‘Watch by the sick, enrich the poorWith blessings from Thy boundless store.’
‘Watch by the sick, enrich the poorWith blessings from Thy boundless store.’
Then I feel there is something wrong, for my eyes get dim and my throat lumpy. But I read to them, ‘Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? Not one shall fall without your Father’s knowledge. Fear not; ye are of more value than many sparrows.’ I know they can make sure of the Heavenly love. I would to God I could feel more sure of earthly love and earthly store, too, for them, for they get precious little of either!
But while I am writing this, February 6, a letter reaches me from the matron, asking questions about my arrangement for the future life of one of the women, and, like most ladies, she adds a postscript: ‘P.S.—Excuse this short letter, but they are making so much noise, laughing and shouting and playing ping-pong, that I am bewildered.’ Sweated drudges, hopeless, broken women, laughing, shouting, and playing ping-pong! I felt rewarded for my trouble. The sea air, good food, and rest, are fine tonics even in the winter.
Appetite comes by eating. The desire to increase happiness increases by giving happiness. I am not content, neither do I want to be content. Did not old Augustine say, ‘The man that says “Enough!” that man’s soul is lost?’ I have tasted the delight of making some of the poorest and most miserable glad, and I long to see more fully the realization of my hopes. I am told by some worthy people that I am ‘spoiling’ these women. I want to. ‘You will make them dissatisfied with their own homes.’ I hope I may, for the apathetic content of the poor with their dirt and misery constitutes the greatest danger. From such content may God deliver them! But who can estimate the value to these hard-working women of a few weeks’ rest and refreshment at a place where the life-giving qualities of the sea may invigorate them and its mighty diapason soothe them? But while the heart is touched and our sympathies are quickened at the sufferings of these women,and while it is easy to be charitable and philanthropic with regard to them, what new condemnation can be brought against the social conditions and the sanitary conditions under which they live and work? To me it seems rank absurdity, savouring almost of national insanity, that a country like ours, knowing what we know, and fearing what we fear, should tolerate them. We have endless and learned talk about ‘germs’; microbes are sought for and classified; sanitation is reduced to a science; isolation in fever or small-pox cases is rigidly insisted on. Yet in hundreds of fœtid and pestilential dens a thousand and one articles of every-day use for the personal comfort or gratification of every section of the community and for every period of life are made. But Nature knows no pity, break her laws, and she arises and smites you when and where you least expect it. As we sow we shall and must reap. And I would like to force it upon the mind of the nation that, if we continue to make our blouses, shirts, children’s pinafores, and babies’ clothing, our fur jackets and our cheap mantles, our tooth-brushes, corsets, match-boxes, and artificial flowers in the mansions of misery, in the dens of disease and death, then of a verity weeping and wailing and the voice of mourning shall be heard in the land. Many must suffer, but they may be the innocent. So kiss your darlings. Your first-born, proud young mothers, put their pretty hats or bonnets on their sweet little heads; but if you had but one glimpse of the room in which they were made fear and trembling would take hold upon you. Hold up your heads, brave young men, adjust your smart neckties; but if you saw the rooms in which they were made and the fingers that made them you would drop them into the fire with a pair of tongs. Here is a letter dated April 18, 1901:
‘Sir,‘Pardon the liberty I am taking, but having read what you said about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per week, I beg to state my case. I am a tie-maker who,after working all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn’t earned a penny for more than ten years.’
‘Sir,
‘Pardon the liberty I am taking, but having read what you said about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per week, I beg to state my case. I am a tie-maker who,after working all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn’t earned a penny for more than ten years.’
Curiosity led me to that room, and though I had some difficulty in squeezing myself into it, I was very soon glad to get out of it. There he lay on a miserable bed, by no means clean. I had to sit on the side of that bed, and I felt uneasy. It was partially covered with ties or silk for making them, and he lay there with his decaying lungs, every few minutes his cough troubling him. I did not stay long, but long enough to see his wife three times put down her work to raise his head that he might with difficulty expectorate.
Again:
‘Sir,‘I see you are going to help Women Home Workers. I have begged two shillings from poor friends, and send it to you, for my wife is one of them. I have been ill for two years, and as I watch my wife at her work night and day, and know how little she gets for it, I feel more than I can tell.’
‘Sir,
‘I see you are going to help Women Home Workers. I have begged two shillings from poor friends, and send it to you, for my wife is one of them. I have been ill for two years, and as I watch my wife at her work night and day, and know how little she gets for it, I feel more than I can tell.’
No address was given, so I never saw the room, but the fact remains that for two years he had lain there ill, while ‘home work’ was continually around him.
