CHAPTER XII.
To get an odd job at the Docks is often the last hope of the labouring men who are out of regular employment, and to whom the acquisition of a few shillings for rent, and the means of subsistence for themselves and families, is a task fraught with as much difficulty as were some of the labours the accomplishment of which added in no inconsiderable degree to the posthumous fame of Hercules.
When it is borne in mind that sometimes at the West India Docks—taking one for example—as many as 2,500 hands can be taken on in the morning, it will be easily understood that the chance of employment draws an immense concourse of men daily to the gates.
The time to see what I venture to think is one of the most remarkable sights in the world is an hour at which the general public is not likely to be passing by.
Sometimes the hands are engaged as early as four, but it is generally about six o'clock that the quay-gangers ascend the rostrums or elevated stands which are placed all along the outside wall, and survey the huge crowd in front of them, and commence to call them out for work and send them into the different docks where the good ships lie, with their vast cargoes, waiting for willing hands to unload them.
The pay is fivepence an hour, and the day's work lasts for eight hours. It is miscellaneous, and a man is expected to put his hand to anything in the shape of loading or unloading that the occasion may require.
Stand outside the dock gates any morning about six, and you will have plenty to study among the vast crowd of men, more or less dilapidated and hungry-looking, who fill all the approaches and line the banks in front of the rostrums.
Many of them are regular men, who are called 'royals,' and who are pretty sure to be taken on, their names being on the ganger's list and called out by him as a matter of course. These men show signs of regular employment, and differ very little from the ordinary labourer. The strangest part of the crowd are the ragged, wretched, woebegone-looking outcasts who are penniless, and whose last hope is that they may have the luck to be selected by the ganger. Many of these come from the distant parts of London, from the North, and the South, and the East, and the West. Some of them have tramped all night, and flung themselves down to sleep at the great dock gates in the early dawn, determined to be in the front rank.
They are of all sorts, sizes, and conditions. Among them is the seedy clerk, the broken-down betting man, the discharged soldier, the dismissed policeman, the ticket-of-leave man, the Jack-of-all-trades, the countryman, and the London rough. An enormous proportion of the regular men are Irish and of the ordinary labouring class, but now and then a foreigner or a negro crops up among the crowd. One man there is among them who wears his rough jacket and his old battered billycock with a certain air of gentility, and whose features are strongly refined when compared with the coarser lineaments of those around him.
In the Docks they call him 'the nobleman.' He is a gentleman by birth and education; he can swear, I believe, in four languages; and as a matter of fact is the son of a baronet, and has a right to be called 'sir' if he chose to demand it. Into the sad story which has brought about this social wreck it is no business of mine to enter, though to the friendly dock police and to the gangers the baronet is ready enough to tell it.
The baronet can work, in spite of his pedigree, as well as any of his mates, and the fivepence an hour is a godsend to him. Strange are the stories of vicissitude which many of these men can tell. I have said it is the last haven of the outcast, and by that I do not mean to imply that all Dock-labourers are destitute; but that among the huge crowd of outsiders who come daily to take their chance are many of those who form the absolutely most helpless and most hopeless of the London poor, No character is required for the work, no questions are asked; a man can call himself any name he likes; so long as he has two hands and is willing to use them, that is all the Dock Company require. Among these men are hundreds of those whose cases are so difficult to deal with in respect of house accommodation. They are the men who have to pay exorbitant rents for the filthy single rooms of the slums, and whose fight with starvation is daily and hourly. They are the men earning precarious livelihoods who are objected to by the managers of all the new Industrial dwellings, which have swept away acres of accommodation of an inferior class. A man who is a dock-labourer may earn a pound a week—he may earn only five shillings. Sometimes they get taken on every day in a week, and then for a fortnight they may have to go empty-handed from the gates day after day.
Once fix on your mind the wear and tear, the anxiety and doubt, the strain and harass, the ups and downs of a life like this, count the smallness of the gain and the uncertainty of employment, and you will understand why it is that the common body of men who are classed as 'Dock-labourers' are reckoned as among the poorest of the London poor who make an honest effort to keep out of the workhouse. Watch the crowd—there must be over two thousand present in the great outer circle. The gangers are getting into the rostrums—two tea ships have come in, and a large number of men will be required. Hope is on many faces now; the men who have been lying in hundreds sleeping on the bank opposite—so usual a bed that the grass is worn away—leap to their feet. The crowd surges close together, and every eye is fixed in the direction of the ganger, who, up in his pulpit, his big book, with the list of the names of regular men, or 'Royals,' open before him, surveys the scene, and prepares for business. He calls out name after name—the men go up and take a pass, present it to the police at the gate, and file in to be told off to the different vessels. It is when the 'Royals' are exhausted that the real excitement begins. The men who are left are over a thousand strong—they have come on the chance. The ganger eyes them with a quick, searching glance, then points his finger to them, 'You—and you—and you—and you.' The extra men go through the usual formality, and pass in. There is still hope for hundreds of them. The ganger keeps on engaging men; but presently he stops.
You can almost hear a sigh run through the ragged crowd. There comes into some of the pale, pinched faces a look of unutterable woe—the hope that welled up in the heart has sunk back again. There is no chance now. All the men wanted are engaged.
As you turn and look at these men and study them—these, the unfortunate ones—you picture to yourself what the situation means to some of them. What are their thoughts as they turn away? Some of them, perhaps, have grown callous to suffering, hardened in despair. To-day's story is but the story of yesterday, and will be the story of tomorrow. There is on many of their faces that look of vacant unconcern to everything that comes of long familiarity with adversity. They have the look of the man who came into the French Court of Justice to take his trial for murdering his colleague at the galleys, and who had branded on his arm his name—'Never a chance!' Never a chance when a man gets that branded, not on his arm but on his heart; he takes bad luck very quietly. It is the good luck which would astonish and upset him.
Some of the men, new-comers most of these, and not used to the game yet, show a certain rough emotion. It is fair to say it generally takes the form of an expletive. Others, men who look as though they had sunk by degrees from better positions, go away with a quivering lip and a flush of disappointment. If we could follow the thoughts of some of them, we should see far away, and perhaps where in some wretched room a wife and children sit cowering and shivering, waiting for the evening to come, when father will bring back the price of the day's work he has gone to seek. It must be with a heavy heart that his wife towards mid-day hears the sound of her husband's footsteps on the creaking stairs. This advent means no joy to her. That footstep tells its sad, cruel tale in one single creak. He has not been taken on at the Docks; another weary day of despair has to be sat through, another night she and the little ones must go hungry to bed.
It must not be imagined that the men clear away directly who have not been engaged. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and dozens of men still wait on in hope. It sometimes happens that a ship comes in late, or something happens, and more men are required. Then the ganger comes out and picks them from among the remaining crowd.
Dozens of them hang about on the off-chance until two; after that it rarely happens any men are engaged, so the last brave few who have stood with wistful eyes for six or eight hours at the gate, turn slowly on their heels and go—God knows where!
Some of them, I believe, are absolutely homeless and friendless, and hang about street corners, getting perhaps a bit of tobacco from one or another more fortunate in this world's goods than themselves, and with it stave off the gnawing pangs of hunger. They hang about up side streets and round corners till night comes, then fling themselves down and sleep where they can, and go back once more at dawn to the gates of their paradise, to wait and hope, and be disappointed perhaps again.
This is the dark side of the Dock-labourer's story. It has a brighter and better one inside, where on miles and miles of wharf hundreds of men, package- and bale-laden, are hurrying to and fro, stowing the produce of the world in shed after shed. Thousands of barrels of sugar are lying in one, and the air is perfectly sweet with it. The ground is treacly with it, and one's boots are saturated with it as one walks through a thick slime of what looks like toffee gone wrong in a sweetstuff window on a hot summer day. Thousands of boxes of tea, just in from China, are in another shed, and their next-door neighbours are myriads of bags of wheat. The steam cranes are going as far as the eye can see, whirling and dragging, and swinging huge bale after bale greedily from the good ships' holds; lighters laden to the top are being piled higher still; whole regiments of men bent with precious burthens are filing from wharf to warehouse; the iron wheels of the trolley, as it is pushed rapidly over the asphalted floor, make a music of their own; and the whole scene is shut in with a background of shipping—argosies freighted with the wealth of the Indies, the produce of many a land beyond the seas; all this goes to make up a picture of industry and enterprise and wealth, which gives just a little pardonable pride to the Englishman who contemplates it for the first time.
The system in the Docks is admirable. The strange men who are taken on are not taken entirely on trust. There is a uniform scale of pay for old hands and new, but there is an overlooker to see that all work well. If a man shirks or makes himself in any way objectionable, the process is short and summary: 'Go to the office and take your money.' The man is discharged—he is paid for the time he has worked, but no more; and he can leave the Docks out of the question as a field for his talents, if he has shown himself a duffer. A mark is put against his name in the ganger's book.
At the door every man who leaves the Docks is searched. This is more of a preventive measure than anything else. The men handle many packages of valuable commodities which have been broken in transit, and could easily extract some for their private use.
It would not be hard for a gentleman brought face to face with a broken chest of tea to fill his pockets with a loose pound or two, for instance. The search at the gate stops that. Knowing that detection is certain, those men who would be dishonest if they could get a chance see the impossibility of escaping with their plunder, and so, making a virtue of necessity, respect the eighth commandment. The Docks are in the custody of a special body of Dock-police, who maintain order, keep guard night and day over the goods in the warehouse, search the men, and check all the carts and vans passing out or in at the gates, and are generally responsible for everything.
The boys employed as messengers between the Dock House in Billiter Street and the Docks themselves, and also the lads employed on the spot, are all dressed in a remarkably neat uniform, and add to the picturesqueness of the busy scene. All these boys are drilled, and come to attention and salute their superiors with the precision of old soldiers.
I have given a little space to the inside of the Docks because such numbers of the men whose homes we have visited in previous chapters are employed there, and it is there that unskilled labour finds the readiest market.
But it is outside that one must search for the misery which those who know them best acknowledge to be the commonest lot of the Dock-labourer.
Inside, when the men are at work, the beer barrel on a stand with wheels is trundled merrily along at certain hours, and there is a contractor who supplies the men with food. It is outside that the beer barrel and the food contractor find their occupation gone.
Poverty in its grimmest form exists here, and it is for these men, struggling so bravely and waiting so patiently for the work their hands are only too willing to do, that philanthropists might look a little more earnestly into the question of house accommodation.
Looking at the uncertainty of employment, it is not hard for anyone to see that a rent of five shillings for a single room is too much for these men to pay, and they cannot go out into the suburbs, where rents are cheaper, because they could not get to the Docks in anything like condition to work.
These men must live within a reasonable distance of their labour, and to do so they have to pay exorbitant prices for vile accommodation. They are kept in the lowest depths of poverty, because rent almost exhausts all the money—all that the luckiest can hope to earn.
'Honest sweat,' the poet has told us, is a very noble decoration to a man's brow, and these men are plentifully decorated before their task is over, I can assure you. It is scandalous that having done all they can, risked life and limb (for Dock accidents are numerous and keep a hospital busy), and done their duty in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them, they should have to creep home to fever dens and pestilential cellars. Half the money they pay ought to go for food for themselves and their children, instead of into the well-lined pockets of those who are making fortunes out of the death-traps they call 'House Property.'
This short and hurried sketch of life in the Docks is necessarily incomplete. Its one great feature connected with the subject of this book my readers can see for themselves at any time they like to take a long walk in the very early morning. No one who does not see the vast crowd can appreciate the character and pathetic elements it contains. I cannot write them with my pen; but I can gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. A. T. A. Brownlow, of the London Offices, and Captain Sheppy, of the Dock Police, whose kindness enabled me to see under peculiar advantages this phase of
HOW THE POOR LIVE.
CHAPTER XIII.
With the present chapter I bring this series to a close. I have endeavoured briefly to present to the reader a few of the phases of existence through which their poorer brethren pass. I have necessarily left untrodden whole acres of ground over which a traveller, in search of startling revelations, might with advantage have journeyed. But startling revelations were not the object I had in view when I undertook these sketches. My object was to skim the surface lightly, but sufficiently to awaken in the general mind an interest in one of the great social problems of the day. A few of the evils of the present system of overcrowding and neglected sanitation, I have the courage to believe, have been brought home for the first time to a world of readers outside the hitherto narrow circle of philanthropists who take an active interest in the social condition of the masses.
One word with regard to the many letters which have appeared in the newspapers, and which have reached me privately. There seems a very general and a very earnest desire among the writers to do something for the people on whose behalf I have appealed to their sympathy.
While fully appreciating the kind-heartedness and the generous feelings evoked, I cannot help regretting that in too many instances the idea prevails that charity can ameliorate the evils complained of. I have been grievously misunderstood if anything I have said has led to the belief that all Englishmen have to do to help the denizens of the slums and alleys is to put their hands in and pull out a sovereign or a shilling.
It is legislation that is wanted, not almsgiving. It is not a temporary relief, but a permanent one, that can alone affect, in any appreciable manner, the condition of the one-roomed portion of the population of great cities.
Charity is to be honoured wherever it is found, but charity, unless accompanied by something else, may do more evil than good. There are in London scores and scores of men and women who live by getting up bogus charities and sham schemes for the relief of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of pounds pass annually through the hands of men whose antecedents, were they known, would make a careful householder nervous about asking them into his hall if there were any coats and umbrellas about.
I am not a thick and thin supporter of the C.O.S. At various times I have been bitterly opposed both to its theories and its practices; but it certainly has done an immense deal of good in exposing some of the scoundrels who appeal to the best sympathies of human nature under absolutely false pretences. .
It is not so long ago that a man who had been convicted of fraud was found to be the flourishing proprietor of a mission to the poor, or something of the sort—whose annual income for two years past had been over a couple of thousand pounds, against an expenditure in tracts, rent, and blankets of one hundred and thirty-six pounds.
In another instance, the promoter of a charity, which had been in a flourishing condition for years, actually had his villa at St. John's Wood, and kept his brougham—his total source of income being the charity itself.
If I quote these cases here it is not to hinder the flow of the broad, pure stream of charity by one single obstacle, but to show such of my readers as may need the hint how dangerous and delusive it is to think that careless almsgiving is in any shape or form a real assistance to. the poor and suffering.
People who wish to do good must give their time as well as their money. They must personally investigate all those cases they wish to relieve, and they must set about seeing how the causes which lead to misery and suffering can be removed.
How are the evils of overcrowding—how are the present miseries of the poor to be removed? In what way can the social status of the labouring classes be permanently raised? Not by collecting-cards or funds, not by tracts or missions, but by remedial legislation—by State help and State protection, and by the general recognition of those rights of citizenship, which should be as carefully guarded for the lowest class as for the highest.
