SECTION 1.--A SLUM CRUSADE.--OUR SLUM SISTERS.

Ver.04.29.93*END*

IN DARKEST ENGLAND and THE WAY OUT

by GENERAL BOOTH

(this Etext comes from the 1890 1st ed. pub. The Salvation Army)

To the memory of the companion, counsellor, and comrade of

nearly 40 years. The sharer of my every ambition for the

welfare of mankind, my loving, faithful, and devoted wife

this book is dedicated.

PREFACE

The progress of The Salvation Army in its work amongst the poor and

lost of many lands has compelled me to face the problems which an more

or less hopefully considered in the following pages. The grim

necessities of a huge Campaign carried on for many years against the

evils which lie at the root of all the miseries of modern life,

attacked in a thousand and one forms by a thousand and one lieutenants,

have led me step by step to contemplate as a possible solution of at

least some of those problems the Scheme of social Selection and

Salvation which I have here set forth.

When but a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor

Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken

through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the

Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare

subsistence kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have

continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my

whole life. A last I may be going to see my longings to help the

workless realised. I think I am.

The commiseration then awakened by the misery of this class has been an

impelling force which has never ceased to make itself felt during forty

years of active service in the salvation of men. During this time I am

thankful that I have been able, by the good hand of God upon me, to do

something in mitigation of the miseries of this class, and to bring not

only heavenly hopes and earthly gladness to the hearts of multitudes of

these wretched crowds, but also many material blessings, including such

commonplace things as food, raiment, home, and work, the parent of so

many other temporal benefits. And thus many poor creatures have proved

Godliness to be "profitable unto all things, having the promise of the

life that now is as well as of that which is to come."

These results have been mainly attained by spiritual means. I have

boldly asserted that whatever his peculiar character or circumstances

might be, if the prodigal would come home to his Heavenly Father, he

would find enough and to spare in the Father's house to supply all his

need both for this world and the next; and I have known thousands nay,

I can say tens of thousands, who have literally proved this to be true,

having, with little or no temporal assistance, come out of the darkest

depths of destitution, vice and crime, to be happy and honest citizens

and true sons and servants of God.

And yet all the way through my career I have keenly felt the remedial

measures usually enunciated in Christian programmes and ordinarily

employed by Christian philanthropy to be lamentably inadequate for any

effectual dealing with the despairing miseries of these outcast

classes. The rescued are appallingly few--a ghastly minority compared

with the multitudes who struggle and sink in the open-mouthed abyss.

Alike, therefore, my humanity and my Christianity, if I may speak of

them in any way as separate one from the other, have cried out for some

more comprehensive method of reaching and saving the perishing crowds.

No doubt it is good for men to climb unaided out of the whirlpool on to

the rock of deliverance in the very presence of the temptations which

have hitherto mastered them, and to maintain a footing there with the

same billows of temptation washing over them. But, alas! with many

this seems to be literally impossible. That decisiveness of character,

that moral nerve which takes hold of the rope thrown for the rescue and

keeps its hold amidst all the resistances that have to be encountered,

is wanting. It is gone.

The general wreck has shattered and disorganised the whole man.

Alas, what multitudes there are around us everywhere, many known to my

readers personally, and any number who may be known to them by a very

short walk from their own dwellings, who are in this very plight! Their

vicious habits and destitute circumstances make it certain that without

some kind of extraordinary help, they must hunger and sin, and sin and

hunger, until, having multiplied their kind, and filled up the measure

of their miseries, the gaunt fingers of death will close upon then and

terminate their wretchedness. And all this will happen this very

winter in the midst of the unparalleled wealth, and civilisation, and

philanthropy of this professedly most Christian land.

Now, I propose to go straight for these sinking classes, and in doing

so shall continue to aim at the heart. I still prophesy the uttermost

disappointment unless that citadel is reached. In proposing to add one

more to the methods I have already put into operation to this end, do

not let it be supposed that I am the less dependent upon the old plans

or that I seek anything short of the old conquest. If we help the man

it is in order that we may change him. The builder who should elaborate

his design and erect his house and risk his reputation without burning

his bricks would be pronounced a failure and a fool. Perfection of

architectural beauty, unlimited expenditure of capital, unfailing

watchfulness of his labourers, would avail him nothing if the bricks

were merely unkilned clay. Let him kindle a fire. And so here I see

the folly of hoping to accomplish anything abiding, either in the

circumstances or the morals of these hopeless classes, except there be

a change effected in the whole man as well as in his surroundings.

To this everything I hope to attempt will tend. In many cases I shall

succeed, in some I shall fail; but even in failing of this my ultimate

design, I shall at least benefit the bodies, if not the souls, of men;

and if I do not save the fathers, I shall make a better chance for the

children.

It will be seen therefore that in this or in any other development that

may follow I have no intention to depart in the smallest degree from

the main principles on which I have acted in the past. My only hope

for the permanent deliverance of mankind from misery, either in this

world or the next, is the regeneration or remaking of the individual by

the power of the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. But in providing for

the relief of temporal misery I reckon that I am only making it easy

where it is now difficult, and possible where it is now all but

impossible, for men and women to find their way to the Cross of our

Lord Jesus Christ.

That I have confidence in my proposals goes without saying.

I believe they will work. In miniature many of them are working

already. But I do not claim that my Scheme is either perfect in its

details or complete in the sense of being adequate to combat all forms

of the gigantic evils against which it is in the main directed.

Like other human things it must be perfected through suffering.

But it is a sincere endeavour to do something, and to do it on

principles which can be instantly applied and universally developed.

Time, experience, criticism, and, above all, the guidance of God will

enable us, I hope, to advance on the lines here laid down to a true and

practical application of the words of the Hebrew Prophet: "Loose the

bands of wickedness; undo the heavy burdens; let the oppressed go free;

break every yoke; deal thy bread to the hungry; bring the poor that are

cast out to thy house. When thou seest the naked cover him and hide

not thyself from thine own flesh. Draw out thy soul to the hungry--

Then they that be of thee shall build the old waste places and Thou

shalt raise up the foundations of many generations."

To one who has been for nearly forty years indissolubly associated with

me in every undertaking I owe much of the inspiration which has found

expression in this book. It is probably difficult for me to fully

estimate the extent to which the splendid benevolence and unbounded

sympathy of her character have pressed me forward in the life-long

service of man, to which we have devoted both ourselves and our

children. It will be an ever green and precious memory to me that amid

the ceaseless suffering of a dreadful malady my dying wife found relief

in considering and developing the suggestions for the moral and social

and spiritual blessing of the people which are here set forth, and I do

thank God she was taken from me only when the book was practically

complete and the last chapters had been sent to the press.

In conclusion, I have to acknowledge the services rendered to me in

preparing this book by Officers under my command. There could be no

hope of carrying out any part of it, but for the fact that so many

thousands are ready at my call and under my direction to labour to the

very utmost of their strength for the salvation of others without the

hope of earthly reward. Of the practical common sense, the resource,

the readiness for every form of usefulness of those Officers and

Soldiers, the world has no conception. Still less is it capable of

understanding the height and depth of their self-sacrificing devotion

to God and the poor.

I have also to acknowledge valuable literary help from a friend of the

poor, who, though not in any way connected with the Salvation Army,

has the deepest sympathy with its aims and is to a large extent in

harmony with its principles. Without such assistance I should probably

have found it--overwhelmed as I already am with the affairs of a

world-wide enterprise--extremely difficult, if not impossible, to

have presented these proposals for which I am alone responsible in so

complete a form, at any rate at this time. I have no doubt that if any

substantial part of my plan is successfully carried out he will

consider himself more than repaid for the services so ably rendered.

WILLIAM BOOTH.

INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE SALVATION ARMY, LONDON, E.C.,

October, 1890.

CONTENTS

PART 1. THE DARKNESS.

CHAPTER 1. Why "Darkest England"?

CHAPTER 2. The Submerged Tenth

CHAPTER 3. The Homeless

CHAPTER 4. The Out-of-Works

CHAPTER 5. On the Verge of the Abyss

CHAPTER 6. The Vicious

CHAPTER 7. The Criminals

CHAPTER 8. The Children of the Lost

CHAPTER 9. Is there no Help?

PART 2. DELIVERANCE.

CHAPTER 1. A Stupendous Undertaking

Section 1. The Essentials to Success

Section 2. My Scheme

CHAPTER 2. To the Rescue!--The City Colony

Section 1. Food and Shelter for Every Man

Section 2. Work for the Out-of-Works--The Factory

Section 3. The Regimentation of the Unemployed

Section 4. The Household Salvage Brigade

CHAPTER 3. To the Country!--The Farm Colony

Section 1. The Farm Proper

Section 2. The Industrial Village

Section 3. Agricultural Villages

Section 4. Co-operative Farm

CHAPTER 4. New Britain--The Colony Over Sea

Section 1. The Colony and the Colonists

Section 2. Universal Emigration

Section 3. The Salvation Ship

CHAPTER 5. More Crusades

Section 1. A Slum Crusade.--Our Slum Sisters

Section 2. The Travelling Hospital

Section 3. Regeneration of our Criminals--The Prison Gate Brigade

Section 4. Effectual Deliverance for the Drunkard

Section 5. A New Way of Escape for Lost Women--The Rescue Homes

Section 6. A Preventive Home for Unfallen Girls when in Danger

Section 7. Enquiry Office for Lost People

Section 8. Refuges for the Children of the Streets

Section 9. Industrial Schools

Section 10. Asylums for Moral Lunatics

CHAPTER 6. Assistance in General

Section 1. Improved Lodgings

Section 2. Model Suburban Villages

Section 3. The Poor Man's Bank

Section 4. The Poor Man's Lawyer

Section 5. Intelligence Department

Section 6. Co-operation in General

Section 7. Matrimonial Bureau

Section 8. Whitechapel-by-the-sea

CHAPTER 7. Can it be done, and how?

Section 1. The Credentials of the Salvation Army

Section 2. How much will it cost?

Section 3. Some advantages stated

Section 4. Some objections met

Section 5. Recapitulation

CHAPTER 8. A Pratical Conclusion

IN DARKEST ENGLAND

PART 1. THE DARKNESS.

CHAPTER 1. WHY "DARKEST ENGLAND"?

This summer the attention of the civilised world has been arrested by

the story which Mr. Stanley has told of Darkest Africa and his

journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent. In all that

spirited narrative of heroic endeavour, nothing has so much impressed

the imagination, as his description of the immense forest, which

offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his advance. The intrepid

explorer, in his own phrase, "marched, tore, ploughed, and cut his way

for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true

tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to

realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half

as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never

penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the

heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into

cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring

home to us the full horror of that awful gloom. He says:

Take a thick Scottish copse dripping with rain; imagine this to be mere

undergrowth nourished under the impenetrable shade of ancient trees

ranging from 100 to 180 feet high; briars and thorns abundant; lazy

creeks meandering through the depths of the jungle, and sometimes a

deep affluent of a great river. Imagine this forest and jungle in all

stages of decay and growth, rain pattering on you every other day of

the year; an impure atmosphere with its dread consequences, fever and

dysentery; gloom throughout the day and darkness almost palpable

throughout the night; and then if you can imagine such a forest

extending the entire distance from Plymouth to Peterhead, you will have

a fair idea of some of the inconveniences endured by us in the Congo

forest.

The denizens of this region are filled with a conviction that the

forest is endless--interminable. In vain did Mr. Stanley and his

companions endeavour to convince them that outside the dreary wood were

to be found sunlight, pasturage and peaceful meadows.

They replied in a manner that seemed to imply that we must be strange

creatures to suppose that it would be possible for any world to exist

save their illimitable forest. "No," they replied, shaking their heads

compassionately, and pitying our absurd questions, "all like this," and

they moved their hand sweepingly to illustrate that the world was all

alike, nothing but trees, trees and trees--great trees rising as high

as an arrow shot to the sky, lifting their crowns intertwining their

branches, pressing and crowding one against the other, until neither

the sunbeam nor shaft of light can penetrate it.

"We entered the forest," says Mr. Stanley, "with confidence; forty

pioneers in front with axes and bill hooks to clear a path through the

obstructions, praying that God and good fortune would lead us."

But before the conviction of the forest dwellers that the forest was

without end, hope faded out of the hearts of the natives of Stanley's

company. The men became sodden with despair, preaching was useless to

move their brooding sullenness, their morbid gloom.

The little religion they knew was nothing more than legendary lore,

and in their memories there dimly floated a story of a land which grew

darker and darker as one travelled towards the end of the earth and

drew nearer to the place where a great serpent lay supine and coiled

round the whole world. Ah! then the ancients must have referred to

this, where the light is so ghastly, and the woods are endless, and are

so still and solemn and grey; to this oppressive loneliness, amid so

much life, which is so chilling to the poor distressed heart; and the

horror grew darker with their fancies; the cold of early morning, the

comfortless grey of dawn, the dead white mist, the ever-dripping tears

of the dew, the deluging rains, the appalling thunder bursts and the

echoes, and the wonderful play of the dazzling lightning. And when the

night comes with its thick palpable darkness, and they lie huddled in

their damp little huts, and they hear the tempest overhead, and the

howling of the wild winds, the grinding an groaning of the storm-tost

trees, and the dread sounds of the falling giants, and the shock of the

trembling earth which sends their hearts with fitful leaps to their

throats, and the roaring and a rushing as of a mad overwhelming sea--

oh, then the horror is intensified! When the march has begun once

again, and the files are slowly moving through the woods, they renew

their morbid broodings, and ask themselves: How long is this to last?

Is the joy of life to end thus? Must we jog on day after day in this

cheerless gloom and this joyless duskiness, until we stagger and fall

and rot among the toads? Then they disappear into the woods by twos,

and threes, and sixes; and after the caravan has passed they return by

the trail, some to reach Yambuya and upset the young officers with

their tales of woe and war; some to fall sobbing under a spear-thrust;

some to wander and stray in the dark mazes of the woods, hopelessly

lost; and some to be carved for the cannibal feast. And those who

remain compelled to it by fears of greater danger, mechanically march

on, a prey to dread and weakness.

That is the forest. But what of its denizens? They are comparatively

few; only some hundreds of thousands living in small tribes from ten to

thirty miles apart, scattered over an area on which ten thousand

million trees put out the sun from a region four times as wide as

Great Britain. Of these pygmies there are two kinds; one a very

degraded specimen with ferretlike eyes, close-set nose, more nearly

approaching the baboon than was supposed to be possible, but very

human; the other very handsome, with frank open innocent features,

very prepossessing. They are quick and intelligent, capable of deep

affection and gratitude, showing remarkable industry and patience.

A pygmy boy of eighteen worked with consuming zeal; time with him was

too precious to waste in talk. His mind seemed ever concentrated on

work. Mr. Stanley said: --

"When I once stopped him to ask him his name, his face seemed to say,

'Please don't stop me. I must finish my task.'

"All alike, the baboon variety and the handsome innocents, are

cannibals. They are possessed with a perfect mania for meat. We were

obliged to bury our dead in the river, lest the bodies should be

exhumed and eaten, even when they had died from smallpox."

Upon the pygmies and all the dwellers of the forest has descended a

devastating visitation in the shape of the ivory raiders of

civilisation. The race that wrote the Arabian Nights, built Bagdad and

Granada, and invented Algebra, sends forth men with the hunger for gold

in their hearts, and Enfield muskets in their hands, to plunder and to

slay. They exploit the domestic affections of the forest dwellers in

order to strip them of all they possess in the world. That has been

going on for years. It is going on to-day. It has come to be regarded

as the natural and normal law of existence. Of the religion of these

hunted pygmies Mr. Stanley tells us nothing, perhaps because there is

nothing to tell. But an earlier traveller, Dr. Kraff, says that one

of these tribes, by name Doko, had some notion of a Supreme Being, to

whom, under the name of Yer, they sometimes addressed prayers in

moments of sadness or terror. In these prayers they say; "Oh Yer, if

Thou dost really exist why dost Thou let us be slaves? We ask not for

food or clothing, for we live on snakes, ants, and mice. Thou hast

made us, wherefore dost Thou let us be trodden down?"

It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved itself deep on the

heart of civilisation. But while brooding over the awful presentation

of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only

too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a

darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation,

which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own

pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover

within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to

those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?

The more the mind dwells upon the subject, the closer the analogy

appears. The ivory raiders who brutally traffic in the unfortunate

denizens of the forest glades, what are they but the publicans who

flourish on the weakness of our poor? The two tribes of savages the

human baboon and the handsome dwarf, who will not speak lest it impede

him in his task, may be accepted as the two varieties who are

continually present with us--the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling

slave. They, too, have lost all faith of life being other than it is

and has been. As in Africa, it is all trees trees, trees with no other

world conceivable; so is it here--it is all vice and poverty and

crime. To many the world is all slum, with the Workhouse as an

intermediate purgatory before the grave. And just as Mr. Stanley's

Zanzibaris lost faith, and could only be induced to plod on in brooding

sullenness of dull despair, so the most of our social reformers, no

matter how cheerily they may have started off, with forty pioneers

swinging blithely their axes as they force their way in to the wood,

soon become depressed and despairing. Who can battle against the ten

thousand million trees? Who can hope to make headway against the

innumerable adverse conditions which doom the dweller in Darkest

England to eternal and immutable misery? What wonder is it that many

of the warmest hearts and enthusiastic workers feel disposed to repeat

the lament of the old English chronicler, who, speaking of the evil

days which fell upon our forefathers in the reign of Stephen, said

"It seemed to them as if God and his Saints were dead."

An analogy is as good as a suggestion; it becomes wearisome when it is

pressed too far. But before leaving it, think for a moment how close

the parallel is, and how strange it is that so much interest should be

excited by a narrative of human squalor and human heroism in a distant

continent, while greater squalor and heroism not less magnificent may

be observed at our very doors.

The Equatorial Forest traversed by Stanley resembles that Darkest

England of which I have to speak, alike in its vast extent--both

stretch, in Stanley's phrase, "as far as from Plymouth to Peterhead;"

its monotonous darkness, its malaria and its gloom, its dwarfish

de-humanized inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected,

their privations and their misery. That which sickens the stoutest

heart, and causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in

despair, is the apparent impossibility of doing more than merely to

peck at the outside of the endless tangle of monotonous undergrowth;

to let light into it, to make a road clear through it, that shall not

be immediately choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant

parasitical growth of the forest--who dare hope for that?

At present, alas, it would seem as though no one dares even to hope!

It is the great Slough of Despond of our time.

And what a slough it is no man can gauge who has not waded therein, as

some of us have done, up to the very neck for long years. Talk about

Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture-chamber

of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and with bleeding heart

through the shambles of our civilisation needs no such fantastic images

of the poet to teach him horror. Often and often, when I have seen the

young and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the

morass, trampled underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that haunt

these regions, it seemed as if God were no longer in His world, but

that in His stead reigned a fiend, merciless as Hell, ruthless as the

grave. Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley's pages of the

slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the

capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the

violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they

could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete,

of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the

ghastly devastation is covered, corpselike, with the artificialities

and hypocrisies of modern civilisation.

The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very

happy one, but is it so very much worse than that of many a pretty

orphan girl in our Christian capital? We talk about the brutalities of

the dark ages, and we profess to shudder as we read in books of the

shameful exaction of the rights of feudal superior. And yet here,

beneath our very eyes, in our theatres, in our restaurants, and in many

other places, unspeakable though it be but to name it, the same hideous

abuse flourishes unchecked. A young penniless girl, if she be pretty,

is often hunted from pillar to post by her employers, confronted always

by the alternative--Starve or Sin. And when once the poor girl has

consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her

virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men

who have ruined her. Her word becomes unbelievable, her life an

ignominy, and she is swept downward ever downward, into the bottomless

perdition of prostitution. But there, even in the lowest depths,

excommunicated by Humanity and outcast from God, she is far nearer the

pitying heart of the One true Saviour than all the men who forced her

down, aye, and than all the Pharisees and Scribes who stand silently by

while these Fiendish wrongs are perpetrated before their very eyes.

The blood boils with impotent rage at the sight of these enormities,

callously inflicted, and silently borne by these miserable victims.

Nor is it only women who are the victims, although their fate is the

most tragic. Those firms which reduce sweating to a fine art,

who systematically and deliberately defraud the workman of his pay,

who grind the faces of the poor, and who rob the widow and the orphan,

and who for a pretence make great professions of public spirit and

philanthropy, these men nowadays are sent to Parliament to make laws

for the people. The old prophets sent them to Hell--but we have

changed all that. They send their victims to Hell, and are rewarded by

all that wealth can do to make their lives comfortable. Read the House

of Lords' Report on the Sweating System, and ask if any African slave

system, making due allowance for the superior civilisation, and

therefore sensitiveness, of the victims, reveals more misery.

Darkest England, like Darkest Africa, reeks with malaria. The foul and

fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African

swamp. Fever is almost as chronic there as on the Equator. Every year

thousands of children are killed off by what is called defects of our

sanitary system. They are in reality starved and poisoned, and all

that can be said is that, in many cases, it is better for them that

they were taken away from the trouble to come.

Just as in Darkest Africa it is only a part of the evil and misery that

comes from the superior race who invade the forest to enslave and

massacre its miserable inhabitants, so with us, much of the misery of

those whose lot we are considering arises from their own habits.

Drunkenness and all manner of uncleanness, moral and physical, abound.

Have you ever watched by the bedside of a man in delirium tremens?

Multiply the sufferings of that one drunkard by the hundred thousand,

and you have some idea of what scenes are being witnessed in all our

great cities at this moment. As in Africa streams intersect the forest

in every direction, so the gin-shop stands at every corner with its

River of the Water of Death flowing seventeen hours out of the

twenty-four for the destruction of the people. A population sodden

with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical

malady, these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life

has been spent, and to whose rescue I would now summon all that is best

in the manhood and womanhood of our land.

But this book is no mere lamentation of despair. For Darkest England,

as for Darkest Africa, there is a light beyond. I think I see my way

out, a way by which these wretched ones may escape from the gloom of

their miserable existence into a higher and happier life.

Long wandering in the Forest of the Shadow of Death at out doors, has

familiarised me with its horrors; but while the realisation is a

vigorous spur to action it has never been so oppressive as to

extinguish hope. Mr. Stanley never succumbed to the terrors which

oppressed his followers. He had lived in a larger life, and knew that

the forest, though long, was not interminable. Every step forward

brought him nearer his destined goal, nearer to the light of the sun,

the clear sky, and the rolling uplands of the grazing land.

Therefore he did not despair. The Equatorial Forest was, after all,

a mere corner of one quarter of the world. In the knowledge of

the light outside, in the confidence begotten by past experience of

successful endeavour, he pressed forward; and when the 160 days'

struggle was over, he and his men came out into a pleasant place where

the land smiled with peace and plenty, and their hardships and hunger

were forgotten in the joy of a great deliverance.

So I venture to believe it will be with us. But the end is not yet.

We are still in the depths of the depressing gloom. It is in no spirit

of light-heartedness that this book is sent forth into the world as if

it was written some ten years ago.

If this were the first time that this wail of hopeless misery had

sounded on our ears the matter would have been less serious. It is

because we have heard it so often that the case is so desperate.

The exceeding bitter cry of the disinherited has become to be as

familiar in the ears of men as the dull roar of the streets or as the

moaning of the wind through the trees. And so it rises unceasing, year

in and year out, and we are too busy or too idle, too indifferent or

too selfish, to spare it a thought. Only now and then, on rare

occasions, when some clear voice is heard giving more articulate

utterance to the miseries of the miserable men, do we pause in the

regular routine of our daily duties, and shudder as we realise for one

brief moment what life means to the inmates of the Slums. But one of

the grimmest social problems of our time should be sternly faced, not

with a view to the generation of profitless emotion, but with a view to

its solution.

Is it not time? There is, it is true, an audacity in the mere

suggestion that the problem is not insoluble that is enough to take

away the breath. But can nothing be done? If, after full and

exhaustive consideration, we come to the deliberate conclusion that

nothing can be done, and that it is the inevitable and inexorable

destiny of thousands of Englishmen to be brutalised into worse than

beasts by the condition of their environment, so be it. But if, on the

contrary, we are unable to believe that this "awful slough," which

engulfs the manhood and womanhood of generation after generation is

incapable of removal; and if the heart and intellect of mankind alike

revolt against the fatalism of despair, then, indeed, it is time, and

high time, that the question were faced in no mere dilettante spirit,

but with a resolute determination to make an end of the crying scandal

of our age.

What a satire it is upon our Christianity and our civilisation that the

existence of these colonies of heathens and savages in the heart of our

capital should attract so little attention! It is no better than a

ghastly mockery--theologians might use a stronger word--to call by

the name of One who came to seek and to save that which was lost those

Churches which in the midst of lost multitudes either sleep in apathy

or display a fitful interest in a chasuble. Why all this apparatus of

temples and meeting-houses to save men from perdition in a world which

is to come, while never a helping hand is stretched out to save them

from the inferno of their present life? Is it not time that,

forgetting for a moment their wranglings about the infinitely little or

infinitely obscure, they should concentrate all their energies on a

united effort to break this terrible perpetuity of perdition, and to

rescue some at least of those for whom they profess to believe their

Founder came to die?

Before venturing to define the remedy, I begin by describing the

malady. But even when presenting the dreary picture of our social

ills, and describing the difficulties which confront us, I speak not in

despondency but in hope. "I know in whom I have believed." I know,

therefore do I speak. Darker England is but a fractional part of

"Greater England." There is wealth enough abundantly to minister to its

social regeneration so far as wealth can, if there be but heart enough

to set about the work in earnest. And I hope and believe that the

heart will not be lacking when once the problem is manfully faced, and

the method of its solution plainly pointed out.

CHAPTER II. THE SUBMERGED TENTH.

In setting forth the difficulties which have to be grappled with,

I shall endeavour in all things to understate rather than overstate my

case. I do this for two reasons: first, any exaggeration would create

a reaction; and secondly, as my object is to demonstrate the

practicability of solving the problem, I do not wish to magnify its

dimensions. In this and in subsequent chapters I hope to convince

those who read them that there is no overstraining in the

representation of the facts, and nothing Utopian in the presentation of

remedies. I appeal neither to hysterical emotionalists nor headlong

enthusiasts; but having tried to approach the examination of this

question in a spirit of scientific investigation, I put forth my

proposals with the view of securing the support and co-operation of the

sober, serious, practical men and women who constitute the saving

strength and moral backbone of the country. I fully admit that them is

much that is lacking in the diagnosis of the disease, and, no doubt,

in this first draft of the prescription there is much room for

improvement, which will come when we have the light of fuller

experience. But with all its drawbacks and defects, I do not hesitate

to submit my proposals to the impartial judgment of all who are

interested in the solution of the social question as an immediate and

practical mode of dealing with this, the greatest problem of our time.

The first duty of an investigator in approaching the study of any

question is to eliminate all that is foreign to the inquiry, and to

concentrate his attention upon the subject to be dealt with. Here I

may remark that I make no attempt in this book to deal with Society as

a whole. I leave to others the formulation of ambitious programmes for

the reconstruction of our entire social system; not because I may not

desire its reconstruction, but because the elaboration of any plans

which are more or less visionary and incapable of realisation for many

years would stand in the way of the consideration of this Scheme for

dealing with the most urgently pressing aspect of the question, which I

hope may be put into operation at once.

In taking this course I am aware that I cut myself off from a wide and

attractive field; but as a practical man, dealing with sternly prosaic

facts, I must confine my attention to that particular section of the

problem which clamours most pressingly for a solution. Only one thing

I may say in passing. Then is nothing in my scheme which will bring it

into collision either with Socialists of the State, or Socialists of

the Municipality, with Individualists or Nationalists, or any of the

various schools of though in the great field of social economics--

excepting only those anti-christian economists who hold that it is an

offence against the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to try to

save the weakest from going to the wall, and who believe that when once

a man is down the supreme duty of a self-regarding Society is to jump

upon him. Such economists will naturally be disappointed with this

book I venture to believe that all others will find nothing in it to

offend their favourite theories, but perhaps something of helpful

suggestion which they may utilise hereafter. What, then, is Darkest

England? For whom do we claim that "urgency" which gives their case

priority over that of all other sections of their countrymen and

countrywomen?

I claim it for the Lost, for the Outcast, for the Disinherited of the

World.

These, it may be said, are but phrases. Who are the Lost? reply, not

in a religious, but in a social sense, the lost are those who have gone

under, who have lost their foothold in Society, those to whom the

prayer to our Heavenly Father, "Give us day by day our daily bread,"

is either unfulfilled, or only fulfilled by the Devil's agency: by the

earnings of vice, the proceeds of crime, or the contribution enforced

by the threat of the law.

But I will be more precise. The denizens in Darkest England; for whom

I appeal, are (1) those who, having no capital or income of their own,

would in a month be dead from sheer starvation were they exclusively

dependent upon the money earned by their own work; and (2) those who by

their utmost exertions are unable to attain the regulation allowance of

food which the law prescribes as indispensable even for the worst

criminals in our gaols.

I sorrowfully admit that it would be Utopian in our present social

arrangements to dream of attaining for every honest Englishman a gaol

standard of all the necessaries of life. Some time, perhaps, we may

venture to hope that every honest worker on English soil will always be

as warmly clad, as healthily housed, and as regularly fed as our

criminal convicts--but that is not yet.

Neither is it possible to hope for many years to come that human beings

generally will be as well cared for as horses. Mr. Carlyle long ago

remarked that the four-footed worker has already got all that this

two-handed one is clamouring for: "There are not many horses in

England, able and willing to work, which have not due food and lodging

and go about sleek coated, satisfied in heart." You say it is

impossible; but, said Carlyle, "The human brain, looking at these sleek

English horses, refuses to believe in such impossibility for English

men." Nevertheless, forty years have passed since Carlyle said that,

and we seem to be no nearer the attainment of the four-footed standard

for the two-handed worker. "Perhaps it might be nearer realisation,"

growls the cynic, "if we could only product men according to demand, as

we do horses, and promptly send them to the slaughter-house when past

their prime"--which, of course, is not to be thought of.

What, then, is the standard towards which we may venture to aim with

some prospect of realisation in our time? It is a very humble one, but

if realised it would solve the worst problems of modern Society. It is

the standard of the London Cab Horse. When in the streets of London a

Cab Horse, weary or careless or stupid, trips and falls and lies

stretched out in the midst of the traffic there is no question of

debating how he came to stumble before we try to get him on his legs

again. The Cab Horse is a very real illustration of poor broken-down

humanity; he usually falls down because of overwork and underfeeding.

If you put him on his feet without altering his conditions, it would

only be to give him another dose of agony; but first of all you'll have

to pick him up again. It may have been through overwork or

underfeeding, or it may have been all his own fault that he has broken

his knees and smashed the shafts, but that does not matter. If not for

his own sake, then merely in order to prevent an obstruction of the

traffic, all attention is concentrated upon the question of how we are

to get him on his legs again. Tin load is taken off, the harness is

unbuckled, or, if need be, cut, and everything is done to help him up.

Then he is put in the shafts again and once more restored to his

regular round of work. That is the first point. The second is that

every Cab Horse in London has three things; a shelter for the night,

food for its stomach, and work allotted to it by which it can earn its

corn.

These are the two points of the Cab Horse's Charter. When he is down

he is helped up, and while he lives he has food, shelter and work.

That, although a humble standard, is at present absolutely unattainable

by millions--literally by millions--of our fellow-men and women in

this country. Can the Cab Horse Charter be gained for human beings?

I answer, yes. The Cab Horse standard can be attained on the Cab Horse

terms. If you get your fallen fellow on his feet again, Docility and

Discipline will enable you to reach the Cab Horse ideal, otherwise it

will remain unattainable. But Docility seldom fails where Discipline

is intelligently maintained. Intelligence is more frequently lacking

to direct than obedience to follow direction. At any rate it is not

for those who possess the intelligence to despair of obedience, until

they have done their part. Some, no doubt, like the bucking horse that

will never be broken in, will always refuse to submit to any guidance

but their own lawless will. They will remain either the Ishmaels or

the Sloths of Society. But man is naturally neither an Ishmael nor a

Sloth.

The first question, then, which confronts us is, what are the

dimensions of the Evil? How many of our fellow-men dwell in this

Darkest England? How can we take the census of those who have fallen

below the Cab Horse standard to which it is our aim to elevate the most

wretched of our countrymen?

The moment you attempt to answer this question, you are confronted by

the fact that the Social Problem has scarcely been studied at all

scientifically. Go to Mudie's and ask for all the books that have been

written on the subject, and you will be surprised to find how few there

are. There are probably more scientific books treating of diabetes or

of gout than there are dealing with the great social malady which eats

out the vitals of such numbers of our people. Of late there has been a

change for the better. The Report of the Royal Commission on the

Housing of the Poor, and the Report of the Committee of the House of

Lords on Sweating, represent an attempt at least to ascertain the facts

which bear upon the Condition of the People question. But, after all,

more minute, patient, intelligent observation has been devoted to the

study of Earthworms, than to the evolution, or rather the degradation,

of the Sunken Section of our people. Here and there in the immense

field individual workers make notes, and occasionally emit a wail of

despair, but where is there any attempt even so much as to take the

first preliminary step of counting those who have gone under? One book

there is, and so far as I know at present, only one, which even

attempts to enumerate the destitute. In his "Life and Labour in the

East of London," Mr. Charles Booth attempts to form some kind of an

idea as to the numbers of those with whom we have to deal. With a

large staff of assistants, and provided with all the facts in

possession of the School Board Visitors, Mr. Booth took an industrial

census of East London. This district, which comprises Tower Hamlets,

Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney, contains a population of

908,000; that is to say, less than one-fourth of the population of

London. How do his statistics work out? If we estimate the number of

the poorest class in the rest of London as being twice as numerous as

those in the Eastern District, instead of being thrice as numerous, as

they would be if they were calculated according to the population in

the same proportion, the following is the result:

PAUPERS

Inmates of Workhouses, Asylums,

and Hospitals .. .. .. 17,000 34,000 51,000

HOMELESS

Loafers, Casuals,

and some Criminals .. .. 11,000 22,000 33,000

STARVING

Casual earnings between

18s. per week and chronic want 100,000 200,000 300,000

THE VERY POOR.

Intermittent earnings

18s. to 21s. per week .. .. 74,000 148,000 222,000

Small regular earnings

18s.to 21s. per week .. .. 129,000 258,000 387,000

------- ------- -------

331,000 662,000 993,000

Regular wages, artizans, etc.,

22s. to 30s. per week .. .. 337,000

Higher class labour,

30s. to 50s. per week .. .. 121,000

Lower middle class,

shopkeepers, clerks, etc. .. 34,000

Upper middle class

(servant keepers) .. .. .. 45,000

-------

908,000

It may be admitted that East London affords an exceptionally bad

district from which to generalise for the rest of the country.

