THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
I was talking with a very vindictive man. In his opinion, his wife had
wronged him and the law had wronged him. The merits and morals of the
case are immaterial. The meat of the matter is that she had obtained a
separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings each week for the
support of her and the five children. “But look you,” said he to me,
“wot’ll ’appen to ’er if I don’t py up the ten shillings? S’posin’,
now, just s’posin’ a accident ’appens to me, so I cawn’t work. S’posin’
I get a rupture, or the rheumatics, or the cholera. Wot’s she goin’ to
do, eh? Wot’s she goin’ to do?”
He shook his head sadly. “No ’ope for ’er. The best she cawn do is the
work’ouse, an’ that’s ’ell. An’ if she don’t go to the work’ouse, it’ll
be a worse ’ell. Come along ’ith me an’ I’ll show you women sleepin’ in
a passage, a dozen of ’em. An’ I’ll show you worse, wot she’ll come to
if anythin’ ’appens to me and the ten shillings.”
The certitude of this man’s forecast is worthy of consideration. He
knew conditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his wife’s
grasp on food and shelter. For her game was up when his working
capacity was impaired or destroyed. And when this state of affairs is
looked at in its larger aspect, the same will be found true of hundreds
of thousands and even millions of men and women living amicably
together and co-operating in the pursuit of food and shelter.
The figures are appalling: 1,800,000 people in London live on the
poverty line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week’s wages
between them and pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen per
cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief, and
in London, according to the statistics of the London County Council,
twenty-one per cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish
for relief. Between being driven to the parish for relief and being an
out-and-out pauper there is a great difference, yet London supports
123,000 paupers, quite a city of folk in themselves. One in every four
in London dies on public charity, while 939 out of every 1000 in the
United Kingdom die in poverty; 8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged
edge of starvation, and 20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the
simple and clean sense of the word.
It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London people
who die on charity.
In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population was
less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for every
succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has been
greater in London than in all England. Yet, from the
Registrar-General’s Report for 1886, the following figures are taken:—
Out of 81,951 deaths in London (1884):—
In workhouses 9,909
In hospitals 6,559
In lunatic asylums 278
Total in public refuges 16,746
Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says: “Considering that
comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that one in
every three London adults will be driven into one of these refuges to
die, and the proportion in the case of the manual labour class must of
course be still larger.”
These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the average
worker to pauperism. Various things make pauperism. An advertisement,
for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday morning’s paper:—
“Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and invoicing:
wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week. Apply by letter,” &c.
And in to-day’s paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age and
an inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
non-performance of task. He claimed that he had done his various tasks
since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to breaking
stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the task. He had
never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he said. The
magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven days’ hard
labour.
Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the accident,
the thing happening, the death or disablement of the husband, father,
and bread-winner. Here is a man, with a wife and three children, living
on the ticklish security of twenty shillings per week—and there are
hundreds of thousands of such families in London. Perforce, to even
half exist, they must live up to the last penny of it, so that a week’s
wages (one pound) is all that stands between this family and pauperism
or starvation. The thing happens, the father is struck down, and what
then? A mother with three children can do little or nothing. Either she
must hand her children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to
be free to do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the
sweat-shops for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to
her reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
their husband’s earnings, and single women who have but themselves
miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale of
wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three children
can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay
and death end their suffering.
To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
newspapers the two following cases:—
A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes. They made each day four
gross. Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d. for
glue, and 1d. for string, so that all they earned between them was 1s.
9d., or a daily wage each of 10.5d.
In the second case, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief. “She was a straw-hat
maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the price
she obtained for them—namely, 2.25d. each. For that price she had to
provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats.”
Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done no
wrong that they should be so punished. They have not sinned. The thing
happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-winner, was struck
down. There is no guarding against it. It is fortuitous. A family
stands so many chances of escaping the bottom of the Abyss, and so many
chances of falling plump down to it. The chance is reducible to cold,
pitiless figures, and a few of these figures will not be out of place.
Sir A. Forwood calculates that—
1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4 weeks.
But these are only the accidents of industry. The high mortality of the
people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part. The average age at
death among the people of the West End is fifty-five years; the average
age at death among the people of the East End is thirty years. That is
to say, the person in the West End has twice the chance for life that
the person has in the East End. Talk of war! The mortality in South
Africa and the Philippines fades away to insignificance. Here, in the
heart of peace, is where the blood is being shed; and here not even the
civilised rules of warfare obtain, for the women and children and babes
in the arms are killed just as ferociously as the men are killed. War!
In England, every year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in
the various industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to
disablement by disease.
In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five
years of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children die
before five years of age. And there are streets in London where out of
every one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during the next
year; and of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before they are
five years old. Slaughter! Herod did not do quite so badly.
That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does no
better substantiation can be given than the following extract from a
recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not applicable
to Liverpool alone:—
In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts, and
the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing largely to
the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which for so many
years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into their porous
material. Singular testimony to the absence of sunlight in these courts
was furnished by the action of the Parks and Gardens Committee, who
desired to brighten the homes of the poorest class by gifts of growing
flowers and window-boxes; but these gifts could not be made in courts
such as these, _as flowers and plants were susceptible to the
unwholesome surroundings, and would not live_.
Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St.
George’s parishes (London parishes):—
Percentage of Population Overcrowded Death-rate per 1000 St.
George’s West 10 13.2 St. George’s South 35 23.7 St.
George’s East 40 26.4
Then there are the “dangerous trades,” in which countless workers are
employed. Their hold on life is indeed precarious—far, far more
precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on life. In
the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet and wet
clothes cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia, and severe
rheumatism; while in the carding and spinning departments the fine dust
produces lung disease in the majority of cases, and the woman who
starts carding at seventeen or eighteen begins to break up and go to
pieces at thirty. The chemical labourers, picked from the strongest and
most splendidly-built men to be found, live, on an average, less than
forty-eight years.
Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter’s trade: “Potter’s dust does not kill
suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly into the
lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed. Breathing becomes
more and more difficult and depressed, and finally ceases.”
Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre
dust—all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-guns
and pom-poms. Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead trades.
Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a young, healthy,
well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead factory:—
Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anæmic. It may be
that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her teeth and
gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible. Coincidently
with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so gradually as
scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends. Sickness, however,
ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are developed. These are
frequently attended by obscuration of vision or temporary blindness.
Such a girl passes into what appears to her friends and medical adviser
as ordinary hysteria. This gradually deepens without warning, until she
is suddenly seized with a convulsion, beginning in one half of the
face, then involving the arm, next the leg of the same side of the
body, until the convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in
character, becomes universal. This is attended by loss of
consciousness, out of which she passes into a series of convulsions,
gradually increasing in severity, in one of which she dies—or
consciousness, partial or perfect, is regained, either, it may be, for
a few minutes, a few hours, or days, during which violent headache is
complained of, or she is delirious and excited, as in acute mania, or
dull and sullen as in melancholia, and requires to be roused, when she
is found wandering, and her speech is somewhat imperfect. Without
further warning, save that the pulse, which has become soft, with
nearly the normal number of beats, all at once becomes low and hard;
she is suddenly seized with another convulsion, in which she dies, or
passes into a state of coma from which she never rallies. In another
case the convulsions will gradually subside, the headache disappears
and the patient recovers, only to find that she has completely lost her
eyesight, a loss that may be temporary or permanent.
And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:—
Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid
constitution—who had never had a day’s illness in her life—became a
white-lead worker. Convulsions seized her at the foot of the ladder in
the works. Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line along her gums,
which shows that the system is under the influence of the lead. He knew
that the convulsions would shortly return. They did so, and she died.
Mary Ann Toler—a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her
life—three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the factory.
Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead poisoning—had fits,
frothed at the mouth, and died.
Mary A., an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead
factory for _twenty years_, having colic once only during that time.
Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions. One
morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all power
in both her wrists.
Eliza H., aged twenty-five, _after five months_ at lead works, was
seized with colic. She entered another factory (after being refused by
the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years. Then the
former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and died in
two days of acute lead poisoning.
Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says: “The
children of the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only to
die from the convulsions of lead poisoning—they are either born
prematurely, or die within the first year.”
And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A. Walker, a young
girl of seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the
industrial battlefield. She was employed as an enamelled ware brusher,
wherein lead poisoning is encountered. Her father and brother were both
out of employment. She concealed her illness, walked six miles a day to
and from work, earned her seven or eight shillings per week, and died,
at seventeen.
Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the workers
into the Abyss. With a week’s wages between a family and pauperism, a
month’s enforced idleness means hardship and misery almost
indescribable, and from the ravages of which the victims do not always
recover when work is to be had again. Just now the daily papers contain
the report of a meeting of the Carlisle branch of the Dockers’ Union,
wherein it is stated that many of the men, for months past, have not
averaged a weekly income of more than from four to five shillings. The
stagnated state of the shipping industry in the port of London is held
accountable for this condition of affairs.
To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there is
no assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old age.
Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure. It is all a
matter of chance. Everything depends upon the thing happening, the
thing with which they have nothing to do. Precaution cannot fend it
off, nor can wiles evade it. If they remain on the industrial
battlefield they must face it and take their chance against heavy odds.
Of course, if they are favourably made and are not tied by kinship
duties, they may run away from the industrial battlefield. In which
event the safest thing the man can do is to join the army; and for the
woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross nurse or go into a nunnery. In
either case they must forego home and children and all that makes life
worth living and old age other than a nightmare.