What were already glaring national ills before the war will, afterwards,
be ills demanding the most immediate, sustained, and resolute attention.
There exists in America a vehicle called the “rubber-neck” car, in which
the tourist is taken and shown the interesting features of the
neighbourhood. Before the political machine settles down again to work,
legislators, editors, business men, writers—we might all with profit
take a round trip and see again evils that our country has never really
faced in the past, but will have to face, and grievously swollen at
that, in the future. At the back of all lack of effort is lack of
realization. Statistics of national problems may foster an impersonal
and scientific attitude, but they do nothing to supply the feeling from
which alone comes driving force.
Take our slums! The powers vested in the State or in local bodies for
dealing with slum areas are obviously either not sufficient or not
sufficiently put to use. Not, of course, that any quick or light-hearted
transformation can be expected; the roots of this evil are too
tortuously coiled in economies and natural selfishness.
Still, just as realization of our country’s danger at the hands of
Germany has produced a marvellous crop of effort and sacrifice, so
realization of the equally distressing menace to the country from within
should produce something similar, when patriotic attention is once more
free, and time and strength at liberty, for fighting dangers at home.
The housing problem desperately needs attention; but, though much can be
done, good gamblers cut their losses, and the adult generation of the
slums has got more or less to be cut, that greater effort may be
concentrated on the children.
The war has focussed attention on the need for arresting infant
mortality. Good! But there is little use in saving babies if you are not
going to feed them decently when they are out of swaddling clothes. A
big step forward has been taken of late years towards the feeding of
necessitous children, both at school and in crêches but many more steps
need to be taken. If this is not a State matter, then nothing is. To
neglect the nourishment of its children is at once the paltriest
economy, the least sagacious policy, and the worst inhumanity of which a
nation can be guilty. The old-fashioned idea that children must go
hungry or be fed so as to grow up rickety because their parents (being
“rotters” already) must not be rotted further is a doctrine devoid both
of common sense and compassion. A nation either has a will towards a
future, or it has none. If it has none, for what are we fighting this
most bloody war? What does our honour matter, or our independence
either? But the future of a nation is its children. As they grow up,
healthy, clean, hopeful, efficient, so will our future be. As they grow
up—half-fed, dirty, don’t care, and ignorant—so will Britain! If to
look after the children makes worse paupers of the parents, well—let
it! Have some courage. Do not be hypnotized by a word, and, grasping the
shadow, lose the substance. Give the children blood in their little
bodies, and hope in their little brains. Any decent parent will be the
better for that; the indecent parent is a loss already, and must be cut.
Working-class mothers who neglect to feed their children better than
themselves are but exceptions, nor will a sounder system of State-help
seriously alter the deepest instinct of human nature. The heroism of
British soldiers in the trenches is no greater than the lifelong heroism
of British mothers in the slums struggling against want. This is a
matter that should not be left to the discretion of local bodies. Once
the principle has been admitted—and who can honestly deny that it
has?—the rest should be simply a question of fact medically certified
not here and there, but all over the country. Either it is justice and
wisdom to feed the children, or it is not, and the scruples, however
philosophical, of gentlemen prepared to watch other people’s children go
hungry should not any longer be indulged.
The estimated number of school children in England and Wales being fed
by the State in 1911-1912 was 230,000 out of a school population of
5,357,367. The estimated number of this school population showing signs
of malnutrition is variously given at from 10 to 20 per cent. Taking it
at 15 per cent., or 800,000 children, we have more than half a million
school children wanting meals and not getting them. This is appalling.
There is no other word for it. But when the children _under_ school age
who need food and are not getting it, are added to this number, the
proportions of this national folly and inhumanity stagger the brain. It
does not yet seem to be grasped that these children, who are fighting
not only against insufficiency of proper food, but against bad air and
bad housing, grow up with so much per cent. knocked off their national
value. A stitch in time is supposed to save nine. A pound spent on the
age of growth brings back many pounds from the age of stability. To
those few who ride the doctrine of Liberty to the death of national
health it may simply be said: So long as you have no hope of repealing
compulsory education, you have no right to let children receive it in an
unfit condition. Education and decent nourishment are inseparable; and
decent nourishment is as necessary in the years that come before as in
the years of schooling. No! In reality the principle is now rooted, and,
like other things, it’s all a question of money. But a country with a
capital of £16,000,000,000 and an income of £2,100,000,000 cannot really
afford to allow this state of affairs to continue—especially after the
gold-letting of this war. The state our national finances will be in
makes it all the more imperative that we should have a well-nourished
and efficient population, or we shall never get out of the slough.
