Glimpses into the Abyss Part 20

[147] See p. 26.

[148] See p. 31.

[149] See p. 29.

[150] See p. 41.

[151] See p. 19.

CHAPTER IX.

VAGRANCY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.

If you stand, in the clear fresh dawn of an early summer morning, on a hill-top in the northern country where I live, and look towards the dawn, you see outspread before you a wide stretch of bare green hills, intersected by the dark stone lines of fields. Your eye follows caressingly each dip and fold of the bosom of Mother Earth, beautiful in bareness, the outline clear against the sky. In each nook and hollow lie grey patches, clumps of stone houses, witnesses to human habitation, and blue spires of smoke ascend revealing the hidden lights of homes. From each group arises the tall spire of a mill chimney, not yet belching smoke, and in the valley cl.u.s.ter the giant mills of to-day, each larger than his brother. As the eye takes in each feature, the mind can by a "bird's-eye view" reconstruct history. There far away is the hill top whereon our Celtic forefathers worshipped when all the British were rude dwellers on hills and in dales--_Short shrift to the vagrant of another tribe in those days!_ There, over yonder hill, lies a Roman camp, to which leads an old Roman road, civilisation was imposed on barbarism; now roads intersect the landscape on every side. With communication comes travel, and the vagrant becomes possible. But _vagrancy is not a problem of unsettled and warlike times_.

On yonder hillsides, if the snow lay thinly on them, you could trace even now by disused furrows the patches of arable land, amid fields for pasture, lying round each little clump of houses, speaking of the day of village communities and communal rights. Between the scattered hamlets lay wide stretches of moor. There would then exist survivals of the past savagery, nomads living a wild life like gipsies; or the marks of the new era, pilgrims bound to shrines making use of the roads, roving soldiers, travelling merchants, here and there a vagrant, made so probably by crime, slipping out of his place in society, but _with all the wide stretches of country between villages to choose from if he would_. Such a man, an involuntary vagrant, was looked on with suspicion, his hand against every man. Bands might gather and live in the forests, like Robin Hood and his merry men.

But yet again, you may watch in thought the spread of those grey lines which speak of ownership of the soil. The village sucks in the surrounding country, the very moors become enclosed, _small s.p.a.ce is left for the nomad life_.

Watch! The cl.u.s.tering cottages develop into industrial communities, yonder village bears a name borrowed from Holland, and there still stand the loom cottages empty of looms. Now the landscape is crowded with busy hives of industry, town and country go hand in hand, the farmer and the weaver live side by side or combine the two occupations. Agriculture gives place to pasture for sheep, as wool is needed. The displaced husbandman, after a period of restlessness _in which the vagrant problem first arose_, settles to weaving or kindred industry. None need now wander save by choice, from hereditary nomad taste for liberty, and the bold life of soldier, sailor, or smuggler lies open for such.

But again comes change. The small grey mill rises in the landscape, the cl.u.s.tering village becomes the small town, houses thicken, land grows scarce--what now is to become of the nomad? _He must "take to the road"

for nowhere else is left him._ Society no longer wants him, and barely tolerates him. Hospitality, a virtue of scattered communities, dwindles to--the Tramp Ward!! He must needs, if he would travel, turn to prey on the communities who will not recognise him otherwise. He becomes hawker, tinker, pedlar, beggar and thus in his turn acquires a trade. We might let him survive as an interesting relic of the past, and die a natural death, by the catching and cultivation of his children.

But hark! A sudden noise breaks the stillness of morning. A noise like nothing else on earth, a whistle and a boom combined. It is the "buzzer." The landscape has changed again, and there, the landmark of _the Industrial Revolution_, stands the giant mill; and now comes a rush of human life, clank, clank, clank, the stream of mill-hands in clattering wooden clogs is hastening to work. It is the daily _migration of labour_, the tide morning and night ebbs and flows. Yet no two days will the stream be alike. Accident, sickness, misfortune, or fault, will each day leave some units stranded, and others take their place, and if you look you see another feature in the landscape, a long line of railway stretches as a link for swift travel between town and town. Here is something _altogether new_. These human units, divorced from native communities, cannot be expected to be readily anch.o.r.ed, and accordingly you see around each ancient community and interspersed with it, crowds of workmen's cottages, _each a tent rather than a home_, taken to-day, and left in a month or two. If you could uncover life and watch it as you do an anthill, you would find that it had attained a new and fresh activity. On every side Humanity is becoming organic. Huge conglomerations which we call cities blacken whole stretches of country, and the feature of the life of most men is _daily migration_. By train, tram, or road, tides of humanity move to toil; every holiday sees crowds covering green fields in pleasure parties, or transported by train. The whole of life has grown _migratory_. Is it not evident that we have here not the ancient problem of the _Tramp_, but the _modern_ problem of the _Fluidity of labour_! To expect our Tramp Ward--the _repressive provision of a stationary society_ for the spa.r.s.e survivals of a previous age--to cope with the needs of _Migration of Labour_ is about as reasonable as it would be to expect the ancient windmill to grind corn for our modern population!

