As the health affects the brain, and the brain the morals, all healthy
and unhealthy influences have a moral bearing.
Bad air, bad water, bad drainage, bad ventilation, damp and dark streets
and houses, dirtiness and over-crowding, all tell against the health,
against the health of children most seriously, and all help on the
deadly progress of degeneration.
Greyness and monotony of life, unclean, unsightly, and sordid
surroundings, tedious and soulless toil, all tend to blunt the senses,
to cloud the mind, and to oppress the spirit.
Millions of the working poor, who live in great and noisy cities, whose
neighbourhoods are vast, huddled masses of sunless streets and airless
courts, whose lives are divided between joyless labour and joyless
leisure; the conditions of whose comfortless and crowded homes are such
as make cleanliness and decency and self-respect well nigh impossible:
millions of men, women, and children are here starved in soul as well as
in body.
These people, throughout their anxious and laborious lives, sleep in
the overcrowded cottages and tenements, ride in the overcrowded and
inconvenient third-class carriages, sit in the crowded and stifling
galleries at the theatre, are regaled with crudest melodrama, the
coarsest humour, the most vapid music. When they read they have the
Yellow Press and the literature of crime. When they get to the
seaside they spend their brief and rare holiday in the rowdiest of
watering-places.
They have no taste for anything higher? True. They have never been
taught to know the highest. And their ignorance, and their slums, and
their clownish pleasures, are part of their environment We need not ask
whether such environment makes for culture, for joy, for health.
They have no refinement in their lives, these poor working millions.
They have no flowers, no trees, no fields, no streams; no books, no art,
no healthy games.
Worse than that, perhaps, they are paid neither honour nor respect: they
are without pride and ambition; they have no ideals, no hope.
The environment that denies to human beings all pride and honour and
hope, all art and nature and beauty, does not make for health, nor for
morality.
The straitness of means, the uncertainty of employment, the looming
shadow of hunger and the workhouse, send some to suicide and some to
crime, but leave the impress of their dreaded and evil presence upon the
hearts and minds of nearly all.
We must remember that these poor creatures human. The difference between
them and us is more a difference of environment than of heredity. The
hunger for pleasure, for excitement and romance, is as strong in their
soul as in ours. Like ourselves, they cannot live by bread alone.
Excitement, pleasure of some kind, they must have, will have. The hog
is contented to snore in his sty, the cat is happy with food and a place
before the fire; but the human being needs food for the soul as well as
for the body. And there is ample environment to feed the hunger of the
ignorant and the poor for excitement: the environment of betting, and
vice, and adulterated drink.
In the poor districts the drinking dens are planted thickly. There is
money to be made. And they are blatant and frowsy places, and the drink
is rubbish--or poison.
I have seen much of the poor. I could tell strange, pathetic histories
of the slums, the mines, the factories: of the workhouses and the
workhouse school, and the police-courts where the poor are unfairly
tried and unjustly punished.
Let me dip back into some of my past work, and show a few pictures. Here
is a rough sketch of the women in the East End slums: