RECONSTRUCTING THE LIFE OF THE LABOURER IN LONDON
At the end of my long journey across Europe I returned to London. I had
seen, during my visit to Denmark, some results of the reorganization of
country life. In this chapter I want to tell something of what I saw
and learned in London of the efforts to reconstruct the life of the
Underman in the more complex conditions of a great city.
In the course of my travels through various parts of the United States,
in the effort to arouse public interest in the work we are trying to
do for the Negro at Tuskegee, I have frequently met persons who have
inquired of me, with some anxiety, as to what, in my opinion, could be
done for the city Negroes, especially that class which is entering in
considerable numbers every year into the life of the larger cities in
the Northern and Southern States. The people who asked this question
assumed, apparently because the great majority of the Negro population
lives on the plantations and in the small towns of the South, that the
work of a school like the Tuskegee Institute, which is located in the
centre of a large Negro farming population, must be confined to the
rural Negro and the South.
In reply to these inquiries I have sometimes tried to point out that
a good many of the problems of the city have their sources in the
country and that, perhaps, the best way to better the situation of the
city Negro is to improve the condition of the masses of the race in
the country. To do this, I explained, would be to attack the evil at
its root, since if country life were made more attractive, the flow of
population to the city would largely cease.
What is true in this respect of the masses of the Negroes in America
is equally true, as I discovered, of similar classes in Europe. Any
one who will take the trouble to look into the cause of European
emigration will certainly be struck with the fact that the conditions
of agriculture in Europe have had a marked effect on the growth and
character of American cities.
This fact suggests the close connection between country conditions
and the city problem, but there is still another side to the matter.
The thing that was mainly impressed upon me by my observation of the
lower strata of London life and the efforts that have been made to
improve it was this: That it is a great deal simpler and, in the
long run, a great deal cheaper to build up and develop a people who
have grown up in the wholesome air of the open country than it is to
regenerate a people who have lived all or most of their lives in the
fetid atmosphere of a city slum. In other words, it is easier to deal
with people who are physically and morally sound than with people who,
by reason of their unhealthy and immoral surroundings, have become
demoralized and degenerate. The first is a problem of education; the
second, one of reconstruction and regeneration.
I think the thing that helped me most to realize the extent and the
difficulty of this work of regeneration in London was the knowledge
that I gained while there of the multitude of institutions and
agencies, of various kinds, which are engaged in this work.
I had been impressed, during my visits to Whitechapel and other
portions of the East End of London, with the number of shelters, homes,
refuges, and missions of all kinds which I saw advertised as I passed
along Whitechapel Road. When I inquired of Rev. John Harris, organizing
secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, who had at one time himself
been engaged in mission work in that part of the city, whether it were
possible to obtain a complete list of all the different types of
charities and institutions of social betterment in London, he placed in
my hands a volume of nearly seven hundred pages devoted entirely to the
classification and description of the various charities, most of which
were located in London.
This book, which was called the "Annual Charities Register and Digest,"
I have read and studied with the greatest interest. I confess that I
was amazed as well at the number and variety of the different charities
as at the amount of time, energy, and money necessary to keep up and
maintain them.
In another volume, "London Statistics," published by the London County
Council, I found the facts about London charities concisely summarized.
From these books I learned that there are something like 2,035
charitable institutions of various kinds in London alone. Perhaps I can
best give some idea of the character of these institutions, a number of
which date back to the eighteenth century and perhaps to still earlier
periods, by giving some details from these two volumes.
There are in London, for example, 112 institutions for the blind, and
143 institutions which give medical aid in one form or another, for
which the total amount of money expended is about five million seven
hundred thousand dollars annually. There are 214 institutions for
the care of convalescents, for which the annual expenditure amounts
to nearly a million and three quarters; 220 homes for children and
training homes for servants, which are maintained at an annual expense
of over four million dollars annually; 257 institutions for "general
and specific relief," which are supported at an annual cost of nearly
six millions.
There are, besides these, 159 institutions for "penitents," which
receive an income of a million per year; 156 institutions for social
and physical improvement, which include a multitude of the most
varied sorts, as, for example, educational, temperance, and Christian
associations, social settlements, boys' brigades, societies for the
improvement of dwellings, for the improvement of national health, for
suppression of the white slave traffic, etc. These 156 institutions are
maintained at an expense of something over three million and a half
dollars per year.
Finally, there are 47 so-called "spiritual" institutions which are
engaged in propagating in various ways and in various forms a knowledge
of the Bible and a belief in the Christian religion. Although the
spiritual associations represent less than one seventeenth of the total
number of charitable organizations, nearly one fourth of the total
amount of the charities is expended in maintaining them.
