rowdy staircase in their own way by sending two girl lieutenants to take
a flat and live there, setting an example of cleanly and orderly life,
and bringing round the women to a better mind. I have heard that their
success in this work has been marked, and I am prepared to believe it.
At the same time, the committee would be a permanent police, while the
appearance of the girls can only be occasional and only temporary.
Another result of the barrack life—one which the working-man himself
does not perceive—is that the children grow up slow of sight, not
short-sighted, but slow of sight. They have nothing to exercise their
eyes upon; in the country there are a thousand things; children are
always looking about them for the birds, the creatures, the flowers, the
berries; in the barracks their playground is an asphalted pavement, with
the high houses for boundary walls; there is nothing to look at. When
they are taken out for a day in the country, once or twice a year, they
see in a bank of flowers only a breadth of color, such as a
house-painter might spread; it takes time for them to discern the
flowers and the grasses which produce the pleasing effect; one bird is
to them the same as another; they are not quick enough to catch the
rapid flight of the swallow. One tree is the same as another; they do
not discern differences of shape or color in the leaf or in the bough. A
few summer days in the country cannot give to that child the training of
sight which the country-bred child receives every time it goes out into
the open.
Here, then, are the facts of the case: overcrowding, with results most
dangerous to the community, and the principal causes—increase of
population, rapid development of industries, the necessity of being near
the work, the condemnation of insanitary streets and areas. There remain
the remedies proposed. We have seen that the erection of blocks, while
it provides decent accommodation for a vast number of working-men, turns
out a large number into the streets to find what accommodation they can.
Obviously, therefore, the further extension of this method would result
in far worse overcrowding. The housing in big barracks has also, it has
been seen, its own dangers.
We come, next, to the proposal which seems to meet with the greatest
amount of favor. It is the creation and erection of industrial villages
within easy reach of town—say not more than twelve miles out. The
railways would have to sell cheap workmen’s tickets; the villages should
consist of three- or four-roomed cottages, each with a scullery and a
garden. There should be a common garden as well; there should be no sale
of drink in any of the villages; there should be in each a coöperative
store; the rent of a cottage ought not to exceed three shillings a week.
This is the proposal advanced by General Booth of the Salvation Army
(“Darkest England,” p. 210).
It is announced (“Times,” February 20, 1900) that the London County
Council is about to ask of Parliament an increase of its powers, so that
it may buy up land beyond its own limits, with a view of erecting some
such industrial villages. We must therefore wait to see the result of
this new experiment. We may be quite certain that it will prove to bring
with it dangers and evils at present unsuspected, but I think that the
gains will be greater than the losses. The country village will be as
much better than the barrack as the barrack is better than the narrow
and stinking court.
It is hoped that when the advantages of living in the country are
understood the men will not mind living at a distance from their work.
At the same time, the experiment must be on a very large scale, and if
it fails will prove very costly. Objections are taken to the
municipality acting as builder and landlord; it is urged that private
companies might take up the question; but the experiment made by a
private company, if it fails, costs the whole capital advanced by
private persons, whereas if the experiment of the County Council fails
it will be only the loss of the ratepayers’ money. Whatever is done must
be done quickly; mischiefs incalculable are inflicted upon the children
by the present overcrowding. To neglect it is to make the evils far
worse. The remedy requires a great mind and a clear vision and unlimited
powers. As yet little practical attention has been paid to the cry of
the houseless and the rack-rented, and to the sobs of the children
poisoned physically by the air, corrupt and vitiated, which they have to
breathe; poisoned morally by evil companionship, starved and cabined
mentally for want of light and air and sunshine, for want of the breeze
among the trees and the grass of the meadows and the flowers of the
field and the creatures of the air and of the hedge.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX
THE SUBMERGED
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX
THE SUBMERGED
THE word “submerged” likes me not. I have endeavored to find or to
invent another and a better word. So far without success. The word must
define the class. It is the unhappy company of those who have fallen in
the world. There are many levels from which one may fall; perhaps there
are many depths into which one may fall; certainly I have never heard of
any depth beyond which there was not another lower and deeper still. The
submerged person, therefore, may have been a gentleman and a scholar, an
officer, a prodigal; or he may have been a tradesman, or a working-man,
or anything you please; the one essential is that he must have stepped
out of his own class and fallen down below. He is a shipwrecked mariner
on the voyage of life, he is a pilgrim who has wandered into the dark
and malarious valleys beside the way. We have read in the annals of
luckless voyages how those who escaped with their lives wandered along
the seashore, living by the shell-fish they could pick up, moving on
when there were no more mussels, huddled together at night in the
shelter of a rock for warmth. We know and are familiar with their tales
of misery. As these shipwrecked mariners on the cold and inhospitable
coast, so are the unfortunates whom we call submerged; in a like misery
of cold and starvation do they drag on a wretched existence.
