In Darkest England and the Way Out Part 11

LABOR BUREAU.

Bureau opened June 16th, 1890. The following are particulars of transactions up to September 26th, 1890: --

Applications for employment--Men .. .. 2462 Women .. 208 ----- 2670 ====

Applications from Employers for Men .. 128 Women .. 59 ----- 187 ====

Sent to Work--Men .. .. .. .. .. 301 Women .. .. .. .. 68 ---- 369 ====

Permanent Situations .. .. .. .. .. 146

Temporary Employment, viz: --Boardmen, Cleaners, &c., &c .. .. 223

Sent to Workshop in Hanbury Street .. .. 165 ====

SECTION 4.--THE HOUSEHOLD SALVAGE BRIGADE.

It is obvious that the moment you begin to find work for the unemployed labour of the community, no matter what you do by way of the registration and bringing together of those who want work and those who want workers, there will still remain a vast residuum of unemployed, and it will be the duty of those who undertake to deal with the question to devise means for securing them employment. Many things are possible when there is a directing intelligence at headquarters and discipline in the rank and file, which would be utterly impossible when everyone is left to go where he pleases, when ten men are running for one man's job, and when no one can be depended upon to be in the way at the time he is wanted. When my Scheme is carried out, there will be in every populous centre a Captain of Industry, an Officer specially charged with the regimentation of unorganised labour, who would be continually on the alert, thinking how best to utilise the waste human material in his district. It is contrary to all previous experience to suppose that the addition of so much trained intelligence will not operate beneficially in securing the disposal of a commodity which is at present a drug in the market.

Robertson, of Brighton, used frequently to remark that every truth was built up of two apparent contradictory propositions. In the same way I may say that the solution of every social difficulty is to be found in the discovery of two corresponding difficulties. It is like the puzzle maps of children. When you are putting one together, you suddenly come upon some awkward piece that will not fit in anywhere, but you do not in disgust and despair break your piece into fragments or throw it away. On the contrary, you keep it by you, knowing that before long you will discover a number of other pieces which it will be impossible to fit in until you fix your unmanageable, unshapely piece in the centre. Now, in the work of piecing together the fragments which lie scattered around the base of our social system we must not despair because we have in the unorganised, untrained labourers that which seems hopelessly out of fit with everything around. There must be something corresponding to it which is equally useless until he can be brought to bear upon it. In other words, having got one difficulty in the case of the Out-of-Works, we must cast about to find another difficulty to pair off against it, and then out of two difficulties will arise the solution of the problem.

We shall not have far to seek before we discover in every town and in every country the corresponding element to our unemployed labourer.

We have waste labour on the one hand; we have waste commodities on the other. About waste land I shall speak in the next chapter; I am concerned now solely with waste commodities. Herein we have a means of immediately employing a large number of men under conditions which will enable us to permanently provide for many of those whose hard lot we are now considering.

I propose to establish in every large town what I may call "A Household Salvage Brigade," a civil force of organised collectors, who will patrol the whole town as regularly as the policeman, who will have their appointed beats, and each of whom will been trusted with the task of collecting the waste of the houses in their circuit. In small towns and villages this is already done, and it will be noticed that most of the suggestions which I have put forth in this book are based upon the central principle, which is that of restoring; to the over-grown, and, therefore, uninformed ma.s.ses of population in our towns the same intelligence and co-operation as to the mutual wants of each and all, that prevails in your small town or village. The latter is the manageable unit, because its dimensions and its needs have not out-grown the range of the individual intelligence and ability of those who dwell therein. Our troubles in large towns arise chiefly from the fact that the ma.s.sing of population has caused the physical bulk of Society to outgrow its intelligence. It is as if a human being had suddenly developed fresh limbs which were not connected by any nervous system with the gray matter of his brain. Such a thing is impossible in the human being, but, unfortunately, it is only too possible in human society. In the human body no member can suffer without an instantaneous telegram being despatched, as it were, to the seat of intelligence; the foot or the finger cries out when it suffers, and the whole body suffers with it. So, in a small community, every one, rich and poor, is more or less cognizant of the sufferings of the community.

In a large town, where people have ceased to be neighbourly, there is only a congested ma.s.s of population settled down on a certain small area without any human ties connecting them together. Here, it is perfectly possible, and it frequently happens, that men actually die of starvation within a few doors of those who, if they had been informed of the actual condition of the sufferer that lay within earshot of their comfortable drawing-rooms, would have been eager to minister the needed relief. What we have to do, therefore, is to grow a new nervous system for the body politic, to create a swift, almost automatic, means of communication between the community as a whole and the meanest of its members, so as to restore to the city what the village possesses.

