The Law and the Poor Part 15

Their first suggestion is that vestries and district boards should put in force existing by-laws, though who was to make them do it is not mentioned. Then they think it would be an added decency to the lives of the poor if there were more mortuaries near their homes to take the dead bodies from the already overcrowded rooms--as though the problem they were there to consider was not the housing of the quick, but the housing of the dead.

Building by-laws, sanitary inspection, and workmen's trains are a few of the Mother Partington Mop remedies that this great Commission had to offer to keep back the sea of troubles that overwhelmed the poor of our great cities in their struggle for decent existence.

One cannot blame the members of the Commission that so little was suggested. It was inevitable when one remembers that nothing at all is possible in the right direction without a great upheaval which is bound to re-act injuriously on some of the greatest vested interests in the country. A meeting of the great ones in whom the interests vest is not likely to bring about immediate reforms.

But at all events here in the pages of the printed evidence are the facts.

The horrors painted by D'Israeli, Kingsley, d.i.c.kens and George R. Sims are at least patiently collated and indexed for us, and now after thirty years we should do better not to expatiate on the little we have done for betterment, but to acknowledge how much we have left undone, and show our repentance in energetic deeds. No one can recognise more clearly than I do the value of such authoritative evidence of facts and details as are collected in the report, but the reading of them only makes one the more impatient at the method of government which can tolerate the continuance of such abuses.

In 1900, little or nothing having been done, it occurred to Lord Salisbury that it was time to have another Commission. But it was not until 1902 that a Select Committee of both Houses was appointed to consider, in Lord Salisbury's own words, how to get rid of "what is really a scandal to our civilisation--I mean the sufferings which many of the working cla.s.ses have to undergo in order to obtain even the most moderate, I may say the most pitiable accommodation."

The problem could not be better stated. The scandal was with us in 1885, it was with us in 1900, and it is with us to-day. At least if we are unwilling or incompetent to solve it let us have done with the constant consideration and further consideration of Royal and Select Commissions which only make the hearts of the poor sick with promises and hopes that can never be fulfilled in our own generation.

One cannot here set out in detail the various Housing Acts that have been pa.s.sed; there was one in 1900, which apparently led to more insanitary houses being closed than new cottages built. There was another in 1903, with further new provisions and modifications of former schemes, and lastly comes the Housing and Town Planning Act, which deals rigorously with owners of insanitary property. This Act industriously made use of may help to realise our hopes of the possibility of hygienic pleasances for the poor of future generations.

Here we have a short record of some fifty years of legislative effort--more or less honest--in which each party has sought to promote measures to help the poor who are oppressed, as Lord Salisbury said, by this "scandal to our civilisation," the want of decent housing. And yet how little has been achieved, how small the results, how disappointing to find the great men who talked in Parliament and sat on Commissions and discussed these matters with so much learning and ability pa.s.sing away and leaving this problem for us to tackle, and we on our part looking idly on and still wondering what can be done. If our schoolmasters had taught us how to make bricks and build with them instead of how to read books and write more of them, better results perhaps had been already achieved.

There are many acres of houses in England built prior to 1870 that exhibit all the slum traits that have been so eloquently described in literature, and many millions of our fellow citizens live in houses which fall below the minimum standard of sanitation where the decent separation of the s.e.xes is impossible and the general conditions of life are sunless and miserable. The amount of overcrowding in England and Wales is shown graphically enough in the census returns for 1911. Overcrowding from a census point of view means that more than two persons live in a room, counting the kitchen as a room, but not the scullery. "Thus," as the Editor of the Land Inquiry Report tells us, "if a tenement or cottage consists of two bedrooms and a kitchen, the Census Authorities would only describe it as overcrowded if there were more than six persons living in it, no matter how small the rooms. The Census test of overcrowding is, in fact, quite inadequate to measure the full extent of the evil, and there is great need for the adoption of a more accurate one. Even adopting this standard, however, the Census Authorities find that one-tenth of the total urban population of England and Wales are overcrowded. This means that nearly 3,000,000 persons are overcrowded."

No one who is constantly meeting the victims of this state of affairs, and discussing with them, as a County Court Judge has to do, their domestic affairs, can fail to be struck with the large amount of infantile mortality and disease, and the prevalence of tuberculosis and the general physical and moral weariness and debility, which may in a great measure be traced to the bad conditions in which the working cla.s.ses must perforce live because there is nothing better obtainable.

