Part 23

The familiarity with the sickness and death constantly present in the crowded and unwholesome districts, appears to re-act as another concurrent, cause in aggravation of the wretchedness and vice in which they are plunged. Seeing the apparent uncertainty of the morrow, the inhabitants really take no heed of it, and abandon themselves with the recklessness and avidity of common soldiers in a war to whatever gross enjoyment comes within their reach. All the districts I visited, where the rate of sickness and mortality was high, presented, as might be expected, a proportionate amount of severe cases of destitute orphanage and widowhood; and the same places were marked by excessive recklessness of the labouring population. In Dumfries, for example, it is estimated, that the cholera, swept away one-eleventh part of the population. Until recently, the town had not recovered the severe effects of the visitation, and the condition of the orphans was most deplorable. Amongst young artisans who were earning from 16_s._ to 18_s._ a-week, I was informed that there were very few who made any reserves against the casualties of sickness. I was led to ask the provost what number of bakers’ shops there were? “Twelve,” was his answer. And what number of whiskey-shops may the town possess? “Seventy-nine” was the reply. If we might rely on the inquiries made of working-men when Dr. Arnott and I went through the wynds of Edinburgh, their consumption of spirits bore almost the like proportion to the consumption of wholesome food. We observed to Captain Stuart, the superintendent of the police at Edinburgh, in our inspection of the wynds, that life appeared to be of little value, and was likely to be held cheap in such spots. He stated, in answer, that a short time ago a man had been executed for the murder of his wife in a fit of passion in the very room we had accidentally entered, and where we were led to make the observation. At a short distance from that spot, and amidst others of this class of habitation, were those which had been the scenes of the murders by Burke and Hare. Yet amidst these were the residences of working men engaged in regular industry. The indiscriminate mixture of workpeople and their children in the immediate vicinity, and often in the same rooms with persons whose character was denoted by the question and answer more than once exchanged, “When were you last washed?” “When I was last in prison,” was only one mark of the entire degradation to which they had been brought. The working-classes living in these districts were equally marked by the abandonment, of every civil or social regulation. Asking some children in one of the rooms of the wynds in which they swarmed in Glasgow what were their names, they hesitated to answer, when one of the inmates said, they called them ——, mentioning some nicknames. “The fact is,” observed Captain Miller, the superintendent of the police, “they really have no names. Within this range of buildings I have no doubt I should be able to find a thousand children who have no names whatever, or only nicknames, like dogs.” There were found amidst the occupants, labourers earning wages undoubtedly sufficient to have paid for comfortable tenements, men and women who were intelligent, and so far as could be ascertained, had received the ordinary education which should have given better tastes and led to better habits. My own observations have been confirmed by the statement of Mr. Sheriff Alison, of Glasgow, that in the great manufacturing towns of Scotland, “in the contest with whiskey, in their crowded population, education has been entirely overthrown.” The ministers, it will be seen, make similar reports from the rural districts. On the observation of other districts, and the comparison of the habits of the same workmen in town and country, it will be seen that I consider that the use of the whiskey and the prostration of the education and moral habits for which the Scottish labourers have been distinguished is, to a considerable extent, attributable to the surrounding physical circumstances, including the effects of the bad ventilation. The labourers presented to our notice in the condition described, in the crowded districts, were almost all Scotch. It is common to ascribe the extreme of misery and vice wholly to the Irish portion of the population of the towns in Scotland. A short inspection on the spot would correct this error. Mr. Baird, in his report on the sanitary condition of the poor of Glasgow, observes that “the bad name of the poor Irish had been too long attached to them.” Dr. Cowan, of Glasgow, stated that “From ample opportunities of observation, they appeared to him to exhibit much less of that squalid misery and addiction to the use of ardent spirits than the Scotch of the same grade.” Instances were indeed stated to us, where the Irish were preferred for employment from their superior steadiness and docility; and Mr. Stuart, the Factory Inspector for Scotland, states, that “instances are now occurring of a preference being given to them as workers in the flax factories on account of their regular habits, and that very significant hints have been given by extensive factory owners, that Irish workmen will be selected unless the natives of the place, and other persons employed by them, relinquish the prevailing habits of intemperance.” Dr. Scott Alison, in his report on Tranent, has described the population in receipt of high wages, but living under similar influences, as prone to passionate excitement, and as apt instruments for political discontents; their moral perceptions appeared to have been obliterated, and they might be said to be characterised by a “ferocious indocility which makes them prompt to wrong and violence, destroys their social nature, and transforms them into something little better than wild beasts.”

