DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer. They are
made dull and sodden by it. Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and
they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs
by right of race. It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they
are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy. Children are begotten
in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath,
born to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.
The public-house is ubiquitous. It flourishes on every corner and
between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by
men. Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers
and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their
elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation,
catching the contagion of it, familiarising themselves with
licentiousness and debauchery.
Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the
bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not
frown upon is the public-house. No disgrace or shame attaches to it,
nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.
I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, “I never drink spirits when
in a public-’ouse.” She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was
laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability and
discretion. Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it
was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into a
public-house to drink it.
Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the
men and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their
very unfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering from
innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their
constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the
sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers
after excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.
Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires.
Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and
fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and
wholesome ideals and aspirations.
As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears. Not only do men and
women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering
from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness
and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and women who have no
home-life flee to the bright and clattering public-house in a vain
attempt to express their gregariousness. And when a family is housed in
one small room, home-life is impossible.
A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light one
important cause of drunkenness. Here the family arises in the morning,
dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and
in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the
wife and mother cooks the breakfast. And in the same room, heavy and
sickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout the
night, that breakfast is eaten. The father goes to work, the elder
children go to school or into the street, and the mother remains with
her crawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework—still in the same
room. Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds
and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen to
dry.
Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the family
goes to its virtuous couch. That is to say, as many as possible pile
into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus turns in on the
floor. And this is the round of their existence, month after month,
year after year, for they never get a vacation save when they are
evicted. When a child dies, and some are always bound to die, since
fifty-five per cent. of the East End children die before they are five
years old, the body is laid out in the same room. And if they are very
poor, it is kept for some time until they can bury it. During the day
it lies on the bed; during the night, when the living take the bed, the
dead occupies the table, from which, in the morning, when the dead is
put back into the bed, they eat their breakfast. Sometimes the body is
placed on the shelf which serves as a pantry for their food. Only a
couple of weeks ago, an East End woman was in trouble, because, in this
fashion, being unable to bury it, she had kept her dead child three
weeks.
Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the men
and women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be pitied,
not blamed. There are 300,000 people, in London, divided into families
that live in single rooms, while there are 900,000 who are illegally
housed according to the Public Health Act of 1891—a respectable
recruiting-ground for the drink traffic.
Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
existence, the well-founded fear of the future—potent factors in
driving people to drink. Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and in
the public-house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained. It is
unhealthy. Certainly it is, but everything else about their lives is
unhealthy, while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their
lives can bring. It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are
finer and better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes
them more beastly than ever. For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a
race between miseries that ends with death.
It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people.
The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn,
the effect of other and prior miseries. The temperance advocates may
preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils
that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will
remain.
Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-intentioned
efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to
set Olympus laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese
art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating
them, of begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and
Good. Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to
know and yearn after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of
their existence and the social law that dooms one in three to a
public-charity death, demonstrate that this knowledge and yearning will
be only so much of an added curse to them. They will have so much more
to forget than if they had never known and yearned. Did Destiny to-day
bind me down to the life of an East End slave for the rest of my years,
and did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget
all about the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget all I
had learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the
things I had heard, and the lands I had seen. And if Destiny didn’t
grant it, I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget it
as often as possible.
These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions,
charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they
cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.
They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.
They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End
as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of
Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp
of social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving
an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of
data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less
expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.
As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child’s schemes
has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful and
predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they
try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left
to him. Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries
for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the
mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more
children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right
along? This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings
for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times
for a wage of ninepence. She is being robbed. Somebody is on her back,
and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her
burden. They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not
do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that
they have done for the child in the day.
And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie. They do not
know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.
And the lie they preach is “thrift.” An instant will demonstrate it. In
overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and
because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.
To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income—in other
words, to live on less. This is equivalent to a lowering of the
standard of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man
with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher
standard. And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded
industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry. And the
thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been
reduced till it balances their expenditure.
In short, thrift negates thrift. If every worker in England should heed
the preachers of thrift and cut expenditure in half, the condition of
there being more men to work than there is work to do would swiftly cut
wages in half. And then none of the workers of England would be
thrifty, for they would be living up to their diminished incomes. The
short-sighted thrift-preachers would naturally be astounded at the
outcome. The measure of their failure would be precisely the measure of
the success of their propaganda. And, anyway, it is sheer bosh and
nonsense to preach thrift to the 1,800,000 London workers who are
divided into families which have a total income of less than 21s. per
week, one quarter to one half of which must be paid for rent.
Concerning the futility of the people who try to help, I wish to make
one notable, noble exception, namely, the Dr. Barnardo Homes. Dr.
Barnardo is a child-catcher. First, he catches them when they are
young, before they are set, hardened, in the vicious social mould; and
then he sends them away to grow up and be formed in another and better
social mould. Up to date he has sent out of the country 13,340 boys,
most of them to Canada, and not one in fifty has failed. A splendid
record, when it is considered that these lads are waifs and strays,
homeless and parentless, jerked out from the very bottom of the Abyss,
and forty-nine out of fifty of them made into men.
Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs
from the streets; so the enormous field he has to work in may be
comprehended. The people who try to help have something to learn from
him. He does not play with palliatives. He traces social viciousness
and misery to their sources. He removes the progeny of the gutter-folk
from their pestilential environment, and gives them a healthy,
wholesome environment in which to be pressed and prodded and moulded
into men.
When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling with
day nurseries and Japanese art exhibits and go back and learn their
West End and the sociology of Christ, they will be in better shape to
buckle down to the work they ought to be doing in the world. And if
they do buckle down to the work, they will follow Dr. Barnardo’s lead,
only on a scale as large as the nation is large. They won’t cram
yearnings for the Beautiful, and True, and Good down the throat of the
woman making violets for three farthings a gross, but they will make
somebody get off her back and quit cramming himself till, like the
Romans, he must go to a bath and sweat it out. And to their
consternation, they will find that they will have to get off that
woman’s back themselves, as well as the backs of a few other women and
children they did not dream they were riding upon.