Part 13

Outside, the pressure grew worse; the more the factories flourished, the more hands were wanted; new houses were run up with all the speed and all the scamping of work that a jerry-builder could provide, but still the pressure grew. For the man his home brought no comfort; he was not a drinking man, but he began to sit in the public house and to spend his evenings talking; his children could not sit at home; they ran about the streets; the eldest girl, who was so pretty and had been so sweet, began to assume the loud talk and rowdy habits of the girls around her; on the unfortunate woman lay the chief burden of all. She toiled all day long to keep things sweet and clean; alas! what can be done when seven people have to sleep in a room with little more than a thousand cubic feet of air between them all? She saw her husband driven away to the public house, she saw her children losing their bright looks and their rosy cheeks: what could she do? Many of the women around her, giving up the struggle, went in and out of the public house all day. This woman did not. But she was no longer the neat, clean housewife amid her clean surroundings. The stamp of deterioration was upon her and upon the others.

Then the summer came, with a week of hot weather to begin with, and the foundation of the house asserted itself; the house, you see, was built upon the rubbish of the dust-cart. You do not believe it possible? I can show you whole streets in the suburbs which I have myself seen built upon the rubbish of the dust-heap. It contains, among other things useful and beneficial to the occupants, quantities of cabbage stumps and other bits of vegetable matter. So when the hot weather came the cabbage stumps behaved accordingly; the foul air from the foundations crept through the floors and crawled up the stairs and poured under the doors.

First it was sore throat, then it was something else, and from house to house it was spread, and the doctor came and went, and in the broad bed of the little room lay four children sick at once; their soft, white skins were hard and dry and red; their brains wandered; the mother, with haggard face, bent over them.

It is all over now; three of the children lie in the new cemetery; the man has got a house at last; he will not get back his children, nor will the two who are left to him ever be again what they once were. This is one story out of the thousands which may be told of the people who live in the crowded quarters.

Another cause of overcrowding springs from the bad building of the workmen’s houses. It is not only the foundation that is rotten: the house itself is built of bad brick laid in single courses, the woodwork is unseasoned and shrinks, zinc is used instead of lead, the stairs are of matchboard—only the cheapest and worst materials are used. There are laws, there always have been laws, against bad building; there are inspectors, yet the bad building continues. A man who had been an apprentice in the building trade told me how this surprising result of our laws and our inspectors used to be possible twenty-five years ago. “It is this way,” he said; “I was a boy when these houses were built. For a house like this it was £15 to the inspector; for one of the smaller houses it was £10.” We must not believe it possible for such a thing to happen now; one’s faith in human nature would suffer too severe a blow, but when one looks around in certain quarters that little transaction between the honest builder and the faithful inspector recurs to my unwilling memory.

In course of time authority interposes. The houses are condemned. Out go the people, with their sticks, into the street; the houses are boarded up, the boys throw stones at the windows; the place is deserted. But where are the people to go?

There is a riverside parish entirely inhabited by the lowest kind of working-people, chiefly dock laborers and casuals and factory girls. There are literally no inhabitants of a higher class, except the clergy and a few ladies who live and work among the people. There was until recently a population of eight thousand in this parish. But street after street has been condemned; the houses, boarded up, their windows broken by the boys, stand miserably waiting to be pulled down; the parish has lost three thousand of its population. Where have they gone? Nobody knows; but they must go somewhere, and they have certainly gone where the rents are higher and the crowding worse.

Or the London County Council, becoming aware of the insanitary condition of a whole area, condemns it all, _en bloc_, takes it over, pulls down the miserable tenements and erects new buildings in their place. Nothing could be better; everybody applauds this vigorous action. Yet what happens? I will show you from a single example.

There is an area of fifteen acres in Bethnal Green, one of the worst and most overcrowded parts of London. It contains twenty streets, all small; there were 730 houses, and there were 5719 people. About a third of this army lived in tenements of one room each; nearly a half lived in tenements of two rooms. This area has been entirely cleared away; the London County Council turned out the people, and built upon the site a small town whose streets are fifty feet wide, whose houses are five stories high; water and gas are laid on, workshops are provided, there are only thirty one-room tenements, there are only five hundred of two rooms, and so on; the rent of the two-room tenements is six shillings a week; the center of the area is occupied by a circular terraced garden. Nothing could be better. Moreover, to crown all, the cost of the whole will be repaid to the ratepayers by means of a sinking fund spread over sixty years.

BUT—what became of the five thousand while these fine palaces were being built? Did their condition improve? Or did it become worse during the period of construction? They were turned out; they had to go somewhere; they imposed themselves upon districts already overcrowded, their habits most certainly grew more careless and more draggled, their condition most certainly grew worse. How many of the five thousand will come back to the old quarters and enter upon the civilized life offered to them? I know not; but the experience is that the former occupants do not return.

London in all directions is now thickly planted with the huge, ugly erections called model lodging-houses, workmen’s residences, and barracks. South London, across the river, is especially rich in these erections. Drury Lane, the historic Drury Lane, once the home of Nell Gwynne, the site of the National Theatre, accommodates a vast number of people in its barracks; it is favored also with two playgrounds for the children; both are disused burial grounds—one of them is the burial ground in “Bleak House.”

Opinions vary as to the success of these buildings. Their advantages at first sight appear overwhelming. Step out of a Drury Lane block into one of the courts beside it and a dozen advantages will immediately be perceived by all your senses at once. It is a great thing to be clean if you like cleanliness; to have a sanitary house if you like fresh air; to have conveniences for washing if, unlike Dr. Johnson, you prefer your linen to be clean. But there are certain losses about the block building. I do not say that they are greater than the gains. It has always been the instinctive desire of the Englishman to have his own home, to himself, separate. It is a survival of the early Anglo-Saxon custom when each family formed a settlement to itself. The working-man would like to have his cottage and his bit of garden, and to enjoy his own individuality apart from the rest of the world. In the block he loses this distinction; his family is one of fifty, of a hundred; his children are part of a flock, there is no more distinction among them than in a flock of sheep. There are great dangers attending the loss of the individual; it tends to destroy ambition, to weaken the power of free thought, to injure the responsibility of self-government. This loss is a very great danger among a people whose whole history illustrates the value of a sturdy assertion of self, of personal independence, of responsibility, and of a continual readiness to revolt against any encroachments of authority. For these reasons many regard the barrack or block system with suspicion and dislike.

Other reasons there are which make these flats unpopular, even though they continue to be in great request. They are defects which might be managed by the exercise of a little organization. But it has not yet occurred to the managing bodies of these barracks that the tenants who are intrusted with the votes for the government of the country might also very well be intrusted with the government of their own dwellings. Thus it is complained that a whole staircase is sometimes terrorized by two or three roughs, that there are quarrels and drunken brawls on the stairs at night, that there are continual disputes concerning the day for using the laundry, that the stairs are not kept clean, that the children see and hear and learn things which they should not—but then the children of the streets learn things which they should not; I fear we cannot keep the children from the tree of knowledge. The presence of drunken rowdies, the objection of many to take their share in cleaning the stairs, and other scandals of the kind ought all to be remedied or, at least, attacked by the formation of committees of order composed of the tenants themselves. I have long been of opinion that the real remedy of most of the abuses of our streets and slums would be the organization of the respectable inhabitants into committees of order and the banishment of the police. Such committees in our barrack dwellings should have power of ejectment against evil-doers; they should be their own police.

It is characteristic of the Salvation Army that they sometimes attack a rowdy staircase in their own way by sending two girl lieutenants to take a flat and live there, setting an example of cleanly and orderly life, and bringing round the women to a better mind. I have heard that their success in this work has been marked, and I am prepared to believe it. At the same time, the committee would be a permanent police, while the appearance of the girls can only be occasional and only temporary.

Another result of the barrack life—one which the working-man himself does not perceive—is that the children grow up slow of sight, not short-sighted, but slow of sight. They have nothing to exercise their eyes upon; in the country there are a thousand things; children are always looking about them for the birds, the creatures, the flowers, the berries; in the barracks their playground is an asphalted pavement, with the high houses for boundary walls; there is nothing to look at. When they are taken out for a day in the country, once or twice a year, they see in a bank of flowers only a breadth of color, such as a house-painter might spread; it takes time for them to discern the flowers and the grasses which produce the pleasing effect; one bird is to them the same as another; they are not quick enough to catch the rapid flight of the swallow. One tree is the same as another; they do not discern differences of shape or color in the leaf or in the bough. A few summer days in the country cannot give to that child the training of sight which the country-bred child receives every time it goes out into the open.

