THE POORER POPULATION
A dominant note of the English character is kindliness. Animals are treated
in England better than anywhere else in the world; the ordinary sleekness
of the English horse and the serene confidence in human nature of the
London cat are two outward and visible signs of the absence of cruelty in
the national character. This kindliness makes more tolerable, and softens
considerably what would be otherwise the intolerable gulf between rich and
poor. England, taking into consideration population and area, is the
richest country in the world, I suppose; yet it has a proportion of its
population sunk in poverty--"the submerged tenth" one social observer
(making a rather pessimistic calculation) called them. English
statesmanship has so far failed to grapple successfully with the pauper
population, and the even more pitiful class which struggles grimly on the
edge of pauperism; but the English kindliness attempts to mollify the
situation with vast organised charities, private and public, and makes it
just tolerable. But even so it is painful: yet has to be faced to get to a
true picture of England.
I spent the late months of autumn one year in looking into the case of the
unemployed and the casual workers; tramping the north country with them and
following them then on their pilgrimage to London. With the first hint of
winter the unemployed or the casual worker who knows the rules of the game
heads for London. In the summer and the autumn he has wandered the
country-side, working more or less regularly as he tramped, in potato
fields, turnip fields, hop gardens, cornfields.
It is a steadily narrowing opportunity, this casual agricultural work. With
each year more and more of England's fruit, hops, vegetables, roots, and
corn are grown abroad. To some extent, also, labour-saving machinery is
displacing the manual worker where the tillage of the soil still survives.
But there is surprisingly little machinery used in British agriculture as
compared with that of Canada, the United States, and Australia. The very
small farms do not allow of the economical use of machines. Some crops are
still cut by scythes; a reaper and binder is less common than the simple
reaper which cuts the corn and leaves it to be gathered and tied by a
harvest hand.
It is astonishing how close the agricultural land comes to London. One may
see, within half a mile of Hampstead "tube," odd hayfields, and after
leaving the Midlands, approaching London from the north, the pall of smoke
lifts and the heavens appear as a broad belt of agricultural land
intervenes. It would seem as if the traveller were passing away from, not
approaching, the great industrial centre. Leaving Luton and coming through
to St. Albans the country smiles in green pleasantness within sight and
sound, almost, of London. Birds see the sky and rejoice. Hayricks warm the
landscape with their golden yellow, and over the stubble fields sturdy
plough-horses pass and repass, painting the fields with broad brush strokes
a rich chocolate brown. The hedges in the autumn are glowing with
berries--blackberries and the scarlet spots of the hawthorn berry. With
close search even hazel-nuts can be found, and this within the area tapped
by London motor-buses and trams.
Sometimes the nuts and the berries give some sort of temporary relief to
the casual worker. I remember one typical man of the "submerged tenth" who
was making a harvest of the berries. He was a poor old tramp, hobbling
along quickly in spite of the stiffness of rheumatism. He had a can to fill
with what he gleaned from the hedges. He hoped, he told me, to get a
shilling for the berries at the next town. His age was sixty-six, and he
had been in his young prime a navvy and road labourer. Now he was past all
hope of further employment as a labourer, and navvying work was impossible.
Proudly he boasted that he had never been "in trouble," and had never
actually begged, though in the main he lived on charity. His winters, it
seems, were spent in the workhouses. With the coming of the spring he
turned his face towards the green fields, and lived somehow through the
summer on what he could pick up as the reward of doing odd jobs or as the
dole of charity. He was one of a class I found common enough on the roads,
past all steady and useful work, going with crippled gait steadily to the
end.
The same day I encountered, among other wayfarers, a man who suggested this
old and desolate tramp in the making. He was a young, vigorous, and capable
fellow, civil, intelligent, and eager for work. He had walked from
Manchester, having been on the road since the previous Sunday (the day was
Saturday), and the golden goal at the end of his journey was a week's work
at the Islington Agricultural Show, which had been promised to him. For the
week he would get 30s. After the Islington Show he had the chance, perhaps,
of getting another job in the same line. He followed agricultural shows
around the country, for he understood cattle and horses.
