town-bred child is at a thousand disadvantages compared with his cousin in the country. But every year there are more town-bred children and fewer cousins in the country. To rear healthy children you want first a home; secondly, milk; thirdly, fresh air; and fourthly, exercise under the green trees and blue sky. All these things every country labourer's child possesses, or used to possess. For the shadow of the City life lies now upon the fields, and even in the remotest rural district the labourer who tends the cows is often denied the milk which his children need. The regular demand of the great towns forestalls the claims of the labouring hind. Tea and slops and beer take the place of milk, and the bone and sinew of the next generation are sapped from the cradle. But the country child, if he has nothing but skim milk, and only a little of that, has at least plenty of exercise in the fresh air. He has healthy human relations with his neighbours. He is looked after, and in some sort of fashion brought into contact with the life of the hall, the vicarage, and the farm. He lives a natural life amid the birds and trees and growing crops and the animals of the fields. He is not a mere human ant, crawling on the granite pavement of a great urban ants' nest, with an unnaturally developed nervous system and a sickly constitution.
But, it will be said, the child of to-day has the inestimable advantage of Education. No; he has not. Educated the children are not. They are pressed through "standards," which exact a certain acquaintance with A B C and pothooks and figures, but educated they are not in the sense of the development of their latent capacities so as to make them capable for the discharge of their duties in life. The new generation can read, no doubt. Otherwise, where would be the sale of "Sixteen String Jack," "Dick Turpin," and the like? But take the girls. Who can pretend that the girls whom our schools are now turning out are half as well educated for the work of life as their grandmothers were at the same age? How many of all these mothers of the future know how to bake a loaf or wash their clothes? Except minding the baby—a task that cannot be evaded—what domestic training have they received to qualify them for being in the future the mothers of babies themselves?
And even the schooling, such as it is, at what an expense is it often imparted! The rakings of the human cesspool are brought into the school-room and mixed up with your children. Your little ones, who never heard a foul word and who are not only innocent, but ignorant, of all the horrors of vice and sin, sit for hours side by side with little ones whose parents are habitually drunk, and play with others whose ideas of merriment are gained from the familiar spectacle of the nightly debauch by which their mothers earn the family bread. It is good, no doubt, to learn the ABC, but it is not so good that in acquiring these indispensable rudiments, your children should also acquire the vocabulary of the harlot and the corner boy. I speak only of what I know, and of that which has been brought home to me as a matter of repeated complaint by my Officers, when I say that the obscenity of the talk of many of the children of some of our public schools could hardly be outdone even in Sodom and Gomorrha. Childish innocence is very beautiful; but the bloom is soon destroyed, and it is a cruel awakening for a mother to discover that her tenderly nurtured boy, or her carefully guarded daughter, has been initiated by a companion into the mysteries of abomination that are concealed in the phrase—a house of ill-fame.
The home is largely destroyed where the mother follows the father into the factory, and where the hours of labour are so long that they have no time to see their children. The omnibus drivers of London, for instance, what time have they for discharging the daily duties of parentage to their little ones? How can a man who is on his omnibus from fourteen to sixteen hours a day have time to be a father to his children in any sense of the word? He has hardly a chance to see them except when they are asleep. Even the Sabbath, that blessed institution which is one of the sheet anchors of human existence, is encroached upon. Many of the new industries which have been started or developed since I was a boy ignore man's need of one day's rest in seven. The railway, the post-office, the tramway all compel some of their employes to be content with less than the divinely appointed minimum of leisure. In the country darkness restores the labouring father to his little ones. In the town gas and the electric light enables the employer to rob the children of the whole of their father's waking hours, and in some cases he takes the mother's also. Under some of the conditions of modern industry, children are not so much born into a home as they are spawned into the world like fish, with the results which we see.
The decline of natural affection follows inevitably from the substitution of the fish relationship for that of the human. A father who never dandles his child on his knee cannot have a very keen sense of the responsibilities of paternity. In the rush and pressure of our competitive City life, thousands of men have not time to be fathers. Sires, yes; fathers, no. It will take a good deal of schoolmaster to make up for that change. If this be the case, even with the children constantly employed, it can be imagined what kind of a home life is possessed by the children of the tramp, the odd jobber, the thief, and the harlot. For all these people have children, although they have no homes in which to rear them. Not a bird in all the woods or fields but prepares some kind of a nest in which to hatch and rear its young, even if it be but a hole in the sand or a few crossed sticks in the bush. But how many young ones amongst our people are hatched before any nest is ready to receive them?