I do not say that the plan which I have suggested is the only plan or the best plan conceivable. All that I claim for it is that it is the only plan which I can conceive as practicable at the present moment, and that, as a matter of fact, it holds the field alone, for no one, so far as I have been able to discover, even proposes to reconst.i.tute the connection between what I have called the gray matter of the brain of the munic.i.p.al community and all the individual units which make up the body politic.

Carrying out the same idea I come to the problem of the waste commodities of the towns, and we will take this as an earnest of the working out of the general principle. In the villages there is very little waste. The sewage is applied directly to the land, and so becomes a source of wealth instead of being emptied into great subterranean reservoirs, to generate poisonous gases, which by a most ingenious arrangement, are then poured forth into the very heart of our dwellings, as is the case in the great cities. Neither is there any waste of broken victuals. The villager has his pig or his poultry, or if he has not a pig his neighbour has one, and the collection of broken victuals is conducted as regularly as the delivery of the post. And as it is with broken victuals, so it is with rags and bones, and old iron, and all the debris of a household. When I was a boy one of the most familiar figures in the streets of a country town was the man, who, with his small hand-barrow or donkey-cart, made a regular patrol through all the streets once a week, collecting rags, bones, and all other waste materials, buying the same from the juveniles who collected them in specie, not of Her Majesty's current coin, but of common sweetmeats, known as "claggum" or "taffy." When the tootling of his familiar horn was heard the children would bring out their stores, and trade as best they could with the itinerant merchant, with the result that the closets which in our towns to-day have become the receptacles of all kinds of, disused lumber were kept then swept and garnished.

Now, what I want to know is why can we not establish on a scale commensurate with our extended needs the rag-and-bone industry in all our great towns? That there is sufficient to pay for the collection is, I think, indisputable. If it paid in a small North-country town or Midland village, why would it not pay much better in an area where the houses stand more closely together, and where luxurious living and thriftless habits have so increased that there must be proportionately far more breakage, more waste, and, therefore, more collectable matter than in the rural districts? In looking over the waste of London it has occurred to me that in the debris of our households there is sufficient food, it utilised, to feed many of the starving poor, and to employ some thousands of them in its collection, and, in addition, largely to a.s.sist the general scheme. What I propose would be to go to work on something like the following plan:-

London would be divided into districts, beginning with that portion of it most likely to furnish the largest supplies of what would be worth collection. Two men, or a man and a boy, would be told of for this purpose to this district.

Households would be requested to allow a receptacle to be placed in some convenient spot in which the servants could deposit the waste food, and a sack of some description would also be supplied for the paper, rags, &c.

The whole would be collected, say once or twice a week, or more frequently, according to the season and circ.u.mstances, and transferred to depots as central as possible to the different districts.

At present much of this waste is thrown into the dust-bin, there to fester and breed disease. Then there are old newspapers, ragged books, old bottles, tins, canisters, etc. We all know what a number of articles there are which are not quite bad enough to be thrown into the dust heap, and yet are no good to us. We put them on one side, hoping that something may turn up, and as that something very seldom does turn up, there they remain.

Crippled musical instruments, for instance, old toys, broken-down perambulators, old clothes, all the things, in short, for which we have no more need, and for which there is no market within our reach, but which we feel it would be a sin and a shame to destroy.

When I get my Household Salvage Brigade properly organised, beginning, as I said, in some district where we should be likely to meet with most material, our uniformed collectors would call every other day or twice a week with their hand barrow or pony cart. As these men would be under strict discipline, and numbered, the householder would have a security against any abuse of which such regular callers might otherwise be the occasion.

At present the rag and bone man who drives a more or less precarious livelihood by intermittent visits, is looked upon askance by prudent housewives. They fear in many cases he takes the refuse in order to have the opportunity of finding something which may be worth while "picking up," and should he be impudent or negligent there is no authority to whom they can appeal. Under our Brigade, each district would have its numbered officer, who would himself be subordinate to a superior officer, to whom any complaints could be made, and whose duty it would be to see that the officers under his command punctually performed their rounds and discharged their duties without offence.

Here let me disclaim any intention of interfering with the Little Sisters of the Poor, or any other persons, who collect the broken victuals of hotels and other establishments for charitable purposes.

My object is not to poach on my neighbour's domains, nor shall I ever be a party to any contentious quarrels for the control of this or that source of supply. All that is already utilised I regard as outside my sphere. The unoccupied wilderness of waste is a wide enough area for the operations of our Brigade. But it will be found in practice that there are no competing agencies. While the broken victuals of certain large hotels are regularly collected, the things before enumerated, and a number of others, are untouched because not sought after.

Of the immense extent to which Food is wasted few people have any notion except those who have made actual experiments. Some years ago, Lady Wolseley established a system of collection from house to house in Mayfair, in order to secure materials for a charitable kitchen which, in concert with Baroness Burdett-Coutts, she had started at Westminster. The amount of the food which she gathered was enormous.