Let us examine the new state of things in reference to that citadel of national life--_the home_. I shall place before you the problem in a startling light, if I ask you whether the present Vagrancy problem is not to a large extent _the disintegration of the home_; and whether, therefore, we are not face to face with the root problem on which the very existence of our civilisation depends, since _by the preservation or extinction of the home a nation stands or falls_.

Right down through all the changes but the last, you would have found the population mainly stationary. Even now the existence of local names, so widely spread that you may have fourteen or fifteen families in a small district of the same surname, reveals the remains of the stationary life. But for good or for evil it has gone. Examine any family you like and it will be the exception to find it whole.

Individuals are scattered far and wide when up-grown, perhaps in England, perhaps over the world. Only the stagnating slum population is stationary. And this is not their virtue. If they had a little more initiative they would not stagnate; they form a _pool_ of underfed and ill-paid labour, and const.i.tute by far the largest part of the modern problem of the unemployed. The alert and well-trained workman is _migratory_--at the news of a "better shop" he will be off to another town, with or without wife and family. The young man will desert the country side to try his luck in some great centre--the girl may go to service. We no longer _expect_ families to stay whole. Greater freedom has brought greater travel, and a relaxing of the bonds of parental discipline. Our streets are crowded nightly by the young, on whom the restless activity of our age has taken such effect that they cannot and will not seek sleep till evening is far advanced. The very "day of rest"

is a day of travel.

What is the result of all this increase of migration? The old inn has become the modern hotel, the occasional "apartment to let" has multiplied a thousand-fold, the seaside resort has sprung up with apparatus of pier and promenade, since we must move about even on a holiday. The whole world is on wheels or on a walking tour. But what about the dest.i.tute pedestrian? Is it fair to dub him a _tramp_? Travel he must if he is to live, but truly he is between Scylla and Charybdis.

For, unmoored from home and friends, he has on the one side the tender mercies of the Tramp Ward, which are often cruel, and on the other the horrors of the common lodging-house. Society hustles him hither and thither, throwing him a dole; or offering him a prison, if he ventures to sleep out. He can hardly exist at all, unless he is clever enough to prey on the community; he becomes a bundle of rags, fain to lie all night in a London park, or sleep near a brick-kiln. It is "hard lines."

If he would die out quietly it would be all right for Society; he would not be missed, no one wants him, and this he feels bitterly. But, unfortunately, his cla.s.s, in the absence of any provision of Society for his needs, is constantly being recruited. _It is no longer a question of the suppression of hereditary vagrancy._ The vagrant cla.s.s is microscopic by the side of the _stranded inefficient labourer_, who recruits the necessarily migratory cla.s.s of the "unemployed." Unless Society will take into account this new factor, it will be the worse for Society. For _every member of a community who is not living a wholesome life is a danger to it_, and the increase and propagation of an underfed, ill-bred, uneducated offspring is the menace of civilisation.

Let me sound the alarm note as loud as I can, for already evil has gone far. While we have been elaborating costly tramp wards, erecting baths and stoving apparatus, and frightening the genuine tramp away, common lodging-houses have been increasing on every side. The following is the testimony of the Rev. Arthur Dale, of Manchester, and it is not one whit exaggerated:--"The men who habitually live there are almost universally morally bad. Many are married, but have left their wives and families; nearly all are the victims of drink. A few, but very few, are honest.

Some are idle, and profess their inability to get up early enough to go to work. Some will work for a day or two and then 'slack.' There are large numbers out of work simply for this cause. Fornication and gambling are both practised largely."[152] Yet in every large town these men are now counted by hundreds, sometimes by thousands, every night.

