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.
PART 2.–DELIVERANCE.
CHAPTER 1. A STUPENDOUS UNDERTAKING.
Such, then, is a brief and hurried survey of Darkest England, and those who have been in the depths of the enchanted forest in which wander the tribes of the despairing Lost will be the first to admit that I have in no way exaggerated its horrors, while most will assert that I have under-estimated the number of its denizens. I have, indeed, very scrupulously striven to keep my estimates of the extent of the evil within the lines of sobriety. Nothing in such an enterprise as that on which I am entering could worse befall me than to come under the reproach of sensationalism or exaggeration. Most of the evidence upon which I have relied is taken direct from the official statistics supplied by the Government Returns; and as to the rest, I can only say that if my figures are compared with those of any other writer upon this subject, it will be found that my estimates are the lowest. I am not prepared to defend the exact accuracy of my calculations, excepting so far as they constitute the minimum. To those who believe that the numbers of the wretched are far in excess of my figures, I have nothing to say, excepting this, that if the evil is so much greater than I have described, then let your efforts be proportioned to your estimate, not to mine. The great point with each of us is, not how many of the wretched exist to-day, but how few shall there exist in the years that are to come.
The dark and dismal jungle of pauperism, vice, and despair is the inheritance to which we have succeeded from the generations and centuries past, during which wars, insurrections, and internal troubles left our forefathers small leisure to attend to the well-being of the sunken tenth. Now that we have happened upon more fortunate times, let us recognise that we are our brother’s keepers, and set to work, regardless of party distinctions and religious differences, to make this world of ours a little bit more like home for those whom we call our brethren.
The problem, it must be admitted, is by no means a simple one; nor can anyone accuse me in the foregoing pages of having minimised the difficulties which heredity, habit, and surroundings place in the way of its solution, but unless we are prepared to fold our arms in selfish ease and say that nothing can be done, and thereby doom those lost millions to remediless perdition in this world, to say nothing of the next, the problem must be solved in some way. But in what way? That is the question. It may tend, perhaps, to the crystallisation of opinion on this subject if I lay down, with such precision as I can command, what must be the essential elements of any scheme likely to command success.
SECTION I.–THE ESSENTIALS TO SUCCESS.
The first essential that must be borne in mind as governing every Scheme that may be put forward is that it must change the man when it is his character and conduct which constitute the reasons for his failure in the battle of life. No change in circumstances, no revolution in social conditions, can possibly transform the nature of man. Some of the worst men and women in the world, whose names are chronicled by history with a shudder of horror, were those who had all the advantages that wealth, education and station could confer or ambition could attain.
The supreme test of any scheme for benefiting humanity lies in the answer to the question, What does it make of the individual? Does it quicken his conscience, does it soften his heart, does it enlighten his mind, does it, in short, make more of a true man of him, because only by such influences can he be enabled to lead a human life? Among the denizens of Darkest England there are many who have found their way thither by defects of character which would under the most favourable circumstances relegate them to the same position. Hence, unless you can change their character your labour will be lost. You may clothe the drunkard, fill his purse with gold, establish him in a well-furnished home, and in three, or six, or twelve months he will once more be on the Embankment, haunted by delirium tremens, dirty, squalid, and ragged. Hence, in all cases where a man’s own character and defects constitute the reasons for his fall, that character must be changed and that conduct altered if any permanent beneficial results are to be attained. If he is a drunkard, he must be made sober; if idle, he must be made industrious; if criminal, he must be made honest; if impure, he must be made clean; and if he be so deep down in vice, and has been there so long that he has lost all heart, and hope, and power to help himself, and absolutely refuses to move, he must be inspired with hope and have created within him the ambition to rise; otherwise he will never get out of the horrible pit.
