Part 19
Considering that Sunday afternoon is especially the time of rest, we must not forget one form of recreation peculiar to that time. It takes the form of an address given in some chapel. There is generally a short service, with prayer and the singing of a hymn; the people who attend and crowd the chapel seem to like this addition to the address which follows. It is intended to be of a kind likely to interest and to instruct; the first duty of the lecturer is to choose a subject which does both; I have myself on more than one occasion attempted to address working-men on the Sunday afternoon; I have found them easy to interest and quick to take up points. As at Toynbee Hall, one must not talk “down” to them. Indeed, the men who come to such lectures are the most intelligent and the best educated of the whole population. It is pleasant and restful for them; the chapel is warm; the singing is not disagreeable, even though in their own homes psalmody is not commonly practised; to be called away on a dark and gloomy November afternoon and led gently into another world, with new scenery and other conditions, is that complete change which is the best rest of all. The lecturer need not be afraid of tiring his audience; he may go on as long as he pleases; when he leaves off they will crowd round him and beg him to come again.
Many other omissions I have made purposely. There are the drinking and the gambling clubs, the betting clubs, haunts, and dens, if one choose to consult the police and to hunt them up, which would enable one to finish this chapter with a lurid picture. Where there are so many men and women there will always be found a percentage of the bad, the worse, and the worst. It is the hopeful point about East London that wherever the better things are offered they are accepted by the better sort; not by a few here and a few there, but by thousands who are worthy of the better things.
XII
THE HELPING HAND
XII
THE HELPING HAND
THE work that lies before us in every city waiting for the Helping Hand—the human wreckage, bankruptcy, age, sickness, poverty, which must always be forming anew however we may meet it and find alleviation—will certainly not decrease as the years roll on. The point for us to consider here is not the volume and variety of the forces which cause this wreckage, but the attempts which are now being made to find this alleviation and, if possible, a remedy.
The Helping Hand has a history, and it is very simple:
1. First of all it threw a penny to the beggar because he was a beggar.
2. Secondly, it offered free meals and free quarters in every monastic house to every beggar because he was a beggar.
3. It continued to give the penny and the free meals and the lodging to the beggar because he was a beggar, but it ordered the beggar to go back to work.
4. It arrested, imprisoned, branded, and flogged the beggar because he was a beggar. It continued also to give him a penny for the same reason.
5. It founded almshouses for some of the aged poor; those who could not get in continued to receive their penny and their flogging because they were beggars.
6. It founded workhouses, Bridewell, and houses of correction for the beggar. And it continued to give that penny to the beggar because he was a beggar.
7. It built houses for the reception of the poor who could no longer work, infirmaries for the sick, orphanages and homes for poor children, casual wards for the homeless. It made begging an offense in the eyes of the law. Yet it continued to give the beggar a penny because he was a beggar.
8. It discovered that a multitude of rogues and people who will not work trade upon the charity and the pity of people, sending around letters asking for help. It therefore established an association, with branches everywhere, to expose the fraudulent. Yet it continued to give the beggar a penny because he was a beggar.
In other words, the Helping Hand has never been able to refrain from giving that penny which encourages the “masterless” man, and the man who will not work, and the fraudulent, and the writer of the begging letter. Could the Helping Hand be persuaded to refuse that penny for a single fortnight, to turn a deaf ear resolutely to the starving family on the road, to the starving children on the pavement, to the starving woman who stands silent, mournful, appealing with mute looks of misery, only for a single fortnight, the existence of the beggar would come to a sudden end. This the Helping Hand can never be persuaded to do. Therefore we have with us not only the real misery caused by fate, by fortune, by the natural consequences of folly and weakness and crime, but also the pretended misery of those who live upon the pity of the world and trade on that strange self-indulgence which gives the dole to remove an unpleasant object out of sight and to awaken the glow which follows with the sense of charity.
I leave aside in this place the casual dole—the penny to the beggar because he is a beggar; it is illustrated for all time by the partition of the cloak between St. Martin and the beggar. The saint, then a gallant cavalryman, did not stop—or stoop—to inquire into the merits of the case; here was a beggar. Was he really starving? could he work? were his sufferings pretended? was he really cold? did he deserve any help at all? Was he, on the contrary, well fed and nourished, money in purse, food in wallet, a sufficiency of clothes on his back, a fire and a pot over it at home, with a well-fed family and a wife on the same “lay” at the other gate of the city? Let us leave the Bishop of Ligugé as a type for all the centuries of the unthinking charity which gives the penny to the beggar because he is a beggar.
