lads have, therefore, like the factory girl already considered, four or
five solid hours every evening to get through. The other day I was
looking through some statistics of work in the eighteenth century. It
then began at six, sometimes at half-past five; it left off at eight in
the evening, with the exception of those trades which could not be
carried on by the light of tallow candles. The people went to bed before
ten. The time for supper, rest, and recreation was therefore reduced to
two hours. There was no Saturday afternoon holiday. All through the
pre-Reformation time there had been a Saturday half-holiday, because
Saturday was reckoned as the eve of a saint’s day, and every eve of an
important saint’s day was a half-holiday. The Reformation swept away
this grateful respite from work. Therefore, except for Sunday, the
craftsman’s working-day was practically the whole day long.
We have changed these long for shorter hours; the people have now a long
evening to themselves and the Saturday half-holiday, as well as Sunday.
Consider what this means to a lad of sixteen, one of the riverside lads.
He has, we have seen, no books and no desire for reading; a free library
offers no attractions to him; he has no study or pursuit of any kind; he
does not wish to learn anything; and he has four hours, perhaps five, to
get through every evening, except Saturday, when he has nine hours, and
Sunday, when he has the whole day—say sixteen hours. In every week he
has actually forty-five long hours in which to amuse himself as best he
can. What is that boy to do? He must do something which brings with it
excitement and activity; his blood is restless; he knows not what he
wants; it is an age which has its ideals, and his are of the heroic
kind, but too often of a perverted heroism.
A few of them, but in proportion very few indeed, belong to the boys’
clubs which are scattered about East London. They are the fortunate
boys; they contract friendships with the young men—gentlemen always—who
run the club; they can learn all kinds of things if they like; they work
off their restlessness and get rid of the devil in the gymnasium with
the boxing-gloves and with the single stick; they contract habits of
order and discipline; they become infected with some of the upper-class
ideals, especially as regards honor and honesty, purity and temperance;
the fruits of the time spent in the club are seen in their after life;
these are the lads who lead the steady lives and become the supporters
of order and authority. A few again, but very few, get the chance of
polytechnic classes and continuation schools, but these things are
mostly above the riverside folk. Here and there a class is formed and
taught by ladies in one or other of the minor arts, such as
wood-carving, in which the lads quickly take great delight.
Setting aside these, what becomes of all the rest?
They have the music-hall; there are half a dozen music-halls in which
the gallery is cheap; they go to one of these places two or three times
a week in winter; they have the public house, but these lads are not, as
a rule, slaves to drink so early in life; their own lodgings are not
inviting either for comfort or for rest or for society. They have,
however, the street.
It is the street which provides the casual hand; it is also the street
which produces the drunkard, the loafer, the man who cannot work, the
man who will not work, the street rough, the street sneak, and the
street thief. The long evening spent in the street nourishes and
encourages these and such as these of both sexes.
It is of course the old story—the abuse of liberty. We shorten the hours
of work, and we offer nothing in the place of work, except the street;
we leave the lads, whom we thought to benefit, to their own devices, and
to discover, if they can, the way to turn the hours thus rescued from
drudgery into a means of climbing to a higher life. We leave them, even,
in complete ignorance as to any higher life at all. Their own idea of
employing their idle time is to do nothing, to amuse themselves, and, as
the street is the only place where they can find amusement for nothing,
they go into the street.
