SAVAGE LONDON
T
Thereare more than one hundred and eighty religious Sects in England;—and all of them have Representatives in London. There are innumerable Charity Organization Societies,—Missions without end,—Relief Funds with Centre Offices and Branch Offices in London. There is much preaching, much lecturing, much writing;—yet, when all is said, done, and written, the grim result is the same,—namely that the squalor, filth, vice, ignorance, recklessness, wretchedness, and brutality of the great Majority of the Poor in our wealthy English metropolis is a crying scandal, and “a rank offence that smells to heaven.” The religious sects meet often and discuss much,—beginning their discussions generally with a bombastical flow of oratory, and ending in a violent wrangle over some knotty point of doctrine, while the miserable creatures who cry to them for relief, cry in vain to ears that are deafened by selfishness and plugged up with conceit. A great deal toomuch of the money subscribed to charitable Societies goes to pay secretaries and underlings, and many and many a starving wretch has been turned ruthlessly away unaided from the doors of a stately building, flagrantly announcing itself as a “Refuge for the Destitute.” Yet nowhere are there such large sums subscribed to Foreign Missions as in London;—the Kaffir, the Zulu, the “Heathen Chinee,”—all these may appeal to London and be sure of a favourable answer. Dukes and Earls who love to see their names blazoned on lists of charitable donations would appear, from what is said about them in print, to take a deep interest in the whole world, except that particular portion of the globe from which they derive their own magnificent revenues,—and thousands of pounds are spent annually in reforming and civilizing the savage tribes of the desert and forest. Yet in the face of all this philanthropy, the horrible, almost incredible miseries of the London poor daily increase, and we know for a fact that, while money is constantly subscribed for the conversion of the foreign heathen to holy Christianity, an enormous population of native heathen, far more degraded than the most uncultured desert barbarians,swarm at the very doors of the wealthy would-be benefactors of humanity, and demand redress for their bitter and long-standing wrongs. It is a sorrow and scandal to us that it should be so; but so it is.
The neglect of years, and the rapid turn of the wheel of modern progress, has produced the London Savage,—a being more wild, more reckless and terrible than the most bloodthirsty Zulu that ever revelled in human gore. He may be met anywhere;—he lurks in dens behind some of the stateliest mansions of Kensington and Belgravia. Rolling in filthy straw, in company with several other savages like himself, who, with their wives and children, all lie together in one damp, dark, foul-smelling room, he lays his plans of robbery and murder with the same equanimity and self-applause as a fashionable preacher pens his sermon for the coming Sunday. He knows no difference between virtue and vice,—morality or the reverse. His reasoning is simple,—in fact, quite primitive;—if someone else happens to have what he wants and does not possess, such as a gold watch, for instance, or a purse of money, he considers himself justified in taking it, if not by persuasion, then by force. Ifhe commits murder, he is perhaps caught and sentenced to be hung. Does he care? Has he any remorse? Any dread of death? Not he! He goes to the gallows with entire fortitude and dies like an ill-used martyr. His children remember him as such, and follow his example in due time, so that the hangman is still a necessary official.
One of the cruellest answers given to the pamphlet known as “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” was that “London must wait.”—On the very top of this a letter was published inThe Timesfrom a Missionary, who begged for contributions towards providing suitable homes for English working-men in Paris. It is most probable that the Dukes and Earls and Marquises of this land came readily forward in response to the appeal, leaving the London Savage in his old quarters, the centres of typhoid, cholera and small-pox, without more than a reiteration of what had already been said—“London must wait.” And still Savage London does wait—in a peculiar way of its own. It is as much as one’s life is worth to walk on the Thames Embankment after dark,—people are knocked down or mysteriously made away with on Hampstead Heath, Wandsworth Common, and other lonely,outlying places, and the very policemen, whose anxious vigilance and activesurveillancecannot be too highly estimated, are in such danger of their lives that they often need fire-arms in order to protect themselves during the exercise of their duty. Moreover, the London Savage has recently been making himself familiar with dynamite. Naturally, he approves of it, and chuckles over the admirable rapidity of its action in destroying life. He tries it in order to be quite certain of its effect. He has been known to place some on a railway line, just as a train is about to pass, just by way of experiment. The female London Savage has also found out a suitable pastime for herself in vitriol throwing,—a pastime the idea of which she has borrowed from her sister the Paris “Pétroleuse.” How delightful to scarify, blister, and burn into utter hideousness the face of some man or woman who has become repulsive to her! It is a task which entirely satisfies her feminine instincts. Some grave clergyman will perhaps take