picture which he presents of the London street boy. That boy has never
ceased to live in and about the streets. Sometimes he sleeps in the
single room rented by his father, but the livelong day he spends in the
streets; he picks up, literally, his food; he picks it up from the
coster’s barrow, from the baker’s counter, from the fishmonger’s stall,
when nobody is looking. For such boys as these there are Barnardo’s
Homes, where waifs and strays to any number are admitted, brought up,
trained to a trade, and then sent out to the colonies. Five thousand
children are in these homes. The history is very simple. Dr. Barnardo, a
young Irish medical student, came to London with the intention of giving
up his own profession and becoming a preacher. He began by preaching in
the streets; he picked up a child, wandering, homeless and destitute,
and took it home to his lodgings; he found another and another, and took
them home too. So it began; the children became too many for his own
resources; they still kept dropping in; he took a house for them, and
let it be known that he wanted support. The rest was easy. He has always
received as much support as he wanted, and he has already trained and
sent out to the colonies nearly ten thousand children. There are also
many less important homes and associations for indigent children, homes
for homeless boys, homes, refuges, and societies for girls; industrial
homes, female protection societies, orphanages, in long array. Most of
these societies are, however, limited as to income; a great part of
their funds goes in management expenses. If they would be persuaded to
unite, a great deal more might be done, while each society, with its
honorary officers, could be carried on in accordance with the intentions
and ideas of its founders and supporters.
Homes and schools for the boys and girls, hospitals for the adult, there
remain the aged. Dotted about all over London there are about a hundred
and fifty almshouses; of these about half are situated in and about East
London. Not that the people of East London have been more philanthropic
in their endowments than those of the west, but, before there was any
city of East London, almshouses were planted here on account of the
salubrity and freshness of the air and the cheapness of the ground. Some
of these have been moved farther afield, their original sites being
built over. The People’s Palace, for instance, is built upon the site of
the Bancroft almshouses, founded in 1728 for the maintenance and
education of one hundred poor. Their original house has gone, but the
charity is still maintained.
I have always been astonished to think that this most excellent form of
charity, one least of all liable to be abused, has gone out of fashion.
If I were rich I should rejoice in creating and founding an almshouse
for the admission and maintenance of as many old men and old women as I
could afford, or as the college which I should build would admit. There
are still some delightful almshouses left in London, although so many
have been removed; those that remain stand beside the crowded
thoroughfares, each one a lesson in charity and pity; there is the
stately Trinity Almshouse in the Whitechapel road, with its two courts
and its chapel and its statue of the founder and the good old men, the
master mariners, who live there; and close beside, unless it has been
lately removed, an almshouse of the humbler kind, but quite homely and
venerable. My almshouse, if I were privileged to build and endow one,
should have its refectory, as well as its chapel; my old people should
have their dinner together, and their common hall for society in the
winter evenings; they should have, as well, their gardens and their
quadrangle and the sense of belonging to a foundation beautiful in its
buildings, as well as charitable in its objects.
The existing almshouses by themselves go very little way toward keeping
the aged out of the workhouse; but there are other aids which carry us
on a little farther, societies which give annuities and pensions to
various persons. On the list more than a hundred different trades are
represented. Among them is one for flower girls and water-cress venders.
This, however, despite its unpretending title, has grown into a very
large and important society. Under this title are conducted industrial
and servants’ training homes, a cottage hospital, a home for waif girls,
an orphanage, a shelter and clubroom for street flower-sellers, and a
seaside holiday home for blind and helpless and crippled girls,
ineligible for ordinary homes—the whole with an income of over £7000,
and giving assistance to 12,000 girls a year. This, like the association
for befriending young servants, has grown gradually out of small
beginnings, and in a space of thirty years has attained to its present
dimensions.
