A dominant note of the English character is kindliness. Animals are treated in England better than anywhere else in the world; the ordinary sleekness of the English horse and the serene confidence in human nature of the London cat are two outward and visible signs of the absence of cruelty in the national character. This kindliness makes more tolerable, and softens considerably what would be otherwise the intolerable gulf between rich and poor. England, taking into consideration population and area, is the richest country in the world, I suppose; yet it has a proportion of its population sunk in poverty—"the submerged tenth" one social observer (making a rather pessimistic calculation) called them. English statesmanship has so far failed to grapple successfully with the I spent the late months of autumn one year in looking into the case of the unemployed and the casual workers; tramping the north country with them and following them then on their pilgrimage to London. With the first hint of winter the unemployed or the casual worker who knows the rules of the game heads for London. In the summer and the autumn he has wandered the country-side, working more or less regularly as he tramped, in potato fields, turnip fields, hop gardens, cornfields. It is a steadily narrowing opportunity, this casual agricultural work. With each year more and more of England's fruit, hops, vegetables, roots, and corn are grown abroad. To some extent, also, labour-saving machinery is displacing the manual worker where the tillage of the soil still survives. But there is surprisingly little machinery used in British agriculture as It is astonishing how close the agricultural land comes to London. One may see, within half a mile of Hampstead "tube," odd hayfields, and after leaving the Midlands, approaching London from the north, the pall of smoke lifts and the heavens appear as a broad belt of agricultural land intervenes. It would seem as if the traveller were passing away from, not approaching, the great industrial centre. Leaving Luton and coming through to St. Albans the country smiles in green pleasantness within sight and sound, almost, of London. Birds see the sky and rejoice. Hayricks warm the landscape with their golden yellow, and over the stubble fields sturdy plough-horses pass and repass, painting the fields with broad brush strokes a rich chocolate brown. The hedges in the autumn are glowing with berries—blackberries and the scarlet spots of the hawthorn berry. With close search even hazel-nuts Sometimes the nuts and the berries give some sort of temporary relief to the casual worker. I remember one typical man of the "submerged tenth" who was making a harvest of the berries. He was a poor old tramp, hobbling along quickly in spite of the stiffness of rheumatism. He had a can to fill with what he gleaned from the hedges. He hoped, he told me, to get a shilling for the berries at the next town. His age was sixty-six, and he had been in his young prime a navvy and road labourer. Now he was past all hope of further employment as a labourer, and navvying work was impossible. Proudly he boasted that he had never been "in trouble," and had never actually begged, though in the main he lived on charity. His winters, it seems, were spent in the workhouses. With the coming of the spring he turned his face towards the green fields, and lived somehow through the summer on what he could pick up as the reward of doing odd jobs or as the dole of charity. He was one of a class I found common enough on the roads, past all steady and useful work, going with crippled gait steadily to the end. The same day I encountered, among other wayfarers, a man who suggested this old and desolate tramp in the making. He was a young, vigorous, and capable fellow, civil, intelligent, and eager for work. He had walked from Manchester, having been on the road since the previous Sunday (the day was Saturday), and the golden goal at the end of his journey was a week's work at the Islington Agricultural Show, which had been promised to him. For the week he would get 30s. After the Islington Show he had the chance, perhaps, of getting another job in the same line. He followed agricultural shows around the country, for he understood cattle and horses. Another type of the poor I met outside of Durham, plodding patiently along two miles out of the old cathedral city. He was something a little higher than a casual labourer, and had a "trade," if one might call it so: that of a porter. He was making out from Durham, where "things were very bad," to a country place, unspecified, where there was work. A brave and cheerful soul he was. At the age of four his leg had been broken and badly set, and he had grown up a little lame. That was over forty years ago, when the poor had less He was a patient little fighter, and had, with his lame leg, kept up somehow with the ranks of the workers, and had never begged a meal or a shilling in his life, and was, in a way, happy for all his frustrated