We live in a country which practically protects the poor and oppressed of every land under the sun at the expense of its own. We organize great military expeditions, we pour out blood and money ad libitum in order to raise the social condition of black men and brown; the woes of an Egyptian, or a Bulgarian, or a Zulu send a thrill of indignation through honest John Bull's veins; and yet at his very door there is a race so oppressed, so hampered, and so utterly neglected, that its condition has become a national scandal.
Is it not time that the long-promised era of domestic legislation gave some faint streaks of dawn in the parliamentary sky? Are we to wait for a revolution before we rescue the poor from the clutches of their oppressors? Are we to wait for the cholera or the plague before we remedy a condition of things which sanitarily is without parallel in civilized countries?
There is a penalty for packing cattle too closely together; why should there be none for improperly packing men and women and children? The law says that no child shall grow up without reading, writing, and arithmetic; but the law does nothing that children may have air, and light, and shelter.
No one urges that the State should be a grandmother to the citizens, but it should certainly exercise ordinary parental care over its family.
To quote an instance of the gross neglect of the interests of the poor by the State, take the working of the Artisans' Dwellings Act. Space after space has been cleared under the provisions of this Act, thousands upon thousands of families have been rendered homeless by the demolition of whole acres of the slums where they hid their heads, and in scores of instances the work of improvement has stopped with the pulling down. To this day the cleared spaces stand empty—a cemetery for cats, a last resting-place for worn-out boots and tea-kettles. The consequence of this is, that the hardships of the displaced families have been increased a hundredfold. So limited is now the accommodation for the class whose wage-earning power is of the smallest, that in the few quarters left open to them rents have gone up 100 per cent, in five years—a room which once let for 2s. a week is now 4s. Worse even than this—the limited accommodation has left the renters helpless victims of any extortion or neglect the landlords of these places may choose to practise.
The tenants cannot now ask for repairs, for a decent water-supply, or for the slightest boon in the way of improvement. They must put up with dirt, and filth, and putrefaction; with dripping walls and broken windows; with all the nameless abominations of an unsanitary hovel, because if they complain the landlord can turn them out at once, and find dozens of people eager to take their places, who will be less fastidious. It is Hobson's choice—that shelter or none—and it is small wonder that few families are stoical enough to move from a death-trap to a ditch or a doorstep for the sake of a little fresh air. The law which allows them the death-trap denies them the doorstep—that is a property which must not be overcrowded.
Now, is it too much to ask that in the intervals of civilizing the Zulu and improving the condition of the Egyptian fellah the Government should turn its attention to the poor of London, and see if in its wisdom it cannot devise a scheme to remedy this terrible state of things?
The social, moral, and physical improvement of the labouring classes is surely a question as important, say, as the condition of the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, or the disfigurement of the Thames Embankment. If one-tenth of the indignation which burst forth when a ventilator ventured to emit a puff of smoke on the great riverside promenade to the injury of the geraniums in Temple Gardens could only be aroused over the wholesale stifling and poisoning of the poor which now goes on all over London, the first step towards a better state of things would have been taken.
Why does that indignation find no stronger outlet than an occasional whisper, a nod of the head, a stray leading article, or a casual question in the House sandwiched between an inquiry concerning the Duke of Wellington's statue, and one about the cost of cabbage-seed for the kitchen-garden at Buckingham Palace?
The answer probably will be, that up to a recent date the magnitude of the evil has not been brought home to the general public or the members of the Legislature. M.P.'s do not drive through the Mint or Whitechapel, nor do they take their constitutional in the back slums of Westminster and Drury Lane. What the eye does not see the heart does not grieve after, and the conservative spirit born and bred in Englishmen makes them loth to start a crusade against any system of wrong until its victims have begun to start a crusade of their own—to demonstrate in Trafalgar Square, and to hold meetings in Hyde Park. There is a disposition in this country not to know that a dog is hungry till it growls, and it is only when it goes from growling to snarling, and from snarling to sniffing viciously in the vicinity of somebody's leg, that the somebody thinks it time to send out a flag of truce in the shape of a bone. We don't want to wait until the dog shows its teeth to know that he has such things. We want the bone to be offered now—a good marrowy bone, with plenty of legislative meat upon it. He has been a good, patient, long-suffering dog, chained to a filthy kennel for years, and denied even a drink of clean water, let alone a bone, so that the tardy offering is at least deserved.
It would be easy to show how the amelioration of the condition of the lower classes would be beneficial to the entire community, but it is scarcely worth while to put the question on such low grounds. The boon craved should come as an act of justice, not as a concession wrung from unwilling hands by fear, or granted with interested motives.