Secondly: The remedy, to be effectual, must change the circumstances of the individual when they are the cause of his wretched condition, and lie beyond his control. Among those who have arrived at their present evil plight through faults of self-indulgence or some defect in their moral character, how many are there who would have been very differently placed to-day had their surroundings been otherwise? Charles Kingsley puts this very abruptly where he makes the Poacher’s widow say, when addressing the Bad Squire, who drew back
“Our daughters, with base–born babies, Have wandered away in their shame.
If your misses had slept, Squire, where they did, Your misses might do the same.’
Placed in the same or similar circumstances, how many of us would have turned out better than this poor, lapsed, sunken multitude?
Many of this crowd have never had a chance of doing better; they have been born in a poisoned atmosphere, educated in circumstances which have rendered modesty an impossibility, and have been thrown into life in conditions which make vice a second nature. Hence, to provide an effective remedy for the evils which we are deploring these circumstances must be altered, and unless my Scheme effects such a change, it will be of no use. There are multitudes, myriads, of men and women, who are floundering in the horrible quagmire beneath the burden of a load too heavy for them to bear; every plunge they take forward lands them deeper; some have ceased even to struggle, and lie prone in the filthy bog, slowly suffocating, with their manhood and womanhood all but perished. It is no use standing on the firm bank of the quaking morass and anathematising these poor wretches; if you are to do them any good, you must give them another chance to get on their feet, you must give them firm foothold upon which they can once more stand upright, and you must build stepping-stones across the bog to enable them safely to reach the other side. Favourable circumstances will not change a man’s heart or transform his nature, but unpropitious circumstances may render it absolutely impossible for him to escape, no matter how he may desire to extricate himself. The first step with these helpless, sunken creatures is to create the desire to escape, and then provide the means for doing so. In other words, give the man another chance.
Thirdly: Any remedy worthy of consideration must be on a scale commensurate with the evil with which it proposes to deal. It is no use trying to bail out the ocean with a pint pot. This evil is one whose victims are counted by the million. The army of the Lost in our midst exceeds the numbers of that multitudinous host which Xerxes led from Asia to attempt the conquest of Greece. Pass in parade those who make up the submerged tenth, count the paupers indoor and outdoor, the homeless, the starving, the criminals, the lunatics, the drunkards, and the harlots–and yet do not give way to despair! Even to attempt to save a tithe of this host requires that we should put much more force and fire into our work than has hitherto been exhibited by anyone. There must be no more philanthropic tinkering, as if this vast sea of human misery were contained in the limits of a garden pond.
Fourthly: Not only must the Scheme be large enough, but it must be permanent. That is to say, it must not be merely a spasmodic effort coping with the misery of to-day; it must be established on a durable footing, so as to go on dealing with the misery of tomorrow and the day after, so long as there is misery left in the world with which to grapple.
Fifthly: But while it must be permanent, it must also be immediately practicable. Any Scheme, to be of use, must be capable of being brought into instant operation with beneficial results.
Sixthly: The indirect features of the Scheme must not be such as to produce injury to the persons whom we seek to benefit. Mere charity, for instance, while relieving the pinch of hunger, demoralises the recipient; and whatever the remedy is that we employ, it must be of such a nature as to do good without doing evil at the same time. It is no use conferring sixpennyworth of benefit on a man if, at the same time, we do him a shilling’sworth of harm.
Seventhly: While assisting one class of the community, it must not seriously interfere with the interests of another. In raising one section of the fallen, we must not thereby endanger the safety of those who with difficulty are keeping on their feet.
These are the conditions by which I ask you to test the Scheme I am about to unfold. They are formidable enough, possibly, to deter many from even attempting to do anything. They are not of my making. They are obvious to anyone who looks into the matter. They are the laws which govern the work of the philanthropic reformer, just as the laws of gravitation, of wind and of weather, govern the operations of the engineer. It is no use saying we could build a bridge across the Tay if the wind did not blow, or that we could build a railway across a bog if the quagmire would afford us a solid foundation. The engineer has to take into account the difficulties, and make them his starting point. The wind will blow, therefore the bridge must be made strong enough to resist it. Chat Moss will shake; therefore we must construct a foundation in the very bowels of the bog on which to build our railway. So it is with the social difficulties which confront us. If we act in harmony with these laws we shall triumph; but if we ignore them they will overwhelm us with destruction and cover us with disgrace.