So numerous are the societies and the charities of every kind that one
thinks there ought not to be any distress, any destitution, any vice in
this City of London. Alas! It is a city of five millions, and out of
this multitude there are many who will not work, many who deliberately
desire the life of vice and crime, and still more who, if the Helping
Hand offers relief without question or condition, will swell the numbers
of those who are wilfully helpless and deliberately destitute. The power
of working is easily lost, and with difficulty regained. The
administration of charitable funds is a most difficult task.
Fourteen years ago, in a time of exceptional distress, the Lord Mayor,
in the kindness of his unreflecting heart, opened a subscription for the
relief of the unemployed. A very large sum was collected in a few days.
Of course this became known not only over all London, but over the whole
country. Then there began a mighty migration; wave after wave of hungry
applicants arrived by every train; the glorious prospect of obtaining a
gift of money without doing anything for it attracted thousands; they
gave up work in order to be eligible; they magnified the amount of the
gift, in anticipation; when the day of distribution arrived they fought
for admission, they threatened to brain the distributors, they took
tickets which entitled them to food and sold them at the public house;
in the end that act of charity developed and strengthened the pauper
spirit in hundreds of thousands; those who had been working for the
better exercise of charity were in despair; to this day the memory of
that day of free gifts, without question and without conditions, lies in
the mind of the working-man who will not work, and nerves him for
another spell of idleness and starvation.
In this attempt to stay the hand that grants the unthinking dole the
Charity Organization Society stands in the forefront. It has offices and
branches everywhere; it intervenes between the rich man and the poor; it
says to the former, “Never give him money, you will only keep him poor;
make him understand that money means conditions of work and effort; do
not turn the unemployed into a pauper.” To the workhouses the Charity
Organization Society says, “Do not give outdoor relief; do not accustom
the sturdy poor to look for doles of bread and orders on the butcher.
Make them go into the house if they want help.” It is better to be cruel
when kindness means weakness, and doles mean pauperizing. The temptation
to give is like the temptation to take opiates. To give relieves the
discomfort of knowing how others are suffering. To give brings food to
the children, fire to the hearth; it also enables the breadwinner to
spend in drink what he should take home to his wife, and it makes the
wives and children accustomed to receive alms, and to look to alms for
the supplies which are only deficient through their own improvidence and
vice. The Charity Organization Society is known and detested by every
thriftless loafer, every beggar, every impostor, every begging-letter
writer in the country; it is also known and detested by that large class
of sentimentalists who give money wherever there is none, who bribe the
women by doles to come to church, and who interpret certain words of our
Lord, as they were interpreted by the monastic houses, into an
injunction to give without question and to relieve without condition.
I come next to a form of philanthropic endeavor concerning which it is
difficult to speak unless in terms of extravagant admiration.
I mean the Settlement, which is spreading and taking root in all great
cities both in America and in Great Britain.
The Settlement very properly began in East London, as the place which
stood most in need of it. There are now some thirteen or fourteen
Settlements in London, of which six, I believe, belong to East London.
There are Settlements in Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester, and Edinburgh.
There are, I believe, speaking under correction, more than twenty in the
greater cities of the United States.
It is now fifteen years since the first creation of the Settlement. What
is it? What was at first proposed? What has it done? We may answer these
questions by the help of Canon Barnett, its real founder. (See
“University and Social Settlements,” chapter ii.)
The Settlement sprang out of a profound distrust of the machinery by
which the Helping Hand could reach the people. It seemed to many that
this machinery hindered rather than helped. The Charity Organization
Society was proving with pitiless statistics and cruel logic that the
widespread system of doles was crushing the spirit of independence in
the poor; the experience of the present, as well as that of the past
taught them that laws cannot touch the restless and the improvident;
they saw that refuges might receive the unhappy, but could not touch or
remove the cause of unhappiness; they discovered that societies for
relieving the poor were too often machines which blindly acted by a
hard-and-fast rule, maintained many officials, and made no attempt at
prevention or improvement. Also they saw that with all the machinery of
the parish and despite the self-denying work of the clergy there had
been little less than a complete failure in inspiring among the people
the faith and hope of religion and its self-restraining powers.