Briefly, and narrowing the question down to its smallest dimensions, what is wanted is this: The immediate erection on cleared spaces of tenements suitable to the classes dislodged. A system of inspection which would not only cause the demolition of unhealthy houses, but prevent unhealthy houses being erected. A certain space should be insisted on for every human being inhabiting a room—say 300 cubic feet for each person, and this regulation should be enforced by inspection of labouring-class dwellings, the enforcement of proper sanitary regulations, and a higher penalty for any breach of them; the providing of increased bath and washing accommodation in every crowded district; the erection of proper mortuaries in every parish; and the preservation in every district of certain open spaces to act as lungs to the neighbourhood—all these should be items in any remedial scheme. Beyond this, the poor should be encouraged in every possible way to decentralize. They must at present all crowd round the big centres of employment, because the means of travelling to and fro are beyond the reach of their slender purses. But if a system of cheap conveyance by tram or rail for the working-classes could be developed, they would scatter themselves more and more about the suburbs, and by their own action reduce the exorbitant rents they are now called upon to pay.
Again, there should be in all new blocks of tenements built for this class accommodation for the hawkers and others who have barrows which they must put somewhere, and who are compelled at times to house the vegetable and animal matter in which they deal. A man who sells cabbages in the streets cannot leave his unsold stock to take care of itself at night, so he takes it home with him. At present he and his family generally sleep on it in their one room, but lock-up sheds and stabling for donkeys and ponies would obviate all the evils of the present system. The men are quite willing to pay for a little extra accommodation, and the removal of the mischief which comes of whole areas polluted with decaying vegetable matter is at least worth an experiment.
The density of the population in certain districts, and the sanitary defects of the tenements, are, at present, absolute dangers to the Public Health. On this ground alone it is desirable to agitate for reform; but there is a broader ground still—humanity. It is on that broad ground I venture to ask those who by these scant sketches of a great evil have become in some slight way acquainted with it, to raise their voices and give strength to the cry which is going up at last for a rigid and searching inquiry into the conditions under which the Poor of this vast city live.
To leave the world a little better than he found it is the best aim a man can have in life, and no labour earns so sweet and so lasting a reward as that which has for its object the happiness of others.
Public opinion boldly expressed never fails to compel the obedience of those who guide the destinies of States. Public opinion is a chorus of voices, and the strength of that chorus depends upon the manner in which each individual member of it exerts his vocal power. How long the scandal which disgraces the age shall continue depends greatly, therefore, good reader, upon your individual exertions. If aught that has been written here, then, has enlisted your sympathy, pass from a recruit to a good soldier of the cause, and help with all your will and all your strength to make so sad a story as this impossible when in future years abler pens than mine shall perhaps once again attempt to tell you
HOW THE POOR LIVE.
HORRIBLE LONDON.*
* Originally published in the Daily News.
CHAPTER I.
A great subject, which for years journalists and philanthropists have been vainly endeavouring to interest the general public in, has suddenly by leaps and bounds assumed the front rank in the great army of social and political problems. The housing of the poor has long been a smouldering question; dozens of willing hands have sought to fan it into a flame, but hitherto with small results. At the last moment a little pamphlet laid modestly on the dying embers has done what all the bellows-blowing of the Press failed to accomplish, and the smouldering question has become a brightly-burning one. It is while the flames are still at their height, and everyone is suggesting a remedy, that I should like to say a few words on a subject with which I have been practically and intimately acquainted for many years.
It is evident, after reading the many letters which have appeared in the Daily News and other journals, that the great bulk of the remedy-suggesters are writing without the slightest personal knowledge of the people who are to be washed and dressed, rehoused and regenerated, and converted by the State and the Church into wholesome, pleasant, God-fearing citizens of the most approved type. There is a capital picture on the hoardings of London of a little black boy in a bath who has been washed white as far as the neck with Messrs. Somebody's wonderful soap. I do not for one moment dispute the excellent qualities of the moral and political soaps which kindly philanthropists are recommending as likely to accomplish a similar miracle for the Outcast Blackamoors of Horrible London; but I am inclined to think the advocates for these said soaps underestimate the blackness of the boy.
In the early part of the present year I spent some two months in visiting the worst slums of London, and in investigating the condition of the inhabitants. I not only went from cellar to attic, but I traced back the family history of many of the occupants. I followed the workers to their work, the thieves and wantons to their haunts, the children to their schools, and the homeless loafers to the holes and corners, the open passages and backyards where they herded together at night. I began my task with a light heart; I finished it with a heavy one. In that two months I saw a vision of hell more terrible than the immortal Florentine's, and this was no poet's dream—it was a terrible truth, ghastly in its reality, heartbreaking in its intensity, and the doom of the imprisoned bodies in this modern Inferno was as horrible as any that Dante depicted for his tortured souls. But the most terrible thing of all was that the case of many of these lost creatures seemed utterly hopeless. I felt this then, and, now that the Press has been flooded with suggestions, I feel it still. In writing this I trust I shall not be misunderstood. I have only ventured to intrude myself in this great discussion now to point out where I think the new forces set in motion may be most profitably employed and where they would simply be wasted.
