THERE are more than one hundred and eighty religious Sects in
England;--and all of them have Representatives in London. There
are innumerable Charity Organization Societies,--Missions without
end,--Relief Funds with Centre Offices and Branch Offices in London.
There is much preaching, much lecturing, much writing;--yet, when all
is said, done, and written, the grim result is the same,--namely that
the squalor, filth, vice, ignorance, recklessness, wretchedness, and
brutality of the great Majority of the Poor in our wealthy English
metropolis is a crying scandal, and “a rank offence that smells to
heaven.” The religious sects meet often and discuss much,--beginning
their discussions generally with a bombastical flow of oratory, and
ending in a violent wrangle over some knotty point of doctrine, while
the miserable creatures who cry to them for relief, cry in vain to ears
that are deafened by selfishness and plugged up with conceit. A great
deal too much of the money subscribed to charitable Societies goes to
pay secretaries and underlings, and many and many a starving wretch
has been turned ruthlessly away unaided from the doors of a stately
building, flagrantly announcing itself as a “Refuge for the Destitute.”
Yet nowhere are there such large sums subscribed to Foreign Missions
as in London;--the Kaffir, the Zulu, the “Heathen Chinee,”--all these
may appeal to London and be sure of a favourable answer. Dukes and
Earls who love to see their names blazoned on lists of charitable
donations would appear, from what is said about them in print, to take
a deep interest in the whole world, except that particular portion of
the globe from which they derive their own magnificent revenues,--and
thousands of pounds are spent annually in reforming and civilizing
the savage tribes of the desert and forest. Yet in the face of all
this philanthropy, the horrible, almost incredible miseries of the
London poor daily increase, and we know for a fact that, while money
is constantly subscribed for the conversion of the foreign heathen to
holy Christianity, an enormous population of native heathen, far more
degraded than the most uncultured desert barbarians, swarm at the
very doors of the wealthy would-be benefactors of humanity, and demand
redress for their bitter and long-standing wrongs. It is a sorrow and
scandal to us that it should be so; but so it is.
The neglect of years, and the rapid turn of the wheel of modern
progress, has produced the London Savage,--a being more wild, more
reckless and terrible than the most bloodthirsty Zulu that ever
revelled in human gore. He may be met anywhere;--he lurks in dens
behind some of the stateliest mansions of Kensington and Belgravia.
Rolling in filthy straw, in company with several other savages like
himself, who, with their wives and children, all lie together in one
damp, dark, foul-smelling room, he lays his plans of robbery and murder
with the same equanimity and self-applause as a fashionable preacher
pens his sermon for the coming Sunday. He knows no difference between
virtue and vice,--morality or the reverse. His reasoning is simple,--in
fact, quite primitive;--if someone else happens to have what he wants
and does not possess, such as a gold watch, for instance, or a purse
of money, he considers himself justified in taking it, if not by
persuasion, then by force. If he commits murder, he is perhaps caught
and sentenced to be hung. Does he care? Has he any remorse? Any dread
of death? Not he! He goes to the gallows with entire fortitude and dies
like an ill-used martyr. His children remember him as such, and follow
his example in due time, so that the hangman is still a necessary
official.
One of the cruellest answers given to the pamphlet known as “The Bitter
Cry of Outcast London,” was that “London must wait.”--On the very top
of this a letter was published in _The Times_ from a Missionary,
who begged for contributions towards providing suitable homes for
English working-men in Paris. It is most probable that the Dukes and
Earls and Marquises of this land came readily forward in response to
the appeal, leaving the London Savage in his old quarters, the centres
of typhoid, cholera and small-pox, without more than a reiteration
of what had already been said--“London must wait.” And still Savage
London does wait--in a peculiar way of its own. It is as much as one’s
life is worth to walk on the Thames Embankment after dark,--people
are knocked down or mysteriously made away with on Hampstead Heath,
Wandsworth Common, and other lonely, outlying places, and the very
policemen, whose anxious vigilance and active _surveillance_
cannot be too highly estimated, are in such danger of their lives that
they often need fire-arms in order to protect themselves during the
exercise of their duty. Moreover, the London Savage has recently been
making himself familiar with dynamite. Naturally, he approves of it,
and chuckles over the admirable rapidity of its action in destroying
life. He tries it in order to be quite certain of its effect. He has
been known to place some on a railway line, just as a train is about
to pass, just by way of experiment. The female London Savage has also
found out a suitable pastime for herself in vitriol throwing,--a
pastime the idea of which she has borrowed from her sister the Paris
“Pétroleuse.” How delightful to scarify, blister, and burn into utter
hideousness the face of some man or woman who has become repulsive to
her! It is a task which entirely satisfies her feminine instincts.
