it, for I know that the drolleries are played out amid sombre
surroundings that should make the heart quake. While the hysterical
newspaper people are venting abuse and coining theories, there are
quiet workers in thousands who go on in uncomplaining steadfastness
striving to remove a deadly shame from our civilisation, and smiling
softly at the furious cries of folk who know so little and vociferate
so much. After each whirlwind of sympathy has reached its full
strength, there is generally a strong disposition among the
sentimentalists to do something. No mere words for the genuine
sentimentalist; he packs his sentimental self into a cab, he engages
the services of a policeman, and he plunges into the nasty deeps of
the City's misery. He treats each court and alley as a department of a
menagerie, and he gazes with mild interest on the animals that he
views. To the sentimentalist they are only animals; and he is kind to
them as he would be to an ailing dog at home. If the sentimentalist's
womenfolk go with him, the tour is made still more pleasing. The
ladies shudder with terror as they trail their dainty skirts up
noisome stairs; but their genteel cackle never ceases. "And you earn
six shillings per week? How very surprising! And the landlord takes
four shillings for your one room? How very mean! And you have--let me
see--four from six leaves two--yes--you have two shillings a week to
keep you and your three children? How charmingly shocking!" The honest
poor go out to work; the wastrels stay at home and invent tales of
woe; then, when the dusk falls on the foul court and all the
sentimentalists have gone home to dinner, the woe-stricken tellers of
harrowing tales creep out to the grimy little public-house at the top
of the row; they spend the gifts of the sentimentalist; and, when the
landlord draws out his brimming tills at midnight, he blesses the kind
people who help to earn a snug income for him. I have seen forty-eight
drunken people come out of a tavern between half-past eleven and
half-past twelve in one night during the time when sentiment ran mad;
there never were such roaring times for lazy and dissolute scoundrels;
and nearly all the money given by the sentimentalists was spent in
sowing crops of liver complaint or _delirium tremens_, and in filling
the workhouses and the police-cells. Then the fit of charity died out;
the clergyman and the "sisters" went on as usual in their sacredly
secret fashion until a new outburst came. It seems strange to talk of
Charity "raging"--it reminds us of Mr. Mantalini's savage lamb--but I
can use no other word but "rage" to express these frantic gushes of
affection for the poor. During one October month I carefully preserved
and collated all the suggestions which were so liberally put forth in
various London and provincial newspapers; and I observed that
something like four hundred of these suggestions resolve themselves
into a very few definite classes. The most sensible of these follow
the lines laid down by Charles Dickens, and the writers say, "If you
do not want the poor to behave like hogs, why do you house them like
hogs? Clear away the rookeries; buy up the sites; pay reasonable
compensation to those now interested in the miserable buildings, and
then erect decent dwellings."
Now I do not want to confuse my readers by taking first a bead-roll of
proposals, and then a bead-roll of arguments for and against, so I
shall deal with each reformer's idea in the order of its importance.
Before beginning, I must say that I differ from all the purveyors of
the cheaper sort of sentiment; I differ from many ladies and gentlemen
who talk about abstractions; and I differ most of all from the
feather-brained persons who set up as authorities after they have paid
flying visits in cabs to ugly neighbourhoods. When a specialist like
Miss Octavia Hill speaks, we hear her with respect; but Miss Hill is
not a sentimentalist; she is a keen, cool woman who has put her
emotions aside, and who has gone to work in the dark regions in a kind
of Napoleonic fashion. No fine phrases for her--nothing but fact,
fact, fact. Miss Hill feels quite as keenly as the gushing persons;
but she has regulated her feelings according to the environment in
which her energies had to be exercised, and she has done more good
than all the poetic creatures that ever raked up "cases" or made
pretty phrases. I leave Miss Hill out of my reckoning, and I deal with
the others. My conclusions may seem hard, and even cruel, but they are
based on what I believe to be the best kindness, and they are
supported by a somewhat varied experience. I shall waive the charge of
cruelty in advance, and proceed to plain downright business.