Has not the disintegration of the home proceeded very far? For, by common experience, prosecutions for child maintenance and separation orders as between husband and wife are granted daily, and with terrible facility the marriage bond is practically annulled, and yet the individual is not freed. What is the consequence? The man removes to another town and lives in nominal celibacy. Vice and idleness may make him a _tramp_. He can no longer have a home; for if he takes a partner and rears children they have all the fatal taint of illegitimacy, they will not respect or obey him. The whole of our lower working cla.s.s is thus becoming leavened with immorality. And what about the woman? The life and death of our nation depends on an awakening to the gravity of the menace that threatens the true home on every side. An unstable society has brought about fear. People fear to fall out of employment and be thrust down into the abyss, and hence the custom of _limitation of family_, with all its consequences, is spreading to the upper stratum of the working cla.s.ses. I cannot recall any one of the many respectable young couples I have known married during the last sixteen years with a large family of living children. Fear has also _postponed marriage_, except in the improvident. Many spend the flower of their youth in gathering for a home. The improvident alone rush to marriage as boys and girls, and rear an unhealthy offspring, to whom they can never teach self-control.

Hence to the _male_ vagrant problem is added the corresponding half, the _female_. Since the balance of the s.e.xes is in England already against women, _what becomes of those who in our large towns correspond to the hundreds or thousands of men who live in lodging-houses or lodgings, homeless_? The answer has been becoming ever more plain to me, but it has only been demonstrated by personal suffering. I could not have believed had I not seen. Our streets contain an army of prost.i.tutes, and there has arisen over against the male problem a vast female problem with which our increasing Homes and Refuges and Shelters are unable to cope. _The correlative of the male wanderer is the female prost.i.tute._ A woman must "get her living," and she does it "on the streets." The man who should support her honourably as a wife is himself a wanderer, afraid to incur family ties, but bound by no wholesome home influence to self-restraint. In 1904 I spent three nights in so-called respectable female lodging-houses.[153] They contained between them close on a hundred women, and, with few exceptions, they were all living by prost.i.tution. The hour when a decent woman retires found almost all perambulating the streets. No rest was possible till the early morning, as at all hours they were admitted, many of them drunk. Those not admitted spent the night in hotels, or in some of those "furnished rooms for married couples," which are multiplying in districts near common lodging-houses with fatal rapidity.

Men and women are making fortunes out of this state of things. To my knowledge, a man who was a barman is said now to own sixteen _lodging-houses_, and a cobbler has risen to be proprietor of lodgings for 600 and _two public-houses_. A man can rent a house at 4_s_., and get a little furniture in, and can then let _each room_ for more than the house-rent per week. To places like this drift many young men or women who are stranded far away from home. A girl gets out of a situation; she seeks a women's lodging-house, and if she enters one where the management connives or winks at vice, in three weeks, or less, she may be manufactured into a full-blown prost.i.tute. This state of things is such as should shock every right-thinking English man and woman. In one street in a northern town a young man of eighteen, fresh from home, who was with a companion who unfortunately "knew too much,"

pa.s.sed in a short walk seventy-five prost.i.tutes. With these problems on our hands in such magnitude, can we stop to tinker at our Tramp Ward and ask if we are to amend it by giving coffee instead of gruel? The wonder is that any one seeks it; that it is used at all shows the stern pressure of dest.i.tution more than anything else. For, as I have stated, and must state repeatedly, the Tramp Ward is itself a factor in national degradation, the mockery of a provision for need; meaning often semi-starvation, weary toil and unrest. A man or woman _must_ emerge from it more unfit for toil, and learn to avoid such a place if possible in future. The tramp uses it as an occasional disinfectant; the genuine working man or woman who is stranded may be forced into it temporarily and learn to be a _tramp_. Mr. Long recently stated that not more than 25 per cent. of the vagrants of the country were in any way within reach of the Local Government Board. The remainder were not paupers, for somehow or other they got a living for themselves. I believe his percentage is too high, owing to the number who simply _sample_ a Tramp Ward and never again enter it. A recent census in Lancashire revealed that out of 936 persons reported only thirty-three were habitual vagrants.[154] Why should they go there? A man who "keeps" (?) a woman can live in idleness on the produce of her industry or sin; a woman can live "on the streets." This has a great deal to do with two features of present-day life--the number of incorrigibly idle, worthless men, who apparently can exist to loaf and drink, side by side with _the deplorable increase of drunkenness among women_.

I am convinced that many of the lower public-houses simply play into the hands of the harlot, and that the marked development of the public-house is due to the homelessness of our people. Alderman Thompson has pointed out in "The Housing Handbook" the existence of a universal house famine.