Think of the multitudes of children born in our workhouses, children of whom it may be said "they are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity," and, as a punishment of the sins of the parents, branded from birth as bastards, worse than fatherless, homeless, and friendless, "damned into an evil world," in which even those who have all the advantages of a good parentage and a careful training find it hard enough to make their way. Sometimes, it is true, the passionate love of the deserted mother for the child which has been the visible symbol and the terrible result of her undoing stands between the little one and all its enemies. But think how often the mother regards the advent of her child with loathing and horror; how the discovery that she is about to become a mother affects her like a nightmare; and how nothing but the dread of the hangman's rope keeps her from strangling the babe on the very hour of its birth. What chances has such a child? And there are many such.
In a certain country that I will not name there exists a scientifically arranged system of infanticide cloaked under the garb of philanthropy. Gigantic foundling establishments exist in its principal cities, where every comfort and scientific improvement is provided for the deserted children, with the result that one-half of them die. The mothers are spared the crime. The State assumes the responsibility. We do something like that here, but our foundling asylums are the Street, the Workhouse, and the Grave. When an English Judge tells us, as Mr. Justice Wills did the other day, that there were any number of parents who would kill their children for a few pounds' insurance money, we can form some idea of the horrors of the existence into which many of the children of this highly favoured land are ushered at their birth.
The overcrowded homes of the poor compel the children to witness everything. Sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them. Incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark. The bitter poverty of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed. There are few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilisation than that of the compulsory attendance of children at school, faint with hunger because they had no breakfast, and not sure whether they would even secure a dry crust for dinner when their morning's quantum of education had been duly imparted. Children thus hungered, thus housed, and thus left to grow up as best they can without being fathered or mothered, are not, educate them as you will, exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the Empire.
What, then, is the ground for hope that if we leave things alone the new generation will be better than their elders? To me it seems that the truth is rather the other way. The lawlessness of our lads the increased license of our girls, the general shiftlessness from the home-making point of view of the product of our factories and schools are far from reassuring. Our young people have never learned to obey. The fighting gangs of half-grown lads in Lisson Grove, and the scuttlers of Manchester are ugly symptoms of a social condition that will not grow better by being left alone.
It is the home that has been destroyed, and with the home the home-like virtues. It is the dis-homed multitude, nomadic, hungry that is rearing an undisciplined population, cursed from birth with hereditary weakness of body and hereditary faults of character. It is idle to hope to mend matters by taking the children and bundling them up in barracks. A child brought up in an institution is too often only half-human, having never known a mother's love and a father's care. To men and women who are without homes children must be more or less of an incumbrance. Their advent is regarded with impatience, and often it is averted by crime. The unwelcome little stranger is badly cared for, badly fed, and allowed every chance to die. Nothing is worth doing to increase his chances of living that does not Reconstitute the Home. But between us and that ideal how vast is the gulf! It will have to be bridged, however, if anything practical is to be done.
CHAPTER 9. IS THERE NO HELP?
It may be said by those who have followed me to this point that while it is quite true that there are many who are out of work, and not less true that there are many who sleep on the Embankment and elsewhere, the law has provided a remedy, or if not a remedy, at least a method, of dealing with these sufferers which is sufficient: The Secretary of the Charity Organisation Society assured one of my Officers, who went to inquire for his opinion on the subject, "that no further machinery was necessary. All that was needed in this direction they already had in working order, and to create any further machinery would do more harm than good."
Now, what is the existing machinery by which Society, whether through the organisation of the State, or by individual endeavour, attempts to deal with the submerged residuum? I had intended at one time to have devoted considerable space to the description of the existing agencies, together with certain observations which have been forcibly impressed upon my mind as to their failure and its cause. The necessity, however, of subordinating everything to the supreme purpose of this book, which is to endeavour to show how light can be let into the heart of Darkest England, compels me to pass rapidly over this department of the subject, merely glancing as I go at the well-meaning, but more or less abortive, attempts to cope with this great and appalling evil.
The first place must naturally be given to the administration of the Poor Law. Legally the State accepts the responsibility of providing food and shelter for every man, woman, or child who is utterly destitute. This responsibility it, however, practically shirks by the imposition of conditions on the claimants of relief that are hateful and repulsive, if not impossible. As to the method of Poor Law administration in dealing with inmates of workhouses or in the distribution of outdoor relief, I say nothing. Both of these raise great questions which lie outside my immediate purpose. All that I need to do is to indicate the limitations—it may be the necessary limitations—under which the Poor Law operates. No Englishman can come upon the rates so long as he has anything whatever left to call his own. When long-continued destitution has been carried on to the bitter end, when piece by piece every article of domestic furniture has been sold or pawned, when all efforts to procure employment have failed, and when you have nothing left except the clothes in which you stand, then you can present yourself before the relieving officer and secure your lodging in the workhouse, the administration of which varies infinitely according to the disposition of the Board of Guardians under whose control it happens to be.
