THE SOCIAL EVIL.
Closely bound up with the sanitary danger, indeed inseparable from
it, is the social evil. The value of healthy habitations, of personal
cleanliness, of pure air, of a sufficient but not exorbitant amount
of work--all that in fact tends to produce the _mens sana in corpore
sano_--all this is fully acknowledged and known; yet we freely throw
open our doors to a class whose habits and customs admittedly militate
against all these powerful agencies for good.
The unlimited pouring in of destitute and degraded foreigners tends
both directly and indirectly to increase our national burden of
pauperism, vice, and crime. With regard to the first part of this
statement it is often objected that but few of these foreign immigrants
come upon the rates, and that our workhouses and penitentiaries show
comparatively faint signs of their presence. This is a half-truth, and
like all half-truths it conceals a most dangerous fallacy. _Nulla falsa
doctrina est, quae non permisceat aliquid veritatis._ On the surface I
admit the plausibility of the objection. In Leeds, for instance, where
the foreign colony has reached abnormal proportions, the total number
of Jews chargeable to the common fund of the Leeds Union, at the time
when particulars were furnished to the Board of Trade in the early
part of this year (1891), was only 62. The numerous Jewish and Foreign
Benevolent Societies and Charitable Institutions are far too careful to
allow their people to come upon the rates more than they can possibly
help. But that the whole tendency of this destitute foreign immigration
is to force those of our English working-classes, who are in any
degree affected by it, into pauperism or something worse, cannot for
one moment be denied by those who have any practical knowledge of the
poor in the crowded centres of population to which these undesirable
foreigners flock.
In proof of this assertion, I may quote the opinion of the Mile
End Board of Guardians, who believed that this destitute foreign
immigration had "a deteriorating effect upon the moral, financial,
and social conditions of the people." The Whitechapel Guardians of
the poor also deplore the substitution of the foreign for the English
population. The result, they say, is the lowering of the general
condition of the people. The Hackney Board of Guardians also, after
an exhaustive inquiry, arrived at the opinion that the unchecked
immigration of destitute foreigners was a serious social danger,
reducing wages to a "starvation point." They supported their decision
by a series of practical and convincing arguments which only lack of
space prevents my quoting in full.[22]
If a life of honest labour has no better reward to offer than the
meagre wages and attendant horrors of the sweaters' dens, can it be
wondered if in despair of earning an honest livelihood, hundreds,
nay thousands, of our people are tempted to abandon the unequal
struggle, and to drift into idleness, drunkenness, and vice? I
have endeavoured to show in a previous chapter how this unnatural
competition forces Englishwomen upon the streets; but that, alas! is
not the only resultant form of vice. A great social reformer[23] once
said that "he had found a man's sobriety to be in direct proportion
to his cleanliness." Without admitting the universal accuracy of this
opinion, there is no doubt that it contains within it the germs of a
great truth. Drunkenness, that endless source of misery and crime, is
not in itself so much a cause as an effect, the effect of the loss
of that innate sense of self-respect which forms one of the great
barriers between the man and the beast. "When we examine into the
ultimate cause of a dangerous class," writes Canon Kingsley,[24] "into
the one property common to all its members, whether thieves, beggars,
profligates, or the merely pauperized--we find it to be this loss of
self-respect. As long as that remains, poor souls may struggle on
heroically, pure amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when
self-respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the
fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in these dens of physical
and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, and they must
sink, into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye, the very
smells, which surround them."
All this is true enough. But how, I would ask, is it possible for our
people to maintain this precious sense of self-respect when they are
forced daily and hourly into contact with those who appear to have no
more idea of decency, cleanliness, and comfort than the beasts which
perish? The whole physical circumstances of their lives fight against
them. To the great bulk of these immigrant aliens, the word "home,"
that word so sacred to English ears, around which so many associations
cling, has no meaning at all. They appear to have only one dominant
passion, the love of gain;--not that they gain much, poor creatures,
still it is there;--and in their pursuit of it they are willing to
accommodate themselves to the meagre wage, the lengthy hours, and the
filthy surroundings already described. With this exception they appear
to be indifferent to everything which makes life worth the living, to
have no happiness in the past, no pleasures in the present, no hope
in the future. With our own people it is different. However degraded
they may be, there exists among them the longing for enjoyment. "Not
to enjoy is not to live." Moral and intellectual enjoyments many have
none; and in default of these, they betake themselves to the lowest
forms of animal enjoyment; snatching at their pleasures greedily,
foully, all the more fiercely because their opportunities of enjoyment
are so limited. Can we wonder that these things are so? Can we judge
them harshly? God forbid!
