CHAPTER VI.WOMAN'S BITTER CRY.

The foregoing considerations make it clear that the effect of foreign immigration upon the condition of our own workmen is not to be measured by the small percentage foreigners bear to the general population of the United Kingdom; but by their distribution in the particular trades of particular localities.It is impossible to deny the displacing power of so large an addition to labour, in trades already overcrowded. The fact that under such circumstances the new-comers find employment, infers of necessity the displacement of labour previously employed. It implies also the denial of employment to natives anxious to obtain it. Nor is this large intrusion of a foreign element confined in its effects to the displacement of native labour alone. It brings down to its own level labour that is not displaced. In all trades that do not require long apprenticeship and technical skill, the supply of labour is greatly in excess of the demand. Competition to obtain employment is in consequence cruelly severe. The inevitable results are, the evasion of the law respecting factories and workshops, the reduction of wages to the lowest minimum, and the extension of the hours of work to the utmost limits of human endurance.The effect of foreign immigration upon our labouringpopulation is far greater than might at first be supposed. Its inevitable effect is the degradation of all the native labour employed, to the level of the foreign labour which is brought into competition with it. When the struggle is between those accustomed to a higher, and those accustomed to a lower standard of life, the latter can obviously oust the former and take their work. Just as a base currency drives out of circulation a pure currency, so does a lower standard of comfort drive out a higher one.What do competent authorities say on the subject of native labour?Mr. Goodman, who was a member of the Executive Committee of the Liverpool Tailors' Society, stated in his evidence before the House of Lords' Committee, that fifteen years ago the Sweating system only existed to a very limited extent in Liverpool; but that now it was carried on in a most extensive manner. He said that he accounted for its existence to a very large extent by the influx of foreigners, principally Jews. "At the present moment, fully two-thirds of the sweaters in Liverpool are foreigners; the majority of whom, as I have already stated, are not tailors at all, and have never served one hour in the tailor trade properly as an apprentice. I was told by a Jew some time ago, and he made a serious complaint to me on that head, that he was already finding the competition of his own people so severe, that being a practical man, he should have to do as they had done in many cases, lower his prices, or else he could not make a living. The competition, even amongst the Jews, is getting so severe that the prices are constantly tending to decrease; and I believe that to-day they are very much lower than they were a few years ago in Liverpool, through this competition of foreignersamongst themselves, together with their competition with the natives."Mr. Allen, Secretary of the Master Tailors' Association in Liverpool, stated that, "As an Association, we have discussed the matter, and we are opposed to it in the main (i.e.foreign immigration), and we passed a resolution that the importation of pauper aliens be prohibited with this condition, the prohibition not to extend to skilled workmen imported under contract."Mr. Keir, General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors, thus moderately and dispassionately stated the case:—"I hardly know that it would be wise to stop immigration altogether. That would be an unnatural and hardly fair way of doing the thing; but I think it ought to be regulated in some way, and that the poorest, and most miserable, and the unskilled, perhaps, of foreign labour ought not to be thrown upon the markets of England to oppose and to act detrimentally to the interests of the English people. I do not think it would be wise, and I don't know that we could advocate, and I am sure any intelligent man would not advocate altogether, the complete prohibition of foreign labour; but at the same time I think there must be, or ought to be, some means devised whereby skilled labour should contend against skilled labour in a fair and straight market. It is not skilled labour against skilled labour; it is poverty thrown in our midst, and it is poverty competing with itself, as it were; and struggling in that way, and the manner in which they live, the food they eat, and the circumstances under which they exist, deprive them altogether of the comforts of home, you may almost say, as far as Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Welshmen are concerned."One point remains to be noted. It has been urged thatthese immigrant aliens do not enter upon native trades, but introduce new industries of their own. If that were really the case, such a contention would undoubtedly have much weight. The Huguenots established new industries of silk, glass, and paper; the Flemings introduced the finer class of weaving into England; in both of these cases the alien influx was beneficial. But it cannot be seriously maintained that these low-class Jewish immigrants have stimulated or created new wants. They have created no new trade; they have debased old ones. I admit that they almost monopolize the cheap clothing trade, but even here they have created no newkindof industry.The power of the German, Russian, or Polish Jew, accustomed to a lower standard of life, to undersell the English worker in the English labour market must be admitted by all, though the exact importance of it is, I know, a disputed point. The industrial degradation of the "sweated" workers arises from the fact that they are working surrounded by a "pool of unemployed," or superfluous supply of labour. So long as this standing pool remains, and so long as it is ever being augmented by the endless influx of cheap, destitute foreign labour, so long it is difficult to see how the wages of the low unskilled workers can be materially raised. Let the pool be gradually drawn off, and wages will rise, since the combined action of the workers will no longer be able to be defeated by the eagerness of the foreigner to take their work and wages. But the pool can never be drawn off until the stream which so largely recruits it is cut off at its source. If once this foreign influx is stopped, it will decrease by the natural process of evaporation.Let us take a national view. The true standard of a nation's prosperity is to be found in the prosperity of itsworking-classes. The higher the rate of wages the better is the condition of the working-classes; the cheaper the labour of a country, the lower the condition of the people therein. One of the surest signs of the real rise of a nation is the elevation of the masses in their wages, their habits, their homes, their scale of living, and their condition generally. Anything which tends to reduce the price of labour tends also to reduce the labourer's standard of comfort and prosperity, and there can be no manner of doubt that this continuous influx of destitute foreigners does tend both directly and indirectly to reduce the profits of the wage-earning classes. Wages follow certain inexorable laws of supply and demand. If the supply of human labour exceeds the market demand, then the men will be beaten down; and how can the supply do otherwise than exceed the demand, when the market is being continually flooded by the influx of the cheapest kind of foreign labour?"Unrestricted immigration," said a witness before the United States Committee, "is the degradation of American labour." If that be true in a country of such enormous resources as the United States, how much more true must it be in our own densely-populated little island? It is the high rate of wages which has given to the American workmen their unexampled prosperity as citizens. It is the recognition of this truth which has induced the United States Government to guard its doors so jealously against the entrance of the destitute and unfit of other lands. And they are right, not only on economic grounds, but for other reasons as well, since all history teaches us that in the long run degraded labour is sure to avenge itself upon all the classes above it."Rely upon yourselves; by societies, combinations, andwell-directed strikes, you can secure higher wages and better conditions for yourselves." Such are the words of the "old" Trades Unionism, and in the main they are true enough. But in this instance they fall beside the mark; for, as I have already pointed out, combination is rendered impossible by this fierce competition of destitute labour from abroad. In the industries affected, any man or woman, or any body of men or women, who refused to work upon the sweating prices quoted, would be simply turned away, and their places filled by the foreigner. They are literally living from hand to mouth. They know that if they lose their wage one week, they will be destitute the next, and starving the week after. Under these circumstances it is not surprising to find that there exists among the native working-classes the strongest feeling against the great and increasing invasion of their rights. This feeling is not only confined to the trades chiefly affected, it is rapidly spreading throughout the country. So far as I have been able to judge, the feeling among the working-classes in favour of restrictive measures is practically unanimous. A vast majority of the great Trades Unions and Labour Organizations—not only those immediately affected, but others as well—have passed strongly-worded resolutions on the subject, recognizing that though the evil may not yet have sensibly affected their particular industry, yet it tends indirectly to do so. That the labour organizations are fully alive to the importance of this question is shown by the following letter, taken almost at random from hundreds of similar communications which have reached me during the last few months. It is from the Secretary of the "National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers," Birmingham.[18]The arguments areso clearly and cogently put, that they are well worthy of being quoted here."The Executive desire me to say that they are unanimously of opinion that the time has come when the State should regulate, in the interests of British labour, the immigration of destitute aliens; and that they have observed with alarm the injury done to their brethren in the East End of London and other parts of the country by this element of unfair competition. My Executive desire me also to say that these conclusions are arrived at reluctantly, as they would like this country to be a really happy England, giving welcome to the oppressed of every land. While, however, they hold this view strongly, they are also of opinion that this broad principle must not be allowed, to any appreciable extent, to be the means of pauperizing English men and English women. The unchecked admission of this force has spread enough misery; and it is hoped that your efforts will bring about such restrictions as will put an end to an evil which has been the means of providing a surplus labour market to become a ready prey to the sweater."These are weighty words. They come from an important Society, which, though its members have not yet felt the shoe pinch themselves, they recognize the truth of the old saying, "If one member suffers, all the other members suffer with it." This utterance does not stand alone; it is but an echo of the opinion of similar organizations throughout the country.[19]The English workman is naturally patient and law-abiding. It is his nature to suffer and be strong. All that he asks for—and surely it is not an unreasonable request—is that he should be allowed a fair field for his energies in the land that gave him birth. If this be denied him, then, sooner orlater, will follow consequences, which, to quote Herbert Spencer, "no man may tell in language."It is because this movement is so essentially a workingman's movement that I am confident of its ultimate success. Let us look the situation in the face. The balance of power has passed into the hands of the wage-earning classes—three-fourths of the electorate are wage-earners; I use the word in its widest sense. Therefore, it follows as a matter of course, that just as the land-owning classes when they had the power made laws in their interests; and the trading-classes when they had the power passed laws for their interests; so the working, wage-earning classes of this country, now that they have the power, will use it to protect and advance their interests likewise. And what can touch their interests more nearly than this unrestricted immigration of destitute foreign labour? "The flowing tide is with us." Whatever may be the immediate interests of the hour, labour questions constitute the politics of the future. There are signs all round the world that social problems and labour questions are gradually taking the place of older issues over which men have contended. There is no likelihood now of a war about creeds, no dynastic contest is now on the cards; the rivalries of nations and of races are not as potent as they were; but the lot of the "dim millions," the labouring-classes, who were ignored by all the warriors and statesmen of the past, is now forcing its way to the front. The contest which is gathering will not be around "exhausted factories and obsolete policies," as Mr. Disraeli said in 1852, but living problems, coming home to the hearts and to the firesides of all labouring men. Labour legislation is the legislation of the future; and it needs no prophetic eye to foresee that one of the leading measures in the labourprogramme of the future will be to protect the English working-men against this perpetual pouring in of destitute foreigners. Hitherto in only one constituency, Lewisham, has this question found a prominent place in an electioneering programme. We all know the result of that election. As it was at Lewisham, so will it be before long in every urban constituency throughout England. "Why," the working-classes are asking, "should we be robbed of our birthright by the refuse population of other countries?" Why, indeed! People are beginning to see that a great and crying evil