Desirability of better pay to the underpaid—Report of Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration—Its hopeful side—No degenerate class—Physical and mental effects of poverty on the individual—The better paid artisan—Conclusion.

If, then, without seriously diminishing the trade of the country or the volume of employment, it is possible gradually to raise the wage of all ill paid workers to a level that will allow them something like a civilised existence, how desirable and how urgent is legislation that will bring about this result. No person, indeed, disputes the desirability of the change; the only point in question is its feasibility. To prove that the change is feasible and is impossible to be effected except by law has been the whole purpose of this volume. Now, in these last pages, it may be permissible to glance at the immense gain to the nation that would arise from a general increase in the pay of such British workers as are now grossly underpaid.

Physically, no person familiar with the poorer quarters of any industrial district can doubt that such workers are suffering seriously. The whole report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration is little more than a report of the results of extreme poverty. Amid the accumulation of melancholy facts, however, is to be found evidence of a most hopeful kind. In our own country, at least, its seems to be true that the physical deterioration which comes of poverty (as distinguished from that which comes of vice) is rather personal than hereditary, and that the starved child will regain health and normality amid better conditions; so that even in a single generation any group of British people suffering from the effects of poverty may be restored to the average standard of the race if properly fed, properly clothed, properly housed, not overworked, and allowed plenty of air. The higher death rate, the inferior physique, the poorer vitality of the ill paid mark tendencies not inborn but acquired, all of which might and would disappear with the diminution of poverty and of that ignorance which is one outcome of poverty, and also, by reaction, one of the contributory causes of poverty. Degeneracy exists; but not a degenerate class; the class which we sometimes call degenerate is, as a class, merely starved. In short all that waste of human life, of human energy and of human happiness which is going on daily around us and is causing to the country a daily loss heavier than that of any campaign, is neither inevitable nor incurable. This misery might be sensibly diminished within three years, and might be ended within the lifetime of children already born.

Nor is it the body alone that suffers the deterioration of poverty. The underfed brain too, remains stunted; and to be constantly hungry is to be constantly apathetic. Lassitude, inertia, the mental dulness that knows no pleasure except of the senses, no personal initiative and no activity save in response to external stimulus, these are the characteristics of the adult whose childhood has been passed in overcrowded rooms, whose food has been insufficient, his clothing inadequate, and to whom no wider horizons have ever been opened. Such an individual knows nothing of the real joys of life; he is a valueless citizen, consuming more than he produces, a poor worker, and even when not personally vicious, an influence rather towards degradation than towards progress.

But taken early enough and fed, clothed and housed like the children of the better paid artisan, the same man might have become healthy of body and alert of mind; a reader of books, a player of outdoor games, a skilled craftsman taking delight in his good work, a citizen rendering intelligent public service, a parent of healthy hopeful children, enjoying and creating prosperity. There are hundreds of such men among the superior artisans of this country. It has been my lot to know many of them, and it is my belief that on the whole they and their families form the happiest, the most valuable and the best conducted portion of our nation. To bring up into that class those compatriots of theirs and ours who now, by no fault of their own, suffer not only the privations but also the degradations of extreme poverty is no impossible feat, and would be the greatest possible of national services. Happily there are signs of a growing public desire to remedy the appalling evils vaguely summarised under the word “sweating,” and of a growing inclination to seek the remedy along the lines of endeavour marked out by our colonial brethren.

In the earnest hope that such an endeavour may be made, quickly, yet not hastily, by the law of Great Britain, and that these chapters may as soon as possible become out of date, I offer to my fellow countrymen the conclusions gradually shaped in my own mind by nearly twenty years of work among industrial problems.