They have no quarter or district of their own; we come upon them
everywhere. In the wealthy quarters there are courts and alleys, lanes
and covered ways, where they find shelter at night; they slouch along
aimlessly, with vacant faces, in the most fashionable streets; they
stand gazing with eyes which have no longer any interest or expression
upon a shop-window whose contents would provide a dozen of them with a
handsome income for life; in the warm summer evenings you may see them
taking up their quarters for the night on the seats outside St. James’s
Park; if you walk along the Thames embankment you will see them sitting
and lying in corners sheltered from the wind; they seek out the dry
arches if they can find any, happy in the chance of finding them; they
sit on door-steps and sleep there until the policeman moves them on;
wherever a night watchman, placed on guard over an open excavation,
hangs up his red lamp and lights his fire in the workman’s grate you
will find one or two of the submerged crouching beside the red coals;
the watchmen willingly allow them their share of warmth and light. If
you are walking in the streets late at night you will presently pass one
of them creeping along looking about for a crust or a lump of bread.
Outside the Board-schools, especially, these windfalls are to be found,
thrown away by the children; it is a sign that food is cheap and work is
abundant when one sees lumps of bread thrown into the gutter. These are
the gifts of fortune to the submerged; the day has brought no jobs and
no pence, not even the penny for a bare shelter with the Salvation Army;
fate, relentless, has refused to hands willing to work—perhaps
unwilling, for the submerged are sometimes incapable of work; like their
betters, they have nerves. But in the night under the gas-lamps there
are the gifts of the great goddess, Luck—the children’s lumps of bread
lying white in the lamplight on kerb or door-step.
Or, again, if you are in the streets early in the morning, at the hour
when the cheap restaurants set out upon the pavement their zinc boxes
full of the refuse and unspeakable stuff of yesterday, you will find the
person submerged busy among this terrible heap; he finds lumps of food,
broken crusts, bones not stripped clean; he turns over the contents with
eager hands; he carries off, at last, sufficient for a substantial meal.
One would hardly expect to find history occupying herself with a class
so little worthy of her dignity. Yet have I found some account of the
submerged in the eighteenth century. They did not prowl about the
streets at night nor did they search the dust-box in the morning,
because there were no crusts of costly wheaten bread thrown away, and
there were no dust-boxes. But they had their customs. And the following
seems to have been the chief resource of the class.
