 Section 5. On the Verge of the Abyss. There is, unfortunately, no need for me to attempt to set out, however imperfectly, any statement of the evil case of the sufferers what we wish to help. For years past the press has been filled with echoes of the bitter cry of outcast London with pictures of horrible Glasgow and the like. We have had several volumes describing how the poor live, and I may therefore assume that all my readers are more or less cognizant of the main outlines a darkest England. My slum officers are living in the midst of it. Their reports are before me, and one day I may publish some more detailed account of the actual facts of the social condition of the sunken millions, but not now. All that must be taken as read. I only glance at the subject in order to bring into clear relief the salient points of our new enterprise. I have spoken of the houseless poor. Each of these represents a point in the scale of human suffering below that of those who have still contrived to keep a shelter over their heads. A home is a home, be it ever so low, and the desperate tenacity with which the poor will cling to the last wretched semblance of one is very touching. There are vile dens, fever-haunted and stenchful crowded courts where the return of summer is dreaded because it means the unloosing of mirids of vermin which render night unbearable, which nevertheless are regarded at this moment as havens of rest by their hard-working occupants. They can scarcely be said to be furnished. A chair, a mattress, a few miserable sticks constitute all the furniture of the single room in which they have to sleep and breed and die, but they cling to it as a drowning man to a half-submerged raft. Every week they contrive by pinching and scheming to raise the rent, for with them it is pay or go, and they struggle to meet the collector as the sailor nerves himself to avoid being sucked under by the foaming wave. If at any time work fails or sickness comes, they are liable to drop helplessly into the ranks of the homeless. It is bad for a single man to have to confront the struggle for life in the streets and casual wards, but how much more terrible it must be for the married man with his wife and children to be turned out into the streets. So long as the family has a lair into which it can creep at night, he keeps his footing. But when he loses that solitary foothold, then arrives the time, if there be such a thing as Christian compassion, for the helping hand to be held out to save him from the vortex that sucks him downward, I downward to the hopeless under strata of crime and despair. The heart knoweth its own bitterness and the stranger intermedaleth not therewith. But now and then, out of the depths, there sounds a bitter wail as of some strong swimmer in his agony as he is drawn under by the current. A short time ago, a respectable man, a chemist in Holloway, fifty years of age, driven hard to the wall, tried to end it all by cutting his throat. His wife also cut her throat, and at the same time they gave Stricknein to their only child. The effort failed, and they were placed on trial for attempted murder. In the court a letter was read, which the poor wretch had written before attempting his life. My dearest George, twelve months have I now passed of a most miserable and struggling existence, and I really cannot stand it any more. I am completely worn out, and relations who could assist me won't do any more, for such was Uncle's last intimation. Never mind, he can't take his money in comfort with him, and in all probability will find himself in the same boat as myself. He never inquires whether I am starving or not. Three pounds, a mere flea-bite to him, would have put us straight, and with his security and good interest might have obtained me a good situation long ago. I can face poverty and degradation no longer, and would sooner die than go to the workhouse, whatever may be the awful consequences of the steps we have taken. We have, God forgive us, taken our darling Arty with us out of pure love and affection, so that the darling should never be cuffed about or reminded or taunted with his heartbroken parents' crime. My poor wife has done her best at needlework, washing, house-minding, etc. In fact, anything and everything that would bring in the shilling, but it would only keep us in semi-starvation. I have now done six weeks traveling from morning till night, and not received one far thing for it. If that is not enough to drive you mad, wickedly mad, I don't know what is. No bright prospect anywhere, no ray of hope. May God Almighty forgive us for this heinous sin, and have mercy on our sinful souls, is the purr of your miserable, broken-hearted but loving brother, Arthur. We have now done everything that we can possibly think of to avert this wicked proceeding, but can discover no ray of hope. Fervent prayer has availed us nothing. Our lot is cast, and we must abide by it. It must be God's will, or he would have ordained it differently. Dearest Georgie, I am exceedingly sorry to leave you all, but I am mad, thoroughly mad. You, dear, must try and forget us, and, if possible, forgive us. For I do not consider it our own fault we have not succeeded. If you could get three pounds for our bed, it will pay our rent, and our scanty furniture may fetch enough to bury us in a cheap way. Don't grieve over us or follow us, for we shall not be worthy of such respect. Our clergyman has never called on us or given us the least consolation, though I called on him