It is to be regretted that the coincidence of pestilence and moral disorder is not confined to one part of the island, nor to any one race of the population. The overcrowding and the removal of what may be termed the architectural barriers or protections of decency and propriety, and the causes of physical deterioration in connexion with the moral deterioration, are also fearfully manifest in the districts in England, which, at the time to which the evidence refers, were in a state of prosperity.

_Mr. Baker_, in his report on the condition of the population, after giving an instance of the contrast presented by the working people living in better dwellings, situated in better cleansed neighbourhoods (to which I shall advert when submitting the evidence in respect to preventive measures), describes the population living in houses—

“With broken panes in every window-frame, and filth and vermin in every nook. With the walls unwhitewashed for years, black with the smoke of foul chimneys, without water, with corded bed-stocks for beds, and sacking for bed-clothing, with floors unwashed from year to year, without out-offices, * * * * while without, there are streets, elevated a foot, sometimes two, above the level of the causeway, by the accumulation of years, and stagnant puddles here and there, with their fœtid exhalations, causeways broken and dangerous, ash-places choked up with filth, and excrementitious deposits on all sides as a consequence, undrained, unpaved, unventilated, uncared-for by any authority but the landlord, who weekly collects his miserable rents from his miserable tenants.

“Can we wonder that such places are the hot-beds of disease, or that it obtains, upon constitutions thus liberally predisposed to receive it, and forms the mortality which Leeds exhibits. Adult life, exposed to such miasmata, gives way. How much more then infant life, when ushered into, and attempted to be reared in, such obnoxious atmospheres. On the moral habits similar effects are produced. An inattention on the part of the local authorities to the state of the streets diminishes year by year the respectability of their occupiers. None dwell in such localities but to whom propinquity to employment is absolutely essential. Those who might advocate a better state of things, depart; and of those who remain, the one-half, by repeated exhibitions of indecency and vulgarity, and indeed by the mere fact of neighbourship, sink into the moral degradation which is natural to the other, and vicious habits and criminal propensities precede the death which these combinations prepare.”

No education as yet commonly given appears to have availed against such demoralizing circumstances as those described; but the cases of moral improvement of a population, by cleansing, draining, and the improvement of the internal and external conditions of the dwellings, of which instances will be presented, are more numerous and decided, though there still occur instances of persons in whom the love of ardent spirits has gained such entire possession as to have withstood all such means of retrieving them. The most experienced public officers acquainted with the condition of the inferior population of the towns would agree in giving the first place in efficiency and importance to the removal of what may be termed the physical barriers to improvement, and that as against such barriers moral agencies have but a remote chance of success.

A gentleman who has had considerable experience in the management of large numbers of the manufacturing population stated to me that in every case of personal and moral improvement the successful step was made by the removal of the party from the ill-conditioned neighbourhood in which he had been brought up. When a young workman married, he interfered to get him a better residence apart from the rest; and when this was done important alterations followed; but if he took up his abode in the old neighbourhood, the condition of the wife was soon brought down to the common level, and the marriage became a source of wretchedness.

Benevolent persons, viewing the bare aspect of some of the most afflicted neighbourhoods, have raised subscriptions for the purchase of furniture, bedding, and blankets, for the relief of the inmates, but by this pecuniary aid they have only added fuel to the flame; that is, they have enabled the inmates to purchase more ardent spirits. The force of the habit, which is aggravated by misdirected charity, is indicated in the following instances, of which one was mentioned to me by the _Rev. Whitwell Elwin_:—

“I was lately informed by a master tailor of Bath that one of his men, who had earned 3_l._ a-week at piece-work for years, had never within his knowledge possessed table, chairs, or bedding. I found the statement on examination to be strictly true. Some straw on which he slept, a square block of wood, a low three-legged stool, and an old tea-caddy, are the complete inventory of the articles of a room, the occupier of which, with only himself and his wife to maintain, was wealthier than many in the station of gentlemen. He had frequently excited lively compassion in benevolent individuals, who, supposing that he was struggling for very existence, furnished him with a variety of household goods, which were regularly pawned before a week was out, and afforded to the superficial observer fresh evidence of the extremity of his distress. The cause of all this is quickly told: the wife was to be seen going to and fro several times a-day with a cream-jug of gin, and to gratify this appetite, they had voluntarily reduced themselves to the condition of savages. I could add numerous instances of a similar kind. Indeed, were a stranger to go through the town, and judge only from the appearance of things, I am convinced that he would select his examples of greatest privation not from the really poor, but from men who were in the receipt of more than 30_s._ a-week. Charity, which when prompted by pure motives, always blesses him that gives, does not always bless him that takes. I am afraid that the indiscriminate adoption of dirt and rags as a test of poverty, especially in a town like Bath, where private charity prevails on an extensive scale, operates as a premium upon ill habits, and as a discouragement to cleanliness, and leads many to affect a vice which was not habitual to them.”

