George R. Sims

“ The mother is ill—has been for weeks; her lips are burning with fever, her throat is dry and parched, and this common reservoir, open to all the dust and dirt with which the air is thick, open to the draining in rainy weather of the filthy roof of the tumble-down structure beside it—this is the spring at which she is to slake her thirst. Is it any wonder that disease is rampant, or that the temperance folk have such trouble to persuade the masses that cold water is a good and healthy drink? ”

“ To the gallery people the starvation in the garret, the separation of husband and wife, the wail of the little children for bread, the agony of the mother over the cradle of her sick baby, the struggle with poverty, the heartlessness of the cruel landlord who wants the rent, and the roughness of the officials who are called in to persecute virtue in distress, are all so many items in their own daily life. ”

“ The hospitals are the heavens-upon-earth of the poor. I have heard little children—their poor pinched faces wrinkled with pain—murmur that they didn't mind it, because if they had been well they would never have come to 'the beautiful place.' Beautiful, indeed, by contrast with their wretched homes are the clean wards, the comfortable beds, and the kind faces of the nurses. Step across from the home of a sick child in the slums of the Borough to the Evelina Hospital, and it is like passing from the infernal regions to Paradise. ”

“ This is the dark side of the Dock-labourer's story. It has a brighter and better one inside, where on miles and miles of wharf hundreds of men, package- and bale-laden, are hurrying to and fro, stowing the produce of the world in shed after shed. Thousands of barrels of sugar are lying in one, and the air is perfectly sweet with it. The ground is treacly with it, and one's boots are saturated with it as one walks through a thick slime of what looks like toffee gone wrong in a sweetstuff window on a hot summer day. ”

“ Drink is the curse of these communities; but how is it to be wondered at? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and fortunes are made out of men and women who seldom know where to-morrow's meal is coming from.
Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their light and their glitter, are crowded? Drink is sustenance to these people; drink gives them the Dutch courage necessary to go on living; drink dulls their senses and reduces them to the level of the brutes they must be to live in such sties. ”

“ All reforms injure one class at first in order to benefit another. But while public attention is so fully aroused to the question of 'Housing the Poor,' we may as well learn the lesson of the past in order to avoid a recurrence of the evil. How is it a puzzled public is asking every day that, with medical officers of health, sanitary inspectors, inspectors of nuisances, and what not, all armed with full powers, so many districts of labouring-class accommodation have been allowed to drift into a state of dilapidation and filth which renders it imperatively necessary to raze them to the ground? ”

“ It is on that broad ground I venture to ask those who by these scant sketches of a great evil have become in some slight way acquainted with it, to raise their voices and give strength to the cry which is going up at last for a rigid and searching inquiry into the conditions under which the Poor of this vast city live.
To leave the world a little better than he found it is the best aim a man can have in life, and no labour earns so sweet and so lasting a reward as that which has for its object the happiness of others. ”

“ You pave the way for the brave soldiers of a good cause to fight under more favourable circumstances. The temperance advocates have accomplished much—they will accomplish more; but if they wish to check the evil in its hotbed, they must be among the strongest advocates of the proper Housing of the Poor. To say, because a certain proportion of the poor are drunkards, it is useless to try and improve the social condition of the masses, is like refusing to send the lifeboat to a sinking ship because half the crew are already known to be drowned. ”

“ Friendly leads, whip-rounds, and benefits are nowhere so common as among the labouring classes whose earnings are precarious. While a millionaire requires a reference from the C. O. S. before giving the 'broken-down officer' who calls on him half-a-sovereign, the street-hawker or the dock labourer flings his sixpence into the hat extended for a 'poor cove' he has never seen in his life without a second thought. A pitiful tale reaches the heart of the poor in a moment—their tears are as easily won as their laughter. ”

“ We choose the heart of a thickly-populated district, and emerge from comparative quiet into a Babel of sound. A sharp turn brings us from a side-street into one long thoroughfare ablaze with light, and as busy as a fair. It is a fair, in fact; the pavement and the roadway are crowded with a seething mass of human beings side by side with the meat-stalls, the fish-stalls, the fruit and vegetable stalls, and the cheap-finery stalls ”

“ With our minds full of this pathetic picture of child-life in the 'Homes of the Poor,' we descend the crazy staircase, and get out into as much light as can find its way down these narrow alleys.
Outside we see a portly gentleman with a big gold chain across his capacious form, and an air of wealth and good living all over him. He is the owner of a whole block of property such as this, and he waxes rich on his rents. Strange as it may seem, these one-roomed outcasts are the best paying tenants in London. They pay so much for so little, and almost fight to get it. ”

“ We must remember that it is not only poverty we have to deal with in order to metamorphose Horrible London into a new Arcadia—we have to do battle with a hydra-headed monster called Vice, and vice is born and bred in tens of thousands of these outcasts, whose lot we are trying to remedy. It taints the entire atmosphere of the slums. The people I refer to are dirty and foul and vicious, as tigers are fierce and vindictive and cruel, because it is part of their nature. ”

“ In the course of many years of the closest contact with the most poverty-stricken of our fellow-men, I have learnt to think better, and not worse, of human nature, and to know that love, self-sacrifice, and devotion flourish in this barren soil as well as in the carefully-guarded family circles, which are, or should be, forcing-houses for all that is choicest and most beautiful among human instincts. ”