Wages are higher in London than elsewhere, but so is rent, and the

number of the homeless and starving is greater in the human warren at

the East End. There are 31 millions of people in Great Britain,

exclusive of Ireland. If destitution existed everywhere in East London

proportions, there would be 31 times as many homeless and starving

people as there are in the district round Bethnal Green.

But let us suppose that the East London rate is double the average for

the rest of the country. That would bring out the following figures:

HOUSELESS

East London. United Kingdom.

Loafers, Casuals, and some Criminals 11,000 165,500

STARVING

Casual earnings or chronic want .. 100,000 1,550,000

Total Houseless and Starving .. 111,000 1,715,500

In Workhouses, Asylums, &c. .. 17,000 190,000

-------- ----------

128,000 1,905,500

Of those returned as homeless and starving, 870,000 were in receipt of

outdoor relief. To these must be added the inmates of our prisons.

In 1889 174,779 persons were received in the prisons, but the average

number in prison at any one time did not exceed 60,000. The figures,

as given in the Prison Returns, are as follows: --

In Convict Prisons .. .. .. .. .. 11,600

In Local Prisons.. .. .. .. .. .. 20,883

In Reformatories.. .. .. .. .. .. 1,270

In Industrial Schools .. .. .. .. 21,413

Criminal Lunatics .. .. .. .. .. 910

-------

56,136

Add to this the number of indoor paupers and lunatics (excluding

criminals) 78,966--and we have an army of nearly two million:

belonging to the submerged classes. To this there must be added at the

very least, another million, representing those dependent upon the

criminal, lunatic and other classes, not enumerated here, and the more

or less helpless of the class immediately above the houseless and

starving. This brings my total to three millions, or, to put it

roughly to one-tenth of the population. According to Lord Brabazon and

Mr. Samuel Smith, "between two and three millions of our population

are always pauperised and degraded." Mr. Chamberlain says there is a

"population equal to that of the metropolis,--that is, between four

and five millions--"which has remained constantly in a state of

abject destitution and misery." Mr. Giffen is more moderate.

The submerged class, according to him, comprises one in five of manual

labourers, six in 100 of the population. Mr. Giffen does not add the

third million which is living on the border line.

Between Mr Chamberlain's four millions and a half, and Mr. Giffen's

1,800,000 I am content to take three millions as representing the total

strength of the destitute army.

Darkest England, then, may be said to have a population about equal to

that of Scotland. Three million men, women, and children a vast

despairing multitude in a condition nominally free, but really

enslaved;--these it is whom we have to save.

It is a large order. England emancipated her negroes sixty years ago,

at a cost of #40,000,000, and has never ceased boasting about it since.

But at our own doors, from "Plymouth to Peterhead," stretches this

waste Continent of humanity--three million human beings who are

enslaved--some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian

overseer, all of them to destitution and despair?

Is anything to be done with them? Can anything be done for them?

Or is this million-headed mass to be regarded as offering a problem as

insoluble as that of the London sewage, which, feculent and festering,

swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and

flow of the tide?

This Submerged Tenth--is it, then, beyond the reach of the

nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they

rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will

be some incurably diseased in morals and in body, some for whom nothing

can be done, some of whom even the optimist must despair, and for whom

he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of an

asylum or a gaol.

But is not one in ten a proportion scandalously high?

The Israelites of old set apart one tribe in twelve to minister to

the Lord in the service of the Temple; but must we doom one in ten of

"God's Englishmen" to the service of the great Twin Devils--

Destitution and Despair?

CHAPTER 3. THE HOMELESS

Darkest England may be described as consisting broadly of three

circles, one within the other. The outer and widest circle is

inhabited by the starving and the homeless, but honest, Poor.

The second by those who live by Vice; and the third and innermost

region at the centre is peopled by those who exist by Crime. The whole

of the three circles is sodden with Drink. Darkest England has many

more public-houses than the Forest of the Aruwimi has rivers, of which

Mr. Stanley sometimes had to cross three in half-an-hour.

The borders of this great lost land are not sharply defined. They are

continually expanding or contracting. Whenever there is a period of

depression in trade, they stretch; when prosperity returns, they

contract. So far as individuals are concerned, there are none among

the hundreds of thousands who live upon the outskirts of the dark

forest who can truly say that they or their children are secure from

being hopelessly entangled in its labyrinth. The death of the

bread-winner, a long illness, a failure in the City, or any one of a

thousand other causes which might be named, will bring within the first

circle those who at present imagine themselves free from all danger of

actual want. The death-rate in Darkest England is high. Death is the

great gaol-deliverer of the captives. But the dead are hardly in the

grave before their places are taken by others. Some escape, but the

majority, their health sapped by their surroundings, become weaker and

weaker, until at last they fall by the way, perishing without hope at

the very doors of the palatial mansions which, maybe, some of them

helped to build.

Some seven years ago a great outcry was made concerning the Housing of

the Poor. Much was said, and rightly said--it could not be said too

strongly--concerning the disease-breeding, manhood-destroying

character of many of the tenements in which the poor herd in our large

cities. But there is a depth below that of the dweller in the slums.

It is that of the dweller in the street, who has not even a lair in the

slums which he can call his own. The houseless Out-of-Work is in one

respect at least like Him of whom it was said, "Foxes have holes, and

birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay

His head."

The existence of these unfortunates was somewhat rudely forced upon the

attention of Society in 1887, when Trafalgar Square became the camping

ground of the Homeless Outcasts of London. Our Shelters have done

something, but not enough, to provide for the outcasts, who this night

and every night are walking about the streets, not knowing where they

can find a spot on which to rest their weary frames.

Here is the return of one of my Officers who was told off this summer

to report upon the actual condition of the Homeless who have no roof to

shelter them in all London: --

There are still a large number of Londoners and a considerable

percentage of wanderers from the country in search of work, who find

themselves at nightfall destitute. These now betake themselves to the

seats under the plane trees on the Embankment. Formerly they

endeavoured to occupy all the seats, but the lynx-eyed Metropolitan

Police declined to allow any such proceedings, and the dossers, knowing

the invariable kindness of the City Police, made tracks for that

portion of the Embankment which, lying east of the Temple, comes under

the control of the Civic Fathers. Here, between the Temple and

Blackfriars, I found the poor wretches by the score; almost every seat

contained its full complement of six--some men, some women--all

reclining in various postures and nearly all fast asleep. Just as

Big Ben strikes two, the moon, flashing across the Thames and lighting

up the stone work of the Embankment, brings into relief a pitiable

spectacle. Here on the stone abutments, which afford a slight

protection from the biting wind, are scores of men lying side by side,

huddled together for warmth, and, of course, without any other covering

than their ordinary clothing, which is scanty enough at the best. Some

have laid down a few pieces of waste paper, by way of taking the chill

off the stones, but the majority are too tired, even for that, and the

nightly toilet of most consists of first removing the hat, swathing the

head in whatever old rag may be doing duty as a handkerchief, and then

replacing the hat.

The intelligent-looking elderly man, who was just fixing himself up on

a seat, informed me that he frequently made that his night's abode.

"You see," quoth he, "there's nowhere else so comfortable. I was here

last night, and Monday and Tuesday as well, that's four nights this

week. I had no money for lodgings, couldn't earn any, try as I might.

I've had one bit of bread to-day nothing else whatever, and I've earned

nothing to-day or yesterday; I had threepence the day before. Gets my

living by carrying parcels, or minding horses, or odd jobs of that

sort. You see I haven't got my health, that's where it is. I used to

work on the London General Omnibus Company and after that on the Road

Car Company, but I had to go to the infirmary with bronchitis and

couldn't get work after that. What's the good of a man what's got

bronchitis and just left the infirmary? Who'll engage him, I'd like to

know? Besides, it makes me short of breath at times, and I can't do

much. I'm a widower; wife died long ago. I have one boy, abroad, a

sailor, but he's only lately started and can't help me. Yes! its very

fair out here of nights, seats rather hard, but a bit of waste paper

makes it a lot softer. We have women sleep here often, and children,

too. They're very well conducted, and there's seldom many rows here,

you see, because everybody's tired out. We're too sleepy to make a

row."

Another party, a tall, dull, helpless-looking individual, had walked up

from the country; would prefer not to mention the place. He had hoped

to have obtained a hospital letter at the Mansion House so as to obtain

a truss for a bad rupture, but failing, had tried various other places,

also in vain, win up minus money or food on the Embankment.

In addition to these sleepers, a considerable number walk about the

streets up till the early hours of the morning to hunt up some job

which will bring I copper into the empty exchequer, and save them from

actual starvation. I had some conversation with one such, a stalwart

youth lately discharged from the militia, and unable to get work.

"You see," said he, pitifully, "I don't know my way about like most of

the London fellows. I'm so green, and don't know how to pick up jobs

like they do. I've been walking the streets almost day and night these

two weeks and can't get work. I've got the strength, though I shan't

have it long at this rate. I only want a job. This is the third night

running that I've walked the streets all night; the only money I get is

by minding blacking-boys' boxes while they go into Lockhart's for their

dinner. I got a penny yesterday at it, and twopence for carrying a

parcel, and to-day I've had a penny. Bought a ha'porth of bread and a

ha'penny mug of tea."

Poor lad! probably he would soon get into thieves' company, and sink

into the depths, for there is no other means of living for many like

him; it is starve or steal, even for the young. There are gangs of lad

thieves in the low Whitechapel lodging-houses, varying in age from

thirteen to fifteen, who live by thieving eatables and other easily

obtained goods from shop fronts. In addition to the Embankment,

al fresco lodgings are found in the seats outside Spitalfields Church,

and many homeless wanderers have their own little nooks and corners of

resort in many sheltered yards, vans, etc., all over London.

Two poor women I observed making their home in a shop door-way in

Liverpool Street. Thus they manage in the summer; what it's like in

winter time is terrible to think of. In many cases it means the

pauper's grave, as in the case of a young woman who was wont to sleep

in a van in Bedfordbury. Some men who were aware of her practice

surprised her by dashing a bucket of water on her. The blow to her

weak system caused illness, and the inevitable sequel--a coroner's

jury came to the conclusion that the water only hastened her death,

which was due, in plain English, to starvation.

The following are some statements taken down by the same Officer from

twelve men whom he found sleeping on the Embankment on the nights of

June 13th and 14th, 1890:-

No. 1. "I've slept here two nights; I'm a confectioner by trade;

I come from Dartford. I got turned off because I'm getting elderly.

They can get young men cheaper, and I have the rheumatism so bad.

I've earned nothing these two days; I thought I could get a job at

Woolwich, so I walked there, but could get nothing. I found a bit of

bread in the road wrapped up in a bit of newspaper. That did me for

yesterday. I had a bit of bread and butter to-day. I'm 54 years old.

When it's wet we stand about all night under the arches.'

No. 2. "Been sleeping out three weeks all but one night; do odd jobs,

mind horses, and that sort of thing. Earned nothing to-day, or

shouldn't be here. Have had a pen'orth of bread to-day. That's all.

Yesterday had some pieces given to me at a cook-shop. Two days last

week had nothing at all from morning till night. By trade I'm a

feather-bed dresser, but it's gone out of fashion, and besides that,

I've a cataract in one eye, and have lost the sight of it completely.

I'm a widower, have one child, a soldier, at Dover. My last regular

work was eight months ago, but the firm broke. Been doing odd jobs

Since."

No. 3. "I'm a tailor; have slept here four nights running. Can't get

work. Been out of a job three weeks. If I can muster cash I sleep at

a lodging-house in Vere Street, Glare Market. It was very wet last

night. I left these seats and went to Covent Garden Market and slept

under cover. There were about thirty of us. The police moved us on,

but we went back as soon as they had gone. I've had a pen'orth of

bread and pen'orth of soup during the last two days--often goes

without altogether. There are women sleep out here. They are decent

people, mostly charwomen and such like who can't get work."

No.4. Elderly man; trembles visibly with excitement at mention of

work; produces a card carefully wrapped in old newspaper, to the effect

that Mr. J.R. is a member of the Trade Protection League. He is a

waterside labourer; last job at that was a fortnight since. Has earned

nothing for five days. Had a bit of bread this morning, but not a

scrap since. Had a cup of tea and two slices of bread yesterday, and

the same the day before; the deputy at a lodging house gave it to him.

He is fifty years old, and is still damp from sleeping out in the wet

last night.

No. 5. Sawyer by trade, machinery cut him out. Had a job, haymaking

near Uxbridge. Had been on same job lately for a month; got 2s. 6d a

day. (Probably spent it in drink, seems a very doubtful worker.) Has

been odd jobbing a long time, earned 2d. to-day, bought a pen'orth of

tea and ditto of sugar (produces same from pocket) but can't get any

place to make the tea; was hoping to get to a lodging house where he

could borrow a teapot, but had no money. Earned nothing yesterday,

slept at a casual ward; very poor place, get insufficient food,

considering the labour. Six ounces of bread and a pint of skilly for

breakfast, one ounce of cheese and six or seven ounces of bread for

dinner (bread cut by guess). Tea same as breakfast,--no supper.

For this you have to break 10 cwt. of stones, or pick 4 lbs. of oakum.

Number 6. Had slept out four nights running. Was a distiller by trade

been out four months; unwilling to enter into details of leaving, but

it was his own fault. (Very likely; a heavy, thick, stubborn, and

senseless-looking fellow, six feet high, thick neck, strong limbs,

evidently destitute of ability. Does odd jobs; earned 3d. for minding

a horse, bought a cup of coffee and pen'orth of bread and butter.

Has no money now. Slept under Waterloo Bridge last night.

No. 7. Good-natured looking man; one who would suffer and say nothing

clothes shining with age, grease, and dirt; they hang on his joints as

on pegs; awful rags! I saw him endeavouring to walk. He lifted his

feet very slowly and put them down carefully in evident pain. His legs

are bad; been in infirmary several times with them. His uncle and

grandfather were clergymen; both dead now. He was once in a good

position in a money office, and afterwards in the London and County

Bank for nine years. Then he went with an auctioneer who broke, and he

was left ill, old, and without any trade. "A clerk's place," says he,

"is never worth having, because there are so many of them, and once out

you can only get another place with difficulty. I have a

brother-in-law on the Stock Exchange, but he won't own me. Look at my

clothes? Is it likely?"

No. 8. Slept here four nights running. Is a builder's labourer by

trade, that is, a handy-man. Had a settled job for a few weeks which

expired three weeks since. Has earned nothing for nine days. Then

helped wash down a shop front and got 2s. 6d. for it. Does anything

he can get. Is 46 years old. Earns about 2d. or 3d. a day at horse

minding. A cup of tea and a bit of bread yesterday, and same to-day,

is all he has had.

No. 9. A plumber's labourer (all these men who are somebody's

"labourers" are poor samples of humanity, evidently lacking in grit,

and destitute of ability to do any work which would mean decent wages).

Judging from appearances, they will do nothing well. They are a kind

of automaton, with the machinery rusty; slow, dull, and incapable.

The man of ordinary intelligence leaves them in the rear. They could

doubtless earn more even at odd jobs, but lack the energy. Of course,

this means little food, exposure to weather, and increased incapability

day by day. ("From him that hath not," etc.) Out of work through

slackness, does odd jobs; slept here three nights running. Is a dock

labourer when he can get work. Has 6d. an hour; works so many hours,

according as he is wanted. Gets 2s., 3s., or 4s. 6d. a day.

Has to work very hard for it. Casual ward life is also very hard he

says, for those who are not used to it, and there is not enough to eat.

Has had to-day a pen'orth of bread, for minding a cab. Yesterday he

spent 3 1/2d. on a breakfast, and that lasted him all day. Age 25.

No. 10. Been out of work a month. Carman by trade. Arm withered,

and cannot do work properly. Has slept here all the week; got an awful

cold through the wet. Lives at odd jobs (they all do). Got sixpence

yesterday for minding a cab and carrying a couple of parcels.

Earned nothing to-day, but had one good meal; a lady gave it him.

Has been walking about all day looking for work, and is tired out.

No. 11. Youth, aged 16. Sad case; Londoner. Works at odd jobs and

matches selling. Has taken 3d. to-day, i.e., net profit 1 1/2d. Has

five boxes still. Has slept here every night for a month. Before that

slept in Covent Garden Market or on doorsteps. Been sleeping out six

months, since he left Feltham Industrial School. Was sent there for

playing truant. Has had one bit of bread to-day; yesterday had only

some gooseberries and cherries, i.e., bad ones that had been thrown

away. Mother is alive. She "chucked him out" when he returned home on

leaving Feltham because he could'nt find her money for drink.

No. 12. Old man, age 67. Seems to take rather a humorous view of the

position. Kind of Mark Tapley. Says he can't say he does like it, but

then he must like it! Ha, ha! Is a slater by trade. Been out of work

some time; younger men naturally get the work. Gets a bit of

bricklaying sometimes; can turn his hand to anything. Goes miles and

gets nothing. Earned one and twopence this week at holding horses.

Finds it hard, certainly. Used to care once, and get down-hearted, but

that's no good; don't trouble now. Had a bit of bread and butter and

cup of coffee to-day. Health is awful bad, not half the size he was;

exposure and want of food is the cause; got wet last night, and is very

stiff in consequence. Has been walking about since it was light, that

is 3 a.m. Was so cold and wet and weak, scarcely knew what to do.

Walked to Hyde Park, and got a little sleep there on a dry seat as soon

as the park opened.

These are fairly typical cases of the men who are now wandering

homeless through the streets. That is the way in which the nomads of

civilization are constantly being recruited from above.

Such are the stories gathered at random one Midsummer night this year

under the shade of the plane trees of the Embankment. A month later,

when one of my staff took the census of the sleepers out of doors along

the line of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster, he found three

hundred and sixty-eight persons sleeping in the open air. Of these,

two hundred and seventy were on the Embankment proper, and ninety-eight

in and about Covent Garden Market, while the recesses of Waterloo and

Blackfriars Bridges were full of human misery.

This, be it remembered, was not during a season of bad trade.

The revival of business has been attested on all hands, notably by the

barometer of strong drink. England is prosperous enough to drink rum

in quantities which appall the Chancellor of the Exchequer but she is

not prosperous enough to provide other shelter than the midnight sky

for these poor outcasts on the Embankment.

To very many even of those who live in London it may be news that there

are so many hundreds who sleep out of doors every night. There are

comparatively few people stirring after midnight, and when we are

snugly tucked into our own beds we are apt to forget the multitude

outside in the rain and the storm who are shivering the long hours

through on the hard stone seats in the open or under the arches of the

railway. These homeless, hungry people are, however there, but being

broken-spirited folk for the most part they seldom make their voices

audible in the ears of their neighbours. Now and again, however, a

harsh cry from the depths is heard for a moment, jarring rudely upon

the ear and then all is still. The inarticulate classes speak as

seldom as Balaam's ass. But they sometimes find a voice. Here for

instance is one such case which impressed me much. It was reported in

one of the Liverpool papers some time back. The speaker was haranguing

a small knot of twenty or thirty men: --

"My lads," he commenced, with one hand in the breast of his ragged

vest, and the other, as usual, plucking nervously at his beard,

"This kind o' work can't last for ever." (Deep and earnest

exclamations, "It can't! It shan't") "Well, boys," continued the

speaker, "Somebody'll have to find a road out o' this. What we want is

work, not work'us bounty, though the parish has been busy enough

amongst us lately, God knows! What we want is honest work,

(Hear, hear.) Now, what I propose is that each of you gets fifty mates

to join you; that'll make about 1,200 starving chaps--And then?"

asked several very gaunt and hungry-looking men excitedly.

"Why, then," continued the leader. "Why, then," interrupted a

cadaverous-looking man from the farther and darkest end of the cellar,

"of course we'll make a--London job of it, eh?" "No, no," hastily

interposed my friend, and holding up his hands deprecatingly, "we'll go

peaceably about it chaps; we'll go in a body to the Town Hall, and show

our poverty, and ask for work. We'll take the women and children with

us too." ("Too ragged! Too starved! They can't walk it!") "The women's

rags is no disgrace, the staggerin' children 'll show what we come to.

Let's go a thousand strong, and ask for work and bread!"

Three years ago, in London, there were some such processions. Church

parades to the Abbey and St. Paul's, bivouacs in Trafalgar Square, etc.

But Lazarus showed his rags and his sores too conspicuously for

the convenience of Dives, and was summarily dealt with in the name of

law and order. But as we have Lord Mayor's Days, when all the well-fed

fur-clad City Fathers go in State Coaches through the town, why should

we not have a Lazarus Day, in which the starving Out-of-Works, and the

sweated half-starved "in-works" of London should crawl in their

tattered raggedness, with their gaunt, hungry faces, and emaciated

Wives and children, a Procession of Despair through the main

thoroughfares past the massive houses and princely palaces of luxurious

London?

For these men are gradually, but surely, being sucked down into the

quicksand of modern life. They stretch out their grimy hands to us in

vain appeal, not for charity, but for work.

Work, work! it is always work that they ask. The Divine curse is to

them the most blessed of benedictions. "In the sweat of thy brow thou

shalt eat thy bread," but alas for these forlorn sons of Adam, they

fail to find the bread to eat, for Society has no work for them to do.

They have not even leave to sweat. As well as discussing how these

poor wanderers should in the second Adam "all be made alive," ought we

not to put forth some effort to effect their restoration to that share

in the heritage of lab our which is theirs by right of descent from the

first Adam?

CHAPTER 4. THE OUT-OF-WORKS

There is hardly any more pathetic figure than that of the strong able

worker crying plaintively in the midst of our palaces and churches not

for charity, but for work, asking only to be allowed the privilege of

perpetual hard labour, that thereby he may earn wherewith to fill his

empty belly and silence the cry of his children for food. Crying for it

and not getting it, seeking for labour as lost treasure and finding it

not, until at last, all spirit and vigour worn out in the weary quest,

the once willing worker becomes a broken-down drudge, sodden with

wretchedness and despairing of all help in this world or in that which

is to come. Our organisation of industry certainly leaves much to be

desired. A problem which even slave owners have solved ought not to be

abandoned as insoluble by the Christian civilisation of the Nineteenth

Century.

I have already given a few life stories taken down from the lip: of

those who were found homeless on the Embankment which suggest somewhat

of the hardships and the misery of the fruitless search for work.

But what a volume of dull, squalid horror--a horror of great darkness

gradually obscuring all the light of day from the life of the sufferer

might be written from the simple prosaic experiences of the ragged

fellows whom you meet every day in the street. These men, whose labour

is their only capital, are allowed, nay compelled to waste day after

day by the want of any means of employment, and then when they have

seen days and weeks roll by during which their capital has been wasted

by pounds and pounds, they are lectured for not saving the pence.

When a rich man cannot employ his capital he puts it out at interest,

but the bank for the labour capital of the poor man has yet to be

invented. Yet it might be worth while inventing one. A man's labour

is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never

more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable

the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the

most urgent tasks before civilisation.

Of all heart-breaking toil the hunt for work is surely the worst.

Yet at any moment let a workman lose his present situation, and he is

compelled to begin anew the dreary round of fruitless calls. Here is

the story of one among thousands of the nomads, taken down from his own

lips, of one who was driven by sheer hunger into crime.

A bright Spring morning found me landed from a western colony.

Fourteen years had passed since I embarked from the same spot.

They were fourteen years, as far as results were concerned, of

non-success, and here I was again in my own land, a stranger, with anew

career to carve for myself and the battle of life to fight over again.

My first thought was work. Never before had I felt more eager for a

down right good chance to win my way by honest toil; but where was I to

find work. With firm determination I started in search. One day

passed without success and another, and another, but the thought

cheered me, "Better luck to-morrow." It has been said, "Hope springs

eternal in the human breast." In my case it was to be severely tested.

Days soon ran into weeks, and still I was on the trail patiently and

hopefully. Courtesy and politeness so often met me in my enquiries for

employment that I often wished they would kick me out, and so vary the

monotony of the sickly veneer of consideration that so thinly overlaid

the indifference and the absolute unconcern they had to my need. A few

cut up rough and said, No; we don't want you. "Please don't trouble us

again (this after the second visit). We have no vacancy; and if we

had, we have plenty of people on hand to fill it."

Who can express the feeling that comes over one when the fact begins to

dawn that the search for work is a failure? All my hopes and prospects

seemed to have turned out false. Helplessness, I had often heard of

it, had often talked about it, thought I knew all about it. Yes! in

others, but now began to understand it for myself. Gradually my

personal appearance faded. My once faultless linen became unkempt and

unclean. Down further and further went the heels of my shoes, and I

drifted into that distressing condition "shabby gentility." If the odds

were against me before, how much more so now, seeing that I was too

shabby even to command attention, much less a reply to my enquiry for

work.

Hunger now began to do its work, and I drifted to the dock gates, but

what chance had I among the hungry giants there? And so down the

stream drifted until "Grim Want" brought me to the last shilling, the

last lodging, and the last meal. What shall I do? Where shall I go?

I tried to think. Must I starve? Surely there must be some door still

open for honest willing endeavour, but where? What can I do? "Drink,"

said the Tempter; but to drink to drunkenness needs cash, and oblivion

by liquor demands an equivalent in the currency.

Starve or steal. "You must do one or the other," said the Tempter.

But recoiled from being a Thief. "Why be so particular?" says the

Tempter again "You are down now, who will trouble about you?

Why trouble about yourself? The choice is between starving and

stealing." And I struggled until hunger stole my judgment, and then I

became a Thief.

No one can pretend that it was an idle fear of death by starvation

which drove this poor fellow to steal. Deaths from actual hunger an

more common than is generally supposed. Last year, a man, whose name

was never known, was walking through St. James's Park, when three of

our Shelter men saw him suddenly stumble and fall. They thought he was

drunk, but found he had fainted. They carried him to the bridge and

gave him to the police. They took him to St George's Hospital, where

he died. It appeared that he had, according to his own tale, walked up

from Liverpool, and had been without food for five days. The doctor,

however, said he had gone longer than that. The jury returned a

verdict of "Death from Starvation."

Without food for five days or longer! Who that has experienced the

sinking sensation that is felt when even a single meal has been

sacrificed may form some idea of what kind of slow torture killed that

man!

In 1888 the average daily number of unemployed in London was estimated

by the Mansion House Committee at 20,000. This vast reservoir of

unemployed labour is the bane of all efforts to raise the scale of

living, to improve the condition of labour. Men hungering to death for

lack of opportunity to earn a crust are the materials from which

"blacklegs" are made, by whose aid the labourer is constantly defeated

in his attempts to improve his condition.

This is the problem that underlies all questions of Trades Unionism and

all Schemes for the Improvement of the Condition of the Industrial Army.

To rear any stable edifice that will not perish when the first storm

rises and the first hurricane blows, it must be built not upon sand,

but upon a rock. And the worst of all existing Schemes for social

betterment by organisation of the skilled workers and the like is that

they are founded, not upon "rock," nor even upon "sand," but upon the

bottomless bog of the stratum of the Workless. It is here where we

must begin. The regimentation of industrial workers who have got

regular work is not so very difficult. That can be done, and is

being done, by themselves. The problem that we have to face is the

regimentation, the organisation, of those who have not got work, or who

have only irregular work, and who from sheer pressure of absolute

starvation are driven irresistibly into cut-throat competition with

their better employed brothers and sisters. Skin for skin, all that a

man hath, will he give for his life; much more, then, will those who

experimentally know not God give all that they might hope hereafter to

have--in this world or in the world to come.

There is no gainsaying the immensity of the problem. It is appalling

enough to make us despair. But those who do not put their trust in man

alone, but in One who is Almighty, have no right to despair.

To despair is to lose faith; to despair is to forget God Without God we

can do nothing in this frightful chaos of human misery. But with God

we can do all things, and in the faith that He has made in His image

all the children of men we face even this hideous wreckage of humanity

with a cheerful confidence that if we are but faithful to our own high

calling He will not fail to open up a way of deliverance.

I have nothing to say against those who are endeavouring to open up a

way of escape without any consciousness of God's help. For them I feel

only sympathy and compassion. In so far as they are endeavouring to

give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and above all, work to

the workless, they are to that extent endeavouring to do the will of

our Father which is in Heaven, and woe be unto all those who say them

nay! But to be orphaned of all sense of the Fatherhood of God is surely

not a secret source of strength. It is in most cases--it would be in

my own--the secret of paralysis. If I did not feel my Father's hand

in the darkness, and hear His voice in the silence of the night watches

bidding me put my hand to this thing, I would shrink back dismayed;--

but as it is I dare not.

How many are there who have made similar attempts and have failed, and

we have heard of them no more! Yet none of them proposed to deal with

more than the mere fringe of the evil which, God helping me, I will try

to face in all its immensity. Most Schemes that are put forward for

the Improvement of the Circumstances of the People are either avowedly

or actually limited to those whose condition least needs amelioration.

The Utopians, the economists, and most of the philanthropists propound

remedies, which, if adopted to-morrow, would only affect the

aristocracy of the miserable. It is the thrifty, the industrious,

the sober, the thoughtful who can take advantage of these plans.

But the thrifty, the industrious, the sober, and the thoughtful are

already very well able for the most part to take care of themselves.

No one will ever make even a visible dint on the Morass of Squalor who

does not deal with the improvident, the lazy, the vicious, and the

criminal. The Scheme of Social Salvation is not worth discussion which

is not as wide as the Scheme of Eternal Salvation set forth in the

Gospel. The Glad Tidings must be to every creature, not merely to an

elect few who are to be saved while the mass of their fellow are

predestined to a temporal damnation. We have had this doctrine of an

inhuman cast-iron pseudo-political economy too long enthroned amongst us.

It is now time to fling down the false idol and proclaim a Temporal

Salvation as full, free, and universal, and with no other limitations

than the "Whosoever will," of the Gospel.

To attempt to save the Lost, we must accept no Limitations to human

brotherhood. If the Scheme which I set forth in these and the

following pages is not applicable to the Thief, the Harlot,

the Drunkard, and the Sluggard, it may as well be dismissed without

ceremony. As Christ came to call not the saints but sinners to

repentance, so the New Message of Temporal Salvation, of salvation from

pinching poverty, from rags and misery, must be offered to all.

They may reject it, of course. But we who call ourselves by the name

of Christ are not worthy to profess to be His disciples until we have

set an open door before the least and worst of these who are now

apparently imprisoned for life in a horrible dungeon of misery and

despair. The responsibility for its rejection must be theirs, not

ours. We all know the prayer, "Give me neither poverty nor riches,

feed me with food convenient for me"--and for every child of man on

this planet, thank God the prayer of Agur, the son of Jakeh, may be

fulfilled.

At present how far it is from being realised may be seen by anyone who

will take the trouble to go down to the docks and see the struggle for

work. Here is a sketch of what was found there this summer: --

London Docks, 7.25 a.m. The three pairs of huge wooden doors are

closed. Leaning against then, and standing about, there are perhaps a

couple of hundred men. The public house opposite is full, doing a

heavy trade. All along the road are groups of men, and from each

direction a steady stream increases the crowd at the gate.

7.30 Doors open, there is a general rush to the interior. Everybody

marches about a hundred yards along to the iron barrier--a temporary

chair affair, guarded by the dock police. Those men who have

previously (i.e., night before) been engaged, show their ticket and

pass through, about six hundred. The rest--some five hundred stand

behind the barrier, patiently waiting the chance of a job, but less

than twenty of these get engaged. They are taken on by a foreman who

appears next the barrier and proceeds to pick his men. No sooner is

the foreman seen, than there is a wild rush to the spot and a sharp mad

fight to "catch his eye." The men picked out, pass the barrier, and the

excitement dies away until another lot of men are wanted.

They wait until eight o'clock strikes, which is the signal to withdraw.

The barrier is taken down and all those hundreds of men, wearily

disperse to "find a job." Five hundred applicants, twenty acceptances!

No wonder one tired-out looking individual ejaculates, "Oh dear,

Oh dear! Whatever shall I do?" A few hang about until mid-day on the

slender chance of getting taken on then for half a day.

Ask the men and they will tell you something like the following story,

which gives the simple experiences of a dock labourer.

R. P. said: --"I was in regular work at the South West India Dock

before the strike. We got 5d. an hour. Start work 8 a.m. summer and

9 a.m winter. Often there would be five hundred go, and only twenty

get taken on (that is besides those engaged the night previous.)

The foreman stood in his box, and called out the men he wanted.

He would know quite five hundred by name. It was a regular fight to

get work, I have known nine hundred to be taken on, but there's always

hundreds turned away. You see they get to know when ships come in, and

when they're consequently likely to be wanted, and turn up then in

greater numbers. I would earn 30s. a week sometimes and then perhaps

nothing for a fortnight. That's what makes it so hard. You get

nothing to eat for a week scarcely, and then when you get taken on, you

are so weak that you can't do it properly. I've stood in the crowd at

the gate and had to go away without work, hundreds of times. Still I

should go at it again if I could. I got tired of the little work and

went away into the country to get work on a farm, but couldn't get it,

so I'm without the 10s. that it costs to join the Dockers' Union. I'm

going to the country again in a day or two to try again. Expect to get

3s. a day perhaps. Shall come back to the docks again. Then is a

chance of getting regular dock work, and that is, to lounge about the

pubs where the foremen go, and treat them. Then they will very likely

take you on next day."

R. P. was a non-Unionist. Henry F. is a Unionist. His history is much

the same.

"I worked at St. Katherine's Docks five months ago. You have to get

to the gates at 6 o'clock for the first call. There's generally about

400 waiting. They will take on one to two hundred. Then at 7 o'clock

there's a second call. Another 400 will have gathered by then, and

another hundred or so will be taken on. Also there will probably be

calls at nine and one o'clock. About the same number turn up but

there's no work for many hundreds of them. I was a Union man. That

means 10s. a week sick pay, or 8s. a week for slight accidents; also

some other advantages. The Docks won't take men on now unless they are

Unionists. The point is that there's too many men. I would often be

out of work a fortnight to three weeks at a time. Once earned #3 in a

week, working day and night, but then had a fortnight out directly

after. Especially when then don't happen to be any ships in for a few

days, which means, of course, nothing to unload. That's the time;

there's plenty of men almost starving then. They have no trade to go

to, or can get no work at it, and they swoop down to the docks for

work, when they had much better stay away."

But it is not only at the dock-gates that you come upon these

unfortunates who spend their lives in the vain hunt for work. Here is

the story of another man whose case has only too many parallels.