As an instance of that state of voluntary wretchedness which renders all such charity or assistance worse than useless, I may give an incident mentioned to me by _Sir Charles Shaw_, the chief commissioner of the new police force in Manchester:—

“A week since,” says Sir Charles, “I sent an inspector of police to examine a lodging-house. He came back to state that he had never witnessed such a sight. He found in one room, totally destitute of furniture, three men and two women lying on the bare floor, without straw, and with bricks only for their pillows. I observed, that I supposed they were drunk. ‘Yes,’ said the inspector; ‘they were, and I found the lodging-house keeper himself in a tolerable bed, and in another room I found bundles of fine fresh straw. I blamed the man for not giving that straw to his lodgers.’ He answered, ‘I keep that straw for the people who prefer purchasing it to gin: those above stairs preferred the gin.’ It is, I find, a common thing here for lodging-house keepers to have straw for sale.”

In the course of an examination which I took, under the Poor Law Commission of Inquiry, from the late _Mr. Walker_, the stipendiary magistrate of the Thames Police Office, he observed, in respect to cases of apparent destitution:—

“Casualties occurring among the indigent or profligate are at all times liable to be represented as cases resulting from the neglect of the proper authorities. Some time ago, in going round the parish of Whitechapel with the churchwardens, during service-time, we entered an old building in Rosemary-lane, for which there was then no owner, the stairs were so dark and ruinous that though it was mid-day we were obliged to have a candle, to enable us to go up to them: the first-floor was the receptacle of every description of filth. We entered one room, in which we found two half-naked dirty children; their mother lay in one corner on some dirty straw, covered only with a sack. There was no furniture nor other articles in the place, except a fagot of wood and a few broken plates, a basket of skate, and some sprats strewed on the floor. This woman was a fish-hawker, a business by which, in all probability, she gained enough to have made her extremely comfortable, but she preferred an alternation of great privation and profligate enjoyment. Had she accidentally died in this state, here would have been a scene of misery, and a case of excitement for the philanthropists! In our district there are other premises under similar circumstances, all of which are tenanted by persons of the very lowest grade; and it is surprising, considering the state in which they live, that unaccountable deaths, having the semblance of starvation, do not take place amongst them. From what I have observed of these places, I am fully convinced that if shambles were built on any spot, and all who choose were allowed to occupy them, they would soon be occupied by a race lower than any yet known. I have often said that if empty casks were placed along the streets of Whitechapel, in a few days each of them would have a tenant, and these tenants would keep up their kind, and prey upon the rest of the community. I am sure that if such facilities were offered, there is no conceivable degradation to which portions of the species might not be reduced. Allow these tub-men no education, and you would have so many savages living in the midst of civilization. Wherever there are empty houses which are not secured, they are soon tenanted by wretched objects, and these tenants continue so long as there is a harbour for them. Parish officers and others come to me to aid them in clearing such places. I tell the police and the parish that there is no use in their watching these places, that they must board them up if they would get rid of the occupants. If they will give the accommodation they will get the occupants. If you will have marshes and stagnant waters you will there have suitable animals, and the only way of getting rid of them is by draining the marshes.”

The _Reverend Whitwell Elwin_ observes upon this subject that—

“Those who think that labourers will work for themselves a reform in their habitations very much underrate the effects of habit. A person accustomed to fresh air, and all the comforts of civilized life, goes into a miserable room, dirty, bare, and, above all, sickening from the smell. Judging from his own sensations, he conceives that nothing but the most abject poverty could have produced this state of things, and he can imagine nothing necessary to a cure but a way for escape. A very simple experiment will correct these erroneous impressions. Let him remain a short time in the room, and the perception of closeness will so entirely vanish that he will almost fancy that the atmosphere has been purified since his entrance. There are few who are not familiar with this fact; and if such are the effects of an hour in blunting our refined sensations, and rendering them insensible to noxious exhalations, what must be the influence of years on the coarser perceptions of the working-man?