If, however, you have not sunk to such despair as to be willing to barter your liberty for the sake of food, clothing, and shelter in the Workhouse, but are only temporarily out of employment seeking work, then you go to the Casual Ward. There you are taken in, and provided for on the principle of making it as disagreeable as possible for yourself, in order to deter you from again accepting the hospitality of the rates,—and of course in defence of this a good deal can be said by the Political Economist. But what seems utterly indefensible is the careful precautions which are taken to render it impossible for the unemployed Casual to resume promptly after his night's rest the search for work. Under the existing regulations, if you are compelled to seek refuge on Monday night in the Casual Ward, you are bound to remain there at least till Wednesday morning.
The theory of the system is this, that individuals casually poor and out of work, being destitute and without shelter, may upon application receive shelter for the night, supper and a breakfast, and in return for this, shall perform a task of work, not necessarily in repayment for the relief received, but simply as a test of their willingness to work for their living. The work given is the same as that given to felons in gaol, oakum-picking and stone-breaking.
The work, too, is excessive in proportion to what is received. Four pounds of oakum is a great task to an expert and an old hand. To a novice it can only be accomplished with the greatest difficulty, if indeed it can be done at all. It is even in excess of the amount demanded from a criminal in gaol.
The stone-breaking test is monstrous. Half a ton of stone from any man in return for partially supplying the cravings of hunger is an outrage which, if we read of as having occurred in Russia or Siberia, would find Exeter Hall crowded with an indignant audience, and Hyde Park filled with strong oratory. But because this system exists at our own doors, very little notice is taken of it. These tasks are expected from all comers, starved, ill-clad, half-fed creatures from the streets, foot-sore and worn out, and yet unless it is done, the alternative is the magistrate and the gaol. The old system was bad enough, which demanded the picking of one pound of oakum. As soon as this task was accomplished, which generally kept them till the middle of next day, it was thus rendered impossible for them to seek work, and they were forced to spend another night in the ward. The Local Government Board, however, stepped in, and the Casual was ordered to be detained for the whole day and the second night, the amount of labour required from him being increased four-fold.
Under the present system, therefore, the penalty for seeking shelter from the streets is a whole day and two nights, with an almost impossible task, which, failing to do, the victim is liable to be dragged before a magistrate and committed to gaol as a rogue and vagabond, while in the Casual Ward their treatment is practically that of a criminal. They sleep in a cell with an apartment at the back, in which the work is done, receiving at night half a pound of gruel and eight ounces of bread, and next morning the same for breakfast, with half a pound of oakum and stones to occupy himself for a day.
The beds are mostly of the plank type, the coverings scant, the comfort nil. Be it remembered that this is the treatment meted out to those who are supposed to be Casual poor, in temporary difficulty, walking from place to place seeking some employment.
The treatment of the women is as follows: Each Casual has to stay in the Casual Wards two nights and one day, during which time they have to pick 2 lb. of oakum or go to the wash-tub and work out the time there. While at the wash-tub they are allowed to wash their own clothes, but not otherwise. If seen more than once in the same Casual Ward, they are detained three days by order of the inspector each time seen, or if sleeping twice in the same month the master of the ward has power to detain them three days. There are four inspectors who visit different Casual Wards; and if the Casual is seen by any of the inspectors (who in turn visit all the Casual Wards) at any of the wards they have previously visited they are detained three days in each one. The inspector, who is a male person, visits the wards at all unexpected hours, even visiting while the females are in bed. The beds are in some wards composed of straw and two rugs, in others cocoanut fibre and two rugs. The Casuals rise at 5.45 a.m. and go to bed 7 p.m. If they do not finish picking their oakum before 7 p.m., they stay up till they do. If a Casual does not come to the ward before 12.30, midnight, they keep them one day extra. The way in which this operates, however, can be best understood by the following statements, made by those who have been in Casual Wards, and who can, therefore, speak from experience as to how the system affects the individual: —
J. C. knows Casual Wards pretty well. Has been in St. Giles, Whitechapel, St. George's, Paddington, Marylebone, Mile End. They vary a little in detail, but as a rule the doors open at 6; you walk in; they tell you what the work is, and that if you fail to do it, you will be liable to imprisonment. Then you bathe. Some places the water is dirty. Three persons as a rule wash in one water. At Whitechapel (been there three times) it has always been dirty; also at St. George's. I had no bath at Mile End; they were short of water. If you complain they take no notice. You then tie your clothes in a bundle, and they give you a nightshirt. At most places they serve supper to the men, who have to go to bed and eat it there. Some beds are in cells; some in large rooms. You get up at 6 a.m. and do the task. The amount of stone-breaking is too much; and the oakum-picking is also heavy. The food differs. At St. Giles, the gruel left over-night is boiled up for breakfast, and is consequently sour; the bread is puffy, full of holes, and don't weigh the regulation amount. Dinner is only 8 ounces of bread and 1 1/2 ounce of cheese, and its that's short, how can anybody do their work? They will give you water to drink if you ring the cell bell for it, that is, they will tell you to wait, and bring it in about half an hour. There are a good lot of "moochers" go to Casual Wards, but there are large numbers of men who only want work.