Another type of the poor I met outside of Durham, plodding patiently along
two miles out of the old cathedral city. He was something a little higher
than a casual labourer, and had a "trade," if one might call it so: that of
a porter. He was making out from Durham, where "things were very bad," to a
country place, unspecified, where there was work.
A brave and cheerful soul he was. At the age of four his leg had been
broken and badly set, and he had grown up a little lame. That was over
forty years ago, when the poor had less chance of good medical attention
than now. The accident had frustrated the wish in him for an outdoor life.
He confessed that all his thoughts turned to the soil, and while he was
working in Durham as a casual porter he would in slack times always try to
get out to the fields. He had never married; there was no hope of married
life in his calling. He had tried to get a more steady sort of job as a
painter, as an ironmonger's assistant; but his leg was against him. He had
not a grumble in his whole composition, and talked cheerfully of the green
grass and confided that he was forty-six. "But I don't look it a bit, do
I?" I lied manfully that he did not seem more than thirty-five, though,
poor, wizened little chap, I would have put him down at ten years above his
age.
He was a patient little fighter, and had, with his lame leg, kept up
somehow with the ranks of the workers, and had never begged a meal or a
shilling in his life, and was, in a way, happy for all his frustrated
longing for the open life of the country.
Out from Newcastle-on-Tyne another day of my tramp I picked up with a
worker in the building trade. He was not a tramp, for he had a house of
his own and a wife of whose house-wifery he was very proud. But he was
unemployed, and had been for some months. That morning he had got up at
five o'clock to tramp eight miles to a suburb of Newcastle in the hope of
getting a place on a little church-repairing job employing three masons. He
had not succeeded, and was tramping the eight miles back again. A penny
fare on the tram would have saved him some two miles, but pennies were not
to be spent lightly.
A homely, domestic man, typically English in his virtues and in the
limitations of his virtues, was my mason friend. In the good times of the
past he used to make 35s., 37s. 6d., and L2:1:6 a week at his trade,
"steady work and constant." As a bachelor he found that all his money went
as fast as he made it. After one long spell on L2:1:6 a week he had nothing
at all left to tide over a week without work. That set his thoughts to
matrimony and he "settled down." Since then his finances had been much more
steady and prosperous. While he was in work he always paid his wife 30s. a
week out of his wages, no more and no less. "He didn't come asking her for
some of it back in the middle of the week like some men did. Thirty
shillings she had, regular, when he was in work, and she saved some of it."
Whatever the balance was, 5s. or 7s. 6d. or 11s. 8d., was for himself. That
was his pocket-money, and he spent it in a moderate and sensible
roystering, and on other comforts of the manly life.
The virtues of his wife as a housekeeper he talked of sturdily. Such a
thing as baker's bread--"nasty, unwholesome stuff"--was never seen in his
house: it was all home-baked bread. Part of the secret of the housekeeping
in unemployed times was perhaps the fact that they had two lodgers, who
paid 3s. 6d. a week each for their quarters and paid for the "raw material"
of their meals, having the food cooked free. I was interested to learn that
11-1/2d. a week was charged to each of the lodgers for the flour used in
his bread--not an extravagant weekly expenditure on that item of food.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF AMBERLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE]
A good average man this, not at all heroic, common-sensible, and strictly
moderate in his virtues, keeping a very good margin of his wages for
himself, but not poaching on the remainder. Probably the wife has much the
harder life of the two, with her 30s. a week steady when the good man is in
work, and nothing at all but the lodgers' money at other times; probably,
too, she is happy enough. May a change of fortune soon bring steady work!
Studied from the English country-side the life of the lowly appeared to me
often pitiful but rarely abject. It was relieved from squalor by much
heroic courage; and by evidences of that beautiful love of the green fields
which the English seem to have by nature. In London the position is more
depressing, for there one encounters a vast army in which are mingled
inextricably poor victims worthy of the fullest compassion, and cunning
"wasters" who, finding it easy to live without work, are resolved not to
work.