He says: "Putting the case in its simplest form, we find, in the first place, that if every room, good and bad, occupied or unoccupied, in all the workmen's dwellings in the country be reckoned as existing accommodation, there are not enough _of any sort_ to house the working population without unhealthy overcrowding.... In the second place, we find that, so far from new rooms being built in sufficient quant.i.ties to make up the deficiency, there is a distinct lessening in the rate of increase" ("Housing Handbook," W. Thompson, pp. 1-2). This _total_ overcrowding accounts for the pressure on Shelters and common lodging-houses and tramp wards. Numbers in London are _refused admission_ to tramp wards; numbers sleep out.[155] Inevitably the cla.s.s that can pay least, or cannot pay at all, will be crowded out, if house accommodation is scanty, and this will especially be the case with the migrating "out-of-work" who has no particular claim on any one. Even if he has money in his pocket, it is difficult to say whether he is not in as grave danger, moral and sanitary, if forced to be a lodger in some already overcrowded home, as if forced into the common lodging-house.

Like a sponge, a slum neighbourhood sucks up by overcrowding in winter those who in summer obtain varied occupation far and wide. Is it any wonder that the children of such overcrowded homes, deprived of the joys of nature, succ.u.mb to the attractions of the brilliantly lighted street?

If the predatory female nightly angles there, in all the attraction of her tawdry finery; if large numbers of men, divorced from home ties, are there to be angled for, and money can freely be obtained, the customary "drink" being proffered; what wonder if the home itself becomes insipid, if the husband seeks the flaring and enticing public-house or not less fatal club, and the wife seeks _him_--or some other man--in the same places, while the children, never at home if they can help it (for home means unpleasantness, or inconvenient toil), walk out with one another in the dangerous thoroughfare, and learn in mere boyhood and girlhood the fascination of pa.s.sion without responsibility?

How must we face such grave national issues? _The home must be made the centre of all our thought, the focus of national consciousness._ We must educate each boy and girl to be primarily father and mother; we must worship at the cradle of the child. The _community_ must a.s.sume fatherhood and motherhood, and enforce a right conception of their duties on its subsidiary units. To counteract the restlessness of modern life we must make of our Fatherland a Home, where every man, woman and child will be rightly cared for, disciplined if need be, but embraced in the wide brotherhood of Humanity.

We cannot turn back the hour-gla.s.s of time and stay the new-born activity, but we can utilise the new energy of Humanity as we have learned to utilise steam and electricity. The units divorced from true use in our social system may, nay must, become a desolating flood, unless we dig channels and build reservoirs, and so direct the living stream back to the formation of true homes, utilising the resources of the smiling acres of our native land, spreading out our cities, and afforesting our barren moors.

The Fluidity of Labour is a fact that has come to stay. Modern subdivided employment depends on _the ready supply at particular places of necessary workmen_. If a man is dest.i.tute through remaining too long where work is not to be had, he must travel, and we need to _facilitate_, not to hinder, his rapid transit to the right place, and to furnish him with all information as to whither he should go. We need to provide him, in fair return for a moderate task of work, with bed and board on the journey. _Except in exchange for work we should give neither State aid nor charity to the traveller_, since, if he cannot work enough to find bed and board, he belongs to the _incapable_, for whom a special provision is required, or the "_won't work_" for whom compulsion is best. The universal provision of a proper remedy for migrating dest.i.tution would soon avail to sort men into the three cla.s.ses of _refractory_, _incapable_, or simply "_unemployed_." The Relief station method of Germany is the key to the situation.

But the Relief station alone will not cope with the evil _unless the common lodging-house is reformed from top to bottom_. It is necessary to recognise the existence not only of _dest.i.tute_ homelessness, but of _migratory_ homelessness. It is necessary to get into safe and sanitary surroundings the whole of the outcasts who sleep out, and to purify our parks and streets. One thousand four hundred and sixty-three men walking London streets in one night const.i.tute a social danger. In addition to this we have on the same night 21,058 single men under the undesirable conditions of the common lodging-house. London common lodging-houses are only required to find 240 cubic feet of air for each lodger, as against 300 cubic feet in the provinces, and 350 cubic feet in an ordinary dwelling house. Alderman Thompson says (p. 22): "Anything less than 350 cubic feet per head ought to result in a conviction before the most reactionary justices." Add the number crowded into London slums, what an army of homelessness!