flourishes in our midst; and when that fact has been thoroughly digested, means will soon be found to remedy it.CHAPTER VI.WOMAN'S BITTER CRY.The woes of the East End workwomen form no new theme. They are as old as the "Song of the Shirt"; even older. In spite of Hood's inspired poem, which when it appeared rang like a tocsin through the land, the miseries of the needlewoman's lot have not only remained unalleviated, but they have gathered in intensity as the years rolled on. How comes it that in these days of social politics and remedial legislation, the condition of such a numerous body should have gone from bad to worse? The answer is not far to seek. They have no votes; the politician passes them by. They have no money to spend, no time to strike, no strength to combine, the agitator ignores them. The class for which I plead, is voiceless, voteless, inarticulate, helpless. These poor women have never been consulted as to whether they are content to pay the price needed to continue the so-called "traditions" of England with regard to the unrestricted entrance of the refuse population of other countries. They are not likely to be consulted, since they are powerless; no one angles for their votes, for they have none to give. The strong man in his strength when confronted by this alien invasioncan battle with it, or when the contest is hopeless, he can retire before it. The world is open to him, and in other lands beyond the seas he may find that fair field for his energies which is denied him in the land of his birth. But the weak woman in her weakness, what of her? She must perforce remain to feebly fight on single-handed in the unequal struggle; and when her weakness conquers her, when her strength fails her, she can only lie down and die. This is a terrible alternative, is there no other? Yes, there is another, infinitely more terrible, infinitely more horrible—the streets.If we apply the four leading features of the "sweating" disease—low wages, long hours, irregular employment, unsanitary conditions—to women, we shall find that in each case the absolute pressure is heavier upon the weaker sex. This is not to be wondered at. Physically weaker than men, women receive a smaller amount of work, and a lower rate of wages, especially in unskilled labour. Combination can do nothing for them; it does not reach them. The mass of women-workers labour either at home or in the small "sweating dens"; the long hours, the excessive labour, and the under-feeding, crush out all the spirit and strength of resistance they possess, and with them combination is impossible.But it is upon the system of "out-work" that "sweating" thrives, and it is this "out-work" that women, more especially married women, chiefly engage. One would think that the very weakness of women, the duties of maternity, the care of children, ought to secure them some respite in this industrial struggle, but it is not so. We are always boasting of our civilization and our Christianity, yet these humanitarian considerations avail nothing. Onthe contrary, they only handicap women the more, and tell fatally against them in the competitive battle. The commercial competition of to-day in the cheap clothing trade, intensified as it is by the influx of the foreigner, positively trades upon the maternity of women-workers. These poor creatures have no time for the pure tender delights of motherhood; they have no opportunity of attending properly to their children, or to the many other little duties which gather around the English word "home." To the low-class foreign Jew this matters little, for the word "home" to him has no meaning at all; but to Englishmen and to Englishwomen it offers a terrible problem. What "hope of our race" can we expect from the feeble, half-starved, and wholly overworked Englishwoman, who is thus thrust into the furnace of this fierce foreign competition!There is another consideration also to be faced, which I have already hinted at. The unrestricted immigration of destitute aliens tends directly to increase prostitution in London and our large cities. This is a startling proposition; let me proceed to demonstrate its truth.A witness giving evidence before the Sweating Committee, described the sweater's dens as "the most filthy, poisoning, soul-and-body-killing places imaginable." Even to stand at the open door of one of such places, and to breathe the fœtid air which rushes forth, is well-nigh unendurable to persons not hardened to such conditions. Yet it is in such places as these that Englishwomen are compelled to work side by side with the foreigner. To the foreigner it seems not to matter so much; to the Englishwoman, sooner or later, it is certain death. But I hear some say, "How about the Factory Regulations?" In theory the Factory Regulations are admirable; in practice they are utterlyinadequate. Their provisions are constantly evaded. Women are kept working in these dens from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., 10 p.m., or even midnight; or the intention of the Act is frustrated by their being given work to do at home. A case was mentioned before the House of Lords' Committee of a girl eighteen years of age, who worked from seven in the morning to half-past eight at night, for wages ranging from 3s.to 8s.a week. On Fridays she worked from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. (eleven hours), that being considered half a day, and paid for accordingly. All sorts of tricks are played to evade the Factory Inspector. His first appearance in the street is notified all along the sweating dens by a preconcerted signal. When he arrives at the door, he is kept in parley for a minute or two. Meanwhile the women and girls are smuggled away, and by the time he is admitted there is not a woman visible. They lend themselves, poor creatures, to this deception, because they know that if they did not, plenty more could be found who would. The result is that they are utterly at the sweater's mercy. Even the time that ought to be allowed for meals is often infringed upon. A woman who availed herself of a full hour for dinner would be liable to instant dismissal. Even the half-hour for tea is frequently denied them; the tea is put down by their side, and they swallow it as they work.Such is the case of women working in the sweating dens. Those who work at home are scarcely better off. They must, through the constant pressure of this foreign competition, labour from dawn till late at night to procure the barest subsistence, a subsistence not sufficient to keep them in health and strength. One wretched garret is all they can afford. Here they labour, and live, and die—no one heeding. In the winter they do without fire, and often theworkers put on their backs, for the sake of warmth, the garments they are not actually engaged upon. Oftentimes it is not the woman alone, but her whole family who have to share this single room. It is impossible for a woman, working these excessive hours, to keep the room clean; and the consequence is that, especially in hot weather, it becomes infested by vermin, which find their way into the garments in process of making. The takers-in of the work in the larger houses, it is stated, kill the worst of these vermin with their shears as they examine their garments!Few of us would consider that any sum could compensate for such grinding toil under such awful conditions. Yet what do these poor women get for their labour? I have already quoted the case of a girl who earned from 3s.to 8s.a week for over thirteen hours a day; but many girls in the East End factories do not earn more than 2s.or 3s.a week! Working by the piece, a woman is paid 5d.for making a vest; 7-1/2d.for making a coat. She can by fifteen hours' work make four coats in a day, which comes to 2s.6d.; but out of this has to be deducted 3d.to a button-holer for making the button-holes, and 4d.for "trimmings," which means fire, ironing, and soap, all necessary for her work. A boy's knickerbocker suit is made at prices varying from 4-1/2d.to 10-1/2d.complete, according to the amount of work. For a suit made at 9d.the sweater gets 1s.3d., leaving him a profit of 6d.Before destitute immigration set in, in such a volume, and prices were consequently higher, such a suit would have been sold at 3s.6d., which would have admitted of a larger profit, and consequently higher price for labour. Other prices are—a shirt, sold in a shop for 7s.6d., is made for 1s.; and men's trousers are made outright at as low a price as 4-1/2d.per pair. The price paidby a sweater to a woman for machining trousers, runs from 1-1/4d.to 3-1/4d.per pair, and out of this she has to find cotton and "trimmings." If she does this at home she pays 2s.6d.a week for the hire of a sewing-machine. The "finishers," as the women are called who press the garments, put on the tickets, and generally make them ready for sale, are paid from 2d.to 2-3/4d.a pair; but they lose a good deal of time in getting their work examined, and have frequently to stand three or four hours at a time. It is an invariable rule that no seats are provided for women when they take their work to the sweaters. If the examiner finds the first two or three pairs of trousers faulty, he will not go through the whole work, but throws them at the unfortunate woman, and tells her to take them back and alter them. In this way she loses two days in doing one day's work.Shirt-makers who make by machine the common kinds of shirts, are paid 7d., 8d., and 9d.per dozen shirts for machining. They can machine 1-1/2 dozen sevenpenny shirts in a day, by working till midnight and later. The shirt-finishers, who make the button-holes by hand and sew on the buttons, get 3d.a dozen shirts, finding their own cotton, and can finish 1-1/2 dozen to 2 dozen in a day. Silk mantles, costing in the West End shops from £1 to £25, are made throughout in the East End for 7-1/2d.apiece, out of which the sweater pays the actual maker 5d.The common mantles are made at 5d.apiece; price to the worker, 3d.to 3-1/2d.Bead-trimmings are made by girls who, working twelve hours, earn from 8d.to 1s.2d.per day. Mackintoshes are made at from 10d.to 1s.apiece.Mrs. Killick, a trouser-finisher, told the Sweating Committee that she could not make more than 1s.a day, working from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. She had a sick husband andthree children, and out of her earnings she paid 2s.a week rent. She chiefly lived on tea and a bit of fish. What a glimpse of patient heroism and noble self-denial does the evidence of this poor woman afford!Five or six years ago these women made nearly double; the competition chiefly caused by the influx of cheap labour from abroad, has reduced prices some 40 or 50 per cent. Now, even the miserable wages earned are irregularly paid. The sweaters frequently keep their workers waiting for their money, and the more disreputable ones will cheat them out of their just dues. Work too is precarious; there are slack times during the year, when the workers may be idle for weeks together; yet they must still pay rent, and keep body and soul together—if they can. And this brings me back to the proposition from which I started.How body and soul are kept together in the case of girls under such circumstances as have been detailed, it is not difficult though very painful to imagine. Working from dawn till night in hideous filth and squalor unutterable, for a wage which does not suffice to buy the barest necessaries (a wage cut down ever lower and lower by the fierce competition from the shoals of destitute foreigners landed in London week by week), hundreds, nay thousands of young women—Englishwomen, our sisters—eke out their wretched earnings by means of the street. The Pharisee and the Self-righteous pass by on the other side and condemn them; but it is not these poor unfortunates who are to be condemned, but the system which makes such a state of things possible. The Vicar of Old Ford, in his evidence before the House of Lords' Committee, mentioned cases he knew of where young girls of thirteen, who work in this cheap tailoring trade, were leading an immoral life.In one instance, two sisters, one twelve and the other ten years of age, had already embarked upon a life of shame. One of these girls had been sent out by her stepmother, because the family "had to live."Another instance, if possible more horrible still, was related to me by a clergyman in the East End of London, of a case which had come under his notice, though not before it was too late. It was that of a woman, an Englishwoman, a seamstress, who with her husband was engaged in the cheap tailoring trade at the usual sweating prices. All went fairly well for a time, for the two were able by their united efforts to earn a living, and to maintain themselves and their little children in a state of comparative decency and comfort. But one winter the husband, never a strong man, fell ill and died. The wife laboured on, managing by some almost superhuman effort to earn enough for herself and the children, and to keep body and soul together. Then the slack time, so greatly dreaded by all those engaged in the "sweating trade," came on, and there was nothing to be done for weeks and weeks. In despair this woman, who had hitherto led a blameless life, took to the streets. "It was wrong," the moralist and purist will say, "wrong and reprehensible to the last degree. Is there not the workhouse for such people, is there not parochial relief, are there not charitable agencies, free dinners, clothing clubs, district visitors without end? Could she not have applied to one of these instead of drifting into sin?" It may be so. All that I know is, that she and her children were starving, and that the sin brought its own punishment, for the poor woman never recovered from the horrors of that awful winter. The shame of it all seemed to settle on her as a blight, and the following year she died, broken-spirited, and broken-hearted,one more victim sacrificed to this infamous system of starvation prices and ruinous competition.Most of the English girls to be seen at night in Oxford Street and the Strand, to say nothing of their even more degraded sisters in Whitechapel, are, or have been, tailoresses. How these poor creatures manage to exist at all, even when they eke out their wretched earnings by the price paid for their dishonour, it is not easy to see. The key of the mystery