There were no police walking about the streets day and night; there were
night watchmen, who went home about five in the morning; then for an
hour, before the workmen turned out on their way to the shops, the
streets were quite deserted and quiet. At that hour the submerged had
their chance; they were the early vultures that hovered over the City
before the dawn; they went out on the prowl, carrying lanterns in the
winter; they searched the streets; where the market carts had passed
there were droppings of vegetables and fruit, there were bones thrown
out into the streets, there were things dropped; drunken men were lying
on door-steps, stretched out on the pavement between the posts, or
propped up against the walls; the night watchmen paid no attention to
these common objects of the night, the helplessly drunk; they cleared
out their pockets of money no doubt, otherwise they left them. But the
prowlers, after another investigation of the pockets, carried off
everything portable—hat, wig, neck-tie, ruffles, boots, coat,
everything. The cold air quickened the recovery of the patient; when he
came to his senses and sat up he was ready to repent, not in sackcloth,
but in shirtsleeves. Later on in the day the prowlers inveigled children
into back courts, stripped them of their fine frocks, cut off their long
curls, and so let them go. Or they lay in wait for a drunken man and led
him carefully to some quiet and secluded spot, where he could be
stripped of all. But the submerged of George III were a ruder and a
rougher folk than those of Queen Victoria.
[Illustration: Salvation Army Shelter.]
The submerged do not, as a rule, give trouble to the police, nor are
they a terror to the householder; they do not rob, they do not brawl,
they do not get up riots, they do not “demonstrate,” they endure in
quiet. Their misery might make them dangerous if they were to unite; but
they cannot unite, they have no leader, they have no prophet; they want
nothing except food and warmth, they accuse nobody, they are not
revolutionaries; they are quite aware—those of them who have any power
of thought left—that no change in the social order could possibly
benefit them. They live simply, each man clothed with his own misery as
with a gaberdine. And they know perfectly well that their present
wretchedness is due to themselves and their own follies and their own
vices. They have lost whatever spirit of enterprise they may once have
possessed; in many cases long habits of drink have destroyed their power
of will and energy.
Many causes have made them what they are. As many men, so many causes.
They cannot be reduced to a class; they come from every social
station—many of them are highly educated men, born of gentle-folk, some
of county families, some of the professional classes. Their tale of woe,
if you ask it, is always the lamentation of the luckless; it should be
the lamentation of a sinner. Incompetence, especially that kind of
incompetence which belongs to an indolent habit of mind and body; the
loss of one situation after another, the throwing away of one chance
after the other, the shrinking from work either bodily or mental, which
grows upon a man until for very nervousness he is unable to do any work;
the worn-out patience of friends and relations, drink—always drink;
dismissal which involves the loss of character, the habit begun in
boyhood of choosing always the easier way; sickness, which too commonly
drives a man out of work and sends him on to the streets in search of
casual jobs; crime and the gaol—all these causes work in the same
direction; they reduce the unfortunate victim to the condition of
hopelessness and helplessness which is the note of the submerged.
I think that where the case is one in which the former social standing
was good the most common cause is loss of character. This does not mean,
necessarily, the taint of dishonesty. It means, in many cases, simply
incompetence. How shall a clerk, a shop assistant, find another place
when he can only give reference to a former employer who can say nothing
in his praise? He goes down, he takes a worse place with lower pay, he
continues in his incompetence, he is again dismissed. He falls lower
still. In any country it is a terrible thing for a young man to lose his
character; it is fatal in a country where laborers of his kind, at the
only work he can do, are redundant; while men with good character can be
obtained, who will employ a man without a character? For such a man it
would seem as if a new country—a new name—were the only chance left for
him. He tries the new country. Alas! Incompetence is no more wanted
there than at home. If, as sometimes happens, such an one yields to the
temptation that is always before the penniless and falls into crime, it
is no longer a descent along the familiar easy slope; it is a headlong
plunge which the unfortunate man makes, once for all, into the
Male-bolge of the submerged.