C. is a fine built man, standing nearly six feet. He has been in the

Royal Artillery for eight years and held very good situations whilst in

it. It seems that he was thrifty and consequently steady. He bought

his discharge, and being an excellent cook opened a refreshment house,

but at the end of five months he was compelled to close his shop on

account of slackness in trade, which was brought about by the closing

of a large factory in the locality.

After having worked in Scotland and Newcastle-on-Tyne for a few years,

and through ill health having to give up his situation, he came to

London with he hope that he might get something to do in his native

town. He has had no regular employment for the past eight months.

His wife and family are in a state of destitution, and he remarked,

"We only had 1 lb. of bread between us yesterday." He is six weeks in

arrears of rent, and is afraid that he will be ejected. The furniture

which is in his home is not worth 3s. and the clothes of each member

of his family are in a tattered state and hardly fit for the rag bag.

He assured us he had tried every where to get employment and would be

willing to take anything. His characters are very good indeed.

Now, it may seem a preposterous dream that any arrangement can be

devised by which it may be possible, under all circumstances,

to provide food, clothes, and shelter for all these Out-of-Works

without any loss of self respect; but I am convinced that it can be

done, providing only that they are willing to Work, and, God helping

me, if the means are forthcoming, I mean to try to do it; how, and

where, and when, I will explain in subsequent chapters.

All that I need say here is, that so long as a man or woman is willing

to submit to the discipline indispensable in every campaign against any

formidable foe, there appears to me nothing impossible about this

ideal; and the great element of hope before us is that the majority

are, beyond all gainsaying, eager for work. Most of them now do more

exhausting work in seeking for employment than the regular toilers do

in their workshops, and do it, too, under the darkness of hope deferred

which maketh the heart sick.

CHAPTER 5. ON THE VERGE OF THE ABYSS.

There is, unfortunately, no need for me to attempt to set out, however

imperfectly, any statement of the evil case of the sufferers what we

wish to help. For years past the Press has been filled with echoes of

the "Bitter Cry of Outcast London," with pictures of "Horrible Glasgow,"

and the like. We have had several volumes describing "How the Poor Live"

and I may therefore assume that all my readers are more or less cognizant

of the main outlines a "Darkest England." My slum officers are living in

the midst of it their reports are before me, and one day I may publish

some more detailed account of the actual facts of the social condition

of the Sunken Millions. But not now. All that must be taken as read.

I only glance at the subject in order to bring into clear relief the

salient points of our new Enterprise.

I have spoken of the houseless poor. Each of these represents a point

in the scale of human suffering below that of those who have still

contrived to keep a shelter over their heads. A home is a home, be it

ever so low; and the desperate tenacity with which the poor will cling

to the last wretched semblance of one is very touching. There are vile

dens, fever-haunted and stenchful crowded courts, where the return of

summer is dreaded because it means the unloosing of myriads of vermin

which render night unbearable, which, nevertheless, are regarded at

this moment as havens of rest by their hard-working occupants.

They can scarcely be said to be furnished. A chair, a mattress, and a

few miserable sticks constitute all the furniture of the single room in

which they have to sleep, and breed, and die; but they cling to it as a

drowning man to a half-submerged raft. Every week they contrive by

pinching and scheming to raise the rent, for with them it is pay or go

and they struggle to meet the collector as the sailor nerves himself to

avoid being sucked under by the foaming wave. If at any time work

fails or sickness comes they are liable to drop helplessly into the

ranks of the homeless. It is bad for a single man to have to confront

the struggle for life in the streets and Casual Wards. But how much

more terrible must it be for the married man with his wife and children

to be turned out into the streets. So long as the family has a lair

into which it can creep at night, he keeps his footing; but when he

loses that solitary foothold then arrives the time if there be such a

thing as Christian compassion, for the helping hand to be held out to

save him from the vortex that sucks him downward--ay, downward to the

hopeless under-strata of crime and despair.

"The heart knoweth its own bitterness and the stranger inter-meddleth

not therewith." But now and then out of the depths there sounds a

bitter wail as of some strong swimmer in his agony as he is drawn under

by the current. A short time ago a respectable man, a chemist in

Holloway, fifty years of age, driven hard to the wall, tried to end it

all by cutting his throat. His wife also cut her throat, and at the

same time they gave strychnine to their only child. The effort failed,

and they were placed on trial for attempted murder. In the Court a

letter was read which the poor wretch had written before attempting his

life:-

MY DEAREST GEORGE,--Twelve months have I now passed of a most

miserable and struggling existence, and I really cannot stand it any

more. I am completely worn out, and relations who could assist me

won't do any more, for such was uncle's last intimation. Never mind;

he can't take his money and comfort with him, and in all probability

will find himself in the same boat as myself. He never enquires

whether I am starving or not. #3--a mere flea-bite to him--would

have put us straight, and with his security and good interest might

have obtained me a good situation long ago. I can face poverty and

degradation no longer, and would sooner die than go to the workhouse,

whatever may be the awful consequences of the steps we have taken.

We have, God forgive us, taken our darling Arty with us out of pure

love and affection, so that the darling should never be cuffed about,

or reminded or taunted with his heartbroken parents' crime. My poor

wife has done her best at needle-work, washing, house-minding, &c.,

in fact, anything and everything that would bring in a shilling; but it

would only keep us in semi-starvation. I have now done six weeks'

travelling from morning till night, and not received one farthing for

it, If that is not enough to drive you mad--wickedly mad--I don't

know what is. No bright prospect anywhere; no ray of hope.

May God Almighty forgive us for this heinous sin, and have mercy on our

sinful souls, is the prayer of your miserable, broken-hearted, but

loving brother, Arthur. We have now done everything that we can

possibly think of to avert this wicked proceeding, but can discover no

ray of hope. Fervent prayer has availed us nothing; our lot is cast,

and we must abide by it. It must be God's will or He would have

ordained it differently. Dearest Georgy, I am exceedingly sorry to

leave you all, but I am mad--thoroughly mad. You, dear, must try and

forget us, and, if possible, forgive us; for I do not consider it our

own fault we have not succeeded. If you could get #3 for our bed it

will pay our rent, and our scanty furniture may fetch enough to bury us

in a cheap way. Don't grieve over us or follow us, for we shall not be

worthy of such respect. Our clergyman has never called on us or given

us the least consolation, though I called on him a month ago. He is

paid to preach, and there he considers his responsibility ends, the

rich excepted. We have only yourself and a very few others who care

one pin what becomes of us, but you must try and forgive us, is the

last fervent prayer of your devotedly fond and affectionate but

broken-hearted and persecuted brother.

(Signed) R. A. O----.

That is an authentic human document--a transcript from the life of

one among thousands who go down inarticulate into the depths, They die

and make no sign, or, worse still, they continue to exist, carrying

about with them, year after year, the bitter ashes of a life from which

the furnace of misfortune has burnt away all joy, and hope, and

strength. Who is there who has not been confronted by many despairing

ones, who come, as Richard O---- went, to the clergyman, crying for

help, and how seldom have we been able to give it them? It is unjust,

no doubt, for them to blame the clergy and the comfortable well-to-do

--for what can they do but preach and offer good advice? To assist

all the Richard O----s' by direct financial advance would drag even

Rothschild into the gutter. And what else can be done? Yet something

else must be done if Christianity is not to be a mockery to perishing

men.

Here is another case, a very common case, which illustrates how the

Army of Despair is recruited.

Mr. T., Margaret Place, Gascoign Place, Bethnal Green, is a bootmaker

by trade. Is a good hand, and has earned three shillings and sixpence

to four shillings and sixpence a day. He was taken ill last Christmas,

and went to the London Hospital; was there three months. A week after

he had gone Mrs. T. had rheumatic fever, and was taken to Bethnal

Green Infirmary, where she remained about three months. Directly after

they had been taken ill, their furniture was seized for the three

weeks' rent which was owing. Consequently, on becoming convalescent,

they were homeless. They came out about the same time. He went out to

a lodging-house for a night or two, until she came out. He then had

twopence, and she had sixpence, which a nurse had given her. They went

to a lodging-house together, but the society there was dreadful.

Next day he had a day's work, and got two shillings and sixpence, and

on the strength of this they took a furnished room at tenpence per day

(payable nightly). His work lasted a few weeks, when he was again

taken ill, lost his job, and spent all their money. Pawned a shirt and

apron for a shilling; spent that, too. At last pawned their tools for

three shillings, which got them a few days' food and lodging. He is

now minus tools and cannot work at his own job, and does anything he

can. Spent their last twopence on a pen'orth each of tea and sugar.

In two days they had a slice of bread and butter each, that's all.

They are both very weak through want of food.

"Let things alone," the laws of supply and demand, and all the rest

of the excuses by which those who stand on firm ground salve their

consciences when they leave their brother to sink, how do they look

when we apply them to the actual loss of life at sea? Does "Let things

alone" man the lifeboat? Will the inexorable laws of political economy

save the shipwrecked sailor from the boiling surf? They often enough

are responsible for his disaster. Coffin ships are a direct result of

the wretched policy of non-interference with the legitimate operations

of commerce, but no desire to make it pay created the National Lifeboat

Institution, no law of supply and demand actuates the volunteers who

risk their lives to bring the shipwrecked to shore.

What we have to do is to apply the same principle to society. We want

a Social Lifeboat Institution, a Social Lifeboat Brigade, to snatch

from the abyss those who, if left to themselves, will perish as

miserably as the crew of a ship that founders in mid-ocean.

The moment that we take in hand this work we shall be compelled to turn

our attention seriously to the question whether prevention is not

better than cure. It is easier and cheaper, and in every way better,

to prevent the loss of home than to have to re-create that home.

It is better to keep a man out of the mire than to let him fall in

first and then risk the chance of plucking him out. Any Scheme,

therefore, that attempts to deal with the reclamation of the lost must

tend to develop into an endless variety of ameliorative measures, of

some of which I shall have somewhat to say hereafter. I only mention

the subject here in order that no one may say I am blind to the

necessity of going further and adopting wider plans of operation than

those which I put forward in this book. The renovation of our Social

System is a work so vast that no one of us, nor all of us put together,

can define all the measures that will have to be taken before we attain

even the Cab-Horse Ideal of existence for our children and children's

children. All that we can do is to attack, in a serious, practical

spirit the worst and most pressing evils, knowing that if we do our

duty we obey the voice of God. He is the Captain of our Salvation.

If we but follow where He leads we shall not want for marching orders,

nor need we imagine that He will narrow the field of operations.

I am labouring under no delusions as to the possibility of inaugurating

the Millennium by any social specific. In the struggle of life the

weakest will go to the wall, and there are so many weak. The fittest,

in tooth and claw, will survive. All that we can do is to soften the

lot of the unfit and make their suffering less horrible than it is at

present. No amount of assistance will give a jellyfish a backbone.

No outside propping will make some men stand erect. All material help

from without is useful only in so far as it develops moral strength

within. And some men seem to have lost even the very faculty of

self-help. There is an immense lack of common sense and of vital

energy on the part of multitudes.

It is against Stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage

our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the

part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful

absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the

advantages?

How can we marvel if, after leaving generation after generation to grow

up uneducated and underfed, there should be developed a heredity of

incapacity, and that thousands of dull-witted people should be born

into the world, disinherited before their birth of their share in the

average intelligence of mankind?

Besides those who are thus hereditarily wanting in the qualities

necessary to enable them to hold their own, there are the weak, the

disabled, the aged, and the unskilled; worse than all, there is the

want of character. Those who have the best of reputation, if they lose

their foothold on the ladder, find it difficult enough to regain their

place. What, then, can men and women who have no character do? When a

master has the choice of a hundred honest men, is it reasonable to

expect that he will select a poor fellow with tarnished reputation?

All this is true, and it is one of the things that makes the problem

almost insoluble. And insoluble it is, I am absolutely convinced

unless it is possible to bring new moral life into the soul of these

people. This should be the first object of every social reformer,

whose work will only last if it is built on the solid foundation of a

new birth, to cry "You must be born again."

To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new

breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University

education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside

remains unchanged you have wasted your labour. You must in some way or

other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the

element of the Divine. All that I propose in this book is governed by

that principle.

The difference between the method which seeks to regenerate the man by

ameliorating his circumstances and that which ameliorates his

circumstances in order to get at the regeneration of his heart, is the

difference between the method of the gardener who grafts a Ribstone

Pippin on a crab-apple tree and one who merely ties apples with string

upon the branches of the crab. To change the nature of the individual,

to get at the heart, to save his soul is the only real, lasting method

of doing him any good. In many modern schemes of social regeneration

it is forgotten that "it takes a soul to move a body, e'en to a cleaner

sty," and at the risk of being misunderstood and misrepresented, I must

assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for

the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body.

But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole

attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep

themselves alive? You might as well give a tract to a shipwrecked

sailor who is battling with the surf which has drowned his comrades and

threatens to drown him. He will not listen to you. Nay, he cannot

hear you any more than a man whose head is underwater can listen to a

sermon. The first thing to do is to get him at least a footing on firm

ground, and to give him room to live. Then you may have a chance.

At present you have none. And you will have all the better opportunity

to find a way to his heart, if he comes to know that it was you who

pulled him out of the horrible pit and the miry clay in which he was

sinking to perdition.

CHAPTER 6. THE VICIOUS.

There are many vices and seven deadly sins. But of late years many of

the seven have contrived to pass themselves off as virtues. Avarice,

for instance; and Pride, when re-baptised thrift and self-respect, have

become the guardian angels of Christian civilisation; and as for Envy,

it is the corner-stone upon which much of our competitive system is

founded. There are still two vices which are fortunate, or

unfortunate, enough to remain undisguised, not even concealing from

themselves the fact that they are vices and not virtues. One is

drunkenness; the other fornication. The viciousness of these vices is

so little disguised, even from those who habitually practise them, that

there will be a protest against merely describing one of them by the

right Biblical name. Why not say prostitution? For this reason:

prostitution is a word applied to only one half of the vice, and that

the most pitiable. Fornication hits both sinners alike. Prostitution

applies only to the woman.

When, however, we cease to regard this vice from the point of view of

morality and religion, and look at it solely as a factor in the social

problem, the word prostitution is less objectionable. For the social

burden of this vice is borne almost entirely by women. The male sinner

does not, by the mere fact of his sin, find himself in a worse position

in obtaining employment, in finding a home, or even in securing a wife.

His wrong-doing only hits him in his purse, or, perhaps, in his health.

His incontinence, excepting so far as it relates to the woman whose

degradation it necessitates, does not add to the number of those for

whom society has to provide. It is an immense addition to the infamy

of this vice in man that its consequences have to be borne almost

exclusively by woman. The difficulty of dealing with drunkards and

harlots is almost insurmountable. Were it not that I utterly repudiate

as a fundamental denial of the essential principle of the Christian

religion the popular pseudo-scientific doctrine that any man or woman

is past saving by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit,

I would sometimes be disposed to despair when contemplating these

victims of the Devil. The doctrine of Heredity and the suggestion of

Irresponsibility come perilously near re-establishing, on scientific

bases, the awful dogma of Reprobation which has cast so terrible a

shadow over the Christian Church. For thousands upon thousands of

these poor wretches are, as Bishop South truly said, "not so much born

into this world as damned into it." The bastard of a harlot, born in a

brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all

the bestialities of debauch, violated before she is twelve, and driven

out into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is

there for such a girl in this world--I say nothing about the next?

Yet such a case is not exceptional. There are many such differing in

detail, but in essentials the same. And with boys it is almost as bad.

There are thousands who were begotten when both parents were besotted

with drink, whose mothers saturated themselves with alcohol every day

of their pregnancy, who may be said to have sucked in a taste for

strong drink with their mothers' milk, and who were surrounded from

childhood with opportunities and incitements to drink. How can we

marvel that the constitution thus disposed to intemperance finds the

stimulus of drink indispensable? Even if they make a stand against it,

the increasing pressure of exhaustion and of scanty food drives them

back to the cup. Of these poor wretches, born slaves of the bottle,

predestined to drunkenness from their mother's womb, there are--who

can say how many? Yet they are all men; all with what the Russian

peasants call "a spark of God" in them, which can never be wholly

obscured and destroyed while life exists, and if any social scheme is

to be comprehensive and practical it must deal with these men. It must

provide for the drunkard and the harlot as it provides for the

improvident and the out-of-work. But who is sufficient for these

things?

I will take the question of the drunkard, for the drink difficulty lies

at the root of everything. Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice,

and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root. Many of our social

evils, which overshadow the land like so many upas trees, would dwindle

away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink.

There is universal agreement on that point; in fact, the agreement as

to the evils of intemperance is almost as universal as the conviction

that politicians will do nothing practical to interfere with them.

In Ireland, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald says that intemperance leads to

nineteen-twentieths of the crime in that country, but no one proposes a

Coercion Act to deal with that evil. In England, the judges all say

the same thing. Of course it is a mistake to assume that a murder, for

instance, would never be committed by sober men, because murderers in

most cases prime themselves for their deadly work by a glass of Dutch

courage. But the facility of securing a reinforcement of passion

undoubtedly tends to render always dangerous, and sometimes

irresistible, the temptation to violate the laws of God and man.

Mere lectures against the evil habit are, however, of no avail.

We have to recognise, that the gin-palace, like many other evils,

although a poisonous, is still a natural outgrowth of our social

conditions. The tap-room in many cases is the poor man's only parlour.

Many a man takes to beer, not from the love of beer, but from a natural

craving for the light, warmth, company, and comfort which is thrown in

along with the beer, and which he cannot get excepting by buying beer.

Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it

in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers.

Then, again, let us never forget that the temptation to drink is

strongest when want is sharpest and misery the most acute. A well-fed

man is not driven to drink by the craving that torments the hungry; and

the comfortable do not crave for the boon of forgetfulness. Gin is the

only Lethe of the miserable. The foul and poisoned air of the dens in

which thousands live predisposes to a longing for stimulant.

Fresh air, with its oxygen and its ozone, being lacking, a man supplies

the want with spirit. After a time the longing for drink becomes a

mania. Life seems as insupportable without alcohol as without food.

It is a disease often inherited, always developed by indulgence, but as

clearly a disease as ophthalmia or stone.

All this should predispose us to charity and sympathy.

While recognising that the primary responsibility must always rest upon

the individual, we may fairly insist that society, which, by its

habits, its customs, and its laws, has greased the slope down which

these poor creatures slide to perdition, shall seriously take in hand

their salvation. How many are there who are, more or less, under the

dominion of strong drink? Statistics abound, but they seldom tell us

what we want to know. We know how many public-houses there are in the

land, and how many arrests for drunkenness the police make in a year;

but beyond that we know little. Everyone knows that for one man who is

arrested for drunkenness there are at least ten and often twenty--who

go home intoxicated. In London, for instance, there are 14,000 drink

shops, and every year 20,000 persons are arrested for drunkenness. But

who can for a moment believe that there are only 20,000, more or less,

habitual drunkards in London? By habitual drunkard I do not mean one

who is always drunk, but one who is so much under the dominion of the

evil habit that he cannot be depended upon not to get drunk whenever

the opportunity offers.

In the United Kingdom there are 190,000 public-houses, and every year

there are 200,000 arrests for drunkenness. Of course, several of these

arrests refer to the same person, who is locked up again and again.

Were this not so, if we allowed six drunkards to each house as an

average, or five habitual drunkards for one arrested for drunkenness,

we should arrive at a total of a million adults who are more or less

prisoners of the publican--as a matter of fact, Isaac Hoyle gives

1 in 12 of the adult population. This may be an excessive estimate,

but, if we take half of a million, we shall not be accused of

exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of confirmed

dipsomania; others are but over the verge; but the procession tends

ever downwards.

The loss which the maintenance of this huge standing army of a half of

a million of men who are more or less always besotted men whose

intemperance impairs their working power, consumes their earnings, and

renders their homes wretched, has long been a familiar theme of the

platform. But what can be done for them? Total abstinence is no doubt

admirable, but how are you to get them to be totally abstinent? When a

man is drowning in mid-ocean the one thing that is needful, no doubt,

is that he should plant his feet firmly on terra firma. But how is he

to get there? It is just what he cannot do. And so it is with the

drunkards. If they are to be rescued there must be something more done

for them than at present is attempted, unless, of course, we decide

definitely to allow the iron laws of nature to work themselves out in

their destruction. In that case it might be more merciful to

facilitate the slow workings of natural law. There is no need of

establishing a lethal chamber for drunkards like that into which the

lost dogs of London are driven, to die in peaceful sleep under the

influence of carbonic oxide. The State would only need to go a little

further than it goes at present in the way of supplying poison to the

community. If, in addition to planting a flaming gin palace at each

corner, free to all who enter, it were to supply free gin to all who

have attained a certain recognised standard of inebriety, delirium

tremens would soon reduce our drunken population to manageable

proportions. I can imagine a cynical millionaire of the scientific

philanthropic school making a clearance of all the drunkards in a

district by the simple expedient of an unlimited allowance of alcohol.

But that for us is out of the question. The problem of what to do with

our half of a million drunkards remains to be solved, and few more

difficult questions confront the social reformer.

The question of the harlots is, however, quite as insoluble by the

ordinary methods. For these unfortunates no one who looks below the

surface can fail to have the deepest sympathy. Some there are, no

doubt, perhaps many, who--whether from inherited passion or from evil

education--have deliberately embarked upon a life of vice, but with

the majority it is not so. Even those who deliberately and of free

choice adopt the profession of a prostitute, do so under the stress of

temptations which few moralists seem to realise. Terrible as the fact

is, there is no doubt it is a fact that there is no industrial career

in which for a short time a beautiful girl can make as much money with

as little trouble as the profession of a courtesan. The case recently

tried at the Lewes assizes, in which the wife of an officer in the army

admitted that while living as a kept mistress she had received as much

as #4,000 a year, was no doubt very exceptional. Even the most

successful adventuresses seldom make the income of a Cabinet Minister.

But take women in professions and in businesses all round, and the

number of young women who have received #500 in one year for the sale

of their person is larger than the number of women of all ages who make

a similar sum by honest industry. It is only the very few who draw

these gilded prizes, and they only do it for a very short time. But it

is the few prizes in every profession which allure the multitude, who

think little of the many blanks. And speaking broadly, vice offers to

every good-looking girl during the first bloom of her youth and beauty

more money than she can earn by labour in any field of industry open to

her sex. The penalty exacted afterwards is disease, degradation and

death, but these things at first are hidden from her sight.

The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum

income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in

which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence;

all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever new embodiment

of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter

offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell

her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the

uttermost farthing. Human nature, however, is short-sighted.

Giddy girls, chafing against the restraints of uncongenial industry,

see the glittering bait continually before them. They are told that if

they will but "do as others do" they will make more in a night, if they

are lucky, than they can make in a week at their sewing; and who can

wonder that in many cases the irrevocable step is taken before they

realise that it is irrevocable, and that they have bartered away the

future of their lives for the paltry chance of a year's ill-gotten

gains?

Of the severity of the punishment there can be no question. If the

premium is high at the beginning, the penalty is terrible at the close.

And this penalty is exacted equally from those who have deliberately

said, "Evil, be thou my Good," and for those who have been decoyed,

snared, trapped into the life which is a living death. When you see a

girl on the street you can never say without enquiry whether she is one

of the most-to-be condemned, or the most-to-be pitied of her sex.

Many of them find themselves where they are because of a too trusting

disposition, confidence born of innocence being often the unsuspecting

ally of the procuress and seducer. Others are as much the innocent

victims of crime as if they had been stabbed or maimed by the dagger of

the assassin. The records of our Rescue Homes abound with

life-stories, some of which we have been able to verify to the letter

--which prove only too conclusively the existence of numbers of

innocent victims whose entry upon this dismal life can in no way be

attributed to any act of their own will. Many are orphans or the

children of depraved mothers, whose one idea of a daughter is to make

money out of her prostitution. Here are a few cases on our register: --

E. C., aged 18, a soldier's child, born on the sea. Her father died,

and her mother, a thoroughly depraved woman, assisted to secure her

daughter's prostitution.

P. S., aged 20, illegitimate child. Went to consult a doctor one time

about some ailment. The doctor abused his position and took advantage

of his patient, and when she complained, gave her #4 as compensation.

When that was spent, having lost her character, she came on the town.

We looked the doctor up, and he fled.

E. A., aged 17, was left an orphan very early in life, and adopted by

her godfather, who himself was the means of her ruin at the age of 10.

A girl in her teens lived with her mother in the "Dusthole," the lowest

part of Woolwich. This woman forced her out upon the streets, and

profited by her prostitution up to the very night of her confinement.

The mother had all the time been the receiver of the gains.

E., neither father nor mother, was taken care of by a grandmother till,

at an early age, accounted old enough. Married a soldier; but shortly

before the birth of her first child, found that her deceiver had a wife

and family in a distant part of the country, and she was soon left

friendless and alone. She sought an asylum in the Workhouse for a few

weeks' after which she vainly tried to get honest employment. Failing

that, and being on the very verge of starvation, she entered a

lodging-house in Westminster and "did as other girls." Here our

lieutenant found and persuaded her to leave and enter one of our Homes,

where she soon gave abundant proof of her conversion by a thoroughly

changed life. She is now a faithful and trusted servant in a

clergyman's family.

A girl was some time ago discharged from a city hospital after an

illness. She was homeless and friendless, an orphan, and obliged to

work for her living. Walking down the street and wondering what she

should do next, she met a girl, who came up to her in a most friendly

fashion and speedily won her confidence.

"Discharged ill, and nowhere to go, are you?" said her new friend.

"Well, come home to my mother's; she will lodge you, and we'll go to

work together, when you are quite strong."

The girl consented gladly, but found herself conducted to the very

lowest part of Woolwich and ushered into a brothel; there was no mother

in the case. She was hoaxed, and powerless to resist.

Her protestations were too late to save her, and having had her

character forced from her she became hopeless, and stayed on to live

the life of her false friend.

There is no need for me to go into the details of the way in which men

and women, whose whole livelihood depends upon their success in

disarming the suspicions of their victims and luring them to their

doom, contrive to overcome the reluctance of the young girl without

parents, friends, or helpers to enter their toils. What fraud fails to

accomplish, a little force succeeds in effecting; and a girl who has

been guilty of nothing but imprudence finds herself an outcast for

life. The very innocence of a girl tells against her. A woman of the

world, once entrapped, would have all her wits about her to extricate

herself from the position in which she found herself. A perfectly

virtuous girl is often so overcome with shame and horror that there

seems nothing in life worth struggling for. She accepts her doom

without further struggle, and treads the long and torturing path-way of

"the streets" to the grave.

"Judge not, that ye be not judged" is a saying that applies most

appropriately of all to these unfortunates. Many of them would have

escaped their evil fate had they been less innocent. They are where

they are because they loved too utterly to calculate consequences, and

trusted too absolutely to dare to suspect evil. And others are there

because of the false education which confounds ignorance with virtue,

and throws our young people into the midst of a great city, with all

its excitements and all its temptations, without more preparation or

warning than if they were going to live in the Garden of Eden.

Whatever sin they have committed, a terrible penalty is exacted.

While the man who caused their ruin passes as a respectable member of

society, to whom virtuous matrons gladly marry--if he is rich--

their maiden daughters, they are crushed beneath the millstone of

social excommunication. Here let me quote from a report made to me by

the head of our Rescue Homes as to the actual life of these

unfortunates.

The following hundred cases are taken as they come from our Rescue

Register. The statements are those of the girls themselves. They are

certainly frank, and it will be noticed that only two out of the

hundred allege that they took to the life out of poverty: --

CAUSE OF FALL.

Drink .. .. .. 14

Seduction .. .. 33

Wilful choice .. .. 24

Bad company .. .. 27

Poverty .. .. .. 2

----

Total 100

CONDITION WHEN APPLYING.

Rags.. .. .. 25

Destitution .. 27

Decently dressed 48

----

Total 100

Out of these girls twenty-three have been in prison. The girls suffer

so much that the shortness of their miserable life is the only

redeeming feature. Whether we look at the wretchedness of the life

itself; their perpetual intoxication; the cruel treatment to which they

are subjected by their task-masters and mistresses or bullies; the

hopelessness, suffering and despair induced by their circumstances and

surroundings; the depths of misery, degradation and poverty to which

they eventually descend; or their treatment in sickness, their

friendlessness and loneliness in death, it must be admitted that a more

dismal lot seldom falls to the fate of a human being. I will take each

of these in turn.

HEALTH.--This life induces insanity, rheumatism, consumption, and

all forms of syphilis. Rheumatism and gout are the commonest of these

evils. Some were quite crippled by both--young though they were.

Consumption sows its seeds broadcast. The life is a hot-bed for the

development of any constitutional and hereditary germs of the disease.

We have found girls in Piccadilly at midnight who are continually

prostrated by haemorrhage, yet who have no other way of life open, so

struggle on in this awful manner between whiles.

DRINK.--This is an inevitable part of the business. All Confess

that they could never lead their miserable lives if it were not for its

influence.

A girl, who was educated at college, and who had a home in which was

every comfort, but who, when ruined, had fallen even to the depth of

Woolwich "Dusthole," exclaimed to us indignantly--"Do you think I

could ever, ever do this if it weren't for the drink? I always have to

be in drink if I want to sin." No girl has ever come into our Homes

front street-life but has been more or less a prey to drink.

CRUEL TREATMENT.--The devotion of these women to their bullies is as

remarkable as the brutality of their bullies is abominable. Probably

the primary cause of the fall of numberless girls of the lower class,

is their great aspiration to the dignity of wifehood;--they are never

"somebody" until they are married, and will link themselves to any

creature, no matter how debased, in the hope of being ultimately

married by him. This consideration, in addition to their helpless

condition when once character has gone, makes them suffer cruelties

which they would never otherwise endure from the men with whom large

numbers of them live.

One case in illustration of this is that of a girl who was once a

respectable servant, the daughter of a police sergeant. She was

ruined, and shame led her to leave home. At length she drifted to

Woolwich, where she came across a man who persuaded her to live with

him, and for a considerable length of time she kept him, although his

conduct to her was brutal in the extreme.

The girl living in the next room to her has frequently heard him knock

her head against the wall, and pound it, when he was out of temper,

through her gains of prostitution being less than usual. He lavished

upon her every sort of cruelty and abuse, and at length she grew so

wretched, and was reduced to so dreadful a plight, that she ceased to

attract. At this he became furious, and pawned all her clothing but

one thin garment of rags. The week before her first confinement he

kicked her black and blue from neck to knees, and she was carried to

the police station in a pool of blood, but; she was so loyal to the

wretch that she refused to appear against him.

She was going to drown herself in desperation, when our Rescue Officers

spoke to her, wrapped their own shawl around her shivering shoulders,

took her home with them, and cared for her. The baby was born dead--

a tiny, shapeless mass. This state of things is all too common.

HOPELESSNESS--SURROUNDINGS.--The state of hopelessness and despair

in which these girls live continually, makes them reckless of

consequences, and large numbers commit suicide who are never heard of.

A West End policeman assured us that the number of prostitute-suicides

was terribly in advance of anything guessed at by the public.

DEPTHS TO WHICH THEY SINK.--There is Scarcely a lower class of girls

to be found than the girls of Woolwich "Dusthole"--where one of our

Rescue Slum Homes is established. The women living and following their

dreadful business in this neighbourhood are so degraded that even

abandoned men will refuse to accompany them home. Soldiers are

forbidden to enter the place, or to go down the street, on pain of

twenty-five days' imprisonment; pickets are stationed at either end to

prevent this. The streets are much cleaner than many of the rooms we

have seen.

One public house there is shut up three or four times in a day

sometimes for fear of losing the licence through the terrible brawls

which take place within. A policeman never goes down this street alone

at night--one having died not long ago from injuries received there

--but our two lasses go unharmed and loved at all hours, spending

every other night always upon the streets.

The girls sink to the "Dusthole" after coming down several grades.

There is but one on record who came there with beautiful clothes, and

this poor girl, when last seen by the officers, was a pauper in the

workhouse infirmary in a wretched condition. The lowest class of all

is the girls who stand at the pier-head--these sell themselves

literally for a bare crust of bread and sleep in the streets. Filth

and vermin abound to an extent to which no one who has not seen it can

have any idea. The "Dusthole" is only one, alas of many similar

districts in this highly civilised land.

SICKNESS, FRIENDLESSNESS--DEATH.--In hospitals it is a known fact

that these girls are not treated at all like other cases; they inspire

disgust, and are most frequently discharged before being really cured.

Scorned by their relations, and ashamed to make their case known even

to those who would help them, unable longer to struggle out on the

streets to earn the bread of shame, there are girls lying in many a

dark hole in this big city positively rotting away, and maintained by

their old companions on the streets. Many are totally friendless,

utterly cast out and left to perish by relatives and friends. One of

this class came to us, sickened and died, and we buried her, being her

only followers to the grave.

It is a sad story, but one that must not be forgotten, for these women

constitute a large standing army whose numbers no one can calculate.

All estimates that I have seem purely imaginary. The ordinary figure

given for London is from 60,000 to 80,000. This maybe true if it is

meant to include all habitually unchaste women. It is a monstrous

exaggeration if it is meant to apply to those who make their living

solely and habitually by prostitution. These figures, however, only

confuse. We shall have to deal with hundreds every month, whatever

estimate we take. How utterly unprepared society is for any such

systematic reformation may be seen from the fact that even now at our

Homes we are unable to take in all the girls who apply. They cannot

escape, even if they would, for want of funds whereby to provide them a

way of release.

CHAPTER 7. THE CRIMINALS.

One very important section of the denizens of Darkest England are the

criminals and the semi-criminals. They are more or less predatory,

and are at present shepherded by the police and punished by the gaoler.

Their numbers cannot be ascertained with very great precision, but the

following figures are taken from the prison returns of 1889: --

The criminal classes of Great Britain, in round figures, sum up a total

of no less than 90,000 persons, made up as follows: --

Convict prisons contain.. .. .. .. .. .. 11,660 persons

Local prisons contain.. .. .. .. .. .. 20,883 ,,

Reformatories for children convicted of crime .. 1,270 ,,

Industrial schools for vagrant

and refractory children .. .. .. .. .. 21,413 ,,

Criminal lunatics under restraint.. .. .. .. 910 ,,

Known thieves at large .. .. .. .. .. .. 14,747 ,,

Known receivers of stolen goods .. .. .. .. 1,121 ,,

Suspected persons .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 17,042 ,,

-------

Total 89,046

-------

The above does not include the great army of known prostitutes, nor the

keepers and owners of brothels and disorderly houses, as to whose

numbers Government is rigidly silent. These figures are, however,

misleading. They only represent the criminals actually in gaol on a

given day. The average gaol population in England and Wales, excluding

the convict establishments, was, in 1889, 15,119 but the total number

actually sentenced and imprisoned in local prisons was 153,000, of whom

25,000 only came on first term sentences; 76,300 of them had been

convicted at least 10 times. But even if we suppose that the criminal

class numbers no more than 90,000, of whom only 35,000 persons are at

large, it is still a large enough section of humanity to compel

attention. 90,000 criminals represents a wreckage whose cost to the

community is very imperfectly estimated when we add up the cost of the

prisons, even if we add to them the whole cost of the police.