is to be found in their mutual help of one another. Even amid all their degradation and shame, many of them retain that divine instinct of self-sacrifice which in all ages has been the noblest part of womanhood. Dim it may be and undeveloped, but still it is there, evidenced daily by many little acts of kindness, many little generous deeds towards those who are more miserable and more suffering than themselves. "It is mostly the poor who help the poor." I will go further and say, it is mostly the wretched who help the wretched, for between them exists that intimate knowledge of each other's sorrows which is the truest bond of sympathy. Under happier circumstances these poor women might have lived honest and virtuous lives. As it is, they have to work side by side with men of all nationalities, under unhealthy and objectionable conditions—conditions subservient of all sense of decency. This, combined with the utterly inadequate wage, naturally leads to immorality, with its attendant satellites of drunkenness, disease, and death. Thus the burden of wretchedness and crime goes on, ever increasing in volume and intensity. How can it be otherwise when the ranks of the lost in our large cities, are thus being continually recruited from within and from without? Every now and then the public conscience is startled by the news of some awful tragedy—somepoor creature done to her death in Whitechapel. It is but a bubble bursting on the surface, which oozes up from the black depths of vice and misery beneath.One of the most potent causes of this vice and misery is undoubtedly the unlimited pouring in of destitute and objectionable foreigners. Again I ask, Can nothing be done to rescue these women—our sisters—from the attendant horrors of this fierce and degrading foreign competition? Can nothing be done to place the price of their labour upon such a level as to enable them by honest work to lead virtuous and happy lives?Usque quo Domine?Lord, how long? Such is the bitter cry of the workwomen in East London.CHAPTER VII.THE SANITARY DANGER.The sanitary conditions amid which the great majority of these alien immigrants labour and live may truly be described as appalling. It is a remarkable thing that just as the lower organisms of animal life are capable of living under circumstances which are intolerable to higher organisms, so can these people exist—and even to a certain extent thrive—in an atmosphere and amid surroundings which to the more highly-developed Englishman and Englishwoman mean disease and death. Cleanliness and sanitation are peculiarities of Western rather than of Eastern nationalities. When Peter the Great went back to Russia after his famous visit to London two centuries ago, he left behind him such a filthy habitation, that the cleansing of it had to be defrayed by an especial grant from the Exchequer. This is a matter of history; and if rumour is to be believed, a similar experience in connection with the visit of an Oriental potentate has occurred in very recent years. If this sort of thing is incidental to the visit of Eastern Princes, how much rather then is it liable to accompany the wholesale inundation of poor and degraded foreigners, who flock into London and our large cities from every country in Europe?In treating of this sanitary aspect, in order to avoid any possible charge of exaggeration, I prefer to quote the statements of unimpeachable authorities rather than to advance any theories of my own. The surroundings amid which these people are content to labour and to live are deplorable and filthy beyond description. To quote from the Majority Report of the Sweating Committee—a Report which has been attacked because of the undue moderation of its language, and which certainly cannot be said to unduly exaggerate the evil:—"Three or four gas-jets may be flaring in a room, a coke fire burning in the wretched fire-place, sinks untrapped, closets without water, and, altogether, the sanitary conditions abominable. A witness told us that in a double room, perhaps 9 feet by 15 feet, a man, his wife, and six children slept, and in the same room ten men were usually employed, so that at night eighteen persons would be in that one room. These witnesses alluded to the want of sanitary precautions, and of decent and sufficient accommodation, and declared that the effects of this, combined with the inadequate wages earned, had the effect of driving girls to prostitution."The state of the sweaters' dens in East London is revolting beyond measure, and resembles rather the description of Dante'sInferno, than the abodes of a professedly civilized people. Here is the description of one taken almost at random from a mass of evidence teeming with similar details. A Factory Inspector, who described it, says it gives a fair idea of all the rest, and he certainly ought to know, seeing that some 4000 factories and "workshops innumerable" are under his inspection. He says:—"You find a filthy bed, on which garments which aremade are laid; little children, perfectly naked little things, lying about on the floor and on the bed; frying-pans and all sorts of dirty utensils with food of various descriptions on the bed, under the bed, over the bed, everywhere; clothes hanging on a line, with nothing more than a large gas-stove with the ashes all flying about, and the atmosphere so dense that you get ill after a night's work there; and that is the reason I am deaf now."In respect of sanitation, the foreign Jews appear to be the worst offenders. The Sanitary Committee of the Jewish Board of Guardians admit in their Report that of 880 houses visited by the inspector, 623 were defective, and below the standard required by the Local Authority. Of these no less than 341 were in Whitechapel alone. To quote a few samples:—"In Whitechapel, some so-called 'Model Dwellings' exist, in which the drain of a water-closet had been entirely stopped up for three weeks prior to the visit of the Inspector, while two of the cellars (inhabited) were flooded with sewage, and had been so flooded for four days past. At another place, where a noxious odour had prevailed for years, the refuse which the Committee succeeded in causing to be removed from the basement room, contained among its various components the dead bodies of five cats, a dog, and a rabbit. The water-closet drains of three other houses were discovered on the Inspector's visit to have remained in a choked condition for three, five, and six weeks respectively. At a house in St. George's-in-the-East, three boot-finishers were found at work in a front basement room, while the adjoining back basement room was flooded with sewage, which forced its way up a gully supposed to be protected by a bell-trap. The cover of this trap, as is generally the casewith these appliances, was absent, and thus the sewer had direct and unobstructed communication with the interior of the house."This extract is taken bodily from the Report of the Sweating Committee of the Jewish Board of Guardians. They are writing of their own people, and are certainly not likely to exaggerate the state of affairs.The habitations of the Italians are little better; in fact in many ways they are just as bad. The sanitary arrangements of the cheap dwellings around Saffron Hill, where the Italians mostly abound, leave everything to be desired. On this subject I had lately some conversation with an officer of the Italian Benevolent Society. He described to me a sleeping-room—it often served as a living-room as well—in one of the ordinary dwelling-houses in the neighbourhood of Saffron Hill. In this one room, neither very lofty nor very large, may frequently be found a dozen persons herded together rather like cattle than human beings, sleeping promiscuously as follows:—In one bed, or what serves as a bed, a married couple; in the next, two young girls; in a third, a single young man; in the fourth, three or four children of different ages and sexes—and so on. Owing to the lack of ventilation, and the number of human beings crowded in the room—to quote the words of my informant—"the stench was awful." The result of all this upon the victims, both physically and morally, can easily be imagined. Another instance was that given by Inspector Holland to Mr. Biron the magistrate.[20]An Italian, who was summoned for sending his little girl out begging, was traced to his home, and there the police inspector found the parents occupying a miserably furnished little apartment in AldisMews, with six children. The room, which "smelt horribly," contained a single bed, under which were kept the appliances for making ice-cream; and Inspector Holland also found the room to be inhabited by a dog, a cat, a monkey, and several white mice. The moral of all this is obvious, viz. that these people are able to live under conditions amid which it would be impossible for an average Englishman to exist at all. Therefore it is only one more illustration of the unfair nature of this unnatural competition.There is, however, another point to be noted in connection with this sanitary aspect. The conditions under which work is done in the sweaters' dens, and in their homes by these unfortunate people, largely assists in the spreading of infectious diseases. I refer of course more especially to the cheap tailoring trade. Some materials carry infection very quickly. Dr. Bate, a medical officer of health in the East End of London, speaks, in his evidence before the Sweating Committee, of infection being carried far and wide by the garments being often made up in rooms where children are lying ill with small-pox, scarlet fever, and other maladies. He had seen the garments thrown over the children's beds; and a case is mentioned of a child covered with measles being wrapt up in one of the half-made garments to keep it warm. And yet the articles made under such conditions are sold in the cheap, ready-made clothes-shops all over London and throughout the provinces.Nor are matters in the foreign quarters of the provincial towns much better. From Manchester, from Leeds, from Liverpool, from Glasgow, the same tale reaches us, of the filthy habits of these foreign immigrants, and their neglect of all sanitary precautions. For instance, at Meadow Bank, an outlying district of Winsford, there is a large colony ofPoles and Hungarians. They are employed in some local salt works, and were especially brought over to England some years ago in consequence of a strike in the Salt District, and now fill the places which were formerly occupied by Englishmen. A description of the way in which these people live, will best show how impossible it is for decent English workmen to compete against them. It is best told in the words of Dr. Fox, the medical officer of the District Board of Health. In his report he writes:—"To say that these people are living together like beasts would be an insult and a libel upon beasts. Beasts would be better provided for than are those human beings. In the first place the rooms are, without exception, overcrowded. Again, they are destitute of furniture. The beds are trays covered with filthy straw; the bed-clothing is entirely constituted of filthy sacking. The men sleep in their clothes, even in their boots. The windows are rarely if ever opened; the beds in point of fact being many of them never empty; one set of workmen occupying them by day, and another by night. The atmosphere is necessarily foul, fœtid, and pestilential to persons of ordinary susceptibilities; and yet, in the absence of larders, and kitchens, and separate living-rooms, in this fœtid, stinking atmosphere the food is stored and cooked. Arrangements for washing there are none, except the outside taps. In one room six men and one woman are sleeping, unmarried, promiscuously; and in another, a man, his wife, and daughter—fourteen years of age—were occupying one bed. Canal-boats are palaces and temples of cleanliness, comfort, and morality, compared with this horrible colony of Bohemianism."It is not possible to say anything which would add to this tale of horror. The facts speak for themselves. Dr. Fox,though subjected to a severe examination before the House of Commons' Committee, maintained that there was not a syllable of exaggeration in his report, though in consequence of public attention having been attracted by its publication, a slight improvement had since taken place in some minor details. There was no necessity, it should be noted, for these foreigners to live in the way they did. In this instance they were paid a sufficient wage for them to exist under decent and sanitary conditions. It was simply that they preferred doing so, and were but following the instincts of a nature which had become engendered in them by long years of filthy and degraded habits. Yet it was to make room for such as these that the English workmen were ousted, and are being ousted daily, in the great manufacturing centres of Great Britain. The question is, therefore, how long are these people to be allowed to pour in upon us unchecked, bringing with them their foreign habits and customs, and living in conformity with these alone, an outstanding defiance to English law, and a serious danger to the health and well-being of the surrounding English community? Is it right or just that our people should be forced by this unnatural competition to live and toil side by side with such people, surrounded by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad water, bad smells, bad and degrading occupations—by every circumstance which depresses the vital energies, and leaves them an easy prey to pestilence? But we are told that to shut our doors upon these aliens would be to reverse England's traditions. I maintain that we have lavished sympathy enough upon them already, and that it is now necessary for us to keep a little of our sympathy for our own flesh and blood. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of sanitation. Where it isneglected, disease and death surely follow. Doctors tell us that more human beings are killed in England every year by unnecessary and preventible diseases, than were killed at Waterloo or Sadowa, and the great majority of these victims are children. Preventible diseases, according to Sir Joseph Fayrer, still kill 125,000 per annum, entailing a loss of labour from sickness estimated at £7,750,000 per annum. "Why then," as the Prince of Wales[21]asked, "are they not prevented?"Sanitary legislation is all very well, but it deals with effects and not with causes. Such dens as those described, not by my imagination, be it noted, but by unimpeachable authorities, are nothing less than breeding-houses of pestilence. If we swept them clean to-morrow others would soon be found as bad, for the filthy and unsanitary habits of these immigrant aliens are bred in the bone, and wherever they go they take them with them. It cannot be healthy for a nation to have such a sore as this existing in its side, yet we allow this plague-spot to continue in our midst, and to spread its contamination far and wide. If we wish to perpetuate that healthy, sturdy stock which has made England what she is, we must prevent the strain from being defiled by this ceaseless pouring in of the unclean and unhealthy of other lands. "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump," and nothing is more contagious than dirty and unsanitary habits. The physical health of the people should be the first care of the State, for upon it depends not only the present, but the future, of our race.Salus populi suprema est lex—and before this inviolable law all other considerations must bow.The Majority Report of the Sweating Committee—from which Lord Dunraven dissented—complacently recommendedthe more frequent use of "limewash" in the sweaters' dens and workshops where these indigent foreigners chiefly congregate. But it will require a great deal more than "limewash" to whiten this hideous evil. People who bring with them filthy and unsanitary habits are a standing source of danger to the rest of the community. Cattle from an infected district are refused admission to our ports; surely the health of even one of the meanest of our people is of more importance than many cattle.CHAPTER VIII.THE SOCIAL EVIL.Closely bound up with the sanitary danger, indeed inseparable from it, is the social evil. The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure air, of a sufficient but not exorbitant amount of work—all that in fact tends to produce themens sana in corpore sano—all this is fully acknowledged and known; yet we freely throw open our doors to a class whose habits and customs admittedly militate against all these powerful agencies for good.The unlimited pouring in of destitute and degraded foreigners tends both directly and indirectly to increase our national burden of pauperism, vice, and crime. With regard to the first part of this statement it is often objected that but few of these foreign immigrants come upon the rates, and that our workhouses and penitentiaries show comparatively faint signs of their presence. This is a half-truth, and like all half-truths it conceals a most dangerous fallacy.Nulla falsa doctrina est, quae non permisceat aliquid veritatis.On the surface I admit the plausibility of the objection. In Leeds, for instance, where the foreign colony has reached abnormal proportions, the total number of Jews chargeable to the common fund of the Leeds Union, at the time whenparticulars were furnished to the Board of Trade in the early part of this year (1891), was only 62. The numerous Jewish and Foreign Benevolent Societies and Charitable Institutions are far too careful to allow their people to come upon the rates more than they can possibly help. But that the whole tendency of this destitute foreign immigration is to force those of our English working-classes, who are in any degree affected by it, into pauperism or something worse, cannot for one moment be denied by those who have any practical knowledge of the poor in the crowded centres of population to which these undesirable foreigners flock.In proof of this assertion, I may quote the opinion of the Mile End Board of Guardians, who believed that this destitute foreign immigration had "a deteriorating effect upon the moral, financial, and social conditions of the people." The Whitechapel Guardians of the poor also deplore the substitution of the foreign for the English population. The result, they say, is the lowering of the general condition of the people. The Hackney Board of Guardians also, after an exhaustive inquiry, arrived at the opinion that the unchecked immigration of destitute foreigners was a serious social danger, reducing wages to a "starvation point." They supported their decision by a series of practical and convincing arguments which only lack of space prevents my quoting in full.[22]If a life of honest labour has no better reward to offer than the meagre wages and attendant horrors of the sweaters' dens, can it be wondered if in despair of earning an honest livelihood, hundreds, nay thousands, of our people are tempted to abandon the unequal struggle, and to drift into idleness, drunkenness, and vice? I have endeavoured toshow in a previous chapter how this unnatural competition forces Englishwomen upon the streets; but that, alas! is not the only resultant form of vice. A great social reformer[23]once said that "he had found a man's sobriety to be in direct proportion to his cleanliness." Without admitting the universal accuracy of this opinion, there is no doubt that it contains within it the germs of a great truth. Drunkenness, that endless source of misery and crime, is not in itself so much a cause as an effect, the effect of the loss of that innate sense of self-respect which forms one of the great barriers between the man and the beast. "When we examine into the ultimate cause of a dangerous class," writes Canon Kingsley,[24]"into the one property common to all its members, whether thieves, beggars, profligates, or the merely pauperized—we find it to be this loss of self-respect. As long as that remains, poor souls may struggle on heroically, pure amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when self-respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in these dens of physical and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, and they must sink, into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye, the very smells, which surround them."All this is true enough. But how, I would ask, is it possible for our people to maintain this precious sense of self-respect when they are forced daily and hourly into contact with those who appear to have no more idea of decency, cleanliness, and comfort than the beasts which perish? The whole physical circumstances of their lives fight against them. To the great bulk of these immigrantaliens, the word "home," that word so sacred to English ears, around which so many associations cling, has no meaning at all. They appear to have only one dominant passion, the love of gain;—not that they gain much, poor creatures, still it is there;—and in their pursuit of it they are willing to accommodate themselves to the meagre wage, the lengthy hours, and the filthy surroundings already described. With this exception they appear to be indifferent to everything which makes life worth the living, to have no happiness in the past, no pleasures in the present, no hope in the future. With our own people it is different. However degraded they may be, there exists among them the longing for enjoyment. "Not to enjoy is not to live." Moral and intellectual enjoyments many have none; and in default of these, they betake themselves to the lowest forms of animal enjoyment; snatching at their pleasures greedily, foully, all the more fiercely because their opportunities of enjoyment are so limited. Can we wonder that these things are so? Can we judge them harshly? God forbid!A well-known social reformer, for whose work and opinions I have the greatest respect, has written:—"It is a fact apparent to every thoughtful man, that the larger portion of the misery that constitutes our social question arises from indulgence, gluttony, drink, waste, profligacy, betting, and dissipation."[25]This on the surface is true enough; but when we come to examine more closely into the problems of poverty, we shall find that though intemperance, unthrift, self-indulgence, and inefficiency are unhappily the common vices of the poor, yet these vices are not so much thecausesof poverty, as theeffectsof it.The Rev. S. A. Barnett, of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, whoknows the East End of London so thoroughly, does not find the origin of poverty in the vices of the poor. Terrible as are the results of drunkenness, unthrift, and self-indulgence, it is not possible, if we view the facts dispassionately, to regard these as the main sources of poverty. We shall rather look upon these evils as the natural outcome of the fierce struggle for existence, which is carried on under our present industrial conditions. Morality is admittedly the truest and most real end of man, and therefore on a superficial aspect it is natural to represent the miseries of the very poor to be chiefly occasioned by their own faults. It is a comfortable view to take, for it at once lightens the responsibility of the rich man, and it salves his conscience by the specious plea that after all the poor and the wretched have brought half their troubles upon themselves; and as they have made their beds, so must they lie. But this is rather the attitude of the Pharisee than of the philanthropist, and the moral and social problems of our age and country will never be solved if approached in such a spirit.It is a cruel and unholy thing thus to intensify the struggle for existence among our own people by the ceaseless immigration of those, who, to quote the words of the Bishop of Bedford, "are at once demoralized and demoralizing."[26]Few have had more practical experience of the crowded East End of London than Dr. Billing, and he has given eloquent testimony to the injury worked upon our own people there by this wholesale invasion. In this fierce battle for life, of what use is it to utter trite platitudes about the "survival of the fittest," since, as another great authority, Lord Dunraven, has pointed out, "the fittestin this instance are those who are able to exist upon the lowest possible diet, in the greatest possible filth, and subject to the greatest amount of hardships and misery"?[27]Englishmen and Englishwomen were not formed thus to live, and thus to toil. They cannot do so without contracting diseased habits of body and mind—without becoming brutalized, in fact. They lose their self-respect, and go to swell that degraded class into which theweakeras well as theworstmembers of society show a perpetual tendency to sink—a class which not respecting itself does not respect others, which has nothing to lose and all to gain, and in which the lowest passions are ever ready to burst out and avenge themselves by frightful methods. That is why it is, at the present hour, in the crowded courts and teeming alleys of East London, there exist all the elements of something even more terrible in its way than the misery which brought about the French Revolution.It has been said that "A great city is a great evil." But paradoxical as it may seem, it is also a great good, since it provides employment for many thousands who otherwise would starve. Still it cannot be denied that the abnormal increase of our great cities, and the gradual depopulation of our country districts, form one of the most serious social problems of our time.There is a constant movement going on from the country to the town. This is due to many causes, one of which is undoubtedly the introduction of machinery, which, whilst lessening the work for labourers in the agricultural districts, at the same time creates an extraordinary demand for "hands" in our manufacturing centres. Another cause is the higher rate of wages, and the bustling customs of thetown, which never cease to offer attractions to young people starting in life. The result of this steady current of human beings flowing away from the country to the town is disastrous to both. Every great city in England is rapidly approaching a state of congestion; and in rural places there is a great dearth of workers, the supply falling very far short of the demand. If the 30,000,000 human beings in England and Wales all had food and lodging, there would be no cause for anxiety; but a large number of them are very poor, and wholly unable to support themselves. In 1890 no less than 671,000 persons received Poor Law relief, of whom 462,000 were relieved outside, and 179,000 inside the workhouse. In London alone 5000 able-bodied men were relieved every day, at a cost to the Metropolitan rate-payers of £188,000 per year. Twenty-four out of every hundred, or nearly one quarter of those who died in London last year, died either in the workhouses, hospitals, or lunatic asylums. Therefore, considering this question of foreign immigration generally, and foreign Jewish immigration in particular, we must take into account the nature of its distribution and the gregarious habits of the Jewish immigrants. The weekly arrival of hundreds of semi-starving foreigners must of necessity have a serious effect upon our unskilled labour market in London and our great provincial cities, to which the immigrant aliens principally flock. All thinking persons will admit that it is of more importance to protect our own workmen than to preserve our traditional character for hospitality, if it can be shown—and I consider it can—that the exercise of such hospitality tends to degrade the social condition of the native workers.Why then add to the difficulties of this problem by letting in yearly thousands of these foreigners, chiefly the "lowestclass of the lowest class," who, parasites that they are, flock at once to our great centres of population, and prey upon our people, underselling their labour, and taking the bread from their mouths?We live in the days of a great social upheaval. We hear on all sides of the great "Labour movement." What does it mean? What is at the bottom of it all? Only the desire of our labouring classes to seek for themselves some alleviation of their lot; some increased opportunity for leisure; some better remuneration for their labour; some surer provision against sickness and old age. They are seeking—not always by the best and wisest methods perhaps, but that is not their fault—how to make their lives better and broader, healthier and happier. With these desires every right-thinking man is in sympathy. The complete realization of their dream may be Utopian perhaps—I do not know. But even if it be, what is there to blame in this divine discontent?