According to the best estimate that can be made, the amount of money
thus expended is not less than fifty millions annually. This does not
include, either, the sums collected and expended by the different
churches--the Congregational, Catholic, and Established churches.
In two dioceses of the Church of England--namely, those of London
and Southwark--the sums raised in this way amounted to more than six
hundred thousand dollars.
My attention was especially attracted by the number of shelters and
refuges where homeless men, women, and children are given temporary
aid of one kind and another. In addition to eight shelters maintained
by the Salvation Army in different parts of the city, where homeless
men and women are able to obtain a bed and something to eat, there is
the asylum for the houseless poor, which claims to have given nights'
lodging during the winter months to 80,000; the Free Shelter, in
Ratcliffe Street East, which has given nights' lodging to 125,000; the
Ham Yard Soup Kitchen and Hospice, which in 1908-1909 cared for 343 for
an average of sixteen nights; the Providence Right Refuge and Home,
with reports of nearly 2,100 lodgings, suppers, and breakfasts every
week.
In addition to these there is a considerable number of refuges and
shelters for various classes of persons--for sailors, soldiers, Jews,
Asiatics, and Africans; for ballet girls; "ladies who, on account of
their conversion to the Catholic faith, are obliged to leave their
homes or situations"; for "respectable female servants"; homeless boys
and girls, governesses; "Protestant servants while they are seeking
employment in the families of the nobility," and for "young women
employed in hotels and West End clubs."
These are but a few of the many different homes, lodging houses, and
shelters with which the city is provided. In most cases it is stated in
connection with these institutions that vagrants are rigidly excluded,
and the purpose of most of them seems to be to keep respectable but
unfortunate people from going to the public workhouses.
In addition to the fifty millions and more spent in charity, nearly
twenty millions more is expended by the different boroughs of London
for relief to the poor in institutions and in homes. Altogether, it
costs something like seventy million dollars annually to provide for
the poor and unfortunate of the city.
In the Southern States, where nine of the ten million Negroes in
the United States make their homes, practically nothing is spent in
charity upon the Negro. In two or three states reformatories have been
established, so that Negro children arrested for petty crimes may not
be sent to the chain gangs and confined with older and more hardened
criminals employed in the mines and elsewhere. At the last session of
the state legislature of Alabama a bill was passed providing that the
state should take over and support a reformatory for coloured children
which had been established and supported by the Negro women of the
state. In several of the larger Southern cities Young Men's Christian
Associations have been started which are supported by charity, and in
certain instances hospitals have been established.
The only purpose for which the Negro has asked or received
philanthropic aid has been for the support of education. The people of
the United States have been generous in their contributions to Negro
education. In spite of this fact the income of all the Negro colleges,
industrial schools, and other institutions of so-called higher
education in the South is not one fiftieth part of what is expended
every year in London in charity and relief, not for the purpose of
education, but merely to rescue from worse disaster the stranded, the
outcasts, and those who are already lost.[6]
I find, as most people do, I have no doubt, that it is very hard to
realize the significance of a fact that is stated in mere abstract
figures. It is only after I have translated these abstractions into
terms of my own experience that I am able to grasp them. That must be
my excuse here for what may seem a rather far-fetched comparison.
The Negro population of the Southern States is at present about nine
million. In other words, the number of Negroes in the South is just
about one fourth larger than the population of Greater London, which
is something over seven million. Four fifths of this Southern Negro
population still live on the plantations and in the small towns.
From time to time thoughtful and interested persons--some of them, by
the way, Englishmen--have visited the Southern States, talked with
the white people and looked at the Negroes. Then they have gone back
and written despondently, sometimes pessimistically, about the Negro
problem. I wish some of these writers might study the situation of the
races in the South long enough to determine what it would be possible
to do there, not with seventy nor even fifty, but with one million
dollars a year, provided that money were used, not for the purpose of
feeding, sheltering, or protecting the Negro population, for which it
is not needed, but in educating them; in building up the public schools
in the country districts; in providing a system of high schools,
industrial and agricultural schools, such as exists, for example, in
Denmark; in extending the demonstration farming to all the people on
the land, and in encouraging the small colleges to adapt their teaching
to the actual needs of the people so that in the course of time Negro
education in the South could be gradually organized and coördinated
into a single coherent system.
Perhaps I can illustrate in a broad way the difference in the situation
of the poor man in the complex life of a great city like London and
that of a similar class in the simpler conditions of a comparatively
rural community, by a further comparison. The state of Alabama is
nearly as large as England and Wales combined. It had, in 1900, a
little more than one third the present population of what is known
as "Administrative London," which means a city of 4,720,729. Of this
population there were, on an average, 139,916 paupers. In Alabama, with
a population in 1900 of 1,828,696, there were, in 1905, 771 paupers in
almshouses, of whom 414 were white and 357 Negroes. In other words,
while in London there were nearly three paupers for every one thousand
of the population, in Alabama there were a little more than four
paupers for every ten thousand of the population. This does not include
the persons confined in asylums or those who are assisted in their
homes. In Alabama the number of paupers cared for in this way is very
small. As compared with the 2,000 charitable institutions in London,
there were twenty such institutions in Alabama in 1904. Three of these,
a hospital, an old folks' home and orphan asylum, and a school for the
deaf and blind were for Negroes.
I have quoted these figures to show the contrast between conditions in
a large city and a comparatively rural community. But Alabama contains
three cities of considerable size, which may account for a fairly large
number of its paupers, so that I suspect that if the comparison were
strictly carried out it would be found that pauperism is a good deal
more of a city disease than it seems.
The institutions in London to which I have referred, whether managed by
private philanthropy or by the public, are mainly maintained for the
sake of those who have already fallen in the struggle for existence.
They are for the sick and wounded, so to speak. In recent years a
movement has been steadily gaining ground which seeks to get at the
source of this city disease, and by improving the conditions of city
life do away to some extent with the causes of it.
The work of reorganizing the life of the poorer classes in London seems
to have made a beginning some fifty or sixty years ago. The condition
of the working population at that time has been described in the
following words by Mr. Sidney Webb, who has made a profound study of
the condition of the labouring classes in London:
Two thirds of the whole child population was growing up not only
practically without schooling or religious influences of any
kind, but also indescribably brutal and immoral; living amid the
filth of vilely overcrowded courts, unprovided with water supply
or sanitary conveniences, existing always at the lowest level of
physical health, and constantly decimated by disease; incessantly
under temptation by the flaring gin palaces which alone relieve
the monotony of the mean streets to which they were doomed;
graduating almost inevitably into vice and crime amid the now
incredible street life of an unpoliced metropolis.[7]
The first thing attempted was to provide public education for those
who were not able to attend private schools, and, as one writer says,
"rescue the children of the abyss." It was in this rescue work that
England's public schools had their origin. These schools, begun in this
way, steadily gained and broadened until now London has an elaborate
system of continuation, trade and technical schools, culminating
in the reorganized University of London. This system is by no means
perfected; it still is in process, but it gives the outlines of a broad
and generous educational plan, equal in conception and organization at
least to the needs of the largest city in the world.
London already has, for example, 327 night schools, with 127,130
pupils, in which young men and women who have left the day schools may
continue their studies at night or perfect themselves in some branch of
their trade.
Cooking, household management, laundry work, and iron work are taught
in more than half the elementary schools of London. The London County
Council supports fourteen schools which give instruction in the arts
and crafts, and in the trades. In addition, the Government lends its
aid to something like sixty-one other institutions, with an attendance
of over 6,000, in which technical and trade education of some kind
is given. A number of these schools, like the Shoreditch Technical
Institute and the Brixton School of Building, are devoted to a
single trade or group of allied trades. In the Shoreditch Institute
boys are fitted for the furniture trade. Half their time is given
to academic studies and half to work in the trade. At the Brixton
School instruction is given in bricklaying and masonry, plumbing,
painting, architecture, building, and surveying. In other schools
pupils are given instruction in photo-engraving and lithographing, in
fine needlework and engraving, bookbinding, and in many other crafts
requiring a high grade of intelligence and skill.
With the growth of these schools the idea has been gaining ground
that it is not sufficient to rescue those who, through misfortune
or disease, are unable to support themselves; that on the contrary,
instead of waiting until an individual has actually fallen a victim to
what I have called the "city disease," measures of prevention be taken
against pauperism as against other diseases.
Along with this changed point of view has come the insight that the
efficiency of the nation as a whole depends upon its ability to make
the most of the capacities of the whole population.
"Indeed," as Mr. Webb, the writer I have already quoted, says, "we
now see with painful clearness that we have in the long run, for
the maintenance of our preëminent industrial position in the world,
nothing to depend on except the brains of our people. Public education
has insensibly, therefore, come to be regarded, not as a matter of
philanthropy, undertaken for the sake of the children benefited, but,
as a matter of national concern, undertaken in the interest of the
community as a whole."
After the schools, the next direction in which an attempt was made
to improve the condition of the poor in London was in the matter
of housing. The Board of Works first and the London County Council
afterward began some forty years ago buying vast areas in the crowded
parts of London, clearing them of the disreputable buildings, and
then offering them for sale again to persons who would agree to erect
on them sanitary dwellings for the working classes. The Metropolitan
Board of Works, for example, purchased forty-two acres in different
parts of the city for clearance. After the buildings had been torn
down and the sites resold, it was estimated that the net cost would be
about £1,320,619 or about $6,603,395. There lived on this area 22,872
persons, so that the net cost of cleaning up this area and moving
the population into better quarters was something like $281 for each
individual inhabitant.
Then the London County Council took up the work and it decided to begin
building its own houses. Finally, a law was passed that the buildings
so created should rent for more than the rents prevailing in the
district and should pay the cost of maintenance, 3 per cent. on the
capital invested.
On these terms the Metropolitan Board of Works and the London County
Council have cleared in various parts of Central London an area of
nearly eighty-six acres, containing a population of 41,584, at a cost
which averages about $250 per person. On the property thus acquired the
London County Council had in 1907 erected 8,223 tenements with 22,331
rooms. At this time, 1907, there were projected dwellings containing a
total of 28,000 rooms, which, with those already erected, make a total
of over 50,000 rooms. These tenements rent on an average of about 70
cents a week per room, so that the city of Greater London has an annual
income of nearly $760,000 from its rents alone, on which the city
earned in 1901, after all charges were paid, a profit of $10,000.
At first the County Council merely sought to replace the buildings
which it removed, and the new buildings occupied the site of the older
ones. On or near Boundary Street, in the neighbourhood of Bethnal
Green, twenty-two acres were cleared of slums and covered with model
dwellings, provided with wash houses, club rooms and every modern
appliance for health and comfort. The sad thing about it was that after
the buildings were completed and occupied it was found that only eleven
of the former inhabitants remained. They had poured down into slums
in the older part of the city and increased the population in those
already overcrowded regions.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the country private enterprise and private
philanthropy had gone in advance of the London County Council. Outside
of Birmingham and Liverpool garden cities had been erected in which
every family was provided with an acre of land, on some of which men
employed in the factories, when they were not at work, increased their
earnings in some instances as much as £50, or $250, a year.
Then the County Council began to acquire tramways radiating out in
every direction into the suburbs. At the present time the city owns
something over a hundred miles of tramway within the city, and of the
300 miles or more in Greater London the majority is either owned by
London or the suburban boroughs.
At the ends of these lines the London County Council, and more
frequently private individuals, have erected model dwellings on a
large scale and are thus gradually moving the city population into the
country.
In the meantime much has been done in recent years to increase the
number of playgrounds and breathing spaces, to supply bathrooms, wash
houses and other conveniences which make it possible to keep the city
and people in a healthful and sanitary condition. In many of the
principal streets in London I noticed signs directing the people to
public baths which were located somewhere underneath the street. The
different boroughs contributed in 1907 $738,545 in taxes to support
these public baths and bath houses, and at the same time the people
of London paid over $400,000 for bath tickets and $85,000 for laundry
tickets in order to make use of these public conveniences.
Inner London, not including suburbs, has now an area of 6,588 acres in
parks large and small, upon which the city has expended a capital of
$9,125,910 and upon which it expends annually the sum of $548,065 or
thereabout.
Now, the thing that strikes me about all this is that these vast sums
of money which London has spent in clearing up its slums, in providing
decent houses, wider streets, breathing spaces, bath houses, swimming
pools, and washrooms have been spent mainly on sunshine, air, and
water, things which any one may have without cost in the country.
I visited some of these wash houses and saw hundreds of women who had
come in from the surrounding neighbourhood to do their week's washing.
They were paying by the hour for the use of the municipal washtubs and
water, but I am sure they were not any better provided for in this
respect than the coloured women of the South who go down on sunshiny
days to the brook to do their washing, boiling their clothes in a big
iron kettle. I saw the boys in some of the swimming pools, but I did
not see any of them that seemed happier than the boy who goes off to
the brook with his hook and line and by the way takes a plunge in an
old-fashioned swimming hole.
Thus it is that London seems to have found that the best if not the
only way to solve the city problem is by transporting its population
to the country, settling them in colonies in the suburbs, where they
may obtain, at an enormous expense, what four fifths of the Negro
population in this country already have and what they can be taught to
value and keep if some of the money that is now expended or which will
be expended on the city slums were spent in giving the people on the
farm some of the advantages which the city offers, the principal one of
which is a chance for an education.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] The annual income of twenty Negro colleges in the United States
was, in 1908, $804,663.
[7] London Education, Nineteenth Century, October 1903, p. 563.