THE HUNGER WAIL
“My father has more stamina than I, for he is country-born.”
The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor physical
development.
“Look at my scrawny arm, will you.” He pulled up his sleeve. “Not
enough to eat, that’s what’s the matter with it. Oh, not now. I have
what I want to eat these days. But it’s too late. It can’t make up for
what I didn’t have to eat when I was a kiddy. Dad came up to London
from the Fen Country. Mother died, and there were six of us kiddies and
dad living in two small rooms.
“He had hard times, dad did. He might have chucked us, but he didn’t.
He slaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and cared for
us. He was father and mother, both. He did his best, but we didn’t have
enough to eat. We rarely saw meat, and then of the worst. And it is not
good for growing kiddies to sit down to a dinner of bread and a bit of
cheese, and not enough of it.
“And what’s the result? I am undersized, and I haven’t the stamina of
my dad. It was starved out of me. In a couple of generations there’ll
be no more of me here in London. Yet there’s my younger brother; he’s
bigger and better developed. You see, dad and we children held
together, and that accounts for it.”
“But I don’t see,” I objected. “I should think, under such conditions,
that the vitality should decrease and the younger children be born
weaker and weaker.”
“Not when they hold together,” he replied. “Whenever you come along in
the East End and see a child of from eight to twelve, good-sized,
well-developed, and healthy-looking, just you ask and you will find
that it is the youngest in the family, or at least is one of the
younger. The way of it is this: the older children starve more than the
younger ones. By the time the younger ones come along, the older ones
are starting to work, and there is more money coming in, and more food
to go around.”
He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic
semi-starvation kills not, but stunts. His voice was but one among the
myriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest empire in
the world. On any one day, over 1,000,000 people are in receipt of
poor-law relief in the United Kingdom. One in eleven of the whole
working-class receive poor-law relief in the course of the year;
37,500,000 people receive less than £12 per month, per family; and a
constant army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of starvation.
A committee of the London County school board makes this declaration:
“At times, _when there is no special distress_, 55,000 children in a
state of hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to teach them, are
in the schools of London alone.” The italics are mine. “When there is
no special distress” means good times in England; for the people of
England have come to look upon starvation and suffering, which they
call “distress,” as part of the social order. Chronic starvation is
looked upon as a matter of course. It is only when acute starvation
makes its appearance on a large scale that they think something is
unusual.
I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East
End shop at the close of a murky day. He had been the eldest of five
children, with a mother and no father. Being the eldest, he had starved
and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of his little
brothers and sisters. Not once in three months did he ever taste meat.
He never knew what it was to have his hunger thoroughly appeased. And
he claimed that this chronic starvation of his childhood had robbed him
of his sight. To support the claim, he quoted from the report of the
Royal Commission on the Blind, “Blindness is more prevalent in poor
districts, and poverty accelerates this dreadful affliction.”
But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the
bitterness of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to
eat. He was one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he said
that in the blind homes they did not receive half enough to eat. He
gave the diet for a day:—
Breakfast—0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner —3 oz. meat.
1 slice of bread.
0.5 lb. potatoes.
Supper —0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:—
“The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger. The
food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked
prison bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven. At
twelve o’clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal
stirabout (skilly), and at half-past five it gets a piece of dry bread
and a tin of water for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong
grown man is always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of
course diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison
astringent medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a
matter of course. In the case of a child, the child is, as a rule,
incapable of eating the food at all. Any one who knows anything about
children knows how easily a child’s digestion is upset by a fit of
crying, or trouble and mental distress of any kind. A child who has
been crying all day long, and perhaps half the night, in a lonely
dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon by terror, simply cannot eat food of
this coarse, horrible kind. In the case of the little child to whom
Warder Martin gave the biscuits, the child was crying with hunger on
Tuesday morning, and utterly unable to eat the bread and water served
to it for its breakfast. Martin went out after the breakfasts had been
served and bought the few sweet biscuits for the child rather than see
it starving. It was a beautiful action on his part, and was so
recognised by the child, who, utterly unconscious of the regulations of
the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens how kind this junior
warden had been to him. The result was, of course, a report and a
dismissal.”
Robert Blatchford compares the workhouse pauper’s daily diet with the
soldier’s, which, when he was a soldier, was not considered liberal
enough, and yet is twice as liberal as the pauper’s.
PAUPER DIET SOLDIER
3.25 oz. Meat 12 oz.
15.5 oz. Bread 24 oz.
6 oz. Vegetables 8 oz.
The adult male pauper gets meat (outside of soup) but once a week, and
the paupers “have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which is the
sure mark of starvation.”
