misery so pitiful that men whose daily duty it has been for years to go
in and out amongst these outcasts, and to be intimately acquainted with
their sufferings, and who might, therefore, be supposed to regard with
comparatively little feeling that which would overwhelm an unaccustomed
spectator, sometimes come away from their visits so oppressed in spirit
and absorbed in painful thought, that they know not whither they are
going. How these devoted labourers can pursue their work at all is a
marvel, especially when it is remembered that the misery they actually
see suggests to them the certain existence of so much more which no
human eye discovers. Who can even imagine the suffering which lies
behind a case like the following? A poor woman in an advanced stage of
consumption, reduced almost to a skeleton, lives in a single room with a
drunken husband and five children. When visited she was eating a few
green peas. The children were gone to gather some sticks wherewith a
fire might be made to boil four potatoes which were lying on the table,
and which would constitute the family dinner for the day. Or, take
another case, related by Rev. Archibald Brown, who, with his
missionaries is doing a noble work amongst the poor in the east of
London. People had doubted the accuracy of reports presented by the
missionaries, and he accordingly devoted a considerable time to personal
visitation and inquiry. He found case after case proving that but little
of the wretchedness had been told, and here is a _fair specimen_. At the
top of an otherwise empty house lived a family; the husband had gone to
try and find some work. The mother 29 years of age, was sitting on the
only chair in the place in front of a grate, destitute of any fire. She
was nursing a baby only six weeks old, that had never had anything but
one old rag round it. The mother had nothing but a gown on, and that
dropping to pieces; it was all she had night or day. There were six
children under 13 years of age. They were barefooted, and the few rags
on them scarcely covered their nakedness. In this room, where was an
unclothed infant, the ceiling was in holes. An old bedstead was in the
place, and seven sleep in it at night, the eldest girl being on the
floor.
This is bad, but it is not the worst. In a room in Wych Street, on the
third floor, over a marine store dealer's, there was, a short time ago,
an inquest as to the death of a little baby. A man, his wife and three
children were living in that room. The infant was the second child who
had died, poisoned by the foul atmosphere; and this dead baby was cut
open in the one room where its parents and brothers and sisters lived,
ate and slept, _because the parish had no mortuary and no room in which
post mortems could be performed_! No wonder that the jurymen who went to
view the body sickened at the frightful exhalations. This case was given
by Mr. G. R. Sims, in his papers on "How the Poor Live;" but all the
particulars are found in the dry newspaper reports of the inquest. In
another miserable room are eight destitute children. Their father died a
short time ago, and "on going into the house to-day," says the
missionary, "the mother was lying in her coffin." Here is a filthy
attic, containing only a broken chair, a battered saucepan and a few
rags. On a dirty sack in the centre of the room sits a neglected,
ragged, bare-legged little baby girl of four. Her father is a
militiaman, and is away. Her mother is out all day and comes home late
at night more or less drunk, and this child is left in charge of the
infant that we see crawling about the floor; left for six or eight hours
at a stretch--hungry, thirsty, tired, but never daring to move from her
post. And this is the kind of sight which may be seen in a Christian
land where it is criminal to ill-treat a horse or an ass.
The child-misery that one beholds is the most heartrending and appalling
element in these discoveries; and of this not the least is the misery
inherited from the vice of drunken and dissolute parents, and manifest
in the stunted, misshapen, and often loathsome objects that we
constantly meet in these localities. From the beginning of their life
they are utterly neglected; their bodies and rags are alive with vermin;
they are subjected to the most cruel treatment; many of them have never
seen a green field, and do not know what it is to go beyond the streets
immediately around them, and they often pass the whole day without a
morsel of food. Here is one of three years old picking up some dirty
pieces of bread and eating them. We go in at the doorway where it is
standing and find a little girl twelve years old. "Where is your
mother?" "In the madhouse." "How long has she been there?" "Fifteen
months." "Who looks after you?" The child, who is sitting at an old
table making match-boxes, replies, "I look after my little brothers and
sisters as well as I can." "Where is your father? Is he in work?" "He
has been out of work three weeks, but he has gone to a job of two days
this morning." Another house visited contains nine motherless children.
The mother's death was caused by witnessing one of her children being
run over. The eldest is only fourteen years old. All live in one small
room, and there is one bed for five. Here is a poor woman deserted by
her husband and left with three little children. One met with an
accident a few days ago and broke his arm. He is lying on a shake-down
in one corner of the room, with an old sack round him. And here, in a
cellar kitchen, are nine little ones. You can scarcely see across the
room for smoke and dirt. They are without food and have scarcely any
clothing.
It is heart-crushing to think of the misery suggested by such
revelations as these; and there is something unspeakably pathetic in the
brave patience with which the poor not seldom endure their sufferings,
and the tender sympathy which they show toward each other. Where,
amongst the well-conditioned, can anything braver and kinder be found
than this? A mother, whose children are the cleanest and tidiest in the
Board School which they attend, was visited. It was found that, though
she had children of her own, she had taken in a little girl, whose
father had gone off tramping in search of work. She was propped up in a
chair, looking terribly ill, but in front of her, in another chair, was
the wash-tub, and the poor woman was making a feeble effort to wash and
wring out some of the children's things. She was dying from dropsy,
scarcely able to breathe and enduring untold agony, but to the very
last striving to keep her little ones clean and tidy. A more touching
sight it would be difficult to present; we might, however, unveil many
more painful ones, but must content ourselves with saying that the
evidence we have gathered from personal observation more than justifies
the words of the writer before referred to, that "there are (_i.e._, in
addition to those who find their way to our hospitals) men and women who
lie and die day by day in their wretched single rooms, sharing all the
family trouble, enduring the hunger and the cold, and waiting without
hope, without a single ray of comfort, until God curtains their staring
eyes with the merciful film of death."