We must remember that it is not only poverty we have to deal with in order to metamorphose Horrible London into a new Arcadia—we have to do battle with a hydra-headed monster called Vice, and vice is born and bred in tens of thousands of these outcasts, whose lot we are trying to remedy. It taints the entire atmosphere of the slums. The people I refer to are dirty and foul and vicious, as tigers are fierce and vindictive and cruel, because it is part of their nature. Take them from their dirt to-morrow, and put them in clean rooms amid wholesome surroundings, and what would be the result?—the dirty people would not be improved, but the clean rooms would be dirtied. You cannot stamp out the result of generations of neglect in a day, or a week, or a year, any more than you can check the ravages of consumption with doses of cough mixture; whether you give it to the patient a tablespoonful or a tumblerful at a time, once an hour or once a week, the result will be the same.
The first great work of the reformers in all their schemes must be to separate the labouring from the criminal classes. At present both classes herd together, to the infinite harm of the former; and the poor artisan's children grow up with every form of crime and vice practised openly before their eyes. The pulling down of vast areas of labouring-class accommodation to make way for Metropolitan improvements is the cause of this commingling of the honest poor with their dishonest brethren. The men and women earning low wages and precarious livelihoods have been driven step by step into the Alsatias of London, because nowhere else have they been able to find shelter. The suburbs are beyond their means, not because of the rents, but because of the expense of getting to and from their daily work. Take the case of the thousands of the labouring poor who get employment at the docks. Their only chance of being taken on is to be at the dock-gates by four or five in the morning. Many of them are there as early as three. How could these men get from the suburbs at such an hour, and how could they afford the daily railway fare? Then there are the factory hands, and the men and women and children who work at home for the City houses—they too must be within walking-distance of the factories and warehouses. At present their only chance is to live in the rookeries, and there they must pay from two-and-sixpence to four shillings for a single room. And without exception all these rookeries are largely peopled by the criminal classes, who find their security in the surrounding filth and lawlessness, which are so many fortifications against the enemy. The criminal classes will oppose all efforts at their redemption, the labouring classes will welcome them, so that, to get a good result quickly, the latter must be the first consideration with politicians, whatever the religious view of the subject may be.
Having separated the criminals from the workers, the next task must be to separate the old from the young, in planning out measures of reform and applying remedies. The condition of many of the older people, even among the poorer workers, is almost hopeless. They could never adapt themselves now to the life the philanthropist dreams for them. They could not be brought to see that marriage is any better than cohabitation, that thrift is a virtue, or that there is any higher pleasure in life than the gratification of the animal instincts. To gratify intellectual instincts, men must have intellects trained and cultivated to gratify. The older denizens of Horrible London have had their intellects dulled rather than sharpened by long years of familiarity with want, privation, and wretched surroundings. They have lived come-day, go-day, God-send-Sunday lives too long to be suddenly awakened to a taste for intellectual amusements or to higher aspirations; and, what is more, the bulk of the class I allude to are absolutely ignorant, and can neither read nor write.
But with their children the case is different; and here is the great hope of the reformer. The Board schools have, through good and evil report, sown the seeds of a new era. Amid all the talk of the last few weeks, few have recognised the fact that it is by the education of the rising generation that the ground has been cleared for the brighter and better state of things we are all hoping to see. The children who go back to the slums from the Board schools are themselves quietly accomplishing more than Acts of Parliament, missions, and philanthropic crusades can ever hope to do. Already the young race of mothers, the girls who had the benefit for a year or two of the Education Act, are tidy in their persons, clean in their homes, and decent in their language. Let the reader, who wishes to judge for himself of the physical and moral results which education has already accomplished, go to any Board school recruited from the 'slum' districts, and note the difference in the elder and the younger children, or attend a 'B' meeting, where the mothers come to plead excuses for their little ones' non-attendance, and note the difference between the old and the young mothers—between those who, before they took 'mates' or husbands, had a year or two of school training, and those who had given birth to children in the old days of widespread ignorance.
It is to the rising generation we look for that which is hopeless in the grown-up outcasts of to-day. Even education, the greatest remedy that has yet been applied to the evil, will be heavily handicapped if such home-teaching is to supplement the efforts of the schools.
I have only touched lightly upon a few points which lie on the outskirts of this great question. Knowing the nature of the task our social reformers have undertaken, I venture most earnestly to hope that nothing may be done hastily, or entrusted to well-meaning dilettanti or crotcheteers. Any scheme, to be successful, must embrace the entire question. The peculiar needs and necessities of a people who are a race by themselves must be borne in mind, and whatever is granted in the way of amelioration must be given, not as a charity to the abject poor, but as a right yielded at last to our long-neglected fellow-citizens.
CHAPTER II.