The police have so many other duties besides the shepherding of

criminals that it is unfair to saddle the latter with the whole of the

cost of the constabulary. The cost of prosecution and maintenance of

criminals, and the expense of the police involves an annual outlay of

#4,437,000. This, however, is small compared with the tax and toll

which this predatory horde inflicts upon the community on which it is

quartered. To the loss caused by the actual picking and stealing must

be added that of the unproductive labour of nearly 65,000 adults.

Dependent upon these criminal adults must be at least twice as many

women and children, so that it is probably an under-estimate to say

that this list of criminals and semi-criminals represents a population

of at least 200,000, who all live more or less at the expense of

society.

Every year, in the Metropolitan district alone, 66,100 persons are

arrested, of whom 444 are arrested for trying to commit suicide--life

having become too unbearable a burden. This immense population is

partially, no doubt, bred to prison, the same as other people are bred

to the army and to the bar. The hereditary criminal is by no means

confined to India, although it is only in that country that they have

the engaging simplicity to describe themselves frankly in the census

returns. But it is recruited constantly from the outside. In many

cases this is due to sheer starvation. Fathers of the Church have laid

down the law that a man who is in peril of death from hunger is

entitled to take bread wherever he can find it to keep body and soul

together. That proposition is not embodied in our jurisprudence.

Absolute despair drives many a man into the ranks of the criminal

class, who would never have fallen into the category of criminal

convicts if adequate provision had been made for the rescue of those

drifting to doom. When once he has fallen, circumstances seem to

combine to keep him there. As wounded and sickly stags are gored to

death by their fellows, so the unfortunate who bears the prison brand

is hunted from pillar to post, until he despairs of ever regaining his

position, and oscillates between one prison and another for the rest of

his days. I gave in a preceding page an account of how a man, after

trying in vain to get work, fell before the temptation to steal in

order to escape starvation. Here is the sequel of that man's story.

After he had stolen he ran away, and thus describes his experiences: --

"To fly was easy. To get away from the scene required very little

ingenuity, but the getting away from one suffering brought another.

A straight look from a stranger; a quick step behind me, sent a chill

through every nerve. The cravings of hunger had been satisfied, but it

was the cravings of conscience that were clamorous now. It was easy to

get away from the earthly consequences of sin, but from the fact--

never. And yet it was the compulsion of circumstances that made me a

criminal. It was neither from inward viciousness or choice, and how

bitterly did I cast reproach on society for allowing such an

alternative to offer itself--'to Steal or Starve,' but there was

another alternative that here offered itself--either give myself up,

or go on with the life of crime. I chose the former. I had travelled

over 100 miles to get away from the scene of my theft, and I now find

myself outside the station house at a place where I had put in my

boyhood days.

"How many times when a lad, with wondering eyes, and a heart stirred

with childhood's pure sympathy, I had watched the poor waifs from time

to time led within its doors. It was my turn now. I entered the

charge room, and with business-like precision disclosed my errand, viz.

that I wished to surrender myself for having committed a felony.

My story was doubted. Question followed question, and confirmation

must be waited. 'Why had I surrendered?' 'I was a rum'un.' 'Cracked.'

'More fool than rogue.' 'He will be sorry when he mounts the wheel.'

These and such like remarks were handed round concerning me. An hour

passed by. An inspector enters, and announces the receipt of a

telegram. 'It is all right. You can put him down.' And turning to me,

he said, 'They will send for you on Monday,' and then I passed into

the inner ward, and a cell. The door closed with a harsh, grating

clang, and I was left to face the most clamorous accuser of all--

my own interior self'

"Monday morning, the door opened, and a complacent detective stood

before me. Who can tell the feeling as the handcuffs closed round my

wrists, and we started for town. As again the charge was entered, and

the passing of another night in the cell; then the morning of the day

arrived. The gruff, harsh 'Come on' of the gaoler roused me, and the

next moment I found myself in the prison van, gazing through the

crevices of the floor, watching the stones flying as it were from

beneath our feet. Soon the court-house was reached, and hustled into a

common cell, I found myself amongst a crowd of boys and men, all bound

for the 'dock.' One by one the names are called, and the crowd is

gradually thinning down, when the announcement of my own name fell on

my startled ear, and I found myself stumbling up the stairs, and

finding myself in daylight and the 'dock.' What a terrible ordeal it

was. The ceremony was brief enough; 'Have you anything to say?'

'Don't interrupt his Worship; prisoner!' 'Give over talking!'

'A month's hard labour.' This is about all I heard, or at any rate

realised, until a vigorous push landed me into the presence of the

officer who booked the sentence, and then off I went to gaol.

I need not linger over the formalities of the reception. A nightmare

seemed to have settled upon me as I passed into the interior of the

correctional.

"I resigned my name, and I seemed to die to myself for henceforth.

332B disclosed my identity to myself and others.

"Through all the weeks that followed I was like one in a dream.

Meal times, resting hours, as did every other thing, came with

clock-like precision. At times I thought my mind had gone--so dull,

so callous, so weary appeared the organs of the brain. The harsh

orders of the gaolers; the droning of the chaplain in the chapel;

the enquiries of the chief warder or the governor in their periodical

visits,--all seemed so meaningless.

"As the day of my liberation drew near, the horrid conviction that

circumstances would perhaps compel me to return to prison haunted me,

and so helpless did I feel at the prospects that awaited me outside,

that I dreaded release, which seemed but the facing of an unsympathetic

world. The day arrived, and, strange as it may sound, it was with

regret that I left my cell. It had become my home, and no home waited

me outside.

"How utterly crushed I felt; feelings of companionship had gone out to

my unfortunate fellow-prisoners, whom I had seen daily, but the sound

of whose voices I had never heard, whilst outside friendships were

dead, and companionships were for ever broken, and I felt as an outcast

of society, with the mark of 'gaol bird' upon me, that I must cover my

face, and stand aside and cry 'unclean.' Such were my feelings.

"The morning of discharge came, and I am once more on the streets.

My scanty means scarcely sufficient for two days' least needs. Could I

brace myself to make another honest endeavour to start afresh?

Try, indeed, I did. I fell back upon my antecedents, and tried to cut

the dark passage out of my life, but straight came the questions to me

at each application for employment, 'What have you been doing lately?'

'Where have you been living?' If I evaded the question it caused doubt;

if I answered, the only answer I could give was 'in gaol,' and that

settled my chances.

"What a comedy, after all, it appeared. I remember the last words of

the chaplain before leaving the prison, cold and precise in their

officialism: 'Mind you never come back here again, young man.' And now,

as though in response to my earnest effort to keep from going to

prison, society, by its actions, cried out, 'Go back to gaol. There

are honest men enough to do our work without such as you.' "Imagine,

if you can, my condition. At the end of a few days, black despair had

wrapt itself around every faculty of mind and body. Then followed

several days and nights with scarcely a bit of food or a resting-place.

I prowled the streets like a dog, with this difference, that the dog

has the chance of helping himself, and I had not. I tried to forecast

how long starvation's fingers would be in closing round the throat they

already gripped. So indifferent was I alike to man or God, as I waited

for the end."

In this dire extremity the writer found his way to one of our Shelters,

and there found God and friends and hope, and once more got his feet on

to the ladder which leads upward from the black gulf of starvation to

competence and character, and usefulness and heaven.

As he was then, however, there are hundreds--nay, thousands--now.

Who will give these men a helping hand? What is to be done with them?

Would it not be more merciful to kill them off at once instead of

sternly crushing them out of all semblance of honest manhood?

Society recoils from such a short cut. Her virtuous scruples reminds

me of the subterfuge by which English law evaded the veto on torture.

Torture was forbidden, but the custom of placing an obstinate witness

under a press and slowly crushing him within a hairbreadth of death was

legalised and practised. So it is to-day. When the criminal comes out

of gaol the whole world is often but a press whose punishment is sharp

and cruel indeed. Nor can the victim escape even if he opens his mouth

and speaks.

CHAPTER 8. THE CHILDREN OF THE LOST.

Whatever may be thought of the possibility of doing anything with the

adults, it is universally admitted that there is hope for the children.

"I regard the existing generation as lost," said a leading Liberal

statesman. "Nothing can be done with men and women who have grown up

under the present demoralising conditions. My only hope is that the

children may have a better chance. Education will do much."

But unfortunately the demoralising circumstances of the children are

not being improved--are, indeed, rather, in many respects, being

made worse. The deterioration of our population in large towns is one

of the most undisputed facts of social economics. The country is the

breeding ground of healthy citizens. But for the constant influx of

Countrydom, Cockneydom would long ere this have perished.

But unfortunately the country is being depopulated. The towns, London

especially, are being gorged with undigested and indigestible masses of

labour, and, as the result, the children suffer grievously.

The town-bred child is at a thousand disadvantages compared with his

cousin in the country. But every year there are more town-bred

children and fewer cousins in the country. To rear healthy children

you want first a home; secondly, milk; thirdly, fresh air;

and fourthly, exercise under the green trees and blue sky. All these

things every country labourer's child possesses, or used to possess.

For the shadow of the City life lies now upon the fields, and even in

the remotest rural district the labourer who tends the cows is often

denied the milk which his children need. The regular demand of the

great towns forestalls the claims of the labouring hind. Tea and slops

and beer take the place of milk, and the bone and sinew of the next

generation are sapped from the cradle. But the country child, if he

has nothing but skim milk, and only a little of that, has at least

plenty of exercise in the fresh air. He has healthy human relations

with his neighbours. He is looked after, and in some sort of fashion

brought into contact with the life of the hall, the vicarage, and the

farm. He lives a natural life amid the birds and trees and growing

crops and the animals of the fields. He is not a mere human ant,

crawling on the granite pavement of a great urban ants' nest, with an

unnaturally developed nervous system and a sickly constitution.

But, it will be said, the child of to-day has the inestimable advantage

of Education. No; he has not. Educated the children are not.

They are pressed through "standards," which exact a certain

acquaintance with A B C and pothooks and figures, but educated they are

not in the sense of the development of their latent capacities so as to

make them capable for the discharge of their duties in life.

The new generation can read, no doubt. Otherwise, where would be the

sale of "Sixteen String Jack," "Dick Turpin," and the like? But take

the girls. Who can pretend that the girls whom our schools are now

turning out are half as well educated for the work of life as their

grandmothers were at the same age? How many of all these mothers of

the future know how to bake a loaf or wash their clothes? Except

minding the baby--a task that cannot be evaded--what domestic

training have they received to qualify them for being in the future the

mothers of babies themselves?

And even the schooling, such as it is, at what an expense is it often

imparted! The rakings of the human cesspool are brought into the

school-room and mixed up with your children. Your little ones, who

never heard a foul word and who are not only innocent, but ignorant, of

all the horrors of vice and sin, sit for hours side by side with little

ones whose parents are habitually drunk, and play with others whose

ideas of merriment are gained from the familiar spectacle of the

nightly debauch by which their mothers earn the family bread.

It is good, no doubt, to learn the ABC, but it is not so good that in

acquiring these indispensable rudiments, your children should also

acquire the vocabulary of the harlot and the corner boy. I speak only

of what I know, and of that which has been brought home to me as a

matter of repeated complaint by my Officers, when I say that the

obscenity of the talk of many of the children of some of our public

schools could hardly be outdone even in Sodom and Gomorrha. Childish

innocence is very beautiful; but the bloom is soon destroyed, and it is

a cruel awakening for a mother to discover that her tenderly nurtured

boy, or her carefully guarded daughter, has been initiated by a

companion into the mysteries of abomination that are concealed in the

phrase--a house of ill-fame.

The home is largely destroyed where the mother follows the father into

the factory, and where the hours of labour are so long that they have

no time to see their children. The omnibus drivers of London, for

instance, what time have they for discharging the daily duties of

parentage to their little ones? How can a man who is on his omnibus

from fourteen to sixteen hours a day have time to be a father to his

children in any sense of the word? He has hardly a chance to see them

except when they are asleep. Even the Sabbath, that blessed

institution which is one of the sheet anchors of human existence, is

encroached upon. Many of the new industries which have been started or

developed since I was a boy ignore man's need of one day's rest in

seven. The railway, the post-office, the tramway all compel some of

their employes to be content with less than the divinely appointed

minimum of leisure. In the country darkness restores the labouring

father to his little ones. In the town gas and the electric light

enables the employer to rob the children of the whole of their father's

waking hours, and in some cases he takes the mother's also. Under some

of the conditions of modern industry, children are not so much born

into a home as they are spawned into the world like fish, with the

results which we see.

The decline of natural affection follows inevitably from the

substitution of the fish relationship for that of the human. A father

who never dandles his child on his knee cannot have a very keen sense

of the responsibilities of paternity. In the rush and pressure of our

competitive City life, thousands of men have not time to be fathers.

Sires, yes; fathers, no. It will take a good deal of schoolmaster to

make up for that change. If this be the case, even with the children

constantly employed, it can be imagined what kind of a home life is

possessed by the children of the tramp, the odd jobber, the thief, and

the harlot. For all these people have children, although they have no

homes in which to rear them. Not a bird in all the woods or fields but

prepares some kind of a nest in which to hatch and rear its young, even

if it be but a hole in the sand or a few crossed sticks in the bush.

But how many young ones amongst our people are hatched before any nest

is ready to receive them?

Think of the multitudes of children born in our workhouses, children of

whom it may be said "they are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity,"

and, as a punishment of the sins of the parents, branded from birth as

bastards, worse than fatherless, homeless, and friendless, "damned into

an evil world," in which even those who have all the advantages of a

good parentage and a careful training find it hard enough to make their

way. Sometimes, it is true, the passionate love of the deserted mother

for the child which has been the visible symbol and the terrible result

of her undoing stands between the little one and all its enemies.

But think how often the mother regards the advent of her child with

loathing and horror; how the discovery that she is about to become a

mother affects her like a nightmare; and how nothing but the dread of

the hangman's rope keeps her from strangling the babe on the very hour

of its birth. What chances has such a child? And there are many such.

In a certain country that I will not name there exists a scientifically

arranged system of infanticide cloaked under the garb of philanthropy.

Gigantic foundling establishments exist in its principal cities, where

every comfort and scientific improvement is provided for the deserted

children, with the result that one-half of them die. The mothers are

spared the crime. The State assumes the responsibility.

We do something like that here, but our foundling asylums are the

Street, the Workhouse, and the Grave. When an English Judge tells us,

as Mr. Justice Wills did the other day, that there were any number of

parents who would kill their children for a few pounds' insurance

money, we can form some idea of the horrors of the existence into which

many of the children of this highly favoured land are ushered at their

birth.

The overcrowded homes of the poor compel the children to witness

everything. Sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them.

Incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark. The bitter poverty

of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed. There are

few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilisation than that of

the compulsory attendance of children at school, faint with hunger

because they had no breakfast, and not sure whether they would even

secure a dry crust for dinner when their morning's quantum of education

had been duly imparted. Children thus hungered, thus housed, and thus

left to grow up as best they can without being fathered or mothered,

are not, educate them as you will, exactly the most promising material

for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the Empire.

What, then, is the ground for hope that if we leave things alone the

new generation will be better than their elders? To me it seems that

the truth is rather the other way. The lawlessness of our lads the

increased license of our girls, the general shiftlessness from the

home-making point of view of the product of our factories and schools

are far from reassuring. Our young people have never learned to obey.

The fighting gangs of half-grown lads in Lisson Grove, and the

scuttlers of Manchester are ugly symptoms of a social condition that

will not grow better by being left alone.

It is the home that has been destroyed, and with the home the home-like

virtues. It is the dis-homed multitude, nomadic, hungry that is

rearing an undisciplined population, cursed from birth with hereditary

weakness of body and hereditary faults of character. It is idle to

hope to mend matters by taking the children and bundling them up in

barracks. A child brought up in an institution is too often only

half-human, having never known a mother's love and a father's care.

To men and women who are without homes children must be more or less of

an incumbrance. Their advent is regarded with impatience, and often it

is averted by crime. The unwelcome little stranger is badly cared for,

badly fed, and allowed every chance to die. Nothing is worth doing to

increase his chances of living that does not Reconstitute the Home.

But between us and that ideal how vast is the gulf! It will have to be

bridged, however, if anything practical is to be done.

CHAPTER 9. IS THERE NO HELP?

It may be said by those who have followed me to this point that while

it is quite true that there are many who are out of work, and not less

true that there are many who sleep on the Embankment and elsewhere, the

law has provided a remedy, or if not a remedy, at least a method, of

dealing with these sufferers which is sufficient: The Secretary of the

Charity Organisation Society assured one of my Officers, who went to

inquire for his opinion on the subject, "that no further machinery was

necessary. All that was needed in this direction they already had in

working order, and to create any further machinery would do more harm

than good."

Now, what is the existing machinery by which Society, whether through

the organisation of the State, or by individual endeavour, attempts to

deal with the submerged residuum? I had intended at one time to have

devoted considerable space to the description of the existing agencies,

together with certain observations which have been forcibly impressed

upon my mind as to their failure and its cause. The necessity,

however, of subordinating everything to the supreme purpose of this

book, which is to endeavour to show how light can be let into the heart

of Darkest England, compels me to pass rapidly over this department of

the subject, merely glancing as I go at the well-meaning, but more or

less abortive, attempts to cope with this great and appalling evil.

The first place must naturally be given to the administration of the

Poor Law. Legally the State accepts the responsibility of providing

food and shelter for every man, woman, or child who is utterly

destitute. This responsibility it, however, practically shirks by the

imposition of conditions on the claimants of relief that are hateful

and repulsive, if not impossible. As to the method of Poor Law

administration in dealing with inmates of workhouses or in the

distribution of outdoor relief, I say nothing. Both of these raise

great questions which lie outside my immediate purpose. All that I

need to do is to indicate the limitations--it may be the necessary

limitations--under which the Poor Law operates. No Englishman can

come upon the rates so long as he has anything whatever left to call

his own. When long-continued destitution has been carried on to the

bitter end, when piece by piece every article of domestic furniture

has been sold or pawned, when all efforts to procure employment have

failed, and when you have nothing left except the clothes in which you

stand, then you can present yourself before the relieving officer and

secure your lodging in the workhouse, the administration of which

varies infinitely according to the disposition of the Board of

Guardians under whose control it happens to be.

If, however, you have not sunk to such despair as to be willing to

barter your liberty for the sake of food, clothing, and shelter in the

Workhouse, but are only temporarily out of employment seeking work,

then you go to the Casual Ward. There you are taken in, and provided

for on the principle of making it as disagreeable as possible for

yourself, in order to deter you from again accepting the hospitality of

the rates,--and of course in defence of this a good deal can be said

by the Political Economist. But what seems utterly indefensible is the

careful precautions which are taken to render it impossible for the

unemployed Casual to resume promptly after his night's rest the search

for work. Under the existing regulations, if you are compelled to seek

refuge on Monday night in the Casual Ward, you are bound to remain

there at least till Wednesday morning.

The theory of the system is this, that individuals casually poor and

out of work, being destitute and without shelter, may upon application

receive shelter for the night, supper and a breakfast, and in return

for this, shall perform a task of work, not necessarily in repayment

for the relief received, but simply as a test of their willingness to

work for their living. The work given is the same as that given to

felons in gaol, oakum-picking and stone-breaking.

The work, too, is excessive in proportion to what is received.

Four pounds of oakum is a great task to an expert and an old hand.

To a novice it can only be accomplished with the greatest difficulty,

if indeed it can be done at all. It is even in excess of the amount

demanded from a criminal in gaol.

The stone-breaking test is monstrous. Half a ton of stone from any man

in return for partially supplying the cravings of hunger is an outrage

which, if we read of as having occurred in Russia or Siberia, would

find Exeter Hall crowded with an indignant audience, and Hyde Park

filled with strong oratory. But because this system exists at our own

doors, very little notice is taken of it. These tasks are expected

from all comers, starved, ill-clad, half-fed creatures from the

streets, foot-sore and worn out, and yet unless it is done, the

alternative is the magistrate and the gaol. The old system was bad

enough, which demanded the picking of one pound of oakum. As soon as

this task was accomplished, which generally kept them till the middle

of next day, it was thus rendered impossible for them to seek work, and

they were forced to spend another night in the ward. The Local

Government Board, however, stepped in, and the Casual was ordered to be

detained for the whole day and the second night, the amount of labour

required from him being increased four-fold.

Under the present system, therefore, the penalty for seeking shelter

from the streets is a whole day and two nights, with an almost

impossible task, which, failing to do, the victim is liable to be

dragged before a magistrate and committed to gaol as a rogue and

vagabond, while in the Casual Ward their treatment is practically that

of a criminal. They sleep in a cell with an apartment at the back,

in which the work is done, receiving at night half a pound of gruel and

eight ounces of bread, and next morning the same for breakfast, with

half a pound of oakum and stones to occupy himself for a day.

The beds are mostly of the plank type, the coverings scant, the comfort

nil. Be it remembered that this is the treatment meted out to those

who are supposed to be Casual poor, in temporary difficulty, walking

from place to place seeking some employment.

The treatment of the women is as follows: Each Casual has to stay in

the Casual Wards two nights and one day, during which time they have to

pick 2 lb. of oakum or go to the wash-tub and work out the time there.

While at the wash-tub they are allowed to wash their own clothes, but

not otherwise. If seen more than once in the same Casual Ward, they

are detained three days by order of the inspector each time seen, or if

sleeping twice in the same month the master of the ward has power to

detain them three days. There are four inspectors who visit different

Casual Wards; and if the Casual is seen by any of the inspectors

(who in turn visit all the Casual Wards) at any of the wards they have

previously visited they are detained three days in each one.

The inspector, who is a male person, visits the wards at all unexpected

hours, even visiting while the females are in bed. The beds are in

some wards composed of straw and two rugs, in others cocoanut fibre and

two rugs. The Casuals rise at 5.45 a.m. and go to bed 7 p.m. If they

do not finish picking their oakum before 7 p.m., they stay up till they

do. If a Casual does not come to the ward before 12.30, midnight, they

keep them one day extra. The way in which this operates, however, can

be best understood by the following statements, made by those who have

been in Casual Wards, and who can, therefore, speak from experience as

to how the system affects the individual: --

J. C. knows Casual Wards pretty well. Has been in St. Giles,

Whitechapel, St. George's, Paddington, Marylebone, Mile End.

They vary a little in detail, but as a rule the doors open at 6;

you walk in; they tell you what the work is, and that if you fail to do

it, you will be liable to imprisonment. Then you bathe. Some places

the water is dirty. Three persons as a rule wash in one water.

At Whitechapel (been there three times) it has always been dirty; also

at St. George's. I had no bath at Mile End; they were short of water.

If you complain they take no notice. You then tie your clothes in a

bundle, and they give you a nightshirt. At most places they serve

supper to the men, who have to go to bed and eat it there. Some beds

are in cells; some in large rooms. You get up at 6 a.m. and do the

task. The amount of stone-breaking is too much; and the oakum-picking

is also heavy. The food differs. At St. Giles, the gruel left

over-night is boiled up for breakfast, and is consequently sour; the

bread is puffy, full of holes, and don't weigh the regulation amount.

Dinner is only 8 ounces of bread and 1 1/2 ounce of cheese, and its

that's short, how can anybody do their work? They will give you water

to drink if you ring the cell bell for it, that is, they will tell you

to wait, and bring it in about half an hour. There are a good lot of

"moochers" go to Casual Wards, but there are large numbers of men who

only want work.

J.D.; age 25; Londoner; can't get work, tried hard; been refused work

several times on account of having no settled residence; looks

suspicious, they think, to have "no home." Seems a decent, willing man.

Had two penny-worth of soup this morning, which has lasted all day.

Earned 1s. 6d. yesterday, bill distributing, nothing the day before.

Been in good many London Casual Wards. Thinks they are no good,

because they keep him all day, when he might be seeking work.

Don't want shelter in day time, wants work. If he goes in twice in a

month to the same Casual Ward, they detain him four days. Considers

the food decidedly insufficient to do the required amount of work.

If the work is not done to time, you are liable to 21 days'

imprisonment. Get badly treated some places, especially where there is

a bullying superintendent. Has done 21 days for absolutely refusing to

do the work on such low diet, when unfit. Can't get justice, doctor

always sides with superintendent.

J. S.; odd jobber. Is working at board carrying, when he can get it.

There's quite a rush for it at 1s. 2d. a day. Carried a couple of

parcels yesterday, got 5d. for them; also had a bit of bread and meat

given him by a working man, so altogether had an excellent day.

Sometimes goes all day without food, and plenty more do the same.

Sleeps on Embankment, and now and then in Casual Ward. Latter is clean

and comfortable enough, but they keep you in all day; that means no

chance of getting work. Was a clerk once, but got out of a job, and

couldn't get another; there are so many clerks.

"A Tramp" says: "I've been in most Casual Wards in London; was in the

one in Macklin Street, Drury Lane, last week. They keep you two nights

and a day, and more than that if they recognise you. You have to break

10 cwt. of stone, or pick four pounds of oakum. Both are hard.

About thirty a night go to Macklin Street. The food is 1 pint gruel

and 6 oz. bread for breakfast; 8 oz. bread and 1 1/2 oz. cheese for

dinner; tea same as breakfast. No supper. It is not enough to do the

work on. Then you are obliged to bathe, of course; sometimes three

will bathe in one water, and if you complain they turn nasty, and ask

if you are come to a palace. Mitcham Workhouse I've been in; grub is

good; 1 1/2 pint gruel and 8 oz. bread for breakfast, and same for

supper.

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 mass 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 passing

through a coffee mill; and as the net result of all my experience and

observation of men and things, I must assert 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 masses 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 institutions, 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 mass

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

assume, and who are in full sympathy with the class 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 destitution, 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 damn 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 multitude 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 passed 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 glass. 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 damned.

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 mass 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 passed 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 passed 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 associates, and familiar with the coarsest 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 sturdy 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

classes, but they are, by their constitution, 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

embarrass 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 classes in this country can be effected except by the gradual

substitution of cooperative associations 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 damnation 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 accumulation 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 attitude 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

nobler 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 class 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 bloody and

violent overturn of all existing institutions. 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 mass 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 God, 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 assert 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 constitute 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 constitute the reasons for his

failure in the battle of life. No change in circumstances, 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

circumstances 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

constitute 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 circumstances 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

"Our daughters, with base--born babies,

Have wandered away in their shame.

If your misses had slept, Squire, where they did,

Your misses might do the same.'

Placed in the same or similar circumstances, how many of us would have

turned out better than this poor, lapsed, sunken multitude?

Many of this crowd have never had a chance of doing better; they have

been born in a poisoned atmosphere, educated in circumstances which

have rendered modesty an impossibility, and have been thrown into life

in conditions which make vice a second nature. Hence, to provide an

effective remedy for the evils which we are deploring these

circumstances must be altered, and unless my Scheme effects such a

change, it will be of no use. There are multitudes, myriads, of men and

women, who are floundering in the horrible quagmire beneath the burden

of a load too heavy for them to bear; every plunge they take forward

lands them deeper; some have ceased even to struggle, and lie prone in

the filthy bog, slowly suffocating, with their manhood and womanhood

all but perished. It is no use standing on the firm bank of the

quaking morass and anathematising these poor wretches; if you are to do

them any good, you must give them another chance to get on their feet,

you must give them firm foothold upon which they can once more stand

upright, and you must build stepping-stones across the bog to enable

them safely to reach the other side. Favourable circumstances will not

change a man's heart or transform his nature, but unpropitious

circumstances may render it absolutely impossible for him to escape,

no matter how he may desire to extricate himself. The first step with

these helpless, sunken creatures is to create the desire to escape,

and then provide the means for doing so. In other words, give the man

another chance.

Thirdly: Any remedy worthy of consideration must be on a scale

commensurate with the evil with which it proposes to deal. It is no use

trying to bail out the ocean with a pint pot. This evil is one whose

victims are counted by the million. The army of the Lost in our midst

exceeds the numbers of that multitudinous host which Xerxes led from

Asia to attempt the conquest of Greece. Pass in parade those who make

up the submerged tenth, count the paupers indoor and outdoor, the

homeless, the starving, the criminals, the lunatics, the drunkards,

and the harlots--and yet do not give way to despair! Even to attempt

to save a tithe of this host requires that we should put much more

force and fire into our work than has hitherto been exhibited by

anyone. There must be no more philanthropic tinkering, as if this vast

sea of human misery were contained in the limits of a garden pond.

Fourthly: Not only must the Scheme be large enough, but it must be

permanent. That is to say, it must not be merely a spasmodic effort

coping with the misery of to-day; it must be established on a durable

footing, so as to go on dealing with the misery of tomorrow and the

day after, so long as there is misery left in the world with which to

grapple.

Fifthly: But while it must be permanent, it must also be immediately

practicable. Any Scheme, to be of use, must be capable of being brought

into instant operation with beneficial results.

Sixthly: The indirect features of the Scheme must not be such as to

produce injury to the persons whom we seek to benefit. Mere charity,

for instance, while relieving the pinch of hunger, demoralises the

recipient; and whatever the remedy is that we employ, it must be of

such a nature as to do good without doing evil at the same time.

It is no use conferring sixpennyworth of benefit on a man if, at the

same time, we do him a shilling'sworth of harm.

Seventhly: While assisting one class of the community, it must not

seriously interfere with the interests of another. In raising one

section of the fallen, we must not thereby endanger the safety of those

who with difficulty are keeping on their feet.

These are the conditions by which I ask you to test the Scheme I am

about to unfold. They are formidable enough, possibly, to deter many

from even attempting to do anything. They are not of my making. They

are obvious to anyone who looks into the matter. They are the laws

which govern the work of the philanthropic reformer, just as the laws

of gravitation, of wind and of weather, govern the operations of the

engineer. It is no use saying we could build a bridge across the Tay

if the wind did not blow, or that we could build a railway across a bog

if the quagmire would afford us a solid foundation. The engineer has

to take into account the difficulties, and make them his starting

point. The wind will blow, therefore the bridge must be made strong

enough to resist it. Chat Moss will shake; therefore we must construct

a foundation in the very bowels of the bog on which to build our

railway. So it is with the social difficulties which confront us.

If we act in harmony with these laws we shall triumph; but if we ignore

them they will overwhelm us with destruction and cover us with

disgrace.

But, difficult as the task may be, it is not one which we can neglect.

When Napoleon was compelled to retreat under circumstances which

rendered it impossible for him to carry off his sick and wounded,

he ordered his doctors to poison every man in the hospital. A general

has before now massacred his prisoners rather than allow them to

escape. These Lost ones are the Prisoners of Society; they are the

Sick and Wounded in our Hospitals. What a shriek would arise from the

civilised world if it were proposed to administer to-night to every one

of these millions such a dose of morphine that they would sleep to wake

no more. But so far as they are concerned, would it not be much less

cruel thus to end their life than to allow them to drag on day after

day, year after year, in misery, anguish, and despair, driven into vice

and hunted into crime, until at last disease harries them into the

grave?

I am under no delusion as to the possibility of inaugurating a

millennium by my Scheme; but the triumphs of science deal so much with

the utilisation of waste material, that I do not despair of something

effectual being accomplished in the utilisation of this waste human

product. The refuse which was a drug and a curse to our manufacturers,

when treated under the hands of the chemist, has been the means of

supplying us with dyes rivalling in loveliness and variety the hues of

the rainbow. If the alchemy of science can extract beautiful colours

from coal tar, cannot Divine alchemy enable us to evolve gladness and

brightness out of the agonised hearts and dark, dreary, loveless lives

of these doomed myriads? Is it too much to hope that in God's world

God's children may be able to do something, if they set to work with a

will, to carry out a plan of campaign against these great evils which

are the nightmare of our existence?

The remedy, it may be, is simpler than some imagine. The key to the

enigma may lie closer to our hands than we have any idea of.

Many devices have been tried, and many have failed, no doubt;

it is only stubborn, reckless perseverance that can hope to succeed;

it is well that we recognise this. How many ages did men try to make

gunpowder and never succeeded? They would put saltpetre to charcoal,

or charcoal to sulphur, or saltpetre to sulphur, and so were ever

unable to make the compound explode. But it has only been discovered

within the last few hundred years that all three were needed.

Before that gunpowder was a mere imagination, a phantasy of the

alchemists. How easy it is to make gunpowder, now the secret of its

manufacture is known!

But take a simpler illustration, one which lies even within the memory

of some that read these pages. From the beginning of the world down to

the beginning of this century, mankind had not found out, with all its

striving after cheap and easy transport, the miraculous difference that

would be brought about by laying down two parallel lines of metal.

All the great men and the wise men of the past lived and died oblivious

of that fact. The greatest mechanicians and engineers of antiquity,

the men who bridged all the rivers of Europe, the architects who built

the cathedrals which are still the wonder of the world, failed to

discern what seems to us so obviously simple a proposition, that two

parallel lines of rail would diminish the cost and difficulty of

transport to a minimum. Without that discovery the steam engine, which

has itself been an invention of quite recent years, would have failed

to transform civilisation.

What we have to do in the philanthropic sphere is to find something

analogous to the engineers' parallel bars. This discovery think I have

made, and hence have I written this book.

SECTION 2--MY SCHEME

What, then, is my Scheme? It is a very simple one, although in its

ramifications and extensions it embraces the whole world. In this book

I profess to do no more than to merely outline, as plainly and as

simply as I can, the fundamental features of my proposals. I propose

to devote the bulk of this volume to setting forth what can practically

be done with one of the most pressing parts of the problem, namely,

that relating to those who are out of work, and who, as the result,

are more or less destitute. I have many ideas of what might be done

with those who are at present cared for in some measure by the State,

but I will leave these ideas for the present.

It is not urgent that I should explain how our Poor Law system could be

reformed, or what I should like to see done for the Lunatics in

Asylums, or the Criminals in Gaols. The persons who are provided for by

the State we will, therefore, for the moment, leave out of count.

The indoor paupers, the convicts, the inmates of the lunatic asylums

are cared for, in a fashion; already. But, over and above all these,

there exists some hundreds of thousands who are not quartered on the

State, but who are living on the verge of despair, and who at any

moment, under circumstances of misfortune, might be compelled to demand

relief or support in one shape or another. I will confine myself,

therefore, for the present to those who have no helper.

It is possible, I think probable, if the proposals which I am now

putting forward are carried out successfully in relation to the lost,

homeless, and helpless of the population, that many of those who are at

the present moment in somewhat better circumstances will demand that

they also shall be allowed to partake in the benefits of the Scheme.

But upon this, also, I remain silent. I merely remark that we have,

in the recognition of the importance of discipline and organisation;

what may be called regimented co-operation, a principle that will be

found valuable for solving many social problems other than that of

destitution. Of these plans, which are at present being brooded over

with a view to their realisation when the time is propitious and the

opportunity occurs, I shall have something to say.

What is the outward and visible form of the Problem of the Unemployed?

Alas! we are all too familiar with it for any lengthy description to

be necessary. The social problem presents itself before us whenever a

hungry, dirty and ragged man stands at our door asking if we can give

him a crust or a job. That is the social question. What are you to do

with that man? He has no money in his pocket, all that he can pawn he

has pawned long ago, his stomach is as empty as his purse, and the

whole of the clothes upon his back, even if sold on the best terms,

would not fetch a shilling. There he stands, your brother, with

sixpennyworth of rags to cover his nakedness from his fellow men and

not sixpennyworth of victuals within his reach. He asks for work,

which he will set to even on his empty stomach and in his ragged

uniform, if so be that you will give him something for it, but his

hands are idle, for no one employs him. What are you to do with that

man? That is the great note of interrogation that confronts Society

to-day. Not only in overcrowded England, but in newer countries beyond

the sea, where Society has not yet provided a means by which the men

can be put upon the land and the land be made to feed the men.

To deal with this man is the Problem of the Unemployed. To deal with

him effectively you must deal with him immediately, you must provide

him in some way or other at once with food, and shelter, and warmth.

Next you must find him something to do, something that will test the

reality of his desire to work. This test must be more or less

temporary, and should be of such a nature as to prepare him for making

a permanent livelihood. Then, having trained him, you must provide him

wherewithal to start life afresh. All these things I propose to do.

My Scheme divides itself into three sections, each of which is

indispensable for the success of the whole. In this three-fold

organisation lies the open secret of the solution of the Social Problem.

The Scheme I have to offer consists in the formation of these people

into self-helping and self-sustaining communities, each being a kind of

co-operative society, or patriarchal family, governed and disciplined

on the principles which have already proved so effective in the

Salvation Army.

These communities we will call, for want of a better term, Colonies.

There will be: --

(1) The City Colony.

(2) The Farm Colony.

(3) The Over-Sea Colony.

THE CITY COLONY.

By the City Colony is meant the establishment, in the very centre of

the ocean of misery of which we have been speaking, of a number of

Institutions to act as Harbours of Refuge for all and any who have been

shipwrecked in life, character, or circumstances. These Harbours will

gather up the poor destitute creatures, supply their immediate pressing

necessities, furnish temporary employment, inspire them with hope for

the future, and commence at once a course of regeneration by moral and

religious influences.

From these Institutions, which are hereafter described, numbers would,

after a short time, be floated off to permanent employment, or sent

home to friends happy to receive them on hearing of their reformation.

All who remain on our hands would, by varied means, be tested as to

their sincerity, industry, and honesty, and as soon as satisfaction was

created, be passed on to the Colony of the second class.

THE FARM COLONY.

This would consist of a settlement of the Colonists on an estate in the

provinces, in the culture of which they would find employment and

obtain support. As the race from the Country to the City has been the

cause of much of the distress we have to battle with, we propose to

find a substantial part of our remedy by transferring these same people

back to the country, that is back again to "the Garden!"

Here the process of reformation of character would be carried forward

by the same industrial, moral, and religious methods as have already

been commenced in the City, especially including those forms of labour

and that knowledge of agriculture which, should the Colonist not

obtain employment in this country, will qualify him for pursuing his

fortunes under more favourable circumstances in some other land.

From the Farm, as from the City, there can be no question that large

numbers, resuscitated in health and character, would be restored to

friends up and down the country. Some would find employment in their

own callings, others would settle in cottages on a small piece of land

that we should provide, or on Co-operative Farms which we intend to

promote; while the great bulk, after trial and training, would be

passed on to the Foreign Settlement, which would constitute our third

class, namely The Over-Sea Colony.

THE OVER-SEA COLONY.

All who have given attention to the subject are agreed that in our

Colonies in South Africa, Canada, Western Australia and elsewhere,

there are millions of acres of useful land to be obtained almost for

the asking, capable of supporting our surplus population in health and

comfort, were it a thousand times greater than it is. We propose to

secure a tract of land in one of these countries, prepare it for

settlement, establish in it authority, govern it by equitable laws,

assist it in times of necessity, settling it gradually with a prepared

people, and so create a home for these destitute multitudes.

The Scheme, in its entirety, may aptly be compared to A Great Machine,

foundationed in the lowest slums and purlieus of our great towns and

cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and destitute of all

classes; receiving thieves, harlots, paupers, drunkards, prodigals,

all alike, on the simple conditions of their being willing to work and

to conform to discipline. Drawing up these poor outcasts, reforming

them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth;

teaching them methods by which alike the bread that perishes and that

which endures to Everlasting Life can be won. Forwarding them from the

City to the Country, and there continuing the process of regeneration,

and then pouring them forth on to the virgin soils that await their

coming in other lands, keeping hold of them with a strong government,

and yet making them free men and women; and so laying the foundations,

perchance, of another Empire to swell to vast proportions in later

times. Why not?

CHAPTER 2. TO THE RESCUE!--THE CITY COLONY.

The first section of my Scheme is the establishment of a Receiving

House for the Destitute in every great centre of population. We start,

let us remember, from the individual, the ragged, hungry, penniless man

who confronts us with despairing demands for food, shelter, and work.

Now, I have had some two or three years' experience in dealing with

this class. I believe, at the present moment, the Salvation Army

supplies more food and shelter to the destitute than any other

organisation in London, and it is the experience and encouragement

which I have gained in the working of these Food and Shelter Depots

which has largely encouraged me to propound this scheme.

SECTION 1.--FOOD AND SHELTER FOR EVERY MAN.

As I rode through Canada and the United States some three years ago,

I was greatly impressed with the superabundance of food which I saw at

every turn. Oh, how I longed that the poor starving people, and the

hungry children of the East of London and of other centres of our

destitute populations, should come into the midst of this abundance,

but as it appeared impossible for me to take them to it, I secretly

resolved that I would endeavour to bring some of it to them.

I am thankful to say that I have already been able to do so on a small

scale, and hope to accomplish it ere long on a much vaster one.

With this view, the first Cheap Food Depot was opened in the East of

London two and a half years ago. This has been followed by others,

and we have now three establishments: others are being arranged for.

Since the commencement in 1888, we have supplied over three and a half

million meals. Some idea can be formed of the extent to which these

Food and Shelter Depots have already struck their roots into the strata

of Society which it is proposed to benefit, by the following figures,

which give the quantities of food sold during the year at our Food

Depots.

FOOD SOLD IN DEPOTS AND SHELTERS DURING 1889.

Article Weight Measure Remarks

Soup ......... 116,400 gallons

Bread 192.5 tons 106,964 4-lb loaves

Tea 2.5 tons 46,980 gallons

Coffee 15 cwt. 13,949 gallons

Cocoa 6 tons 29,229 gallons

Sugar 25 tons ..................... 300 bags

Potatoes 140 tons ..................... 2,800 bags

Flour 18 tons ..................... 180 sacks

Peaflour 28.5 tons ..................... 288 sacks

Oatmeal 3.5 tons ..................... 36 sacks

Rice 12 tons ..................... 120 sacks

Beans 12 tons ..................... 240 sacks

Onions and parsnips 12 tons ..................... 240 sacks

Jam 9 tons ..................... 2,880 jars

Marmalade 6 tons ..................... 1,920 jars

Meat 15 tons .....................

Milk .......... 14,300 quarts

This includes returns from three Food Depots and five Shelters.

I propose to multiply their number, to develop their usefulness,

and to make them the threshold of the whole Scheme. Those who have

already visited our Depots will understand exactly what th is means.

The majority, however, of the readers of these pages have not done so,

and for them it is necessary to explain what they are.

At each of our Depots, which can be seen by anybody that cares to take

the trouble to visit them, there are two departments, one dealing with

food, the other with shelter. Of these both are worked together and

minister to the same individuals. Many come for food who do not come

for shelter, although most of those who come for shelter also come for

food, which is sold on terms to cover, as nearly as possible, the cost

price and working expenses of the establishment. In this our Food

Depots differ from the ordinary soup kitchens.

There is no gratuitous distribution of victuals. The following is our

Price List: --

WHAT IS SOLD AT THE FOOD DEPOTS.

For a child

Soup Per Basin 1/4d

Soup With Bread 1/2d

Coffee or Cocoa per cup 1/4d

Coffee or Cocoa With Bread and Jam 1/2d

For adults

Soup .. .. .. Per Basin 1/2d

Soup .. .. .. With Bread 1d

Potatoes .. .. .. .. .. 1/2d

Cabbage .. .. .. .. .. 1/2d

Haricot Beans .. .. .. .. 1/2d

Boiled Jam Pudding .. .. .. 1/2d

Boiled Plum Pudding .. .. Each 1d

Rice .. .. .. .. .. .. 1/2d

Baked Plum .. .. .. .. 1/2d

Baked Jam Roll .. .. .. .. 1/2d

Meat Pudding and Potatoes .. .. 3d

Corned Beef .. .. .. .. 2d

Corned Mutton .. .. .. .. 2d

Coffee per cup 1/2d; per mug 1d

Cocoa per cup 1/2d; per mug 1d

Tea per cup 1/2d; per mug 1d

Bread & Butter, Jam or Marmalade per slice 1/2d

Soup in own Jugs, 1d per Quart. Ready at 10 a.m.

A certain discretionary power is vested in the Officers in charge of

the Depot, and they can in very urgent cases give relief, but the rule

is for the food to be paid for, and the financial results show that

working expenses are just about covered.

These Cheap Food Depots I have no doubt have been and are or great

service to numbers of hungry starving men, women, and children, at the

prices just named, which must be within the reach of all, except the

absolutely penniless; but it is the Shelter that I regard as the most

useful feature in this part of our undertaking, for if anything is to

be done to get hold of those who use the Depot, some more favourable

opportunity must be afforded than is offered by the mere coming into

the food store to get, perhaps, only a basin of soup. This part of the

Scheme I propose to extend very considerably.

Suppose that you are a casual in the streets of London, homeless,

friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding none.

Night comes on. Where are you to go? You have perhaps only a few

coppers, or it may be, a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling

store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open

air; you equally shrink from going to the fourpenny Dosshouse where,

in the midst of strange and ribald company, you may be robbed of the

remnant of the money still in your possession. While at a loss as to

what to do, someone who sees you suggests that you should go to our

Shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the Casual Ward of the Workhouse

as long as you have any money in your possession. You come along to

one of our Shelters. On entering you pay fourpence, and are free of

the establishment for the night. You can come in early or late.

The company begins to assemble about five o'clock in the afternoon.

In the women's Shelter you find that many come much earlier and sit

sewing, reading or chatting in the sparely furnished but well warmed

room from the early hours of the afternoon until bedtime.

You come in, and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa,

and a hunk of bread. You can go into the wash-house, where you can

have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels free.

Then after having washed and eaten you can make yourself comfortable.

You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to

write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing.

At eight o'clock the Shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what

we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern.

Two or three hundred men in the men's Shelter, or as many women in the

women's Shelter, are collected together, most of them strange to each

other, in a large room. They are all wretchedly poor--what are you

to do with them? This is what we do with them.

We hold a rousing Salvation meeting. The Officer in charge of the

Depot, assisted by detachments from the Training Homes, conducts a

jovial free-and-easy social evening. The girls have their banjos and

their tambourines, and for a couple of hours you have as lively a

meeting as you will find in London. There is prayer, short and to the

point; there are addresses, some delivered by the leaders of the

meeting, but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been

saved at previous meetings, and who, rising in their seats, tell their

companions their experiences. Strange experiences they often are of

those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice

and misery, but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand,

and who are, as they say in all sincerity, "as happy as the day is

long." There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these

meetings which is refreshing to the soul. There are all sorts and

conditions of men; casuals, gaol birds, Out-of-Works, who have come

there for the first time, and who find men who last week or last month

were even as they themselves are now--still poor but rejoicing in a

sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of their being no longer

outcasts and forlorn in this wide world. There are men who have at

last seen revive before them a hope of escaping from that dreadful

vortex, into which their sins and misfortunes had drawn them, and being

restored to those comforts that they had feared so long were gone for

ever; nay, of rising to live a true and Godly life. These tell their

mates how this has come about, and urge all who hear them to try for

themselves and see whether it is not a good and happy thing to be

soundly saved. In the intervals of testimony--and these testimonies,

as every one will bear me witness who has ever attended any of our

meetings, are not long, sanctimonious lackadaisical speeches, but

simple confessions of individual experience--there are bursts of

hearty melody. The conductor of the meeting will start up a verse or

two of a hymn illustrative of the experiences mentioned by the last

speaker, or one of the girls from the Training Home will sing a solo,

accompanying herself on her instrument, while all join in a rattling

and rollicking chorus.

There is no compulsion upon anyone of our dossers to take part in this

meeting; they do not need to come in until it is over; but as a simple

matter of fact they do come in. Any night between eight and ten o'clock

you will find these people sitting there, listening to the

exhortations and taking part in the singing, many of them, no doubt,

unsympathetic enough, but nevertheless preferring to be present with

the music and the warmth, mildly stirred, if only by curiosity,

as the various testimonies are delivered.

Sometimes these testimonies are enough to rouse the most cynical of

observers. We had at one of our shelters the captain of an ocean

steamer, who had sunk to the depths of destitution through strong

drink. He came in there one night utterly desperate and was taken in

hand by our people--and with us taking in hand is no mere phrase,

for at the close of our meetings our officers go from seat to seat,

and if they see anyone who shows signs of being affected by the

speeches or the singing, at once sit down beside him and begin to

labour with him for the salvation of his soul. By this means they are

able to get hold of the men and to know exactly where the difficulty

lies, what the trouble is, and if they do nothing else, at least

succeed in convincing them that there is someone who cares for their

soul and would do what he could to lend them a helping hand.

The captain of whom I was speaking was got hold of in this way.

He was deeply impressed, and was induced to abandon once and for all

his habits of intemperance. From that meeting he went an altered man.

He regained his position in the merchant service, and twelve months

afterwards astonished us all by appearing in the uniform of a captain

of a large ocean steamer, to testify to those who were there how low he

had been, how utterly he had lost all hold on Society and all hope of

the future, when, fortunately led to the Shelter, he found friends,

counsel, and salvation, and from that time had never rested until he

had regained the position which he had forfeited by his intemperance.

The meeting over, the singing girls go back to the Training Home,

and the men prepare for bed. Our sleeping arrangements are somewhat

primitive; we do not provide feather beds, and when you go into our

dormitories, you will be surprised to find the floor covered by what

look like an endless array of packing cases. These are our beds,

and each of them forms a cubicle. There is a mattress laid on the

floor, and over the mattress a leather apron, which is all the

bedclothes that we find it possible to provide. The men undress,

each by the side of his packing box, and go to sleep under their

leather covering. The dormitory is warmed with hot water pipes to a

temperature of 60 degrees, and there has never been any complaint of

lack of warmth on the part of those who use the Shelter. The leather

can be kept perfectly clean, and the mattresses, covered with American

cloth, are carefully inspected every day, so that no stray specimen of

vermin may be left in the place. The men turn in about ten o'clock and

sleep until six. We have never any disturbances of any kind in the

Shelters. We have provided accommodation now for several thousand of

the most helplessly broken-down men in London, criminals many of them,

mendicants, tramps, those who are among the filth and offscouring of

all things; but such is the influence that is established by the

meeting and the moral ascendancy of our officers themselves, that we

have never had a fight on the premises, and very seldom do we ever hear

an oath or an obscene word. Sometimes there has been trouble outside

the Shelter, when men insisted upon coming in drunk or were otherwise

violent; but once let them come to the Shelter, and get into the swing

of the concern, and we have no trouble with them. In the morning they

get up and have their breakfast and, after a short service, go off

their various ways. We find that we can do this, that is to say, we

can provide coffee and bread for breakfast and for supper, and a

shake-down on the floor in the packing-boxes I have described in a warm

dormitory for fourpence a head.

I propose to develop these Shelters, so as to afford every man a

locker, in which he could store any little valuables that he may

possess. I would also allow him the use of a boiler in the washhouse

with a hot drying oven, so that he could wash his shirt over night and

have it returned to him dry in the morning. Only those who have had

practical experience of the difficulty of seeking for work in London

can appreciate the advantages of the opportunity to get your shirt

washed in this way--if you have one. In Trafalgar Square, in 1887,

there were few things that scandalised the public more than the

spectacle of the poor people camped in the Square, washing their shirts

in the early morning at the fountains. If you talk to any men who have

been on the road for a lengthened period they will tell you that

nothing hurts their self-respect more or stands more fatally in the way

of their getting a job than the impossibility of getting their little

things done up and clean.

In our poor man's "Home" everyone could at least keep himself clean and

have a clean shirt to his back, in a plain way, no doubt; but still not

less effective than if he were to be put up at one of the West End

hotels, and would be able to secure anyway the necessaries of life

while being passed on to something far better. This is the first step.

SOME SHELTER TROPHIES.

Of the practical results which have followed our methods of dealing

with the outcasts who take shelter with us we have many striking

examples. Here are a few, each of them a transcript of a life

experience relating to men who are now active, industrious members of

the community upon which but for the agency of these Depots they would

have been preying to this day.

A.S.--Born in Glasgow, 1825. Saved at Clerkenwell, May 19, 1889.

Poor parents raised in a Glasgow Slum. Was thrown on the streets at

seven years of age, became the companion and associate of thieves, and

drifted into crime. The following are his terms of imprisonment: --

14 days, 30 days, 30 days. 60 days, 60 days (three times in succession),

4 months, 6 months (twice), 9 months, 18 months, 2 years, 6 years,

7 years (twice), 14 years; 40 years 3 months and 6 days in the

aggregate. Was flogged for violent conduct in gaol 8 times.

W. M. ("Buff").--Born in Deptford, 1864, saved at Clerkenwell,

March 31st, 1889. His father was an old Navy man, and earned a decent

living as manager. Was sober, respectable, and trustworthy. Mother

was a disreputable drunken slattern: a curse and disgrace to husband

and family. The home was broken up, and little Buff was given over to

the evil influences of his depraved mother. His 7th birthday present

from his admiring parent was a "quarten o'gin." He got some education

at the One Tun Alley Ragged School, but when nine years old was caught

apple stealing, and sent to the industrial School at Ilford for

7 years. Discharged at the end of his term, he drifted to the streets,

the casual wards, and Metropolitan gaols, every one of whose interiors

he is familiar with. He became a ringleader of a gang that infested

London; a thorough mendicant and ne'er-do-well; a pest to society.

Naturally he is a born leader, and one of those spirits that command a

following; consequently, when he got Salvation, the major part of his

following came after him to the Shelter, and eventually to God.

His character since conversion has been altogether satisfactory, and he

is now an Orderly at Whitechapel, and to all appearances a "true lad."

C. W. ("Frisco").--Born in San Francisco, 1862. Saved April 24th,

1889. Taken away from home at the age of eight years, and made his way

to Texas. Here he took up life amongst the Ranches as a Cowboy,

and varied it with occasional trips to sea, developing into a typical

brass and rowdy. He had 2 years for mutiny at sea, 4 years for mule

stealing, 5 years for cattle stealing and has altogether been in gaol

for thirteen years and eleven months. He came over to England,

got mixed up with thieves and casuals here, and did several short terms

of imprisonment. He was met on his release at Millbank by an old chum

(Buff) and the Shelter Captain; came to Shelter, got saved, and has

stood firm.

H. A.--Born at Deptford, 1850. Saved at Clerkenwell, January 12th,

1889. Lost mother in early life, step-mother difficulty supervening,

and a propensity to misappropriation of small things developed into

thieving. He followed the sea, became a hard drinker, a foul-mouthed

blasphemer, and a blatant spouter of infidelity. He drifted about for

years, ashore and afloat, and eventually reached the Shelter stranded.

Here he sought God, and has done well. This summer he had charge of a

gang of haymakers sent into the country, and stood the ordeal

satisfactorily. He seems honest in his profession, and strives

patiently to follow after God. He is at the workshops.

H. S.--Born at A---, in Scotland. Like most Scotch lads although

parents were in poor circumstances he managed to get a good education.

Early in life he took to newspaper work, and picked up the details of

the journalistic profession in several prominent papers in N.B.

Eventually he got a position on a provincial newspaper, and having put

in a course at Glasgow University, graduated B.A. there. After this

he was on the staff of a Welsh paper. He married a decent girl,

and had several little ones, but giving way to drink, lost position,

wife, family, and friends. At times he would struggle up and recover

himself, and appears generally to have been able to secure a position,

but again and again his besetment overcame him, and each time he would

drift lower and lower. For a time he was engaged in secretarial work

on a prominent London Charity, but fell repeatedly, and at length was

dismissed. He came to us an utter outcast, was sent to Shelter and

Workshop got saved, and is now in a good situation. He gives every

promise, and those best able to judge seem very sanguine that at last a

real good work has been accomplished in him.

F. D.--Was born in London, and brought up to the iron trade.

Held several good situations, losing one after another, from drink and

irregularity. On one occasion, with #20 in his pocket, he started for

Manchester, got drunk there, was locked up and fined five shillings,

and fifteen shillings costs; this he paid, and as he was leaving the

Court, a gentleman stopped him, saying that he knew his father,

and inviting him to his house; however, with #10 in his pocket, he was

too independent, and he declined; but the gentleman gave him his

address, and left him. A few days squandered his cash, and clothes

soon followed, all disappearing for drink, and then without a coin he

presented himself at the address given to him, at ten o'clock at night.

It turned out to be his uncle, who gave him #2 to go back to London,

but this too disappeared for liquor. He tramped back to London utterly

destitute. Several nights were passed on the Embankment, and on one

occasion a gentleman gave him a ticket for the Shelter; this, however,

he sold for 2d. and had a pint of beer, and stopped out all night.

But it set him thinking, and he determined next day to raise 4d. and

see what a Shelter was like. He came to Whitechapel, became a regular

customer, eight months ago got saved, and is now doing well.

F. H.--Was born at Birmingham, 1858. Saved at Whitechapel,

March 26th, 1890. Father died in his infancy, mother marrying again.

The stepfather was a drunken navvy, and used to knock the mother about,

and the lad was left to the streets. At 12 years of age he left home,

and tramped to Liverpool, begging his way, and sleeping on the

roadsides. In Liverpool he lived about the Docks for some days,

sleeping where he could. Police found him and returned him to

Birmingham; his reception being an unmerciful thrashing from the

drunken stepfather. He got several jobs as errand-boy, remarkable for

his secret pilferings, and two years later left with fifty shillings

stolen money, and reached Middlesbrough by road. Got work in a nail

factory stayed nine months, then stole nine shillings from

fellow-lodger, and again took the road. He reached Birmingham, and

finding a warrant out for him, joined the Navy. He was in the

Impregnable training-ship three years behaved himself, only getting

"one dozen," and was transferred with character marked "good" to the

Iron Duke in the China seas; soon got drinking, and was locked up and

imprisoned for riotous conduct in almost every port in the stations.

He broke ship, and deserted several times, and was a thorough specimen

of a bad British tar. He saw gaol in Signapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama,

Shanghai, Canton, and other places. In five years returned home, and,

after furlough, joined the Belle Isle in the Irish station. Whisky

here again got hold of him, and excess ruined his constitution.

On his leave he had married, and on his discharge joined his wife in

Birmingham. For some time he worked as sweeper in the market, but two

years ago deserted his wife and family, and came to London, settled

down to a loafer's life, lived on the streets with Casual Wards for his

home. Eventually came to Whitechapel Shelter, and got saved.

He is now a trustworthy, reliable lad; has become reconciled to wife,

who came to London to see him, and he bids fair to be a useful man.

J. W. S.--Born in Plymouth. His parents are respectable people.

He is clever at his business, and has held good situations. Two years

ago he came to London, fell into evil courses, and took to drink.

Lost situation after situation, and kept on drinking; lost everything,

and came to the streets. He found out Westminster Shelter,

and eventually got saved; his parents were communicated with, and help

and clothes forthcoming; with Salvation came hope and energy; he got a

situation at Lewisham (7d. per hour) at his trade. Four months

standing, and is a promising Soldier as well as a respectable mechanic.

J. T.--Born in Ireland; well educated (commercially); clerk and

accountant. Early in life joined the Queen's Army, and by good conduct

worked his way up. Was orderly-room clerk and paymaster's assistant in

his regiment. He led a steady life whilst in the service, and at the

expiration of his term passed into the Reserve with a "very good"

character. He was a long time unemployed, and this appears to have

reduced him to despair, and so to drink. He sank to the lowest ebb,

and came to Westminster in a deplorable condition; coatless, hatless,

shirtless, dirty altogether, a fearful specimen of what a man of good

parentage can be brought to. After being at Shelter some time, he got

saved, was passed to Workshops, and gave great satisfaction.

At present he is doing clerical work and gives satisfaction as a workman:

a good influence in the place.

J. S.--Born in London, of decent parentage. From a child he

exhibited thieving propensities; soon got into the hands of the police,

and was in and out of gaol continually. He led the life of a confirmed

tramp, and roved all over the United Kingdom. He has been in penal

servitude three times, and his last term was for seven years, with

police supervision. After his release he married a respectable girl,

and tried to reform, but circumstances were against him; character he

had none, a gaol career only to recommend him, and so he and his wife

eventually drifted to destitution. They came to the Shelter, and asked

advice; they were received, and he made application to the sitting

Magistrate at Clerkenwell as to a situation, and what he ought to do.

The Magistrate helped him, and thanked the Salvation Army for its

efforts in behalf of him and such as he, and asked us to look after the

applicant. A little work was given him, and after a time a good

situation procured. To-day they have a good time; he is steadily

employed, and both are serving God, holding the respect and confidence

of neighbours, etc.

E. G.--Came to England in the service of a family of position,

and afterwards was butler and upper servant in several houses of the

nobility. His health broke down, and for a long time he was altogether

unfit for work. He had saved a considerable sum of money, but the cost

of doctors and the necessaries of a sick man soon played havoc with his

little store, and he became reduced to penury and absolute want.

For some time he was in the Workhouse, and, being discharged,

he was advised to go to the Shelter. He was low in health as well as

in circumstances, and broken in spirit, almost despairing. He was

lovingly advised to cast his care upon God, and eventually he was

converted. After some time work was obtained as porter in a City

warehouse. Assiduity and faithfulness in a year raised him to the

position of traveller. Today he prospers in body and soul, retaining

the respect and confidence of all associated with him.

We might multiply these records, but those given show the kind of

results attained.

There's no reason to think that influences which have been blessed of

God to the salvation of these poor fellows will not be equally

efficacious if applied on a wider scale and over a vaster area.

The thing to be noted in all these cases is that it was not the mere

feeding which effected the result; it was the combination of the

feeding with the personal labour for the individual soul. Still, if we

had not fed them, we should never have come near enough to gain any

hold upon their hearts. If we had merely fed them, they would have

gone away next day to resume, with increased energy, the predatory and

vagrant life which they had been leading. But when our feeding and

Shelter Depots brought them to close quarters, our officers were

literally able to put their arms round their necks and plead with them

as brethren who had gone astray. We told them that their sins and

sorrows had not shut them out from the love of the Everlasting Father,

who had sent us to them to help them with all the power of our strong

Organisation, of the Divine authority of which we never feel so sure as

when it is going forth to seek and to save the lost.

SECTION 2.--WORK FOR THE OUT-OF-WORKS.--THE FACTORY.

The foregoing, it will be said, is all very well for your outcast when

he has got fourpence in his pocket, but what if he has not got his

fourpence? What if you are confronted with a crowd of hungry desperate

wretches, without even a penny in their pouch, demanding food and

shelter? This objection is natural enough, and has been duly

considered from the first.

I propose to establish in connection with every Food and Shelter Depot

a Workshop or Labour Yard, in which any person who comes destitute and

starving will be supplied with sufficient work to enable him to earn

the fourpence needed for his bed and board. This is a fundamental

feature of the Scheme, and one which I think will commend it to all

those who are anxious to benefit the poor by enabling them to help

themselves without the demoralising intervention of charitable relief.

Let us take our stand for a moment at the door of one of our Shelters.

There comes along a grimy, ragged, footsore tramp, his feet bursting

out from the sides of his shoes, his clothes all rags, with filthy

shirt and towselled hair. He has been, he tells you, on the tramp for

the last three weeks, seeking work and finding none, slept last night

on the Embankment, and wants to know if you can give him a bite and a

sup, and shelter for the night. Has he any money? Not he; he probably

spent the last penny he begged or earned in a pipe of tobacco, with

which to dull the cravings of his hungry stomach. What are you to do

with this man?

Remember this is no fancy sketch--it is a typical case. There are

hundreds and thousands of such applicants. Any one who is at all

familiar with life in London and our other large towns, will recognise

that gaunt figure standing there asking for bread and shelter or for

work by which he can obtain both. What can we do with him? Before him

Society stands paralysed, quieting its conscience every now and then by

an occasional dole of bread and soup, varied with the semi-criminal

treatment of the Casual Ward, until the manhood is crushed out of the

man and you have in your hands a reckless, despairing, spirit-broken

creature, with not even an aspiration to rise above his miserable

circumstances, covered with vermin and filth, sinking ever lower and

lower, until at last he is hurried out of sight in the rough shell

which carries him to a pauper's grave.

I propose to take that man, put a strong arm round him, and extricate

him from the mire in which he is all but suffocated. As a first step we

will say to him, "You are hungry, here is food; you are homeless, here

is a shelter for your head; but remember you must work for your

rations. This is not charity; it is work for the workless, help for

those who cannot help themselves. There is the labour shed, go and earn

your fourpence, and then come in out of the cold and the wet into the

warm shelter; here is your mug of coffee and your great chunk of bread,

and after you have finished these there is a meeting going on in full

swing with its joyful music and hearty human intercourse. There are

those who pray for you and with you, and will make you feel yourself a

brother among men. There is your shake-down on the floor, where you

will have your warm, quiet bed, undisturbed by the ribaldry and curses

with which you have been familiar too long. There is the wash-house,

where you can have a thorough wash-up at last, after all these days of

unwashedness. There is plenty of soap and warm water and clean towels;

there, too, you can wash your shirt and have it dried while you sleep.

In the morning when you get up there will be breakfast for you,

and your shirt will be dry and clean. Then when you are washed and

rested, and are no longer faint with hunger, you can go and seek a job,

or go back to the Labour shop until something better turns up."

But where and how?

Now let me introduce you to our Labour Yard. Here is no pretence

of charity beyond the charity which gives a man remunerative labour.

It is not our business to pay men wages. What we propose is to enable

those, male or female, who are destitute, to earn their rations and do

enough work to pay for their lodging until they are able to go out into

the world and earn wages for themselves. There is no compulsion upon

any one to resort to our shelter, but if a penniless man wants food he

must, as a rule, do work sufficient to pay for what he has of that and

of other accommodation. I say as a rule because, of course, our

Officers will be allowed to make exceptions in extreme cases, but the

rule will be first work then eat. And that amount of work will be

exacted rigorously. It is that which distinguishes this Scheme from

mere charitable relief.

I do not wish to have any hand in establishing a new centre of

demoralisation. I do not want my customers to be pauperised by being

treated to anything which they do not earn. To develop self-respect in

the man, to make him feel that at last he has go this foot planted on

the first rung of the ladder which leads upwards, is vitally important,

and this cannot be done unless the bargain between him and me is

strictly carried out. So much coffee, so much bread, so much shelter,

so much warmth and light from me, but so much labour in return from

him.

What labour? it is asked. For answer to this question I would like to

take you down to our Industrial Workshops in Whitechapel. There you

will see the Scheme in experimental operation. What we are doing there

we propose to do everywhere up to the extent of the necessity, and

there is no reason why we should fail elsewhere if we can succeed

there.

Our Industrial Factory at Whitechapel was established this Spring.

We opened it on a very small scale. It has developed until we have

nearly ninety men at work. Some of these are skilled workmen who are

engaged in carpentry. The particular job they have now in hand is the

making of benches for the Salvation Army. Others are engaged in

mat-making, some are cobblers, others painters, and so forth.

This trial effort has, so far, answered admirably. No one who is taken

on comes for a permanency. So long as he is willing to work for his

rations he is supplied with materials and provided with skilled

superintendents. The hours of work are eight per day. Here are the

rules and regulations under which the work is carried on at present:-

THE SALVATION ARMY SOCIAL REFORM WING.

Temporary Headquarters--

36, UPPER THAMES STREET, LONDON, E.C,

CITY INDUSTRIAL WORKSHOPS.

OBJECTS.--These workshops are open for the relief of the unemployed

and destitute, the object being to make it unnecessary for the homeless

or workless to be compelled to go to the Workhouse or Casual Ward,

food and shelter being provided for them in exchange for work done by

them, until they can procure work for themselves, or it can be found

for them elsewhere.

PLAN OF OPERATION.--All those applying for assistance will be placed

in what is termed the first class. They must be willing to do any kind

of work allotted to them. While they remain in the first class,

they shall be entitled to three meals a day, and shelter for the night,

and will be expected in return to cheerfully perform the work allotted

to them.

Promotions will be made from this first-class to the second-class of

all those considered eligible by the Labour Directors. They will,

in addition to the food and shelter above mentioned, receive sums of

money up to 5s. at the end of the week, for the purpose of assisting

them to provide themselves with tools, to get work outside.

REGULATIONS.--No smoking, drinking, bad language, or conduct

calculated to demoralize will be permitted on the factory premises.

No one under the influence of drink will be admitted. Any one refusing

to work, or guilty of bad conduct, will be required to leave the

premises.

HOURS OF WORK.--7 a.m. to 8.30 a.m.; 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.;

2 p.m. to 5.30 p.m, Doors will be closed 5 minutes after 7, 9,

and 2 p.m. Food Checks will be given to all as they pass out at each

meal time. Meals and Shelter provided at 272, Whitechapel Road.

Our practical experience shows that we can provide work by which a man

can earn his rations. We shall be careful not to sell the goods so

manufactured at less than the market prices. In firewood, for instance,

we have endeavoured to be rather above the average than below it.

