In Darkest England and the Way Out Part 7

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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing through a coffee mill; and as the net result of all my experience and observation of men and things, I must a.s.sert 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 ma.s.ses 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sume, and who are in full sympathy with the cla.s.s 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 dest.i.tution, 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 d.a.m.n 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 mult.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s. 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 d.a.m.ned.

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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociates, and familiar with the coa.r.s.est 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 st.u.r.dy 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 cla.s.ses, but they are, by their const.i.tution, 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 embarra.s.s 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 cla.s.ses in this country can be effected except by the gradual subst.i.tution of cooperative a.s.sociations 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 d.a.m.nation 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 acc.u.mulation 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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.bler 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 cla.s.s 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 b.l.o.o.d.y and violent overturn of all existing inst.i.tutions. 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sert 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 const.i.tute 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 const.i.tute the reasons for his failure in the battle of life. No change in circ.u.mstances, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 const.i.tute 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 circ.u.mstances 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