They begin by walking about in little companies of two and three; by way
of asserting their early manhood the boys smoke cheap cigarettes,
called, I believe, “fags”; also, by way of asserting their own
importance—no one knows the conceit and vanity of lads of fifteen and
sixteen, the age between the boy and the man—they occupy a great deal of
the pavement, they hustle each other, regardless of other people; they
get up impromptu fights and sham fights; they wrestle; they make rushes
among the crowd; they push about the girls of their own age, who are by
no means backward in appreciating and returning these delicate
attentions; they whistle and sing, and practise the calls of the day and
the locality. A very favorite amusement, in which they are joined and
assisted by the girls, is to get up a little acting in dumb show; some
of them are excellent mimics. I have, for instance, read more than once
in the columns of temperance organs or the letters of philanthropists,
tearful or indignant, most melancholy accounts of precocious drunkenness
among the boys and girls of East London—that poor East London! “I have
seen,” writes the visitor to Ratcliffe and Shadwell, “with my own eyes,
boys and girls, quite young boys and girls, reeling about
drunk,—actually drunk, hopelessly drunk,—the girls, poor creatures,
worse than the boys. I spoke to one. She was no more than thirteen or
so—a pretty child, but helplessly intoxicated. When I spoke to her she
tried to reply, but became inarticulate; she gasped, she laughed—the
awful laugh of a drunkard! She made a gesture of helplessness, she fell
sideways on the pavement, and would not rise. Her companions, as far
gone as herself, only laughed. A sad sight, truly, in a civilized
country!”
A very sad sight, indeed! This observer, however, did not understand
that the personation of drunken people is one of the favorite amusements
of the boys and girls in the evening streets. They have every day
opportunities of studying their subject. A life school exists in every
street, and is thrown open every night, and the fidelity with which
every stage of drunkenness is represented by these young actors would be
remarkable even on the boards of Drury Lane. Had the indignant writer of
that letter known so simple a fact his pity and his wrath would have
been reserved for a more worthy object.
[Illustration: The “Hooligans.”]
Acting and running and shouting are amusing as far as they go, but they
are not enough. The blood is very restless at seventeen; it wants
exercise in reality. This restlessness is the cause of the certain
street companies of which the London papers have recently spoken with
indignation. They are organized originally for local fights. The boys of
Cable Street constitute themselves, without asking the permission of the
War Office, into a small regiment; they arm themselves with clubs, with
iron bars, with leather belts to which buckles belong, with knotted
handkerchiefs containing stones—a lethal weapon—with sling and stones,
with knives even, with revolvers of the “toy” kind, and they go forth to
fight the lads of Brook Street. It is a real fight; the field is
presently strewn with the wounded; the police have trouble in putting a
stop to the combat; with broken heads, black eyes, and bandaged arms,
the leaders appear next day before the magistrate.
The local regiment cannot always be meeting its army on the field of
glory; the next step, therefore, to hustling the people in the street is
natural. The boys gather together and hold the street; if any one
ventures to pass through it they rush upon him, knock him down, and kick
him savagely about the head; they rob him as well. In the autumn of last
year (1899) an inoffensive elderly gentleman was knocked down by such a
gang, robbed, kicked about the head, and taken up insensible; he was
carried home, and died the next day. These gangs are the modern Mohocks;
South London is more frequently favored with their achievements than the
quarter with which we are here concerned; they are difficult to deal
with because they meet, fight, and disperse with such rapidity that it
is next to impossible to get hold of them. It is an ugly feature of the
time; it is mainly due to the causes I have pointed out, and it will
probably disappear before long. Meantime, the boys regard the holding of
the street with pride; their captain is a hero, as much as the captain
of the Eleven at a public school.
Sometimes they devise other modes of achieving greatness. A year or two
ago half a dozen of them thought that it would be a good thing if they
were to attend Epsom races on the Derby Day, the great race of the year.
One can go to Epsom by road or rail; the latter is the cheaper and the
easier way, but the more glorious way is to go by road, as the swells
go. They hire a carriage and pair, and get a luncheon hamper from
Fortnum and Mason’s, and pay for a stand on the hill—the thing can be
done for about £25. These boys thought to emulate the swells; they would
drive to Epsom. They therefore helped themselves to a baker’s horse and
light cart, and, all in the gray of the morning, drove the whole way in
the greatest glory to the race-course. Arrived there they sold the horse
and cart to a Gipsy for three pounds, and spent the day in watching the
races, in betting on the events, and in feasting. When the glorious day
was over and their money all gone they found an outhouse near the
common, and there lay down to sleep, intending to walk home in the
morning. Now, the baker, on discovering his loss, had gone to the
police, and the police, remembering the day and suspecting the truth,
for the lads’ thirst for sport was well known, telegraphed to Epsom; the
horse and cart were recovered, and in the middle of the night the boys
themselves were found. They did return to town in the morning, but not
as they left. It was in the roomy vehicle commonly called “Black Maria”
that they were taken to the police court, and from the court to the
Reformatory, where they still languish.
