THE MAN IN THE SLUM
The countrysides have been laid waste, but what of the men and women
who were thus driven from the wide, wind-swept spaces to stony streets
and airless barracks? What did it mean of happiness and well-being to
them? Let us try to present the contrast to ourselves.
I
In no sphere is there such an opportunity of happiness as that of work
in the open air, when men have learned to love the sights and the
sounds of the wide sky. The pleasantest sight in the world is to watch
a ploughman driving straight his long furrow, or resting at the furrow
end crooning to his {79} well-groomed team, while the fresh air fans
his face and the westering sun casts a mantle of loveliness around him.
He may be a lover of nature, this man. He may watch the coming of the
birds and the first white flashing of the swallows' wings. If he does
not own the land there is no reason why he should not 'own the
landscape.' At the close of the day he goes home and is met by the
welcoming shout of his children, who, strong and sturdy, clamber on his
knees.
But it was decreed that he be driven into a slum; and see what has been
made of him! Walk through the East End of Glasgow on a Saturday night
and mark the product of the 'highest civilisation' the world has ever
known. Out of reeking public-houses men and women reel into the
streets. Degradation and brutality have marked them for their own.
Their diseased bodies witness to their lives of sensuality. They were
children of the fresh air, now 133,000 of them in {80} Glasgow live in
one-room houses with the very decencies of life denied them; and
486,000 live in one-room and kitchen houses--a total population of
619,000, in the one city, doomed to live under conditions which render
all privacy impossible. Often a father and mother and three or four
children live in a single apartment. When that single apartment is at
the top of the rookery, the pitiful spectacle is seen of little
children with bowed or bent legs climbing painfully up the squalid
stairs. The mothers of the race can be seen toiling up weary flights
of stairs carrying a heavy basket on one arm and a child in the other.
Once streams of purest water from the hillsides flowed day and night,
singing to them, cleansing for them; now it is impossible to keep
clean, for in these rookeries the washhouse is only available once
every three weeks! Out of a million of a population, 60 per cent. live
under conditions such as these. The Medical Officer of Health (an
office that can be no {81} sinecure in such a city) has declared that
there are 10,000 houses in Glasgow absolutely unfit for human
habitation, and which it is impossible to make fit. But a doomed
population must go on living in them because there is no other
accommodation to be found for them. In these places the children
perish in the first year of life at a rate of 200 per thousand; but in
the West End only 50 children die per thousand. Out of every thousand
babies born in those parts of the city in which the poor are massed,
150 at least are destroyed by the social conditions which the highest
modern civilisation has created.[1] After a day of nerve-racking toil
the freeborn Scotsman comes home to his lair, the one-roomed house
which can command the use of a {82} wash-house once in three weeks, to
the foulness and the squalor, and what is he to do? The State has
provided. The whisky-shop is there, at the corner, with its brightness
and its allurements and its forgetfulness of woe. The State says to
him, you can escape out of your intolerable surroundings through the
door of alcohol. And he escapes. There is no other course left for
him, and only the Pharisee can blame him. Thus it comes that the
State-regulated alcoholic manufactories of paupers and criminals pass
the slum-dwellers through the mill, and they come forth moral refuse.
Children with the faces of old men and women cry to each other the
undertones of a babel of profanity. For weeks they never see the sun,
moving under a pall of black smoke. They rise to toil in the dark, and
all day they watch and feed clanking machinery, and they return home in
the dark. The State has provided for them the narcotic of drunkenness.
Vigour dies low in them. Out of every {83} three one is rejected as
physically unfit to bear arms. When stringency is exercised one out of
two is rejected. In the process of transplantation and disinheritance
the people have lost not only the land but their bodies. For them
there has been yielded no profit. They have lost the world, but they
have not gained their souls.
For the greatest of all their losses is this, that they have lost the
sense of God. In the country they could not fall to those depths.
There they were face to face with the Unseen.
'Who plants a seed beneath the sod
And waits to see it push away the clod--
He trusts in God.'
But in the East Ends of our cities no work of God is ever visible. And
they were told by many wise men that God was superfluous. Everything
could be explained without any God! There was nothing but sensations!
Ah! who can blame him because he has sunk so low? {84} They took the
earth from him; they took the sunlight from him; they took the air from
him; they darkened the moon and the stars for him--until at last they
took God Himself from him. And it has all been so cunningly wrought
that he is all unconscious that he has been driven out of Paradise.
That is the essence of the grim tragedy.