I was once in a London police court looking on at the day’s cases which
were brought up one after the other before the magistrate. The drunk and
disorderly came first; these were soon dismissed; indeed, there is a
terrible monotony about them; the reporters do not take the trouble even
to listen or to make a note of them unless the prisoner is a man of some
note. Then followed the case of a young man, apparently four- or
five-and-twenty years of age. He was described as a clerk; he was
dressed in the uniform of his craft, with a black coat and a tall hat;
it was the cold, early spring, and he had no overcoat or wrapper or
collar or neckerchief of any kind, and he was barefooted. The sight of
him filled one with a kind of terror. Now, the face of that poor wretch
told its own story; it was a handsome face, with regular features, light
hair, and blue eyes. As a boy he must have been singularly attractive;
as a child, lovely. But now the face was stamped and branded with the
mark of one who has always followed the Easy Way; his weak mouth, his
shifting eyes, the degradation of what had once promised to be a face of
such nobility and beauty, proclaimed aloud his history. I could see the
boy at school who would do no more work than he was obliged to do; the
young clerk at five shillings a week, who would do no more than he was
bidden, and that without intelligence or zeal; the lad rising, as even
the junior clerk rises, by seniority; the billiard-room, the public
house, the wasted evenings, the betting, the evil companions, the
inevitable dismissal for incompetence, the difficulty of finding another
place, the influence of friends not too influential, the second
dismissal, the tramp up thousands of stairs in search of a vacant desk
where character was not required, borrowing of small sums, with faithful
promises of repayment, the consequent loss of friends, the alienation
even of brothers, the inevitable destitution, the pawning of all but the
barest necessaries of clothes, even at last parting with his boots—all
this was revealed by the mere aspect of the man. He was charged with
stealing a pair of boots to replace those which he had pawned. There was
no shame in his face; the thing had come at last which he had felt
coming so long. It was not shame, it was a look of resigned
hopelessness; he was become the foot-ball of fate, he was henceforth to
be kicked about here and there as fate in her gamesome moods might
choose. Practically there was no defense; he had nothing to say; he only
shook his head; the magistrate was lenient because it was a first
offense. Leniency in such a case is only apparent, though the magistrate
means well, for a fortnight in prison is as ruinous for the rest of a
man’s life as a twelvemonth. So he stepped out of the dock, and
presently the wheels of Black Maria—sometimes called the Queen’s
omnibus—rolled out into the street with the day’s freight of woe and
retribution.
I met this poor creature afterward; I came upon him carrying a pair of
boards; I stumbled over him as he sat in the sun in St. James’s Park,
monumental in shabbiness; I met him once or twice shambling about the
Embankment, which was his favorite boulevard—a place where no work can
be picked up, and for that reason, I suppose, dear to him. London is a
very big city, but such men as this have their haunts; they are too weak
of will to wander far from the way of habit; it requires an effort, a
moment of energetic decision, to change his daily walk from the
Embankment to the Strand. I never saw him, except on that one occasion
when he was a sandwich man, doing any kind of work; I never saw him
begging; I never saw him in a shelter at night; I know not how he lived
or how, if ever, he procured a renewal of his rags when they fell off
him. Presently it occurred to me that I had not seen him lately. I
looked about for him. By this time I took an interest in the case; had
he asked me for money I should have given him some, I dare say. Why not?
The indiscriminate giving of alms is, one knows and has been taught for
years, a most mischievous thing; but in this case money will not lift a
man out of the slough, nor will it plunge him deeper; give him money and
he will devour it; refuse him money and he will go on just in the same
way. But I have never seen him since, and I am sure that in some
workhouse infirmary he lay lingering awhile with pneumonia, which
carries off most of the half-fed and the ill-clad, and that he died
without murmuring against his fate, resigned and hopeless. I dare say
that those who composed his limbs in death admired the singular beauty
of the face. For lo! a marvel—when the debased soul, which has also
debased the face, goes out of the body, the face resumes the delicacy
and the nobility for which it was originally intended.
Another case of a submerged. I knew something of the man, not the man
himself. He began very well; he was clever in some things; he could play
more than one instrument, he was a companionable person; he got into the
civil service by open competition very creditably; for some ten or
twelve years he lived blamelessly. It was known by his friends that he
was always thirsty; he would drink large quantities of tea for
breakfast; he drank pints of cold water with his pipe. Presently his
friends began to whisper—things. Then openly there were said—things.