Here is a table, comparing the workhouse officer’s weekly allowance:—
OFFICER DIET PAUPER
7 lb. Bread 6.75 lb.
5 lb. Meat 1 lb. 2 oz.
12 oz. Bacon 2.5 oz.
8 oz. Cheese 2 oz.
7 lb. Potatoes 1.5 lb.
6 lb. Vegetables none.
1 lb. Flour none.
2 oz. Lard none.
12 oz. Butter 7 oz.
none. Rice Pudding 1 lb.
And as the same writer remarks: “The officer’s diet is still more
liberal than the pauper’s; but evidently it is not considered liberal
enough, for a footnote is added to the officer’s table saying that ‘a
cash payment of two shillings and sixpence a week is also made to each
resident officer and servant.’ If the pauper has ample food, why does
the officer have more? And if the officer has not too much, can the
pauper be properly fed on less than half the amount?”
But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper
that starve. Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always to
have a full belly. In truth, it is his empty belly which has driven him
to the city in such great numbers. Let us investigate the way of living
of a labourer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor Law Union, Berks.
Supposing him to have two children, steady work, a rent-free cottage,
and an average weekly wage of thirteen shillings, which is equivalent
to $3.25, then here is his weekly budget:—
s. d.
Bread (5 quarterns) 1 10
Flour (0.5 gallon) 0 4
Tea (0.25 lb.) 0 6
Butter (1 lb.) 1 3
Lard (1 lb.) 0 6
Sugar (6 lb.) 1 0
Bacon or other meat (about 0.25 lb.) 2 8
Cheese (1 lb.) 0 8
Milk (half-tin condensed) 0 3.25
Coal 1 6
Beer none
Tobacco none
Insurance (“Prudential”) 0 3
Labourers’ Union 0 1
Wood, tools, dispensary, &c. 0 6
Insurance (“Foresters”) and margin 1 1.75
for clothes
Total 13 0
The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves on
their rigid economy. It costs per pauper per week:—
s. d.
Men 6 1.5
Women 5 6.5
Children 5 1.25
If the labourer whose budget has been described should quit his toil
and go into the workhouse, he would cost the guardians for
s. d.
Himself 6 1.5
Wife 5 6.5
Two children 10 2.5
Total 21 10.5
Or roughly, $5.46
It would require more than a guinea for the workhouse to care for him
and his family, which he, somehow, manages to do on thirteen shillings.
And in addition, it is an understood fact that it is cheaper to cater
for a large number of people—buying, cooking, and serving
wholesale—than it is to cater for a small number of people, say a
family.
Nevertheless, at the time this budget was compiled, there was in that
parish another family, not of four, but eleven persons, who had to live
on an income, not of thirteen shillings, but of twelve shillings per
week (eleven shillings in winter), and which had, not a rent-free
cottage, but a cottage for which it paid three shillings per week.
This must be understood, and understood clearly: _Whatever is true of
London in the way of poverty and degradation, is true of all England_.
While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London is England.
The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno likewise mark the
United Kingdom an inferno. The argument that the decentralisation of
London would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false. If the
6,000,000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities each
with a population of 60,000, misery would be decentralised but not
diminished. The sum of it would remain as large.
In this instance, Mr. B. S. Rowntree, by an exhaustive analysis, has
proved for the country town what Mr. Charles Booth has proved for the
metropolis, that fully one-fourth of the dwellers are condemned to a
poverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that fully
one-fourth of the dwellers do not have enough to eat, are inadequately
clothed, sheltered, and warmed in a rigorous climate, and are doomed to
a moral degeneracy which puts them lower than the savage in cleanliness
and decency.
After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert
Blatchford asked him what he wanted. “The old man leaned upon his spade
and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies.
‘What is it that I’m wantun?’ he said; then in a deep plaintive tone he
continued, more to himself than to me, ‘All our brave bhoys and dear
gurrls is away an’ over the says, an’ the agent has taken the pig off
me, an’ the wet has spiled the praties, an’ I’m an owld man, _an’ I
want the Day av Judgment_.’”
The Day of Judgment! More than he want it. From all the land rises the
hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward,
from asylum and workhouse—the cry of the people who have not enough to
eat. Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind,
the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners and
paupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have not
enough to eat. And this, in face of the fact that five men can produce
bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250
people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000. It would seem
that 40,000,000 people are keeping a big house, and that they are
keeping it badly. The income is all right, but there is something
criminally wrong with the management. And who dares to say that it is
not criminally mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce
bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?