bicycle. Now, all the roads outside London are on Saturday and Sunday
dotted with the frequent bicycle. It goes out in companies of twenty and
thirty; it goes out by twos and threes; it goes out singly. On one
Sunday twenty-five thousand bicycles were counted crossing one bridge
over the Thames and making for the country beyond. And it seems that
there are none so poor as not to afford a bicycle. The secret is, I
believe, that a second-hand bicycle, or a bicycle of the last fashion
but one, or a damaged bicycle, may be purchased of its owner for a mere
trifle, and these lads learn very quickly how to repair the machine
themselves.
But the summer all too quickly draws to an end. By the middle of
September twilight falls before seven. There are no more evening spins
ten miles out and back again; by the end of October twilight falls at
five; then there are no more Saturday afternoons on the road. The
weather breaks, the roads are heavy, the bicycle is laid aside for the
next four months, perhaps for more, because the cold east wind of early
spring does not make the roads pleasant except for the hardiest and the
strongest. The winter amusements begin. For the factory girls and the
dockers we have seen what they are: the street first and foremost;
always the street, imperfectly lit, the pavement crowded; always the
street, in which the girls march up and down three or four abreast.
Their laugh is loud, but it is not forced; their jokes and their
badinage with the lads are commonplace and coarse, but they pass for
wit; they enjoy the quick pulse when all the world is young; they are as
happy as any girls in any other class; they need not our pity; youth, if
it has enough to eat and its evening of amusement, is always happy.
They have, then, the boulevard without the café, the street with the
public house and the invitation from youth, prodigal of its pence, to
step in and have a drink. In addition, they have the music-hall and the
theater. For some there is the club; but only a few, comparatively, can
be persuaded to go into the club for an hour or two every evening. Most
of them have no desire for a quiet place; they are obliged to be quiet
in the factory; at night they like to make up for the day’s long
silence.
So with their companions, the casual hands, the factory lads, the
Hooligans, the children of the kerb, they rejoice in the days of their
youth.
Let us mount the social scale; we come to the craftsman in steady work,
to the small clerk, to the small shopkeeper. Not that these are of equal
rank. The working-man consorts with other working-men; the small clerk
calls himself a gentleman; the small shopkeeper is a master. What have
they for amusements? The small shopkeeper seems to get along altogether
without any amusement. He keeps his “place” open till late in the
evening; he shuts it, takes his supper, and goes to bed. His social
ambitions are limited by the distinctions to be acquired in his chapel;
he reads a halfpenny journal for all his literature.
As for what is offered to those who will accept these gifts, there are
lectures first and foremost; there are the lectures offered every winter
at Toynbee Hall. These lectures are not, if you please, given by the
“man in the street”; the lecturers are the most distinguished men in
their own lines to be found; there is no talking “down” to the
Whitechapel audience; those serious faces show that they are here to be
taught, if the lecturer has anything to tell them, or to receive
suggestions and advice; they are all of the working-class; they are far
more appreciative than the audiences of the West End; they read and
think; they have been trained and encouraged to read and think by Canon
Barnett for many years; they are very much in earnest, and they do not
come with vacuous minds; as Emerson said of the traveler so we may say
of a man who listens to a lecture—he takes away what he brought with
him. About the Settlements and the gifts which they offer, with full
hands, to the people, I speak in the next chapter.
[Illustration: Toynbee Hall and St. Jude’s Church.]
What Barnett and Toynbee Hall have done for the intellectual side the
People’s Palace has done for the musical side. Its cheap concerts have
led the people, naturally inclined to music, insensibly into ways of
good taste; the palace was fortunate, at first, in getting a musical
director who knew how to lead the people on; one of the most gratifying
successes of this institution has been its music. They have now their
own orchestra, vocal and instrumental. At the same place are held
exhibitions, from time to time, of East London industries, of pictures,
of arts and crafts of all kinds. Here is the finest gymnasium in London,
and here are many clubs—for foot-ball, cricket, and games of all kinds.
One omission in the amusements of London must be noted. There are no
public dancing-halls. I see no reason at all why a public dancing-hall
should not be carried on with as much attention to good behavior as a
private dance, or a theater, or any other place where people assemble
together. It requires only the coöperation of the people themselves,
without the aid of the police. Meantime, there is no form of exercise,
to my mind, so delightful to the young and so healthful as dancing;
nothing that more satisfies the restlessness of youth than the rapid and
rhythmic movement of the limbs in the dance. Nature makes the young long
to jump about; education should take in hand their jumping and make it
part of the orderly recreation which we are substituting for the old
brutal sports. Dancing was tried at the People’s Palace; it was a great
success; the balls given in the Queen’s Hall were crowded, and the
people were as orderly as could be desired. But, indeed, the whole
feeling of the assembly was in favor of order.
The theater and the music-hall claim, and claim successfully, their
supporters; concerning the former one has only to recognize that it may
be a school of good manners, as well as of good sentiments, and that it
is also an institution capable of ruining a whole generation. The pieces
given at the theaters of East London are, so far as I have observed,
chiefly melodramas. The music-halls are places frankly of amusement, and
for the most part, I believe, vulgar enough, but not otherwise
mischievous.
And there is the public billiard-room, with all that it means—the
betting man, the professional player, the proximity to the bar, the beer
and the tobacco, and the talk. It attracts the young clerk more readily
than the young craftsman. It is his first step downward. If it does not
plunge him beneath the waves after the fashion that we have witnessed,
it will keep him where he is and what he is—a writing machine, a machine
on hire at a wage not so very much better than a typewriting instrument,
all his life. Let us rather contemplate the thousands of lads who attend
the classes at the palace, the polytechnics, and the Settlements; let us
rather think of those who crowd into the concerts, sit as students at
the lectures and listen and look on while the guide leads them round the
exhibitions.
In this long list of amusements I must have omitted some, perhaps many.
For instance, I have not spoken of reading or of literature. The
craftsman of East London has not yet begun to read books; at present he
only reads the paper; his children read the penny dreadfuls, and are
beginning to read books.
Considering that Sunday afternoon is especially the time of rest, we
must not forget one form of recreation peculiar to that time. It takes
the form of an address given in some chapel. There is generally a short
service, with prayer and the singing of a hymn; the people who attend
and crowd the chapel seem to like this addition to the address which
follows. It is intended to be of a kind likely to interest and to
instruct; the first duty of the lecturer is to choose a subject which
does both; I have myself on more than one occasion attempted to address
working-men on the Sunday afternoon; I have found them easy to interest
and quick to take up points. As at Toynbee Hall, one must not talk
“down” to them. Indeed, the men who come to such lectures are the most
intelligent and the best educated of the whole population. It is
pleasant and restful for them; the chapel is warm; the singing is not
disagreeable, even though in their own homes psalmody is not commonly
practised; to be called away on a dark and gloomy November afternoon and
led gently into another world, with new scenery and other conditions, is
that complete change which is the best rest of all. The lecturer need
not be afraid of tiring his audience; he may go on as long as he
pleases; when he leaves off they will crowd round him and beg him to
come again.
Many other omissions I have made purposely. There are the drinking and
the gambling clubs, the betting clubs, haunts, and dens, if one choose
to consult the police and to hunt them up, which would enable one to
finish this chapter with a lurid picture. Where there are so many men
and women there will always be found a percentage of the bad, the worse,
and the worst. It is the hopeful point about East London that wherever
the better things are offered they are accepted by the better sort; not
by a few here and a few there, but by thousands who are worthy of the
better things.
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XII
THE HELPING HAND
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XII
THE HELPING HAND
THE work that lies before us in every city waiting for the Helping
Hand—the human wreckage, bankruptcy, age, sickness, poverty, which must
always be forming anew however we may meet it and find alleviation—will
certainly not decrease as the years roll on. The point for us to
consider here is not the volume and variety of the forces which cause
this wreckage, but the attempts which are now being made to find this
alleviation and, if possible, a remedy.
The Helping Hand has a history, and it is very simple:
1. First of all it threw a penny to the beggar because he was a beggar.
2. Secondly, it offered free meals and free quarters in every monastic
house to every beggar because he was a beggar.
3. It continued to give the penny and the free meals and the lodging to
the beggar because he was a beggar, but it ordered the beggar to go back
to work.
4. It arrested, imprisoned, branded, and flogged the beggar because he
was a beggar. It continued also to give him a penny for the same reason.
5. It founded almshouses for some of the aged poor; those who could not
get in continued to receive their penny and their flogging because they
were beggars.
6. It founded workhouses, Bridewell, and houses of correction for the
beggar. And it continued to give that penny to the beggar because he was
a beggar.
7. It built houses for the reception of the poor who could no longer
work, infirmaries for the sick, orphanages and homes for poor children,
casual wards for the homeless. It made begging an offense in the eyes of
the law. Yet it continued to give the beggar a penny because he was a
beggar.
8. It discovered that a multitude of rogues and people who will not work
trade upon the charity and the pity of people, sending around letters
asking for help. It therefore established an association, with branches
everywhere, to expose the fraudulent. Yet it continued to give the
beggar a penny because he was a beggar.
In other words, the Helping Hand has never been able to refrain from
giving that penny which encourages the “masterless” man, and the man who
will not work, and the fraudulent, and the writer of the begging letter.
Could the Helping Hand be persuaded to refuse that penny for a single
fortnight, to turn a deaf ear resolutely to the starving family on the
road, to the starving children on the pavement, to the starving woman
who stands silent, mournful, appealing with mute looks of misery, only
for a single fortnight, the existence of the beggar would come to a
sudden end. This the Helping Hand can never be persuaded to do.
Therefore we have with us not only the real misery caused by fate, by
fortune, by the natural consequences of folly and weakness and crime,
but also the pretended misery of those who live upon the pity of the
world and trade on that strange self-indulgence which gives the dole to
remove an unpleasant object out of sight and to awaken the glow which
follows with the sense of charity.
I leave aside in this place the casual dole—the penny to the beggar
because he is a beggar; it is illustrated for all time by the partition
of the cloak between St. Martin and the beggar. The saint, then a
gallant cavalryman, did not stop—or stoop—to inquire into the merits of
the case; here was a beggar. Was he really starving? could he work? were
his sufferings pretended? was he really cold? did he deserve any help at
all? Was he, on the contrary, well fed and nourished, money in purse,
food in wallet, a sufficiency of clothes on his back, a fire and a pot
over it at home, with a well-fed family and a wife on the same “lay” at
the other gate of the city? Let us leave the Bishop of Ligugé as a type
for all the centuries of the unthinking charity which gives the penny to
the beggar because he is a beggar.
Let us turn to other and later developments. The Helping Hand has
founded and endowed and now maintains by voluntary contributions
hospitals of every kind for the sick; by rates and taxes, workhouses for
the poor, schools for the children. Yet there has passed—there is now
passing—over the work of charity a great and most remarkable revolution;
it is a revolution characteristic of a time in which every theory of
social life, social conditions, and social responsibilities has been
completely changed. The old duties remain still; schools and hospitals
have been multiplied; if almshouses have not increased, the workhouse
system has become better organized. But we have become aware of other
duties, of new responsibilities. It is now understood that it is not
enough to put the children to school from one to fourteen; they must be
looked after when they leave school; it is not enough to provide for the
diseases of the body; we must make provision for the diseases, and the
cause of the diseases, of the mind. The Helping Hand is at work in these
days for the arrest of degeneracy; for the opening up of art,
literature, music, science, culture of all kinds, to the better sort
among the working-classes; for the wider extension of the area and the
depth of culture; for the creation of that kind of public opinion which,
more than anything else, makes for public order and the maintenance of
law; for the care and safeguarding of young people at the perilous time
of emancipation from school; for the rescue of those who can be rescued;
for the cleansing of the slums; for the restoration to the world of
those who, as we have seen, have dropped out; and for the prevention of
pauperizing by ill-considered schemes of ill-informed benevolence.