Sometimes legs of mutton from which only one or two slices had been cut were thrown into the tub, where they waited for the arrival of the cart on its rounds. It is by no means an excessive estimate to a.s.sume that the waste of the kitchens of the West End would provide a sufficient sustenance for all the Out-of-Works who will be employed in our labour sheds at the industrial centres. All that it needs is collection, prompt, systematic, by disciplined men who can be relied upon to discharge their task with punctuality and civility, and whose failure in this duty can be directly brought to the attention of the controlling authority.

Of the utilisation of much of the food which is to be so collected I shall speak hereafter, when I come to describe the second great division of my scheme, namely the Farm Colony. Much of the food collected by the Household Salvage Brigade would not be available for human consumption. In this the greatest care would be exercised, and the remainder would be dispatched, if possible, by barges down the river to the Farm Colony, where we shall meet it hereafter.

But food is only one of the materials which we should handle. At our Whitechapel Factory there is one shoemaker whom we picked off the streets dest.i.tute and miserable. He is now saved, and happy, and cobbles away at the shoe leather of his mates. That shoemaker, I foresee, is but the pioneer of a whole army of shoemakers constantly at work in repairing the cast-off boots and shoes of London. Already in some provincial towns a great business is done by the conversion of old shoes into new. They call the men so employed translators. Boots and shoes, as every wearer of them knows, do not go to pieces all at once or in all parts at once. The sole often wears out utterly, while the upper leather is quite good, or the upper leather bursts while the sole remains practically in a salvable condition; but your individual pair of shoes and boots are no good to you when any section of them is hopelessly gone to the bad. But give our trained artist in leather and his army of a.s.sistants a couple of thousand pairs of boots and shoes, and it will go ill with him if out of the couple of thousand pairs of wrecks he cannot construct five hundred pairs, which, if not quite good, will be immeasurably better than the apologies for boots which cover the feet of many a poor tramp, to say nothing of the thousands of poor children who are at the present moment attending our public schools. In some towns they have already established a Boot and Shoe Fund in order to provide the little ones who come to school with shoes warranted not to let in water between the school house and home. When you remember the 43,000 children who are reported by the School Board to attend the schools of London alone unfed and starving, do you not think there are many thousands to whom we could easily dispose, with advantage, the resurrected shoes of our Boot Factory?

This, however, is only one branch of industry. Take old umbrellas.

We all know the itinerant umbrella mender, whose appearance in the neighbourhood of the farmhouse leads the good wife to look after her poultry and to see well to it that the watchdog is on the premises.

But that gentleman is almost the only agency by which old umbrellas can be rescued from the dust heap. Side by side with our Boot Factory we shall have a great umbrella works. The ironwork of one umbrella will be fitted to the stick of another, and even from those that are too hopelessly gone for any further use as umbrellas we shall find plenty of use for their steels and whalebone.

So I might go on. Bottles are a fertile source of minor domestic worry. When you buy a bottle you have to pay a penny for it; but when you have emptied it you cannot get a penny back; no, nor even a farthing. You throw your empty bottle either into the dust heap, or let it lie about. But if we could collect all the waste bottles of London every day, it would go hardly with us if we could not turn a very pretty penny by washing them, sorting them, and sending them out on a new lease of life. The washing of old bottles alone will keep a considerable number of people going.

I can imagine the objection which will be raised by some shortsighted people, that by giving the old, second-hand material a new lease of life it will be said that we shall diminish the demand for new material, and so curtail work and wages at one end while we are endeavouring to piece on something at the other. This objection reminds me of a remark of a North Country pilot who, when speaking of the dulness in the shipbuilding industry, said that nothing would do any good but a series of heavy storms, which would send a goodly number of ocean-going steamers to the bottom, to replace which, this political economist thought, the yards would once more be filled with orders.

This, however, is not the way in which work is supplied. Economy is a great auxiliary to trade, inasmuch as the money saved is expended on other products of industry.

There is one material that is continually increasing in quant.i.ty, which is the despair of the life of the householder and of the Local Sanitary Authority. I refer to the tins in which provisions are supplied.

Nowadays everything comes to us in tins. We have coffee tins, meat tins, salmon tins, and tins ad nauseam. Tin is becoming more and more the universal envelope of the rations of man. But when you have extracted the contents of the tin what can you do with it?

Huge mountains of empty tins lie about every dustyard, for as yet no man has discovered a means of utilising them when in great ma.s.ses.

Their market price is about four or five shillings a ton, but they are so light that it would take half a dozen trucks to hold a ton.

They formerly burnt them for the sake of the solder, but now, by a new process, they are jointed without solder. The problem of the utilisation of the tins is one to which we would have to address ourselves, and I am by no means desponding as to the result.

I see in the old tins of London at least one means of establishing an industry which is at present almost monopolised by our neighbours.