But, difficult as the task may be, it is not one which we can neglect. When Napoleon was compelled to retreat under circumstances which rendered it impossible for him to carry off his sick and wounded, he ordered his doctors to poison every man in the hospital. A general has before now massacred his prisoners rather than allow them to escape. These Lost ones are the Prisoners of Society; they are the Sick and Wounded in our Hospitals. What a shriek would arise from the civilised world if it were proposed to administer to-night to every one of these millions such a dose of morphine that they would sleep to wake no more. But so far as they are concerned, would it not be much less cruel thus to end their life than to allow them to drag on day after day, year after year, in misery, anguish, and despair, driven into vice and hunted into crime, until at last disease harries them into the grave?
I am under no delusion as to the possibility of inaugurating a millennium by my Scheme; but the triumphs of science deal so much with the utilisation of waste material, that I do not despair of something effectual being accomplished in the utilisation of this waste human product. The refuse which was a drug and a curse to our manufacturers, when treated under the hands of the chemist, has been the means of supplying us with dyes rivalling in loveliness and variety the hues of the rainbow. If the alchemy of science can extract beautiful colours from coal tar, cannot Divine alchemy enable us to evolve gladness and brightness out of the agonised hearts and dark, dreary, loveless lives of these doomed myriads? Is it too much to hope that in God’s world God’s children may be able to do something, if they set to work with a will, to carry out a plan of campaign against these great evils which are the nightmare of our existence?
The remedy, it may be, is simpler than some imagine. The key to the enigma may lie closer to our hands than we have any idea of. Many devices have been tried, and many have failed, no doubt; it is only stubborn, reckless perseverance that can hope to succeed; it is well that we recognise this. How many ages did men try to make gunpowder and never succeeded? They would put saltpetre to charcoal, or charcoal to sulphur, or saltpetre to sulphur, and so were ever unable to make the compound explode. But it has only been discovered within the last few hundred years that all three were needed. Before that gunpowder was a mere imagination, a phantasy of the alchemists. How easy it is to make gunpowder, now the secret of its manufacture is known!
But take a simpler illustration, one which lies even within the memory of some that read these pages. From the beginning of the world down to the beginning of this century, mankind had not found out, with all its striving after cheap and easy transport, the miraculous difference that would be brought about by laying down two parallel lines of metal. All the great men and the wise men of the past lived and died oblivious of that fact. The greatest mechanicians and engineers of antiquity, the men who bridged all the rivers of Europe, the architects who built the cathedrals which are still the wonder of the world, failed to discern what seems to us so obviously simple a proposition, that two parallel lines of rail would diminish the cost and difficulty of transport to a minimum. Without that discovery the steam engine, which has itself been an invention of quite recent years, would have failed to transform civilisation.
What we have to do in the philanthropic sphere is to find something analogous to the engineers’ parallel bars. This discovery think I have made, and hence have I written this book.
SECTION 2–MY SCHEME
What, then, is my Scheme? It is a very simple one, although in its ramifications and extensions it embraces the whole world. In this book I profess to do no more than to merely outline, as plainly and as simply as I can, the fundamental features of my proposals. I propose to devote the bulk of this volume to setting forth what can practically be done with one of the most pressing parts of the problem, namely, that relating to those who are out of work, and who, as the result, are more or less destitute. I have many ideas of what might be done with those who are at present cared for in some measure by the State, but I will leave these ideas for the present.