a month ago. He is paid to preach, and there he considers his responsibility ends, the rich accepted. We have only yourself and a few others who care one pin what becomes of us, but you must try and forgive us. Is the last fervent prayer of your devotedly fond and affectionate but broken-hearted and persecuted brother? Signed our AO. That is an authentic human document, a transcript from the life of one among thousands who go down in articulate into the depths. They die and make no sign, or, worse still, they continue to exist, caring about with them year after year the bitter ashes of a life from which the furnace of misfortune has burned away all joy and hope and strength. Who is there who has not been confronted by many despairing ones, who come as Richard Owent to the clergyman crying for help, and how seldom have we been able to give it them? It is unjust, no doubt, for them to blame the clergy in the comfortable well to do, for what can they do but preach and offer good advice? To assist all the Richard Owents by direct financial advance would drag even Rothschild into the gutter. And what else can be done? Yet something else must be done if Christianity is not to be a mockery to perishing men. Here is another case, a very common case, which illustrates how the army of despair is recruited. Mr. T., Margaret Place, Gascoigne Place, Bethnal Green, is a bootmaker by trade, is a good hand, and has earned three shillings and six pence to four shillings and six pence a day. He was taken ill last Christmas and went to the London Hospital, was there three months. A week after he had gone Mrs. T. had rheumatic fever and was taken to Bethnal Green Infirmary, where she remained about three months. Directly after they had been taken ill their furniture was seized for the three weeks rent which was owing. Consequently on becoming convalescent they were homeless. They came out about the same time. He went out to a lodging house for a night or two until she came out. He then had Toppinson, she had six pence, which a nurse had given her. They went to a lodging house together, but the society there was dreadful. Next day he had a day's work and got two shillings and six pence, and on the strength of this they took a furnished room and ten pence a day, payable nightly. His work lasted a few weeks. When he was again taken ill lost his job and spent all their money. Pawned a shirt and apron for a shelling, but that too. At last pawned their tools for three shillings, which got them a few days food and lodging. He is now minus tools and cannot work at his own job and does anything he can. Spent their last Toppinson on a pennearth each of tea and sugar. In two days they had a slice of bread and butter each, that's all. They are both very weak through want of food. Let things alone, the laws of supply and demand, and all the rest of the excuses by which those who stand on firm ground sav their consciousness when they leave their brother to sink. How do they look when we apply them to the actual loss of life at sea? Does let things alone man the lifeboat? Will the inexorable laws of political economy save the shipwrecked sailor from the boiling surf? They often enough are responsible for this disaster. Coffinships are a direct result of the wretched policy of non-interference with the legitimate operations of commerce. But no desire to make it pay created the National Lifeboat Institution. No law of supply and demand actuates the volunteers who risk their lives to bring the shipwrecked to shore. What we have to do is apply the same principles to society. We want a social lifeboat institution. A social lifeboat brigade to snatch from the abyss those who, if left to themselves, will perish as miserably as the crew of a ship that founders in mid-ocean. The moment that we take in hand this work we shall be compelled to turn our attention seriously to the question whether prevention is not better than cure. It is easier and cheaper and in every way better to prevent the loss of home than to have to recreate that home. It is better to keep a man out of the mire than to let him fall in first and then risk the chance of plucking him out. Any scheme therefore that attempts to deal with the reclamation of the lost must tend to develop into an endless variety of ameliorative measures, of some of which I shall have something to say hereafter. I only mention the subject here in order that no one may say I am blind to the necessity of going further and adopting wider plans of operation than those which I put forward in this book. The renovation of our social system is a work so vast that no one of us, nor all of us put together, can define all the measures that will have to be taken before we attain even the cab-horse ideal of existence for our children and children's children. All that we can do is to attack in a serious, practical spirit the worst and most pressing evils, knowing that if we do our duty we obey the voice of God. He is the captain of our salvation. If we but follow where he leads, we shall not want for marching orders, nor need we imagine that he will narrow the field of operations. I am laboring under no delusions as to the possibility of inaugurating the millennium by any social specific. In the struggle of life the weakest will go to the wall, and there are so many weak. The fittest in tooth and claw will survive. All that we can do is to soften the lot of the unfit and make their suffering less horrible than it is at present. No amount of assistance will give a