To the "professional unemployed," I believe, the autumn entry into London
is a blessed relief. He knows all the charities which can be worked for
food and shelter. He has put in his penitential period in the country to
give a reasonable air to the tale that he has been in work, and prepares
with zest to tap the old springs of alms. London promises him winter
comfort, human companionship; warm nights in shelters, when politics can be
discussed and the state of the nation learnedly argued; amusing tests of
his skill in bamboozling charitable societies. To the genuine seeker for
work a first impression of London must be terrifying. The place is so vast,
so inchoate. It seems to suggest a great organised mass into which no
newcomer can hope to penetrate.
The day I tramped in--on my mission of investigation--a thin rain filled
the air with a blurring mist and made a horrible mud underfoot. My too
realistic boots gave this mud entrance to my feet. The soft, suggy sound
and feel of this mud making its way in and out was at once depressing and
enraging. I cursed the weather, and London, and the resolution which had
brought me on the enterprise. It seemed as if it would be just heaven to
have clean feet, and stout soles between them and the loathsome dirt. I was
wet through as regards clothes. That did not matter. The rain from above
was clean except for a little soot. But this stuff beneath--faugh! If other
men think and feel as I do, when you wish to "lift" a man out of the mire
of hopelessness give him first a stout pair of boots.
The Spitalfields "doss" to which I had been directed looked too much like
the mud beneath felt. It was stale and dirty, from its ceiling to its
floor; and all the air between was stale and dirty. The men steaming and
smoking in the thick atmosphere were sympathetic to the place. I passed on.
That dossery could be investigated another time, on some night when the
streets were dry. At a "Rowton House" in Whitechapel I found a clean and
endurable lodging, paying ninepence for a night's lodging. There were good
facilities to wash and to eat and to cook one's food, and a reading-room
even. One could be, clearly, comfortable enough here--if one had the
ninepence.
There are much cheaper lodging-houses, and one absolutely free one, Medland
Hall, on the Ratcliff Highway near Stepney Station. I visited it one
November evening at five o'clock. Under a railway arch there was drawn up a
tattered regiment of men some 300 strong. Now and again a late-comer
arrived and took his place in the rear rank. Two police officers attended
to keep order, but in the men there seemed not enough energy left for
disorder. Like a cluster of bats they hung, dark, inert, to that wall of
the arch which gave some little shelter from the driving rain. There was
not one touch of colour in all the dark ranks. Each man seemed to be
dressed like his fellows, in something that was black, either originally or
made so from the struggle in the mud of life. It was a patient crowd. Now
and again a harsh cough sounded from some man, and always he seemed to be
trying to smother it, as if unwilling to break into the silence of the
common misery; or a lame man shuffled uneasily on his feet, and he also
seemed ashamed a little of the noise.
At six, when the great bulk of the crowd had been waiting an hour (some of
them probably much longer), the order was given to march, and the men filed
into Medland Hall, each one getting as he entered a half-pound of bread
with a little butter. That was his meal for the night, and, like his bed,
it was absolutely free. The bed was a box on the floor, with a seaweed
mattress and an oilskin covering.
Most of the men were young. Few of them had gone past the labouring age.
Some were obviously tuberculous, others crippled with rheumatism. The
gathering, too, had its castes. A man who had been once a chief clerk, and
who still wore a "boxer" hat in place of the usual cap of the unemployed,
was the aristocrat of the doss.
This winter (1912) the London authorities, at last awake to the scandal of
homeless men wandering or sleeping in the streets, have instituted a system
by which the police will find shelter for all who are found without homes.
But even that will not remove all the scandal.
For many years the charitable provision for the homeless in London has been
ample, and I could not at first find an explanation for the Thames
Embankment miserables who huddled on the seats throughout the nights and
had their shivering sleep disturbed again and again by the police, or for
the unfortunates who haunted "the Dark Arches" of the Strand and other
places giving shelter from the rain. With the use of any intelligence at
all, it seemed, a man could get shelter of a sort and food of a sort. Yet
people, I know, did in rare cases actually perish from exposure and from
hunger in London. Inquiring among the Embankment men, the unhappiest of all
the miserable army, there seemed to be always one of two explanations for
haunting the Embankment--either the desperate sense of shame of the man who
has come down from a position of some comfort and decency and shuns a
shelter because it means a display of his misery; or the dull lethargy that
comes from extreme hardship and kills every suggestion of self-help.
One unemployed with whom I conversed, or tried to converse, at midnight
just near the Temple Pier was sunk in such apathy that he, I verily
believe, would not have walked 400 yards to get the most comfortable bed in
London. At any rate, when I gave him a shilling he made no move away from
his seat, showed, indeed, very little interest in the dole. His was an
extreme case, but many seemed to be almost as dead to any idea of effort.
"With the use of any intelligence" a man can get shelter--yes. But the man
who is down often loses his intelligence as he sinks. The "cunning"
unemployed, on the other hand, flourishes.
In China they have a term "rice Christians" for heathen who pretend
conversion to Christianity in order to secure food from the missionaries.
The cunning unemployed is usually a "rice" Anglican, or Roman Catholic or
Wesleyan of the most fervent type. His religious views are strong to the
point of bigotry. But should he have a wife and household to maintain by
the sweat of his brain it will often happen that, while he is a rice
Anglican of the most uncompromising type, she is a rice Wesleyan or
professor of some other type of Nonconformity.
For the man who has made a study of the art of living without work London
offers a vast field. There are so many charities that by going the round it
is possible to avoid all danger of becoming too familiar at any one of
them, and since there is no effective safeguard against overlapping it is
easy to be getting help from two or even more sources simultaneously.
This state of affairs, of course, does not help the genuine unemployed, the
man who wants work and not charity. But it is a constant temptation to him
to drop his self-respect and sink to the level of the men who, he finds,
live just as comfortably without labour as he is able to do by steady
industry.
The life of "toiling for leave to live," using up to-day for just as much
reward as will allow you to be fit for work to-morrow--and that is the life
of thousands--has, after all, not much attraction, considered
dispassionately. The tramp in Mr. Wells's story who explained that it was
followed only by people who had been "pithed"--_i.e._ had had their brains
extracted while at school--had some grim reasonableness in his
fancifulness. When honest work offers a hope of progressive betterment the
enthusiasm for it is natural. When, as for too many, honest work offers
nothing but a subsistence fractionally better than that of the dishonest
loafer it is surprising not that there are so many but so few of the
"cunning unemployed." Only a very strong innate sense of duty and
self-respect can account for the fact that millions keep pressing
desperately on in the ranks of the workers with no more real reward for
their efforts than the pride that they have never been to the "workhouse"
or taken alms from any one.
[Illustration: THE TOWER FROM THE TOWER BRIDGE, LOOKING WEST]
Recognising that, it is possible to come away from a study even of the
"submerged tenth" in England with some cheerfulness. The mistakes of the
past which have allowed that inundation of misery can be rectified, and,
serious as those mistakes have been, they have left the character of the
English people in the main sturdy and self-respecting. Of the "submerged
tenth" I think only a tenth, _i.e._ one per cent of the total population,
is actually hopeless and helpless. The others will respond to a wiser
organisation of the national life offering more opportunity and less
charity. On this point I have sought the views of several clergymen working
in the East End, the poor quarter of London. They were all proud, and
justifiably so, of the various efforts made to salve the lot of the
poor--the university settlements, the hospitals, infirmaries, nursing
associations, charitable and semi-charitable dormitories, the associations
for the supply of food, clothing, coal, and the like. But not one,
challenged to it, could truthfully claim that the sum of all this work was
remedial in any real sense of the word. Not one of them could deny that
most of it directly attacked the principle of self-reliance. The wretched
were kept alive, and that was all. No future was opened out for the great
majority of them, and very very rarely did any future mean useful
citizenship of Great Britain, but rather the export of the young citizen to
some other land in the hope that it would give him a chance.
Yet all agreed that as a matter of reasonable probability most of the men
who are down could be saved and are worth saving. The proportion that is
absolutely hopeless was variously stated. It may be averaged, in their
opinion, at 5 per cent. The other 95 per cent could be brought to useful
lives, these clergymen who are close students of the matter agreed.
That leaves, in the opinion of the men who have made a life study of the
subject, not my one per cent, but only one-half per cent of the total
English population as hopelessly "down." It is a bad wastage when one
thinks that every human creature is a temple of the Divine, but it is not
so gloomy a position as most imagine. And it can, and it will be stopped.