Some grave clergyman will perhaps take her very seriously to task
for having smothered her baby under a mattress. She will not see the
force of his reasoning in the least. She will state rough facts in the
face of his fancy arguments. She will tell him there was no room for
the baby in a den measuring seven feet by ten, where fifteen people
huddle together,--she will also prove that there was no food for the
baby, and no clothes either. It would have died anyhow. So she goes
cheerfully to prison for having smothered her child, and as she goes,
she administers a few consolatory oaths to her brute companions, who
congratulate her on her good fortune. Good fortune? Certainly. She goes
to prison, and prison means shelter and wholesome food at regular hours
every day. For the English Government takes the tenderest care of its
criminals. They are visited by the ministers of the Church, who bless
them solemnly and commend their fragments of black souls to the care
of Heaven; and lady missionaries sit with them for an hour at a time,
and give them good books and pretty little tracts to read. But for the
miserable beings, who, in the midst of their misery, still feebly try
to cling to honesty, there is no help--no hope. And so the evil grows
and widens, like the ever moving ball of snow which gradually becomes
an avalanche. The blood yet runs cold to read of the horrors of the
French Revolution of 1789,--of the unbridled ferocity of the Paris
mob, to whom the crushing of human life was no more than the killing
of mosquitoes. The graphic picture of the whole frightful scene drawn
by Thomas Carlyle is not so much a history as a warning. The English
temperament is much colder, more stolid and patient than that of
the French,--but at the same time it is more deliberately cruel and
brutal when once awakened to a sense of injustice, and smarting under
inexplicable wrong. The London Savages, once let loose, would be more
dangerous to deal with than even those Savages of Paris were. And who
can tell how long London _will_ wait? How long will its ferocious
patience, the patience of a tiger waiting for its prey, continue to
hold out? One thing might certainly be done in the meantime, and that
is, to draw in all the money that is pouring out of the great English
capital to the relief of foreigners, and let it flow into the proper
channels. Charity begins at home. It is a mockery of wealth to use it
for the benefit of strange nations who, as soon as not, will turn and
rend us, while neglecting our own people. The immense river of golden
coin which rushes abundantly out of England on the least appeal to
its generosity, should be turned in the right direction,--homeward.
Let it flow down the city slums,--let it reach to the wretched hovels
that lie within a stone’s throw of the King’s Palace of Windsor,--let
it sweep away some of the accumulated mountains of misery in the homes
of the poor,--and Savage London, melted to the heart, may yet learn to
believe in a beneficent Creator, for whom at present it has less honour
and less faith than the most abandoned heathen worshipper of wooden
idols. Recognize the fact, good people!--Christian London is more than
half heathen, and the sooner this terrible truth is taken to heart, the
more hope there is of those who are sincerely religious and charitable
hastening to the immediate rescue of their perishing kindred, the
limit of whose stupefied endurance has been nearly reached, and when
reached must culminate in some appalling disaster. It is a matter which
at Christmas-time calls for some consideration among the numerous
other claims which are set forward as worthy of remembrance by the
influential and wealthy. Persons who give Two Thousand Guineas for a
horse might ponder it,--and those who are rushing abroad to spend
their money on the gambling tables of Monte Carlo might also take it
to heart. The “Hooligan” is made of human material like ourselves; he
is not a special sort of manufacture. He is the unfortunate result of
long years of neglect inflicted on his class by his brothers; yet he is
our blood and kin, and perhaps if we knew all about him, we should find
that his faults of breeding and education are not so much his as the
faults of those who leave him neglected in his lair. The King, whose
earnest exertions on behalf of the “Housing of the Poor” have scarcely
been done full justice to, has, perhaps, nothing more at heart than the
desire to remedy the evils of overcrowding, and to alleviate the misery
resulting from want of proper breathing-room and light,--and Queen
Alexandra’s gentle and noble efforts in the same direction have added
an extra grace to the many which adorn her life and character. But
both the King and the Queen naturally expect response and assistance
from the wealthier of their subjects in so great and necessary a work.
Missionaries in India who spend time and money in endeavouring to
“convert” Hindoos, who are often more truly religious than some of
their would-be teachers, would do well to turn their efforts towards
“Hooliganism,” and Jesuit priests who go about collecting funds to
build more Roman Catholic Churches than are needed or wished for in
a Protestant country, would build a truer and far more convincing
Spiritual fabric if they would use some of their surplus cash for
the rescue of such London heathens who have never heard of either
Protestantism or Romanism, or indeed of any religious faith at all. To
such blighted and disastrous lives in the purlieus of the great city,
Christ would assuredly go first of all, if He ever came again with the
Divine Christmas message of “Good-Will.”