You want to clear away rookeries and erect decent dwellings in their
place? Good and beautiful! I sympathise with the intention, and I wish
that it could be carried into effect instantly. Unhappily reforms of
that sort cannot by any means be arranged on the instant, and
certainly they cannot be arranged so as to suit the case of the
Hopeless Poor. Shall I tell you, dear sentimentalist, that the
Hopeless brigade would not accept your kindness if they could? I shall
stagger many people when I say that the Hopeless division like the
free abominable life of the rookery, and that any kind of restraint
would only send them swarming off to some other centre from which they
would have to be dislodged by degrees according to the means and the
time of the authorities. Hard, is it not? But it is true. Certain
kinds of cultured men like the life which they call "Bohemian." The
Hopeless class like their peculiar Bohemianism, and they like it with
all the gusto and content of their cultured brethren. Suppose you
uproot a circle of rookeries. The inhabitants are scattered here and
there, and they proceed to gain their living by means which may or may
not be lawful. The decent law-abiding citizens who are turned out of
house and home during the progress of reform suffer most. They are not
inclined to become predatory animals; and, although they may have been
used to live according to a very low human standard, they cannot all
at once begin to live merely up to the standard of pigs. No writer
dare tell in our English tongue the consequences of evicting the
denizens of a genuine rookery for the purpose of substituting
improvements; and I know only one French writer who would be bold
enough to furnish cogent details to any civilised community. But, for
argument's sake, let me suppose that your "rooks" are transferred from
their nests to your model dwellings. I shall allow you to do all that
philanthropy can dictate; I shall grant you the utmost powers that a
government can bestow; and I shall give six months for your
experiment. What will be found at the end of that time? Alas, your
fine model dwellings will be in worse condition than the wigwam that
the Apache and his squaw inhabit! Let a colony of "rooks" take
possession of a sound, well-fitted building, and it will be found that
not even the most stringent daily visitation will prevent utter wreck
from being wrought. The pipes needed for all sanitary purposes will be
cut and sold; the handles of doors and the brass-work of taps will be
cut away; every scrap of wood-work available for fire-wood will be
stolen sooner or later, and the people will relapse steadily into a
state of filth and recklessness to be paralleled only among Australian
and North American aborigines. Which of the sentimentalists has ever
travelled to America with a few hundreds of Russian and Polish Jews,
Saxon peasants, and Irish peasants from the West? That is the only
experience capable of giving an idea of what happens when a
fairly-fitted house is handed over to the tender mercies of a
selection from the British "residuum." I shall be accused of talking
the language of despair. I have never done that. I should like to see
the time come when the poor may no more dwell in hovels like swine,
and when a poverty-stricken inhabitant of London may not be brought up
with ideas and habits coarser than those of a pig; I merely say that
shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way. They
are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars
for the use of ferrets. I grant that the condition of many London
streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see
how the desolation is caused. Wanton, brutish destructiveness has been
at work everywhere. The cistern which should supply a building cannot
be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few yards of pipe
have been chopped away and carried to a marine-store dealer; the
landings and the floors are strewn with dirt which a smart, cleanly
countrywoman would have cleared away without ten minutes' trouble. The
very windows are robbed; and the whole set of inhabitants rests in
contented, unspeakable squalor. No--something more is required than
delicate, silky-handed reform; something more is required than
ready-made blocks of neat dwellings; and something more is required
than sighing sentimentalism, which looks at miserable effects without
scrutinising causes. Let the sentimentalist mark this. If you
transplant a colony of "rooks" into good quarters, you will have
another rookery on your hands; if you remove a drove of brutes into
reasonable human dwelling-places, you will soon have a set of homes
fit for brutes and for brutes alone. Bricks and mortar and whitewash
will not change the nature of human vermin; phrases about beauty and
duty and loveliness will not affect the maker of slums, any more than
perfumes or pretty colours would affect the rats that squirm under the
foundations of the city. Does the sentimentalist imagine that the
brick-and-mortar structures about which he wails were always centres
of festering ugliness? If he has that fancy, let him take a glance at
some of the quaint old houses of Southwark. They were clean and
beautiful in their day, but the healthy human plant can no longer
flourish in them, and the weed creeps in, the crawling parasite
befouls their walls, and the structures which were lovely when
Chaucer's pilgrims started from the "Tabard" are abominable now. If
English folk of gentle and cleanly breeding had lived on in those
ancient places, they would have been wholesome and sound like many
another house erected in days gone by; but the weed gradually took
root, and now the ugliest dens in London are found in the places where
knights and trim clerks and gracious dames once lived. In the face of
all these things, how strangely unwise it is to fancy that ever the
Forlorn Army can be saved by bricks and mortar!