Most of the toys which are sold in France on New Year's Day are almost entirely made of sardine tins collected in the French capital. The toy market of England is at present far from being overstocked, for there are mult.i.tudes of children who have no toys worth speaking of with which to amuse themselves. In these empty tins I see a means of employing a large number of people in turning out cheap toys which will add a new joy to the households of the poor--the poor to whom every farthing is important, not the rich the rich can always get toys--but the children of the poor, who live in one room and have nothing to look out upon but the slum or the street. These desolate little things need our toys, and if supplied cheap enough they will take them in sufficient quant.i.ties to make it worth while to manufacture them.

A whole book might be written concerning the utilisation of the waste of London. But I am not going to write one. I hope before long to do something much better than write a book, namely, to establish an organisation to utilise the waste, and then if I describe what is being done it will be much better than by now explaining what I propose to do.

But there is one more waste material to which it is necessary to allude.

I refer to old newspapers and magazines, and books.

Newspapers acc.u.mulate in our houses until we sometimes burn them in sheer disgust. Magazines and old books lumber our shelves until we hardly know where to turn to put a new volume. My Brigade will relieve the householder from these difficulties, and thereby become a great distributing agency of cheap literature. After the magazine has done its duty in the middle cla.s.s household it can be pa.s.sed on to the reading-rooms, workhouses, and hospitals. Every publication issued from the Press that is of the slightest use to men and women will, by our Scheme, acquire a double share of usefulness. It will be read first by its owner, and then by many people who would never otherwise see it.

We shall establish an immense second-hand book shop. All the best books that come into our hands will be exposed for sale, not merely at our central depots, but on the barrows of our peripatetic colporteurs, who will go from street to street with literature which, I trust, will be somewhat superior to the ordinary pabulum supplied to the poor.

After we have sold all we could, and given away all that is needed to public inst.i.tutions, the remainder will be carried down to our great Paper Mill, of which we shall speak later, in connection with our Farm Colony.

The Household Salvage Brigade will const.i.tute an agency capable of being utilised to any extent for the distribution of parcels newspapers, &c. When once you have your reliable man who will call at every house with the regularity of a postman, and go his beat with the punctuality of a policeman, you can do great things with him. I do not need to elaborate this point. It will be a universal Corps of Commissionaires, created for the service of the public and in the interests of the poor, which will bring us into direct relations with every family in London, and will therefore const.i.tute an unequalled medium for the distribution of advertis.e.m.e.nts and the collection of information.

It does not require a very fertile imagination to see that when such a house-to-house visitation is regularly established, it will develop in all directions; and working, as it would, in connection with our Anti-sweating Shops and Industrial Colony, would probably soon become the medium for negotiating sundry household repairs, from a broken window to a damaged stocking. If a porter were wanted to move furniture, or a woman wanted to do charing, or some one to clean windows or any other odd job, the ubiquitous Servant of All who called for the waste, either verbally or by postcard, would receive the order, and whoever was wanted would appear at the time desired without any further trouble on the part of the householder.

One word as to the cost. There are five hundred thousand houses in the Metropolitan Police district. To supply every house with a tub and a sack for the reception of waste would involve an initial expenditure which could not possibly be less than one shilling a house. So huge is London, and so enormous the numbers with which we shall have to deal, that this simple preliminary would require a cost of #25,000.

Of course I do not propose to begin on anything like such a vast scale.

That sum, which is only one of the many expenditures involved, will serve to ill.u.s.trate the extent of the operations which the Household Salvage Brigade will necessitate. The enterprise is therefore beyond the reach of any but a great and powerful organisation, commanding capital and able to secure loyalty, discipline, and willing service.

CHAPTER 3. TO THE COUNTRY!--THE FARM COLONY.

A leave on one side for a moment various features of the operations which will be indispensable but subsidiary to the City Colony, such as the Rescue Homes for Lost Women, the Retreats for Inebriates, the Homes for Discharged Prisoners, the Enquiry Office for the Discovery of Lost Friends and Relatives, and the Advice Bureau, which will, in time, become an inst.i.tution that will be invaluable as a poor man's Tribune.

All these and other suggestions for saving the lost and helping the poor, although they form essential elements of the City Colony, will be better dealt with after I have explained the relation which the Farm Colony will occupy to the City Colony, and set forth the way in which the former will act as a feeder to the Colony Over sea.

I have already described how I propose to deal, in the first case, with the ma.s.s of surplus labour which will infallibly acc.u.mulate on our hands as soon as the Shelters are more extensively established and in good working order. But I fully recognise that when all has been done that can be done in the direction of disposing of the unhired men and women of the town, there will still remain many whom you can neither employ in the Household Salvage Brigade, nor for whom employers, be they registered never so carefully, can be found. What, then, must be done with them? The answer to that question seems to me obvious.