[Illustration: Sunday Gambling.]
The boys are great gamblers. As gambling and betting are strictly
forbidden in the streets, they have to find places where they can play
undisturbed. Sunday is the day devoted to gambling. The boys get on
board a barge, where they sit in the hold and play cards—locally called
“darbs”—all day long; sometimes they find an empty house, sometimes a
room in a condemned row of crazy tenements. The favorite game, the name
of which I do not know, is one in which the dealer holds the bank; he
deals a card to every player and one to himself. Each player covers his
card with a stake, generally a penny: the cards are turned up; the
players pay the dealer for cards below, and are paid for cards above the
dealer’s card. It is quite a simple game, and one in which a boy may
lose his Saturday wages in a very short time. They also play “heads and
tails,” and they are said to bet freely among each other.
At this period of their career some of them begin to read a good deal.
Not the newspapers, not any books; their reading is confined to the
penny novelette; for them Jack Harkaway performs incredible feats of
valor; it is not for them that the maiden of low degree is wedded by the
belted earl—that is for the girls; for these lads, to whom a fight is
the finest thing in the world, the renowned Jack Harkaway knocks down
the wicked captain on the quarter-deck, rescues a whole ship’s company
from pirates, performs prodigies at Omdurman. His feats are described in
the amazing sheets which he calls “ha’penny bloods” or “penny
dreadfuls.” If the boys buy a paper it is one of like mind, such as are
written and printed especially and exclusively for him.
They go often, I have said, to the music-hall; there are three or four
in their own quarter—the Paragon, Mile End Road; the Foresters,
Cambridge Road; and the Queen’s, Poplar. But they go farther afield, and
may be found in the galleries of even West-End music-halls to see a
popular “turn.” As for concerts and lectures and entertainments given at
the Town Hall or other places, they will not go to them. There is too
much “class.”
At this time, namely, at sixteen or seventeen, the boys commonly take a
sweetheart; they “keep company” with a girl; night after night they walk
the streets together; what they talk about no one knows, what vows of
constancy they exchange no man hath ever heard or can divine; they take
each other, the boy paying when he can, to the music-hall or to the
theater; they stand drinks—it is at this period that the fatal yearning
for drink begins to fasten itself upon the lad. The “keeping company” is
perhaps a worse evil than the growing thirst for drink; it ends,
invariably, in the early marriage, which is one of the most deplorable
features in the lower life; the young girl of sixteen or seventeen,
ignorant of everything, enters upon the married life, and for the rest
of her days endures all the wretchedness of grinding poverty, children
half-nourished and in rags, a drunken husband and a drunken self. The
boys’ clubs, the girls’ clubs, the settlements, of which I shall speak
again presently, do all in their power to occupy the young people’s
minds with other things; but the club closes at ten, and the street
remains open all night.
None of these street boys and girls—or very few, as I have said
already—are country-born; the country lads come up to London Town, to
the city paved with gold, in thousands, but they are older than these
children of the street; they have not learned the fascination which the
street exercises upon those who have always lived in it and always
played in it.
Their martial tastes should make them enlist, but the discipline forbids
enlistment. Many of them, however, belong to the Tower Hamlets Militia,
a regiment called out for drill for six weeks every year. They enjoy
sporting the uniform ; they like marching; they like the band and the
mess in barracks, but they cannot endure the discipline for more than
six weeks, even in return for the grandeur and the glory of the thing.