her very seriously to task for having smothered her baby under a mattress. She will not see the force of his reasoning in the least. She will state rough facts in the face of his fancy arguments.She will tell him there was no room for the baby in a den measuring seven feet by ten, where fifteen people huddle together,—she will also prove that there was no food for the baby, and no clothes either. It would have died anyhow. So she goes cheerfully to prison for having smothered her child, and as she goes, she administers a few consolatory oaths to her brute companions, who congratulate her on her good fortune. Good fortune? Certainly. She goes to prison, and prison means shelter and wholesome food at regular hours every day. For the English Government takes the tenderest care of its criminals. They are visited by the ministers of the Church, who bless them solemnly and commend their fragments of black souls to the care of Heaven; and lady missionaries sit with them for an hour at a time, and give them good books and pretty little tracts to read. But for the miserable beings, who, in the midst of their misery, still feebly try to cling to honesty, there is no help—no hope. And so the evil grows and widens, like the ever moving ball of snow which gradually becomes an avalanche. The blood yet runs cold to read of the horrors of the French Revolution of 1789,—ofthe unbridled ferocity of the Paris mob, to whom the crushing of human life was no more than the killing of mosquitoes. The graphic picture of the whole frightful scene drawn by Thomas Carlyle is not so much a history as a warning. The English temperament is much colder, more stolid and patient than that of the French,—but at the same time it is more deliberately cruel and brutal when once awakened to a sense of injustice, and smarting under inexplicable wrong. The London Savages, once let loose, would be more dangerous to deal with than even those Savages of Paris were. And who can tell how long Londonwillwait? How long will its ferocious patience, the patience of a tiger waiting for its prey, continue to hold out? One thing might certainly be done in the meantime, and that is, to draw in all the money that is pouring out of the great English capital to the relief of foreigners, and let it flow into the proper channels. Charity begins at home. It is a mockery of wealth to use it for the benefit of strange nations who, as soon as not, will turn and rend us, while neglecting our own people. The immense river of golden coin which rushes abundantly out ofEngland on the least appeal to its generosity, should be turned in the right direction,—homeward. Let it flow down the city slums,—let it reach to the wretched hovels that lie within a stone’s throw of the King’s Palace of Windsor,—let it sweep away some of the accumulated mountains of misery in the homes of the poor,—and Savage London, melted to the heart, may yet learn to believe in a beneficent Creator, for whom at present it has less honour and less faith than the most abandoned heathen worshipper of wooden idols. Recognize the fact, good people!—Christian London is more than half heathen, and the sooner this terrible truth is taken to heart, the more hope there is of those who are sincerely religious and charitable hastening to the immediate rescue of their perishing kindred, the limit of whose stupefied endurance has been nearly reached, and when reached must culminate in some appalling disaster. It is a matter which at Christmas-time calls for some consideration among the numerous other claims which are set forward as worthy of remembrance by the influential and wealthy. Persons who give Two Thousand Guineas for a horse might ponder it,—andthose who are rushing abroad to spend their money on the gambling tables of Monte Carlo might also take it to heart. The “Hooligan” is made of human material like ourselves; he is not a special sort of manufacture. He is the unfortunate result of long years of neglect inflicted on his class by his brothers; yet he is our blood and kin, and perhaps if we knew all about him, we should find that his faults of breeding and education are not so much his as the faults of those who leave him neglected in his lair. The King, whose earnest exertions on behalf of the “Housing of the Poor” have scarcely been done full justice to, has, perhaps, nothing more at heart than the desire to remedy the evils of overcrowding, and to alleviate the misery resulting from want of proper breathing-room and light,—and Queen Alexandra’s gentle and noble efforts in the same direction have added an extra grace to the many which adorn her life and character. But both the King and the Queen naturally expect response and assistance from the wealthier of their subjects in so great and necessary a work. Missionaries in India who spend time and money in endeavouring to “convert” Hindoos,who are often more truly religious than some of their would-be teachers, would do well to turn their efforts towards “Hooliganism,” and Jesuit priests who go about collecting funds to build more Roman Catholic Churches than are needed or wished for in a Protestant country, would build a truer and far more convincing Spiritual fabric if they would use some of their surplus cash for the rescue of such London heathens who have never heard of either Protestantism or Romanism, or indeed of any religious faith at all. To such blighted and disastrous lives in the purlieus of the great city, Christ would assuredly go first of all, if He ever came again with the Divine Christmas message of “Good-Will.”