In a sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, the Rev. Prebendary Capel-Cure referred to the preceding article on 'Horrible London.' While insisting on the necessity for State interference, the preacher went on to say that he had read a series of papers on the 'Misery of Paris,' published in 1881, and that the unspeakable, the nameless horrors, the awful accumulation of guilt and filth and misery which the French writer had seen with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears, 'made even the dreadful revelation of the English writer seem almost trivial in comparison.' Now, as a matter of fact, no English writer conversant with the subject has dared to tell a plain unvarnished tale of London's guilt and woe. There are many of us who have seen with our own eyes, and heard with our own ears, things so revolting that we can only hint at them in vague and hesitating language. Were I, even now that public attention has been thoroughly aroused to a great danger, to go into the details of ordinary life in a London slum, the story would be one which no journal enjoying a general circulation could possibly print.
There is indeed a great danger that, in endeavouring to steer clear of loathsome details, writers dealing with the question of the amelioration of the condition of the poor may fail to bring home to the public the real nature of the ills that have to be remedied. It is to the general avoidance of offensive revelations that we owe most of the impracticable schemes of reform with which the Press all over the country is being flooded.
Let us 'rehouse' the poor by all means, but before we set about the task it is imperatively necessary that we should know what kind of people we are going to build for. Unless this is thoroughly understood, the result of the present agitation will be simply deplorable. We shall pull down slum after slum, not to rehouse the present inhabitants, but to drive them into still closer and closer contact, until we have massed together a huge army of famished and desperate men and women, ready, in the 'wild hour' that must sooner or later come, to burst their barriers at last, and to declare open and violent war against law and order and property.
The present terrible condition of affairs is mainly due to two causes—over-population and the small remuneration commanded by labour, and it is out of the former evil that the latter has grown. That drink is the curse of poverty-stricken districts no one wishes to deny, but it is a mistake to say that drink is the cause of poverty; as a matter of fact, poverty is equally the cause of drink. On this part of the question I may at some future time give the result of my experiences among the poor. For the present I want my readers to accompany me through a typical London slum, and to make a short study of the inhabitants, in order that they may form their own opinion of the remedies likely to be of permanent value.
One London slum is very like another, but for my purpose now I will select a district in Southwark, where the houses are in such a condition that they are bound to come down under any scheme of sanitary improvement, however halfhearted it may be.
We enter a narrow court, picking our way with caution over the nameless filth and garbage and the decaying vegetable matter that, flung originally in heaps outside the doors, has been trodden about by the feet of the inhabitants until the broken flags are almost undiscernible beneath a thick paste of indescribable filth. The outside of the houses prepares us for what is to come. Inside them we find the staircases rotten and breaking away. A greasy cord stretched from flight to flight is often the sole protection they possess. Wooden rails there may originally have been, but the landlord has not replaced them. He does not supply his tenants with firewood gratis. The windows are broken and patched with paper, or occasionally with a bit of board. The roofs are dilapidated, and the wet of a rainy season has soaked through the loose tiles, and saturated the walls and ceilings from attic to basement. And the rooms themselves! To describe them with anything like truth taxes my knowledge of euphemisms to the utmost. The rooms in these houses are pigsties, and nothing more, and in them men, women and children live and sleep and eat. More I cannot say, except that the stranger, entering one of these rooms for the first time, has every sense shocked, and finds it almost impossible to breathe the pestilent atmosphere without being instantly sick. And in such rooms as these there are men and women now living who never leave them for days and weeks together. They are sometimes discovered in an absolute state of nudity, having parted with every rag in their possession in order to keep body and soul together through times when no work is to be had.
So much for the district which is to be levelled, and the general habits of the inhabitants who are to be 'rehoused.' Let us take a few of the families who will have to be somebody's tenants under any scheme, and see what their circumstances are. The cases are all selected from the district I have endeavoured to hint at above. I will begin with the workers:
T. Harborne, stonemason, occupies two dilapidated rooms, which are in a filthy condition. Has five children. Total weekly income through slackness, 8s. Rent, 4s. 6d.
E. Williams, costermonger, two rooms in a court which is a hotbed of vice and disease. Has eight children. Total earnings, 17s. Rent, 5s. 6d.
T. Briggs, labourer, one room, four children. Rent, 4s. No furniture; all sleep on floor. Daughter answered knock, absolutely naked; ran in and covered herself with a sack.
Mrs. Johnson, widow, one room, three children. Earnings, 6s. Rent, 3s. 6d.
W. Leigh, fancy boxmaker, two awful rooms, four children. Earnings, 14s. Rent, 6s.
H. Walker, hawker, two rooms, seven children. Earnings, 10s. Rent, 5s. 6d.
E. Thompson, out of work, five children. Living by pawning goods and clothes. Wife drinks. Rent, 4s.
G. Garrard, labourer, out looking for work, eight children. No income. Rent, 5s. 6d. Pawning last rags. No parish relief. Starving. Declines to go into workhouse.
These people may fairly be described as workers. They will accept employment if they can get it, but they positively refuse to go into the workhouse when they cannot. If they fail to get the rent together, they will go into a furnished apartment, i.e., a frightful hovel, with an awful bed, a broken table, and one chair in it. These places can be had by the night, and vary in price from sixpence to a shilling. They are largely used by the criminal classes, who do not care to accumulate household goods, which their frequent temporary retirements from society would leave at the mercy of others.