I have been in rooms and seen sometimes sick or dying children, sometimes a dead child, where clothing for other children was being made night and day; I have breathed, or, rather, swallowed, the close, heavy, sickening atmosphere, and come away feeling faint, but wondering into what homes the garments being made would go, and how the children would fare that wore them. Ay, I thought, too, of the old words, ‘Rachel weeping for her children because they are not.’ The bodies of the poor folk who are engaged in these ‘home industries’ are of necessity but poor bodies, so frightfully ill-nourished that they fall an easy prey to all kinds of disease—not only to chest complaints and fevers, but to all forms ofdisease; skin diseases especially abound. The ill-nourished and sickly plant develops parasites; the ill-nourished human does precisely the same. The weaker the animal life, the more it becomes the prey of the myriads of relentless foes, seen and unseen, that are greedily waiting for it; while filthy air and water, vile rooms and insanitary accommodation, dirty bodies, endless work, and hopeless apathy all combine to make Home Workers a danger to the community.
I have no wish to raise any feelings of disgust; I am but stating bare truths that might be enlarged upon, but I forbear. Far be it from me to say one word that might divert an atom of sympathy from the poor; my heart is with them, and I know, as few can know, the difficulties that environ their lives. I know that it is impossible for them under their present conditions to be clean, decent, and healthy. None the less, I repeat that their dirt and misery are a national danger. But see how this question appeals to the two primal instincts of humanity: First to that touch of nature that makes all men kin, that leads men and women to sacrifice themselves that they may save others; and, secondly, to that instinct for self-preservation that is said to be Nature’s first law. I would that we were true to either.
But I believe in the application of common-sense when difficulties are to be solved, and I love justice. So I want my last words to be practical. Why should this evil and danger exist at all? Its very presence proclaims our lack of thought. It need not exist. It ought not to exist. Consider the lives of these people. Do they work hard enough and hours enough? Far too hard and far too many hours everyone admits. Do they pay rent enough for the accommodation called their home? Most people will say far, far too much. Do they pay highly enough for their meagre quantities of wretched food? I may be told that the poor can get things very cheap nowadays. Can they? Come and see.
I was visiting in the home of a widowed match-box maker.Her sister, who had a crippled husband, lived with her, and was also a match-box maker. This sister had gone with her broken-down perambulator to take a shilling’s worth of finished boxes to the factory—the everlasting baby underneath, the boxes on top. A lady friend was with me. While she essayed to learn the art of box-making, I stood looking on till the sister match-box maker returned. Evidently there had been something wrong, for the woman was breathless, and when she recovered was a bit hysterical. ‘What is the matter?’ her sister asked. ‘They gave me a bad shilling at the factory, and I did not find it out till I got half-way home.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘I gave a boy a penny to mind the baby, and ran all the way back.’ ‘Did they change it for you?’ In reply a genuine shilling was shown. But it was a near thing—a hair’s-breadth escape from financial ruin.
How are those shillings spent? Again I say, come and see; for here is the housekeeping account of another widow living in the same neighbourhood, a blouse-maker. She had four children—a girl of twelve, a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a younger child. The girl, who was, of course, deputy mother, had been charged with stealing some food, which undoubtedly she took to give to her younger brothers. In my visitations I came across the widow’s rent-book—five shillings weekly. Paid up to date. I found her wage-book with its pitiful tale of hard work and poor pay. I saw also the widow’s housekeeping account and her expenditure of her last shilling. Here it is: ‘Tea, ½d.; sugar, ½d.; bread, 1¼d.; margarine, 1d.; oil, 1d.; firewood, ½d.; and a bit of bacon.’ When this story appeared in the press, I received 1,600 letters in a few days about the widow and her children, and England seemed to weep over them. By the aid of theDaily Telegraphwe were enabled to open five banking accounts, and place them above the fear of poverty. But when that fear was gone, when the cupboard was full of good food for which the children no longer cried, the youngest boy died, for even a banking account could notsave him. And so it happened that a kind-hearted public clothed the family in mourning, paid the undertaker’s bill and cemetery fees. Will the dark path of the destroyer ever prove a way of light to a social heaven? Some day, perhaps, when we have suffered more.