It is not urgent that I should explain how our Poor Law system could be reformed, or what I should like to see done for the Lunatics in Asylums, or the Criminals in Gaols. The persons who are provided for by the State we will, therefore, for the moment, leave out of count. The indoor paupers, the convicts, the inmates of the lunatic asylums are cared for, in a fashion; already. But, over and above all these, there exists some hundreds of thousands who are not quartered on the State, but who are living on the verge of despair, and who at any moment, under circumstances of misfortune, might be compelled to demand relief or support in one shape or another. I will confine myself, therefore, for the present to those who have no helper.
It is possible, I think probable, if the proposals which I am now putting forward are carried out successfully in relation to the lost, homeless, and helpless of the population, that many of those who are at the present moment in somewhat better circumstances will demand that they also shall be allowed to partake in the benefits of the Scheme. But upon this, also, I remain silent. I merely remark that we have, in the recognition of the importance of discipline and organisation; what may be called regimented co-operation, a principle that will be found valuable for solving many social problems other than that of destitution. Of these plans, which are at present being brooded over with a view to their realisation when the time is propitious and the opportunity occurs, I shall have something to say.
What is the outward and visible form of the Problem of the Unemployed? Alas! we are all too familiar with it for any lengthy description to be necessary. The social problem presents itself before us whenever a hungry, dirty and ragged man stands at our door asking if we can give him a crust or a job. That is the social question. What are you to do with that man? He has no money in his pocket, all that he can pawn he has pawned long ago, his stomach is as empty as his purse, and the whole of the clothes upon his back, even if sold on the best terms, would not fetch a shilling. There he stands, your brother, with sixpennyworth of rags to cover his nakedness from his fellow men and not sixpennyworth of victuals within his reach. He asks for work, which he will set to even on his empty stomach and in his ragged uniform, if so be that you will give him something for it, but his hands are idle, for no one employs him. What are you to do with that man? That is the great note of interrogation that confronts Society to-day. Not only in overcrowded England, but in newer countries beyond the sea, where Society has not yet provided a means by which the men can be put upon the land and the land be made to feed the men. To deal with this man is the Problem of the Unemployed. To deal with him effectively you must deal with him immediately, you must provide him in some way or other at once with food, and shelter, and warmth. Next you must find him something to do, something that will test the reality of his desire to work. This test must be more or less temporary, and should be of such a nature as to prepare him for making a permanent livelihood. Then, having trained him, you must provide him wherewithal to start life afresh. All these things I propose to do. My Scheme divides itself into three sections, each of which is indispensable for the success of the whole. In this three-fold organisation lies the open secret of the solution of the Social Problem.
The Scheme I have to offer consists in the formation of these people into self-helping and self-sustaining communities, each being a kind of co-operative society, or patriarchal family, governed and disciplined on the principles which have already proved so effective in the Salvation Army.
These communities we will call, for want of a better term, Colonies. There will be: —
(1) The City Colony.
(2) The Farm Colony.
(3) The Over-Sea Colony.
THE CITY COLONY.
By the City Colony is meant the establishment, in the very centre of the ocean of misery of which we have been speaking, of a number of Institutions to act as Harbours of Refuge for all and any who have been shipwrecked in life, character, or circumstances. These Harbours will gather up the poor destitute creatures, supply their immediate pressing necessities, furnish temporary employment, inspire them with hope for the future, and commence at once a course of regeneration by moral and religious influences.
From these Institutions, which are hereafter described, numbers would, after a short time, be floated off to permanent employment, or sent home to friends happy to receive them on hearing of their reformation. All who remain on our hands would, by varied means, be tested as to their sincerity, industry, and honesty, and as soon as satisfaction was created, be passed on to the Colony of the second class.
THE FARM COLONY.
This would consist of a settlement of the Colonists on an estate in the provinces, in the culture of which they would find employment and obtain support. As the race from the Country to the City has been the cause of much of the distress we have to battle with, we propose to find a substantial part of our remedy by transferring these same people back to the country, that is back again to “the Garden!”