The foregoing considerations make it clear that the effect of foreign immigration upon the condition of our own workmen is not to be measured by the small percentage foreigners bear to the general population of the United Kingdom; but by their distribution in the particular trades of particular localities.

It is impossible to deny the displacing power of so large an addition to labour, in trades already overcrowded. The fact that under such circumstances the new-comers find employment, infers of necessity the displacement of labour previously employed. It implies also the denial of employment to natives anxious to obtain it. Nor is this large intrusion of a foreign element confined in its effects to the displacement of native labour alone. It brings down to its own level labour that is not displaced. In all trades that do not require long apprenticeship and technical skill, the supply of labour is greatly in excess of the demand. Competition to obtain employment is in consequence cruelly severe. The inevitable results are, the evasion of the law respecting factories and workshops, the reduction of wages to the lowest minimum, and the extension of the hours of work to the utmost limits of human endurance.

The effect of foreign immigration upon our labouringpopulation is far greater than might at first be supposed. Its inevitable effect is the degradation of all the native labour employed, to the level of the foreign labour which is brought into competition with it. When the struggle is between those accustomed to a higher, and those accustomed to a lower standard of life, the latter can obviously oust the former and take their work. Just as a base currency drives out of circulation a pure currency, so does a lower standard of comfort drive out a higher one.

What do competent authorities say on the subject of native labour?

Mr. Goodman, who was a member of the Executive Committee of the Liverpool Tailors' Society, stated in his evidence before the House of Lords' Committee, that fifteen years ago the Sweating system only existed to a very limited extent in Liverpool; but that now it was carried on in a most extensive manner. He said that he accounted for its existence to a very large extent by the influx of foreigners, principally Jews. "At the present moment, fully two-thirds of the sweaters in Liverpool are foreigners; the majority of whom, as I have already stated, are not tailors at all, and have never served one hour in the tailor trade properly as an apprentice. I was told by a Jew some time ago, and he made a serious complaint to me on that head, that he was already finding the competition of his own people so severe, that being a practical man, he should have to do as they had done in many cases, lower his prices, or else he could not make a living. The competition, even amongst the Jews, is getting so severe that the prices are constantly tending to decrease; and I believe that to-day they are very much lower than they were a few years ago in Liverpool, through this competition of foreignersamongst themselves, together with their competition with the natives."

Mr. Allen, Secretary of the Master Tailors' Association in Liverpool, stated that, "As an Association, we have discussed the matter, and we are opposed to it in the main (i.e.foreign immigration), and we passed a resolution that the importation of pauper aliens be prohibited with this condition, the prohibition not to extend to skilled workmen imported under contract."

Mr. Keir, General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors, thus moderately and dispassionately stated the case:—"I hardly know that it would be wise to stop immigration altogether. That would be an unnatural and hardly fair way of doing the thing; but I think it ought to be regulated in some way, and that the poorest, and most miserable, and the unskilled, perhaps, of foreign labour ought not to be thrown upon the markets of England to oppose and to act detrimentally to the interests of the English people. I do not think it would be wise, and I don't know that we could advocate, and I am sure any intelligent man would not advocate altogether, the complete prohibition of foreign labour; but at the same time I think there must be, or ought to be, some means devised whereby skilled labour should contend against skilled labour in a fair and straight market. It is not skilled labour against skilled labour; it is poverty thrown in our midst, and it is poverty competing with itself, as it were; and struggling in that way, and the manner in which they live, the food they eat, and the circumstances under which they exist, deprive them altogether of the comforts of home, you may almost say, as far as Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Welshmen are concerned."

One point remains to be noted. It has been urged thatthese immigrant aliens do not enter upon native trades, but introduce new industries of their own. If that were really the case, such a contention would undoubtedly have much weight. The Huguenots established new industries of silk, glass, and paper; the Flemings introduced the finer class of weaving into England; in both of these cases the alien influx was beneficial. But it cannot be seriously maintained that these low-class Jewish immigrants have stimulated or created new wants. They have created no new trade; they have debased old ones. I admit that they almost monopolize the cheap clothing trade, but even here they have created no newkindof industry.

The power of the German, Russian, or Polish Jew, accustomed to a lower standard of life, to undersell the English worker in the English labour market must be admitted by all, though the exact importance of it is, I know, a disputed point. The industrial degradation of the "sweated" workers arises from the fact that they are working surrounded by a "pool of unemployed," or superfluous supply of labour. So long as this standing pool remains, and so long as it is ever being augmented by the endless influx of cheap, destitute foreign labour, so long it is difficult to see how the wages of the low unskilled workers can be materially raised. Let the pool be gradually drawn off, and wages will rise, since the combined action of the workers will no longer be able to be defeated by the eagerness of the foreigner to take their work and wages. But the pool can never be drawn off until the stream which so largely recruits it is cut off at its source. If once this foreign influx is stopped, it will decrease by the natural process of evaporation.

Let us take a national view. The true standard of a nation's prosperity is to be found in the prosperity of itsworking-classes. The higher the rate of wages the better is the condition of the working-classes; the cheaper the labour of a country, the lower the condition of the people therein. One of the surest signs of the real rise of a nation is the elevation of the masses in their wages, their habits, their homes, their scale of living, and their condition generally. Anything which tends to reduce the price of labour tends also to reduce the labourer's standard of comfort and prosperity, and there can be no manner of doubt that this continuous influx of destitute foreigners does tend both directly and indirectly to reduce the profits of the wage-earning classes. Wages follow certain inexorable laws of supply and demand. If the supply of human labour exceeds the market demand, then the men will be beaten down; and how can the supply do otherwise than exceed the demand, when the market is being continually flooded by the influx of the cheapest kind of foreign labour?

"Unrestricted immigration," said a witness before the United States Committee, "is the degradation of American labour." If that be true in a country of such enormous resources as the United States, how much more true must it be in our own densely-populated little island? It is the high rate of wages which has given to the American workmen their unexampled prosperity as citizens. It is the recognition of this truth which has induced the United States Government to guard its doors so jealously against the entrance of the destitute and unfit of other lands. And they are right, not only on economic grounds, but for other reasons as well, since all history teaches us that in the long run degraded labour is sure to avenge itself upon all the classes above it.

"Rely upon yourselves; by societies, combinations, andwell-directed strikes, you can secure higher wages and better conditions for yourselves." Such are the words of the "old" Trades Unionism, and in the main they are true enough. But in this instance they fall beside the mark; for, as I have already pointed out, combination is rendered impossible by this fierce competition of destitute labour from abroad. In the industries affected, any man or woman, or any body of men or women, who refused to work upon the sweating prices quoted, would be simply turned away, and their places filled by the foreigner. They are literally living from hand to mouth. They know that if they lose their wage one week, they will be destitute the next, and starving the week after. Under these circumstances it is not surprising to find that there exists among the native working-classes the strongest feeling against the great and increasing invasion of their rights. This feeling is not only confined to the trades chiefly affected, it is rapidly spreading throughout the country. So far as I have been able to judge, the feeling among the working-classes in favour of restrictive measures is practically unanimous. A vast majority of the great Trades Unions and Labour Organizations—not only those immediately affected, but others as well—have passed strongly-worded resolutions on the subject, recognizing that though the evil may not yet have sensibly affected their particular industry, yet it tends indirectly to do so. That the labour organizations are fully alive to the importance of this question is shown by the following letter, taken almost at random from hundreds of similar communications which have reached me during the last few months. It is from the Secretary of the "National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers," Birmingham.[18]The arguments areso clearly and cogently put, that they are well worthy of being quoted here.

"The Executive desire me to say that they are unanimously of opinion that the time has come when the State should regulate, in the interests of British labour, the immigration of destitute aliens; and that they have observed with alarm the injury done to their brethren in the East End of London and other parts of the country by this element of unfair competition. My Executive desire me also to say that these conclusions are arrived at reluctantly, as they would like this country to be a really happy England, giving welcome to the oppressed of every land. While, however, they hold this view strongly, they are also of opinion that this broad principle must not be allowed, to any appreciable extent, to be the means of pauperizing English men and English women. The unchecked admission of this force has spread enough misery; and it is hoped that your efforts will bring about such restrictions as will put an end to an evil which has been the means of providing a surplus labour market to become a ready prey to the sweater."

These are weighty words. They come from an important Society, which, though its members have not yet felt the shoe pinch themselves, they recognize the truth of the old saying, "If one member suffers, all the other members suffer with it." This utterance does not stand alone; it is but an echo of the opinion of similar organizations throughout the country.[19]The English workman is naturally patient and law-abiding. It is his nature to suffer and be strong. All that he asks for—and surely it is not an unreasonable request—is that he should be allowed a fair field for his energies in the land that gave him birth. If this be denied him, then, sooner orlater, will follow consequences, which, to quote Herbert Spencer, "no man may tell in language."

It is because this movement is so essentially a workingman's movement that I am confident of its ultimate success. Let us look the situation in the face. The balance of power has passed into the hands of the wage-earning classes—three-fourths of the electorate are wage-earners; I use the word in its widest sense. Therefore, it follows as a matter of course, that just as the land-owning classes when they had the power made laws in their interests; and the trading-classes when they had the power passed laws for their interests; so the working, wage-earning classes of this country, now that they have the power, will use it to protect and advance their interests likewise. And what can touch their interests more nearly than this unrestricted immigration of destitute foreign labour? "The flowing tide is with us." Whatever may be the immediate interests of the hour, labour questions constitute the politics of the future. There are signs all round the world that social problems and labour questions are gradually taking the place of older issues over which men have contended. There is no likelihood now of a war about creeds, no dynastic contest is now on the cards; the rivalries of nations and of races are not as potent as they were; but the lot of the "dim millions," the labouring-classes, who were ignored by all the warriors and statesmen of the past, is now forcing its way to the front. The contest which is gathering will not be around "exhausted factories and obsolete policies," as Mr. Disraeli said in 1852, but living problems, coming home to the hearts and to the firesides of all labouring men. Labour legislation is the legislation of the future; and it needs no prophetic eye to foresee that one of the leading measures in the labourprogramme of the future will be to protect the English working-men against this perpetual pouring in of destitute foreigners. Hitherto in only one constituency, Lewisham, has this question found a prominent place in an electioneering programme. We all know the result of that election. As it was at Lewisham, so will it be before long in every urban constituency throughout England. "Why," the working-classes are asking, "should we be robbed of our birthright by the refuse population of other countries?" Why, indeed! People are beginning to see that a great and crying evil flourishes in our midst; and when that fact has been thoroughly digested, means will soon be found to remedy it.