The one thing in the finding of the Vagrancy Committee with which the author does not agree is the stricture on Shelters. The Shelter reveals the magnitude of the problem that is upon us. It is the provision that has arisen over against this grave national danger. It is insufficient, it is not always well managed. But _it is seldom less sanitary and well managed than the common lodging-house_. The dangers it replaces are largely out of sight, but they are none the less real. It is true that the lowest cla.s.s gravitate to the Shelter. Let us be thankful that it is so. "Out of sight is out of mind," but not out of existence. How real and keen the compet.i.tion for bed and board is, is demonstrated by the pressure on prisons. It has come to something serious in our national history when the last social deterrent to crime has been removed and _men seek prison as their only home_. Even girls "do not mind being pinched," it "gives them a rest."[156]

It is absolutely necessary that good and sufficient Workmen's Homes, munic.i.p.al or State, should supersede the common lodging-house. Glasgow has been able to make its seven lodging-houses, accommodating 2,166 men and 248 women, pay a reasonable interest on capital. London has only one, and accommodates but 324.[157] The cost per head of 68_l_. per bed, as against 39_l_. per bed in Glasgow, militates against financial success, though the charge is 6_d_. per night as against 3-1/2_d_. and 4-1/2_d_. Nevertheless receipts appear to more than cover expenditure (2,942_l_. against 2,844_l_.), and the benefit to the community must be reckoned an a.s.set. London has 611 common lodging-houses, Manchester 268.

In Glasgow the provision of munic.i.p.al lodging-houses has reduced the total to 81; most of the old insanitary ones have disappeared, and those newly built are superior even to the munic.i.p.al ones. Thus Glasgow has demonstrated the way out. The Glasgow Women's Lodging-house pays 5 per cent., is orderly, closes at a decent hour, and is well managed and sanitary. The pressure on its accommodation shows that another is required, as women are turned away for want of room. Where do they sleep?

It is not enough to receive dest.i.tute women into the workhouse. In every town there is needed _some safe place for a working woman to sleep_, and some provision of employment that will just earn bed and board to stand between a struggling woman and vice. In every town there should be some co-ordinating charitable inst.i.tution, like the Citizens' Guild of Help, or the Charity Organisation Society at its best, to link together the benevolence of the district, to pa.s.s persons on to employment or to the Poor-law authorities. _It is necessary to sound the depths of our poverty problems, or our charity is unavailing._ It is necessary to have compulsion at the bottom of our social system and apply it to the wastrel.

For men we need at the back a graded system of colonies, such as is described in Mr. Percy Alden's recent pamphlet on "Labour Colonies"

(price 1_d_., 1, Woburn Square, London, W.C.).

But the author is convinced that while such national reservoirs are essential as a background, the real problems of poverty must be worked out in connection with the _munic.i.p.ality_. Charity cannot cope with acc.u.mulated national evil, neither can the State redress it. The State can "way-bill" the migrating workman, can sift the ma.s.s of vagrancy and apply "compulsion to work," can link labour bureaux, can reform the Poor Law. But we possess, at present hardly tapped, a vast fund of local patriotism. _It is to reconstructed civic life we must look for the solution of civic problems_, the abolition of the slum, the education of the child, the provision of "unemployed" capital to place "unemployed"

labour on "unemployed" land, and thereby convert "a trinity of waste into a unity of production." A great step has been taken by the Unemployed Act, however imperfect. The whole subject of unemployment the author has dealt with in a book ent.i.tled "How to Deal with the Unemployed" (Brown, Langham & Co.), and she regards the chapter on "The Labour Market" as the key to the solution of the problem.

We shall have to recognise the maintenance of the home by the recognition of the _droit au travail_--"the right to work"--in some form or another. The streams of labour, which, if let loose in misery and idleness, are destructive, can, if rightly husbanded, fertilise the soil.

Grave as are the problems to be solved, menacing as is the danger if reforms are neglected or delayed, I believe the Spirit of G.o.d which created in the mind of our forefathers the ideal of the "_Commonwealth_"

will guide our national policy into right channels,

"True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home."

FOOTNOTES:

[152] It must be remembered that the largest cities attract such, and form, as it were, cesspools of degeneration. The honest traveller may be in some lodging-houses in larger proportion, but he has to herd with the worst, or sleep out. See pp. 35-37.

[153] See Chap. V.

[154] See p. 19.

[155] See Minutes of Evidence before Vagrancy Committee, 10,482-10,492.

[156] See p. 213.

[157] Rowton Houses, however, accommodate large numbers of working men