Here, then, are the facts of the case: overcrowding, with results most dangerous to the community, and the principal causes—increase of population, rapid development of industries, the necessity of being near the work, the condemnation of insanitary streets and areas. There remain the remedies proposed. We have seen that the erection of blocks, while it provides decent accommodation for a vast number of working-men, turns out a large number into the streets to find what accommodation they can. Obviously, therefore, the further extension of this method would result in far worse overcrowding. The housing in big barracks has also, it has been seen, its own dangers.

We come, next, to the proposal which seems to meet with the greatest amount of favor. It is the creation and erection of industrial villages within easy reach of town—say not more than twelve miles out. The railways would have to sell cheap workmen’s tickets; the villages should consist of three- or four-roomed cottages, each with a scullery and a garden. There should be a common garden as well; there should be no sale of drink in any of the villages; there should be in each a coöperative store; the rent of a cottage ought not to exceed three shillings a week.

This is the proposal advanced by General Booth of the Salvation Army (“Darkest England,” p. 210).

It is announced (“Times,” February 20, 1900) that the London County Council is about to ask of Parliament an increase of its powers, so that it may buy up land beyond its own limits, with a view of erecting some such industrial villages. We must therefore wait to see the result of this new experiment. We may be quite certain that it will prove to bring with it dangers and evils at present unsuspected, but I think that the gains will be greater than the losses. The country village will be as much better than the barrack as the barrack is better than the narrow and stinking court.

It is hoped that when the advantages of living in the country are understood the men will not mind living at a distance from their work. At the same time, the experiment must be on a very large scale, and if it fails will prove very costly. Objections are taken to the municipality acting as builder and landlord; it is urged that private companies might take up the question; but the experiment made by a private company, if it fails, costs the whole capital advanced by private persons, whereas if the experiment of the County Council fails it will be only the loss of the ratepayers’ money. Whatever is done must be done quickly; mischiefs incalculable are inflicted upon the children by the present overcrowding. To neglect it is to make the evils far worse. The remedy requires a great mind and a clear vision and unlimited powers. As yet little practical attention has been paid to the cry of the houseless and the rack-rented, and to the sobs of the children poisoned physically by the air, corrupt and vitiated, which they have to breathe; poisoned morally by evil companionship, starved and cabined mentally for want of light and air and sunshine, for want of the breeze among the trees and the grass of the meadows and the flowers of the field and the creatures of the air and of the hedge.

IX

THE SUBMERGED

IX

THE SUBMERGED

THE word “submerged” likes me not. I have endeavored to find or to invent another and a better word. So far without success. The word must define the class. It is the unhappy company of those who have fallen in the world. There are many levels from which one may fall; perhaps there are many depths into which one may fall; certainly I have never heard of any depth beyond which there was not another lower and deeper still. The submerged person, therefore, may have been a gentleman and a scholar, an officer, a prodigal; or he may have been a tradesman, or a working-man, or anything you please; the one essential is that he must have stepped out of his own class and fallen down below. He is a shipwrecked mariner on the voyage of life, he is a pilgrim who has wandered into the dark and malarious valleys beside the way. We have read in the annals of luckless voyages how those who escaped with their lives wandered along the seashore, living by the shell-fish they could pick up, moving on when there were no more mussels, huddled together at night in the shelter of a rock for warmth. We know and are familiar with their tales of misery. As these shipwrecked mariners on the cold and inhospitable coast, so are the unfortunates whom we call submerged; in a like misery of cold and starvation do they drag on a wretched existence.