As stated elsewhere, we are firmly opposed to injuring one class of

workmen while helping another.

Attempts on somewhat similar lines to those now being described have

hitherto excited the liveliest feelings of jealousy on the part of the

Trade Unions, and representatives of labour. They rightly consider it

unfair that labour partly paid for out of the Rates and Taxes, or by

Charitable Contributions, should be put upon the market at less than

market value, and so compete unjustly with the production of those who

have in the first instance to furnish an important quota of the funds

by which these Criminal or Pauper workers are supported. No such

jealousy can justly exist in relation to our Scheme, seeing that we are

endeavouring to raise the standard of labour and are pledged to a war

to the death against sweating in every shape and form.

But, it will be asked, how do these Out-of-Works conduct themselves

when you get them into the Factory? Upon this point I have a very

satisfactory report to render. Many, no doubt, are below par,

under-fed, and suffering from ill health, or the consequence of their

intemperance. Many also are old men, who have been crowded out of the

labour market by their younger generation. But, without making too

many allowances on these grounds, I may fairly say that these men have

shown themselves not only anxious and willing, but able to work.

Our Factory Superintendent reports:-

Of loss or time there has practically been none since the opening,

June 29th. Each man during his stay, with hardly an exception,

has presented himself punctually at opening time and worked more or

less assiduously the whole of the labour hours. The morals of the men

have been good, in not more than three instances has there been an

overt act of disobedience, insubordination, or mischief. The men, as a

whole, are uniformly civil, willing, and satisfied; they are all fairly

industrious, some, and that not a few, are assiduous and energetic.

The Foremen have had no serious complaints to make or delinquencies to

report.

On the 15th of August I had a return made of the names and trades and

mode of employment of the men at work. Of the forty in the shops at

that moment, eight were carpenters, twelve labourers, two tailors,

two sailors, three clerks, two engineers, while among the rest was a

shoemaker, two grocers, a cooper, a sailmaker, a musician, a painter,

and a stonemason. Nineteen of these were employed in sawing, cutting

and tying up firewood, six were making mats, seven making sacks, and

the rest were employed in various odd jobs. Among them was a Russian

carpenter who could not speak a word of English. The whole place is a

hive of industry which fills the hearts of those who go to see it with

hope that something is about to be done to solve the difficulty of the

unemployed.

Although our Factories will be permanent institutions they will not be

anything more than temporary resting-places to those who avail

themselves of their advantages. They are harbours of refuge into which

the storm-tossed workman may run and re-fit, so that he may again push

out to the ordinary sea of labour and earn his living.

The establishment of these Industrial Factories seems to be one of the

most obvious duties of those who would effectually deal with the Social

Problem. They are as indispensable a link in the chain of deliverance

as the Shelters, but they are only a link and not a stopping-place.

And we do not propose that they should be regarded as anything but

stepping-stones to better things.

These Shops will also be of service for men and women temporarily

unemployed who have families, and who possess some sort of a home.

In numerous instances, if by any means these unfortunates could find

bread and rent for a few weeks, they would tide over their

difficulties, and an untold amount of misery would be averted, In such

cases Work would be supplied at their own homes where preferred,

especially for the women and children, and such remuneration would be

aimed at as would supply the immediate necessities of the hour.

To those who have rent to pay and families to support something beyond

rations would be indispensable.

The Labour Shops will enable us to work out our Anti-Sweating

experiments. For instance, we propose at once to commence manufacturing

match boxes, for which we shall aim at giving nearly treble the amount

at present paid to the poor starving creatures engaged in this work.

In all these workshops our success will depend upon the extent to which

we are able to establish and maintain in the minds of the workers sound

moral sentiments and to cultivate a spirit of hopefulness and

aspiration. We shall continually seek to impress upon them the fact

that while we desire to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and

provide shelter for the shelterless, we are still more anxious to bring

about that regeneration of heart and life which is essential to their

future happiness and well-being.

But no compulsion will for a moment be allowed with respect to religion.

The man who professes to love and serve God will be helped because of

such profession, and the man who does not will be helped in the hope

that he will, sooner or later, in gratitude to God, do the same; but

there will be no melancholy misery-making for any. There is no

sanctimonious long face in the Army. We talk freely about Salvation,

because it is to us the very light and joy of our existence.

We are happy, and we wish others to share our joy. We know by our own

experience that life is a very different thing when we have found the

peace of God, and are working together with Him for the salvation of

the world, instead of toiling for the realisation of worldly ambition

or the amassing of earthly gain.

SECTION 3.--THE REGIMENTATION OF THE UNEMPLOYED.

When we have got the homeless, penniless tramp washed, and housed,

and fed at the Shelter, and have secured him the means of earning his

fourpence by chopping firewood, or making mats or cobbling the shoes of

his fellow-labourers at the Factory, we have next to seriously address

ourselves to the problem of how to help him to get back into the

regular ranks of industry. The Shelter and the Factory are but

stepping-stones, which have this advantage, they give us time to look

round and to see what there is in a man and what we can make of him.

The first and most obvious thing to do is to ascertain whether there is

any demand in the regular market for the labour which is thus thrown

upon our hands. In order to ascertain this I have already established a

Labour Bureau, the operations of which I shall at once largely extend,

at which employers can register their needs, and workmen can register

their names and the kind of work they can do.

At present there is no labour exchange in existence in this country.

The columns of the daily newspaper are the only substitute for this

much needed register. It is one of the many painful consequences

arising from the overgrowth of cities. In a village where everybody

knows everybody else this necessity does not exist. If a farmer wants

a couple of extra men for mowing or some more women for binding at

harvest time, he runs over in his mind the names of every available

person in the parish. Even in a small town there is little difficulty

in knowing who wants employment. But in the cities this knowledge is

not available; hence we constantly hear of persons who would be very

glad to employ labour for odd jobs in an occasional stress of work

while at the same time hundreds of persons are starving for want of

work at another end of the town. To meet this evil the laws of Supply

and Demand have created the Sweating Middlemen, who farm out the

unfortunates and charge so heavy a commission for their share that the

poor wretches who do the work receive hardly enough to keep body and

soul together. I propose to change all this by establishing Registers

which will enable us to lay our hands at a moment's notice upon all the

unemployed men in a district in any particular trade. In this way we

should become the universal intermediary between those who have no

employment and those who want workmen.

In this we do not propose to supersede or interfere with the regular

Trade Unions. Where Unions exist we should place ourselves in every

case in communication with their officials. But the most helpless mass

of misery is to be found among the unorganised labourers who have no

Union, and who are, therefore, the natural prey of the middleman.

Take, for instance, one of the most wretched classes of the community,

the poor fellows who perambulate the streets as Sandwich Men. These

are farmed out by certain firms. If you wish to send fifty or a

hundred men through London carrying boards announcing the excellence of

your goods, you go to an advertising firm who will undertake to supply

you with as many sandwich men as you want for two shillings or half a

crown a day. The men are forthcoming, your goods are advertised,

you pay your money, but how much of that goes to the men? About one

shilling, or one shilling and threepence; the rest goes to the

middleman. I propose to supersede this middleman by forming a

Co-operative Association of Sandwich Men. At every Shelter there would

be a Sandwich Brigade ready in any numbers when wanted. The cost of

registration and organisation, which the men would gladly pay, need not

certainly amount to more than a penny in the shilling.

All that is needed is to establish a trustworthy and disinterested

centre round which the unemployed can group themselves, and which will

form the nucleus of a great Co-operative Self-helping Association. The

advantages of such a Bureau are obvious. But in this, also, I do not

speak from theory. I have behind me the experience of seven months of

labour both in England and Australia. In London we have a registration

office in Upper Thames Street, where the unemployed come every morning

in droves to register their names and to see whether they can obtain

situations. In Australia, I see, it was stated in the House of

Assembly that our Officers had been instrumental in finding situations

for no less than one hundred and thirty-two "Out-of-Works" in a few

days. Here, in London, we have succeeded in obtaining employment for a

great number, although, of course, it is beyond our power to help all

those who apply. We have sent hay-makers down to the country and there

is every reason to believe that when our Organisation is better known,

and in more extended operation, we shall have a great labour exchange

between town and country, so that when there is scarcity in one place

and congestion in another, there will be information immediately sent,

so that the surplus labour can be drafted into those districts where

labour is wanted. For instance, in the harvest seasons,

with changeable weather, it is quite a common occurrence for the crops

to be seriously damaged for want of labourers, while at the same time

there will be thousands wandering about in the big towns and cities

seeking work, but finding no one to hire them. Extend this system all

over the world, and make it not only applicable to the transfer of

workers between the towns and the provinces, but between Country and

Country, and it is impossible to exaggerate the enormous advantages

which would result. The officer in charge of our experimental Labour

Bureau sends me the following notes as to what has already been done

through the agency of the Upper Thames Street office:

SALVATION ARMY SOCIAL REFORM WING.

LABOR BUREAU.

Bureau opened June 16th, 1890. The following are particulars of

transactions up to September 26th, 1890: --

Applications for employment--Men .. .. 2462

Women .. 208

----- 2670

====

Applications from Employers for Men .. 128

Women .. 59

----- 187

====

Sent to Work--Men .. .. .. .. .. 301

Women .. .. .. .. 68

---- 369

====

Permanent Situations .. .. .. .. .. 146

Temporary Employment,

viz: --Boardmen, Cleaners, &c., &c .. .. 223

Sent to Workshop in Hanbury Street .. .. 165

====

SECTION 4.--THE HOUSEHOLD SALVAGE BRIGADE.

It is obvious that the moment you begin to find work for the unemployed

labour of the community, no matter what you do by way of the

registration and bringing together of those who want work and those who

want workers, there will still remain a vast residuum of unemployed,

and it will be the duty of those who undertake to deal with the

question to devise means for securing them employment. Many things are

possible when there is a directing intelligence at headquarters and

discipline in the rank and file, which would be utterly impossible when

everyone is left to go where he pleases, when ten men are running for

one man's job, and when no one can be depended upon to be in the way at

the time he is wanted. When my Scheme is carried out, there will be in

every populous centre a Captain of Industry, an Officer specially

charged with the regimentation of unorganised labour, who would be

continually on the alert, thinking how best to utilise the waste human

material in his district. It is contrary to all previous experience to

suppose that the addition of so much trained intelligence will not

operate beneficially in securing the disposal of a commodity which is

at present a drug in the market.

Robertson, of Brighton, used frequently to remark that every truth was

built up of two apparent contradictory propositions. In the same way I

may say that the solution of every social difficulty is to be found in

the discovery of two corresponding difficulties. It is like the puzzle

maps of children. When you are putting one together, you suddenly come

upon some awkward piece that will not fit in anywhere, but you do not

in disgust and despair break your piece into fragments or throw it

away. On the contrary, you keep it by you, knowing that before long

you will discover a number of other pieces which it will be impossible

to fit in until you fix your unmanageable, unshapely piece in the

centre. Now, in the work of piecing together the fragments which lie

scattered around the base of our social system we must not despair

because we have in the unorganised, untrained labourers that which

seems hopelessly out of fit with everything around. There must be

something corresponding to it which is equally useless until he can be

brought to bear upon it. In other words, having got one difficulty in

the case of the Out-of-Works, we must cast about to find another

difficulty to pair off against it, and then out of two difficulties

will arise the solution of the problem.

We shall not have far to seek before we discover in every town and in

every country the corresponding element to our unemployed labourer.

We have waste labour on the one hand; we have waste commodities on the

other. About waste land I shall speak in the next chapter;

I am concerned now solely with waste commodities. Herein we have a

means of immediately employing a large number of men under conditions

which will enable us to permanently provide for many of those whose

hard lot we are now considering.

I propose to establish in every large town what I may call "A Household

Salvage Brigade," a civil force of organised collectors, who will

patrol the whole town as regularly as the policeman, who will have

their appointed beats, and each of whom will been trusted with the task

of collecting the waste of the houses in their circuit. In small towns

and villages this is already done, and it will be noticed that most of

the suggestions which I have put forth in this book are based upon the

central principle, which is that of restoring; to the over-grown, and,

therefore, uninformed masses of population in our towns the same

intelligence and co-operation as to the mutual wants of each and all,

that prevails in your small town or village. The latter is the

manageable unit, because its dimensions and its needs have not

out-grown the range of the individual intelligence and ability of those

who dwell therein. Our troubles in large towns arise chiefly from the

fact that the massing of population has caused the physical bulk of

Society to outgrow its intelligence. It is as if a human being had

suddenly developed fresh limbs which were not connected by any nervous

system with the gray matter of his brain. Such a thing is impossible

in the human being, but, unfortunately, it is only too possible in

human society. In the human body no member can suffer without an

instantaneous telegram being despatched, as it were, to the seat of

intelligence; the foot or the finger cries out when it suffers, and the

whole body suffers with it. So, in a small community, every one, rich

and poor, is more or less cognizant of the sufferings of the community.

In a large town, where people have ceased to be neighbourly, there is

only a congested mass of population settled down on a certain small

area without any human ties connecting them together. Here, it is

perfectly possible, and it frequently happens, that men actually die of

starvation within a few doors of those who, if they had been informed

of the actual condition of the sufferer that lay within earshot of

their comfortable drawing-rooms, would have been eager to minister the

needed relief. What we have to do, therefore, is to grow a new nervous

system for the body politic, to create a swift, almost automatic, means

of communication between the community as a whole and the meanest of

its members, so as to restore to the city what the village possesses.

I do not say that the plan which I have suggested is the only plan or

the best plan conceivable. All that I claim for it is that it is the

only plan which I can conceive as practicable at the present moment,

and that, as a matter of fact, it holds the field alone, for no one,

so far as I have been able to discover, even proposes to reconstitute

the connection between what I have called the gray matter of the brain

of the municipal community and all the individual units which make up

the body politic.

Carrying out the same idea I come to the problem of the waste

commodities of the towns, and we will take this as an earnest of the

working out of the general principle. In the villages there is very

little waste. The sewage is applied directly to the land, and so

becomes a source of wealth instead of being emptied into great

subterranean reservoirs, to generate poisonous gases, which by a most

ingenious arrangement, are then poured forth into the very heart of our

dwellings, as is the case in the great cities. Neither is there any

waste of broken victuals. The villager has his pig or his poultry, or

if he has not a pig his neighbour has one, and the collection of broken

victuals is conducted as regularly as the delivery of the post. And as

it is with broken victuals, so it is with rags and bones, and old iron,

and all the debris of a household. When I was a boy one of the most

familiar figures in the streets of a country town was the man, who,

with his small hand-barrow or donkey-cart, made a regular patrol

through all the streets once a week, collecting rags, bones, and all

other waste materials, buying the same from the juveniles who collected

them in specie, not of Her Majesty's current coin, but of common

sweetmeats, known as "claggum" or "taffy." When the tootling of his

familiar horn was heard the children would bring out their stores, and

trade as best they could with the itinerant merchant, with the result

that the closets which in our towns to-day have become the receptacles

of all kinds of, disused lumber were kept then swept and garnished.

Now, what I want to know is why can we not establish on a scale

commensurate with our extended needs the rag-and-bone industry in all

our great towns? That there is sufficient to pay for the collection is,

I think, indisputable. If it paid in a small North-country town or

Midland village, why would it not pay much better in an area where the

houses stand more closely together, and where luxurious living and

thriftless habits have so increased that there must be proportionately

far more breakage, more waste, and, therefore, more collectable matter

than in the rural districts? In looking over the waste of London it has

occurred to me that in the debris of our households there is sufficient

food, it utilised, to feed many of the starving poor, and to employ

some thousands of them in its collection, and, in addition, largely to

assist the general scheme. What I propose would be to go to work on

something like the following plan:-

London would be divided into districts, beginning with that portion of

it most likely to furnish the largest supplies of what would be worth

collection. Two men, or a man and a boy, would be told of for this

purpose to this district.

Households would be requested to allow a receptacle to be placed in

some convenient spot in which the servants could deposit the waste

food, and a sack of some description would also be supplied for the

paper, rags, &c.

The whole would be collected, say once or twice a week, or more

frequently, according to the season and circumstances, and transferred

to depots as central as possible to the different districts.

At present much of this waste is thrown into the dust-bin, there to

fester and breed disease. Then there are old newspapers, ragged books,

old bottles, tins, canisters, etc. We all know what a number of

articles there are which are not quite bad enough to be thrown into the

dust heap, and yet are no good to us. We put them on one side,

hoping that something may turn up, and as that something very seldom

does turn up, there they remain.

Crippled musical instruments, for instance, old toys, broken-down

perambulators, old clothes, all the things, in short, for which we have

no more need, and for which there is no market within our reach, but

which we feel it would be a sin and a shame to destroy.

When I get my Household Salvage Brigade properly organised, beginning,

as I said, in some district where we should be likely to meet with most

material, our uniformed collectors would call every other day or twice

a week with their hand barrow or pony cart. As these men would be

under strict discipline, and numbered, the householder would have a

security against any abuse of which such regular callers might

otherwise be the occasion.

At present the rag and bone man who drives a more or less precarious

livelihood by intermittent visits, is looked upon askance by prudent

housewives. They fear in many cases he takes the refuse in order to

have the opportunity of finding something which may be worth while

"picking up," and should he be impudent or negligent there is no

authority to whom they can appeal. Under our Brigade, each district

would have its numbered officer, who would himself be subordinate to a

superior officer, to whom any complaints could be made, and whose duty

it would be to see that the officers under his command punctually

performed their rounds and discharged their duties without offence.

Here let me disclaim any intention of interfering with the Little

Sisters of the Poor, or any other persons, who collect the broken

victuals of hotels and other establishments for charitable purposes.

My object is not to poach on my neighbour's domains, nor shall I ever

be a party to any contentious quarrels for the control of this or that

source of supply. All that is already utilised I regard as outside my

sphere. The unoccupied wilderness of waste is a wide enough area for

the operations of our Brigade. But it will be found in practice that

there are no competing agencies. While the broken victuals of certain

large hotels are regularly collected, the things before enumerated,

and a number of others, are untouched because not sought after.

Of the immense extent to which Food is wasted few people have any

notion except those who have made actual experiments. Some years ago,

Lady Wolseley established a system of collection from house to house in

Mayfair, in order to secure materials for a charitable kitchen which,

in concert with Baroness Burdett-Coutts, she had started at

Westminster. The amount of the food which she gathered was enormous.

Sometimes legs of mutton from which only one or two slices had been cut

were thrown into the tub, where they waited for the arrival of the cart

on its rounds. It is by no means an excessive estimate to assume that

the waste of the kitchens of the West End would provide a sufficient

sustenance for all the Out-of-Works who will be employed in our labour

sheds at the industrial centres. All that it needs is collection,

prompt, systematic, by disciplined men who can be relied upon to

discharge their task with punctuality and civility, and whose failure

in this duty can be directly brought to the attention of the

controlling authority.

Of the utilisation of much of the food which is to be so collected I

shall speak hereafter, when I come to describe the second great

division of my scheme, namely the Farm Colony. Much of the food

collected by the Household Salvage Brigade would not be available for

human consumption. In this the greatest care would be exercised,

and the remainder would be dispatched, if possible, by barges down the

river to the Farm Colony, where we shall meet it hereafter.

But food is only one of the materials which we should handle. At our

Whitechapel Factory there is one shoemaker whom we picked off the

streets destitute and miserable. He is now saved, and happy, and

cobbles away at the shoe leather of his mates. That shoemaker, I

foresee, is but the pioneer of a whole army of shoemakers constantly at

work in repairing the cast-off boots and shoes of London. Already in

some provincial towns a great business is done by the conversion of old

shoes into new. They call the men so employed translators. Boots and

shoes, as every wearer of them knows, do not go to pieces all at once

or in all parts at once. The sole often wears out utterly, while the

upper leather is quite good, or the upper leather bursts while the sole

remains practically in a salvable condition; but your individual pair

of shoes and boots are no good to you when any section of them is

hopelessly gone to the bad. But give our trained artist in leather and

his army of assistants a couple of thousand pairs of boots and shoes,

and it will go ill with him if out of the couple of thousand pairs of

wrecks he cannot construct five hundred pairs, which, if not quite

good, will be immeasurably better than the apologies for boots which

cover the feet of many a poor tramp, to say nothing of the thousands of

poor children who are at the present moment attending our public

schools. In some towns they have already established a Boot and Shoe

Fund in order to provide the little ones who come to school with shoes

warranted not to let in water between the school house and home. When

you remember the 43,000 children who are reported by the School Board

to attend the schools of London alone unfed and starving, do you not

think there are many thousands to whom we could easily dispose, with

advantage, the resurrected shoes of our Boot Factory?

This, however, is only one branch of industry. Take old umbrellas.

We all know the itinerant umbrella mender, whose appearance in the

neighbourhood of the farmhouse leads the good wife to look after her

poultry and to see well to it that the watchdog is on the premises.

But that gentleman is almost the only agency by which old umbrellas can

be rescued from the dust heap. Side by side with our Boot Factory we

shall have a great umbrella works. The ironwork of one umbrella will

be fitted to the stick of another, and even from those that are too

hopelessly gone for any further use as umbrellas we shall find plenty

of use for their steels and whalebone.

So I might go on. Bottles are a fertile source of minor domestic

worry. When you buy a bottle you have to pay a penny for it; but when

you have emptied it you cannot get a penny back; no, nor even a

farthing. You throw your empty bottle either into the dust heap,

or let it lie about. But if we could collect all the waste bottles of

London every day, it would go hardly with us if we could not turn a

very pretty penny by washing them, sorting them, and sending them out

on a new lease of life. The washing of old bottles alone will keep a

considerable number of people going.

I can imagine the objection which will be raised by some shortsighted

people, that by giving the old, second-hand material a new lease of

life it will be said that we shall diminish the demand for new

material, and so curtail work and wages at one end while we are

endeavouring to piece on something at the other. This objection reminds

me of a remark of a North Country pilot who, when speaking of the

dulness in the shipbuilding industry, said that nothing would do any

good but a series of heavy storms, which would send a goodly number of

ocean-going steamers to the bottom, to replace which, this political

economist thought, the yards would once more be filled with orders.

This, however, is not the way in which work is supplied. Economy is a

great auxiliary to trade, inasmuch as the money saved is expended on

other products of industry.

There is one material that is continually increasing in quantity, which

is the despair of the life of the householder and of the Local Sanitary

Authority. I refer to the tins in which provisions are supplied.

Nowadays everything comes to us in tins. We have coffee tins,

meat tins, salmon tins, and tins ad nauseam. Tin is becoming more and

more the universal envelope of the rations of man. But when you have

extracted the contents of the tin what can you do with it?

Huge mountains of empty tins lie about every dustyard, for as yet no

man has discovered a means of utilising them when in great masses.

Their market price is about four or five shillings a ton, but they are

so light that it would take half a dozen trucks to hold a ton.

They formerly burnt them for the sake of the solder, but now, by a new

process, they are jointed without solder. The problem of the

utilisation of the tins is one to which we would have to address

ourselves, and I am by no means desponding as to the result.

I see in the old tins of London at least one means of establishing an

industry which is at present almost monopolised by our neighbours.

Most of the toys which are sold in France on New Year's Day are almost

entirely made of sardine tins collected in the French capital. The toy

market of England is at present far from being overstocked, for there

are multitudes of children who have no toys worth speaking of with

which to amuse themselves. In these empty tins I see a means of

employing a large number of people in turning out cheap toys which will

add a new joy to the households of the poor--the poor to whom every

farthing is important, not the rich the rich can always get toys--but

the children of the poor, who live in one room and have nothing to look

out upon but the slum or the street. These desolate little things need

our toys, and if supplied cheap enough they will take them in

sufficient quantities to make it worth while to manufacture them.

A whole book might be written concerning the utilisation of the waste

of London. But I am not going to write one. I hope before long to do

something much better than write a book, namely, to establish an

organisation to utilise the waste, and then if I describe what is being

done it will be much better than by now explaining what I propose to do.

But there is one more waste material to which it is necessary to allude.

I refer to old newspapers and magazines, and books.

Newspapers accumulate in our houses until we sometimes burn them in

sheer disgust. Magazines and old books lumber our shelves until we

hardly know where to turn to put a new volume. My Brigade will relieve

the householder from these difficulties, and thereby become a great

distributing agency of cheap literature. After the magazine has done

its duty in the middle class household it can be passed on to the

reading-rooms, workhouses, and hospitals. Every publication issued

from the Press that is of the slightest use to men and women will,

by our Scheme, acquire a double share of usefulness. It will be read

first by its owner, and then by many people who would never otherwise

see it.

We shall establish an immense second-hand book shop. All the best

books that come into our hands will be exposed for sale, not merely at

our central depots, but on the barrows of our peripatetic colporteurs,

who will go from street to street with literature which, I trust, will

be somewhat superior to the ordinary pabulum supplied to the poor.

After we have sold all we could, and given away all that is needed to

public institutions, the remainder will be carried down to our great

Paper Mill, of which we shall speak later, in connection with our Farm

Colony.

The Household Salvage Brigade will constitute an agency capable of

being utilised to any extent for the distribution of parcels

newspapers, &c. When once you have your reliable man who will call at

every house with the regularity of a postman, and go his beat with the

punctuality of a policeman, you can do great things with him. I do not

need to elaborate this point. It will be a universal Corps of

Commissionaires, created for the service of the public and in the

interests of the poor, which will bring us into direct relations with

every family in London, and will therefore constitute an unequalled

medium for the distribution of advertisements and the collection of

information.

It does not require a very fertile imagination to see that when such a

house-to-house visitation is regularly established, it will develop in

all directions; and working, as it would, in connection with our

Anti-sweating Shops and Industrial Colony, would probably soon become

the medium for negotiating sundry household repairs, from a broken

window to a damaged stocking. If a porter were wanted to move

furniture, or a woman wanted to do charing, or some one to clean

windows or any other odd job, the ubiquitous Servant of All who called

for the waste, either verbally or by postcard, would receive the order,

and whoever was wanted would appear at the time desired without any

further trouble on the part of the householder.

One word as to the cost. There are five hundred thousand houses in the

Metropolitan Police district. To supply every house with a tub and a

sack for the reception of waste would involve an initial expenditure

which could not possibly be less than one shilling a house. So huge is

London, and so enormous the numbers with which we shall have to deal,

that this simple preliminary would require a cost of #25,000.

Of course I do not propose to begin on anything like such a vast scale.

That sum, which is only one of the many expenditures involved, will

serve to illustrate the extent of the operations which the Household

Salvage Brigade will necessitate. The enterprise is therefore beyond

the reach of any but a great and powerful organisation, commanding

capital and able to secure loyalty, discipline, and willing service.

CHAPTER 3. TO THE COUNTRY!--THE FARM COLONY.

A leave on one side for a moment various features of the operations

which will be indispensable but subsidiary to the City Colony, such as

the Rescue Homes for Lost Women, the Retreats for Inebriates, the Homes

for Discharged Prisoners, the Enquiry Office for the Discovery of Lost

Friends and Relatives, and the Advice Bureau, which will, in time,

become an institution that will be invaluable as a poor man's Tribune.

All these and other suggestions for saving the lost and helping the

poor, although they form essential elements of the City Colony, will be

better dealt with after I have explained the relation which the Farm

Colony will occupy to the City Colony, and set forth the way in which

the former will act as a feeder to the Colony Over sea.

I have already described how I propose to deal, in the first case, with

the mass of surplus labour which will infallibly accumulate on our

hands as soon as the Shelters are more extensively established and in

good working order. But I fully recognise that when all has been done

that can be done in the direction of disposing of the unhired men and

women of the town, there will still remain many whom you can neither

employ in the Household Salvage Brigade, nor for whom employers,

be they registered never so carefully, can be found. What, then, must

be done with them? The answer to that question seems to me obvious.

They must go upon the land!

The land is the source of all food; only by the application of labour

can the land be made fully productive. There is any amount of waste

land in the world, not far away in distant Continents, next door to the

North Pole, but here at our very doors. Have you ever calculated,

for instance, the square miles of unused land which fringe the sides of

all our railroads? No doubt some embankments are of material that

would baffle the cultivating skill at a Chinese or the careful

husbandry of a Swiss mountaineer; but these are exceptions. When other

people talk of reclaiming Salisbury Plain, or of cultivating the bare

moorlands of the bleak North, I think of the hundreds of square miles

of land that lie in long ribbons on the side of each of our railways,

upon which, without any cost for cartage, innumerable tons of City

manure could be shot down, and the crops of which could be carried at

once to the nearest market without any but the initial cost of heaping

into convenient trucks. These railway embankments constitute a vast

estate, capable of growing fruit enough to supply all the jam that

Crosse and Blackwell ever boiled. In almost every county in England

are vacant farms, and, in still greater numbers, farms but a quarter

cultivated, which only need the application of an industrious

population working with due incentive to produce twice, thrice,

and four times as much as they yield to-day.

I am aware that there are few subjects upon which there are such fierce

controversies as the possibilities of making a livelihood out of small

holdings, but Irish cottiers do it, and in regions infinitely worse

adapted for the purpose than our Essex corn lands, and possessing none

of the advantages which civilization and co-operation place at the

command of an intelligently directed body of husbandmen. Talk about

the land not being worth cultivating! Go to the Swiss Valleys and

examine for yourself the miserable patches of land, hewed out as it

were from the heart of the granite mountains, where the cottager grows

his crops and makes a livelihood. No doubt he has his Alp, where his

cows pasture in summer-time, and his other occupations which enable him

to supplement the scanty yield of his farm garden among the crags;

but if it pays the Swiss mountaineer in the midst of the eternal snows,

far removed from any market, to cultivate such miserable soil in the

brief summer of the high Alps, it is impossible to believe that

Englishmen, working on English soil, close to our markets and enjoying

all the advantages of co-operation, cannot earn their daily bread by

their daily toil. The soil of England is not unkindly, and although

much is said against our climate, it is, as Mr. Russell Lowell

observes, after a lengthened experience of many countries and many

climes, "the best climate in the whole world for the labouring man."

There are more days in the English year on which a man can work out of

doors with a spade with comparative comfort than in any other country

under heaven. I do not say that men will make a fortune out of the

land, nor do I pretend that we can, under the grey English skies,

hope ever to vie with the productiveness of the Jersey farms; but I am

prepared to maintain against all comers that it is possible for an

industrious man to grow his rations, provided he is given a spade with

which to dig and land to dig in. Especially will this be the case with

intelligent direction and the advantages of co-operation.

Is it not a reasonable supposition? It always seems to me a strange

thing that men should insist that you must first transport your

labourer thousands of miles to a desolate, bleak country in order to

set him to work to extract a livelihood from the soil when hundreds of

thousands of acres lie only half tilled at home or not tilled at all.

Is it reasonable to think that you can only begin to make a living out

of land when it lies several thousand miles from the nearest market,

and thousands of miles from the place where the labourer has to buy his

tools and procure all the necessaries of life which are not grown on

the spot? If a man can make squatting pay on the prairies or in

Australia, where every quarter of grain which he produces has to be

dragged by locomotives across the railways of the continent, and then

carried by steamers across the wide ocean, can he not equally make the

operation at least sufficiently profitable to keep himself alive if you

plant him with the same soil within an hour by rail of the greatest

markets in the world?

The answer to this is, that you cannot give your man as much soil as he

has on the prairies or in the Canadian lumber lands. This, no doubt,

is true, but the squatter who settles in the Canadian backwoods does

not clear his land all at once. He lives on a small portion of it,

and goes on digging and delving little by little, until, after many

years of Herculean labour, he hews out for himself, and his children

after him, a freehold estate. Freehold estates, I admit, are not to be

had for the picking up on English soil, but if a man will but work in

England as they work in Canada or in Australia, he will find as little

difficulty in making a livelihood here as there.

I may be wrong, but when I travel abroad and see the desperate struggle

on the part of peasant proprietors and the small holders in mountainous

districts for an additional patch of soil, the idea of cultivating

which would make our agricultural labourers turn up their noses in

speechless contempt, I cannot but think that our English soil could

carry a far greater number of souls to the acre than that which it

bears at present. Suppose, for instance, that Essex were suddenly to

find itself unmoored from its English anchorage and towed across the

Channel to Normandy, or, not to imagine miracles, suppose that an

Armada of Chinese were to make a descent on the Isle of Thanet, as did

the sea-kings, Hengist and Horsa, does anyone imagine for a moment that

Kent, fertile and cultivated as it is, would not be regarded as a very

Garden of Eden out of the odd corners of which our yellow-skinned

invaders would contrive to extract sufficient to keep themselves in

sturdy health? I only suggest the possibility in order to bring out

clearly the fact that the difficulty is not in the soil nor in the

climate, but in the lack of application of sufficient labour to

sufficient land in the truly scientific way.

"What is the scientific way?" I shall be asked impatiently. I am not

an agriculturist; I do not dogmatize. I have read much from many pens,

and have noted the experiences of many colonies, and I have learned the

lesson that it is in the school of practical labour that the most

valuable knowledge is to be obtained. Nevertheless, the bulk of my

proposals are based upon the experience of many who have devoted their

lives to the study of the subject, and have been endorsed by

specialists whose experience gives them authority to speak with

unquestioning confidence.

SECTION 1.--THE FARM PROPER.

My present idea is to take an estate from five hundred to a thousand

acres within reasonable distance of London. It should be of such land

as will be suitable for market gardening, while having some clay on it

for brick-making and for crops requiring a heavier soil. If possible,

it should not only be on a line of railway which is managed by

intelligent and progressive directors, but it should have access to the

sea and to the river. It should be freehold land, and it should lie at

some considerable distance from any town or village. The reason for

the latter desideratum is obvious. We must be near London for the sake

of our market and for the transmission of the commodities collected by

our Household Salvage Brigade, but it must be some little distance from

any town or village in order that the Colony may be planted clear out

in the open away from the public house, that upas tree of civilisation.

A sine qua non of the new Farm Colony is that no intoxicating liquors

will be permitted within its confines on any pretext whatever.

The doctors will have to prescribe some other stimulant than alcohol

for residents in this Colony. But it will be little use excluding

alcohol with a strong hand and by cast-iron regulations if the

Colonists have only to take a short walk in order to find themselves in

the midst of the "Red Lions," and the "Blue Dragons," and the

"George the Fourths," which abound in every country town.

Having obtained the land I should proceed to prepare it for the

Colonists. This is an operation which is essentially the same in any

country. You need water supply, provisions and shelter. All this

would be done at first in the simplest possible style. Our pioneer

brigade, carefully selected from the competent Out-of-Works in the City

Colony, would be sent down to layout the estate and prepare it for

those who would come after. And here let me say that it is a great

delusion to imagine that in the riffraff and waste of the labour market

there are no workmen to be had except those that are worthless.