The woes of the East End workwomen form no new theme. They are as old as the "Song of the Shirt"; even older. In spite of Hood's inspired poem, which when it appeared rang like a tocsin through the land, the miseries of the needlewoman's lot have not only remained unalleviated, but they have gathered in intensity as the years rolled on. How comes it that in these days of social politics and remedial legislation, the condition of such a numerous body should have gone from bad to worse? The answer is not far to seek. They have no votes; the politician passes them by. They have no money to spend, no time to strike, no strength to combine, the agitator ignores them. The class for which I plead, is voiceless, voteless, inarticulate, helpless. These poor women have never been consulted as to whether they are content to pay the price needed to continue the so-called "traditions" of England with regard to the unrestricted entrance of the refuse population of other countries. They are not likely to be consulted, since they are powerless; no one angles for their votes, for they have none to give. The strong man in his strength when confronted by this alien invasioncan battle with it, or when the contest is hopeless, he can retire before it. The world is open to him, and in other lands beyond the seas he may find that fair field for his energies which is denied him in the land of his birth. But the weak woman in her weakness, what of her? She must perforce remain to feebly fight on single-handed in the unequal struggle; and when her weakness conquers her, when her strength fails her, she can only lie down and die. This is a terrible alternative, is there no other? Yes, there is another, infinitely more terrible, infinitely more horrible—the streets.

If we apply the four leading features of the "sweating" disease—low wages, long hours, irregular employment, unsanitary conditions—to women, we shall find that in each case the absolute pressure is heavier upon the weaker sex. This is not to be wondered at. Physically weaker than men, women receive a smaller amount of work, and a lower rate of wages, especially in unskilled labour. Combination can do nothing for them; it does not reach them. The mass of women-workers labour either at home or in the small "sweating dens"; the long hours, the excessive labour, and the under-feeding, crush out all the spirit and strength of resistance they possess, and with them combination is impossible.

But it is upon the system of "out-work" that "sweating" thrives, and it is this "out-work" that women, more especially married women, chiefly engage. One would think that the very weakness of women, the duties of maternity, the care of children, ought to secure them some respite in this industrial struggle, but it is not so. We are always boasting of our civilization and our Christianity, yet these humanitarian considerations avail nothing. Onthe contrary, they only handicap women the more, and tell fatally against them in the competitive battle. The commercial competition of to-day in the cheap clothing trade, intensified as it is by the influx of the foreigner, positively trades upon the maternity of women-workers. These poor creatures have no time for the pure tender delights of motherhood; they have no opportunity of attending properly to their children, or to the many other little duties which gather around the English word "home." To the low-class foreign Jew this matters little, for the word "home" to him has no meaning at all; but to Englishmen and to Englishwomen it offers a terrible problem. What "hope of our race" can we expect from the feeble, half-starved, and wholly overworked Englishwoman, who is thus thrust into the furnace of this fierce foreign competition!

There is another consideration also to be faced, which I have already hinted at. The unrestricted immigration of destitute aliens tends directly to increase prostitution in London and our large cities. This is a startling proposition; let me proceed to demonstrate its truth.

A witness giving evidence before the Sweating Committee, described the sweater's dens as "the most filthy, poisoning, soul-and-body-killing places imaginable." Even to stand at the open door of one of such places, and to breathe the fœtid air which rushes forth, is well-nigh unendurable to persons not hardened to such conditions. Yet it is in such places as these that Englishwomen are compelled to work side by side with the foreigner. To the foreigner it seems not to matter so much; to the Englishwoman, sooner or later, it is certain death. But I hear some say, "How about the Factory Regulations?" In theory the Factory Regulations are admirable; in practice they are utterlyinadequate. Their provisions are constantly evaded. Women are kept working in these dens from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., 10 p.m., or even midnight; or the intention of the Act is frustrated by their being given work to do at home. A case was mentioned before the House of Lords' Committee of a girl eighteen years of age, who worked from seven in the morning to half-past eight at night, for wages ranging from 3s.to 8s.a week. On Fridays she worked from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. (eleven hours), that being considered half a day, and paid for accordingly. All sorts of tricks are played to evade the Factory Inspector. His first appearance in the street is notified all along the sweating dens by a preconcerted signal. When he arrives at the door, he is kept in parley for a minute or two. Meanwhile the women and girls are smuggled away, and by the time he is admitted there is not a woman visible. They lend themselves, poor creatures, to this deception, because they know that if they did not, plenty more could be found who would. The result is that they are utterly at the sweater's mercy. Even the time that ought to be allowed for meals is often infringed upon. A woman who availed herself of a full hour for dinner would be liable to instant dismissal. Even the half-hour for tea is frequently denied them; the tea is put down by their side, and they swallow it as they work.

Such is the case of women working in the sweating dens. Those who work at home are scarcely better off. They must, through the constant pressure of this foreign competition, labour from dawn till late at night to procure the barest subsistence, a subsistence not sufficient to keep them in health and strength. One wretched garret is all they can afford. Here they labour, and live, and die—no one heeding. In the winter they do without fire, and often theworkers put on their backs, for the sake of warmth, the garments they are not actually engaged upon. Oftentimes it is not the woman alone, but her whole family who have to share this single room. It is impossible for a woman, working these excessive hours, to keep the room clean; and the consequence is that, especially in hot weather, it becomes infested by vermin, which find their way into the garments in process of making. The takers-in of the work in the larger houses, it is stated, kill the worst of these vermin with their shears as they examine their garments!

Few of us would consider that any sum could compensate for such grinding toil under such awful conditions. Yet what do these poor women get for their labour? I have already quoted the case of a girl who earned from 3s.to 8s.a week for over thirteen hours a day; but many girls in the East End factories do not earn more than 2s.or 3s.a week! Working by the piece, a woman is paid 5d.for making a vest; 7-1/2d.for making a coat. She can by fifteen hours' work make four coats in a day, which comes to 2s.6d.; but out of this has to be deducted 3d.to a button-holer for making the button-holes, and 4d.for "trimmings," which means fire, ironing, and soap, all necessary for her work. A boy's knickerbocker suit is made at prices varying from 4-1/2d.to 10-1/2d.complete, according to the amount of work. For a suit made at 9d.the sweater gets 1s.3d., leaving him a profit of 6d.Before destitute immigration set in, in such a volume, and prices were consequently higher, such a suit would have been sold at 3s.6d., which would have admitted of a larger profit, and consequently higher price for labour. Other prices are—a shirt, sold in a shop for 7s.6d., is made for 1s.; and men's trousers are made outright at as low a price as 4-1/2d.per pair. The price paidby a sweater to a woman for machining trousers, runs from 1-1/4d.to 3-1/4d.per pair, and out of this she has to find cotton and "trimmings." If she does this at home she pays 2s.6d.a week for the hire of a sewing-machine. The "finishers," as the women are called who press the garments, put on the tickets, and generally make them ready for sale, are paid from 2d.to 2-3/4d.a pair; but they lose a good deal of time in getting their work examined, and have frequently to stand three or four hours at a time. It is an invariable rule that no seats are provided for women when they take their work to the sweaters. If the examiner finds the first two or three pairs of trousers faulty, he will not go through the whole work, but throws them at the unfortunate woman, and tells her to take them back and alter them. In this way she loses two days in doing one day's work.

Shirt-makers who make by machine the common kinds of shirts, are paid 7d., 8d., and 9d.per dozen shirts for machining. They can machine 1-1/2 dozen sevenpenny shirts in a day, by working till midnight and later. The shirt-finishers, who make the button-holes by hand and sew on the buttons, get 3d.a dozen shirts, finding their own cotton, and can finish 1-1/2 dozen to 2 dozen in a day. Silk mantles, costing in the West End shops from £1 to £25, are made throughout in the East End for 7-1/2d.apiece, out of which the sweater pays the actual maker 5d.The common mantles are made at 5d.apiece; price to the worker, 3d.to 3-1/2d.Bead-trimmings are made by girls who, working twelve hours, earn from 8d.to 1s.2d.per day. Mackintoshes are made at from 10d.to 1s.apiece.

Mrs. Killick, a trouser-finisher, told the Sweating Committee that she could not make more than 1s.a day, working from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. She had a sick husband andthree children, and out of her earnings she paid 2s.a week rent. She chiefly lived on tea and a bit of fish. What a glimpse of patient heroism and noble self-denial does the evidence of this poor woman afford!

Five or six years ago these women made nearly double; the competition chiefly caused by the influx of cheap labour from abroad, has reduced prices some 40 or 50 per cent. Now, even the miserable wages earned are irregularly paid. The sweaters frequently keep their workers waiting for their money, and the more disreputable ones will cheat them out of their just dues. Work too is precarious; there are slack times during the year, when the workers may be idle for weeks together; yet they must still pay rent, and keep body and soul together—if they can. And this brings me back to the proposition from which I started.

How body and soul are kept together in the case of girls under such circumstances as have been detailed, it is not difficult though very painful to imagine. Working from dawn till night in hideous filth and squalor unutterable, for a wage which does not suffice to buy the barest necessaries (a wage cut down ever lower and lower by the fierce competition from the shoals of destitute foreigners landed in London week by week), hundreds, nay thousands of young women—Englishwomen, our sisters—eke out their wretched earnings by means of the street. The Pharisee and the Self-righteous pass by on the other side and condemn them; but it is not these poor unfortunates who are to be condemned, but the system which makes such a state of things possible. The Vicar of Old Ford, in his evidence before the House of Lords' Committee, mentioned cases he knew of where young girls of thirteen, who work in this cheap tailoring trade, were leading an immoral life.

In one instance, two sisters, one twelve and the other ten years of age, had already embarked upon a life of shame. One of these girls had been sent out by her stepmother, because the family "had to live."

Another instance, if possible more horrible still, was related to me by a clergyman in the East End of London, of a case which had come under his notice, though not before it was too late. It was that of a woman, an Englishwoman, a seamstress, who with her husband was engaged in the cheap tailoring trade at the usual sweating prices. All went fairly well for a time, for the two were able by their united efforts to earn a living, and to maintain themselves and their little children in a state of comparative decency and comfort. But one winter the husband, never a strong man, fell ill and died. The wife laboured on, managing by some almost superhuman effort to earn enough for herself and the children, and to keep body and soul together. Then the slack time, so greatly dreaded by all those engaged in the "sweating trade," came on, and there was nothing to be done for weeks and weeks. In despair this woman, who had hitherto led a blameless life, took to the streets. "It was wrong," the moralist and purist will say, "wrong and reprehensible to the last degree. Is there not the workhouse for such people, is there not parochial relief, are there not charitable agencies, free dinners, clothing clubs, district visitors without end? Could she not have applied to one of these instead of drifting into sin?" It may be so. All that I know is, that she and her children were starving, and that the sin brought its own punishment, for the poor woman never recovered from the horrors of that awful winter. The shame of it all seemed to settle on her as a blight, and the following year she died, broken-spirited, and broken-hearted,one more victim sacrificed to this infamous system of starvation prices and ruinous competition.