“All who know the lower classes will testify that the last want felt by the dirty is cleanliness, that their last expenditure is on the comforts of their home. Two winters ago I found a painter whose bed was without blankets, whose room was without furniture, who was destitute even of the ordinary utensils of civilized life, whose floor was covered with worse filth than that of the streets—I found this man at dinner with a roast loin of pork stuffed with onions, a Yorkshire pudding, a large jug of ale, cheese, and a salad. I will undertake to say that half the gentlemen in Bath did not sit down on that Sunday to so good a dinner.”

A number of communications simply assign “intemperance” as the cause of fever, and of the prevalent mortality. Of most of these communications, which it were unnecessary to recite, it may be observed, that when intemperance is mentioned as the cause of disease, as being the immediate antecedent, on carrying investigation a little further back, discomfort is found to be the immediate antecedent to the intemperance; and where the external causes of positive discomfort do not prevail in the towns, the workpeople are generally found to have few or no rival pleasures to wean them from habits of intemperance, and to have come from districts subject to the discomforts likely to engender them. In one of the returns from Scotland it is observed that with the people, whether for a fever, a cold, or consumption, or a pleurisy, whiskey is the universal antidote. The popular belief that fermented liquor or ardent spirits are proper antidotes to the effects of damp or cold has been universal, and has not wanted even medical sanction. Out-door allowances of beer have been prescribed by some medical officers in marshy and undrained districts as the proper preservatives against ague or rheumatism. The Board will now be in a position to urge the importance of facilitating drainage as a means for the protection of the population by the prevention of disease and the inducement to pernicious habits, as well as a source of profitable industry. It is now beginning to be observed in several dangerous occupations that temperance is the best means of withstanding the effects of the noxious agencies which they have to encounter. Amongst the painters, for example, the men who are temperate and cleanly suffer little from the occupation, but if any one of them become intemperate, the noxious causes take effect with a certainty and rapidity proportioned to the relaxed domestic habits. The Inquiry presents many instances of the beneficial effects of the changes of the popular habit of having recourse to fermented liquors or to spirits as necessary protective stimulants. In several of the mining districts, for example, it is an extensive practice to provide for the accommodation of the miners out of the hot mines a room in which they may drink beer as a preservative against the effects of the change to the cold and damp air to which they are about to expose themselves. _Dr. Barham_, in his Report to the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Employment of Young Persons in Mines and Manufactories, notices an admirable example within the province of voluntary exertion, and the beneficial effects produced by it at the Dolcoath copper and tin mine, Camborne, Cornwall. There the proprietors, besides establishing other easy and economical preventive arrangements, provide a warm room for the miners to change their dresses and take hot meat-soup, which is cheaper, probably, than beer. “And the men” (says a witness) “say they never feel cold when they take it. We conceive that there have been much fewer cases of consumption on the club since this practice has been adopted.”

The effects of the noxious physical agencies on the moral condition of the population will receive more full illustration in connexion with the statistical evidence as to their effects, with the evidence on the practical operation of the means of prevention.

_Domestic mismanagement, a predisposing cause of disease._

The subsequent examples relate chiefly to the effects of general domestic mismanagement as a concurrent cause of disease.

_Dr. Baker_, in his report on the sanitary condition of the population of Derby, states that—

“There is also another cause of sickness to be found in their houses, and which, like the former, _i. e._, the external circumstances, is in constant operation: I mean the want of domestic comforts, a want which the wages they earn would, in many instances, enable them to remove if their means were not, as too often happens, expended viciously or improvidently. It is with regret that I speak unfavourably of the poor, whilst my whole aim, in this communication, has been to awaken a sympathy towards those sufferings of which I have been so often a witness. But several years’ experience of the habits of the poor, derived from my situation as an hospital physician, and backed by the additional evidence I have obtained by acting for three years as a guardian of the poor in this large town, has, I am sorry to say, served but to confirm me in the opinion I have just now expressed; and in support of which I shall instance the family of the Slaters mentioned at No. 12, in Short-street.

“The earnings of four members of this family were as follows:—

_s._ _d._ The father 14 0 per week, at gardening, &c. The eldest son, aged 20 12 0 per week, at a brewery. Daughter {Twins, } 6 0 per week, at a factory. Son {aged 18} 9 0 per week, at the same factory. —— —— — £2 1 0 per week.

“The mother of this family, it appears, is left disengaged from all but her household duties and the care of the younger children; the house, nevertheless, is nearly destitute of furniture, and presents a picture of disorder and want. On the other hand, at No. 15, (Briggs) although the husband has for some years past been a weak and ailing man, the family is well ordered and cleanly; and to this fact I mainly attribute the milder and modified form of fever which affected the children.”