The price paid for such accommodation as there is, is a cruel tax on the working man. For the meanest shelter he has to pay anything up to twenty per cent. of his weekly income. Imagine a man with a thousand a year spending two hundred a year in rent alone. How eloquent would the Official Receiver be did bankruptcy supervene, as it probably would, and what homilies he would preach on the rash and extravagant folly of the bankrupt in spending so large a proportion of his income on a house. And yet this extravagance is compulsory to a working man, who has to pay out of his wages for a mere roof over his head money that is badly needed for the food and clothing of himself and his family.

I have dwelt on this subject at some length because in most of the chapters of this book my complaint has been that the laws are insufficient to help the poor, because they have in past days been enacted by the rich, and are still being administered by the rich, without knowledge of, and sympathy for, the best interests of the poor. Here the problem is entirely different. Everyone must admit the energy and good faith of all cla.s.ses and parties and officials, within the rules of the party game, in their endeavour to cope with a condition of things which is an admitted national disgrace, and a scandal to civilisation. The melancholy conclusion, however, stares one in the face. The result of interminable inquiries and committee meetings and palaver is plain unmistakable failure. The fringe of the subject has scarcely been reached, and the state of affairs which the man of letters portrayed to the shame of our grandfathers is likely enough, it would seem, to be "copy" for our grandchildren and their grandchildren to journalise with world without end Amen!

And although it would be impertinent in me to pretend to have a remedy for these evils where all the great ones have failed to bring about reform, yet I cannot help thinking that the reason of the failure is the reason of much of our legislative failure--the dread of vested interests and the permissive character of the statutes pa.s.sed. What is the good of asking a town council of builders and landowners and estate agents to put in force laws that will, or at least are expected to, have the effect of diminishing their incomes? Should I, or would you, enforce an Act of Parliament with any joyful energy when we knew that the more thoroughly we did it the more we should be out of pocket? It is asking too much of human nature.

There has been a clear failure in the smaller local governing bodies in putting in force even such legislation as exists for the betterment of the district. The Rivers Pollution Acts are a standing instance of the neglect of duty by local councils. For years nothing was done to put the Acts in force, because the smaller polluters were the mill owners, who were members of the local council, and the biggest polluter of all was the council itself pouring crude sewage into the river to relieve the rates.

Parliament lacked a sense of humour when it expected mill owners and sewage boards to prosecute themselves for river pollution.

Good work in housing will never, I think, be really effectively done until it is left to the initiative of a medical officer of health or a sanitary engineer, with judicial power to order things to be done and force behind him to have them done. The idea that a medical officer of health should be a servant of the casual butchers and bakers of the Town Council is, on the face of it, an absurd one. He should be as permanent and independent as are the stipendiary, the judge, or the coroner, for he requires even more than common fearlessness to deal roundly with the jerry builders and slum owners who are his aldermen and councillors, and who at present sit on a committee of appeal from his decisions.

As long as these matters are left solely to local bodies the real burden of financial consideration, the lack of personal knowledge of hygiene and sanitation among the members themselves, and the shrinking from enforcing legal hardships on the poor owners of bad property, will alone prevent effective reform. To these natural and honest forces must also be added the weight of vested interests, which deliberately obtain power on local bodies for the purpose of preventing housing reform being put into thorough operation.

Never was there a greater and louder demand by the people for a fair share of the land they live in. The countryman wants his plot and his cottage, and the town dweller a decent house at a reasonable rent. This is the "condition of England question" to-day as it was eighty years ago. Never were there more earnest and sincere people discussing what is to be done and how it is possible to transform slums into decent dwellings by Act of Parliament. We have a willing legislature, a desire to make laws for the benefit of the poor, and after many efforts the result has to be written down as failure and stagnation. It would almost seem as though voluntary effort in this affair had p.r.o.nounced itself impossible, and it remains undealt with until those who are the real sufferers by the system feel strong enough to put it right.

Carlyle in an eloquent pa.s.sage cries out in his pa.s.sionate way: "Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical. Whose land _was_ this of Britain? G.o.d's who made it, His and no other's it was and is. Who of G.o.d's creatures had a right to live in it? The wolves and bisons? Yes, they; till one with a better right showed himself. The Celt, 'aboriginal savage of Europe,' as a snarling antiquary names him arrived, pretending to have a better right, and did accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the same. He had a better right to that piece of G.o.d's land; namely, a better might to turn it to use--a might to settle himself there and try what use he could turn it to. The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession and tilled."

Interpreting this pa.s.sage as one written in the true frenzy of prophecy, two things seem to me to take clear shape in the future outlook of the housing question. In the first place, it would seem that it will have to be settled by a Celt, and in the second place it will not be achieved "without pain to the bisons."

One would have thought that a better plan would be a small business parliamentary committee of all interests with power to enforce their decrees against owners and corporate bodies. Something permanent is necessary, akin to the Imperial Defence Committee, which knows no party politics. Are we not here in the face of a real danger to the nation?