II
In the countryside it was possible for men and women to live clean and
decent lives, and those who are left there continue to do so. In proof
of that it may be cited that the north-west districts of Scotland can
still show a birthrate of 34.8. Were it not for the 'Celtic Fringe'
and the country places, the birthrate of Scotland would be far lower
than it is. For the country and the hillsides are the land of far
vistas and empty spaces, so that the apostle of racial limitation could
not there plead that there is no room for more. And life is natural;
children, {85} so far from being an endless burden to their parents,
are looked upon as life's true riches, the helpers and the supporters
of their parents. The crofter's house may be poor, but it rings with
the shouting of children at play, and love spreads its endless feast.
In these places, so unsophisticated and so 'uncivilised,' children are
not a burden, and, however large the family, there is room in the heart
for more.
But far different is it when the family is driven from the countryside
into the slum. There the new civilisation decrees that men and women
must no longer live natural lives. If they have children they must pay
the penalty, and the penalty is that landlords refuse to accept them as
tenants. Long, long ago a Child was born in a stable 'because there
was no room for them in the inn.' There was room for tax-gatherers and
soldiers and traders, but there was nobody found to make room for a
woman in the hour of her direst need. The Child was shut {86} out.
But that was in a rude age and the door was shut by untutored men. The
most startling of all the facts which leap to light as we consider the
social and moral condition of our generation is the fact that after
nineteen centuries of Christianity, in the heart of the most 'perfect'
development of civilisation, the same tragedy is perpetrated--the child
is shut out. There is room for everything but not for innocence.
There is conclusive evidence to prove that the property owner in London
has set his face against tenants who happen to be the unhappy parents
of little children.[2] Childhood is {87} that which nobody now desires
except a few poor people whom the Malthusians have not yet instructed.
'A printer told me the other day,' says Monsignor Brown, '...he had
five children; when he went to an agent the other day, the agent bowed
him out and would not listen to him, though he wanted five rooms and
was prepared to pay the rent.'[1] If a family exceeds four the
position becomes acute. 'If a family consist of four or five
children,' declared the Assistant Housing Manager of the London County
Council, 'they would have a difficulty in obtaining accommodation.[3]
All this is quite natural. The property owner wants his rent, and he
wants it without his property suffering undue dilapidation. And the
rent is more certain when there are not more than two or three
children. He is not a philanthropist; he wants his money, the race
must look after itself. Profits and not children--that is the rule of
{88} his life. In every city it is the same. The owner of house
property will not have children in his houses, even as the London
County Council will not have married women as teachers--for they might
have children! This then is what we have done. We have deprived
four-fifths of our population of their birthright in the air and the
sunshine and the land, and we have decreed that they must live
unnatural lives--otherwise we will allow them no place wherein to live!
We have built up a civilisation in the midst of which childhood is
anathema.
III
When we look beneath the surface and ask the reasons why the poor
cannot find houses in which they can live with comfort, we discover
that it is a matter of finance. The extortionate prices of building
sites render it impossible to build on them any dwelling-houses except
tenements. Here is an example: {89} 'Unless the land were given you,
you could not possibly build cottages,' says the Secretary of the
Guinness Trust. 'Our new site, which was supposed to be sold to us on
cheap terms, cost L11,000 an acre, so that you can see the landrent per
tenement will work out at about 2s. 6d. a week, and as I say, the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners professed to sell to us at a low rate,
having regard to our objects. It is really not a stiff price for the
position.' In this bare statement we touch bedrock. The Guinness
Trust, founded with the philanthropic purpose of providing decent
housing for the poor, buys an acre for building purposes from the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who, from their very name, must be
interested in the poor, and they get it cheap at L11,000 an acre! What
does it mean this fabulous cost of land in great cities? A hundred
years ago that acre would be bought and sold at its agricultural value
of a few score pounds sterling. Whence, then, this inflated price?
The {90} answer is that the people created that value. We deprived
them of the land of England and drove them to the cities. In the
cities they, by their labour, made the land valuable; and the value
which they themselves created we turn against them. We exiled the
people from the soil; and in the cities, where we piled them, we turned
the values, which they created, into an instrument for their ultimate
destruction. They have made the land so valuable that cottages can no
longer be built on it, and the man with four children searches in vain
for a house. It is a staggering product of a perfect civilisation.
And still more staggering when one realises that the birthrate of these
poor people, for whom the Guinness Trust provides some measure of
comfort, is 36.95 per thousand, as compared to 17.53 in the west. The
section of the population still willing to carry on the race must pay
L11,000 an acre for the sites of their teeming tenements. Only after
that form can civilisation make room for the child.
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IV
What guerdon has the State provided for the massed populations who have
the very riches they create thus turned into an instrument for their
impoverishment? One looks for that guerdon in vain. The vast majority
of them are consigned to a life of privation from birth to death.
