"My father has more stamina than I, for he is country-born."
The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor physical
development.
"Look at my scrawny arm, will you." He pulled up his sleeve. "Not
enough to eat, that's what's the matter with it. Oh, not now. I have
what I want to eat these days. But it's too late. It can't make up for
what I didn't have to eat when I was a kiddy. Dad came up to London from
the Fen Country. Mother died, and there were six of us kiddies and dad
living in two small rooms.
"He had hard times, dad did. He might have chucked us, but he didn't. He
slaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and cared for us. He
was father and mother, both. He did his best, but we didn't have enough
to eat. We rarely saw meat, and then of the worst. And it is not good
for growing kiddies to sit down to a dinner of bread and a bit of cheese,
and not enough of it.
"And what's the result? I am undersized, and I haven't the stamina of my
dad. It was starved out of me. In a couple of generations there'll be
no more of me here in London. Yet there's my younger brother; he's
bigger and better developed. You see, dad and we children held together,
and that accounts for it."
"But I don't see," I objected. "I should think, under such conditions,
that the vitality should decrease and the younger children be born weaker
and weaker."
"Not when they hold together," he replied. "Whenever you come along in
the East End and see a child of from eight to twelve, good-sized, well-developed, and healthy-looking, just you ask and you will find that it is
the youngest in the family, or at least is one of the younger. The way
of it is this: the older children starve more than the younger ones. By
the time the younger ones come along, the older ones are starting to
work, and there is more money coming in, and more food to go around."
He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic
semi-starvation kills not, but stunts. His voice was but one among the
myriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest empire in
the world. On any one day, over 1,000,000 people are in receipt of poor-law relief in the United Kingdom. One in eleven of the whole working-class receive poor-law relief in the course of the year; 37,500,000
people receive less than 12 pounds per month, per family; and a constant
army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of starvation.
A committee of the London County school board makes this declaration: "At
times, _when there is no special distress_, 55,000
children in a state of
hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to teach them, are in the
schools of London alone." The italics are mine. "When there is no
special distress" means good times in England; for the people of England
have come to look upon starvation and suffering, which they call
"distress," as part of the social order. Chronic starvation is looked
upon as a matter of course. It is only when acute starvation makes its
appearance on a large scale that they think something is unusual
I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East End
shop at the close of a murky day. He had been the eldest of five
children, with a mother and no father. Being the eldest, he had starved
and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of his little brothers
and sisters. Not once in three months did he ever taste meat. He never
knew what it was to have his hunger thoroughly appeased.
And he claimed
that this chronic starvation of his childhood had robbed him of his
sight. To support the claim, he quoted from the report of the Royal
Commission on the Blind, "Blindness is more prevalent in poor districts,
and poverty accelerates this dreadful affliction."
But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the bitterness
of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to eat. He was
one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he said that in the blind
homes they did not receive half enough to eat. He gave the diet for a
day:-
Breakfast--0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner --3 oz. meat.
1 slice of bread.
0.5 lb. potatoes.
Supper --0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:-
"The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger. The
food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked prison
bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven. At twelve
o'clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal stirabout
(skilly), and at half-past five it gets a piece of dry bread and a tin of
water for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong grown man is
always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea,
with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison astringent
medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a matter of course.
In the case of a child, the child is, as a rule, incapable of eating the
food at all. Any one who knows anything about children knows how easily
a child's digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental
distress of any kind. A child who has been crying all day long, and
perhaps half the night, in a lonely dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon by
terror, simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible kind. In the
case of the little child to whom Warder Martin gave the biscuits, the
child was crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and utterly unable to
eat the bread and water served to it for its breakfast.
Martin went out
after the breakfasts had been served and bought the few sweet biscuits
for the child rather than see it starving. It was a beautiful action on
his part, and was so recognised by the child, who, utterly unconscious of
the regulations of the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens how
kind this junior warden had been to him. The result was, of course, a
report and a dismissal."
Robert Blatchford compares the workhouse pauper's daily diet with the
soldier's, which, when he was a soldier, was not considered liberal
enough, and yet is twice as liberal as the pauper's.
PAUPER DIET SOLDIER
3.25 oz. Meat 12 oz.