longing for the open life of the country. Out from Newcastle-on-Tyne another day of my tramp I picked up with a worker in the building trade. He was not a tramp, for he had A homely, domestic man, typically English in his virtues and in the limitations of his virtues, was my mason friend. In the good times of the past he used to make 35s., 37s. 6d., and £2:1:6 a week at his trade, "steady work and constant." As a bachelor he found that all his money went as fast as he made it. After one long spell on £2:1:6 a week he had nothing at all left to tide over a week without work. That set his thoughts to matrimony and he "settled down." Since then his finances had been much more steady and prosperous. While he was in work he always paid his wife 30s. a week out of his wages, no more and no less. "He didn't come asking her for some of it back in the middle The virtues of his wife as a housekeeper he talked of sturdily. Such a thing as baker's bread—"nasty, unwholesome stuff"—was never seen in his house: it was all home-baked bread. Part of the secret of the housekeeping in unemployed times was perhaps the fact that they had two lodgers, who paid 3s. 6d. a week each for their quarters and paid for the "raw material" of their meals, having the food cooked free. I was interested to learn that 11-1/2d. a week was charged to each of the lodgers for the flour used in his bread—not an extravagant weekly expenditure on that item of food. THE VILLAGE OF AMBERLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE THE VILLAGE OF AMBERLEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE A good average man this, not at all heroic, common-sensible, and strictly moderate in his virtues, keeping a very good margin of his wages for himself, but not poaching on the remainder. Probably the wife has much the harder life of the two, with her 30s. a week steady when the good man is in work, and nothing at all but the lodgers' money at other times; probably, too, she is happy enough. May a change of fortune soon bring steady work! Studied from the English country-side the life of the lowly appeared to me often pitiful but rarely abject. It was relieved from squalor by much heroic courage; and by evidences of that beautiful love of the green fields which the English seem to have by nature. In London the position is more depressing, for there one encounters a vast army in which are mingled inextricably poor victims worthy of the fullest compassion, and cunning "wasters" who, finding it easy to live without work, are resolved not to work. To the "professional unemployed," I believe, the autumn entry into London is a blessed relief. He knows all the charities which can be worked for food and shelter. He has put in his penitential period in the country to give a reasonable air to the tale that he has been in work, and prepares with zest to tap the old springs of alms. London promises him winter comfort, human companionship; warm nights in shelters, when politics can be discussed and the state of the The day I tramped in—on my mission of investigation—a thin rain filled the air with a blurring mist and made a horrible mud underfoot. My too realistic boots gave this mud entrance to my feet. The soft, suggy sound and feel of this mud making its way in and out was at once depressing and enraging. I cursed the weather, and London, and the resolution which had brought me on the enterprise. It seemed as if it would be just heaven to have clean feet, and stout soles between them and the loathsome dirt. I was wet through as regards clothes. That did not matter. The rain from above was clean except for a little soot. But this stuff beneath—faugh! If other men think and feel as I do, when you wish to "lift" a man out of the mire of hopelessness give him first a stout pair of boots. The Spitalfields "doss" to which I had been There are much cheaper lodging-houses, and one absolutely free one, Medland Hall, on the Ratcliff Highway near Stepney Station. I visited it one November evening at five o'clock. Under a railway arch there was drawn up a tattered regiment of men some 300 strong. Now and again a late-comer arrived and took his place in the rear rank. Two police officers attended to keep order, but in the men there seemed not enough energy left for disorder. Like a cluster of bats they hung, dark, inert, to that wall of the arch which gave some little shelter from the At six, when the great bulk of the crowd had been waiting an hour (some of them probably much longer), the order was given to march, and the men filed into Medland Hall, each one getting as he entered a half-pound of bread with a little butter. That was his meal for the night, and, like his bed, it was absolutely free. The bed was a box on the floor, with a seaweed mattress and an oilskin covering. Most of the men were young. Few of them had gone past the labouring age. Some were obviously tuberculous, others crippled with rheumatism. The gathering, too, had its castes. A man who had been once a chief clerk, and who still wore a "boxer" hat in place of the usual This winter (1912) the London authorities, at last awake to the scandal of homeless men wandering or sleeping in the streets, have instituted a system by which the police will find shelter for all who are found without homes. But even that will not remove all the scandal. For many years the charitable provision for the homeless in London has been ample, and I could not at first find an explanation for the Thames Embankment miserables who huddled on the seats throughout the nights and had their shivering sleep disturbed again and again by the police, or for the unfortunates who haunted "the Dark Arches" of the Strand and other places giving shelter from the rain. With the use of any intelligence at all, it seemed, a man could get shelter of a sort and food of a sort. Yet people, I know, did in rare cases actually perish from exposure and from hunger in London. Inquiring among the Embankment men, the unhappiest of all the miserable army, there seemed to be always one of two explanations for haunting the Embankment—either the desperate sense of shame of the man who has come down One unemployed with whom I conversed, or tried to converse, at midnight just near the Temple Pier was sunk in such apathy that he, I verily believe, would not have walked 400 yards to get the most comfortable bed in London. At any rate, when I gave him a shilling he made no move away from his seat, showed, indeed, very little interest in the dole. His was an extreme case, but many seemed to be almost as dead to any idea of effort. "With the use of any intelligence" a man can get shelter—yes. But the man who is down often loses his intelligence as he sinks. The "cunning" unemployed, on the other hand, flourishes. In China they have a term "rice Christians" for heathen who pretend conversion to Christianity in order to secure food from the missionaries. The cunning unemployed is usually a "rice" Anglican, or Roman Catholic or Wesleyan of the most fervent type. His religious views are strong to the point of bigotry. But should For the man who has made a study of the art of living without work London offers a vast field. There are so many charities that by going the round it is possible to avoid all danger of becoming too familiar at any one of them, and since there is no effective safeguard against overlapping it is easy to be getting help from two or even more sources simultaneously. This state of affairs, of course, does not help the genuine unemployed, the man who wants work and not charity. But it is a constant temptation to him to drop his self-respect and sink to the level of the men who, he finds, live just as comfortably without labour as he is able to do by steady industry. The life of "toiling for leave to live," using up to-day for just as much reward as will allow you to be fit for work to-morrow—and that is the life of thousands—has, after all, not much attraction, considered dispassionately. The tramp in Mr. Wells's story who explained that Recognising that, it is possible to come away from a study even of the "submerged tenth" in England with some cheerfulness. The mistakes of the past which have allowed that inundation of misery can be rectified, and, serious as those mistakes have been, they have left the character of the English people in the main sturdy and self-respecting. Of the "submerged tenth" I think only a tenth, i.e. one per cent of the total population, is actually hopeless and helpless. The others will respond to a wiser organisation of the national life offering more opportunity and less charity. On this point I have sought the views of several clergymen working in the East End, the poor quarter of London. They were all proud, and justifiably so, of the various efforts made to salve the lot of the poor—the university settlements, the hospitals, infirmaries, nursing associations, charitable and semi-charitable dormitories, the associations for the supply of food, clothing, coal, and the like. But not one, challenged to it, could truthfully claim that the sum of all this work was remedial in any real sense of the word. Not one of them could deny that most of it directly attacked the principle of self-reliance. The wretched were kept alive, and that was all. No future was opened out for the great majority of them, and very very rarely did any future mean useful citizenship of Great Britain, but rather the export of the young citizen to some other land in the hope that it would give him a chance. Yet all agreed that as a matter of reasonable probability most of the men who are down could be saved and are worth saving. The proportion That leaves, in the opinion of the men who have made a life study of the subject, not my one per cent, but only one-half per cent of the total English population as hopelessly "down." It is a bad wastage when one thinks that every human creature is a temple of the Divine, but it is not so gloomy a position as most imagine. And it can, and it will be stopped. |