But to return to that widow’s housekeeping account. A notable business man said to me: ‘Do you know what strikes me most about that widow’s housekeeping account?’ I supposed the poverty of it. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It is the horrible and senseless waste it tells of! Do you suppose she gets a halfpennyworth of tea or sugar, or a pennyworth of margarine for her money? No. She loses on every purchase; she is bound to. The shopkeeper can’t lose, so she must. Multiply the loss on that shilling by the number of shillings spent in a year. Why, it is frightful!’ He went to the root of the matter at once. The poorer people are, the greater the cost of living; the more abject their poverty, and the greater their need of nourishing food, the dearer they have to pay for the barest necessities. Come into a marketing street in a poor neighbourhood toward midnight on Saturday, watch the butchers’ shops, and you will see a poorly-clothed and miserable woman standing looking with wistful eyes at the meat. With a few hardly-earned coppers she has to provide some pretence of a Sunday dinner for her family. The joints are ticketed, and they are beyond even her dreams. She comes nearer and looks at the inferior pieces, and timidly inquires the price. Still too high. She looks again and again, until the butcher says, and not unkindly, ‘Buy some of those nice pieces, ma’am?’ Nice pieces! they have lain on the block all day, after being trimmed off foreign meat, ticketed English—bits of mutton and shreds of beef on which the wind has blown. On them the dust and dirt of the street has found a resting-place; flies have paid them a visit; dirty fingers of other speculative purchasers have turned them over again and again. She finds her coppers, gets one pound and a half ofthe pieces, and takes them to her own home—her one room, her larder and bedroom, workshop and kitchen, in which the whole family sleeps—and on the Sunday makes an inviting stew. But there are plenty who fare worse than this, and to whom even the ‘pieces’ would be a Godsend, to whom even a bit of ‘macadamized cheese’ would represent luxury, and whose children from very birth are fed with material that would test the stomach of a dog or an ostrich. Can this go on, and the nation be free from the penalty? Impossible! and the penalty is paid all round. Now, I have no wish for all difficulties to be removed from the lives even of the poor. Life without difficulty would be a poor thing, and hardly worth the living. But I do claim that the poorest, the hardest worked of all London’s toilers, should have the possibility of living in decency, cleanliness, and some degree of comfort, and be able to obtain clean and nourishing food. And it can be done—I know it can be done. But it can only be by organization and combination, without which it will be for ever impossible for the Home Workers to get value for their money. I have had glimpses of a promised land, and in my fancy have seen the Home Workers organized and living in sweet content—organized not for strikes or lock-outs, but for health, virtue, happiness; not in filthy slums enveloped with rank odours and moral and physical corruption; near the town, but a little way out, where the free air of heaven can enter their lungs and the silence of the country speak to them; in their communities, where each family had its suite of rooms, and each suite of rooms its bath-room; where children had rounded limbs and merry hearts; where brave boyhood and sweet girlhood ripened and matured; where poor women hovered not at midnight for scraps of dirty meat, and where the miserable items—tea, ½d.; sugar, ½d.—were no longer known, for they had their own stores. Some day we shall enter this promised land in which the jerry-builder shall not enter, and in which nothing that is unclean or maketh a lie shall be found. And when weenter it we shall hear the deep roar of the nation as it rolls its heavy curse on the buried past. We shall feel that the heart of England is lighter, the hand of the oppressor has been stayed. Then the mothers of England will buy clothing for their darlings without fear. No nameless terrors will haunt the dainty brush, neither will men or women’s clothing convey contagion, or the smart necktie disseminate the seeds of death.
For all these things will be made in light and cleanliness, and the brand of shame will be no longer upon them. Then the pioneers of the Empire at the ends of the earth will be no longer sad when their hearts, touched by remembrance, vibrate to the magnet of their soul, their old country and home. For in the circuit of the sun gladness and joy shall be felt in the knowledge that the poorest of the poor in the world’s greatest city have a chance for health and virtue, for peace and comfort.
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
FOOTNOTES:1TOO OLD TO LIVE!‘Aged forty-six, and out of work, a grocer’s assistant named Thomas Harvey hanged himself at a house in Euston Road.‘On a piece of paper in the suicide’s pocket was written:‘“I cannot get work, so have to die in a so-called Christian country. Young men only are employed, and the elders shoved aside when too old for the trade, to do what they can, no matter how meritorious their service to their employer may have been.”‘At the inquest, yesterday, a verdict of “temporary insanity” was returned.’—Daily Express, July 5, 1900.
1TOO OLD TO LIVE!‘Aged forty-six, and out of work, a grocer’s assistant named Thomas Harvey hanged himself at a house in Euston Road.‘On a piece of paper in the suicide’s pocket was written:‘“I cannot get work, so have to die in a so-called Christian country. Young men only are employed, and the elders shoved aside when too old for the trade, to do what they can, no matter how meritorious their service to their employer may have been.”‘At the inquest, yesterday, a verdict of “temporary insanity” was returned.’—Daily Express, July 5, 1900.
1
‘Aged forty-six, and out of work, a grocer’s assistant named Thomas Harvey hanged himself at a house in Euston Road.
‘On a piece of paper in the suicide’s pocket was written:
‘“I cannot get work, so have to die in a so-called Christian country. Young men only are employed, and the elders shoved aside when too old for the trade, to do what they can, no matter how meritorious their service to their employer may have been.”
‘At the inquest, yesterday, a verdict of “temporary insanity” was returned.’—Daily Express, July 5, 1900.
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious printer errors corrected silently.Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.
Obvious printer errors corrected silently.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.