Worthless under the present conditions, exposed to constant temptations

to intemperance no doubt they are, but some of the brightest men in

London, with some of the smartest pairs of hands, and the cleverest

brains, are at the present moment weltering helplessly in the sludge

from which we propose to rescue them.

I am not speaking without book in this matter. Some of my best

Officers to-day have been even such as they. There is an infinite

potentiality of capacity lying latent in our Provincial Tap-rooms and

the City Gin Palaces if you can but get them soundly saved, and even

short of that, if you can place them in conditions where they would no

longer be liable to be sucked back into their old disastrous habits,

you may do great things with them.

I can well imagine the incredulous laughter which will greet my proposal.

"What," it will be said, "do you think that you can create agricultural

pioneers out of the scum of Cockneydom?" Let us look for a moment at

the ingredients which make up what you call "the scum of Cockneydom."

After careful examination and close cross-questioning of the

Out-of-Works, whom we have already registered at our Labour Bureau,

we find that at least sixty per cent. are country folk, men, women,

boys, and girls, who have left their homes in the counties to come up

to town in the hope of bettering themselves. They are in no sense of

the word Cockneys, and they represent not the dregs of the country but

rather its brighter and more adventurous spirits who have boldly tried

to make their way in new and uncongenial spheres and have terribly come

to grief. Of thirty cases, selected haphazard, in the various Shelters

during the week ending July 5th, 1890, twenty-two were country-born,

sixteen were men who had come up a long time ago, but did not ever seem

to have settled to regular employ, and four were old military men.

Of sixty cases examined into at the Bureau and Shelters during the

fortnight ending August 2nd, forty-two were country people; twenty-six

men who had been in London for various periods; ranging from six months

to four years; nine were lads under eighteen, who had run away from

home and come up to town; while four were ex-military. Of eighty-five

cases of dossers who were spoken to at night when they slept in the

streets, sixty-three were country people. A very small proportion of

the genuine homeless Out-of-Works are Londoners bred and born.

There is another element in the matter, the existence of which will be

news to most people, and that is the large proportion of ex-military

men who are among the helpless, hopeless destitute. Mr. Arnold White,

after spending many months in the streets of London interrogating more

than four thousand men whom he found in the course of one bleak winter

sleeping out of doors like animals returns it as his conviction that at

least 20 per cent. are Army Reserve men. Twenty per cent! That is to

say one man in every five with whom we shall have to deal has served

Her Majesty the Queen under the colours. This is the resource to which

these poor fellows come after they have given the prime of their lives

to the service of their country. Although this may be largely brought

about by their own thriftless and evil conduct, it is a scandal and

disgrace which may well make the cheek of the patriot tingle.

Still, I see in it a great resource. A man who has been in the Queen's

Army is a man who has learnt to obey. He is further a man who has been

taught in the roughest of rough schools to be handy and smart, to make

the best of the roughest fare, and not to consider himself a martyr if

he is sent on a forlorn hope. I often say if we could only get

Christians to have one-half of the practical devotion and sense of duty

that animates even the commonest Tommy Atkins what a change would be

brought about in the world!

Look at poor Tommy! A country lad who gets himself into some scrape,

runs away from home, finds himself sinking lower and lower, with no

hope of employment, no friends to advise; him, and no one to give him a

helping hand. In sheer despair he takes the Queen's shilling and

enters the ranks. He is handed over to an inexorable drill sergeant,

he is compelled to room in barracks where privacy is unknown, to mix

with men, many of them vicious, few of them companions whom he would of

his own choice select. He gets his rations, and although he is told he

will get a shilling a day, there are so many stoppages that he often

does not finger a shilling a week. He is drilled and worked and

ordered hither and thither as if he were a machine, all of which he

takes cheerfully, without even considering that there is any hardship

in his lot, plodding on in a dull, stolid kind of way for his Queen and

his country, doing his best, also, poor chap, to be proud of his red

uniform, and to cultivate his self-respect by reflecting that he is one

of the defenders of his native land, one of the heroes upon whose

courage and endurance depends the safety of the British realm.

Some fine day at the other end of the world some prancing pro-consul

finds it necessary to smash one of the man-slaying machines that loom

ominous on his borders, or some savage potentate makes an incursion

into territory of a British colony, or some fierce outburst of

Mahommedan fanaticism raises up a Mahdi in mid-Africa. In a moment

Tommy Atkins is marched off to the troop-ship, and swept across the

seas, heart-sick and sea-sick, and miserable exceedingly, to tight the

Queen's enemies in foreign parts. When he arrives there he is bundled

ashore, brigaded with other troops, marched to the front through the

blistering glare of a tropical sun over poisonous marshes in which his

comrades sicken and die, until at last he is drawn up in square to

receive the charge of tens of thousands of ferocious savages.

Far away from all who love him or care for him, foot-sore and travel

weary, having eaten perhaps but a piece of dry bread in the last

twenty-four hours, he must stand up and kill or be killed. Often he

falls beneath the thrust of an assegai or the slashing broadsword of

the charging enemy. Then, after the fight is over his comrades turn up

the sod where he lies, bundle his poor bones into the shallow pit,

and leave him without even a cross to mark his solitary grave.

Perhaps he is fortunate and escapes. Yet Tommy goes uncomplainingly

through all these hardships and privations, does not think himself

a martyr, takes no fine airs about what he has done and suffered,

and shrinks uncomplainingly into our Shelters and our Factories, only

asking as a benediction from heaven that someone will give him an

honest job of work to do. That is the fate of Tommy Atkins. If in our

churches and chapels as much as one single individual were to bear and

dare, for the benefit of his kind and the salvation of men, what a

hundred thousand Tommy Atkins' bear uncomplainingly, taking it all as

if it were in the day's work, for their rations and their shilling a

day (with stoppages), think you we should not transform the whole face

of the world? Yea, verily. We find but very little of such devotion;

no, not in Israel.

I look forward to making great use of these Army Reserve men.

There are engineers amongst them; there are artillery men and infantry;

there are cavalry men, who know what a horse needs to keep him in good

health, and men of the transport department, for whom I shall find work

enough to do in the transference of the multitudinous waste of London

from our town Depots to the outlying Farm. This, however, is a

digression, by the way.

After having got the Farm into some kind of ship-shape, we should

select from the City Colonies all those who were likely to be

successful as our first settlers. These would consist of men who had

been working so many weeks or days in the Labour Factory, or had been

under observation for a reasonable time at the Shelters or in the

Slums, and who had given evidence of their willingness to work, their

amenity to discipline, and their ambition to improve themselves.

On arrival at the Farm they would be installed in a barracks, and at

once told off to work. In winter time there would be draining,

and road-making, and fencing, and many other forms of industry which

could go on when the days are short and the nights are long.

In Spring, Summertime and Autumn, some would be employed on the land,

chiefly in spade husbandry, upon what is called the system of

"intensive" agriculture, such as prevails in the suburbs of Paris,

where the market gardeners literally create the soil, and which yields

much greater results than when you merely scratch the surface with a

plough.

Our Farm, I hope, would be as productive as a great market garden.

There would be a Superintendent on the Colony, who would be a practical

gardener, familiar with the best methods of small agriculture,

and everything that science and experience shows to be needful for the

profitable treatment of the land. Then there would be various other

forms of industry continually in progress, so that employment could be

furnished, adapted to the capacity and skill of every Colonist.

Where farm buildings are wanted, the Colonists must erect them

themselves. If they want glass houses, they must put them up.

Everything on the Estate must be the production of the Colonists.

Take, for instance, the building of cottages. After the first

detachment has settled down into its quarters and brought the fields

somewhat into cultivation, there will arise a demand for houses.

These houses must be built, and the bricks made; by the Colonists

themselves. All the carpentering and the joinery will be done on the

premises, and by this means a sustained demand for work will be

created. Then there would be furniture, clothing, and a great many

other wants, the supply of the whole of which would create labour which

the Colonists must perform.

For a long time to come the Salvation Army will be able to consume all

the vegetables and crops which the Colonies will produce. That is one

advantage of being connected with so great and growing a concern;

the right hand will help the left, and we shall be able to do many

things which those who devote themselves exclusively to colonisation

would find it impossible to accomplish. We have seen the large

quantities of provisions which are required to supply the Food Depots

in their present dimensions, and with the coming extensions the

consumption will be enormously augmented. On this Farm I propose to

carry on every description of "little agriculture."

I have not yet referred to the female side of our operations,

but have reserved them for another chapter. It is necessary, however,

to bring them in here in order to explain that employment will be

created for women as well as men. Fruit farming affords a great

opening for female labour, and it will indeed be a change as from

Tophet to the Garden of Eden when the poor lost girls on the

streets of London exchange the pavements of Piccadilly for the

strawberry Beds of Essex or Kent.

Not only will vegetables and fruit of every description be raised,

but I think that a great deal might be done in the smaller adjuncts of

the Farm.

It is quite certain that amongst the mass of people with whom we have

to deal there will be a residual remnant of persons to some extent

mentally infirm or physically incapacitated from engaging in the harder

toils. For these people it is necessary to find work, and I think

there would be a good field for their benumbed energies in looking

after rabbits, feeding poultry, minding bees, and, in short doing all

those little odd jobs about a place which must be attended to,

but which will not repay the labour of able-bodied men.

One advantage of the cosmopolitan nature of the Army is that we have

Officers in almost every country in the world. When this Scheme is

well on the way every Salvation Officer in every I and will have it

imposed upon him as one of the duties of his calling to keep his eyes

open for every useful notion and every conceivable contrivance for

increasing the yield of the soil and utilising the employment of waste

labour. By this means I hope that there will not be an idea in the

world which will not be made available for our Scheme. If an Officer

in Sweden can give us practical hints as to how they manage food

kitchens for the people, or an Officer in the South of France can

explain how the peasants are able to rear eggs and poultry not only for

their own use, but so as to be able to export them by the million to

England; if a Sergeant in Belgium understands how it is that the rabbit

farmers there can feed and fatten and supply our market with millions

of rabbits we shall have him over, tap his brains, and set him to work

to benefit our people.

By the establishment of this Farm Colony we should create a great

school of technical agricultural education. It would be a Working

Men's Agricultural University, training people for the life which they

would have to lead in the new countries they will go forth to colonise

and possess.

Every man who goes to our Farm Colony does so, not to acquire his

fortune, but to obtain a knowledge of an occupation and that mastery of

his tools which will enable him to play his part in the battle of life.

He will be provided with a cheap uniform, which we shall find no

difficulty in rigging up from the old clothes of London, and it will go

hardly with us, and we shall have worse luck than the ordinary market

gardener, if we do not succeed in making sufficient profit to pay all

the expenses of the concern, and leave something over for the

maintenance of the hopelessly incompetent, and those who, to put it

roughly, are not worth their keep.

Every person in the Farm Colony will be taught the elementary lesson of

obedience, and will be instructed in the needful arts of husbandry,

or some other method of earning his bread. The Agricultural Section

will learn the lesson of the seasons and of the best kind of seeds and

plants. Those belonging to this Section will learn how to hedge and

ditch, how to make roads and build bridges, and generally to subdue the

earth and make it yield to him the riches which it never withholds from

the industrious and skilful workman. But the Farm Colony, any more

than the City Colony, although an abiding institution, will not provide

permanently for those with whom we have to deal. It is a Training

School for Emigrants, a place where those indispensably practical

lessons are given which will enable the Colonists to know their way

about and to feel themselves at home wherever there is land to till,

stock to rear, and harvests to reap. We shall rely greatly for the

peace and prosperity of the Colony upon the sense of brotherhood which

will be universal in it from the highest to the lowest. While there

will be no systematic wage-paying there will be some sort of rewards

and remuneration for honest industry, which will be stored up, for his

benefit, as afterwards explained. They will in the main work each for

all, and, therefore, the needs of all will be supplied, and any

overplus will go to make the bridge over which any poor fellow may

escape from the horrible pit and the miry clay from which they

themselves have been rescued.

The dulness and deadness of country life, especially in the Colonies,

leads many men to prefer a life of hardship and privation in a City

slum. But in our Colony they would be near to each other, and would

enjoy the advantages of country life and the association and

companionship of life in town.

SECTION 2.--THE INDUSTRIAL VILLAGE.

In describing the operations of the Household Salvage Brigade I have

referred to the enormous quantities of good sound food which would be

collected from door to door every day of the year. Much of this food

would be suitable for human consumption, its waste being next door to

sinful. Imagine, for instance, the quantities of soup which might be

made from boiling the good fresh meaty bones of the great City!

Think of the dainty dishes which a French cook would be able to serve

up from the scraps and odds and ends of a single West End kitchen.

Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty

dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be

discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel.

But after all that is done there will remain a mass of food which

cannot be eaten by man, but can be converted into food for him by the

simple process of passing it through another digestive apparatus.

The old bread of London, the soiled, stale crusts can be used in

foddering the horses which are employed in collecting the waste.

It will help to feed the rabbits, whose hutches will be close by every

cottage on the estate, and the hens of the Colony will flourish on the

crumbs which fall from the table of Dives. But after the horses and

the rabbits and poultry have been served, there will remain a residuum

of eatable matter, which can only be profitably disposed of to the

voracious and necessary pig. I foresee the rise of a piggery in

connection with the new Social Scheme, which will dwarf into

insignificance all that exist in Great Britain and Ireland. We have

the advantage of the experience of the whole world as to the choice of

breeds, the construction of sties, and the rearing of stock. We shall

have the major part of our food practically for the cost of collection,

and be able to adopt all the latest methods of Chicago for the killing,

curing, and disposing of our pork, ham, and bacon.

There are few animals more useful than the pig. He will eat anything,

live anywhere, and almost every particle of him, from the tip of his

nose to the end of his tail, is capable of being converted into a

saleable commodity. Your pig also is a great producer of manure,

and agriculture is after all largely a matter of manure. Treat the

land well and it will treat you well. With our piggery in connection

with our Farm Colony there would be no lack of manure.

With the piggery there would grow up a great bacon factory for curing,

and that again would make more work. Then as for sausages they would

be produced literally by the mile, and all made of the best meat

instead of being manufactured out of the very objectionable ingredients

too often stowed away in that poor man's favourite ration.

Food, however, is only one of the materials which will be collected

by the Household Salvage Brigade. The barges which float down the

river with the tide, laden to the brim with the cast-off waste of

half a million homes, will bring down an enormous quantity of material

which cannot be eaten even by pigs. There will be, for instance, the

old bones. At present it pays speculators to go to the prairies of

America and gather up the bleached bones of the dead buffaloes,

in order to make manure. It pays manufacturers to bring bones from the

end of the earth in order to grind them up for use on our fields.

But the waste bones of London; who collects them? I see, as in a

vision, barge loads upon barge loads of bones floating down the Thames

to the great Bone Factory. Some of the best will yield material for

knife handles and buttons, and the numberless articles which will

afford ample opportunity in the long winter evenings for the

acquisition of skill on the part of our Colonist carvers, while the

rest will go straight to the Manure Mill. There will be a constant

demand for manure on the part of our ever-increasing nests of new

Colonies and our Co-operative Farm, every man in which will be educated

in the great doctrine that there is no good agriculture without liberal

manuring. And here will be an unfailing source of supply.

Among the material which comes down will be an immense quantity of

greasy matter, bits of fat, suet and lard, tallow, strong butter,

and all the rancid fat of a great city. For all that we shall have to

find use. The best of it will make waggon grease, the rest, after due

boiling and straining, will form the nucleus of the raw material which

will make our Social Soap a household word throughout the kingdom.

After the Manure Works, the Soap Factory will be the natural adjunct of

our operations.

The fourth great output of the daily waste of London will be waste

paper and rags, which, after being chemically treated, and duly

manipulated by machinery, will be re-issued to the world in the shape

of paper. The Salvation Army consumes no less than thirty tons of

paper every week. Here, therefore, would be one customer for as much

paper as the new mill would be able to turn out at the onset; paper on

which we could print the glad tidings of great joy, and tell the poor

of all nations the news of salvation for earth and Heaven, full,

present, and free to all the children of men.

Then comes the tin. It will go hard with us if we cannot find some way

of utilizing these tins, whether we make them into flowerpots with a

coat of enamel, or convert them into ornaments, or cut them up for toys

or some other purpose. My officers have been instructed to make an

exhaustive report on the way the refuse collectors of Paris deal with

the sardine tins. The industry of making tin toys will be one which

can be practised better in the Farm Colony than in the City.

If necessary, we shall bring an accomplished workman from France,

who will teach our people the way of dealing with the tin.

In connection with all this it is obvious there would be a constant

demand for packing cases, for twine, rope, and for boxes of all kinds;

for carts and cars; and, in short, we should before long have a

complete community practising almost all the trades that are to be

found in London, except the keeping of grog shops, the whole being

worked upon co-operative principles, but co-operation not for the

benefit of the individual co-operator, but for the benefit of the

sunken mass that lies behind it.

RULES AND REGULATIONS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF COLONISTS.

A document containing the Orders and Regulations for the Government of

the Colony must be approved and signed by every Colonist before

admission. Amongst other things there will be the following: --

1. All Officers must be treated respectfully and implicitly obeyed.

2. The use of intoxicants strictly prohibited, none being allowed

within its borders. Any Colonist guilty of violating this Order to

be expelled, and that on the first offence.

3. Expulsion for drunkenness, dishonesty, or falsehood will follow the

third offence.

4. Profane language strictly forbidden.

5. No cruelty to be practised on man, woman, child, or animal.

6. Serious offenders against the virtue of women, or of children of

either sex, to incur immediate expulsion.

7. After a certain period of probation, and a considerable amount of

patience, all who will not work to be expelled.

8. The decision of the Governor of the Colony, whether in the City,

or the Farm, or Over the Sea, to be binding in all cases.

9. With respect to penalties, the following rules will be acted upon.

The chief reliance for the maintenance of order, as has been

observed before, will be placed upon the spirit of love which will

prevail throughout the community. But as it cannot be expected to

be universally successful, certain penalties will have to be

provided: --

(a) First offences, except in flagrant cases, will be recorded.

(b) The second offence will be published.

(c) The third offence will incur expulsion or being handed over to the

authorities.

Other regulations will be necessary as the Scheme develops.

There will be no attempt to enforce upon the Colonists the rules and

regulations to which Salvation Soldiers are subjected. Those who are

soundly saved and who of their own free will desire to become

Salvationists will, of course, be subjected to the rules of the

Service. But Colonists who are willing to work and obey the orders of

the Commanding Officer will only be subject to the foregoing and

similar regulations; in all other things they will be left free.

For instance, there will be no objection to field recreations or any

outdoor exercises which conduce to the maintenance of health and

spirits. A reading room and a library will be provided, together with

a hall, in which they can amuse themselves in the long winter nights

and in unfavourable weather. These things are not for the Salvation

Army Soldiers, who have other work in the world, but for those who are

not in the Army these recreations will be permissible. Gambling and

anything of an immoral tendency will be repressed like stealing.

There will probably be an Annual Exhibition of fruit and flowers,

at which all the Colonists who have a plot of garden of their own will

take part. They will exhibit their fruit and vegetables as well as

their rabbits, their poultry and all the other live-stock of the farm.

Every effort will be made to establish village industries, and I am not

without hope but that we may be able to restore some of the domestic

occupations which steam has compelled us to confine to the great

factories. The more the Colony can be made self-supporting the better.

And although the hand loom can never compete with Manchester mills,

still an occupation which kept the hands of the goodwife busy in the

long winter nights, is not to be despised as an element in the

economics of the Settlement. While Manchester and Leeds may be able to

manufacture common goods much more cheaply than they can be spun at

home, even these emporiums, with all their grand improvements in

machinery, would be sorely pressed to-day to compete with the hand-loom

in many superior classes of work. For instance, we all know the

hand-sewn boot still holds its own against the most perfect article

that machinery can turn out.

There would be, in the centre of the Colony, a Public Elementary School

at which the children would receive training, and side by side with

that an Agricultural Industrial School, as elsewhere described.

The religious welfare of the Colony would be looked after by the

Salvation Army, but there will be no compulsion to take part in

its services. The Sabbath will be strictly observed; no unnecessary

work will be done in the Colony on that day, but beyond interdicted

labour, the Colonists will be allowed to spend Sunday as they please.

It will be the fault of the Salvation Army if they do not find our

Sunday Services sufficiently attractive to command their attendance.

SECTION 3.--AGRICULTURAL VILLAGES.

This brings me to the next feature of the Scheme, the creation of

agricultural settlements in the neighbourhood of the Farm, around the

original Estate. I hope to obtain land for the purpose of allotments

which can be taken up to the extent of so many acres by the more

competent Colonists who wish to remain at home instead of going abroad.

There will be allotments from three to five acres with a cottage,

a cow, and the necessary tools and seed for making the allotment

self-supporting. A weekly charge will be imposed for the he repayment

of the cost of the fixing and stock. The tenant will of course,

be entitled to his tenant-right, but adequate precautions will be taken

against underletting and other forms by which sweating makes its way

into agricultural communities. On entering into possession, the tenant

will become responsible for his own and his family's maintenance.

I shall stand no longer in the relation of father of the household to

him, as I do to the other members of the Colony; his obligations will

cease to me, except in the payment of his rent.

The creation of a large number of Allotment Farms would make the

establishment of a creamery necessary, where the milk could be brought

in every day and converted into butter by the most modern methods,

with the least possible delay. Dairying, which has in some places on

the Continent almost developed to a fine art, is in a very backward

condition in this country. But by co-operation among the cottiers and

an intelligent Headquarter staff much could be done which at present

appears impossible.

The tenant will be allowed permanent tenancy on payment of an annual

rent or land tax, subject, of course, to such necessary regulations

which may be made for the prevention of intemperance and immorality and

the preservation of the fundamental features of the Colony. In this

way our Farm Colony will throw off small Colonies all round it until

the original site is but the centre of a whole series of small farms,

where those whom we have rescued and trained will live, if not under

their own vine and fig tree, at least in the midst of their own little

fruit farm, and surrounded by their small flocks and herds.

The cottages will be so many detached residences, each standing in its

own ground, not so far away from its neighbours as to deprive its

occupants of the benefit of human intercourse.

SECTION 4.--CO-OPERATIVE FARM.

Side by side with the Farm Colony proper I should propose to renew the

experiment of Mr. E. T. Craig, which he found work so successfully at

Ralahine. When any members of the original Colony had pulled

themselves sufficiently together to desire to begin again on their own

account, I should group some of them as partners in a Co-operative

Farm, and see whether or no the success achieved in County Clare could

not be repeated in Essex or in Kent. I cannot have more unpromising

material to deal with than the wild Irishmen on Colonel Vandeleur's

estate, and I would certainly take care to be safeguarded against any

such mishap as destroyed the early promise of Ralahine.

I shall look upon this as one of the most important experiments of the

entire series, and if, as I anticipate, it can be worked successfully,

that is, if the results of Ralahine can be secured on a larger scale,

I shall consider that the problem of the employment of the people,

and the use of the land, and the food supply for the globe,

is unquestionably solved, were its inhabitants many times greater in

number than they are.

Without saying more, some idea will be obtained as to what I propose

from the story of Ralahine related briefly at the close of this volume.

CHAPTER 4. NEW BRITAIN--THE COLONY OVER-SEA.

We now come to the third and final stage of the regenerative process.

The Colony Over-Sea. To mention Over-Sea is sufficient with some

people to damn the Scheme. A prejudice against emigration has been

diligently fostered in certain quarters by those who have openly

admitted that they did not wish to deplete the ranks of the Army of

Discontent at home, for the more discontented people you have here the

more trouble you can give the Government, and the more power you have

to bring about the general overturn, which is the only thing in which

they see any hope for the future. Some again object to emigration on

the ground that it is transportation. I confess that I have great

sympathy with those who object to emigration as carried on hitherto,

and if it be a consolation to any of my critics I may say at once that

so far from compulsorily expatriating any Englishman I shall refuse to

have any part or lot in emigrating any man or woman who does not

voluntarily wish to be sent out.

A journey over sea is a very different thing now to what it was when

a voyage to Australia consumed more than six months, when emigrants

were crowded by hundreds into sailing ships, and scenes of abominable

sin and brutality were the normal incidents of the passage. The world

has grown much smaller since the electric telegraph was discovered and

side by side with the shrinkage of this planet under the influence of

steam and electricity there has come a sense of brotherhood and a

consciousness of community of interest and of nationality on the part

of the English-speaking people throughout the world. To change from

Devon to Australia is not such a change in many respects as merely to

cross over from Devon to Normandy. In Australia the Emigrant finds him

self among men and women of the same habits, the same language, and in

fact the same people, excepting that they live under the southern cross

instead of in the northern latitudes. The reduction of the postage

between England and the Colonies, a reduction which I hope will soon be

followed by the establishment of the Universal Penny Post between the

English speaking lands, will further tend to lessen the sense of

distance.

The constant travelling of the Colonists backwards and forwards to

England makes it absurd to speak of the Colonies as if they were a

foreign land. They are simply pieces of Britain distributed about the

world, enabling the Britisher to have access to the richest parts of

the earth.

Another objection which will be taken to this Scheme is that colonists

already over sea will see with infinite alarm the prospect of the

transfer of our waste labour to their country. It is easy to

understand how this misconception will arise, but there is not much

danger of opposition on this score. The working-men who rule the roost

at Melbourne object to the introduction of fresh workmen into their

labour market, for the same reason that the new Dockers' Union objects

to the appearance of new hands at the dock gates, that is for fear the

newcomers will enter into unfriendly competition with them. But no

Colony, not even the Protectionist and Trade Unionists who govern

Victoria, could rationally object to the introduction of trained

Colonists planted out upon the land. They would see that these men

would become a source of wealth, simply because they would at once

become producers as well as consumers, and instead of cutting down

wages they would tend directly to improve trade and so increase the

employment of the workmen now in the Colony. Emigration as hitherto

conducted has been carried out on directly opposite principles to

these. Men and women have simply been shot down into countries without

any regard to their possession of ability to earn a livelihood,

and have consequently become an incubus upon the energies of the

community, and a discredit, expense, and burden. The result is that

they gravitate to the towns and compete with the colonial workmen,

and thereby drive down wages. We shall avoid that mistake. We need

not wonder that Australians and other Colonists should object to their

countries being converted into a sort of dumping ground, on which to

deposit men and women totally unsuited for the new circumstances in

which they find themselves.

Moreover, looking at it from the aspect of the class itself, would such

emigration be of any enduring value? It is not merely more favourable

circumstances that are required by these crowds, but those habits of

industry, truthfulness, and self-restraint, which will enable them to

profit by better conditions if they could only come to possess them.

According to the most reliable information there are already sadly too

many of the same classes we want to help in countries supposed to be

the paradise of the working-man.

What could be done with a people whose first enquiry on reaching

a foreign land would be for a whisky shop, and who were utterly

ignorant of those forms of labour and habits of industry absolutely

indispensable to the earning of a subsistence amid the hardships of an

Emigrant's life? Such would naturally shrink from the self-denial the

new circumstances inevitably called for, and rather than suffer the

inconveniences connected with a settler's life, would probably sink

down into helpless despair, or settle in the slums of the first city

they came to.

These difficulties, in my estimation, bar the way to the emigration on

any considerable scale of the "submerged tenth," and yet I am strongly

of opinion, with the majority of those who have thought and written on

political economy, that emigration is the only remedy for this

mighty evil. Now, the Over-Sea Colony plan, I think, meets these

difficulties: --

(1) In the preparation of the Colony for the people.

(2) In the preparation of the people for the Colony.

(3) In the arrangements that are rendered possible for the transport

of the people when prepared.

It is proposed to secure a large tract of land in some country suitable

to our purpose. We have thought of South Africa, to begin with.

We are in no way pledged to this part of the world, or to it alone.

There is nothing to prevent our establishing similar settlements in

Canada, Australia, or some other land. British Columbia has been

strongly urged upon our notice. Indeed, it is certain if this Scheme

proves the success we anticipate, the first Colony will be the

forerunner of similar communities elsewhere. Africa, however, presents

to us great advantages for the moment. There is any amount of land

suitable for our purpose which can be obtained, we think, without

difficulty. The climate is healthy. Labour is in great demand,

so that if by any means work failed on the Colony, there would be

abundant opportunities for securing good wages from the neighbouring

Companies.

SECTION 1.--THE COLONY AND THE COLONISTS.

Before any decision is arrived at, however, information will be

obtained as to the position and character of the land;

the accessibility of markets for commodities; communication with

Europe, and other necessary particulars.

The next business would be to obtain on grant, or otherwise,

a sufficient tract of suitable country for the purpose of a Colony,

on conditions that would meet its present and future character.

After obtaining a title to the country, the next business will be to

effect a settlement in it. This, I suppose, will be accomplished by

sending a competent body of men under skilled supervision to fix on a

suitable location for the first settlement, erecting such buildings as

would be required, enclosing and breaking up the land, putting in first

crops, and so storing sufficient supplies of food for the future.

Then a supply of Colonists would be sent out to join them, and from

time to time other detachments, as the Colony was prepared to receive

them. Further locations could then be chosen, and more country broken

up, and before a very long period has passed the Colony would be

capable of receiving and absorbing a continuous stream of emigration of

considerable proportions.

The next work would be the establishment of a strong and efficient

government, prepared to carry out and enforce the same laws and

discipline to which the Colonists had been accustomed in England,

together with such alterations and additions as the new circumstances

would render necessary.

The Colonists would become responsible for all that concerned their own

support; that is to say, they would buy and sell, engage in trade,

hire servants, and transact all the ordinary business affairs of

every-day life.

Our Headquarters in England would represent the Colony in this country

on their behalf, and with money supplied by them, when once fairly

established, would buy for their agents what they were at the outset

unable to produce themselves, such as machinery and the like,

also selling their produce to the best advantage.

All land, timber, minerals, and the like, would be rented to the

Colonists, all unearned increments, and improvements on the land,

would be held on behalf of the entire community, and utilised for its

general advantages, a certain percentage being set apart for the

extension of its borders, and the continued transmission of Colonists

from England in increasing numbers.

Arrangements would be made for the temporary accommodation of new

arrivals, Officers being maintained for the purpose of taking them

in hand on landing and directing and controlling them generally.

So far as possible, they would be introduced to work without any waste

of time, situations being ready for them to enter upon; and any way,

their wants would be supplied till this was the case.

There would be friends who would welcome and care for them, not merely

on the principle of profit and loss, but on the ground of friendship

and religion, many of whom the emigrants would probably have known

before in the old country, together with all the social influences,

restraints, and religious enjoyments to which the Colonists have

been accustomed. After dealing with the preparation of the Colony

for the Colonists, we now come to the preparation of the

COLONISTS FOR THE COLONY OVER-SEA.

They would be prepared by an education in honesty, truth, and industry,

without which we could not indulge in any hope of their succeeding.

While men and women would be received into the City Colony without

character, none would be sent over the sea who had not been proved

worthy of this trust.

They would be inspired with an ambition to do well for themselves

and their fellow Colonists.

They would be instructed in all that concerned their future career.

They would be taught those industries in which they would be most

profitably employed.

They would be inured to the hardships they would have to endure.

They would be accustomed to the economies they would have to practise.

They would be made acquainted with the comrades with whom they would

have to live and labour.

They would be accustomed to the Government, Orders, and Regulations

which they would have to obey.

They would be educated, so far as the opportunity served, in those

habits of patience, forbearance, and affection which would so largely

tend to their own welfare, and to the successful carrying out of this

part of our Scheme.

TRANSPORT TO THE COLONY OVER-SEA.

We now come to the question of transport. This certainly has an

element of difficulty in it, if the remedy is to be applied on a very

large scale. But this will appear of less importance if we consider: --

That the largeness of the number will reduce the individual cost.

Emigrants can be conveyed to such a location in South Africa, as we

have in view, by ones and twos at #8 per head, including land journey;

and, no doubt, were a large number carried, this figure would be

reduced considerably.

Many of the Colonists would have friends who would assist them with the

cost of passage money and outfit.

All the unmarried will have earned something on the City and Farm

Colonies, which will go towards meeting their passage money. In the

course of time relatives, who are comfortably settled in the Colony,

will save money, and assist their kindred in getting out to them.

We have the examples before our eyes in Australia and the United States

of how those countries have in this form absorbed from Europe millions

of poor struggling people.

All Colonists and emigrants generally will bind themselves in a legal

instrument to repay all monies, expenses of passage, outfit,

or otherwise, which would in turn be utilised in sending out further

contingents.

On the plan named, if prudently carried out, and generously assisted,

the transfer of the entire surplus population of this country is not

only possible, but would, we think, in process of time, be effected

with enormous advantage to the people themselves, to this country,

and the country of their adoption. The history of Australia and the

United States evidences this. It is quite true the first settlers in

the latter were people superior in every way for such an enterprise to

the bulk of those we propose to send out. But it is equally true that

large numbers of the most ignorant and vicious of our European

populations have been pouring into that country ever since without

affecting its prosperity, and this Colony Over-Sea would have the

immense advantage at the outset which would come from a government and

discipline carefully adapted to its peculiar circumstances, and rigidly

enforced in every particular.

I would guard against misconception in relation to this Colony Over-Sea

by pointing out that all my proposals here are necessarily tentative

and experimental. There is no intention on my part to stick to any of

these suggestions if, on maturer consideration and consultation with

practical men, they can be improved upon. Mr. Arnold White, who has

already conducted two parties of Colonists to South Africa, is one of

the few men in this country who has had practical experience of the

actual difficulties of colonisation. I have, through a mutual friend,

had the advantage of comparing notes with him very fully, and I venture

to believe that there is nothing in this Scheme that is not in harmony

with the result of his experience. In a couple of months this book will

be read all over the world. It will bring me a plentiful crop of

suggestions, and, I hope, offers of service from many valuable and

experienced Colonists in every country. In the due order of things the

Colony Over-Sea is the last to be started. Long before our first batch

of Colonists is ready to cross the ocean I shall be in a position to

correct and revise the proposals of this chapter by the best wisdom and

matured experience of the practical men of every Colony in the Empire.

SECTION 2.--UNIVERSAL EMIGRATION.

We have in our remarks on the Over-Sea Colony referred to the general

concensus of opinion on the part of those who have studied the Social

Question as to Emigration being the only remedy for the overcrowded

population of this country, at the same time showing some of the

difficulties which lie in the way of the adoption of the remedy; the

dislike of the people to so great a change as is involved in going from

one country to another; the cost of their transfer, and their general

unfitness for an emigrant's life. These difficulties, as I think we

have seen, are fully met by the Over-Sea Colony Scheme. But, apart

from those who, driven by their abject poverty, will avail themselves

of our Scheme, there are multitudes of people all over the country who

would be likely to emigrate could they be assisted in so doing.