Education? Ah, there comes a pinch--and a very severe pinch it is!
About five or six years since some of the most important thoroughfares
in London, Liverpool, and many great towns have been rendered totally
impassable by the savage proceedings of gangs of young roughs. Certain
districts in Liverpool could not be traversed after dark, and the
reason was simply this--any man or woman of decent appearance was
liable to be first of all surrounded by a carefully-picked company of
blackguards; then came the clever trip-up from behind; then the victim
was left to be robbed; and then the authorities wrung their hands and
said that it was a pity, and that everything should be done. The
Liverpool youths went a little too far, and one peculiarly obnoxious
set of rascals were sent to penal servitude, while the leader of a
gang of murderers went to the gallows. But in London we have such
sights every night as never were matched in the most turbulent Italian
cities at times when the hot Southern blood was up; our great English
capital can match Venice, Rome, Palermo, Turin, or Milan in the matter
of stabbing; and, for mere wanton cruelty and thievishness, I imagine
that Hackney Road or Gray's Inn Road may equal any thoroughfare of
François Villon's Paris. These turbulent London mobs that make night
hideous are made up of youths who have tasted the full blessings of
our educational system; they were mostly mere infants when the great
measure was passed which was to regenerate all things, and yet the
London of Swift's time was not much worse than the Southwark or
Hackney of our own day. I never for an instant dispute the general
advance which our modern society has made, and I dislike the gruesome
rubbish talked of the good old times; but I must nevertheless point
out that "fancy" building and education are not the main factors which
have aided in making us better and more seemly. The brutal rough
remains, and the gangs of scamps who infest London in various spots
are quite as bad as the beings whom Hogarth drew. They have all been
forced into the Government schools; all of them have learned to read
and write, and not one was suffered to leave school until he had
reached the age of fourteen years or passed a moderately high standard
according to the Code. Still, we have this monstrous army of the
Hopeless Poor, and they are usually massed with the Hopeful Poor--the
poor who attend the People's Palaces, and institutes, and so forth.
Alas, the Hopeless Poor are not to be dismissed with a light
phrase--they are not to be dealt with by mere pretty words! They are
creatures who remain poor and villainous because they choose to be
poor and villainous; so pity and nice theories will not cure them. The
best of us yearn toward the good poor folk, and we find a healthful
joy in aiding them; but we have a set of very different feelings
towards the Evil Brigade.
XIII.
WAIFS AND STRAYS.
When I talked[2] of the hopeless poor and of degraded men, I had in my
mind only the feeble or detestable adults who degrade our
civilisation; but I have by no means forgotten the unhappy little
souls who develop into wastrels unless they are taken away from
hideous surroundings which cramp vitality, destroy all childish
happiness, and turn into brutes poor young creatures who bear the
human image. Lately I heard one or two little stories which are
amongst the most pathetic that ever came before me in the course of
some small experience of life among the forsaken classes--or rather
let me say, the classes that used to be forsaken. These little stories
have prompted me to endeavour to deal carefully with a matter which
has cost me many sad thoughts.
[2] Essay XII.
A stray child was rescued from the streets by a society which is
extending its operations very rapidly, and the little creature was
placed as a boarder with a cottager in the country. To the utter
amazement of the good rustic folk, their queer little guest showed
complete ignorance of the commonest plants and animals; she had never
seen any pretty thing, and she was quite used to being hungry and to
satisfying her appetite with scraps of garbage. When she first saw a
daisy on the green, she gazed longingly, and then asked plaintively,
"Please, might I touch that?" When she was told that she might pluck a
few daisies she was much delighted. After her first experiences in the
botanising line she formally asked permission to pluck many wild
flowers; but she always seemed to have a dread of transgressing
against some dim law which had been hitherto represented to her mind
by the man in blue who used to watch over her miserable alley. Before
she became accustomed to receiving food at regular intervals, she
fairly touched the hearts of her foster-parents by one queer request.
The housewife was washing some Brussels sprouts, when the little stray
said timidly, "Please, may I eat a bit of that stalk?" Of course the
stringy mass was uneatable; but it turned out that the forlorn child
had been very glad to worry at the stalks from the gutter as a dog
does at an unclean bone. Another little girl was taken from the den
which she knew as home, after her parents had been sent to prison for
treating her with unspeakable cruelty. The matron of the country home
found that the child's body was scarred from neck to ankle in a
fashion which no lapse of years could efface. The explanation of the
disfigurement was very simple. "If I didn't bring in any money mother
beat me first; and then, when father came in drunk, she tied my hands
behind my back and told him to give me the buckle. Then they strapped
me on the bed and fastened my feet, and he whacked me with the
buckle-end of his strap." It sounds very horrible, does it not?
