The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do--that
is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I
think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary
succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that
there is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the
worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All
this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the
certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose
body is doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for
much of the evil that ensues from giving something to people who have
nothing; but I dare say the Dissenters are also guilty.
Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it
would be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of
the frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able
to feed themselves. One day, in the outskirts--they were very tattered
and draggled--of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind
woman “thought she could accommodate” us with a cup of tea, though she
was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids and
small boys coming in for “penn’orths” of that frightful variety of tart
and cake which dismays the beholder from innumerable shop windows
in England. When we were brought our safer refection, we noted her
activities to the hostess, and she said, “Yes, they all want a bit
of cake with their tea, even the poorest”; and when we ventured our
supposition that they made their afternoon tea the last meal of the day,
she laughed at the notion. “Last meal! They have a good supper before
they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four meals a day.”
Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to
Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank
cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. “They
don’t know how to charge!” he said, with an irony that referred to the
fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station tea; and when
I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the company, he
readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to eating
generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to do a
job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I
knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for
his board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies
fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will
find to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward’s time, five
hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose
every morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread,
butter, and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had
soup, meat, and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from
work, he had a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He
thought that English people ate too much, generally, and especially
on Sunday, when they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home
without asking, “Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?”
When I remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I
thought that he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact
remained that they looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh,
though the difference may have had as much to do with the air as the
food. I liked him, and I cannot leave him without noting that he was of
the lean-faced, slightly aquiline British type, with a light mustache;
he was well dressed and well set up, and he spoke strongly, as North
Britons do, with nothing of our people’s husky whine. I found him on
further acquaintance of anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to
the late war, and rather socialistic. He blamed the labor men for
not choosing labor men to office instead of the gentry who offered
themselves. He belonged to a plumbers’ union, and he had nothing to
complain of, but he inferred that the working-man was better off in
America, from the fact that none of his friends who had gone to the
States ever came home to stay, though they nearly all came home for
a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my other friend, the
accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be owned their race
seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of two sovereigns
which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand,
he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially at
Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than
anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking
with them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook
on life, but I dare say there was more of it.