jellyfish a backbone. No outside propping will make some men stand erect. All material help from without is useful only insofar as it develops moral strength within, and some men seem to have lost even the very faculty of self-help. There is an immense lack of common sense and a vital energy on the part of multitudes. It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages? How can we marvel if after leaving generation after generation to grow up uneducated and underfed there should be developed a heredity of incapacity, and that thousands of dull-witted people should be born into the world disinherited before their birth of their share in the average intelligence of mankind. Besides those who are thus hereditarily wanting in the qualities necessary to enable them to hold their own, there are the weak, the disabled, the aged, and the unskilled. Worse than all there is the want of character. Those who have the best of reputation, if they lose their foothold on the latter, find it difficult enough to regain their place. What then can men and women who have no character do? When a master has the choice of a hundred honest men, is it reasonable to expect that he will select a poor fellow with tarnished reputation? All this is true, and it is one of the things that makes the problem almost insoluble. When insoluble it is, I am absolutely convinced, unless it is possible to bring new moral life into the soul of these people. This should be the first object of every social reformer, whose work will only last if it is built on the solid foundation of a new birth to cry you must be born again. To get a man soundly saved, it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches to give him regular work, or even to give him a university education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged, you have wasted your labor. You must, in some way or other, graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the divine. All that I propose in this book is governed by that principle. The difference between the method which seeks to regenerate the man by ameliorating his circumstances, and that which ameliorates his circumstances in order to get at the regeneration of his heart, is the difference between the method of the gardener who grafts a rib stone pippin on a crab apple tree, and one who merely ties apples with string upon the branches of the crab. To change the nature of the individual, to get at the heart, to save his soul, is the only real lasting method of doing him any good. In many modern schemes of social regeneration, it is forgotten that it takes the soul to move a body into a cleaner style, and at the risk of being misunderstood and misrepresented, I must assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body. But what is the use of preaching the gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad desperate struggle to keep themselves alive? You might as well give a tract to a shipwrecked sailor who is battling with the surf which has drowned his comrades and threatens to drown him. He will not listen to you. Nay, he cannot hear you any more than the man whose head is under water can listen to a sermon. The first thing to do is get him at least a footing on firm ground, and to give him room to live. Then you may have a chance. At present you have none, and you will have all the better opportunity to find a way to his heart if he comes to know that it was you who pulled him out of the horrible pit and the miry clay in which he was sinking to perdition. But of late years many of the seven have contrived to pass themselves off as virtues. Averas, for instance, and pride, when re-baptized, thrift, and self-respect have become the guardian angels of Christian civilization. And as for envy, it is the cornerstone upon which much of our competitive system is founded. There are still two vices which are fortunate or unfortunate enough to remain undisguised, not even concealing from themselves the fact that they are vices and not virtues. One is drunkenness, the other fornication. The viciousness of these vices is so little disguised, even from those who habitually practice them, that there will be a protest against merely describing one of them by the right biblical name. When I say prostitution, for this reason prostitution is a word applied to only one half of the vice, and that the most pitiable. Fornication hits both centers alike. Prostitution applies only to the woman. When however we cease to regard this vice from a point of view of morality and religion, and look at it solely as a factor in the social problem, the word prostitution is less objectionable. For the social burden of this vice is born almost entirely by women. The male sinner does not, by the mere fact of his sin, find himself in a worse position in obtaining employment, in finding a home, or even in securing a wife. His wrongdoing only hits him in his purse, or perhaps in his health. His incontinence, except so far as it relates to the woman whose degradation it necessitates, does not add to the number of those for whom society has to provide. It is an immense addition to the infamy of this vice in man that its consequences have to be born almost exclusively by women. The difficulty of dealing with drunkards and harlots is almost insurmountable. Were it not that I utterly repudiate as a fundamental denial of the essential principle of the Christian religion, the popular pseudo-scientific doctrine that any man or woman is past saving by the grace of God in the