J.D.; age 25; Londoner; can't get work, tried hard; been refused work several times on account of having no settled residence; looks suspicious, they think, to have "no home." Seems a decent, willing man. Had two penny-worth of soup this morning, which has lasted all day. Earned 1s. 6d. yesterday, bill distributing, nothing the day before. Been in good many London Casual Wards. Thinks they are no good, because they keep him all day, when he might be seeking work. Don't want shelter in day time, wants work. If he goes in twice in a month to the same Casual Ward, they detain him four days. Considers the food decidedly insufficient to do the required amount of work. If the work is not done to time, you are liable to 21 days' imprisonment. Get badly treated some places, especially where there is a bullying superintendent. Has done 21 days for absolutely refusing to do the work on such low diet, when unfit. Can't get justice, doctor always sides with superintendent.
J. S.; odd jobber. Is working at board carrying, when he can get it. There's quite a rush for it at 1s. 2d. a day. Carried a couple of parcels yesterday, got 5d. for them; also had a bit of bread and meat given him by a working man, so altogether had an excellent day. Sometimes goes all day without food, and plenty more do the same. Sleeps on Embankment, and now and then in Casual Ward. Latter is clean and comfortable enough, but they keep you in all day; that means no chance of getting work. Was a clerk once, but got out of a job, and couldn't get another; there are so many clerks.
"A Tramp" says: "I've been in most Casual Wards in London; was in the one in Macklin Street, Drury Lane, last week. They keep you two nights and a day, and more than that if they recognise you. You have to break 10 cwt. of stone, or pick four pounds of oakum. Both are hard. About thirty a night go to Macklin Street. The food is 1 pint gruel and 6 oz. bread for breakfast; 8 oz. bread and 1 1/2 oz. cheese for dinner; tea same as breakfast. No supper. It is not enough to do the work on. Then you are obliged to bathe, of course; sometimes three will bathe in one water, and if you complain they turn nasty, and ask if you are come to a palace. Mitcham Workhouse I've been in; grub is good; 1 1/2 pint gruel and 8 oz. bread for breakfast, and same for supper.
F.K. W.; baker. Been board-carrying to-day, earned one shilling, Hours 9 till 5. I've been on this kind of life six years. Used to work in a bakery, but had congestion of the brain, and couldn't stand the heat. I've been in about every Casual Ward in England. They treat men too harshly. Have to work very hard, too. Has had to work whilst really unfit. At Peckham (known as Camberwell) Union, was quite unable to do it through weakness, and appealed to the doctor, who, taking the part of the other officials, as usual, refused to allow him to forego the work. Cheeked the doctor, telling him he didn't understand his work; result, got three days' imprisonment. Before going to a Casual Ward at all, I spent seven consecutive nights on the Embankment, and at last went to the Ward.
The result of the deliberate policy of making the night refuge for the unemployed labourer as disagreeable as possible, and of placing as many obstacles as possible in the way of his finding work the following day, is, no doubt, to minimise the number of Casuals, and without question succeeds. In the whole of London the number of Casuals in the wards at night is only 1,136. That is to say, the conditions which are imposed are so severe, that the majority of the Out-of-Works prefer to sleep in the open air, taking their chance of the inclemency and mutability of our English weather, rather than go through the experience of the Casual Ward.