15.5 oz. Bread 24 oz.
6 oz. Vegetables 8 oz.
The adult male pauper gets meat (outside of soup) but once a week, and
the paupers "have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which is the
sure mark of starvation."
Here is a table, comparing the workhouse officer's weekly allowance:-
OFFICER DIET PAUPER
7 lb. Bread 6.75 lb.
5 lb. Meat 1 lb. 2 oz.
12 oz. Bacon 2.5 oz.
8 oz. Cheese 2 oz.
7 lb. Potatoes 1.5 lb.
6 lb. Vegetables none.
1 lb. Flour none.
2 oz. Lard none.
12 oz. Butter 7 oz.
none. Rice Pudding 1 lb.
And as the same writer remarks: "The officer's diet is still more liberal
than the pauper's; but evidently it is not considered liberal enough, for
a footnote is added to the officer's table saying that
'a cash payment of
two shillings and sixpence a week is also made to each resident officer
and servant.' If the pauper has ample food, why does the officer have
more? And if the officer has not too much, can the pauper be properly
fed on less than half the amount?"
But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper that
starve. Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always to have a
full belly. In truth, it is his empty belly which has driven him to the
city in such great numbers. Let us investigate the way of living of a
labourer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor Law Union, Berks. Supposing
him to have two children, steady work, a rent-free cottage, and an
average weekly wage of thirteen shillings, which is equivalent to $3.25,
then here is his weekly budget:-
s. d.
Bread (5 quarterns) 1 10
Flour (0.5 gallon) 0 4
Tea (0.25 lb.) 0 6
Butter (1 lb.) 1 3
Lard (1 lb.) 0 6
Sugar (6 lb.) 1 0
Bacon or other meat (about 0.25 lb.) 2 8
Cheese (1 lb.) 0 8
Milk (half-tin condensed) 0 3.25
Coal 1 6
Beer none Tobacco none Insurance ("Prudential") 0 3
Labourers' Union 0 1
Wood, tools, dispensary, &c. 0 6
Insurance ("Foresters") and margin 1 1.75
for clothes
Total 13 0
The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves on
their rigid economy. It costs per pauper per week:-
s. d.
Men 6 1.5
Women 5 6.5
Children 5 1.25
If the labourer whose budget has been described should quit his toil and
go into the workhouse, he would cost the guardians for s. d.
Himself 6 1.5
Wife 5 6.5
Two children 10 2.5
Total 21 10.5
Or roughly, $5.46
It would require more than a guinea for the workhouse to care for him and
his family, which he, somehow, manages to do on thirteen shillings. And
in addition, it is an understood fact that it is cheaper to cater for a
large number of people--buying, cooking, and serving wholesale--than it
is to cater for a small number of people, say a family.
Nevertheless, at the time this budget was compiled, there was in that
parish another family, not of four, but eleven persons, who had to live
on an income, not of thirteen shillings, but of twelve shillings per week
(eleven shillings in winter), and which had, not a rent-free cottage, but
a cottage for which it paid three shillings per week.
This must be understood, and understood clearly: _Whatever is true of
London in the way of poverty and degradation, is true of all England_.
While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London is England.
The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno likewise mark the
United Kingdom an inferno. The argument that the decentralisation of
London would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false. If the
6,000,000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities each
with a population of 60,000, misery would be decentralised but not
diminished. The sum of it would remain as large.
In this instance, Mr. B. S. Rowntree, by an exhaustive analysis, has
proved for the country town what Mr. Charles Booth has proved for the
metropolis, that fully one-fourth of the dwellers are condemned to a
poverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that fully one-fourth of the dwellers do not have enough to eat, are inadequately
clothed, sheltered, and warmed in a rigorous climate, and are doomed to a
moral degeneracy which puts them lower than the savage in cleanliness and
decency.
After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert
Blatchford asked him what he wanted. "The old man leaned upon his spade
and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies. 'What
is it that I'm wantun?' he said; then in a deep plaintive tone he
continued, more to himself than to me, 'All our brave bhoys and dear
gurrls is away an' over the says, an' the agent has taken the pig off me,
an' the wet has spiled the praties, an' I'm an owld man, _an' I want the
Day av Judgment_.'"
The Day of Judgment! More than he want it. From all the land rises the
hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward,
from asylum and workhouse--the cry of the people who have not enough to
eat. Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind,
the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners and
paupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have not
enough to eat. And this, in face of the fact that five men can produce
bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250
people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000.
It would seem
that 40,000,000 people are keeping a big house, and that they are keeping
it badly. The income is all right, but there is something criminally
wrong with the management. And who dares to say that it is not
criminally mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread
for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?
CHAPTER XXVI--DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer. They are
made dull and sodden by it. Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and they
lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs by
right of race. It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they are
accustomed to it from their earliest infancy. Children are begotten in
drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, born
to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.
The public-house is ubiquitous. It flourishes on every corner and
between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men.
Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and
mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders,
listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the
contagion of it, familiarising themselves with licentiousness and
debauchery.
Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the
bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not
frown upon is the public-house. No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor
to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.
I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, "I never drink spirits when
in a public-'ouse." She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was
laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability and
discretion. Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it
was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into a
public-house to drink it.
Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the
men and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their very
unfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering from
innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their
constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly
stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers after
excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.
Unhealthy
working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannot
be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is
housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and
aspirations.
As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears. Not only do men and
women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering
from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness
and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and women who have no
home-life flee to the bright and clattering public-house in a vain
attempt to express their gregariousness. And when a family is housed in
one small room, home-life is impossible.
A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light one
important cause of drunkenness. Here the family arises in the morning,
dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and
in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the wife
and mother cooks the breakfast. And in the same room, heavy and
sickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout the
night, that breakfast is eaten. The father goes to work, the elder
children go to school or into the street, and the mother remains with her
crawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework--still in the same
room. Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds
and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen to
dry.
Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the family
goes to its virtuous couch. That is to say, as many as possible pile
into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus turns in on the
floor. And this is the round of their existence, month after month, year
after year, for they never get a vacation save when they are evicted.
When a child dies, and some are always bound to die, since fifty-five per
cent. of the East End children die before they are five years old, the
body is laid out in the same room. And if they are very poor, it is kept
for some time until they can bury it. During the day it lies on the bed;
during the night, when the living take the bed, the dead occupies the
table, from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into the
bed, they eat their breakfast. Sometimes the body is placed on the shelf
which serves as a pantry for their food. Only a couple of weeks ago, an
East End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion, being unable to
bury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks.
Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the men
and women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be pitied, not
blamed. There are 300,000 people, in London, divided into families that
live in single rooms, while there are 900,000 who are illegally housed
according to the Public Health Act of 1891--a respectable
recruiting-ground for the drink traffic.
Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
existence, the well-founded fear of the future--potent factors in driving
people to drink. Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and in the public-house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained.
It is unhealthy.
Certainly it is, but everything else about their lives is unhealthy,
while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their lives can
bring. It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are finer and
better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes them more
beastly than ever. For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a race
between miseries that ends with death.
It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people.
The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn,
the effect of other and prior miseries. The temperance advocates may
preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that
cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain.
Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-intentioned
efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to set
Olympus laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got
up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of
begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good. Granting
(what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn
after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence
and the social law that dooms one in three to a public-charity death,
demonstrate that this knowledge and yearning will be only so much of an
added curse to them. They will have so much more to forget than if they
had never known and yearned. Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life
of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me
but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautiful
and True and Good; that I might forget all I had learned from the open
books, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and the
lands I had seen. And if Destiny didn't grant it, I am pretty confident
that I should get drunk and forget it as often as possible.
These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions,
charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they
cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.
They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.
They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End
as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of
Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of
social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an
infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data
which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively
collected, they have achieved nothing.
As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes
has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful and
predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try
to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.
Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women
workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes
violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and
violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along? This
violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576
handlings for three
farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912
times for a wage
of ninepence. She is being robbed. Somebody is on her back, and a
yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.
They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the
mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have
done for the child in the day.
And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie. They do not
know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.
And the lie they preach is "thrift." An instant will demonstrate it. In
overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and
because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.
To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income--in other
words, to live on less. This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard
of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower
standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard. And a
small group of such