Nevertheless, the facts remain that the wretched parents were caught
in the act and convicted, and that the child must carry her scars to
her grave. No one who has not seen these lost children can form an
idea of their darkness and helplessness of mind. We all know the story
of the South Sea islanders, who said, "What a big pig!" when they
first saw a horse; one little London savage quite equalled this by
remarking, "What a little cow!" when she saw a tiny Maltese terrier
brought by a lady missionary. The child had some vague conception
regarding a cow; but, like others of her class, her notions of size,
form, and colour, were quite cloudy. Another of these city phenomena
did not know how to blow out a candle; and in many cases it is most
difficult to persuade those newly reclaimed to go to bed without
keeping their boots on. We cannot call such beings barbarians, because
"barbarian" implies something wild, strong, and even noble; yet, to
our shame, we must call them savages, and we must own that they are
born and bred within easy gunshot distance of our centres of culture,
enlightenment, and luxury. They swarm, do these children of suffering:
and easy-going people have no idea of the density of the savagery amid
which such scions of our noble English race are reared. A gentleman
once offered sixpence to a little girl who appeared before him dressed
in a single garment which seemed to have been roughly made from some
sort of sacking. He expected to see her snatch at the coin with all
the eagerness of the ordinary hardy street-arab; but she showed her
jagged brown teeth, and said huskily, "No! Big money!" A lady,
divining with the rapid feminine instinct what was meant by the
enigmatic muttering, explained, "She does not know the sixpence. She
has had coppers to spend before." And so it turned out to be.
Perhaps comfortable, satisfied readers may be startled, or even
offended, if I say that there are young creatures in our great cities
who rarely see even the light of day, save when the beams are filtered
through the reek of a court; and these same infants resemble the black
fellows of Western Australia or the Troglodytes of Africa in general
intelligence. I have little heart to speak of the parents who are
answerable for such horrors of crass neglect and cruelty. By laying a
set of dry police reports before any sensitive person I could make
that person shudder without adding a word of rhetoric; for it would be
seen that the popular picture of a fiend represents rather a mild and
harmless entity if we compare it with the foul-souled human beings who
dwell in our benighted places. What is to be done? It is best to
grapple swiftly with an ugly question; and I do not hesitate to attack
deliberately one of the most delicate puzzles that ever came before
the world. Wise emotionless men may say, and do say, "Are you going to
relieve male and female idlers and drunkards of all anxiety regarding
their offspring? Do you mean to discourage the honest but
poverty-stricken parents who do their best for their children? What
kind of world will you make for us all if you give your aid to the
worst and neglect the good folk?" Those are very awkward questions,
and I can answer them only by a sort of expedient which must not be
mistaken for intellectual conjuring; I drop ordinary logic and
theories of probability and go at once to facts. At first sight it
seems like rank folly for any man or body of men to take charge of a
child which has been neglected by shameless parents; but, on the other
hand, let us consider our own self-interest, and leave sentiment alone
for a while. We cannot put the benighted starvelings into a lethal
chamber and dispose of their brief lives in that fashion; we are bound
to maintain them in some way or other--and the ratepayers of St.
George's-in-the-East know to some trifling extent what that means. If
the waifs grow up to be predatory animals, we must maintain them first
of all in reformatories, and afterwards, at intervals during their
lives, in prisons. If they grow up without shaking off the terrible
mental darkness of their starveling childhood, we must provide for
them in asylums. A thoroughly neglected waif costs this happy country
something like fifteen pounds per year for the term of his natural
life. Very good. At this point some hard-headed person says, "What
about the workhouses?" This brings us face to face with another
astounding problem to solve which at all satisfactorily requires no
little research and thought. I know that there are good workhouses;
but I happen to know that there are also bad ones. In many a ship and
fishing-vessel fine fellows may be met with who were sent out early
from workhouse-schools and wrought their way onward until they became
brave and useful seamen; there are also many industrious
well-conducted girls who came originally from the great Union schools.