It seems to me that such a mode of coping with distress does not so much meet the difficulty as evade it. It is obvious that an apparatus, which only provides for 1,136 persons per night, is utterly unable to deal with the numbers of the homeless Out-of-Works. But if by some miracle we could use the Casual Wards as a means of providing for all those who are seeking work from day to day, without a place in which to lay their heads, save the kerbstone of the pavement or the back of a seat on the Embankment, they would utterly fail to have any appreciable effect upon the mass of human misery with which we have to deal. For this reason; the administration of the Casual Wards is mechanical, perfunctory, and formal. Each of the Casuals is to the Officer in Charge merely one Casual the more. There is no attempt whatever to do more than provide for them merely the indispensable requisites of existence. There has never been any attempt to treat them as human beings, to deal with them as individuals, to appeal to their hearts, to help them on their legs again. They are simply units, no more thought of and cared for than if they were so many coffee beans passing through a coffee mill; and as the net result of all my experience and observation of men and things, I must assert unhesitatingly that anything which dehumanises the individual, anything which treats a man as if he were only a number of a series or a cog in a wheel, without any regard to the character, the aspirations, the temptations, and the idiosyncrasies of the man, must utterly fail as a remedial agency. The Casual Ward, at the best, is merely a squalid resting place for the Casual in his downward career. It anything is to be done for these men, it must be done by other agents than those which prevail in the administration of the Poor Laws.
The second method in which Society endeavours to do its duty to the lapsed masses is by the miscellaneous and heterogeneous efforts which are clubbed together under the generic head of Charity. Far be it from me to say one word in disparagement of any effort that is prompted by a sincere desire to alleviate the misery of our fellow creatures, but the most charitable are those who most deplore the utter failure which has, up till now, attended all their efforts to do more than temporarily alleviate pain, or effect an occasional improvement in the condition of individuals.
There are many institutions, very excellent in their way, without which it is difficult to see how society could get on at all, but when they have done their best there still remains this great and appalling mass of human misery on our hands, a perfect quagmire of Human Sludge. They may ladle out individuals here and there, but to drain the whole bog is an effort which seems to be beyond the imagination of most of those who spend their lives in philanthropic work. It is no doubt better than nothing to take the individual and feed him from day to day, to bandage up his wounds and heal his diseases; but you may go on doing that for ever, if you do not do more than that; and the worst of it is that all authorities agree that if you only do that you will probably increase the evil with which you are attempting to deal, and that you had much better let the whole thing alone.
There is at present no attempt at Concerted Action. Each one deals with the case immediately before him, and the result is what might be expected; there is a great expenditure, but the gains are, alas! very small. The fact, however, that so much is subscribed for the temporary relief and the mere alleviation of distress justifies my confidence that if a Practical Scheme of dealing with this misery in a permanent, comprehensive fashion be discovered, there will be no lack of the sinews of war. It is well, no doubt, sometimes to administer an anaesthetic, but the Cure of the Patient is worth ever so much more, and the latter is the object which we must constantly set before us in approaching this problem.
The third method by which Society professes to attempt the reclamation of the lost is by the rough, rude surgery of the Gaol. Upon this a whole treatise might be written, but when it was finished it would be nothing more than a demonstration that our Prison system has practically missed aiming at that which should be the first essential of every system of punishment. It is not Reformatory, it is not worked as if it were intended to be Reformatory. It is punitive, and only punitive. The whole administration needs to be reformed from top to bottom in accordance with this fundamental principle, viz., that while every prisoner should be subjected to that measure of punishment which shall mark a due sense of his crime both to himself and society, the main object should be to rouse in his mind the desire to lead an honest life; and to effect that change in his disposition and character which will send him forth to put that desire into practice. At present, every Prison is more or less a Training School for Crime, an introduction to the society of criminals, the petrifaction of any lingering human feeling and a very Bastille of Despair. The prison brand is stamped upon those who go in, and that so deeply, that it seems as if it clung to them for life. To enter Prison once, means in many cases an almost certain return there at an early date. All this has to be changed, and will be, when once the work of Prison Reform is taken in hand by men who understand the subject, who believe in the reformation of human nature in every form which its depravity can assume, and who are in full sympathy with the class for whose benefit they labour; and when those charged directly with the care of criminals seek to work out their regeneration in the same spirit.
The question of Prison Reform is all the more important because it is only by the agency of the Gaol that Society attempts to deal with its hopeless cases. If a woman, driven mad with shame, flings herself into the river, and is fished out alive, we clap her into Prison on a charge of attempted suicide. If a man, despairing of work and gaunt with hunger, helps himself to food, it is to the same reformatory agency that he is forthwith subjected. The rough and ready surgery with which we deal with our social patients recalls the simple method of the early physicians. The tradition still lingers among old people of doctors who prescribed bleeding for every ailment, and of keepers of asylums whose one idea of ministering to a mind diseased was to put the body into a strait waistcoat. Modern science laughs to scorn these simple "remedies" of an unscientific age, and declares that they were, in most cases, the most efficacious means of aggravating the disease they professed to cure. But in social maladies we are still in the age of the blood-letter and the strait waistcoat. The Gaol is our specific for Despair. When all else fails Society will always undertake to feed, clothe, warm, and house a man, if only he will commit a crime. It will do it also in such a fashion as to render it no temporary help, but a permanent necessity.
Society says to the individual: "To qualify for free board and lodging you must commit a crime. But if you do you must pay the price. You must allow me to ruin your character, and doom you for the rest of your life to destitution, modified by the occasional successes of criminality. You shall become the Child of the State, on condition that we doom you to a temporal perdition, out of which you will never be permitted to escape, and in which you will always be a charge upon our resources and a constant source of anxiety and inconvenience to the authorities. I will feed you, certainly, but in return you must permit me to damn you." That surely ought not to be the last word of Civilised Society.
"Certainly not," say others. "Emigration is the true specific. The waste lands of the world are crying aloud for the application of surplus labour. Emigration is the panacea." Now I have no objection to emigration. Only a criminal lunatic could seriously object to the transference of hungry Jack from an overcrowded shanty—where he cannot even obtain enough bad potatoes to dull the ache behind his waistcoat, and is tempted to let his child die for the sake of the insurance money—to a land flowing with milk and honey, where he can eat meat three times a day and where a man's children are his wealth. But you might as well lay a new-born child naked in the middle of a new-sown field in March, and expect it to live and thrive, as expect emigration to produce successful results on the lines which some lay down. The child, no doubt, has within it latent capacities which, when years and training have done their work, will enable him to reap a harvest from a fertile soil, and the new sown field will be covered with golden grain in August. But these facts will not enable the infant to still its hunger with the clods of the earth in the cold spring time. It is just like that with emigration. It is simply criminal to take a multitude of untrained men and women and land them penniless and helpless on the fringe of some new continent. The result of such proceedings we see in the American cities; in the degradation of their slums, and in the hopeless demoralisation of thousands who, in their own country, were living decent, industrious lives.
A few months since, in Paramatta, in New South Wales, a young man who had emigrated with a vague hope of mending his fortunes, found himself homeless, friendless, and penniless. He was a clerk. They wanted no more clerks in Paramatta. Trade was dull, employment was scarce, even for trained hands. He went about from day to day seeking work and finding none. At last he came to the end of all his resources. He went all day without food; at night he slept as best he could. Morning came, and he was hopeless. All next day passed without a meal. Night came. He could not sleep. He wandered about restlessly. At last, about midnight, an idea seized him. Grasping a brick, he deliberately walked up to a jeweller's window, and smashed a hole through the glass. He made no attempt to steal anything: He merely smashed the pane and then sat down on the pavement beneath the window, waiting for the arrival of the policeman. He waited some hours; but at last the constable arrived. He gave himself up, and was marched off to the lock-up. "I shall at least have something to eat now," was the reflection. He was right. He was sentenced to one year's imprisonment, and he is in gaol at this hour. This very morning he received his rations, and at this very moment he is dodged, and clothed and cared for at the cost of the rates and taxes. He has become the child of the State, and, therefore, one of the socially damned. Thus emigration itself, instead of being an invariable specific, sometimes brings us back again to the gaol door.
Emigration, by all means. But whom are you to emigrate? These girls who do not know how to bake? These lads who never handled a spade? And where are you to emigrate them? Are you going to make the Colonies the dumping ground of your human refuse? On that the colonists will have something decisive to say, where there are colonists; and where there are not, how are you to feed, clothe, and employ your emigrants in the uninhabited wilderness? Immigration, no doubt, is the making of a colony, just as bread is the staff of life. But if you were to cram a stomach with wheat by a force-pump you would bring on such a fit of indigestion that unless your victim threw up the indigestible mass of unground, uncooked, unmasticated grain he would never want another meal. So it is with the new colonies and the surplus labour of other countries.