Here the process of reformation of character would be carried forward by the same industrial, moral, and religious methods as have already been commenced in the City, especially including those forms of labour and that knowledge of agriculture which, should the Colonist not obtain employment in this country, will qualify him for pursuing his fortunes under more favourable circumstances in some other land.
From the Farm, as from the City, there can be no question that large numbers, resuscitated in health and character, would be restored to friends up and down the country. Some would find employment in their own callings, others would settle in cottages on a small piece of land that we should provide, or on Co-operative Farms which we intend to promote; while the great bulk, after trial and training, would be passed on to the Foreign Settlement, which would constitute our third class, namely The Over-Sea Colony.
THE OVER-SEA COLONY.
All who have given attention to the subject are agreed that in our Colonies in South Africa, Canada, Western Australia and elsewhere, there are millions of acres of useful land to be obtained almost for the asking, capable of supporting our surplus population in health and comfort, were it a thousand times greater than it is. We propose to secure a tract of land in one of these countries, prepare it for settlement, establish in it authority, govern it by equitable laws, assist it in times of necessity, settling it gradually with a prepared people, and so create a home for these destitute multitudes.
The Scheme, in its entirety, may aptly be compared to A Great Machine, foundationed in the lowest slums and purlieus of our great towns and cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and destitute of all classes; receiving thieves, harlots, paupers, drunkards, prodigals, all alike, on the simple conditions of their being willing to work and to conform to discipline. Drawing up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth; teaching them methods by which alike the bread that perishes and that which endures to Everlasting Life can be won. Forwarding them from the City to the Country, and there continuing the process of regeneration, and then pouring them forth on to the virgin soils that await their coming in other lands, keeping hold of them with a strong government, and yet making them free men and women; and so laying the foundations, perchance, of another Empire to swell to vast proportions in later times. Why not?
CHAPTER 2. TO THE RESCUE!–THE CITY COLONY.
The first section of my Scheme is the establishment of a Receiving House for the Destitute in every great centre of population. We start, let us remember, from the individual, the ragged, hungry, penniless man who confronts us with despairing demands for food, shelter, and work. Now, I have had some two or three years’ experience in dealing with this class. I believe, at the present moment, the Salvation Army supplies more food and shelter to the destitute than any other organisation in London, and it is the experience and encouragement which I have gained in the working of these Food and Shelter Depots which has largely encouraged me to propound this scheme.
SECTION 1.–FOOD AND SHELTER FOR EVERY MAN.
As I rode through Canada and the United States some three years ago, I was greatly impressed with the superabundance of food which I saw at every turn. Oh, how I longed that the poor starving people, and the hungry children of the East of London and of other centres of our destitute populations, should come into the midst of this abundance, but as it appeared impossible for me to take them to it, I secretly resolved that I would endeavour to bring some of it to them. I am thankful to say that I have already been able to do so on a small scale, and hope to accomplish it ere long on a much vaster one.
With this view, the first Cheap Food Depot was opened in the East of London two and a half years ago. This has been followed by others, and we have now three establishments: others are being arranged for.
Since the commencement in 1888, we have supplied over three and a half million meals. Some idea can be formed of the extent to which these Food and Shelter Depots have already struck their roots into the strata of Society which it is proposed to benefit, by the following figures, which give the quantities of food sold during the year at our Food Depots.
FOOD SOLD IN DEPOTS AND SHELTERS DURING 1889.