power of the Holy Spirit, I would sometimes be disposed to despair when contemplating these victims of the devil. The doctrine of heredity and the suggestion of irresponsibility come perilously near re-establishing, on scientific basis, the awful dogma of reprobation which has cast so terrible a shadow over the Christian church. For thousands upon thousands of these poor wretches are, as Bishop South truly said, not so much born into this world as damned into it. The bastard of a harlot, born in a brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all the bestialities of debauch, violated before she is twelve and driven out into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is there for such a girl in this world? I say nothing about the next, yet such a case is not exceptional. There are many such, differing in detail but in essentials the same, and with boys it is almost as bad. There are thousands who were begotten when both parents were besotted with drink, whose mothers saturated themselves with alcohol every day of their pregnancy, who may be said to have sucked in a taste for strong drink with their mother's milk, and who were surrounded from childhood with opportunities and incitements to drink. How can we marvel that the constitution thus disposed to intemperance finds the stimulus of drink indispensable? Even if they make a stand against it, the increasing pressure of exhaustion and the scanty food drives them back to the cup. Of these poor wretches, born slaves of the bottle, predestined to drunkenness from their mother's womb, there are, who can say how many? Yet they are all men, all with what the Russian peasant calls a spark of God in them, which can never be wholly obscured and destroyed while life exists, and if any social scheme is to be comprehensive and practical, it must deal with these men. It must provide for the drunkard and the harlot as it provides for the improvident and the out of work. But who is sufficient for these things? I will take the question of the drunkard for the drink difficulty lies at the root of everything. Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice, and crime spring from this poisonous taproot. Many of our social evils, which overshadow the land like so many upistries, would dwindle away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink. There is universal agreement on that point. In fact, the agreement as to the evils of intemperance is almost as universal as the conviction that politicians will do nothing practical to interfere with them. In Ireland, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald says that intemperance leads to nineteen-twentieths of the crime in that country, but no one proposes a coercion act to deal with that evil. In England, the judges all say the same thing. Of course, it is a mistake to assume that a murder, for instance, would never be committed by sober men, because murderers, in most cases, prime themselves for their deadly work by a glass of Dutch courage. But the facility of securing a reinforcement of passion undoubtedly tends to render always dangerous and sometimes irresistible the temptation to violate the laws of God and man. Murder lectures against the evil habit are, however, of no avail. We have to recognize that the gin palace, like many other evils, although a poisonous, is still a natural outgrowth of our social condition. The taproom, in many cases, is the poor man's only parlor. Many a man takes to beer not from the love of beer, but from a natural craving for the light, warmth, company, and comfort which is thrown in along with the beer, in which he cannot get accepting by buying beer. Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers. Then again, let us never forget that the temptation to drink is strongest when want is sharpest and misery the most acute. A well-fed man is not driven to drink by the craving that torments the hungry, and the comfortable do not crave for the boon of forgetfulness. Gin is the only lethe of the miserable. The foul and poisoned air of the dens in which thousands live predisposes to a longing for stimulant. Fresh air, with its oxygen and ozone being lacking, a man supplies the want with spirit. After a time the longing for drink becomes a mania. Life seems as insupportable without alcohol as without food. It is a disease often inherited, always developed by indulgence, but is clearly a disease as ophthalmia or stone. All this should predispose us to charity and sympathy, while recognizing that the primary responsibility must always rest upon the individual, we may fairly insist that society, which by its habits, its customs and its laws, has greased the slope down which these poor creatures slide to perdition, shall seriously take in hand their salvation. How many are there who are more or less under the dominion of strong drink? Statistics abound, but they seldom tell us what we want to know. We know how many public houses there are in the land, and how many arrests for drunkenness the police make in a year. But beyond that we know little. Everyone knows that for one man who is arrested for drunkenness there are at least ten and often twenty who go home intoxicated. In London, for instance, there are fourteen thousand drink shops, and every year twenty thousand persons are arrested for drunkenness. But who can, for a moment, believe that there are only twenty thousand, more or less, habitual drunkards in London? By habitual drunkard I do not mean one who is always drunk, but one who is so much under the dominion of the evil habit that he cannot be depended upon not to get drunk whenever the opportunity offers. In the United Kingdom there are one hundred ninety thousand public houses, and every year there are two hundred thousand arrests for drunkenness. Of course, several of these arrests refer to the same person who is locked up again and again. Where this not so, if we allowed six drunkards to each house as an average, or five habitual drunkards for one arrested for drunkenness, we should arrive at a total of a million adults who are more or less prisoners of the public. As a matter of fact, Isaac Hoyle gives one in twelve of the adult population. This may be an excessive estimate, but if we take half a million we shall not be accused of exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of confirmed dipsomania. Others are but over the verge, but the procession tends ever downward. The loss which the maintenance of this huge standing army of a half a million men who are more or less always be sotted, men whose intemperance impairs their working power, consumes their earnings, and renders their homes wretched, has long been a familiar theme of the platform. But what can be done for them? Total abstinence is no doubt admirable, but how are you going to get them to be totally abstinent? When a man is drowning in mid-ocean, though one thing that is needful, no doubt, is that he should plant his feet firmly on terra firma. But how is he to get there? It is just what he cannot do. And so it is with the drunkards. If they are to be rescued, there must be something more done for them than at present is attempted. Unless, of course, we decide definitely to allow the iron laws of nature to work themselves out in their destruction. In that case it might be more merciful to facilitate the slow workings of natural law. There is no need of establishing a lethal chamber for drunkards like that into which the lost dogs of London are driven to die in peaceful sleep under the influence of carbonic oxide. The state would only need to go a little further than it goes at present in the way of supplying poison to the community. If, in addition to planting a flaming gin palace at each corner, free to all who enter, it were to supply free gin to all who have attained a certain recognized standard of inebriity, delirium tremens would soon reduce our drunken population to manageable proportions. I can imagine a cynical millionaire of the scientific philanthropic school making a clearance of all the drunkards in a district by the simple expedient of an unlimited allowance of alcohol. But that is for us out of the question. The problem of what to do with our half a million drunkards remains to be solved and few more difficult questions confront the social reformer. The question of the harlots is, however, quite as insoluble by the ordinary methods. For these unfortunate, no one who looks below the surface can fail to have the deepest sympathy. Some there are no doubt, perhaps many, who, whether from inherited passion or from evil education, have deliberately embarked upon a life of vice. But with the majority it is not so. Even those who deliberately in a free choice adopt the profession of a prostitute do so under the stress of temptations which few moralists seem to realize. Terrible as the fact is, there is no doubt it is a fact that there is no industrial career in which, for a short time, a beautiful girl can make as much money with as little trouble as the profession of a courtesan. The case recently tried at the loser sizes in which the wife of an officer in the army admitted that while living as a kept mistress she had received as much as four thousand pounds a year was no doubt very exceptional. Even the most successful adventurers seldom make the income of a cabinet minister. But take women in professions and in businesses all around, and the number of young women who have received five hundred pounds in one year for the sale of their person is larger than the number of women of all ages who make a similar sum by honest industry. It is only the very few who draw these gilded prizes and they do it for a very short time. But it is the few prizes in every profession which allure the multitude who think little of the many blanks. And speaking broadly, vice offers to every good looking girl during the first bloom of her youth and beauty more money than she can earn by labor in any field of industry open to her sex. The penalty exacted afterwards is disease, degradation, and death. But these things at first are hidden from her sight. The protrusion of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence. All the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul. Nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing. Human nature, however, is short-sighted. Giddy girls chafing against the restraints of uncongenial industry see the glittering bait continually before them. They are told that if they will but do as others do, they will make more in a night, if they are lucky, than they can make in a week if they are sowing. And who can wonder that in many cases the irrevocable step is taken before they realize that it is irrevocable, and that they have bartered away the future of their lives for the paltry chance of a year's ill-gotten gains? Of the severity of the punishment there can be no question. If the premium is high at the beginning, the penalty is terrible at the close. And this penalty is exacted equally from those who have deliberately