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 the mens 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 when particulars 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 to show 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 immigrant aliens, 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 the causes of poverty, as the effects of it.

The Rev. S. A. Barnett, of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, who knows 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 fittest in 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 the weaker as well as the worst members 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 the town, 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 "lowest class 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?