Article Weight Measure Remarks Soup ……… 116,400 gallons Bread 192.5 tons 106,964 4-lb loaves Tea 2.5 tons 46,980 gallons
Coffee 15 cwt. 13,949 gallons Cocoa 6 tons 29,229 gallons
Sugar 25 tons ………………… 300 bags Potatoes 140 tons ………………… 2,800 bags Flour 18 tons ………………… 180 sacks Peaflour 28.5 tons ………………… 288 sacks Oatmeal 3.5 tons ………………… 36 sacks Rice 12 tons ………………… 120 sacks Beans 12 tons ………………… 240 sacks Onions and parsnips 12 tons ………………… 240 sacks Jam 9 tons ………………… 2,880 jars Marmalade 6 tons ………………… 1,920 jars Meat 15 tons ………………… Milk ………. 14,300 quarts
This includes returns from three Food Depots and five Shelters. I propose to multiply their number, to develop their usefulness, and to make them the threshold of the whole Scheme. Those who have already visited our Depots will understand exactly what th is means. The majority, however, of the readers of these pages have not done so, and for them it is necessary to explain what they are.
At each of our Depots, which can be seen by anybody that cares to take the trouble to visit them, there are two departments, one dealing with food, the other with shelter. Of these both are worked together and minister to the same individuals. Many come for food who do not come for shelter, although most of those who come for shelter also come for food, which is sold on terms to cover, as nearly as possible, the cost price and working expenses of the establishment. In this our Food Depots differ from the ordinary soup kitchens.
There is no gratuitous distribution of victuals. The following is our Price List: —
WHAT IS SOLD AT THE FOOD DEPOTS.
For a child
Soup Per Basin 1/4d
Soup With Bread 1/2d
Coffee or Cocoa per cup 1/4d
Coffee or Cocoa With Bread and Jam 1/2d
For adults
Soup .. .. .. Per Basin 1/2d
Soup .. .. .. With Bread 1d
Potatoes .. .. .. .. .. 1/2d
Cabbage .. .. .. .. .. 1/2d
Haricot Beans .. .. .. .. 1/2d
Boiled Jam Pudding .. .. .. 1/2d Boiled Plum Pudding .. .. Each 1d
Rice .. .. .. .. .. .. 1/2d
Baked Plum .. .. .. .. 1/2d
Baked Jam Roll .. .. .. .. 1/2d
Meat Pudding and Potatoes .. .. 3d Corned Beef .. .. .. .. 2d
Corned Mutton .. .. .. .. 2d
Coffee per cup 1/2d; per mug 1d
Cocoa per cup 1/2d; per mug 1d
Tea per cup 1/2d; per mug 1d
Bread & Butter, Jam or Marmalade per slice 1/2d
Soup in own Jugs, 1d per Quart. Ready at 10 a.m.
A certain discretionary power is vested in the Officers in charge of the Depot, and they can in very urgent cases give relief, but the rule is for the food to be paid for, and the financial results show that working expenses are just about covered.
These Cheap Food Depots I have no doubt have been and are or great service to numbers of hungry starving men, women, and children, at the prices just named, which must be within the reach of all, except the absolutely penniless; but it is the Shelter that I regard as the most useful feature in this part of our undertaking, for if anything is to be done to get hold of those who use the Depot, some more favourable opportunity must be afforded than is offered by the mere coming into the food store to get, perhaps, only a basin of soup. This part of the Scheme I propose to extend very considerably.
Suppose that you are a casual in the streets of London, homeless, friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding none. Night comes on. Where are you to go? You have perhaps only a few coppers, or it may be, a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air; you equally shrink from going to the fourpenny Dosshouse where, in the midst of strange and ribald company, you may be robbed of the remnant of the money still in your possession. While at a loss as to what to do, someone who sees you suggests that you should go to our Shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the Casual Ward of the Workhouse as long as you have any money in your possession. You come along to one of our Shelters. On entering you pay fourpence, and are free of the establishment for the night. You can come in early or late. The company begins to assemble about five o’clock in the afternoon. In the women’s Shelter you find that many come much earlier and sit sewing, reading or chatting in the sparely furnished but well warmed room from the early hours of the afternoon until bedtime.
You come in, and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and a hunk of bread. You can go into the wash-house, where you can have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels free. Then after having washed and eaten you can make yourself comfortable. You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing. At eight o’clock the Shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern. Two or three hundred men in the men’s Shelter, or as many women in the women’s Shelter, are collected together, most of them strange to each other, in a large room. They are all wretchedly poor–what are you to do with them? This is what we do with them.