In the same district and in the same houses, mixing freely with their more honest neighbours, and quarrelling, fighting, and drinking with them, we find another class whose earnings are also precarious. I will quote one or two cases, as these people must be dislodged when the present buildings come down:
Mrs. Smith. Husband in gaol. One room, three children. She earns 6s. a week, and pays 2s. 6d. rent. The man has been away fourteen years for burglary. The day of his release he came home. (The manner in which the men coming from long terms of imprisonment find their wives is marvellous.) The woman gave him what money she had, and he went out at once and got drunk. In the evening he came back, quarrelled with his neighbour, and stabbed a woman in a fight. He was taken to the police-station, tried, and sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment.
F. Barker. One dreadful room, three children; father and mother both criminals. Have been getting three and six months at intervals for years. Sometimes both in gaol together. Their neighbours take the children and mind them till parents come out.
W. Moggs, Raspberry Court—a sweet name for a hideous place—one room, four children. Rent, 4s. Father professional thief. Constantly in and out of prison.
These cases are fair samples of the class of people we call the abject poor, people who will not go to the workhouse under any circumstances, and who are at present herding together in the rookeries we are all agreed must be demolished and replaced by something better. Add to them the people carrying on objectionable trades in one or two rooms—and who must carry them on to live wherever they go—and the reformers will have a fair idea of the tenants for whom houses must be provided somewhere, if their present dwellings are to be pulled down. At the first glance it seems almost impossible to cater for them. Fancy turning these people into nice clean rooms and expecting five per cent, for your money! Besides, putting their habits on one side, they are never sure of regular work. They may pay the rent one week and be penniless the next. Then five per cent, philanthropy must turn them out, having given them a glimpse of Paradise which will make the return to Hades a terrible trial to those who have had their better instincts aroused.
Whichever way we look at the subject, it is fraught with difficulties, and if we are challenged to find a remedy, we have to go into a question which thousands of excellent people refuse altogether to discuss. The deserving poor could all be better housed now without a single brick being laid or a single Act of Parliament passed, if they had fewer children. Even in the slums the rents are lower and the rooms better for couples who have only two children. In dozens of instances where I have asked the denizens of these hovels why they pay four and five shillings for such vile accommodation, the answer is, 'They won't take us in a decent place because of the children.'
I know a case now of a man who took a house for himself and family, and found he had two rooms to spare. The house was clean and healthy, and he had dozens of applications from would-be lodgers. But, though he was poor—and the extra rent would have been a godsend to him—he remained unlet for four months because all the applicants had three or four children. His case is the case of hundreds of people who have decent rooms to let for the labouring poor.
The large families these people invariably have not only keep them in grinding poverty all their lives, but the overpopulation floods the labour market and keeps the scale of wages down to starvation point. While supply so enormously exceeds demand, how can any market be in a healthy condition?
Men and women, and boys and girls, all eager for something to do, are to be had by thousands, and labour is at a discount. If the supply diminished, and hands were more in proportion to the work to be done, labour would be at a premium.
We have reached a point when it is absolutely mischievous to ignore this side of the question. It is not only labour that is affected by the rapid increase in the population; half of the vice and half the crime we deplore in these districts is traceable to the same cause. Did I wish to imitate the French writer and plunge the reader to his eyes in horror, I might tell how the lack of employment brings mere children in these districts into the streets—how girls of eleven and twelve are forced into sin by their wretched parents as the last desperate means of that self-preservation which we are told is the first law of nature. And as the girls in evil times sin at first for bread to eat, so the boys begin to thieve; and we are brought face to face with the fact that we have in our midst vast human warrens, which are simply places where thieves and wantons are bred, and poverty and crime increase and multiply together.
I have no desire to argue a vexed question or engage in a controversy on a subject which requires the most delicate handling, but no one who has actual experience of outcast London can keep this one great cause of the teeming misery and vice entirely out of sight. What the remedy for it may be it is no part of my purpose to discuss, but here again I believe that the great hope is in the new race that is coming to replace the old. The next generation will be more cultured, more intellectual, and more refined; mental faculties will be exercised which have been dormant in the poor of to-day, and as we increase in civilization so shall we decrease in numbers. Education will make even the lowest of our citizens something better than they are at present—mere animal reproducers of their species.
In the meantime, while we are waiting for that good day to dawn, we can be helping it on. If we begin our task by catering at once for the most hopeful class we can find, we shall make a distinct step in advance. Weed out the slums by degrees—encourage the most decent among the workers first, and get down to the lower strata step by step. Leave the poor wretches who are impossible in any but rookeries a rookery or two to finish their careers in. Encourage everything that will keep their rents down, and encourage everything that will give labour a better return. If the process of elimination is gradual, we shall in time improve the condition of all who are not beyond help. As for the rest, they will solve the riddle in time for themselves by dying off, and leaving the ground free for the well-paid, well-educated, healthy labourer, with two little children and a contented mind, who is the dream of the modern social reformer.