Let us turn to other and later developments. The Helping Hand has founded and endowed and now maintains by voluntary contributions hospitals of every kind for the sick; by rates and taxes, workhouses for the poor, schools for the children. Yet there has passed—there is now passing—over the work of charity a great and most remarkable revolution; it is a revolution characteristic of a time in which every theory of social life, social conditions, and social responsibilities has been completely changed. The old duties remain still; schools and hospitals have been multiplied; if almshouses have not increased, the workhouse system has become better organized. But we have become aware of other duties, of new responsibilities. It is now understood that it is not enough to put the children to school from one to fourteen; they must be looked after when they leave school; it is not enough to provide for the diseases of the body; we must make provision for the diseases, and the cause of the diseases, of the mind. The Helping Hand is at work in these days for the arrest of degeneracy; for the opening up of art, literature, music, science, culture of all kinds, to the better sort among the working-classes; for the wider extension of the area and the depth of culture; for the creation of that kind of public opinion which, more than anything else, makes for public order and the maintenance of law; for the care and safeguarding of young people at the perilous time of emancipation from school; for the rescue of those who can be rescued; for the cleansing of the slums; for the restoration to the world of those who, as we have seen, have dropped out; and for the prevention of pauperizing by ill-considered schemes of ill-informed benevolence.
These are general terms. In order to carry out its work in detail, the Helping Hand looks after the children in their homes, while the Board-school looks after their teaching; it provides cases for the hospital, and aids the parish authorities during sickness in the home; it introduces the social side into the lives of the better sort; it devises attractions for the young people who stand at the parting of the ways, where temptation is strong and the primrose path is bright with flowers; it teaches the lads a trade, and the girls a love for the quiet life; it wages war with the public house and the street; it endeavors to bring back the lowest strata to a sense of religion which they have come to think the peculiar and rather unaccountable property of “class”; it brings friendliness among folk who have only known the order of the policeman.
These are some of the functions which to-day are exercised by the Helping Hand. In East London we can see the hand at work with greater energy, wiser supervision, and in directions more varied than in any other city of Great Britain. I do not venture, for the obvious reason of ignorance, upon comparison with American cities, but I should think that we have in East London, with its vast population of working-people of all kinds, ranging from the highly-paid foreman to the casual hand, the lad of the street, the wastrel, and the wreck, a mass of humanity which is not paralleled anywhere, and a corresponding amount of philanthropic endeavor which it would be impossible to equal elsewhere.
In this immense multitude there are many slums of the worst kind; but they are now much fewer, and they are much less offensive, than they were; the most terrible of the plague spots seem to have been improved away; to find the real old slum, the foul, indescribable human pigsty, one must no longer look for it in East London. That is to say, there are, I dare say, a few of the old slums left, but the places—there were then many of them—into which one peered, shuddering, twenty years ago, have now vanished. The police, the clergy, the ladies who go about the parish, can still take the visitor into strange courts and noisome tenements, but he who remembers the former state of things feels that light and air and a certain amount of public opinion, with some measure of cleanliness, have been brought to the old-fashioned slum by the modern Helping Hand.
If the American visitor to London desires to see a real old-fashioned slum—one where all the surroundings, physical and moral, are, to use the mild word of the day, absolutely “insanitary”—I would recommend him not to try East London, where he would have to search long for what he wants, but to pay a visit to Guy’s Hospital on the south side of the Thames and to seek the guidance of one of the students through the courts of crime and grime which still lie pretty thickly round that fortress of the army of health.
If you read novels of the day describing things brutal beyond belief, it will be well to suspect that the situations are a little mixed. Art must exaggerate; art must select; art must group. In this way it is quite possible that a picture tendered as of to-day may really belong to twenty years ago. There is still plenty of misery left in East London—we need, in fact, no exaggeration; I could fill these pages with lamentable histories; the people are still very much “down below”; some of them are a long way down; they are not only suffering for the sins of their fathers, they are busily piling up by their own sins sufferings for their children. Terrible has been their own inheritance; more terrible still will be the inheritance of the children.
Among these people, being such as they are, a whole army is at work continually. Let me now, in such short space as is at my command, consider in detail some of the more important methods by which this army is at work. It is not yet an army completely drilled and subdivided and commanded; some of their work overlaps, or hinders, other work. Perhaps it is not to be desired that this army should be completely drilled and organized. We do not ask for the crystallized methods of French education, or the iron drill of the Prussian sergeant. Let us leave some room for individual choice. Given certain principles of action, the element of personal freedom in carrying out these principles becomes of vital importance.