We hold a rousing Salvation meeting. The Officer in charge of the Depot, assisted by detachments from the Training Homes, conducts a jovial free-and-easy social evening. The girls have their banjos and their tambourines, and for a couple of hours you have as lively a meeting as you will find in London. There is prayer, short and to the point; there are addresses, some delivered by the leaders of the meeting, but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been saved at previous meetings, and who, rising in their seats, tell their companions their experiences. Strange experiences they often are of those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice and misery, but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand, and who are, as they say in all sincerity, “as happy as the day is long.” There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these meetings which is refreshing to the soul. There are all sorts and conditions of men; casuals, gaol birds, Out-of-Works, who have come there for the first time, and who find men who last week or last month were even as they themselves are now–still poor but rejoicing in a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of their being no longer outcasts and forlorn in this wide world. There are men who have at last seen revive before them a hope of escaping from that dreadful vortex, into which their sins and misfortunes had drawn them, and being restored to those comforts that they had feared so long were gone for ever; nay, of rising to live a true and Godly life. These tell their mates how this has come about, and urge all who hear them to try for themselves and see whether it is not a good and happy thing to be soundly saved. In the intervals of testimony–and these testimonies, as every one will bear me witness who has ever attended any of our meetings, are not long, sanctimonious lackadaisical speeches, but simple confessions of individual experience–there are bursts of hearty melody. The conductor of the meeting will start up a verse or two of a hymn illustrative of the experiences mentioned by the last speaker, or one of the girls from the Training Home will sing a solo, accompanying herself on her instrument, while all join in a rattling and rollicking chorus.
There is no compulsion upon anyone of our dossers to take part in this meeting; they do not need to come in until it is over; but as a simple matter of fact they do come in. Any night between eight and ten o’clock you will find these people sitting there, listening to the exhortations and taking part in the singing, many of them, no doubt, unsympathetic enough, but nevertheless preferring to be present with the music and the warmth, mildly stirred, if only by curiosity, as the various testimonies are delivered.
Sometimes these testimonies are enough to rouse the most cynical of observers. We had at one of our shelters the captain of an ocean steamer, who had sunk to the depths of destitution through strong drink. He came in there one night utterly desperate and was taken in hand by our people–and with us taking in hand is no mere phrase, for at the close of our meetings our officers go from seat to seat, and if they see anyone who shows signs of being affected by the speeches or the singing, at once sit down beside him and begin to labour with him for the salvation of his soul. By this means they are able to get hold of the men and to know exactly where the difficulty lies, what the trouble is, and if they do nothing else, at least succeed in convincing them that there is someone who cares for their soul and would do what he could to lend them a helping hand.
The captain of whom I was speaking was got hold of in this way. He was deeply impressed, and was induced to abandon once and for all his habits of intemperance. From that meeting he went an altered man. He regained his position in the merchant service, and twelve months afterwards astonished us all by appearing in the uniform of a captain of a large ocean steamer, to testify to those who were there how low he had been, how utterly he had lost all hold on Society and all hope of the future, when, fortunately led to the Shelter, he found friends, counsel, and salvation, and from that time had never rested until he had regained the position which he had forfeited by his intemperance.