Factories pour heavenward the smoke which lies over our cities as a
pall, and in the gloom men and women toil with bloodless faces
producing the goods which, elaborate and costly, or cheap and nasty,
crowd the markets of all the world. But ten millions of the toilers go
shivering through life ever tottering on the verge of the precipice of
want. Over one and a half millions of them were rated as paupers in
the years before the war. In the old Roman world half the population
were slaves, but three-fourths of our population are virtually slaves.
For the man who marries and has children, who is forced into a slum,
and is {92} once chained to the chariot of modern machinery, there is
no escape. 'Man is born free,' declared Rousseau, 'and is everywhere
in chains.' No chains of slavery were ever more degrading than those
forged in our day. Systems of indoor sweating found for their antidote
the pauper system of outdoor relief. England, that struck the shackles
off the African slaves, forged shackles for her own children. The
conditions of the modern slaves are in a sense worse than that of the
Roman serf. For the Roman slaves often laboured in noble toil,
building temples which have defied the corroding power of time and
which still inspire the heart with admiration and awe. But these
slaves of to-day build nothing that endures. The cities of their
labour might perish to-morrow, but in their perishing no beauty would
disappear from the earth. The very efforts which the toilers have made
to improve their state have been movements of blindness and folly.
They have organised {93} far-reaching systems by which they seek
through the limitation of output to improve their condition. The gate
through which they press towards deliverance is the gate of dishonesty.
That is the proof of the servitude not of body only, but of mind and
spirit, to which they have been brought. 'I do not hesitate to express
the opinion,' wrote Huxley in 1890, that if there is no hope of a large
improvement in the condition of the greater part of the human family;
if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater
dominion over nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which
follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and
the intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral
degradation amongst the masses of the people, I should hail the advent
of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole thing away as a
desirable consummation.' Since then, wealth has enormously increased,
science has triumphed more and {94} more over nature, but the increase
of the one and the triumph of the other have only produced an increase
of physical and moral degradation on the part of masses of the people.
Whoever ponders the two Reports in which for the first time that
degeneration is fearlessly and mercilessly exposed, cannot any longer
be blind to that. It is not, however, by means of a 'kindly comet'
that the arrest comes. For God's judgments shut not the door against
hope.
V
In the days of old a prophet surveying the decay of Israel used a
phrase which grips the heart: 'They build up Zion with blood, and
Jerusalem with iniquity,'[4] and so has visualised our pitiful state
also. It is not, however, quite the same. For Zion was the temple,
and stood for the hunger of the soul. We no longer build any temples.
We build factories and playhouses and endless miles of grey and
colourless {95} streets. To-day the prophet would vary the words,
'They build up theatres and cinemas with blood and London with
iniquity.' That is near the truth. London has been built up by that
iniquity which has made the home-counties of England waste; and the
life-blood of islands and fair valleys and hill-sheltered glens has
been drained that Glasgow might grow and its slums be enlarged. The
call to repentance which comes to our ears is a call summoning us to
right the wrong wrought by blinded politicians, to restore again to the
people the decencies of life and the possibilities of happiness. The
call to national repentance is not a call to emotion but a call to
action. Of old prophets summoned a race fast hurrying to decay to
return to God. The way of return was the way of action. They were
exhorted to people the waste places, to curb licentiousness, and to
walk in the path of righteousness. And to-day the call of national
repentance is the same. {96} It is the call to the realisation of an
ideal of life in which masses of the people will not be damned from
birth by a social organism in whose grip they are powerless. All in
vain does a mission, appealing to the soul, feeble of help, wage
conflict in a slum with the forces of the State, wielded through a
dozen public-houses, that depress and enslave. As things now are there
can be no escape and no salvation for the man in the slum.
[1] Dr. Chalmers has pointed out in the _Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Medicine_, 1913, vol. vi., that the mortality of infants
varied inversely with the number of rooms occupied up to four.
Infant mortality in one-apartment houses, per thousand, 210
" " two " " " 164
" " three " " " 129
" " four " " " 103
[2] The following quotation from a newspaper of this summer is
illuminating:--
'A woman with six children, who sought advice at Acton, said that so as
to get a flat she told the landlord that she had only three.
'He accepted her deposit, and allowed her to enter the flat, but on
learning of the other three children, ordered her to leave, and would
not take her rent. He described her as a trespasser, and threatened to
eject her unless she left.
'"If I had told him the truth," said the woman, "he would not have
taken me. As soon as I say I have six children, people will not listen
any longer."
'The magistrate told applicant that she must make arrangements to
leave.'
[3] _The Declining Birthrate_, p. 202.
[4] Micah iii. 10.
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