I was talking with a very vindictive man. In his opinion, his wife had
wronged him and the law had wronged him. The merits and morals of the
case are immaterial. The meat of the matter is that she had obtained a
separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings each week for the
support of her and the five children. "But look you,"
said he to me,
"wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten shillings? S'posin', now,
just s'posin' a accident 'appens to me, so I cawn't work. S'posin' I get
a rupture, or the rheumatics, or the cholera. Wot's she goin' to do, eh?
Wot's she goin' to do?"
He shook his head sadly. "No 'ope for 'er. The best she cawn do is the
work'ouse, an' that's 'ell. An' if she don't go to the work'ouse, it'll
be a worse 'ell. Come along 'ith me an' I'll show you women sleepin' in
a passage, a dozen of 'em. An' I'll show you worse, wot she'll come to
if anythin' 'appens to me and the ten shillings."
The certitude of this man's forecast is worthy of consideration. He knew
conditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his wife's grasp on
food and shelter. For her game was up when his working capacity was
impaired or destroyed. And when this state of affairs is looked at in
its larger aspect, the same will be found true of hundreds of thousands
and even millions of men and women living amicably together and
co-operating in the pursuit of food and shelter.
The figures are appalling: 1,800,000 people in London live on the poverty
line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week's wages between them
and pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen per cent. of the whole
population are driven to the parish for relief, and in London, according
to the statistics of the London County Council, twenty-one per cent. of
the whole population are driven to the parish for relief. Between being
driven to the parish for relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is
a great difference, yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of
folk in themselves. One in every four in London dies on public charity,
while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and
20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of the
word.
It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London people who
die on charity.
In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population was
less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for every
succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has been
greater in London than in all England. Yet, from the Registrar-General's
Report for 1886, the following figures are taken:-
Out of 81,951 deaths in London (1884):-
In workhouses 9,909
In hospitals 6,559
In lunatic asylums 278
Total in public refuges 16,746
Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says:
"Considering that
comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that one in every
three London adults will be driven into one of these refuges to die, and
the proportion in the case of the manual labour class must of course be
still larger."
These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the average
worker to pauperism. Various things make pauperism. An advertisement,
for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday morning's paper:-
"Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and invoicing:
wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week. Apply by letter,"
&c.
And in to-day's paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age and an
inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
non-performance of task. He claimed that he had done his various tasks
since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to breaking
stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the task. He had
never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he said. The
magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven days' hard
labour.
Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the accident, the
thing happening, the death or disablement of the husband, father, and
bread-winner. Here is a man, with a wife and three children, living on
the ticklish security of twenty shillings per week--and there are
hundreds of thousands of such families in London.
Perforce, to even half
exist, they must live up to the last penny of it, so that a week's wages
(one pound) is all that stands between this family and pauperism or
starvation. The thing happens, the father is struck down, and what then?
A mother with three children can do little or nothing.
Either she must
hand her children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be
free to do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-shops for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale of
wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three children
can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay and
death end their suffering.
To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
newspapers the two following cases:-
A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes. They made each day four gross.
Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d. for glue, and
1d. for string, so that all they earned between them was 1s. 9d., or a
daily wage each of 10.5d.
In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief. "She was a straw-hat
maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the price she
obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each. For that price she had to
provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."
Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done no
wrong that they should be so punished. They have not sinned. The thing
happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-winner, was struck
down. There is no guarding against it. It is fortuitous. A family
stands so many chances of escaping the bottom of the Abyss, and so many
chances of falling plump down to it. The chance is reducible to cold,
pitiless figures, and a few of these figures will not be out of place.
Sir A. Forwood calculates that--
1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4
weeks.
But these are only the accidents of industry. The high mortality of the
people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part.
The average age at
death among the people of the West End is fifty-five years; the average
age at death among the people of the East End is thirty years. That is
to say, the person in the West End has twice the chance for life that the
person has in the East End. Talk of war! The mortality in South Africa
and the Philippines fades away to insignificance. Here, in the heart of
peace, is where the blood is being shed; and here not even the civilised
rules of warfare obtain, for the women and children and babes in the arms
are killed just as ferociously as the men are killed.
War! In England,
every year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in the various
industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement by
disease.
In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five years
of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children die before
five years of age. And there are streets in London where out of every
one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during the next year; and
of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before they are five years old.
Slaughter! Herod did not do quite so badly.