A well-known social reformer, for whose work and opinions I have
the greatest respect, has written:--"It is a fact apparent to every
thoughtful man, that the larger portion of the misery that constitutes
our social question arises from indulgence, gluttony, drink, waste,
profligacy, betting, and dissipation."[25] This on the surface is
true enough; but when we come to examine more closely into the
problems of poverty, we shall find that though intemperance, unthrift,
self-indulgence, and inefficiency are unhappily the common vices of the
poor, yet these vices are not so much the _causes_ of poverty, as the
_effects_ of it.
The Rev. S. A. Barnett, of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, who knows the
East End of London so thoroughly, does not find the origin of poverty
in the vices of the poor. Terrible as are the results of drunkenness,
unthrift, and self-indulgence, it is not possible, if we view the
facts dispassionately, to regard these as the main sources of poverty.
We shall rather look upon these evils as the natural outcome of the
fierce struggle for existence, which is carried on under our present
industrial conditions. Morality is admittedly the truest and most
real end of man, and therefore on a superficial aspect it is natural
to represent the miseries of the very poor to be chiefly occasioned
by their own faults. It is a comfortable view to take, for it at
once lightens the responsibility of the rich man, and it salves his
conscience by the specious plea that after all the poor and the
wretched have brought half their troubles upon themselves; and as they
have made their beds, so must they lie. But this is rather the attitude
of the Pharisee than of the philanthropist, and the moral and social
problems of our age and country will never be solved if approached in
such a spirit.
It is a cruel and unholy thing thus to intensify the struggle for
existence among our own people by the ceaseless immigration of
those, who, to quote the words of the Bishop of Bedford, "are at
once demoralized and demoralizing."[26] Few have had more practical
experience of the crowded East End of London than Dr. Billing, and he
has given eloquent testimony to the injury worked upon our own people
there by this wholesale invasion. In this fierce battle for life, of
what use is it to utter trite platitudes about the "survival of the
fittest," since, as another great authority, Lord Dunraven, has pointed
out, "the fittest in this instance are those who are able to exist
upon the lowest possible diet, in the greatest possible filth, and
subject to the greatest amount of hardships and misery"?[27]
Englishmen and Englishwomen were not formed thus to live, and thus
to toil. They cannot do so without contracting diseased habits of
body and mind--without becoming brutalized, in fact. They lose their
self-respect, and go to swell that degraded class into which the
_weaker_ as well as the _worst_ members of society show a perpetual
tendency to sink--a class which not respecting itself does not respect
others, which has nothing to lose and all to gain, and in which the
lowest passions are ever ready to burst out and avenge themselves by
frightful methods. That is why it is, at the present hour, in the
crowded courts and teeming alleys of East London, there exist all the
elements of something even more terrible in its way than the misery
which brought about the French Revolution.
It has been said that "A great city is a great evil." But paradoxical
as it may seem, it is also a great good, since it provides employment
for many thousands who otherwise would starve. Still it cannot be
denied that the abnormal increase of our great cities, and the gradual
depopulation of our country districts, form one of the most serious
social problems of our time.
There is a constant movement going on from the country to the
town. This is due to many causes, one of which is undoubtedly the
introduction of machinery, which, whilst lessening the work for
labourers in the agricultural districts, at the same time creates an
extraordinary demand for "hands" in our manufacturing centres. Another
cause is the higher rate of wages, and the bustling customs of the
town, which never cease to offer attractions to young people starting
in life. The result of this steady current of human beings flowing away
from the country to the town is disastrous to both. Every great city
in England is rapidly approaching a state of congestion; and in rural
places there is a great dearth of workers, the supply falling very far
short of the demand. If the 30,000,000 human beings in England and
Wales all had food and lodging, there would be no cause for anxiety;
but a large number of them are very poor, and wholly unable to support
themselves. In 1890 no less than 671,000 persons received Poor Law
relief, of whom 462,000 were relieved outside, and 179,000 inside
the workhouse. In London alone 5000 able-bodied men were relieved
every day, at a cost to the Metropolitan rate-payers of £188,000 per
year. Twenty-four out of every hundred, or nearly one quarter of
those who died in London last year, died either in the workhouses,
hospitals, or lunatic asylums. Therefore, considering this question
of foreign immigration generally, and foreign Jewish immigration in
particular, we must take into account the nature of its distribution
and the gregarious habits of the Jewish immigrants. The weekly arrival
of hundreds of semi-starving foreigners must of necessity have a
serious effect upon our unskilled labour market in London and our
great provincial cities, to which the immigrant aliens principally
flock. All thinking persons will admit that it is of more importance
to protect our own workmen than to preserve our traditional character
for hospitality, if it can be shown--and I consider it can--that the
exercise of such hospitality tends to degrade the social condition of
the native workers.