Those we propose to help in the following manner: --

1. By opening a Bureau in London, and appointing Officers whose

business it will be to acquire every kind of information as to

suitable countries, their adaptation to, and the openings they

present for different trades and callings, the possibility of

obtaining land and employment, the rates of remuneration, and the

like. These enquiries will include the cost of passage-money,

railway fares, outfit, together with every kind of information

required by an emigrant.

2. From this Bureau any one may obtain all necessary information.

3. Special terms will be arranged with steamships, railway companies,

and land agents, of which emigrants using the Bureau will have the

advantage.

4. Introductions will be supplied, as far as possible, to agents and

friends in the localities to which the emigrant may be proceeding.

5. Intending emigrants, desirous of saving money, can deposit it

through this Bureau in the Army Bank for that purpose.

6. It is expected that government contractors and other employers of

labour requiring Colonists of reliable character will apply to this

Bureau for such, offering favourable terms with respect to

passage-money, employment, and other advantages.

7. No emigrant will be sent out in response to any application from

abroad where the emigrant's expenses are defrayed, without

references as to character, industry, and fitness.

This Bureau, we think, will be especially useful to women and young

girls. There must be a large number of such in this country living in

semi-starvation, anyway, with very poor prospects, who would be very

welcome abroad, the expense of whose transfer governments, and masters

and mistresses alike would be very glad to defray, or assist in

defraying, if they could only be assured on both sides of the

beneficial character of the arrangements when made.

So widespread now are the operations of the Army, and so extensively

will this Bureau multiply its agencies that it will speedily be able to

make personal enquiries on both sides, that is in the interest alike of

the emigrant and the intended employer in any part of the world.

SECTION 3.--THE SALVATION SHIP.

When we have selected a party of emigrants whom we believe to be

sufficiently prepared to settle on the land which has been got ready

for them in the Colony over Sea, it will be no dismal expatriation

which will await them. No one who has ever been on the West Coast of

Ireland when the emigrants were departing, and has heard the dismal

wails which arise from those who are taking leave of each other for the

last time on earth, can fail to sympathise with the horror excited in

many minds by the very word emigration. But when our party sets out,

there will be no violent wrenching of home ties. In our ship we shall

export them all--father, mother, and children. The individuals will

be grouped in families, and the families will, on the Farm Colony, have

been for some months past more or less near neighbours, meeting each

other in the field, in the workshops, and in the Religious Services.

It will resemble nothing so much as the unmooring of a little piece of

England, and towing it across the sea to find a safe anchorage in a

sunnier clime. The ship which takes out emigrants will bring back the

produce of the farms, and constant travelling to and fro will lead more

than ever to the feeling that we and our ocean-sundered brethren are

members of one family.

No one who has ever crossed the ocean can have failed to be impressed

with the mischief that comes to emigrants when they are on their way to

their destination. Many and many a girl has dated her downfall from

the temptations which beset her while journeying to a land where she

had hoped to find a happier future

"Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," and he must

have his hands full on board an emigrant ship. Look into the steerage

at any time, and you will find boredom inexpressible on every face.

The men have nothing to do, and an incident of no more importance than

the appearance of a sail upon the distant horizon is an event which

makes the whole ship talk. I do not see why this should be so.

Of course, in the case of conveying passengers and freight, with the

utmost possible expedition, for short distances, it would be idle to

expect that either time or energies could be spared for the employment

or instruction of the passengers. But the case is different when,

instead of going to America, the emigrant turns his face to South

Africa or remote Australia. Then, even with the fastest steamers,

they must remain some weeks or months upon the high seas. The result

is that habits of idleness are contracted, bad acquaintances are

formed, and very often the moral and religious work of a lifetime is

undone.

To avoid these evil consequences, I think we should be compelled to

have a ship of our own as soon as possible. A sailing vessel might be

found the best adapted for the work. Leaving out the question of time,

which would be of very secondary importance with us, the construction

of a sailing ship would afford more space for the accommodation of

emigrants and for industrial occupation, and would involve considerably

less working expenses, besides costing very much less at the onset,

even if we did not have one given to us, which I should think would be

very probable.

All the emigrants would be under the charge of Army Officers, and

instead of the voyage being demoralising, it would be made instructive

and profitable. From leaving London to landing at their destination,

every colonist would be under watchful oversight, could receive

instruction in those particulars where they were still needing it,

and be subjected to influences that would be beneficial everyway.

Then we have seen that one of the great difficulties in the direction

of emigration is the cost of transport. The expense of conveying a man

from England to Australia, occupying as it does some seven or eight

weeks, arises not so much from the expense connected with the working

of the vessel which carries him, as the amount of provisions he

consumes during the passage. Now, with this plan I think that the

emigrants might be made to earn at least a portion of this outlay.

There is no reason why a man should not work on board ship any more

than on land. Of course, nothing much could be done when the weather

was very rough; but the average number of days during which it would be

impossible for passengers to employ themselves profitably in the time

spent between the Channel and Cape Town or Australia would be

comparatively few.

When the ship was pitching or rolling, work would be difficult; but

even then, when the Colonists get their sea-legs, and are free from the

qualmishness which overtakes landsmen when first getting afloat,

I cannot see why they should not engage in some form of industrial work

far more profitable than yawning and lounging about the deck, to say

nothing of the fact that by so doing they would lighten the expense of

their transit. The sailors, firemen, engineers, and everybody else

connected with a vessel have to work, and there is no reason why our

Colonists should not work also.

Of course, this method would require special arrangements in the

fitting up of the vessel, which, if it were our own, it would not be

difficult to make. At first sight it may seem difficult to find

employments on board ship which could be engaged in to advantage,

and it might not be found possible to fix up every individual right

away; but I think there would be very few of the class and character of

people we should take out, with the prior instructions they would have

received, who would not have fitted themselves into some useful labour

before the voyage ended.

To begin with, there would be a large amount of the ordinary ship's

work that the Colonists could perform, such as the preparation of food,

serving it out, cleaning the decks and fittings of the ship generally,

together with the loading and unloading of cargo. All these operations

could be readily done under the direction of permanent hands.

Then shoemaking, knitting, sewing, tailoring, and other kindred

occupations could be engaged in. I should think sewing-machines could

be worked, and, one way or another, any amount of garments could be

manufactured, which would find ready and profitable sale on landing,

either among the Colonists themselves, or with the people round about.

Not only would the ship thus be a perfect hive of industry, it would

also be a floating temple. The Captain, Officers, and every member of

the crew would be Salvationists, and all, therefore, alike interested

in the enterprise. Moreover, the probabilities are that we should

obtain the service of the ship's officers and crew in the most

inexpensive manner, in harmony with the usages of the Army everywhere

else, men serving from love and not as a mere business. The effect

produced by our ship cruising slowly southwards testifying to the

reality of a Salvation for both worlds, calling at all convenient

ports, would constitute a new kind of mission work, and drawing out

everywhere a large amount of warm practical sympathy. At present the

influence of those who go down to the sea in ships is not always in

favour of raising the morals and religion of the dwellers in the places

where they come. Here, however, would be one ship at least whose

appearance foretold no disorder, gave rise to no debauchery, and from

whose capacious hull would stream forth an Army of men, who, instead of

thronging the grog-shops and other haunts of licentious indulgence,

would occupy themselves with explaining and proclaiming the religion of

the Love of God and the Brotherhood of Man.

CHAPTER 5. MORE CRUSADES.

I have now sketched out briefly the leading features of the threefold

Scheme by which I think a way can be opened out of "Darkest England,"

by which its forlorn denizens can escape into the light and freedom of

a new life. But it is not enough to make a clear broad road out of the

heart of this dense and matted jungle forest; its inhabitants are in

many cases so degraded, so hopeless, so utterly desperate that we shall

have to do something more than make roads. As we read in the parable,

it is often not enough that the feast be prepared, and the guests be

bidden; we must needs go into the highways and byways and compel them

to come in. So it is not enough to provide our City Colony and our

Farm Colony, and then rest on our oars as if we had done our work.

That kind of thing will not save the Lost.

It is necessary to organise rescue expeditions to free the miserable

wanderers from their captivity, and bring them out into the larger

liberty and the fuller life. Talk about Stanley and Emin! There is not

one of us but has an Emin somewhere or other in the heart of Darkest

England, whom he ought to sally forth to rescue. Our Emins have the

Devil for their Mahdi, and when we get to them we find that it is their

friends and neighbours who hold them back, and they are, oh,

so irresolute! It needs each of us to be as indomitable as Stanley,

to burst through all obstacles, to force our way right to the centre of

things, and then to labour with the poor prisoner of vice and crime

with all our might. But had not the Expeditionary Committee furnished

the financial means whereby a road was opened to the sea, both Stanley

and Emin would probably have been in the heart of Darkest Africa to

this day. This Scheme is our Stanley Expedition. The analogy is very

close. I propose to make a road clear down to the sea. But alas our

poor Emin! Even when the road is open, he halts and lingers and doubts.

First he will, and then he won't, and nothing less than the

irresistible pressure of a friendly and stronger purpose will constrain

him to take the road which has been opened for him at such a cost of

blood and treasure. I now, therefore, proceed to sketch some of the

methods by which we shall attempt to save the lost and to rescue those

who are perishing in the midst of "Darkest England."

SECTION 1.--A SLUM CRUSADE.--OUR SLUM SISTERS.

When Professor Huxley lived as a medical officer in the East of London

he acquired a knowledge of the actual condition of the life of many of

its populace which led him long afterwards to declare that the

surroundings of the savages of New Guinea were much more conducive to

the leading of a decent human existence than those in which many of the

East-Enders live. Alas, it is not only in London that such lairs exist

in which the savages of civilisation lurk and breed. All the great

towns in both the Old World and the New have their slums, in which

huddle together, in festering and verminous filth, men, women, and

children. They correspond to the lepers who thronged the lazar houses

of the Middle Ages.

As in those days St. Francis of Assissi and the heroic band of saints

who gathered under his orders were wont to go and lodge with the lepers

at the city gates, so the devoted souls who have enlisted in the

Salvation Army take up their quarters in the heart of the worst slums.

But whereas the Friars were men, our Slum Brigade is composed of women.

I have a hundred of them under my orders, young women for the most part,

quartered all of them in outposts in the heart of the Devil's country.

Most of them are the children of the poor who have known hardship from

their youth up. Some are ladies born and bred, who have not been

afraid to exchange the comfort of a West End drawing-room for service

among the vilest of the vile, and a residence in small and fetid rooms

whose walls were infested with vermin. They live the life of the

Crucified for the sake of the men and women for whom He lived and died.

They form one of the branches of the activity of the Army upon which I

dwell with deepest sympathy. They are at the front; they are at close

quarters with the enemy. To the dwellers in decent homes who occupy

cushioned pews in fashionable churches there is something strange and

quaint in the language they hear read from the Bible, language which

habitually refers to the Devil as an actual personality, and to the

struggle against sin and uncleanness as if it were a hand to hand death

wrestle with the legions of Hell. To our little sisters who dwell in

an atmosphere heavy with curses, among people sodden with drink,

in quarters where sin and uncleanness are universal, all these Biblical

sayings are as real as the quotations of yesterday's price of Consols

are to a City man. They dwell in the midst of Hell, and in their daily

warfare with a hundred devils it seems incredible to them that anyone

can doubt the existence of either one or the other.

The Slum Sister is what her name implies, the Sister of the Slum.

They go forth in Apostolic fashion, two-and-two living in a couple of

the same kind of dens or rooms as are occupied by the people

themselves, differing only in the cleanliness and order, and the few

articles of furniture which they contain. Here they live all the year

round, visiting the sick, looking after the children, showing the women

how to keep themselves and their homes decent, often discharging the

sick mother's duties themselves; cultivating peace, advocating

temperance, counselling in temporalities, and ceaselessly preaching the

religion of Jesus Christ to the Outcasts of Society.

I do not like to speak of their work. Words fail me, and what I say

is so unworthy the theme. I prefer to quote two descriptions by

Journalists who have seen these girls at work in the field.

The first is taken from a long article which Julia Hayes Percy

contributed to the New York World, describing a visit paid by her to

the slum quarters of the Salvation Army in Cherry Hill Alleys, in the

Whitechapel of New York.

Twenty-four hours in the slums--just a night and a day--

yet into them were crowded such revelations of misery, depravity,

and degradation as having once been gazed upon life can never be the

same afterwards. Around and above his blighted neighbourhood flows

the tide of active, prosperous life. Men and women travel past in

street cars by the Elevated Railroad and across the bridge,

and take no thought of its wretchedness, of the criminals bred there,

and of the disease engendered by its foulness. It is a fearful menace

to the public health, both moral and physical, yet the multitude is as

heedless of danger as the peasant who makes his house and plants green

vineyards and olives above Vesuvian fires. We are almost as careless

and quite as unknowing as we pass the bridge in the late afternoon.

Our immediate destination is the Salvation Army Barracks in Washington

Street, and we are going finally to the Salvation Officers--two young

women--who have been dwelling and doing a noble mission work for

months in one of the worst corners of New York's most wretched quarter.

These Officers are not living under the aegis of the Army, however.

The blue bordered flag is furled out of sight, the uniforms and poke

bonnets are laid away, and there are no drums or tambourines.

"The banner over them is love" of their fellow-creatures among whom

they dwell upon an equal plane of poverty, wearing no better clothes

than the rest, eating coarse and scanty food, and sleeping upon hard

cots or upon the floor. Their lives are consecrated to God's service

among the poor of the earth. One is a woman in the early prime of

vigorous life, the other a girl of eighteen. The elder of these

devoted women is awaiting us at the barracks to be our guide to

Slumdom. She is tall, slender, and clad in a coarse brown gown, mended

with patches. A big gingham apron, artistically rent in several

places, is tied about her waist. She wears on old plaid woollen shawl

and an ancient brown straw hat. Her dress indicates extreme poverty,

her face denotes perfect peace. "This is Em," says Mrs. Ballington

Booth, and after this introduction we sally forth.

More and more wretched grows the district as we penetrate further Em

pauses before a dirty, broken, smoke-dimmed window, through which in a

dingy room are seen a party of roughs, dark-looking men, drinking and

squabbling at a table. "They are our neighbours in the front."

We enter the hall-way and proceed to the rear room. It is tiny,

but clean and warm. A fire burns on the little cracked stove,

which stands up bravely on three legs, with a brick eking out its

support at the fourth corner. A tin lamp stands on the table,

half-a-dozen chairs, one of which has arms, but must have renounced its

rockers long ago, and a packing box, upon which we deposit our shawls,

constitute the furniture. Opening from this is a small dark bedroom,

with one cot made up and another folded against the wall. Against a

door, which must communicate with the front room, in which we saw the

disagreeable-looking men sitting, is a wooden table for the hand-basin.

A small trunk and a barrel of clothing complete the inventory.

Em's sister in the slum work gives us a sweet shy welcome. She is a

Swedish girl, with the fair complexion and crisp, bright hair peculiar

to the Scandinavian blonde-type. Her head reminds me of a Grenze that

hangs in the Louvre, with its low knot of rippling hair, which fluffs

out from her brow and frames a dear little face with soft childish

outlines, a nez retrousse, a tiny mouth, like a crushed pink rose,

and wistful blue eyes. This girl has been a Salvationist for two

years. During that time she has learned to speak, read, and write

English, while she has constantly laboured among the poor and wretched.

The house where we find ourselves was formerly notorious as one of the

worst in the Cherry Hill district. It has been the scene of some

memorable crimes, and among them that of the Chinaman who slew his

Irish wife, after the manner of "Jack the Ripper," on the staircase

leading to the second floor. A notable change has taken place in the

tenement since Mattie and Em have lived there, and their gentle

influence is making itself felt in the neighbouring houses as well.

It is nearly eight o'clock when we sally forth. Each of us carries a

handful of printed slips bearing a text of Scripture and a few words of

warning to lead the better life.

"These furnish an excuse for entering places where otherwise we could

not go," explains Em.

After arranging a rendezvous, we separate. Mattie and Liz go off in

one direction, and Em and I in another. From this our progress seems

like a descent into Tartarus. Em pauses before a miserable-looking

saloon, pushes open the low, swinging door, and we go in.

It is a low-ceiled room, dingy with dirt, dim with the smoke,

nauseating with the fumes of sour beer and vile liquor. A sloppy bar

extends along one side, and opposite is a long table, with

indescribable viands littered over it, interspersed with empty glasses,

battered hats, and cigar stumps. A motley crowd of men and women

jostle in the narrow space. Em speaks to the soberest looking of the

lot. He listens to her words, others crowd about. Many accept the

slips we offer, and gradually as the throng separates to make way,

we gain the further end of the apartment. Em's serious, sweet,

saint-like face I follow like a star. All sense of fear slips from me,

and a great pity fills my soul as I look upon the various types of

wretchedness.

As the night wears on, the whole apartment seems to wake up.

Every house is alight; the narrow sidewalks and filthy streets are full

of people. Miserable little children, with sin-stamped faces,

dart about like rats; little ones who ought to be in their cribs shift

for themselves, and sleep on cellar doors and areas, and under carts;

a few vendors are abroad with their wares, but the most of the traffic

going on is of a different description. Along Water Street are women

conspicuously dressed in gaudy colours. Their heavily-painted faces

are bloated or pinched; they shiver in the raw night air. Liz speaks

to one, who replies that she would like to talk, but dare not,

and as she says this an old hag comes to the door and cries:

"Get along; don't hinder her work! During the evening a man to whom Em

has been talking has told her: --"You ought to join the Salvation Army;

they are the only good women who, bother us down here. I don't want to

lead that sort of life; but I must go where it is light and warm and

clean after working all day, and there isn't any place but this to come

to" exclaimed the man. "You will appreciate the plea to-morrow when

you see how the people live," Em says, as we turn our steps toward the

tenement room, which seems like an oasis of peace and purity after the

howling desert we have been wandering in. Em and Mattie brew some

oatmeal gruel, and being chilled and faint we enjoyed a cup of it.

Liz and I share a cot in the outer room. We are just going to sleep

when agonised cries ring out through the night; then the tones of a

woman's voice pleading pitifully reach our ears. We are unable to

distinguish her words, but the sound is heart-rending. It comes from

one of those dreadful Water Street houses, and we all feel that a

tragedy is taking place. There is a sound of crashing blows and then

silence.

It is customary in the slums to leave the house door open perpetually,

which is convenient for tramps, who creep into the hall-ways to sleep

at night, thereby saving the few pence it costs to occupy a "spot" in

the cheap lodging houses. Em and Mat keep the corridor without their

room beautifully clean, and so it has become an especial favourite

stamping ground for these vagrants. We were told this when Mattie

locked and bolted the door and then tied the keys and the door-handle

together. So we understand why there are shuffling steps along the

corridor, bumping against the panels of the door, and heavily breathing

without during the long hours of the night.

All day Em and Mat have been toiling among their neighbours, and the

night before last they sat up with a dying woman. They are worn out

and sleep heavily. Liz and I lie awake and wait for the coming of the

morning; we are too oppressed by what we have seen and heard to talk.

In the morning Liz and I peep over into the rear houses where we

heard those dreadful shrieks in the night. There is no sign of life,

but we discover enough filth to breed diphtheria and typhoid throughout

a large section. In the area below our window there are several inches

of stagnant water, in which is heaped a mass of old shoes, cabbage

heads, garbage, rotten wood, bones, rags and refuse, and a few dead rats.

We understand now why Em keeps her room full of disinfectants.

She tells us that she dare not make any appeal to the sanitary

authorities, either on behalf of their own or any other dwelling,

for fear of antagonizing the people, who consider such officials as

their natural enemies.

The first visit we pay is up a number of eccentric little flights of

shaky steps interspersed with twists of passageway. The floor is full

of holes. The stairs have been patched here and there, but look

perilous and sway beneath the feet, A low door on the landing is opened

by a bundle of rags and filth, out of which issues a woman's voice in

husky tones, bidding us enter. She has La grippe. We have to stand

very close together, for the room is small, and already contains three

women, a man, a baby, a bedstead, a stove, and indescribable dirt.

The atmosphere is rank with impurity. The man is evidently dying.

Seven weeks ago he was "gripped." He is now in the last stages of

pneumonia. Em has tried to induce him to be removed to the hospital,

and he gasps out his desire "to die in comfort in my own bed." Comfort!

The "bed' is a rack heaped with rags. Sheets, pillow-cases, and

night-clothes are not in vogue in the slums. A woman lies asleep on

the dirty floor with her head under the table. Another woman, who has

been sharing the night watch with the invalid's wife, is finishing her

morning meal, in which roast oysters on the half shell are conspicuous.

A child that appears never to have been washed toddles about the floor

and tumbles over the sleeping woman's form. Em gives it some gruel,

and ascertains that its name is "Christine."

The dirt, crowding, and smells in the first place are characteristic of

half a dozen others we visited. We penetrate to garrets and descend

into cellars. The "rear houses" are particularly dreadful. Everywhere

there is decaying garbage lying about, and the dead cats and rats are

evidence that there are mighty hunters among the gamins of the Fourth

Ward. We find a number ill from the grip and consequent maladies.

None of the sufferers will entertain the thought of seeking a hospital.

One probably voices the opinion of the majority when he declares that

"they'll wash you to death there." For these people a bath possesses

more terror than the gallows or the grave.

In one room, with a wee window, lies a women dying of consumption;

wasted wan, and wretched, lying on rags and swarming with vermin.

Her little son, a boy of eight years, nestles beside her. His cheeks

are scarlet, his eyes feverishly bright, and he has a hard cough.

"It's the chills, mum," says the little chap. Six beds stand close

together in another room; one is empty. Three days ago a woman died

there and the body has just been taken away. It hasn't disturbed the

rest of the inmates to have death present there. A woman is lying on

the wrecks of a bedstead, slats and posts sticking out in every

direction from the rags on which she reposes.

"It broke under me in the night," she explains. A woman is sick and

wants Liz to say a prayer. We kneel on the filthy floor. Soon all my

faculties are absorbed in speculating which will arrive first, the

"Amen" or the "B flat" which is wending its way to wards me. This time

the bug does not get there, and I enjoy grinding him under the sole of

my Slum shoe when the prayer is ended.

In another room we find what looks like a corpse. It is a woman in an

opium stupor. Drunken men are brawling around her.

Returning to our tenement, Em and Liz meet us, and we return to our

experience. The minor details vary slightly, but the story is the same

piteous tale of woe everywhere, and crime abounding, conditions which

only change to a prison, a plunge in the river, or the Potter's field.

The Dark Continent can show no lower depth of degradation than that

sounded by the dwellers of the dark alleys in Cherry Hill. There isn't

a vice missing in that quarter. Every sin in the Decalogue flourishes

in that feeder of penitentiaries and prisons. And even as its moral

foulness permeates and poisons the veins of our social life so the

malarial filth with which the locality reeks must sooner or later

spread disease and death.

An awful picture, truly, but one which is to me irradiated with the

love-light which shone in the eyes of "Em's serious, sweet, saintlike

face."

Here is my second. It was written by a Journalist who had just

witnessed the scene in Whitechapel. He writes: --

I had just passed Mr. Barnett's church when I was stopped by a small

crowd at a street corner. There were about thirty or forty men, women,

and children standing loosely together, some others were lounging on

the opposite side of the street round the door of a public-house.

In the centre of the crowd was a plain-looking little woman in

Salvation Army uniform, with her eyes closed, praying the "dear Lord

that he would bless these dear people, and save them, save them now!"

Moved by curiosity, I pressed through the outer fringe of the crowd,

and in doing so, I noticed a woman of another kind, also invoking

Heaven, but in an altogether different fashion. Two dirty tramp-like

men were listening to the prayer, standing the while smoking their

short cutty pipes. For some reason or other they had offended the

woman, and she was giving them a piece of her mind. They stood

stolidly silent while she went at them like a fiend. She had been

good-looking once, but was now horribly bloated with drink, and excited

by passion. I heard both voices at the same time. What a contrast!

The prayer was over now, and a pleading earnest address was being

delivered.

"You are wrong," said the voice in the centre "you know you are; all

this misery and poverty is a proof of it. You are prodigals. You have

got away from your Father's house, and you are rebelling against Him

every day Can you wonder that there is so much hunger, and oppression,

and wretchedness allowed to come upon you? In the midst of it all your

Father loves you He wants you to return to Him; to turn your backs upon

your sins; abandon your evil doings; give up the drink and the service

of the devil. He has given His Son Jesus Christ to die for you.

He wants to save you. Come to His feet. He is waiting. His arms are

open. I know the devil has got fast hold of you; but Jesus will give

you grace to conquer him. He will help you to master your wicked

habits and your love of drink. But come to Him now. God is love.

He loves me. He loves you. He loves us all. He wants to save us all."

Clear and strong the voice, eloquent with the fervour of intense

feeling, rang through the little crowd, past which streamed the

ever-flowing tide of East End life. And at the same time that I heard

this pure and passionate invocation to love God and be true to man I

heard a voice on the outskirts, and it said this: "You ---- swine!

I'll knock the vitals out of yer. None of your ---- impudence to me.

---- your ---- eyes, what do you mean by telling me that? You know

what you ha' done, and now you are going to the Salvation Army.

I'll let them know you, you dirty rascal." The man shifted his pipe.

"What's the matter?" "Matter!" screamed the virago hoarsely." ----

yer life, don't you know what's the matter? I'll matter ye, you ----

hound. By God! I will, as sure as I'm alive. Matter! you know what's

the matter." And so she went on, the men standing silently smoking

until at last she took herself off her mouth full of oaths and cursing,

to the public-house. It seemed as though the presence, and spirit,

and words of the Officer, who still went on with the message of mercy,

had some strange effect upon them, which made these poor wretches

impervious to the taunting, bitter sarcasms of this brazen, blatant

virago.

"God is love." Was it not, then, the accents of God's voice that

sounded there above the din of the street and the swearing of the

slums? Yea, verily, and that voice ceases not and will not cease,

so long as the Slum Sisters fight under the banner of the Salvation

Army.

To form an idea of the immense amount of good, temporal and spiritual,

which the Slum Sister is doing; you need to follow them into the

kennels where they live, preaching the Gospel with the mop and the

scrubbing brush, and driving out the devil with soap and water.

In one of our Slum posts, where the Officer's rooms were on the ground

floor, about fourteen other families lived in the same house.

One little water-closet in the back yard had to do service for the

whole place. As for the dirt, one Officer writes, "It is impossible to

scrub the Homes; some of them are in such a filthy condition.

When they have a fire the ashes are left to accumulate for days.

The table is very seldom, if ever, properly cleaned, dirty cups and

saucers lie about it, together with bits of bread, and if they have

bloaters the bones and heads are left on the table, Sometimes there are

pieces of onions mixed up with the rest. The floors are in a very much

worse condition than the street pavements, and when they are supposed

to clean them they do it with about a pint of dirty water. When they

wash, which is rarely, for washing to them seems an unnecessary work,

they do it in a quart or two of water, and sometimes boil the things in

some old saucepan in which they cook their food. They do this simply

because they have no larger vessel to wash in. The vermin fall off the

walls and ceiling on you while you are standing in the rooms.

Some of the walls are covered with marks where they have killed them.

Many people in the summer sit on the door steps all night, the reason

for this being, that their rooms are so close from the heat and so

unendurable from the vermin that they prefer staying out in the cool

night air. But as they cannot stay anywhere long without drinking,

they send for beer from the neighbouring public--alas! never far away

--and pass it from one doorway to another, the result being singing,

shouting and fighting up till three and four o'clock in the morning."

I could fill volumes with stories of the war against vermin, which is

part of this campaign in the slums, but the subject is too revolting to

those who are often indifferent to the agonies their fellow creatures

suffer, so long as their sensitive ears are not shocked by the mention

of so painful a subject. Here, for instance, is a sample of the kind

of region in which the Slum Sisters spend themselves:

"In an apparently respectable street near Oxford street, the Officers

where visiting one day when they saw a very dark staircase leading into

a cellar, and thinking it possible that someone might be there they

attempted to go down, and yet the staircase was so dark they thought it

impossible for anyone to be there. However, they tried again and

groped their way along in the dark for some time until at last they

found the door and entered the room. At first they could not discern

anything because of the darkness. But after they got used to it they

saw a filthy room. There was no fire in the grate, but the fire-place

was heaped up with ashes, an accumulation of several weeks at least.

At one end of the room there was an old sack of rags and bones partly

emptied upon the floor, from which there came a most unpleasant odour.

At the other end lay an old man very ill. The apology for a bed on

which he lay was filthy and had neither sheets nor blankets.

His covering consisted of old rags. His poor wife, who attended on

him, appeared to be a stranger to soap and water. These Slum Sisters

nursed the old people, and on one occasion undertook to do their

washing, and they brought it home to their copper for this purpose,

but it was so infested with vermin that they did not know how to wash

it. Their landlady, who happened to see them, forbade them ever to

bring such stuff there any more. The old man, when well enough, worked

at his trade, which was tailoring. They had two shillings and sixpence

per week from the parish."

Here is a report from the headquarters of our Slum Brigade as to the

work which the Slum Sisters have done. It is almost four years since

the Slum Work was started in London. The principal work done by our

first Officers was that of visiting the sick, cleansing the homes of

the Slummers, and of feeding the hungry. The following are a few of

the cases of those who have gained temporally, as well as spiritually,

through our work: --

Mrs. W.--Of Haggerston Slum. Heavy drinker, wrecked home, husband a

drunkard, place dirty and filthy, terribly poor. Saved now over two

years, home A1., plenty of employment at cane-chair bottoming; husband

now saved also.

Mrs. R.--Drury Lane Slum. Husband and wife, drunkards; husband

very lazy, only worked when starved in to it. We found them both out

of work, home furnitureless, in debt. She got saved, and our lasses

prayed for him to get work. He did so, and went to it. He fell out

again a few weeks after, and beat his wife. She sought employment at

charing and office cleaning, got it, and has been regularly at work

since. He too got work. He is now a teetotaler. The home is very

comfortable now, and they are putting money in the bank.

A.M. in the Dials. Was a great drunkard, thriftless, did not go to

the trouble of seeking work. Was in a Slum meeting, heard the Captain

speak on "Seek first the Kingdom of God!" called out and said,

"Do you mean that if I ask God for work, He will give it me?"

Of course she said, "Yes." He was converted that night, found work,

and is now employed in the Gas Works, Old Kent Road.

Jimmy is a soldier in the Boro' Slum! Was starving when he got

converted through being out of work. Through joining the Army, he was

turned out of his home. He found work, and now owns a coffee-stall in

Billingsgate Market, and is doing well.

Sergeant R.--Of Marylebone Slum. Used to drink, lived in a wretched

place in the famous Charles Street, had work at two places, at one of

which he got 5s. a week and the other 10s., when he got saved;

this was starvation wages, on which to keep himself, his wife,

and four children. At the 10s. a week work he had to deliver drink for

a spirit merchant; feeling condemned over it, he gave it up, and was

out of work for weeks. The brokers were put in, but the Lord rescued

him just in time. The 5s. a week employer took him afterwards at 18s.,

and he is now earning 22s., and has left the ground-floor slum tenement

for a better house.

H.--Nine Elms Slum. Was saved on Easter Monday, out of work several

weeks before, is a labourer, seems very earnest, in terrible distress.

We allow his wife 2s. 6d. a week for cleaning the hall (to help them).

In addition to that, she gets another 2s. 6d. for nursing, and on that

husband, wife, and a couple of children pay the rent of 2s. a week and

drag out an existence. I have tried to get work for this man, but have

failed.

T.--Of Rotherhithe Slum. Was a great drunkard, is a carpenter;

saved about nine months ago, but, having to work in a public-house on a

Sunday, he gave it up; he has not been able to get another job, and has

nothing but what we have given him for making seats.

Emma Y.--Now a Soldier of the Marylebone Slum Post, was a wild young

Slummer when we opened in the Boro'; could be generally seen in the

streets, wretchedly clad, her sleeves turned up, idle, only worked

occasionally, got saved two years ago, had terrible persecution in her

home. We got her a situation, where she has been for nearly eighteen

months, and is now a good servant.

Lodging-House Frank.--At twenty-one came into the possession of

#750, but, through drink and gambling, lost it all in six or eight

months, and for over seven years he has tramped about from Portsmouth,

through the South of England, and South Wales, from one lodging-house

to another, often starving, drinking when he could get any money;

thriftless, idle, no heart for work. We found him in a lodging-house

six months ago, living with a fallen girl; got them both saved and

married; five weeks after he got work as a carpenter at 30s. a week.

He has a home of his own now, and promises well to make an officer.

The Officer who furnishes the above reports goes on to say: --

I can't call the wretched dwelling home, to which drink had brought

Brother and Sister X. From a life of luxury, they drifted down by

degrees to one room in a Slum tenement, surrounded by drunkards and the

vilest characters. Their lovely half-starved children were compelled

to listen to the foulest language, and hear fighting and quarrelling,

and alas, alas, not only to hear it in the adjoining rooms, but witness

it within their own. For over two years they have been delivered from

the power of the cursed drink. The old rookery is gone, and now they

have a comfortably-furnished home. Their children give evidence of

being truly converted, and have a lively gratitude for their father's

salvation. One boy of eight said, last Christmas Day, "I remember when

we had only dry bread for Christmas; but to-day we had a goose and two

plum-puddings." Brother X. was dismissed in disgrace from his

situation as commercial traveller before his conversion; to-day he is

chief man, next to his employer, in a large business house.

He says: --

I and perfectly satisfied that very few of the lowest strata of Society

are unwilling to work if they could get it. The wretched hand-to-mouth

existence many of them have to live disheartens them, and makes life

with them either a feast or a famine, and drives those who have brains

enough to crime.

The results of our work in the Slums may be put down as: --

1st. A marked improvement in the cleanliness of the homes and

children; disappearance of vermin, and a considerable lessening

of drunkenness.

2nd. A greater respect for true religion, and especially that of the

Salvation Army.

3rd. A much larger amount of work is being done now than before our

going there.

4th. The rescue of many fallen girls.

5th. The Shelter work seems to us a development of the Slum work.

In connection with our Scheme, we propose to immediately increase the

numbers of these Slum Sisters, and to add to their usefulness by

directly connecting their operations with the Colony, enabling them

thereby to help the poor people to conditions of life more favourable

to health, morals, and religion. This would be accomplished by getting

some of them employment in the City, which must necessarily result in

better homes and surroundings, or in the opening up for others of a

straight course from the Slums to the Farm Colony.