That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does no
better substantiation can be given than the following extract from a
recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not applicable
to Liverpool alone:-
In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts, and
the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing largely to
the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which for so many
years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into their porous
material. Singular testimony to the absence of sunlight in these
courts was furnished by the action of the Parks and Gardens Committee,
who desired to brighten the homes of the poorest class by gifts of
growing flowers and window-boxes; but these gifts could not be made in
courts such as these, _as flowers and plants were susceptible to the
unwholesome surroundings, and would not live_.
Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St. George's
parishes (London parishes):-
Percentage of
Population Death-rate
Overcrowded per 1000
St. George's West 10 13.2
St. George's South 35 23.7
St. George's East 40 26.4
Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers are
employed. Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far more
precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on life. In
the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet and wet clothes
cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia, and severe rheumatism;
while in the carding and spinning departments the fine dust produces lung
disease in the majority of cases, and the woman who starts carding at
seventeen or eighteen begins to break up and go to pieces at thirty. The
chemical labourers, picked from the strongest and most splendidly-built
men to be found, live, on an average, less than forty-eight years.
Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter's trade: "Potter's dust does not kill
suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly into the
lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed.
Breathing becomes
more and more difficult and depressed, and finally ceases."
Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre
dust--all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-guns
and pom-poms. Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead trades.
Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a young, healthy,
well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead factory:-
Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic. It may
be that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her teeth
and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible.
Coincidently with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so
gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends.
Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are
developed. These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision or
temporary blindness. Such a girl passes into what appears to her
friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria.
This gradually
deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a
convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the arm,
next the leg of the same side of the body, until the convulsion,
violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes universal.
This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which she passes
into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in severity, in one
of which she dies--or consciousness, partial or perfect, is regained,
either, it may be, for a few minutes, a few hours, or days, during
which violent headache is complained of, or she is delirious and
excited, as in acute mania, or dull and sullen as in melancholia, and
requires to be roused, when she is found wandering, and her speech is
somewhat imperfect. Without further warning, save that the pulse,
which has become soft, with nearly the normal number of beats, all at
once becomes low and hard; she is suddenly seized with another
convulsion, in which she dies, or passes into a state of coma from
which she never rallies. In another case the convulsions will
gradually subside, the headache disappears and the patient recovers,
only to find that she has completely lost her eyesight, a loss that
may be temporary or permanent.
And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:-
Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid
constitution--who had never had a day's illness in her life--became a
white-lead worker. Convulsions seized her at the foot of the ladder
in the works. Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line along her
gums, which shows that the system is under the influence of the lead.
He knew that the convulsions would shortly return.
They did so, and
she died.
Mary Ann Toler--a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her
life--three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the
factory. Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead
poisoning--had fits, frothed at the mouth, and died.
Mary A., an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead
factory for _twenty years_, having colic once only during that time.
Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions. One
morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all power
in both her wrists.
Eliza H., aged twenty-five, _after five months_ at lead works, was
seized with colic. She entered another factory (after being refused
by the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years. Then
the former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and
died in two days of acute lead poisoning.
Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says: "The children
of the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only to die from the
convulsions of lead poisoning--they are either born prematurely, or die
within the first year."
And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A.
Walker, a young girl
of seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the industrial
battlefield. She was employed as an enamelled ware brusher, wherein lead
poisoning is encountered. Her father and brother were both out of
employment. She concealed her illness, walked six miles a day to and
from work, earned her seven or eight shillings per week, and died, at
seventeen.
Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the workers
into the Abyss. With a week's wages between a family and pauperism, a
month's enforced idleness means hardship and misery almost indescribable,
and from the ravages of which the victims do not always recover when work
is to be had again. Just now the daily papers contain the report of a
meeting of the Carlisle branch of the Dockers' Union, wherein it is
stated that many of the men, for months past, have not averaged a weekly
income of more than from four to five shillings. The stagnated state of
the shipping industry in the port of London is held accountable for this
condition of affairs.
To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there is no
assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old age. Work
as they will, they cannot make their future secure. It is all a matter
of chance. Everything depends upon the thing happening, the thing with
which they have nothing to do. Precaution cannot fend it off, nor can
wiles evade it. If they remain on the industrial battlefield they must
face it and take their chance against heavy odds. Of course, if they are
favourably made and are not tied by kinship duties, they may run away
from the industrial battlefield. In which event the safest thing the man
can do is to join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red
Cross nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home
and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other than
a nightmare.