They have no quarter or district of their own; we come upon them everywhere. In the wealthy quarters there are courts and alleys, lanes and covered ways, where they find shelter at night; they slouch along aimlessly, with vacant faces, in the most fashionable streets; they stand gazing with eyes which have no longer any interest or expression upon a shop-window whose contents would provide a dozen of them with a handsome income for life; in the warm summer evenings you may see them taking up their quarters for the night on the seats outside St. James’s Park; if you walk along the Thames embankment you will see them sitting and lying in corners sheltered from the wind; they seek out the dry arches if they can find any, happy in the chance of finding them; they sit on door-steps and sleep there until the policeman moves them on; wherever a night watchman, placed on guard over an open excavation, hangs up his red lamp and lights his fire in the workman’s grate you will find one or two of the submerged crouching beside the red coals; the watchmen willingly allow them their share of warmth and light. If you are walking in the streets late at night you will presently pass one of them creeping along looking about for a crust or a lump of bread. Outside the Board-schools, especially, these windfalls are to be found, thrown away by the children; it is a sign that food is cheap and work is abundant when one sees lumps of bread thrown into the gutter. These are the gifts of fortune to the submerged; the day has brought no jobs and no pence, not even the penny for a bare shelter with the Salvation Army; fate, relentless, has refused to hands willing to work—perhaps unwilling, for the submerged are sometimes incapable of work; like their betters, they have nerves. But in the night under the gas-lamps there are the gifts of the great goddess, Luck—the children’s lumps of bread lying white in the lamplight on kerb or door-step.

Or, again, if you are in the streets early in the morning, at the hour when the cheap restaurants set out upon the pavement their zinc boxes full of the refuse and unspeakable stuff of yesterday, you will find the person submerged busy among this terrible heap; he finds lumps of food, broken crusts, bones not stripped clean; he turns over the contents with eager hands; he carries off, at last, sufficient for a substantial meal.

One would hardly expect to find history occupying herself with a class so little worthy of her dignity. Yet have I found some account of the submerged in the eighteenth century. They did not prowl about the streets at night nor did they search the dust-box in the morning, because there were no crusts of costly wheaten bread thrown away, and there were no dust-boxes. But they had their customs. And the following seems to have been the chief resource of the class.

There were no police walking about the streets day and night; there were night watchmen, who went home about five in the morning; then for an hour, before the workmen turned out on their way to the shops, the streets were quite deserted and quiet. At that hour the submerged had their chance; they were the early vultures that hovered over the City before the dawn; they went out on the prowl, carrying lanterns in the winter; they searched the streets; where the market carts had passed there were droppings of vegetables and fruit, there were bones thrown out into the streets, there were things dropped; drunken men were lying on door-steps, stretched out on the pavement between the posts, or propped up against the walls; the night watchmen paid no attention to these common objects of the night, the helplessly drunk; they cleared out their pockets of money no doubt, otherwise they left them. But the prowlers, after another investigation of the pockets, carried off everything portable—hat, wig, neck-tie, ruffles, boots, coat, everything. The cold air quickened the recovery of the patient; when he came to his senses and sat up he was ready to repent, not in sackcloth, but in shirtsleeves. Later on in the day the prowlers inveigled children into back courts, stripped them of their fine frocks, cut off their long curls, and so let them go. Or they lay in wait for a drunken man and led him carefully to some quiet and secluded spot, where he could be stripped of all. But the submerged of George III were a ruder and a rougher folk than those of Queen Victoria.

The submerged do not, as a rule, give trouble to the police, nor are they a terror to the householder; they do not rob, they do not brawl, they do not get up riots, they do not “demonstrate,” they endure in quiet. Their misery might make them dangerous if they were to unite; but they cannot unite, they have no leader, they have no prophet; they want nothing except food and warmth, they accuse nobody, they are not revolutionaries; they are quite aware—those of them who have any power of thought left—that no change in the social order could possibly benefit them. They live simply, each man clothed with his own misery as with a gaberdine. And they know perfectly well that their present wretchedness is due to themselves and their own follies and their own vices. They have lost whatever spirit of enterprise they may once have possessed; in many cases long habits of drink have destroyed their power of will and energy.

Many causes have made them what they are. As many men, so many causes. They cannot be reduced to a class; they come from every social station—many of them are highly educated men, born of gentle-folk, some of county families, some of the professional classes. Their tale of woe, if you ask it, is always the lamentation of the luckless; it should be the lamentation of a sinner. Incompetence, especially that kind of incompetence which belongs to an indolent habit of mind and body; the loss of one situation after another, the throwing away of one chance after the other, the shrinking from work either bodily or mental, which grows upon a man until for very nervousness he is unable to do any work; the worn-out patience of friends and relations, drink—always drink; dismissal which involves the loss of character, the habit begun in boyhood of choosing always the easier way; sickness, which too commonly drives a man out of work and sends him on to the streets in search of casual jobs; crime and the gaol—all these causes work in the same direction; they reduce the unfortunate victim to the condition of hopelessness and helplessness which is the note of the submerged.