What, then, is the connection between the casual hand and the lads of
the street? This: the life of the street is an ordeal through which
these lads must pass, since we give them no other choice; some of them
emerge without harm; for them the craving for drink has not become a
demoniac possession; they have never been haled before the police court;
they know not the interior of prison or reformatory; they have not
married at seventeen; these are the young fellows who get, and keep,
permanent places with “good money,” they are hewers of wood and drawers
of water like the children of Gideon, yet they live not in the slums;
their homes are in the Monotonies; theirs is a four-or six-roomed house,
one of a row, one of a street, a flat in a barrack; their houses and
dwelling-places stand side by side miles around. But the life that is
led in these streets is not monotonous, because every man has his own
life and his own experience, his birth and childhood, his manhood and
his age, and these can never be monotonous.
There remain, alas! those with whom we began, the company of two or
three who hang around the corner outside the public house or lean
against the walls of the docks. They are the men whom the ordeal of the
street, more than any other cause, has broken down. They have emerged
from that ordeal with a confirmed habit of taking the Easy Way, that of
no self-restraint, that which temptation indicates with beckoning finger
and false smiles; at nineteen they have lost any possible joy of work,
pride in work, desire for work—they know not any work which can afford
the workman joy or pride; to them the necessity for work is an
ever-present curse which corrupts and poisons life. Were it not for this
cruel necessity they might pass through the allotted span with no more
effort and no more ambition than the common slug of the hedge.
Alas! work must be done if they would drink; they do not mind being
badly fed; it is wonderful to think of the small amount of solid food
they get, but they must drink. In their single room they have wife and
children, but they must drink; they hang about waiting for work, in the
hope that no work may come, yet that food will appear; they have neither
honesty, nor self-respect, nor any sense of duty or responsibility at
all. But they must drink.
What to do for, or with, these unfortunates is the most difficult and
the most pressing question of the slums. The only hope seems to be to
get hold of the boys and girls and to spare them, if possible, the cruel
ordeal of the street.
And meantime, while we look and while we talk, lo! the company has
melted away; the cold wind and the rain have fallen upon them; drink has
robbed them of their immunity; the infirmary ward holds them to-day;
to-morrow the pauper’s funeral will wind up the sum and story of their
sordid days.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
THE ALIEN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
THE ALIEN
LONDON has always held out hands of toleration, if not of welcome, to
the alien. He has come to London from every part of Great Britain and
Ireland, and from every country of Europe. Under the Plantagenets the
country lad was as much an alien or a foreigner as the Hollander or the
German. To country lads and the continental alike London was the city
paved with gold. First came Saxon, Jute, and Angle; then came Dane; then
Norman; after these came Fleming, French, German. The German, indeed,
laid hands on our foreign trade and kept it for six hundred years;
whenever one of our kings married a foreign princess the Queen’s
countrymen flocked over in swarms, to pick up what they could. William
the Conqueror’s consort brought over the weavers from her own country;
when Eleanor of Provence married Henry III her people came with her,
especially the ecclesiastics, seizing on dignities and benefices from
the Archbishopric of Canterbury downward; when Queen Mary married Philip
of Spain the streets of London were filled with Spaniards; when Charles
I married Henrietta of France French priests, for the first time since
the Reformation, paraded the streets by scores, offending the Protestant
conscience. Italy and the South of France sent usurers with the pope’s
license to prey upon the land.
London was a city of refuge as well as a city where gold was to be
picked up in the streets. Many exiles have sought and found protection
within its walls.
The most important of these arrivals was that of the French Huguenots
after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. An immense number came
over; in one year 15,500 were relieved by the collection of a fund
amounting to £63,713. A large colony of 13,500 of them settled in
London, most of them in Spitalfields, at that time still a place of
fields. Here they introduced the industry of silk-weaving, very much to
the profit of the country and city of their adoption.
The next invasion of aliens was that of the unfortunate Palatines, in
the year 1709. The Palatinate had been devastated by the French; it was
a vast battle-field plundered during every incursion of the enemy; in
despair, the people abandoned their country; they flocked over to
England in companies and troops; the immigration continued for three
years, during which time thirteen thousand thrust themselves upon the
mercy of the City. A collection was made for them amounting to £22,038.