I have spoken of the revolution in opinion as to the responsibilities of the better educated and the wealthier toward those below them. Perhaps the situation may be illustrated by considering the change that has passed over us in our conception of what civilization should mean. The view of the eighteenth century was that civilization, culture, the pursuit of art, reading, learning of all kinds, science, the power, as well as the right, of government belonged essentially to the upper classes. When the good people of Spalding, for instance, in the year 1701, founded a literary society they called it the “Spalding Gentlemen’s Society”—only gentlemen, you see, could be expected to take any interest in things that belong to civilization. It was further considered that it was impossible to expect civilizing influences to bear upon the working-classes. They were kept in order by discipline, by the prison, and by the lash. To open the doors of education, to give them access to the tree of knowledge, would be a most dangerous, a most fatal, mistake. Even at the present day one hears, at times, the belated cry that the working-classes need no more than the barest elements of learning.
In certain circles the distinction between the cultured class and those outside was marked by artificial notes of manner and of speech. The limits were intolerably narrow; outside these circles there was no leadership, no statesmanship, possible.
But apart from the pretensions of the eighteenth-century aristocracy it was considered by the middle class and the professional class alike dangerous to interfere with Providence; the working-class were born to do service; let them learn to do it. Religion, of course, they could have if they wanted it; the church was there, the doors were open every Sunday, anybody might go in; the clergyman would visit the sick, if he were invited; the children were baptized in the church; some of the people were married in the church; all the people were buried in the churchyard, with the service of the church by law established. That was all; there were very few schools; education, even if the parents wished it, was not to be had, and the folk were left altogether to their own devices. They had been forced out of the City to make room for warehouses and offices; they lived in their own quarters, especially along the riverside and in Whitechapel, and they were left quite alone to their own devices.
There were no police; the hand of the law among these crowded streets was weak; they did what they pleased. There is a story belonging to the year 1790, or thereabouts, of a man living in Wapping, just outside the Tower of London, which was always garrisoned with troops. This man gave offense to his neighbors by complying with some obnoxious law. He heard that they were going to attack him, meaning that they were going to murder him. The man had the bulldog courage of his time; he sent away his wife and children; he got a friend as brave as himself to join him; he closed his lower shutters and barricaded his door; he laid in ammunition, and he brought in and loaded two guns, one for himself and one for his friend.
At nightfall the attacking party arrived; they were armed with guns and stones. They began with a volley of the latter; the besieged paid no attention; they then fired at the windows; the besieged received their fire, and while they were loading again let fly among them, and killed or wounded two or three. They retired in confusion, but returned in larger numbers and with greater fury. All night long the unequal combat raged. When their ammunition was spent the two men dropped out of a back window into a timber yard, where they hid in a saw-pit. Observe that this battle lasted all the night, close to the Tower, and that no soldiers were sent out to stop it till the morning, when the mischief was done and the house was sacked. And no one was arrested, no one was punished, save the men who were shot. Can any story more clearly indicate the abandonment of the people to their own devices?
Reading these things, remembering how brutal, how ignorant, how degraded were whole masses of our people at that time, I am amazed that we came out of that long struggle of 1792–1815 without some awful outburst, some Jacquerie, like that of the Parisian mob, which might have drenched our land, as it did that of France, with blood and murder. And I think that when the social history of the nineteenth century, which we who have lived in it cannot grasp, save in parts, comes to be really and impartially considered, the chief feature, the redeeming point, will be that it began to recognize in practice the elementary truths that we are all responsible for each other, that each is his brother’s keeper, that no class can separate itself from the rest, and that no civilization is durable or safe unless it includes the whole people.
What, then, have we done? What have we attempted? What are our present aims? It is not my purpose either to defend or to attack. I have only to state what is being done. Nothing can be attempted in this direction that is not open to abuses of one kind or another. The relief of distress encourages the idle; help of every kind is seized upon by the fraud and the impostor; if we feed and clothe the children their parents have more money for drink; the most we can do is to choose the line that seems open to the fewest objections and to exercise the most unremitting vigilance, care, and caution. The worst feature in the whole chapter of modern charity is that love and forbearance the most unwearied, devotion the most unselfish, seem too often only to pauperize the people, to induce more impudent frauds. But not always; we must take the line of the greatest, not the least, resistance,—that which is hardest for the worker, and certainly most unpopular with the subjects,—and we must judge of results from what follows. All modern philanthropic effort must, in order to be successful, be based upon the people understanding quite clearly that such effort cannot, by any ingenuity or any lies and legends, be turned to the encouragement of those who will not work.