But, when I take another side of the picture, I am inclined to say
very fervently, "Anything rather than the workhouse system for
children! Anything short of complete neglect!" Observe that in one of
the overgrown schools the young folk are scarcely treated as human;
their individuality--if they have any to begin with--is soon lost;
they are known only by a number, and they are passed into the outer
world like bundles of shot rubbish. There are seamen who have never
cast off the peculiar workhouse taint--and no worse shipmates ever
afflicted any capable and honourable soul: for these Union weeds carry
the vices of Rob the Grinder and Noah Claypole on to blue water, and
show themselves to be hounds who would fawn or snarl, steal or talk
saintliness, lie or sneak just as interest suited them. Then the
workhouse girls: I have said sharp words about cruel mistresses; but I
frankly own that the average lady who is saddled with the average
workhouse servant has some slight reasons for showing acerbity, though
she has none for practising cruelty. How could anybody expect a girl
to turn out well after the usual course of workhouse training? The
life of the soul is too often quenched; the flame of life in the poor
body is dim and low; and the mechanical morality, the dull,
meaningless round of useless lessons, the habit of herding in
unhealthy rooms with unhealthy companions, all tend to develop a
creature which can be regarded only as one of Nature's failures, if I
may parody a phrase of the superlative Beau Brummel's.
There is another and darker side to the workhouse question, but I
shall skim it lightly. The women whose conversation the young girls
hear are often wicked, and thus a dull, under-fed, inept child may
have a great deal too much knowledge of evil. Can we expect such a
collection to contain a large percentage of seemly and useful
children? Is it a fact that the Unions usually supply domestics worth
keeping? Ask the mistresses, and the answer will not be encouraging.
No; the workhouse will not quite suffice. What we want to do is to
take the waifs and strays into places where they may lead a natural
and healthy life. Get them clear of the horror of the slums, let them
breathe pure air and learn pure and simple habits, and then, instead
of odious and costly human weeds, we may have wholesome, useful
fellow-citizens, who not only will cost us nothing, but who will be a
distinct source of solid profit to the empire. The thing has been and
is being done steadily by good men and women who defy prejudice and go
to work in a vigorous practical way. The most miserable and apparently
hopeless little creatures from the filthy purlieus of great towns
become gradually bright and healthy and intelligent when they are
taken to their natural home--the country--and cut adrift from the
congested centres of population. The cost of their maintenance is at
first a little over the workhouse figure; but then the article
produced for the money is far and away superior to anything turned out
by any workhouse. The rescued children are eagerly sought after in the
Colonies; and I am not aware of any case in which one of the young
emigrants has expressed discontent. How much better it is to see these
poor waifs changed into useful, profitable colonists than to have them
sullenly, uselessly starving in the dens of London and Liverpool and
Manchester! The work of rescuing and training the lost children has
not been fully developed yet; but enough has been done to show that in
a few years we shall have a large number of prosperous Colonial
farmers who will indirectly contribute to the wealth of mighty
Britain. Had the trained emigrants never been snatched away from the
verge of the pit, we should have been obliged to maintain them until
their wretched lives ended with sordid deaths, and the very cost of
their burial would have come from the pockets of pinched workers. I
fancy that I have shown the advisability of neglecting strict economic
canons in this instance. I abhor the pestilent beings who swarm in
certain quarters, and I should never dream of removing any burden from
their shoulders if I thought that it would only leave the rascals with
more money to expend on brutish pleasures; but I desire to look far
ahead, and I can see that, when the present generation of adult
wastrels dies out, it will be a very good thing for all of us if there
are few or none of the same stamp ready to take their places. By
resolutely removing the children of vice and sorrow, we clear the road
for a better race. Let it be understood that I have a truly orthodox
dread of "pauperisation," and I watch very jealously the doings of
those who are anxious to feed all sorts and conditions of men; but
pauperising men by maintaining them in laziness is very different from
rearing useful subjects of the empire, whose trained labour is a
source of profit and whose developed morality is a fund of security.
We cannot take Chinese methods of lessening the pressure of
population, and we must at once decide on the wisest way of dealing
with our waifs and strays; if we do not, then the chances are that
they will deal unpleasantly with us. The locust, the lemming, the
phylloxera, are all very insignificant creatures; but, when they act
together in numbers, they can very soon devastate a district. The
parable is not by any means inapt.
XIV.
STAGE-CHILDREN.