The meeting over, the singing girls go back to the Training Home, and the men prepare for bed. Our sleeping arrangements are somewhat primitive; we do not provide feather beds, and when you go into our dormitories, you will be surprised to find the floor covered by what look like an endless array of packing cases. These are our beds, and each of them forms a cubicle. There is a mattress laid on the floor, and over the mattress a leather apron, which is all the bedclothes that we find it possible to provide. The men undress, each by the side of his packing box, and go to sleep under their leather covering. The dormitory is warmed with hot water pipes to a temperature of 60 degrees, and there has never been any complaint of lack of warmth on the part of those who use the Shelter. The leather can be kept perfectly clean, and the mattresses, covered with American cloth, are carefully inspected every day, so that no stray specimen of vermin may be left in the place. The men turn in about ten o’clock and sleep until six. We have never any disturbances of any kind in the Shelters. We have provided accommodation now for several thousand of the most helplessly broken-down men in London, criminals many of them, mendicants, tramps, those who are among the filth and offscouring of all things; but such is the influence that is established by the meeting and the moral ascendancy of our officers themselves, that we have never had a fight on the premises, and very seldom do we ever hear an oath or an obscene word. Sometimes there has been trouble outside the Shelter, when men insisted upon coming in drunk or were otherwise violent; but once let them come to the Shelter, and get into the swing of the concern, and we have no trouble with them. In the morning they get up and have their breakfast and, after a short service, go off their various ways. We find that we can do this, that is to say, we can provide coffee and bread for breakfast and for supper, and a shake-down on the floor in the packing-boxes I have described in a warm dormitory for fourpence a head.
I propose to develop these Shelters, so as to afford every man a locker, in which he could store any little valuables that he may possess. I would also allow him the use of a boiler in the washhouse with a hot drying oven, so that he could wash his shirt over night and have it returned to him dry in the morning. Only those who have had practical experience of the difficulty of seeking for work in London can appreciate the advantages of the opportunity to get your shirt washed in this way–if you have one. In Trafalgar Square, in 1887, there were few things that scandalised the public more than the spectacle of the poor people camped in the Square, washing their shirts in the early morning at the fountains. If you talk to any men who have been on the road for a lengthened period they will tell you that nothing hurts their self-respect more or stands more fatally in the way of their getting a job than the impossibility of getting their little things done up and clean.
In our poor man’s “Home” everyone could at least keep himself clean and have a clean shirt to his back, in a plain way, no doubt; but still not less effective than if he were to be put up at one of the West End hotels, and would be able to secure anyway the necessaries of life while being passed on to something far better. This is the first step.
SOME SHELTER TROPHIES.
Of the practical results which have followed our methods of dealing with the outcasts who take shelter with us we have many striking examples. Here are a few, each of them a transcript of a life experience relating to men who are now active, industrious members of the community upon which but for the agency of these Depots they would have been preying to this day.
A.S.–Born in Glasgow, 1825. Saved at Clerkenwell, May 19, 1889. Poor parents raised in a Glasgow Slum. Was thrown on the streets at seven years of age, became the companion and associate of thieves, and drifted into crime. The following are his terms of imprisonment: — 14 days, 30 days, 30 days. 60 days, 60 days (three times in succession), 4 months, 6 months (twice), 9 months, 18 months, 2 years, 6 years, 7 years (twice), 14 years; 40 years 3 months and 6 days in the aggregate. Was flogged for violent conduct in gaol 8 times.
W. M. (“Buff”).–Born in Deptford, 1864, saved at Clerkenwell, March 31st, 1889. His father was an old Navy man, and earned a decent living as manager. Was sober, respectable, and trustworthy. Mother was a disreputable drunken slattern: a curse and disgrace to husband and family. The home was broken up, and little Buff was given over to the evil influences of his depraved mother. His 7th birthday present from his admiring parent was a “quarten o’gin.” He got some education at the One Tun Alley Ragged School, but when nine years old was caught apple stealing, and sent to the industrial School at Ilford for 7 years. Discharged at the end of his term, he drifted to the streets, the casual wards, and Metropolitan gaols, every one of whose interiors he is familiar with. He became a ringleader of a gang that infested London; a thorough mendicant and ne’er-do-well; a pest to society. Naturally he is a born leader, and one of those spirits that command a following; consequently, when he got Salvation, the major part of his following came after him to the Shelter, and eventually to God. His character since conversion has been altogether satisfactory, and he