“ The principal amusement in the street, apart from buying knives and neckties of the Cheap Jack and entering into a raffle for a concertina, which is the sole business of one densely-crowded stall, seems to be shooting at a target—three shots a penny—and the prize for hitting the bull's-eye a real Whitechapel cigar. This seems to be an intensely popular pastime with the boys, and the one who wins a cigar and turns away and proudly lights it is at once surrounded by a crowd of lads, who praise his skill, and plead for a puff at the luxury which his marksmanship has won for him. ”

“ There is a Bill Sikes and Nancy in scores of these tenements, and the brutal blow is ever the accompaniment of the brutal oath.
These people, remember, rub elbows with the honest labouring poor; their lives are no mystery to the boys and girls in the neighbourhood; the little girls often fetch Nancy's gin, and stand in a gaping crowd while Nancy and Bill exchange compliments on the doorstep, drawn from the well of Saxon, impure and utterly defiled. ”

“ This mighty mob of famished, diseased, and filthy helots is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically dangerous. The barriers that have kept it back are rotten and giving way, and it may do the State a mischief if it be not looked to in time. Its fevers and its filth may spread to the homes of the wealthy; its lawless armies may sally forth and give us a taste of the lesson the mob has tried to teach now and again in Paris, when long years of neglect have done their work. ”

“ Knowing the nature of the task our social reformers have undertaken, I venture most earnestly to hope that nothing may be done hastily, or entrusted to well-meaning dilettanti or crotcheteers. Any scheme, to be successful, must embrace the entire question. The peculiar needs and necessities of a people who are a race by themselves must be borne in mind, and whatever is granted in the way of amelioration must be given, not as a charity to the abject poor, but as a right yielded at last to our long-neglected fellow-citizens. ”

“ It has at any rate filled up the time as we walk along to the outskirts of the land through which we are to travel for a few weeks together. And now, turning out of the busy street alive with the roar of commerce, and where the great marts and warehouses tower stories high, and where Dives adds daily to his wealth, we turn up a narrow court, and find ourselves at once in the slum where Lazarus lays his head—even as he did in the sacred story—at the very gates of the mighty millionaire. ”

“ Life with them is always a toss-up, a daily battle, an hourly struggle. Thousands of them can never hope to be five shillings ahead of the world if they keep honest. The utmost limit of their wage is reached when they have paid their rent, kept themselves and their horribly large families from starvation, and bought the few rags which keep their limbs decently covered. With them the object of life is attained when the night's rent is paid, and they do not have to hesitate between the workhouse or a corner of the staircase in some doorless house. ”

“ It is a truism to say that the curse of the lower orders is drink, but no man with eyes can walk on a Saturday night through the homes of the wage-earning class without feeling how terrible the evil is, and how earnestly, without being either a bigot or a fanatic, every man who has a chance should raise his voice at the criminal neglect which flings these poor people into the arms of their only caterer—the publican. ”

“ I see that many humane people are asking what can be done to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. I don't know whether there is any society which looks after the wives and children of malefactors, and lends them a helping hand, if they deserve it, to tide over the absence of their sole source of income; but if there is not, I fancy here is work for idle hands to do, and a source for charity that, worked with discrimination and care, might alleviate one of the crushing evils to which poor families are liable. ”

“ Among the poor there is humour as well as pathos, there is food for laughter as well as for tears, and the rays of God's sunshine lose their way now and again, and bring light and gladness into the vilest of the London slums. ”

“ But those who have studied the horticulture of the slums know that deep down under all the rank luxuriance of nettle and weed there may be found many a fair flower of humanity. And the fairest of all is the flower which is the offshoot of a weed. The generosity of the very poor to each other is to a great extent the outcome of their improvidence.
The poor help the poor. Nowhere are the bonds of human sympathy so strong as down the courts and alleys whose horrors have lately been exhibited in as fierce a light as ever beat upon a throne. ”

“ The flood can never rise high enough to cleanse those who have grown up ignorant—at best it can but wet their feet; but the children cannot escape it—the waters will gather force and volume and grow into a broad glorious river, through which the boys and girls of to-day will wade breast high until they gain the banks of the Promised Land. It is this river of knowledge which the modern wanderers in the wilderness must ford to reach the Canaan which the philanthropist sees waiting for them in his dreams. ”

“ So important a bearing on the home question has the schooling of the children who are to be the rent-payers of the next generation, that I propose to devote the next chapter to some sketches of School Board life and character; and I will take it in one of the worst districts in London, where the parents are sunk in a state of misery almost beyond belief.
I will show you the children at school who come daily to their work from the foulest and dirtiest dens in London—that awful network of hovels which lie about the Borough and the Mint. ”

“ We are not in the square now, but in a long dirty street, full of lodging-houses from end to end, a perfect human warren, where every door stands open night and day—a state of things that shall be described and illustrated a little later on when we come to the ''appy dossers.' In this street, close to the repaired residence, we select at hazard an open doorway and plunge into it. We pass along a greasy, grimy passage, and turn a corner to ascend the stairs. Round the corner it is dark. There is no staircase light, and we can hardly distinguish in the gloom where we are going. ”