THE CHILDREN
“Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
Forgetting the world is fair.”
There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is
the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his
round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next
generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and
graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and
easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in
dancing school.
I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and
they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even
brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for
projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is
remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in
music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling
beauty of face and form under their filth and rags.
But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. They
disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them.
You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Here
you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds.
Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are
gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but
twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift
her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps
upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children
who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps
are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged
recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a
girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about
her, with all the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more
than parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and
stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on.
The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for
noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated
tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these
qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does
not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and
wretched below the beasts of the field.
As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters
described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in
brief:—
“Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all
great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware
that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns
supreme . . . that condition which the French call _la misère_, a word
for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a
condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary
for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal
state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced
to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary
conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in
which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and
drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the
shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral
degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry
is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper’s
grave.”
In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like
flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive
vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which
they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in
which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent.
And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by
bad sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and
mother live with three or four children in a room where the children
take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers,
when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and
made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women
the survivors will make can readily be imagined.
“Dull despair and misery
Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
Are their earliest lullaby.”
A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room. Their
income does not increase with the years, though their family does, and
the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job. A
baby comes, and then another. This means that more room should be
obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean additional expense
and make it absolutely impossible to get more spacious quarters. More
babies come. There is not room in which to turn around. The youngsters
run the streets, and by the time they are twelve or fourteen the
room-issue comes to a head, and out they go on the streets for good.
The boy, if he be lucky, can manage to make the common lodging-houses,
and he may have any one of several ends. But the girl of fourteen or
fifteen, forced in this manner to leave the one room called home, and
able to earn at the best a paltry five or six shillings per week, can
have but one end. And the bitter end of that one end is such as that of
the woman whose body the police found this morning in a doorway in
Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one
with her in her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure. She
was sixty-two years old and a match vendor. She died as a wild animal
dies.
Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End
police court. His head was barely visible above the railing. He was
being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman, which he
had spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for food.
“Why didn’t you ask the woman for food?” the magistrate demanded, in a
hurt sort of tone. “She would surely have given you something to eat.”
“If I ’ad arsked ’er, I’d got locked up for beggin’,” was the boy’s
reply.
The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke. Nobody knew
the boy, nor his father or mother. He was without beginning or
antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the jungle
of empire, preying upon the weak and being preyed upon by the strong.
The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and send
them away on a day’s outing to the country, believe that not very many
children reach the age of ten without having had at least one day
there. Of this, a writer says: “The mental change caused by one day so
spent must not be undervalued. Whatever the circumstances, the children
learn the meaning of fields and woods, so that descriptions of country
scenery in the books they read, which before conveyed no impression,
become now intelligible.”
One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be picked
up by the people who try to help! And they are being born faster every
day than they can be carted off to the fields and woods for the one day
in their lives. One day! In all their lives, one day! And for the rest
of the days, as the boy told a certain bishop, “At ten we ’ops the wag;
at thirteen we nicks things; an’ at sixteen we bashes the copper.”
Which is to say, at ten they play truant, at thirteen steal, and at
sixteen are sufficiently developed hooligans to smash the policemen.
The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish who
set out to walk to the forest. They walked and walked through the
never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by; until they
sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind
woman who brought them back. Evidently they had been overlooked by the
people who try to help.
The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street in
Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children,
between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses. And he
adds: “It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze of
streets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in sky
and field and brook, that they grow up to be men and women physically
unfit.”
He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to a
married couple. “They said they had two children; when they got
possession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifth
appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid no
attention to it. Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the law
so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings. He
pleaded that he could not get them out. They pleaded that nobody would
have them with so many children at a rental within their means, which
is one of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye. What was to
be done? The landlord was between two millstones. Finally he applied to
the magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case. Since
that time about twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been
done. Is this a singular case? By no means; it is quite common.”
Last week the police raided a disorderly house. In one room were found
two young children. They were arrested and charged with being inmates
the same as the women had been. Their father appeared at the trial. He
stated that himself and wife and two older children, besides the two in
the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that he occupied it
because he could get no other room for the half-crown a week he paid
for it. The magistrate discharged the two juvenile offenders and warned
the father that he was bringing his children up unhealthily.
But there is no need further to multiply instances. In London the
slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any
before in the history of the world. And equally stupendous is the
callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and
go to church regularly on Sunday. For the rest of the week they riot
about on the rents and profits which come to them from the East End
stained with the blood of the children. Also, at times, so peculiarly
are they made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits
and send it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan.