W. H. Wilkins

“ You may let in commodities freely if you choose; but to let in human bodies to compete with those who are natives of the soil, who are your flesh and blood, and who already have the greatest difficulty in supporting life—to allow this, because to shut them out would be violating the principle of Free Trade, is to sacrifice a principle to a name.
Lastly, it has been said that to prohibit the destitute and unfit of other countries would be a dangerous and a mischievous innovation. Prohibition in itself is no innovation. ”

“ So long as they are wanting, there will always be a tendency to exaggerate the evil on the one hand, and to minimize it on the other. Things are bad enough as they are, and there is nothing to be gained by exaggeration. It is greatly to be hoped that the present Government, which has done much in the way of good and useful reform, will take steps to wipe away this reproach—for it is nothing less than a reproach—that, while we have such admirable statistics as to the imports of merchandise, the returns as to the importation of human beings should remain in their present imperfect state. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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—some [94] poor 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Speaking generally, I am not a believer in what is termed "grandmotherly legislation." You cannot make men sober, religious, industrious, or moral by Acts of Parliament. The experiment has been tried, and failed. But you can at least remove all the stumbling-blocks in the way of their becoming so. In this particular instance, individual effort has been tried and failed. It has been found to be useless in stemming the tide of pauperism and degradation which pours in upon us from abroad. Therefore, in the last extremity, we resort to the State as the natural protector of our people. ”

“ On the surface it certainly appears that a great wrong has been done, a wrong which is also a blunder, but we must remember that we have not yet heard what there is to be urged on the other side. We can scarcely be expected to credit without adequate proof all the hearsay tales of Russian oppression. Isolated instances do not suffice. If a Russian were to make a collection of all the instances of murder, outrage, and misery which unhappily still stain the annals of our law-courts, he would hardly present to his compatriots a faithful picture of English life. ”

“ I would only say that the competition among these small employers is almost as fierce as the competition among the employed. Much indignation has been directed against the "sweater," the bloated human spider, who, according to Alton Locke, sucks the life-blood of his victims, or who more recently has been presented to us in the pages of Punch as a gorgeously-apparelled, champagne-drinking, cigar-smoking Hebrew, who, as he rakes in his gold, laughs and grows fat upon the sufferings of the wretched creatures sacrificed to his greed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No objection can be urged against foreign immigration as a whole, but only that part of it which exercises an injurious effect upon our own people. There are, for instance, at the present time many foreigners in England employed in different professions and vocations, as teachers of languages, clerks, waiters, cooks, artisans, and so forth. These are in no sense an evil, for they supply a felt want, and are decent and cleanly in their habits and mode of living. Many of them are gradually absorbed into our national life, and become good and useful members of the community. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For her difficulties with her Jewish population Russia has only herself to thank. The long years of oppression to which they have been subjected have degraded them, until their ignorance and dislike of their masters have become a danger to the State. Anything which savours of a religious persecution is abhorrent to all liberal-minded men; and if it be true, as alleged, that the present sufferings of the Russian Jews are inflicted upon them because of their faith, then our sympathies with the victims of such an unholy persecution cannot be too great. ”

“ So too, England in the Victorian era—an era of prosperity unequalled even by Imperial Rome—throws open wide her arms to receive the destitute, the criminal, and the worthless of other lands, heedless of the injury which the influx of such a class must work upon her own community, and forgetful that the first duty of the State is towards its own people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How are these longings to be gratified?—how are they to be even partially realized, while this unchecked flood of destitution and degradation pours in upon us from abroad?
We hear much in these days of schemes for elevating and evangelizing the masses of the poor in our great cities. All honour to such schemes, whether they succeed or whether they fail, for the motive which animates them is good. But it cannot be too often insisted upon, that spiritual and intellectual necessities do not arise until some decency of physical conditions has been first attained. ”

“ Every one with any practical knowledge of business, will admit that it is the lowest price [69] which rules the market. If then we have a body of men combining together for the purpose of getting what they consider to be a fair wage, how can they maintain that combination, if, when a strike occurs, or any little dispute arises between employer and employed, by which the employed hope to get a little better terms for themselves, the destitute foreigner steps in ready to undersell them, and to work for little or next to nothing at all? ”

“ On all subjects connected with population Lord Derby is a great [5] authority; but of what avail, I would ask him, is it to recommend emigration as a panacea for our social ills, when for every hundred of our people taken away, a leak remains behind by which thousands more of an immeasurably inferior calibre come pouring in, by whom the conditions of existence are made harder than before, and the standard of comfort and decency in the home-life of our people is infinitely lowered? ”

“ The expulsion of resident Germans from Russian territory unless they consent to become naturalized, and the recent edicts promulgated against the Jews, are however illustrations of my meaning. In this Russia differs from all other European countries. They are all willing to admit the desirable alien, the skilled artisan, the foreigner who is decent and law-abiding in his habits and mode of life. It is only the destitute, the vagrant, the convict, the suspect, the evil-liver that they object to. But Russia, it would seem, has a dislike to all alien influence, whether for good or for evil. ”

“ Twenty years ago it was a common calculation in the United States that every new immigrant was worth a thousand dollars to the particular State in which he settled. A farm might be had for practically nothing by anybody who chose to apply for it. In those comparatively early days, what are now flourishing States west of the Mississippi, were then, in parts, wild unpeopled wildernesses, and the country could not afford to be very discriminative as to either the character or the means of particular immigrants. Thus for many years America was the camping-ground of the social refuse of Europe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one in England ever comes across a Jewish farmer, or a Jewish agricultural labourer. These immigrants invariably turn their backs on thinly-populated districts; and wherever our people are most closely huddled together, wherever the struggle for existence is keenest, there will the greatest number of foreign Jews be found, with the inevitable result that the conditions of life become even harder than before. It is very necessary to consider the distribution of this unlimited immigration, if we are to form an adequate idea of the injury it works upon our own people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The unlimited influx of cheap, destitute, foreign labour, cannot but exercise a prejudicial effect upon the wages of the native working-classes. It forces the decent British workman to compete on unequal terms with those who are willing to work for any wage—however meagre—for any number of hours, and amid surroundings filthy and disgusting in the extreme. ”

“ Under the Republic, when the middle class was dominant, though Italy was several times invaded, the native population always proved too strong for the invaders. When under the latter days of the Empire the middle class was wanting, and there was nothing but fabulous wealth and prodigal luxury on the one hand, and abject poverty and consequent misery on the other, the heart of the State became corrupt; and as soon as the Barbarians had broken through the cordon of Legions at the frontier, the mighty Roman Empire sank to rise no more. ”