I begin with the parish. There is at the present moment no more active clergy in the world than our own; there is no organization more complete than that of a well-worked London parish. The young men who now take Holy Orders know, at the outset, that they must lead lives of perpetual activity. There are the services of the parish church, with outlying mission churches; there are Sunday-schools, there are clubs, there are mothers’ meetings, there are amusements for the people—concerts and entertainments for the winter; there is the supervision of the visiting ladies who go about the parish and learn the history of all the tenants in all the courts. There is the choir to be looked after, there are the sick to be cared for, there are always people in distress and in need of help—people for whom the vestry officers and workhouse officers can do nothing; the despairing young clergyman very soon finds out that the more you give to people who want help, the more people there are who clamor for help; he has to learn, you see, the great lesson that in certain social levels, where not to work should mean not to eat, no one will do a stroke of work if he can avoid it. Some of the clergy never do learn this lesson; they go on, all their lives, giving, doling, distributing, and pauperizing.
The organization of a London parish on the modern line is amazing in the extent of the aims and the variety of the work done. I have before me the annual report of a parish. From this document, which is like most of the other parochial annuals, it would seem the resolved endeavor of the clergy to make every kind of helpful and civilized work spring from the church and rest upon the church. In this report there are notices of seventy-five associations of various kinds; among them are gilds and fraternities, schools and classes; there are institutions purely religious and purely secular; with the Bible classes and the gilds we find the penny bank, the sharing club, the sale of clothes, the library, the maternity society, the mothers’ meetings, the cookery class, and the blanket society. All these associations are conducted by the vicar and his four curates, assisted by a voluntary staff of about twenty ladies. It is evident that without unpaid and voluntary assistance the work could not be even attempted. The remarkable point—the “note” of the time—is that this voluntary assistance is like the widow’s cruse—it never fails.
If, on the other hand, it is asked how far the people respond to the assumption that everything is done by the church, it is necessary to reply that the church, as a rule, remains comparatively empty. We have seen elsewhere that the percentage of attendance at the Sunday services of the parish or the district church was, fourteen years ago, a little over three. Occasionally, however, when the vicar is a man of exceptional character, one who succeeds in winning the respect and the affection of the people so that they will follow him even into his church, the services are well attended, and in the evening crowded. There is, for example, a church in a district—a very poor and humble district near Shoreditch: the church was built through the exertions of the present vicar, who has succeeded in making the people attend. The history of the man partly explains the phenomenon. Fifteen years ago, when he went there, the place, consisting of a dozen miserable streets, was one of the vilest kind. Violence, robbery, drunkenness, murder, life in the most uncleanly forms imaginable prevailed in this slice of a large, crowded parish, which this man cut off to make a parish by itself. He sat down in the midst of them all, and he began. Observe that the first lesson he had to teach them was that he was not afraid of them; he was neither afraid of their threats nor of their proffered violence nor of their tongues; he went about among the women—the owners of those tongues—and opened up conversation with them; he spoke them friendly; they gave him the retort unfriendly; he replied readily and boldly, carrying the laugh against his adversaries; the common bludgeon of Billingsgate he met with the gentle rapier of “chaff,” insomuch that the women were first infuriated, then silenced, and then reduced to friendliness, and, in this more desirable frame of mind, so remain. He put up a temporary church; beside the church he started schools; he opened a club for lads and the younger men; he provided his club with things that attracted them—rough games and gymnastics; more than this, he gave them boxing-gloves and taught them how to fight according to the strict rules of the prize-ring. You think that this is not the ideal amusement for a clergyman—wait a bit. The rules of the prize-ring are rigid rules; they demand a good deal of study; they make boxing a duello conducted according to rules of honor and courtesy. Now, when a lad has learned to handle the gloves according to the rules he becomes a stickler for them. Like Mrs. Battle over a game of whist, he exacts the rigor of the game. As for the old methods—the stones in the knotted handkerchief, the club, the short iron rod, and the cowardly boot—he will have no more of them. Moreover, fifteen minutes with a stout adversary, two or three returns to earth, and a shake-hand at the end, knock the devil out of a lad—the devil of restlessness and of pugnacity—give him a standard of honor, and make the rough-and-tumble in the street no longer worthy of consideration.