Most of the English girls to be seen at night in Oxford Street and the Strand, to say nothing of their even more degraded sisters in Whitechapel, are, or have been, tailoresses. How these poor creatures manage to exist at all, even when they eke out their wretched earnings by the price paid for their dishonour, it is not easy to see. The key of the mystery is to be found in their mutual help of one another. Even amid all their degradation and shame, many of them retain that divine instinct of self-sacrifice which in all ages has been the noblest part of womanhood. Dim it may be and undeveloped, but still it is there, evidenced daily by many little acts of kindness, many little generous deeds towards those who are more miserable and more suffering than themselves. "It is mostly the poor who help the poor." I will go further and say, it is mostly the wretched who help the wretched, for between them exists that intimate knowledge of each other's sorrows which is the truest bond of sympathy. Under happier circumstances these poor women might have lived honest and virtuous lives. As it is, they have to work side by side with men of all nationalities, under unhealthy and objectionable conditions—conditions subservient of all sense of decency. This, combined with the utterly inadequate wage, naturally leads to immorality, with its attendant satellites of drunkenness, disease, and death. Thus the burden of wretchedness and crime goes on, ever increasing in volume and intensity. How can it be otherwise when the ranks of the lost in our large cities, are thus being continually recruited from within and from without? Every now and then the public conscience is startled by the news of some awful tragedy—somepoor creature done to her death in Whitechapel. It is but a bubble bursting on the surface, which oozes up from the black depths of vice and misery beneath.

One of the most potent causes of this vice and misery is undoubtedly the unlimited pouring in of destitute and objectionable foreigners. Again I ask, Can nothing be done to rescue these women—our sisters—from the attendant horrors of this fierce and degrading foreign competition? Can nothing be done to place the price of their labour upon such a level as to enable them by honest work to lead virtuous and happy lives?

Usque quo Domine?Lord, how long? Such is the bitter cry of the workwomen in East London.

The sanitary conditions amid which the great majority of these alien immigrants labour and live may truly be described as appalling. It is a remarkable thing that just as the lower organisms of animal life are capable of living under circumstances which are intolerable to higher organisms, so can these people exist—and even to a certain extent thrive—in an atmosphere and amid surroundings which to the more highly-developed Englishman and Englishwoman mean disease and death. Cleanliness and sanitation are peculiarities of Western rather than of Eastern nationalities. When Peter the Great went back to Russia after his famous visit to London two centuries ago, he left behind him such a filthy habitation, that the cleansing of it had to be defrayed by an especial grant from the Exchequer. This is a matter of history; and if rumour is to be believed, a similar experience in connection with the visit of an Oriental potentate has occurred in very recent years. If this sort of thing is incidental to the visit of Eastern Princes, how much rather then is it liable to accompany the wholesale inundation of poor and degraded foreigners, who flock into London and our large cities from every country in Europe?

In treating of this sanitary aspect, in order to avoid any possible charge of exaggeration, I prefer to quote the statements of unimpeachable authorities rather than to advance any theories of my own. The surroundings amid which these people are content to labour and to live are deplorable and filthy beyond description. To quote from the Majority Report of the Sweating Committee—a Report which has been attacked because of the undue moderation of its language, and which certainly cannot be said to unduly exaggerate the evil:—

"Three or four gas-jets may be flaring in a room, a coke fire burning in the wretched fire-place, sinks untrapped, closets without water, and, altogether, the sanitary conditions abominable. A witness told us that in a double room, perhaps 9 feet by 15 feet, a man, his wife, and six children slept, and in the same room ten men were usually employed, so that at night eighteen persons would be in that one room. These witnesses alluded to the want of sanitary precautions, and of decent and sufficient accommodation, and declared that the effects of this, combined with the inadequate wages earned, had the effect of driving girls to prostitution."

The state of the sweaters' dens in East London is revolting beyond measure, and resembles rather the description of Dante'sInferno, than the abodes of a professedly civilized people. Here is the description of one taken almost at random from a mass of evidence teeming with similar details. A Factory Inspector, who described it, says it gives a fair idea of all the rest, and he certainly ought to know, seeing that some 4000 factories and "workshops innumerable" are under his inspection. He says:—

"You find a filthy bed, on which garments which aremade are laid; little children, perfectly naked little things, lying about on the floor and on the bed; frying-pans and all sorts of dirty utensils with food of various descriptions on the bed, under the bed, over the bed, everywhere; clothes hanging on a line, with nothing more than a large gas-stove with the ashes all flying about, and the atmosphere so dense that you get ill after a night's work there; and that is the reason I am deaf now."

In respect of sanitation, the foreign Jews appear to be the worst offenders. The Sanitary Committee of the Jewish Board of Guardians admit in their Report that of 880 houses visited by the inspector, 623 were defective, and below the standard required by the Local Authority. Of these no less than 341 were in Whitechapel alone. To quote a few samples:—

"In Whitechapel, some so-called 'Model Dwellings' exist, in which the drain of a water-closet had been entirely stopped up for three weeks prior to the visit of the Inspector, while two of the cellars (inhabited) were flooded with sewage, and had been so flooded for four days past. At another place, where a noxious odour had prevailed for years, the refuse which the Committee succeeded in causing to be removed from the basement room, contained among its various components the dead bodies of five cats, a dog, and a rabbit. The water-closet drains of three other houses were discovered on the Inspector's visit to have remained in a choked condition for three, five, and six weeks respectively. At a house in St. George's-in-the-East, three boot-finishers were found at work in a front basement room, while the adjoining back basement room was flooded with sewage, which forced its way up a gully supposed to be protected by a bell-trap. The cover of this trap, as is generally the casewith these appliances, was absent, and thus the sewer had direct and unobstructed communication with the interior of the house."

This extract is taken bodily from the Report of the Sweating Committee of the Jewish Board of Guardians. They are writing of their own people, and are certainly not likely to exaggerate the state of affairs.

The habitations of the Italians are little better; in fact in many ways they are just as bad. The sanitary arrangements of the cheap dwellings around Saffron Hill, where the Italians mostly abound, leave everything to be desired. On this subject I had lately some conversation with an officer of the Italian Benevolent Society. He described to me a sleeping-room—it often served as a living-room as well—in one of the ordinary dwelling-houses in the neighbourhood of Saffron Hill. In this one room, neither very lofty nor very large, may frequently be found a dozen persons herded together rather like cattle than human beings, sleeping promiscuously as follows:—In one bed, or what serves as a bed, a married couple; in the next, two young girls; in a third, a single young man; in the fourth, three or four children of different ages and sexes—and so on. Owing to the lack of ventilation, and the number of human beings crowded in the room—to quote the words of my informant—"the stench was awful." The result of all this upon the victims, both physically and morally, can easily be imagined. Another instance was that given by Inspector Holland to Mr. Biron the magistrate.[20]An Italian, who was summoned for sending his little girl out begging, was traced to his home, and there the police inspector found the parents occupying a miserably furnished little apartment in AldisMews, with six children. The room, which "smelt horribly," contained a single bed, under which were kept the appliances for making ice-cream; and Inspector Holland also found the room to be inhabited by a dog, a cat, a monkey, and several white mice. The moral of all this is obvious, viz. that these people are able to live under conditions amid which it would be impossible for an average Englishman to exist at all. Therefore it is only one more illustration of the unfair nature of this unnatural competition.

There is, however, another point to be noted in connection with this sanitary aspect. The conditions under which work is done in the sweaters' dens, and in their homes by these unfortunate people, largely assists in the spreading of infectious diseases. I refer of course more especially to the cheap tailoring trade. Some materials carry infection very quickly. Dr. Bate, a medical officer of health in the East End of London, speaks, in his evidence before the Sweating Committee, of infection being carried far and wide by the garments being often made up in rooms where children are lying ill with small-pox, scarlet fever, and other maladies. He had seen the garments thrown over the children's beds; and a case is mentioned of a child covered with measles being wrapt up in one of the half-made garments to keep it warm. And yet the articles made under such conditions are sold in the cheap, ready-made clothes-shops all over London and throughout the provinces.

Nor are matters in the foreign quarters of the provincial towns much better. From Manchester, from Leeds, from Liverpool, from Glasgow, the same tale reaches us, of the filthy habits of these foreign immigrants, and their neglect of all sanitary precautions. For instance, at Meadow Bank, an outlying district of Winsford, there is a large colony ofPoles and Hungarians. They are employed in some local salt works, and were especially brought over to England some years ago in consequence of a strike in the Salt District, and now fill the places which were formerly occupied by Englishmen. A description of the way in which these people live, will best show how impossible it is for decent English workmen to compete against them. It is best told in the words of Dr. Fox, the medical officer of the District Board of Health. In his report he writes:—

"To say that these people are living together like beasts would be an insult and a libel upon beasts. Beasts would be better provided for than are those human beings. In the first place the rooms are, without exception, overcrowded. Again, they are destitute of furniture. The beds are trays covered with filthy straw; the bed-clothing is entirely constituted of filthy sacking. The men sleep in their clothes, even in their boots. The windows are rarely if ever opened; the beds in point of fact being many of them never empty; one set of workmen occupying them by day, and another by night. The atmosphere is necessarily foul, fœtid, and pestilential to persons of ordinary susceptibilities; and yet, in the absence of larders, and kitchens, and separate living-rooms, in this fœtid, stinking atmosphere the food is stored and cooked. Arrangements for washing there are none, except the outside taps. In one room six men and one woman are sleeping, unmarried, promiscuously; and in another, a man, his wife, and daughter—fourteen years of age—were occupying one bed. Canal-boats are palaces and temples of cleanliness, comfort, and morality, compared with this horrible colony of Bohemianism."

It is not possible to say anything which would add to this tale of horror. The facts speak for themselves. Dr. Fox,though subjected to a severe examination before the House of Commons' Committee, maintained that there was not a syllable of exaggeration in his report, though in consequence of public attention having been attracted by its publication, a slight improvement had since taken place in some minor details. There was no necessity, it should be noted, for these foreigners to live in the way they did. In this instance they were paid a sufficient wage for them to exist under decent and sanitary conditions. It was simply that they preferred doing so, and were but following the instincts of a nature which had become engendered in them by long years of filthy and degraded habits. Yet it was to make room for such as these that the English workmen were ousted, and are being ousted daily, in the great manufacturing centres of Great Britain. The question is, therefore, how long are these people to be allowed to pour in upon us unchecked, bringing with them their foreign habits and customs, and living in conformity with these alone, an outstanding defiance to English law, and a serious danger to the health and well-being of the surrounding English community? Is it right or just that our people should be forced by this unnatural competition to live and toil side by side with such people, surrounded by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad water, bad smells, bad and degrading occupations—by every circumstance which depresses the vital energies, and leaves them an easy prey to pestilence? But we are told that to shut our doors upon these aliens would be to reverse England's traditions. I maintain that we have lavished sympathy enough upon them already, and that it is now necessary for us to keep a little of our sympathy for our own flesh and blood. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of sanitation. Where it isneglected, disease and death surely follow. Doctors tell us that more human beings are killed in England every year by unnecessary and preventible diseases, than were killed at Waterloo or Sadowa, and the great majority of these victims are children. Preventible diseases, according to Sir Joseph Fayrer, still kill 125,000 per annum, entailing a loss of labour from sickness estimated at £7,750,000 per annum. "Why then," as the Prince of Wales[21]asked, "are they not prevented?"