During this war our heroism has jibbed at Liquor. That jovial monster
looms nearly as large as ever. We shall have a National Debt after the
war of three or four thousand millions, perhaps more. And yet the
cheapest thing that could possibly be done, in the long run, would be to
increase it and buy up the Liquor Trade; achieve that dream of Joseph
Chamberlain, “the total and absolute elimination of any idea of private
gain in the retail sale of liquor”; convert drink into food to the tune
of some eighty millions a year; and vastly diminish the number of
children that require State nourishment, and the number of underfed men
and women. In 1911, £162,797,229 was the drink bill of the nation; of
which it is estimated that about £110,000,000 was spent by the working
class. The working classes are no more inclined to liquor than the rest
of the population, but they have obviously less to spare for the
indulgence of their inclination. With proper control of the liquor
traffic they will perhaps spend half what they spend now, extracting
therefrom just as much enjoyment, and most of the other half will go
into the bodies of themselves and their children in the form of food.
Before the war one-tenth of our people were getting too little food;
two-tenths more just balanced on a knife-edge of bare sufficiency. And
the great majority of this third of our population were too closely or
too badly housed for health.
What is it going to be—_after_—unless our measures in regard to food,
to housing, and to drink, are heroic? For heroic measures we shall need
a keener sense of justice, a larger humanity, than we have ever had.
Though the war may conceivably not diminish humane feeling in those who
fight, it blunts the sensibilities of those who do not see its horrors
at first-hand. Tales of others’ sufferings have become the daily fodder
of the brain; narratives of death and misery the companions of every
hour. Alongside the brutalities and agonies of the war, the injustice
and cruelties of normal civil live seem pale and tame. Man has only a
certain capacity for feeling; one expects callousness now towards civil
inhumanities. But must that callousness last after peace has come? If
so, we are in a bad way.
What is it that our modern State is reaching after? Presumably health,
and balance. And what are these qualities built on, if not on Justice?
At the back of all social inhumanities will be found a lack of
reasonable freedom and opportunity for some people, and the possession
in other people of too much freedom and opportunity. And for the swift
redress of social cruelties, the thorough attainment of social justice,
we have at present not only to contend with human nature, but with an
admitted deficiency in our legislative machinery.
When the chief obstacle to laws is not the callousness of public
opinion, but a mere block on the lines of procedure, some drastic change
is due, a new departure wanted. Before the war many measures of reform
hung in the wind year after year, not because there was no public
feeling behind them, not even because there were the usual political
cleavages concerning them, but simply because time could not be found in
which to pass them. Of such were: Measures for the feeding and education
of children; the control of drink; rural housing; improvement of slum
areas; furtherance of the minimum wage; reform of the Poor Law; of the
Divorce Law; of the disability that attends the needy in their access to
civil justice; of the imprisonment of poor persons for debt; of the
procedure in regard to pauper lunatics; of the prison system; of
provision for the blind; measures for the better treatment of animals.
All these and others hung in the wind; are they to go on hanging those
when the war is over? Wanted before, they will be wanted still more
badly then, because the general conditions of life will for some years,
perhaps many years, be harder; and economic pressure fosters rough and
unjust treatment.
Is it too early for a united effort, to think out, in readiness for
peace, a scheme of parliamentary procedure which shall afford time for
the serious and uninterrupted consideration of non-party measures, and
the furtherance of needed reforms?
Party no longer exists, but they who think it has gone for good dwell in
a fools’ paradise. As sure as fate it will spring up again, because it
is rooted in temperamental difference. But must it come back with all
its old cat-and-dog propensities, and waste of national time? It will,
unless some method be devised that will remove some of party’s
unhandsome opportunities and save it from itself. Politicians alone know
the difficulties, many and great, in the way of a better procedure.
Surely, while faction is in abeyance, Parliament will set its wits to
overcoming those difficulties, so that when the war ends we may not
witness again the tedious and distressful blocking of so many needed
measures that prevailed aforetime. Party was made for the Country, not
the Country for Party; and what was tolerated with Job-like patience
before this vast upheaval is not by any means likely to be tolerated
after. Needs will be more insistent; the sense of reality much greater;
the aspiration towards National Health a live thing, because it will be
so desperately necessary.
Reform of parliamentary procedure is obviously the prime precedent for
national reform. Shall not then the question be even now given all the
attention that can be spared to it? What better moment—when men of all
parties are filled with the one great thought—Our Country!