|Looking over what I have written, I am struck by what seems to me an
important omission. In driving home the nail of the miserable condition
in which the poor are forced to live, I have perhaps led the reader to
imagine that the better instincts of humanity have been utterly stamped
out--that the courts and alleys are great wastes of weed, where never a
flower grows.
I should be loth to father such an idea as this. In the course of many
years of the closest contact with the most poverty-stricken of our
fellow-men, I have learnt to think better, and not worse, of human
nature, and to know that love, self-sacrifice, and devotion flourish
in this barren soil as well as in the carefully-guarded family circles,
which are, or should be, forcing-houses for all that is choicest and
most beautiful among human instincts.
Braver than many a hero who comes back from foreign plains, with a deed
of prowess to his credit and a medal on his breast, are some of the
ragged rank and file who fight the battle of life against overwhelming
odds, and never flinch or falter, but fight on to the end; and the end,
alas! is rarely victory or renown--too often the guerdon of these brave
soldiers is the workhouse, the hospital, or a miserable death from cold
and slow starvation, in a quiet corner of the street, where they have
sunk down to rise no more.
It is often a matter of wonder--at least, I hope it is--to the good
folks who skim their newspapers at the morning meal, and take their
politics, their Court Circular, and their police intelligence at
a single draught between their sips of coffee, what becomes of the
children whose fathers and mothers are sent to prison for long or short
periods.
The State does not consider the innocent victims of crime; the law
punishes the individual without taking thought of the consequences
to those who may be dependent upon her or him for bread. I am not
advocating any leniency to a culprit on the score of his value as
a breadwinner; I am simply going to state a few facts, and leave my
readers to draw any moral they please from the narrative.
Half the men and women of the lower orders who are imprisoned for
various small offences, such as being drunk and incapable, assaulting
each other, or committing petty larceny, are married and have
families. Bachelors and spinsters are rare after a certain age in low
neighbourhoods, and large families are invariably the result of early
marriages, or that connection which, among the criminal classes and
the lowest grade of labourers, does duty for the legally-solemnized
institution.
Many persons who wander into police-courts at the East-end, either for
business or amusement, must be familiar with the poor woman, a baby in
her arms, and her head strapped up with sticking-plaster and surgical
bandages, who begs the magistrate not to punish the hulking fellow in
the dock who has so brutally ill-used her. The woman knows, what the
magistrate and the public ignore, that the three months' sentence means
comfort and luxury to the man--misery and starvation to the woman and
her little ones.
He has probably been the chief bread-winner; the woman is incapacitated
by his ill-treatment from doing any work, and so she and her children
are suddenly rendered penniless and homeless. She must crawl back from
the court to her miserable garret, and when her babies ask for food pawn
her few rags to get it for them; and when all is pawned and gone, she
cannot pay her nightly rent, so she must turn out with her little family
into the streets or go into the workhouse. Such a case we heard as we
looked into a police-court on our travels; and I shall not soon forget
the agonized cry of the woman as the magistrate gave her husband
six months, and congratulated her on being temporarily rid of such a
ruffian.
'Great God, what will become of us now?'
I see that many humane people are asking what can be done to alleviate
the sufferings of the poor. I don't know whether there is any society
which looks after the wives and children of malefactors, and lends them
a helping hand, if they deserve it, to tide over the absence of their
sole source of income; but if there is not, I fancy here is work
for idle hands to do, and a source for charity that, worked with
discrimination and care, might alleviate one of the crushing evils to
which poor families are liable.
But these people are not always friendless, and it is a case I wish to
quote which has led me to touch upon the subject.
In one wretched room we visited there were six little ones home at the
mid-day hour from school.
'You have six children?' I said to the woman.
'No, sir, only four; these two little ones ain't mine--they are staying
with us.'
I imagined that they were the children of a relative, and questioned
the woman further, wondering how she cared to crowd her little den with
extra visitors, and then the story came out.
These two extra mouths the good soul was feeding belonged to two little
children whose mother, a widow, lived in a room above. For an assault
upon the police she had been sent to prison. Thus the position of these
orphans with a living parent was terrible. They would have been starved
or taken to the workhouse, but this good creature went up and fetched
them down to be with her own children, and made them welcome; she washed
them and dressed them, and did for them all she could, and she intended
to keep them if she was able till the mother came out.
She didn't see that she had done anything wonderful. 'It was only
neighbourly-like, and my heart bled to see the poor young 'uns a-cryin',
and that wretched and neglected and dirty.'
Such cases as this are common enough--the true charity, the charity
which robs itself to give to others, is nowhere so common as among the
poor. The widow's mite that won the Saviour's praise is cast into the
great treasury daily, and surely stands now, as then, far higher on the
roll of good deeds than all the gold flung carelessly by the hands of
the rich to every box-rattler who promises 'that the amount shall be
duly acknowledged in the _Times_.'
I will quote one more case, which has just come under my personal
observation, and which illustrates the brave struggles against adversity
of which these people are capable.
Our attention was directed to the circumstance by the head-mistress of
the school which the children were attending, and who had noticed that
they, who had always been the cleanest and tidiest in the class, were
beginning to show signs of a little less motherly care. The children
said their mother was too ill to do much, and we went to see her.
Mrs. B. had some children of her own, and in addition she and her
husband had taken in a little girl whose father had gone off tramping in
search of work.
We found her propped up in a chair looking terribly ill, but in front of
her, in another chair, was the wash-tub, and the poor woman was making
a feeble effort to wash and wring out some of the children's things. She
was dying. She was suffering from dropsy, and had not lain down for a
month--the water was rising rapidly, and would soon reach her heart
and kill her. Yet here she sat, scarcely able to breathe, and enduring
untold agony, but making an effort to the very last to work and keep her
little ones clean and tidy.
It is a glorious lot in life, these people's--is it not?--to toil on and
struggle, to resist temptation, and giving their youth and age to the
hardest labour for a wage that barely staves off starvation, to know
that when illness comes, or time steals their strength away, they are
mere burthens, refuse to be got rid of, since it encumbers the land.
Can one blame them if, knowing their hard lot and the little reward the
most virtuous life can bring them, they sink into the temptations spread
around them? Remember that, for half their miseries, half their illness
and premature decay, and much of the disease which cripples and carries
off their children, the shameful way in which they are housed, and the
callous neglect of their rights as citizens by the governing class, is
responsible.
They are handicapped in the race from start to finish. And, under
these circumstance, such charity, such humanity, and such patience and
long-suffering, as exist among them, are indeed worthy of admiration.
The natural instinct of man is to evil, and when I read in little tracts
and clerical addresses of the awful depravity of the 'heathen in our
midst,' I am tempted to ask what the reverend gentlemen and shocked
philanthropists expect. I say, with a full knowledge of their
surroundings, that the lower classes of our great cities are entitled
to the highest credit for not being twenty times more depraved than they
are.
They are a class which contains the germs of all that goes to make up
good citizenship, and the best proof of it is the patience with
which they endure the systematic neglect of their more fortunate
fellow-countrymen. In any other land but ours, the mighty mass of helots
would long ago have broken their bonds and swept over the land in vast
revolutionary hordes. They did not always know their power, and had not
enough knowledge to appreciate their wrongs. Education is opening
their eyes, and their lips will not be slow to express their new-born
sentiments. It will be well to meet the movement half-way, and yield to
them that reform and humane recognition which some day they may all too
noisily demand.
Here am I up on a platform and thumping away at the table and spouting
what I have no doubt many excellent persons will think is rank
communism, though it is nothing of the sort. _Peccavi_, I apologize. The
fumes of the misery I have passed through the last two months have got
into my head and made me talk wildly. Let me resume my labour more
in the character of a missionary or special correspondent, and leave
oratory and denunciation to the Sunday morning Wilkeses of Battersea
Park.
We have no business out-of-doors at all--let us study another domestic
interior. The scene, a street which lies cheek by jowl with the quarter
where the world of fashion rolls nightly in comfortable carriages to
enjoy theatrical and operatic performances in half-guinea stalls and
three-guinea boxes, and where fabulous fortunes are made by those who
can make Mr. and Mrs. Dives weep at imaginary woes or laugh at a merry
jest or comic antic.
From such a scene as I am going to ask you to witness, thousands who
crowd a theatre nightly to see a woman's head battered out against a
sofa, or a young man suffocate himself with the fumes of charcoal, would
shrink back in disgust. But you will not, for if you have gone so far
with us as this journey, you are, I feel sure, convinced that no good
can come of hiding the worst phase of a question which is only dragged
forward here that it may, by the very horror of its surroundings, arrest
attention and so secure that discussion which must always precede a
great scheme of reformation.
Come with me to this place. Our way lies through Clare Market, so don't
go alone, for it is a dangerous neighbourhood to strangers. Come with me
through strange sights and sounds, past draggled, tipsy women crowding
the footway, and hulking fellows whose blasphemies fill the tainted air;
pick your way carefully through the garbage and filth that litter
the streets, and stop in this narrow thoroughfare which is but a
stone's-throw from many a stage that holds the mirror up to nature, and
yet would shrink from holding such a scene as this.