Already endeavours have been made to take this matter out of the common rut of party politics, but these efforts have not been altogether successful, and if the matter is not settled soon there would seem nothing for it but a forcible solution and a merry set-to between the Celt and the bison, in which we may expect the Celt will get the better of the bison but we cannot be sure that the poor will get all they need even from the Celt.

CHAPTER XIII

THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES

1. THE ALEHOUSE.

Judged by no o'er-zealous rigour Much this mystic throng expresses; Bacchus was the type of vigour And Silenus of excesses.

LONGFELLOW: "Drinking Song."

Whatever you may think about it you cannot travel from Charing Cross to Dijon through the hop-fields of Kent to the vineyards of the Cote-d'Or without admitting that whether the vine be a gift of good or evil it has come to stay. Bacchus is still full of vigour and has as many followers as ever. But the law has nothing to say to Bacchus. The law is after old Silenus. It lures him into a den and makes him drunk and then locks him up, and the holy w.i.l.l.i.e.s wag their heads at his shame and collect money for his reformation.

There are two public houses open to the poorer citizens--the Alehouse and the Workhouse. The rich man frequents neither, yet as magistrate or guardian he takes upon himself to lay down the rules by which they shall be run. These fussy, amiable, amateur bosses have conspicuously failed at their job. It is not to be wondered at. As an able Manchester business man once said to me of his partner: "He loves sitting on the licensing bench, and thank heaven he does; it keeps him out of the office." But even if the bosses were capable and intelligent they could not hope to succeed in their work. Public inst.i.tutions should be governed by the men who make use of them. The rich man's public-house is so regulated--and what is the result? One may not approve of every detail of cookery or decoration at hotels like the Ritz in London, or the Adelphi and Midland in Liverpool and Manchester, but the average middle-cla.s.s man will find in them such reasonable standard of comfort as he desires. There is, at all events, s.p.a.ce and light and air, cleanliness, and some luxury. On proper occasions and in fit places there is music, dancing, and billiards, and you may play a game of bridge with your friends when you wish, even for threepence a hundred, in a private room. Moreover, there is always food of good quality obtainable at varied prices, and you need not take your drink standing at a counter, though you can if you wish to when there is an American bar.

Why may not the working man have similar entertainment at the Pig and Whistle? A complete answer to that question would necessitate a study of the position of artificers and labourers in the middle ages and a short history of the ideals of the well-to-do puritans.

The rich have had two objects in view in their legislation about the working-man's public house. A certain section of the rich--the brewers--have aimed at a monopoly of the right to sell him ale, and nothing else, at the biggest possible profit to themselves. A second section opposing the first--the teetotal magistracy--have sought to make the public house as dreary and miserable a place as possible in order to punish the wicked man who wants to drink ale. Between the brewer and the puritan the respectable working man with a normal thirst has been jockeyed out of his freedom. Swilling and tippling in alehouses and private clubs has been encouraged; the reasonable use of ale--which Mr. Belloc rightly a.s.serts to be the finest beverage in the world--has been crabbed and discouraged. Except an opium den--of which I have only hearsay knowledge--there is probably nothing more comfortless and degrading than the lower-cla.s.s alehouse of our towns and cities.

Even in the remote days of Plato it was recognised--at all events by philosophers--that there was such a thing as thirst. "No one desires _drink_ simply, but good drink, nor food simply, but good food; because, since all desire good things, if thirst is a desire, it must be a desire of something good." Further on in the discussion, Socrates addresses Ademantus thus: "Then for any particular kind of drink there is a particular kind of thirst; but thirst in the abstract is neither for much drink, nor for little, neither for good drink nor for bad, nor, in one word for any kind of drink, but simply and absolutely thirst for drink is it not?"

"Most decidedly so," replies Ademantus--who never on any occasion stood up to Socrates and contradicted him. "Most decidedly so."

"Then the soul of a thirsty man," continues Socrates, "in so far as he is thirsty has no other wish than to drink; but this it desires and towards this it is impelled."

"Clearly so."

If the licensing bench, and especially the teetotal portion of it, could once arrive as far in their studies of the subject as Socrates had done, and could comprehend the zoological fact that man was a mammal with a thirst, they would be on the road to enlightenment, temperance, and reform.

Of course Socrates knew all that the puritans know and a lot more about the rational satisfaction of love and hunger and thirst and the irrational and concupiscent desires that are attached to all natural appet.i.tes, but in dealing with the law of licensing in reference to the poor these considerations are not really important. What is wanted is equality. Grant to the poor the same reasonable facilities of enjoyment that you grant to the rich, and leave it to public opinion to see that they are not abused.