[Illustration: The New Whitechapel Art Gallery. (The building to the
right is a free library.)]
These are general terms. In order to carry out its work in detail, the
Helping Hand looks after the children in their homes, while the
Board-school looks after their teaching; it provides cases for the
hospital, and aids the parish authorities during sickness in the home;
it introduces the social side into the lives of the better sort; it
devises attractions for the young people who stand at the parting of the
ways, where temptation is strong and the primrose path is bright with
flowers; it teaches the lads a trade, and the girls a love for the quiet
life; it wages war with the public house and the street; it endeavors to
bring back the lowest strata to a sense of religion which they have come
to think the peculiar and rather unaccountable property of “class”; it
brings friendliness among folk who have only known the order of the
policeman.
These are some of the functions which to-day are exercised by the
Helping Hand. In East London we can see the hand at work with greater
energy, wiser supervision, and in directions more varied than in any
other city of Great Britain. I do not venture, for the obvious reason of
ignorance, upon comparison with American cities, but I should think that
we have in East London, with its vast population of working-people of
all kinds, ranging from the highly-paid foreman to the casual hand, the
lad of the street, the wastrel, and the wreck, a mass of humanity which
is not paralleled anywhere, and a corresponding amount of philanthropic
endeavor which it would be impossible to equal elsewhere.
In this immense multitude there are many slums of the worst kind; but
they are now much fewer, and they are much less offensive, than they
were; the most terrible of the plague spots seem to have been improved
away; to find the real old slum, the foul, indescribable human pigsty,
one must no longer look for it in East London. That is to say, there
are, I dare say, a few of the old slums left, but the places—there were
then many of them—into which one peered, shuddering, twenty years ago,
have now vanished. The police, the clergy, the ladies who go about the
parish, can still take the visitor into strange courts and noisome
tenements, but he who remembers the former state of things feels that
light and air and a certain amount of public opinion, with some measure
of cleanliness, have been brought to the old-fashioned slum by the
modern Helping Hand.
If the American visitor to London desires to see a real old-fashioned
slum—one where all the surroundings, physical and moral, are, to use the
mild word of the day, absolutely “insanitary”—I would recommend him not
to try East London, where he would have to search long for what he
wants, but to pay a visit to Guy’s Hospital on the south side of the
Thames and to seek the guidance of one of the students through the
courts of crime and grime which still lie pretty thickly round that
fortress of the army of health.
If you read novels of the day describing things brutal beyond belief, it
will be well to suspect that the situations are a little mixed. Art must
exaggerate; art must select; art must group. In this way it is quite
possible that a picture tendered as of to-day may really belong to
twenty years ago. There is still plenty of misery left in East London—we
need, in fact, no exaggeration; I could fill these pages with lamentable
histories; the people are still very much “down below”; some of them are
a long way down; they are not only suffering for the sins of their
fathers, they are busily piling up by their own sins sufferings for
their children. Terrible has been their own inheritance; more terrible
still will be the inheritance of the children.
Among these people, being such as they are, a whole army is at work
continually. Let me now, in such short space as is at my command,
consider in detail some of the more important methods by which this army
is at work. It is not yet an army completely drilled and subdivided and
commanded; some of their work overlaps, or hinders, other work. Perhaps
it is not to be desired that this army should be completely drilled and
organized. We do not ask for the crystallized methods of French
education, or the iron drill of the Prussian sergeant. Let us leave some
room for individual choice. Given certain principles of action, the
element of personal freedom in carrying out these principles becomes of
vital importance.
I have spoken of the revolution in opinion as to the responsibilities of
the better educated and the wealthier toward those below them. Perhaps
the situation may be illustrated by considering the change that has
passed over us in our conception of what civilization should mean. The
view of the eighteenth century was that civilization, culture, the
pursuit of art, reading, learning of all kinds, science, the power, as
well as the right, of government belonged essentially to the upper
classes. When the good people of Spalding, for instance, in the year
1701, founded a literary society they called it the “Spalding
Gentlemen’s Society”—only gentlemen, you see, could be expected to take
any interest in things that belong to civilization. It was further
considered that it was impossible to expect civilizing influences to
bear upon the working-classes. They were kept in order by discipline, by
the prison, and by the lash. To open the doors of education, to give
them access to the tree of knowledge, would be a most dangerous, a most
fatal, mistake. Even at the present day one hears, at times, the belated
cry that the working-classes need no more than the barest elements of
learning.
In certain circles the distinction between the cultured class and those
outside was marked by artificial notes of manner and of speech. The
limits were intolerably narrow; outside these circles there was no
leadership, no statesmanship, possible.
But apart from the pretensions of the eighteenth-century aristocracy it
was considered by the middle class and the professional class alike
dangerous to interfere with Providence; the working-class were born to
do service; let them learn to do it. Religion, of course, they could
have if they wanted it; the church was there, the doors were open every
Sunday, anybody might go in; the clergyman would visit the sick, if he
were invited; the children were baptized in the church; some of the
people were married in the church; all the people were buried in the
churchyard, with the service of the church by law established. That was
all; there were very few schools; education, even if the parents wished
it, was not to be had, and the folk were left altogether to their own
devices. They had been forced out of the City to make room for
warehouses and offices; they lived in their own quarters, especially
along the riverside and in Whitechapel, and they were left quite alone
to their own devices.
There were no police; the hand of the law among these crowded streets
was weak; they did what they pleased. There is a story belonging to the
year 1790, or thereabouts, of a man living in Wapping, just outside the
Tower of London, which was always garrisoned with troops. This man gave
offense to his neighbors by complying with some obnoxious law. He heard
that they were going to attack him, meaning that they were going to
murder him. The man had the bulldog courage of his time; he sent away
his wife and children; he got a friend as brave as himself to join him;
he closed his lower shutters and barricaded his door; he laid in
ammunition, and he brought in and loaded two guns, one for himself and
one for his friend.
At nightfall the attacking party arrived; they were armed with guns and
stones. They began with a volley of the latter; the besieged paid no
attention; they then fired at the windows; the besieged received their
fire, and while they were loading again let fly among them, and killed
or wounded two or three. They retired in confusion, but returned in
larger numbers and with greater fury. All night long the unequal combat
raged. When their ammunition was spent the two men dropped out of a back
window into a timber yard, where they hid in a saw-pit. Observe that
this battle lasted all the night, close to the Tower, and that no
soldiers were sent out to stop it till the morning, when the mischief
was done and the house was sacked. And no one was arrested, no one was
punished, save the men who were shot. Can any story more clearly
indicate the abandonment of the people to their own devices?
Reading these things, remembering how brutal, how ignorant, how degraded
were whole masses of our people at that time, I am amazed that we came
out of that long struggle of 1792–1815 without some awful outburst, some
Jacquerie, like that of the Parisian mob, which might have drenched our
land, as it did that of France, with blood and murder. And I think that
when the social history of the nineteenth century, which we who have
lived in it cannot grasp, save in parts, comes to be really and
impartially considered, the chief feature, the redeeming point, will be
that it began to recognize in practice the elementary truths that we are
all responsible for each other, that each is his brother’s keeper, that
no class can separate itself from the rest, and that no civilization is
durable or safe unless it includes the whole people.