Sanitary legislation is all very well, but it deals with effects and not with causes. Such dens as those described, not by my imagination, be it noted, but by unimpeachable authorities, are nothing less than breeding-houses of pestilence. If we swept them clean to-morrow others would soon be found as bad, for the filthy and unsanitary habits of these immigrant aliens are bred in the bone, and wherever they go they take them with them. It cannot be healthy for a nation to have such a sore as this existing in its side, yet we allow this plague-spot to continue in our midst, and to spread its contamination far and wide. If we wish to perpetuate that healthy, sturdy stock which has made England what she is, we must prevent the strain from being defiled by this ceaseless pouring in of the unclean and unhealthy of other lands. "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump," and nothing is more contagious than dirty and unsanitary habits. The physical health of the people should be the first care of the State, for upon it depends not only the present, but the future, of our race.Salus populi suprema est lex—and before this inviolable law all other considerations must bow.

The Majority Report of the Sweating Committee—from which Lord Dunraven dissented—complacently recommendedthe more frequent use of "limewash" in the sweaters' dens and workshops where these indigent foreigners chiefly congregate. But it will require a great deal more than "limewash" to whiten this hideous evil. People who bring with them filthy and unsanitary habits are a standing source of danger to the rest of the community. Cattle from an infected district are refused admission to our ports; surely the health of even one of the meanest of our people is of more importance than many cattle.

Closely bound up with the sanitary danger, indeed inseparable from it, is the social evil. The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure air, of a sufficient but not exorbitant amount of work—all that in fact tends to produce themens sana in corpore sano—all this is fully acknowledged and known; yet we freely throw open our doors to a class whose habits and customs admittedly militate against all these powerful agencies for good.

The unlimited pouring in of destitute and degraded foreigners tends both directly and indirectly to increase our national burden of pauperism, vice, and crime. With regard to the first part of this statement it is often objected that but few of these foreign immigrants come upon the rates, and that our workhouses and penitentiaries show comparatively faint signs of their presence. This is a half-truth, and like all half-truths it conceals a most dangerous fallacy.Nulla falsa doctrina est, quae non permisceat aliquid veritatis.On the surface I admit the plausibility of the objection. In Leeds, for instance, where the foreign colony has reached abnormal proportions, the total number of Jews chargeable to the common fund of the Leeds Union, at the time whenparticulars were furnished to the Board of Trade in the early part of this year (1891), was only 62. The numerous Jewish and Foreign Benevolent Societies and Charitable Institutions are far too careful to allow their people to come upon the rates more than they can possibly help. But that the whole tendency of this destitute foreign immigration is to force those of our English working-classes, who are in any degree affected by it, into pauperism or something worse, cannot for one moment be denied by those who have any practical knowledge of the poor in the crowded centres of population to which these undesirable foreigners flock.

In proof of this assertion, I may quote the opinion of the Mile End Board of Guardians, who believed that this destitute foreign immigration had "a deteriorating effect upon the moral, financial, and social conditions of the people." The Whitechapel Guardians of the poor also deplore the substitution of the foreign for the English population. The result, they say, is the lowering of the general condition of the people. The Hackney Board of Guardians also, after an exhaustive inquiry, arrived at the opinion that the unchecked immigration of destitute foreigners was a serious social danger, reducing wages to a "starvation point." They supported their decision by a series of practical and convincing arguments which only lack of space prevents my quoting in full.[22]

If a life of honest labour has no better reward to offer than the meagre wages and attendant horrors of the sweaters' dens, can it be wondered if in despair of earning an honest livelihood, hundreds, nay thousands, of our people are tempted to abandon the unequal struggle, and to drift into idleness, drunkenness, and vice? I have endeavoured toshow in a previous chapter how this unnatural competition forces Englishwomen upon the streets; but that, alas! is not the only resultant form of vice. A great social reformer[23]once said that "he had found a man's sobriety to be in direct proportion to his cleanliness." Without admitting the universal accuracy of this opinion, there is no doubt that it contains within it the germs of a great truth. Drunkenness, that endless source of misery and crime, is not in itself so much a cause as an effect, the effect of the loss of that innate sense of self-respect which forms one of the great barriers between the man and the beast. "When we examine into the ultimate cause of a dangerous class," writes Canon Kingsley,[24]"into the one property common to all its members, whether thieves, beggars, profligates, or the merely pauperized—we find it to be this loss of self-respect. As long as that remains, poor souls may struggle on heroically, pure amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when self-respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in these dens of physical and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, and they must sink, into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye, the very smells, which surround them."

All this is true enough. But how, I would ask, is it possible for our people to maintain this precious sense of self-respect when they are forced daily and hourly into contact with those who appear to have no more idea of decency, cleanliness, and comfort than the beasts which perish? The whole physical circumstances of their lives fight against them. To the great bulk of these immigrantaliens, the word "home," that word so sacred to English ears, around which so many associations cling, has no meaning at all. They appear to have only one dominant passion, the love of gain;—not that they gain much, poor creatures, still it is there;—and in their pursuit of it they are willing to accommodate themselves to the meagre wage, the lengthy hours, and the filthy surroundings already described. With this exception they appear to be indifferent to everything which makes life worth the living, to have no happiness in the past, no pleasures in the present, no hope in the future. With our own people it is different. However degraded they may be, there exists among them the longing for enjoyment. "Not to enjoy is not to live." Moral and intellectual enjoyments many have none; and in default of these, they betake themselves to the lowest forms of animal enjoyment; snatching at their pleasures greedily, foully, all the more fiercely because their opportunities of enjoyment are so limited. Can we wonder that these things are so? Can we judge them harshly? God forbid!

A well-known social reformer, for whose work and opinions I have the greatest respect, has written:—"It is a fact apparent to every thoughtful man, that the larger portion of the misery that constitutes our social question arises from indulgence, gluttony, drink, waste, profligacy, betting, and dissipation."[25]This on the surface is true enough; but when we come to examine more closely into the problems of poverty, we shall find that though intemperance, unthrift, self-indulgence, and inefficiency are unhappily the common vices of the poor, yet these vices are not so much thecausesof poverty, as theeffectsof it.

The Rev. S. A. Barnett, of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, whoknows the East End of London so thoroughly, does not find the origin of poverty in the vices of the poor. Terrible as are the results of drunkenness, unthrift, and self-indulgence, it is not possible, if we view the facts dispassionately, to regard these as the main sources of poverty. We shall rather look upon these evils as the natural outcome of the fierce struggle for existence, which is carried on under our present industrial conditions. Morality is admittedly the truest and most real end of man, and therefore on a superficial aspect it is natural to represent the miseries of the very poor to be chiefly occasioned by their own faults. It is a comfortable view to take, for it at once lightens the responsibility of the rich man, and it salves his conscience by the specious plea that after all the poor and the wretched have brought half their troubles upon themselves; and as they have made their beds, so must they lie. But this is rather the attitude of the Pharisee than of the philanthropist, and the moral and social problems of our age and country will never be solved if approached in such a spirit.

It is a cruel and unholy thing thus to intensify the struggle for existence among our own people by the ceaseless immigration of those, who, to quote the words of the Bishop of Bedford, "are at once demoralized and demoralizing."[26]Few have had more practical experience of the crowded East End of London than Dr. Billing, and he has given eloquent testimony to the injury worked upon our own people there by this wholesale invasion. In this fierce battle for life, of what use is it to utter trite platitudes about the "survival of the fittest," since, as another great authority, Lord Dunraven, has pointed out, "the fittestin this instance are those who are able to exist upon the lowest possible diet, in the greatest possible filth, and subject to the greatest amount of hardships and misery"?[27]

Englishmen and Englishwomen were not formed thus to live, and thus to toil. They cannot do so without contracting diseased habits of body and mind—without becoming brutalized, in fact. They lose their self-respect, and go to swell that degraded class into which theweakeras well as theworstmembers of society show a perpetual tendency to sink—a class which not respecting itself does not respect others, which has nothing to lose and all to gain, and in which the lowest passions are ever ready to burst out and avenge themselves by frightful methods. That is why it is, at the present hour, in the crowded courts and teeming alleys of East London, there exist all the elements of something even more terrible in its way than the misery which brought about the French Revolution.

It has been said that "A great city is a great evil." But paradoxical as it may seem, it is also a great good, since it provides employment for many thousands who otherwise would starve. Still it cannot be denied that the abnormal increase of our great cities, and the gradual depopulation of our country districts, form one of the most serious social problems of our time.

There is a constant movement going on from the country to the town. This is due to many causes, one of which is undoubtedly the introduction of machinery, which, whilst lessening the work for labourers in the agricultural districts, at the same time creates an extraordinary demand for "hands" in our manufacturing centres. Another cause is the higher rate of wages, and the bustling customs of thetown, which never cease to offer attractions to young people starting in life. The result of this steady current of human beings flowing away from the country to the town is disastrous to both. Every great city in England is rapidly approaching a state of congestion; and in rural places there is a great dearth of workers, the supply falling very far short of the demand. If the 30,000,000 human beings in England and Wales all had food and lodging, there would be no cause for anxiety; but a large number of them are very poor, and wholly unable to support themselves. In 1890 no less than 671,000 persons received Poor Law relief, of whom 462,000 were relieved outside, and 179,000 inside the workhouse. In London alone 5000 able-bodied men were relieved every day, at a cost to the Metropolitan rate-payers of £188,000 per year. Twenty-four out of every hundred, or nearly one quarter of those who died in London last year, died either in the workhouses, hospitals, or lunatic asylums. Therefore, considering this question of foreign immigration generally, and foreign Jewish immigration in particular, we must take into account the nature of its distribution and the gregarious habits of the Jewish immigrants. The weekly arrival of hundreds of semi-starving foreigners must of necessity have a serious effect upon our unskilled labour market in London and our great provincial cities, to which the immigrant aliens principally flock. All thinking persons will admit that it is of more importance to protect our own workmen than to preserve our traditional character for hospitality, if it can be shown—and I consider it can—that the exercise of such hospitality tends to degrade the social condition of the native workers.

Why then add to the difficulties of this problem by letting in yearly thousands of these foreigners, chiefly the "lowestclass of the lowest class," who, parasites that they are, flock at once to our great centres of population, and prey upon our people, underselling their labour, and taking the bread from their mouths?

We live in the days of a great social upheaval. We hear on all sides of the great "Labour movement." What does it mean? What is at the bottom of it all? Only the desire of our labouring classes to seek for themselves some alleviation of their lot; some increased opportunity for leisure; some better remuneration for their labour; some surer provision against sickness and old age. They are seeking—not always by the best and wisest methods perhaps, but that is not their fault—how to make their lives better and broader, healthier and happier. With these desires every right-thinking man is in sympathy. The complete realization of their dream may be Utopian perhaps—I do not know. But even if it be, what is there to blame in this divine discontent?

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