These people, who seem to have been agricultural rather than industrial,
contributed little to the population of London; three thousand of them
were sent to Ireland; to each of the provinces of North and South
Carolina six hundred were sent; to New York nearly four thousand, but
seventeen hundred died on the voyage, no doubt enfeebled by their
sufferings and privations before embarking; they seem not to have met
with favor in New York; many of them emigrated to Pennsylvania, where,
it is said, their descendants still preserve the memory of their origin.
Those who settled in London got their names Anglicized, so that they
were entirely absorbed and lost in the general population.
At the beginning of the French Revolution, when the madness of the
revolutionaries fell upon the priests and nobles, there was an immense
flight of the persecuted classes into England. They did not however, as
a rule, come to settle; as soon as circumstances permitted they returned
to France; some, however, remained; it is not uncommon to find families
descended from the _émigrés_ of 1792–93 who preserve the memory of their
former nobility, though they have long since abandoned all intention of
claiming a title which carries with it neither privilege nor property
nor honor.
The _émigrés_ formed during their stay small colonies in and about
London. One of them was at St. Pancras, in whose churchyard many of them
are buried; another was a little further out, five or six miles out of
the City, at Hampstead—the Roman Catholic chapel built for them still
remains; there were other small settlements, and many of them remained
in Westminster and in Soho. The hospitality offered them, the pity shown
to them, the maintenance granted to them by our government, the cordial
friendship extended to them by our people, were worthy of all praise.
Yet it was remarked, with some bitterness, that when these refugees were
enabled to return to their own country they ignored every obligation of
gratitude, or even courtesy, and actually refused to admit their old
friends of the English gentry to their salons in Paris. Partly, I
believe, this apparent ingratitude was due to their poverty, of which
they were ashamed.
Another political invasion of refugees was that of the Poles after their
abortive rising in the thirties; they, too were received by our
government with a generosity unparalleled. There were many thousands of
them. They were granted barracks to live in and a small pension to live
upon; both were continued as long as they lived; they must now all be
dead; some of them no doubt married here, and their children must now be
part of the general population. A few of the most foolhardy ventured
back again, to lead one more forlorn hope in another mad attempt at
rebellion, and to die unprofitable patriots by the Russian bayonet.
In our own time there has been—it is still going on—a considerable
influx of Russian, Polish and German Jews flying from the Judenhetze of
the continent. I will speak of them immediately.
[Illustration: Whitechapel Shops.]
Every year there is an immigration as from a barren and an unfertile
soil to a land of promise. The immense strides made by industrial
Germany during the last few years will probably check this immigration.
Hamburg, Berlin, not to speak of Antwerp and Rotterdam, also rapidly
growing centers of trade, will attract some of those who have been
accustomed to look toward London as the land of promise. At present
there appear to be about ten thousand new immigrants every year, without
counting those who purpose going on to America. They consist of
Russians, Poles, Germans, Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Belgians,
French, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Swiss—but we have gone through
the whole of Europe. I find no mention of Spain or Portugal or Turkey;
nor are there, so far as I have heard, any aliens hailing from the
smaller peoples—the Croats, Celts, Servians, or Bulgarians. What becomes
of this array? What has become of the hundred thousand who have come
over during the last ten years? Go up and down the streets of East
London—over the shop-fronts you will see everywhere German and Jewish
names, which seem to answer this question in part. Walk along the
Whitechapel Road on a Sunday morning; there you will see most of the
hundred thousand, there you will see the peaceful invaders who have
occupied a large part of East London and have achieved for themselves,
by dint of unconquerable patience and untiring work, a far better
livelihood, with a far higher level of comfort, than could have been
possible for them in their native lands. As for their children, you may
look for them in the Board-schools; they have become English—both boys
and girls: except for their names, they are English through and through;
they accept our institutions, laws, and customs; they rejoice with our
successes, they grieve with our misfortunes; never yet has it been known
that the second generation of the alien has failed to become English
through and through. I believe that our power of absorbing alien
immigrants is even greater than that of the United States.