Then I was told that A. A. had been turned out of his place, and that
meant a good many—things. For certain reasons I was interested in the
man. One evening in July I strolled in St. James’s Park after dinner;
the air was balmy; the benches of the park were nearly full. I found a
vacant seat and sat down. Beside me was a youngish man; by the light of
the gas-lamp I observed that the brim of his hat was broken, and that in
other respects rags were his portion. He entered into conversation by a
question as to some race-horse, to which I pleaded ignorance. He then
began to talk about himself. It was, as I have said above, the
lamentation of the luckless. “One man,” he said, “may steal a pig,
another may not look over the garden-wall. I, sir, am what I am; in
rags, as you see; penniless, or I should not be here; tormented by
thirst, and no means of procuring a drink. I, sir, am the man who looked
over the garden-wall.” He went on; suddenly the story became familiar to
me; he was the man of whose decline and fall I had heard so much.
He had not abandoned his grand air, for which he was always
distinguished. I offered him a cigar. He examined it critically. “A
brand of this kind,” he said, “I keep in tea for three years.” He lit
it. “A gentleman,” he reminded me, “is not lowered by bad luck, nor is
he disgraced by having to do work belonging to the service—the menial
service. The other day I was a sandwich man—in Bond Street. I met my
brother face to face. I have a brother—” the poor man is a member of the
Travelers and a few other clubs of that kind. “He will do nothing for
me. At sight of me he winced; he changed color. Do you think I flinched?
Not so, sir. The disgrace was his; he felt it.” And so on; he was
instructive. I believe his friends shipped him off somewhere.
Some of the submerged contrive to make their own livelihood; they are
even able, as a rule, to take a bed at the Sixpenny Hotel. One of these
institutions has, indeed, the credit of being the chosen haunt of the
brokendown gentlemen. Here they are all broken down together; to meet
here, to cook their own suppers, to rail at fortune like kings deposed
is an agreeable diversion. At least they talk with each other in the
language to which they are accustomed. And there is always something
about the manner of the brokendown “swell” which distinguishes him from
those of lower beginnings. There is something of the old gallantry left;
he does not sit down and hang a head and moan like the poor bankrupt
small trader; so long as the sixpence is forthcoming he is not unhappy.
It is a strange company; they were once soldiers, sports-men, billiard
players, betting men, scholars, journalists, poets, novelists,
travelers, physicians, actors. One of the submerged of whom I heard had
been a reader of some learned language at one of our universities;
another was a clergyman—not, if the story about him was true, quite
admirable professionally; both these gentlemen, however, found it best,
after a time, to exchange the Sixpenny Hotel for the workhouse, where
they are at least free from the anxiety about the sixpence.
One more illustration of the submerged who has been a gentleman. I met
him once, only once. It was in Oxford Street; he was standing before the
window of a very artistic and attractive shop—a china and glass shop.
The window was most æsthetically “dressed”; it contained, besides
Venetian glass and other glass of wondrous cunning and beauty, a small
dinner-table set out with flowers, glass, silver plate, costly china of
new design, some white napery, and those pretty little lights—called
fairy lights—which were a few years ago fashionable.
The man was unmistakably a gentleman; his dress betrayed his extreme
poverty ; his boots showed a solution of continuity between the upper
leather and the sole; his closely buttoned coat was frayed, his round
hat was broken, apparently he had no shirt; he certainly had no collar;
his red cotton handkerchief was tied round his neck; the morning was
cold and raw, a morning in November. Evidently, a gentleman. The poor
wretch was looking at the dinner-table; it reminded him of mess nights,
of dinner parties, of clubs, of evenings abroad and at home, before he
fell; of what else did that dinner-table remind him—of what light
laughter and music of women’s voices, while as yet he was worthy to sit
among them? One knows not. He was absorbed in the contemplation of the
table; as he gazed his face changed strangely; it went back, I know not
how many years; it became the face of a hawk, the face of a man keen and
masterful. How did he fall? How came the look of mastery and command to
go out of his face?