THE PROBLEM OF DELIVERANCE.
_Curious Problem_.—_The Best Method of Treatment_.—_The_ “_Child of the
Gutter_” _not to be Entirely Abolished_.—_The Genuine Alley-Bred
Arab_.—_The Poor Lambs of the Ragged Flock_.—_The Tree of Evil in Our
Midst_.—_The Breeding Places of Disease and Vice_.
THE curious problem—“What is the best method of treatment to adopt
towards improving the condition of neglected children, and to diminish
their number for the future?” has been attempted for solution from so
many points of attack, and by means so various, that a bare enumeration
of the instances would occupy much more space than these limited pages
afford.
We may never hope entirely to abolish the child of the gutter. To a
large extent, as has been shown, he is a natural growth of vices that
seem inseparable from our social system: he is of the world, the flesh,
and the devil; and, until we purge our grosser nature, and become
angelic, we must tolerate him as we must the result of all our
ill-breeding. It is a thousand pities that it should be so, because, as
I have endeavoured in these pages to show, the neglected child issuing
from the source here hinted at, is by far the most unmanageable and
dangerous. Blood is thicker than any water, not excluding ditch water;
and the chances are that the unlucky “love-child” will not remain content
to grovel in the kennel to which an accident of birth consigned him, but,
out of his rebellious nature, conceive a deadly hatred against the world
that has served him so shabbily, and do his best to be revenged on it.
It is not of the neglected child of this breed that I would say a few
concluding words, but of the genuine alley-bred Arab of the City; the
worthy descendant of a tribe that has grown so used to neglect that it
regards it as its privilege, and fiercely resents any move that may be
taken towards its curtailment.
If ever a distressed creature had friends surely this one has. From time
immemorial it has been the pet of the philanthropist. Unsavoury,
unsightly bantling as it is, he is never tired of fondling it, spending
his time and money over it, and holding it up to the commiseration of a
humane public, and building all manner of homes and asylums for it; but
he still remains on hand. If he would grow up, and after being bound
’prentice to a wholesome trade cease to trouble us, there would be some
satisfaction in the business; but it never grows up. It is like the
borrowed beggar’s brat, that, in defiance of the progress of time, never
emerges from its bedgown, and never grows too big to be tucked under one
arm, leaving the other at liberty to arrest the charitable passer-by.
To be sure it is a great consolation to know that despite our
non-success, the poor little object of our solicitude is in no danger of
being dropped in hopelessness and abandoned, but it would be encouraging
to discover that we were making some progress with our main design, which
can be nothing less than the complete extinction of children of the
“gutter” tribe, such as we are now discussing.
As it is, we are making scarcely any progress at all. I am aware that
statistics are against this statement, that the triumphant reports of
this and that charity point to a different conclusion. This home has
rescued so many little ones from the streets—that asylum can show a
thousand decently clad and educated children that but for its efforts
would at this moment be either prowling the streets, picking up a more
precarious living than the stray dog picks up, or leading the life of a
petty thief, and rapidly earning his right to penal servitude.
This, and much more, is doubtless true, but there remains the grim fact
that our filthy byways still swarm with these dirty, ragged,
disease-stricken little ones, and as plentifully as of yore they infest
our highways, an eyesore and a shuddering to all decent beholders. If
there has occurred any recent diminution in their number, I should
rejoice to know it; but that such is in the least degree the fact,
certainly I am not justified in assuming in the face of the urgent
appeals daily put forth by the wise in such matters, and who never tire
of urging on the benevolently disposed, that never was there such need as
now to be up and stirring.
And it can never be otherwise while we limit our charitable doing to
providing for those poor lambs of the ragged flock as fast as they are
bred, and cast loose on the chance of their being mercifully kidnapped
and taken care of. As with indiscriminate giving to beggars, it may be
urged that we can never go wrong in ministering to the distress of the
infantine and helpless. Opportunities of doing so should perhaps be
joyfully hailed by us as affording wholesome exercise of our belief in
the Christian religion, but we may rely on it that the supply of the
essential ingredient towards the said exercise will never be unequal to
the demand. Our charitable exertion flows in too narrow a channel. It
is pure, and of depth immeasurable, but it is not broad enough. We have
got into a habit of treating our neglected children as an evil
unavoidable, and one that must be endured with kindly and pious
resignation. We have a gigantic tree of evil rooted in our midst, and
our great care is to collect the ripe seeds it drops and provide against
their germinating, and we expend as much time and money in the process as
judiciously applied would serve to tear up the old tree from its
tenacious holding, and for ever destroy its mischievous power. No doubt
it may be justly claimed by the patrons and supporters of homes and
asylums, that by rescuing these children from the streets they are saved
from becoming debased and demoralized as were the parents they sprang
from, and so, in course of time, by a steady perseverance in their
system, the breed of gutter prowlers must become extinct; but that is a
tedious and roundabout method of reform that can only be tolerated until
a more direct route is discovered, and one that can scarcely prove
satisfactory to those who look forward to a lifetime return for some of
their invested capital.
We may depend on it that we shall never make much real progress in our
endeavours to check the growth of these seedlings and offshoots of ragged
poverty and reckless squalor until we turn our attention with a settled
purpose to the haunts they are bred in. Our present system compels us
even in its first preliminary steps to do violence against nature. We
cannot deal with our babies of the gutter effectually, and with any
reasonable chance of success, until we have separated them entirely from
their _home_. We may tame them and teach them to feed out of our hands,
and to repeat after us the alphabet, and even words of two and three
syllables. We may even induce them to shed their bedraggled feathers and
adopt a more decent plumage; but they can never be other than restless
and ungovernable, and unclean birds, while they inhabit the vile old
parent nest.
It is these vile old nests that should be abolished. While they are
permitted to exist, while Rosemary Lane, and Peter Street, Westminster,
and Back Church Lane in Whitechapel, and Cow Cross and Seven Dials, and a
hundred similar places are tolerated and allowed to flourish, it is
utterly impossible to diminish the race of children of the gutter. Why
should these breeding places of disease and vice and all manner of
abomination be permitted to cumber the earth? There is but one opinion
that these horrid dens are the sources from which are derived two-thirds
of our neglected ragged urchin population. Further, it is generally
conceded, that it is not because of the prevalence of extreme poverty
there; the filthy little public-houses invariably to be found lurking in
the neighbourhood of rags and squalor would not be so prosperous if such
were the case. It is the pestilential atmosphere of the place that will
let nothing good live in it. You may never purify it. It is altogether
a rotten carcase; and if you stuff it to the mouth with chloride of lime,
and whitewash it an inch thick, you will make nothing else of it. It is
a sin and a disgrace that human creatures should be permitted to herd in
such places. One and all should be abolished, and wholesome habitations
built in their stead. Half measures will not meet the case. That has
been sufficiently proved but recently, when, not for morality or decency
sake, but to make room for a railway, a few score of these odious
hole-and-corner “slums” were razed to the ground.
The result was to make bad worse. The wretched occupants of the doomed
houses clung to them with as much tenacity as though each abode were an
ark, and if they were turned out of it, it would be to drown in the
surrounding flood. When the demolishers came with their picks and
crows—the honest housebreakers,—and mounted to the roof, the garret
lodgers retreated to the next floor, and so on, debating the ground step
by step before the inexorable pickaxe, until they were driven into the
cellar and could go no lower. Then they had to run for it; but, poor
purblind wretches, they had lived so long in dungeon darkness, that the
broad light of day was unbearable. Like rats disturbed from a drain, all
they desired was to escape out of sight and hide again; and again, like
rats, they knew of neighbouring burrows and scuttled to them with all
speed.
Ousted from Slusher’s Alley, they sought Grimes’s Rents. Grimes’s Rents
were already fully occupied by renters, but the present was a calamity
that might overtake anyone, and the desired shelter was not refused. It
was a mere matter of packing a little closer. The donkey that lodged in
the cellar was turned into the wash-house, and there was a commodious
apartment for a large family, and nothing was easier than to rig up an
old counterpane on an extended string, so converting one chamber into
two. Hard as it is to believe, and in mockery of all our Acts of
Parliament for the better ordering of lodging-houses, and our legal
enactments regulating the number of cubic feet of air every lodger was
entitled to and might insist on, in hundreds of cases this condition of
things exists at the present writing. Within a stone’s cast of the
Houses of Parliament, where sit six hundred wise gentlemen empanelled to
make what laws they please for improving the condition of the people,
every one of the said six hundred being an educated man of liberal mind,
and fully recognising the Christian maxim that godliness and cleanliness
are identical, may be found human creatures housed in places that would
ruin the health of a country-bred pig were he removed thereto. In these
same places parents and grown up and little children herd in the same
room night and day. Sickness does not break up the party, or even the
presence of grim Death himself. Singularly enough, however, more
ceremony is observed with new life than with old Death. A missionary
friend related to me the case of a family of five inhabiting one small
room, and the youngest boy, aged thirteen, died. The domestic
arrangements, however, were not in the least disturbed by the melancholy
event; the lad’s coffin was laid against the wall, and meals were cooked
and eaten and the two beds made and occupied as usual until the day of
burial. A little while after, however, the mother gave birth to a child,
and my friend visiting the family found it grouped on the landing
partaking of a rough-and-ready tea. It was voted “undacent to be
inthrudin’” until next day. However, the decent scruples of the head of
the family did not hold out beyond that time, and by the evening of the
next day the old order of things was quite restored.
How in the name of goodness and humanity can we, under such
circumstances, hope to be delivered from the curse of neglected children?
II.—Professional Thieves.