Why then add to the difficulties of this problem by letting in yearly
thousands of these foreigners, chiefly the "lowest class of the lowest
class," who, parasites that they are, flock at once to our great
centres of population, and prey upon our people, underselling their
labour, and taking the bread from their mouths?
We live in the days of a great social upheaval. We hear on all sides
of the great "Labour movement." What does it mean? What is at the
bottom of it all? Only the desire of our labouring classes to seek for
themselves some alleviation of their lot; some increased opportunity
for leisure; some better remuneration for their labour; some surer
provision against sickness and old age. They are seeking--not always by
the best and wisest methods perhaps, but that is not their fault--how
to make their lives better and broader, healthier and happier. With
these desires every right-thinking man is in sympathy. The complete
realization of their dream may be Utopian perhaps--I do not know. But
even if it be, what is there to blame in this divine discontent?
"Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man!"
How are these longings to be gratified?--how are they to be even
partially realized, while this unchecked flood of destitution and
degradation pours in upon us from abroad?
We hear much in these days of schemes for elevating and evangelizing
the masses of the poor in our great cities. All honour to such schemes,
whether they succeed or whether they fail, for the motive which
animates them is good. But it cannot be too often insisted upon, that
spiritual and intellectual necessities do not arise until some decency
of physical conditions has been first attained. Among the "submerged
tenth," as they have been called, decency of physical conditions will
never come to pass until steps have first been taken to forbid the
entrance of the unclean and unhealthy of other lands. So long as the
bare struggle for existence absorbs all the energies of our very poor,
they cannot be civilized.
I do not underrate the greater worth of the moral life as compared
with the purely physical life; but we must begin at the lowest rung
of the ladder before we can ascend to the highest. As things are, the
dregs of our slum population have neither the time, the energy, or the
desire to be clean, thrifty, intelligent, or moral. In our haste we
must not blame them. What they want first of all is better food, and
more of it, warmer clothes, better shelter, higher wages, and more
permanent employment. Unless we can first assist them to obtain these
material desires, all our efforts to awaken the higher part of their
natures will be in vain. Some perhaps will object that many of these
poor creatures are so brutalized, so criminal, so degraded, that they
have no higher nature left to awaken. I do not believe it--I will never
believe it. However degraded a human being may be, however handicapped
from his birth by the circumstances of his life, and even handicapped
before his birth by the transmitted vices of his progenitors, there
still is implanted in him, dormant and infinitesimal though it may be,
that spark of the divine nature which alone separates man from the
beast.
In writing on the social aspect of this evil, it is well to make
one's meaning quite plain. I do not of course mean to say--no one can
say--that to restrict the immigration of the destitute, the criminal,
or the worthless, would be a panacea for all our social ills. Far from
it; but it would at least remove from their way, one of the most
potent causes of degradation in the material and social condition of
the poor in our large cities. Until something has first been done to
check this evil, charitable agencies, religious movements, colonization
and emigration schemes will be beside the mark. However much good they
may do here and there--and I freely admit the amount of good that such
movements have done, and are doing every day--they will fail to go to
the root of the evil, since they deal with effects and not with causes;
they treat the symptoms, but not the disease.
Emigration is worthless while this continuous influx is allowed to go
on. At the best, emigration is a drastic remedy only to be applied
in the last resource. If, like the Great Plague, or Fire of London,
emigration carried off the diseased, or swept away foul and unhealthy
tenements, it might possibly be regarded with more complacency. But
under existing circumstances this is just what emigration does not
do. We must bear in mind that we can no longer draft off our social
failures to other countries. Even our colonies now refuse to take the
"wreckage" of the mother country. The people we emigrate now, are just
those we can least afford to lose. And there is another consideration.
Of the thousands we emigrate yearly, most are men, young, healthy,
and vigorous. Of the women, all--or nearly all--are virtuous and
industrious. In either sex the residuum, both men and women, and more
especially women, remain behind. "Bad men die, but bad women multiply,"
once said a lady whose name is a synonym for all that is charitable
and good, when urging the advisability of giving the fallen sisterhood
of our great cities a chance of beginning life over again in some new
land beyond the seas. These are pregnant words, but under our present
system little or no provision is made for carrying them into effect.
Things have come to such a pass, that while we emigrate the flower of
our population, the industrious, the vigorous, and the courageous;
the feeble, the idle, and the worthless remain with us; and this
undesirable increment is ever being augmented by the refuse population
of other countries.
Look at it from whatever point we will, it cannot be right that these
things should be.