In Darkest England and the Way Out Part 6

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 G.o.d, as I waited for the end."

In this dire extremity the writer found his way to one of our Shelters, and there found G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances 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, c.o.c.kneydom would long ere this have perished.

But unfortunately the country is being depopulated. The towns, London especially, are being gorged with undigested and indigestible ma.s.ses 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 const.i.tution.

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," "d.i.c.k 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 inst.i.tution 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 sp.a.w.ned into the world like fish, with the results which we see.

The decline of natural affection follows inevitably from the subst.i.tution 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 compet.i.tive 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 mult.i.tudes 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, worse than fatherless, homeless, and friendless, "d.a.m.ned 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 pa.s.sionate 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sumes 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. s.e.xual 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 rea.s.suring. 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 mult.i.tude, 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 inst.i.tution 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 inc.u.mbrance. 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 Reconst.i.tute 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 a.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.s 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 dest.i.tute. 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 dest.i.tution has been carried on to the bitter end, when piece by piece every article of domestic furniture has been sold or p.a.w.ned, 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 dest.i.tute 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, oak.u.m-picking and stone-breaking.

The work, too, is excessive in proportion to what is received.

Four pounds of oak.u.m 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 oak.u.m. 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 oak.u.m 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 oak.u.m 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 oak.u.m 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 oak.u.m-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 oak.u.m. 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.