We have stopped at a marine-store shop--we enter the passage and find
our way up to the third floor. Here in a single room live a man, his
wife, and three children. There has been an inquest on a baby who has
died--poisoned by the awful atmosphere it breathed. We have stumbled up
the dark crazy staircase at the risk of our limbs, to see this room
in which the family live and sleep and eat, because in its way it is a
curiosity. It has been the scene of an incident which one would hardly
believe possible in this Christian country. For days in this foul room
the body of a dead baby had to lie because the parish had no mortuary.
Not only did the corpse have to lie here for days among the living, but
on that little table, propped against the window, the surgeon had to
perform a post-mortem examination.
Think of it, you who cry out that the sufferings of these people are
sensationally exaggerated--the dead baby was cut open in the one room
where the mother and the other little ones, its brothers and sisters,
lived and ate and slept. And why?
Because the parish had no mortuary, and no room in which post-mortems
could be performed.
The jurymen who went to view the body sickened at the frightful
exhalations of this death-trap, and one who had thirty years' experience
of London said never had he seen a fouler den.
I have turned to the newspapers for a report of the inquest and found
it, and I think it will be better to present it word for word. It is
an ordinary newspaper report of what has happened and been legally
investigated, and may carry conviction where my own unsupported
testimony would fail:
'A coroner's inquiry was held last night by Mr. Langham regarding the
death of an infant aged two and a half months, the daughter of a butcher
named Kent, who, with his wife and three children, occupy a single room
on the third floor of premises used as a marine store in Wych Street.
The inquiry was held in the Vestry-room of the parish. On the return of
the jury from viewing the body--which lay in the room occupied by the
family--one of the jurymen addressed the coroner. He had, he stated,
during his thirty years' residence in the parish, seen many places which
he regarded as unfit for dwelling-houses, but never had he seen one so
bad as that which the jury had just visited. The staircase was dark and
out of repair. The atmosphere inside was intolerable. Indeed, it was
so bad that several of his fellow-jurymen had felt ill while they were
there. They hoped that this expression of opinion would have some
effect in inducing the proper authorities to provide a mortuary for the
district, and that families who lived in one room might not be compelled
to sleep and take their meals with a dead body within sight. Mr. Samuel
Mills, surgeon, 3, Southampton Street, Strand, medical officer to the
Bow Street Division of Police, deposed that he had made a post-mortem
examination of the body on a propped-up table placed in front of the
window of the room occupied by the family. The cause of death was
consumption of the brain. From the state of the atmosphere in which the
child was born, it was unhealthy. Another child had died from the same
cause. He thought the local authority ought to provide a mortuary, and
also a room in which post-mortem examinations could be conducted. A
verdict in accordance with the medical evidence was returned by the
jury, who further expressed their opinion that the want of a mortuary
was calculated to be detrimental to the health of the persons living in
the district; that there being no mortuary was a disgrace to the local
authority; and that the circumstances surrounding the case they had
investigated were a disgrace to this enlightened age.'
I will not add a word. I leave the newspaper report to arouse whatever
thoughts it may in the minds of those who will peruse it. It is at least
a revelation to many of 'How the Poor Live.'
Let me hark back again to the lighter side of my subject. I began the
chapter with a story of the self-sacrifice of the poor. I will now
end it with a little incident of which I was an eye-witness. Some poor
children of the slums had 'a day in the country' given them by a friend,
at which I had the privilege of being present.
At tea, to every little one there were given two large slices of cake;
I noticed one little boy take his, break a little piece off, eat it, and
quietly secrete the remainder in his jacket pocket. Curious, and half
suspecting what his intention was, I followed the lad when tea was over
to the fields.
'Eaten your cake yet?' I asked.
'No, sir,' he answered, colouring as though he had done something wrong.
'What are you going to do with it?'
'Please, sir,' he stammered, 'I'm goin' to take it 'ome to mother. She's
ill and can't eat nothink, and I thought as she might manage cake, sir.'
In the train that brought those youngsters down came one white-faced
child, who looked faint and ill with the walk to the station.
The head teacher, who has the history of each child at her fingers'
ends, saw what was the matter.
'Had no breakfast to-day, Annie?'
'No, ma'am,' was the faltering reply.
There was a crowd of poor mothers at the station, come to see the
children off. One went ont and presently returned with a penny, which
she pressed into the child's hand--to buy herself something with.
The woman had pawned her shawl for a copper or two in sheer womanly
sympathy. Had she had the money about her, she needn't have left the
station.
There was a good deal of pawning that morning, I know, from an
eye-witness, and all to give the little children a copper or two to
spend.
And what a struggle there had been to get them something decent to wear
for that grand day out! If all the stories were written that could be
told of the privations and sacrifices endured by mothers, that Sally
and Jane and Will might look respectable at the treat, your heart would
ache. As I don't wish it to, we will not go into the matter.