There was also, thanks to certain influences which it would take us long
to discuss, a growing recognition of certain evils, such as the
separation of the rich from the poor, the withholding from the poor of
so many things enjoyed by the rich, the condescension of rich to poor,
an exclusive spirit on the one side and a natural resentment on the
other, and a conviction that something should be done to resist these
evils. In other words, the feeling was gradually growing, especially
among certain groups of young men of Oxford and Cambridge, that
civilization should belong not to one class but to all classes; that the
things which we believe to be the most important—knowledge, art,
manners, beauty, purity, unselfishness—should be made possible for the
working-man, if he will accept them, as well as for the rich. The root
idea, therefore, of a Settlement is the example, the teaching and the
maintenance of what we call the life of culture among the
working-classes.
By example—for the members of the Settlement live among them, go about
with them, live in the sight of all The working-man dines with them,
spends the evening with them, talks with them. He finds that their mode
of life is simple; that the luxury he has been taught to believe as the
common rule among the easy class does not exist among these members of
that class; that cleanliness, using the word to cover everything—the
home, the meals, the person, the daily habit—is the first thing
necessary; that knowledge may be pursued for its own sake, and not
because it has a commercial value and is saleable; and that these men
and women have come to live in his quarter without the least intention
of giving him any money or of taking off his shoulders any one of his
own responsibilities.
Next, by teaching. The Settlement has its library, its class-rooms, its
lecture-room, and its fifteen hundred students—yet it is not a college.
The residents do not all teach. The visitor thinks perhaps that if they
are not come to teach, their object is to preach temperance and to get a
hold over the criminal classes. Nothing of the kind; the Settlement is
not a mission. Nor, again, is it a Polytechnic, despite the manifold
studies that are carried on. The lads of the Polytechnic learn a trade
by which to live; the students at the Settlement make a study of some
science. Nor is it in the narrow sense a charitable institution. In a
Settlement every resident carries on his own life in his own way; he
does not stoop to the ways of the people around; he is not their
benefactor; he is not a superior person; he is just one man among the
men all round him into whose interests he enters and whose ideas he
endeavors to understand.
In all countries governed by our institutions or by those which have our
institutions as their basis the duty of the individual citizen to his
town and to his state is assumed as essential for the government of the
people by the people. A man who deliberately abstains from exercising
the right to vote, who leaves to any who please to snatch it the
government of his own city, is little less than a traitor to the cause
of freedom; he enjoys rights which have been won for him by his fathers,
but refuses to watch over and to defend those rights. It is the work of
the Settlement to teach this duty and to set the example. The
constitution of a municipality assumes that citizens will give, freely
and without pay, such time as is wanted for the conduct of the municipal
affairs. In local government the Settlement carries on a quiet work
which is perhaps more effective than its classes and its lectures. The
members become guardians and vestrymen; they sit on school boards, they
are school visitors, they inspire every branch of local government with
the sense of duty and of principle. For the members themselves the
Settlement teaches and requires, as Canon Barnett points out, “the
surrender of self-will and of will worship.”
[Illustration: Mile End Almshouses.]
For those who come under the influence of the Settlement it destroys
class suspicion, it removes prejudices; the working-men discover that
those whom they call, in a lump, the rich are not what their radical
orators of Whitechapel Waste believe and teach; they make friends where
they thought to find only enemies; they learn the things in which the
rich are happier than themselves—the cleanly life, the power of
acquiring knowledge, the possession of, or the access to, art of all
kinds, more gentle manners, greater self-restraint, and in the cases
before their eyes unselfishness and the power of working without pay,
without praise, without apparent reward of any kind. Above all, there is
no hidden motive; Canon Barnett’s church stands beside the Settlement of
Toynbee Hall, but there is no invitation, no condition, no pressure put
upon the people to step out of the Settlement into the church. There is
no teaching of politics; there is no attempt to introduce shibboleths;
there are no bribes, unless it is the pressure of the friendly hand and
the pulse of the sympathetic heart; the evenings spent with gentlewomen
and gentlemen, the patient teaching, the lecture by a man whose name is
known over the whole world—unless these things be considered bribes,
then the Settlement offers none.
In education, then, the Settlement has classes which learn all kinds of
sciences, but not for trade purposes; it has lectures by great, or at
least by distinguished, men; it offers exhibitions of pictures the same
as those presented to West End people; it encourages the formation of
clubs and associations of all kinds; it opens the library to everyone;
it leads the way in local government; it offers recreation that shall be
really _recreative_; it enrolls the boys in athletic clubs, and gives
them something to aim at and to think about; it gathers in the girls and
keeps them from the dangers of long evenings with nothing to do; it is a
center for the study of the labor problems and difficulties of all
kinds. In one word, the Settlements of East London, where I know most of
their workings, are set up as lamps in a dark place; they are not like
an ordinary lamp which at a distance becomes a mere glimmer; the lamp of
the Settlement, the more widely its light penetrates, the farther the
darkness recedes; the deeper is the gloom, the more brightly shines the
light of this lamp so set and so illuminated and so maintained.
Should the workhouse be considered as any part of the work of the
Helping Hand? It should be, but it cannot be. Whatever the state touches
in the way of charity or philanthropy it corrupts and destroys, whether
it is the workhouse or the prison or the casual ward. As for the London
workhouse, it is simply a terrible place. It is a huge barrack; it
contains over a thousand inmates; they are all alike herded and huddled
together, the respectable and the disreputable; there is no distinction
between misfortune and the natural consequence of a wasted life. The
system is a barbarous survival of a time when the system was not so
barbarous because the respectable poor were much rougher, coarser,
ruder, and nearer to the disreputable poor. It must be reformed
altogether. There ought not, to begin with, to be this kind of barrack
life for the respectable poor; there should be municipal almshouses.
Meantime the poor folk themselves hate the workhouse; they loathe the
thought of it; they are wretched in the shelter of it; you may see the
old men and the old women sitting in gloomy silence, brooding over their
own wreck; they have nothing else to do; they are prisoners; they cannot
go in and out as they please; they are under strict rule, a rule as
rigid as that of any prison; they have no individuality; they all try to
cheat the officers by smuggling in forbidden food; they are at the mercy
of Bumble, who may be a very dreadful person, not comic in the least.
The most unhappy are those who should be the objects of the greatest
pity, the brokendown, able-bodied man, too often bent with
rheumatism—the English agony—or some other incurable disease. Such an
one enters into this place, where all hope must be abandoned; we use the
phrase so often that we hardly understand what it means. No hope at
forty but to lead the rest of life without work, without change, without
comforts; to be deprived of tobacco, beer, meat, society, mental
occupation; to live on among the other wrecks of humanity, with so much
bread every day, so much suet pudding, so much cocoa, so much pea soup,
so much tea. Can the workhouse be truly called part and parcel of the
work of the Helping Hand?
Let us end, as we began, with the lower levels. Very far, indeed, below
the working-men who attend the lectures and the drawing-room of Toynbee
Hall are the submerged and the casuals, the dockers, the wanderers, and
the criminals at large. What is done for them? They are, of course,
looked after with the utmost zeal and attention by the police, by the
officers of the vestry, and by the magistrates. But these agencies are
not exactly reformatory in their character.
I have spoken of the Settlement as one of two forces now acting upon the
mass of the people which seem to promise the most powerful influence
upon the future. The second of these two forces I believe to be the
social work of the Salvation Army. I am not speaking of their religious
efforts; they do not appeal, as a rule, to the educated; on the other
hand, I would not speak a word in disrespect of efforts which I know to
be genuine and which I know to have been attended with signal success in
the reclaiming of thousands from evil ways.
The first step in the social work of the Salvation Army is the opening
of a lodging-house of the cheapest kind. So far, against great
opposition, they have, I believe, succeeded in keeping it free from the
ordinary law as regards common lodging-houses—viz., the visit of the
policeman whenever he chooses either to see that there is no disorder or
because he “wants” somebody, and so in the middle of the night tramps
round the dormitories, turning his bull’s eye upon the faces of the
sleepers. It is most important that the poor creatures in the place
should feel that in that shelter at least they will not be hunted down.
The men have to pay for their lodging—the price of a bed varies from
twopence to fourpence; the beds are laid in bunks; they are covered with
American cloth; they are provided each with a thick blanket; foot-baths
and complete baths are ready for them; a cup of cocoa and a large piece
of bread cost a trifle; they are received in a light, warm, and spacious
hall; they are invited every evening to join in a short service, with
singing and an address. In the morning those of them who choose lay
their cares before the superintendent, who sends them on to the Labor
Bureau, where in most cases, if the man is willing to work, something is
found for him.
They have, next, workshops where all kinds of work are undertaken and
turned out; homeless and friendless lads are received in these workshops
and taught trades. Whatever may be the previous record of a case, the
man received is treated as a friend; his past is regarded as already
finished and done with, perhaps already atoned. He is made to understand
that if he would return to the world he must work for every step; by
work alone he is to get food, shelter, and clothes; beside him at every
step stands the officer in whose charge he has been placed. He is
constantly watched, without being allowed to entertain any suspicion
that his conduct is under careful supervision.
If you visit one of these workshops you will be astonished at the show
of cheerful industry. Everyone seems doing his very best. Some of this
apparent zeal is genuine; some of it is inspired by passing emotion and
evanescent passion or repentance; out of the whole number so many per
cent. give up the work and go back to the old life. But some persevere.
I have already spoken of the English prison. The cry of the wretched
prisoner goes up continually, but in vain. The long agony and torture,
especially to the young, of the solitary cell, the enforced silence, the
harsh punishments, the insufficient food, the general orders which will
allow of no relaxation in any case, the system which turns the most
humane of warders into a machine for depriving his prisoner of
everything that makes a man—these things crush the unhappy victim. After
a long sentence—say of two years—this poor wretch comes out broken; he
has no longer any will, any resource, any courage; he is like a cur
whipped and kicked into a thing that follows when it is bidden.
Let me again recall the appearance of these unhappy creatures on the
morning of their deliverance. They sit spiritless, obedient, not
speaking to each other or to their new friends, waiting for some fresh
order. It is pitiful to look at the semblance of manhood and to think
that this—this is the method adopted by the nation in its wisdom in
order to punish the crime and to reform the criminal. When the sentence
is over they escort him to the gates of the prison; they throw the doors
open wide and say, “Go, and sin no more.” What is the wretched man to
do, but to go and sin again? No one will employ him. He has lost his
skill and sleight of hand. He has lost his old pride in his work; he
cares for nothing now. It is a hard world for many; it is a black,
hopeless, despairing world for the man who once enters or comes out of
an English prison. There is a poem, written the other day, by one who
endured this awful sentence—a scholar and a man of culture:
“With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, we tear the rope,
Each in his separate hell.
And the silence is more awful far,
Than the sound of a brazen bell.”
“And never a human voice comes near,
To speak a gentle word.
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard;
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.”
The officers of the Salvation Army’s Home welcome their guests with warm
hand grasps and friendly words. What, however, is to be done to find
them work to go on with? Not far from the home there is a disused
chapel; in this place some thirty or forty of the discharged prisoners
are engaged in sorting waste paper. Others go out and collect it; there
is paper of all sorts—fine note-paper, coarse paper, packing paper,
newspaper, everything. The men sort this in crates, and so earn a few
pence a day. It is a rude beginning for the new life; many of them lose
heart; the uphill fight, the long strain of patience until work of a
better kind is found is too much for them; they relapse, they disappear
in the streets, they are seen no more for a time, until one day they are
met again at the prison gates and are led back to the home they
deserted, where they meet with the same welcome and where they are
encouraged to make another attempt.