It is a grave disaster that the granting and regulation of licenses should have fallen into the hands it has. Mr. Balfour's observation "that among all the social evils which meet us in every walk of life, every sphere of activity, the greatest of all evils is the evil of intemperance" is useful as a peroration to any platform speech on the subject, but only makes the judicious grieve that with the opportunity to do exactly as he liked and the ability to draft useful legislation, Mr. Balfour did nothing whatever to improve matters and diminish the evil of which he was so sensible.

Section 4 of his Act does indeed enable the magistrates to grant new licenses and to make their own conditions as to the payments to be made by the licensee, the tenure of the license, and any other matters "as they think proper in the interests of the public." Under this section if there were a licensing bench containing a working majority of friends of the people, men who had no social or political interest whatever either in breweries or teetotallers, it would seem that almost any experiment in model public houses could be made under any regulations that the bench chose to impose on the licensee. Mr. Balfour was perfectly right in telling us that "love of temperance is the polite name for hatred of the publican"; but what is the right name for love of the brewer? The fact is that with these two warring political factions in the field the ideal public house is not for this generation. No use will ever be made of Section 4 under present conditions, because whoever applied for a license, and however n.o.ble and beautiful the licensed premises were to be, however ideal the provision of food, entertainment and drink, and whatever the guarantees of good management, the combined opposition of the puritans and the brewers would always strive to defeat or destroy any effort to give the poorer cla.s.ses pure beer in pure surroundings.

The first step you have to take is to convince the unenlightened puritan that the Alehouse is, or ought to be, as worthy a public house as the church or the school. This might be done by means of thoughtfully prepared text books of English literature. There is no great English book from the Bible downwards that has not incidental good and holy things to tell you of "The Inn." What an appetising volume could be written of the inns and innkeepers of Charles d.i.c.kens. How he revelled in their outward appearance and the inward soul of welcome which he found there. How he rejoiced in his sane English way over "The Maypole," "with its overhanging stories, drowsy little panes of gla.s.s and front bulging out and projecting over the pathway," and honest John Willet, the burly, large-headed man with a fat face, intended by providence and nature for licensed victualling. Could we have met Mrs. Lupin anywhere else than beneath the sign of that "certain Dragon who swung and creaked complainingly before the village alehouse door"? Could Mark Tapley have acquired his saintly outlook on life anywhere but at "The Blue Dragon," and are we not full of joy to find him returning there to live happily ever afterwards under the "wery new, conwivial, and expressive" sign of "The Jolly Tapley"? How pleasant it is to a.s.sist Crummles and Nicholas over their bowl of punch and the beefsteak-pudding in the inn on the Portsmouth Road. Pickwick is a cyclopaedia of inns, each with its own human character, good, bad and indifferent. Who has not stayed at a "Peac.o.c.k" with a "mantelshelf ornamented with a wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half a wafer: a road book and directory: a county history minus the cover: and the mortal remains of a trout in a gla.s.s coffin"?

One could run on in pleasant remembrances of these beautiful and delightful places by the hour, but one imagines that even the most hardened political teetotaller must really know all about them, and perhaps in his dreams strolls into "The Marquis of Granby" and sips his gla.s.s of reeking hot pine-apple rum and water with a slice of lemon in it, and awakens to the horrible imagination that his astral body has wandered instinctively into a manifestation of his master and leader, the incomparable Stiggins.

One very noticeable matter about any old-world book in which inns are faithfully pictured is that in former days there was a real race of English innkeepers, independent licensed victuallers, not mere brewers'

managers. There are still a few remaining with us who keep up the old traditions, but the political forces of brewers and teetotallers have squeezed this excellent race of public servants almost wholly out of existence. You remember the Six-Jolly-Fellowship-Porters whose bar was "a bar to soften the human breast" with its "corpulent little casks and cordial bottles radiant with fict.i.tious grapes in bunches and lemons in nets and biscuits in baskets, and polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were served with beer." How could there have been such an ideal haven for the weary porters but for the sole proprietor and manager, Miss Abbey Potterson, whose dignity and firmness were a tradition of the riverside?

And then the dressing down she gave Rogue Riderhood.

"But you know, Miss Potterson," this was suggested very meekly though, "if I behave myself you can't help serving me, miss."

"_Can't I!_" said Abbey with infinite expression.

"No, Miss Potterson; because you see the law----"

"I am the law here, my man," returned Miss Abbey, "and I'll soon convince you of that if you doubt it at all."

"I never said I did doubt it at all, Miss Abbey."