Emigration is in itself not a panacea. Is Education? In one sense it may be, for Education, the developing in a man of all his latent capacities for improvement, may cure anything and everything. But the Education of which men speak when they use the term, is mere schooling. No one but a fool would say a word against school teaching. By all means let us have our children educated. But when we have passed them through the Board School Mill we have enough experience to see that they do not emerge the renovated and regenerated beings whose advent was expected by those who passed the Education Act. The "scuttlers" who knife inoffensive persons in Lancashire, the fighting gangs of the West of London, belong to the generation that has enjoyed the advantage of Compulsory Education. Education, book-learning and schooling will not solve the difficulty. It helps, no doubt. But in some ways it aggravates it. The common school to which the children of thieves and harlots and drunkards are driven, to sit side by side with our little ones, is often by no means a temple of all the virtues. It is sometimes a university of all the vices. The bad infect the good, and your boy and girl come back reeking with the contamination of bad associates, and familiar with the coarsest obscenity of the slum. Another great evil is the extent to which our Education tends to overstock the labour market with material for quill-drivers and shopmen, and gives our youth a distaste for sturdy labour. Many of the most hopeless cases in our Shelters are men of considerable education. Our schools help to enable a starving man to tell his story in more grammatical language than that which his father could have employed, but they do not feed him, or teach him where to go to get fed. So far from doing this they increase the tendency to drift into those channels where food is least secure, because employment is most uncertain, and the market most overstocked.
"Try Trades Unionism," say some, and their advice is being widely followed. There are many and great advantages in Trades Unionism. The fable of the bundle of sticks is good for all time. The more the working people can be banded together in voluntary organisations, created and administered by themselves for the protection of their own interests, the better—at any rate for this world—and not only for their own interests, but for those of every other section of the community. But can we rely upon this agency as a means of solving the problems which confront us? Trades Unionism has had the field to itself for a generation. It is twenty years since it was set free from all the legal disabilities under which it laboured. But it has not covered the land. It has not organised all skilled labour. Unskilled labour is almost untouched. At the Congress at Liverpool only one and a half million workmen were represented. Women are almost entirely outside the pale. Trade Unions not only represent a fraction of the labouring classes, but they are, by their constitution, unable to deal with those who do not belong to their body. What ground can there be, then, for hoping that Trades Unionism will by itself solve the difficulty? The most experienced Trades Unionists will be the first to admit that any scheme which could deal adequately with the out-of-works and others who hang on to their skirts and form the recruiting ground of blacklegs and embarrass them in ever way, would be, of all others that which would be most beneficial to Trades Unionism. The same may be said about Co-operation. Personally, I am a strong believer in Co-operation, but it must be Co-operation based on the spirit of benevolence. I don't see how any pacific re-adjustment of the social and economic relations between classes in this country can be effected except by the gradual substitution of cooperative associations for the present wages system. As you will see in subsequent chapters, so far from there being anything in my proposals that would militate in any way against the ultimate adoption of the co-operative solution of the question, I look to Co-operation as one of the chief elements of hope in the future. But we have not to deal with the ultimate future, but with the immediate present, and for the evils with which we are dealing the existing cooperative organisations do not and cannot give us much help.
Another—I do not like to call it specific; it is only a name, a mere mockery of a specific—so let me call it another suggestion made when discussing this evil, is Thrift. Thrift is a great virtue no doubt. But how is Thrift to benefit those who have nothing? What is the use of the gospel of Thrift to a man who had nothing to eat yesterday, and has not threepence to-day to pay for his lodging to-night? To live on nothing a day is difficult enough, but to save on it would beat the cleverest political economist that ever lived. I admit without hesitation that any Scheme which weakened the incentive to Thrift would do harm. But it is a mistake to imagine that social damnation is an incentive to Thrift. It operates least where its force ought to be most felt. There is no fear that any Scheme that we can devise will appreciably diminish the deterrent influences which dispose a man to save. But it is idle wasting time upon a plea that is only brought forward as an excuse for inaction. Thrift is a great virtue, the inculcation of which must be constantly kept in view by all those who are attempting to "educate and save the people. It is not in any sense a specific for the salvation of the lapsed and the lost. Even among the most wretched of the very poor, a man must have an object and a hope before he will save a halfpenny. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we perish," sums up the philosophy of those who have no hope. In the thriftiness of the French peasant we see that the temptation of eating and drinking is capable of being resolutely subordinated to the superior claims of the accumulation of a dowry for the daughter, or for the acquisition of a little more land for the son.
Of the schemes of those who propose to bring in a new heaven and a new earth by a more scientific distribution of the pieces of gold and silver in the trouser pockets of mankind, I need not say anything here. They may be good or they may not. I say nothing against any short cut to the Millennium that is compatible with the Ten Commandments. I intensely sympathise with the aspirations that lie behind all these Socialist dreams. But whether it is Henry George's Single Tax on Land Values, or Edward Bellamy's Nationalism, or the more elaborate schemes of the Collectivists, my attitude towards them all is the same. What these good people want to do, I also want to do. But I am a practical man, dealing with the actualities of to-day. I have no preconceived theories, and I flatter myself I am singularly free from prejudices. I am ready to sit at the feet of any who will show me any good. I keep my mind open on all these subjects; and am quite prepared to hail with open arms any Utopia that is offered me. But it must be within range of my finger-tips. It is of no use to me if it is in the clouds. Cheques on the Bank of Futurity I accept gladly enough as a free gift, but I can hardly be expected to take them as if they were current coin, or to try to cash them at the Bank of England.
It may be that nothing will be put permanently right until everything has been turned upside down. There are certainly so many things that need transforming, beginning with the heart of each individual man and woman, that I do not quarrel with any Visionary when in his intense longing for the amelioration of the condition of mankind he lays down his theories as to the necessity for radical change, however impracticable they may appear to me. But this is the question. Here at our Shelters last night were a thousand hungry, workless people. I want to know what to do with them? Here is John Jones, a stout stalwart labourer in rags, who has not had one square meal for a month, who has been hunting for work that will enable him to keep body and soul together, and hunting in vain. There he is in his hungry raggedness, asking for work that he may live, and not die of sheer starvation in the midst of the wealthiest city in the world. What is to be done with John Jones?
The individualist tells me that the free play of the Natural Laws governing the struggle for existence will result in the Survival of the Fittest, and that in the course of a few ages, more or less, a much nobler type will be evolved. But meanwhile what is to become of John Jones? The Socialist tells me that the great Social Revolution is looming large on the horizon. In the good time coming, when wealth will be re-distributed and private property abolished, all stomachs will be filled and there will be no more John Jones' impatiently clamouring for opportunity to work that they may not die. It may be so, but in the meantime here is John Jones growing more impatient than ever because hungrier, who wonders if he is to wait for a dinner until the Social Revolution has arrived. What are we to do with John Jones? That is the question. And to the solution of that question none of the Utopians give me much help. For practical purposes these dreamers fall under the condemnation they lavish so freely upon the conventional religious people who relieve themselves of all anxiety for the welfare of the poor by saying that in the next world all will be put right. This religious cant, which rids itself of all the importunity of suffering humanity by drawing unnegotiable bills payable on the other side of the grave, is not more impracticable than the Socialistic clap-trap which postpones all redress of human suffering until after the general overturn. Both take refuge in the Future to escape a solution of the problems of the Present, and it matters little to the sufferers whether the Future is on this side of the grave or the other. Both are, for them, equally out of reach.
When the sky falls we shall catch larks. No doubt.
But in the meantime?
It is the meantime—that is the only time in which we have to work. It is in the meantime that the people must be fed, that their life's work must be done or left undone for ever. Nothing that I have to propose in this book, or that I propose to do by my Scheme, will in the least prevent the coming of any of the Utopias. I leave the limitless infinite of the Future to the Utopians. They may build there as they please. As for me, it is indispensable that whatever I do is founded on existing fact, and provides a present help for the actual need.
There is only one class or men who have cause to oppose the proposals which I am about to set forth. That is those, if such there be, who are determined to bring about by any and every means a bloody and violent overturn of all existing institutions. They will oppose the Scheme, and they will act logically in so doing. For the only hope of those who are the artificers of Revolution is the mass of seething discontent and misery that lies in the heart of the social system. Honestly believing that things must get worse before they get better, they build all their hopes upon the general overturn, and they resent as an indefinite postponement of the realisation of their dreams any attempt at a reduction of human misery.
The Army of the Revolution is recruited by the Soldiers of Despair. Therefore, down with any Scheme which gives men Hope. In so far as it succeeds it curtails our recruiting ground and reinforces the ranks of our Enemies. Such opposition is to be counted upon, and to be utilised as the best of all tributes to the value of our work. Those who thus count upon violence and bloodshed are too few to hinder, and their opposition will merely add to the momentum with which I hope and believe this Scheme will ultimately be enabled to surmount all dissent, and achieve, with the blessing of God, that measure of success with which I verily believe it to be charged.