said, Evil be thou my good, and for those who have been decoyed, snared, trapped into the life which is a living death. When you see a girl on the street you can never say without inquiry whether she is one of the most to be condemned or the most to be pitied of her sex. Many of them find themselves where they are because of a too trusting disposition, confidence born of innocence being often the unsuspecting ally of the procurus and seducer. Others are as much the innocent victims of crime as if they had been stabbed or maimed by the dagger of the assassin. The records of our rescue homes abound with life stories, some of which we have been able to verify to the letter, which prove only too conclusively the existence of numbers of innocent victims whose entry upon this dismal life can in no way be attributed to any act of their own will. Many are orphans or the children of depraved mothers whose one idea of a daughter is to make money out of her prostitution. Here are a few cases on our register. E. C. Aged 18, a soldier's child born on the sea. Her father died and her mother, a thoroughly depraved woman, assisted to secure her daughter's prostitution. P. S. Aged 20, illegitimate child, went to consult a doctor one time about some ailment. The doctor abused his position and took advantage of his patient and when she complained gave her four pounds as compensation. When that was spent, having lost her character, she came on the town. We looked the doctor up and he fled. E. A. Aged 17, was left an orphan very early in life and adopted by her godfather, who himself was the means of her ruin at the age of ten. A girl in her teens lived with her mother in the dust hole, the lowest part of Woolridge. This woman forced her out upon the streets and profited by her prostitution up to the very night of her confinement. The mother had all the time been the receiver of the gains. E. Neither father nor mother was taken care of by a grandmother till at an early age accounted old enough. Married a soldier but shortly before the birth of her first child found that her deceiver had a wife and family in a distant part of the country and she was soon left friendless and alone. She sought an asylum in the workhouse for a few weeks after which she vainly tried to get honest employment. Failing that and being on the very verge of starvation, she entered a lodging house in Westminster and did as other girls. Here our lieutenant found and persuaded her to leave and enter one of our homes, where she soon gave abundant proof of her conversion by a thoroughly changed life. She is now a faithful and trusted servant in the clergyman's family. A girl was some time ago discharged from a city hospital after an illness. She was homeless and friendless, an orphan and obliged to work for her living. Walking down the street and wondering what she should do next, she met a girl who came up to her in a most friendly fashion and speedily won her confidence. "'Discharged ill and nowhere to go, are you?' said her new friend. "'Well, come home to my mother's. She will lodge you and we'll go to work together when you are quite strong.' The girl consented gladly but found herself conducted to the very lowest part of Woolridge and ushered into a brothel. There was no mother in the case. She was hoaxed and powerless to resist. Her protestations were too late to save her, and having had her character forced from her, she became hopeless and stayed on to live the life of her false friend. "'There is no need for me to go into the details of the way in which men and women whose whole livelihood depend upon their success in disarming the suspicions of their victims and alluring them to their doom, contrived to overcome the reluctance of the young girl without parents, friends, or helpers to enter their toils. What fraud fails to accomplish a little force succeeds in effecting, and a girl who has been guilty of nothing but imprudence finds herself an outcast for life. The very innocence of a girl tells against her. A woman of the world, once entrapped, would have all her wits about her to extricate herself from the position in which she found herself. A perfectly virtuous girl is often so overcome with shame and horror that there seems nothing in life worth struggling for. She accepts her doom without further struggle and treads the long and torturing pathway of the streets to the grave. Judge not that ye be not judged, is a saying that applies most appropriately of all to these unfortunates. Many of them would have escaped their evil fate had they been less innocent. They are where they are because they love too utterly to calculate consequences and trusted too absolutely to dare to suspect evil. And others are there because of the false education which confounds ignorance with virtue and throws our young people into the midst of a great city with all its excitements and all its temptations without more preparation or warning than if they were going to live in the Garden of Eden. Whatever sin they have committed, a terrible penalty is exacted. While the man who caused their ruin passes as a respectable member of society, to whom virtuous matrons gladly marry, if he is rich, their maiden daughters, they are crushed beneath the millstone of social excommunication. Here let me quote from a report made to me by the head of our rescue homes as to the actual life of these unfortunates. The following hundred cases are taken as they come from our rescue register. The statements are those of the girls themselves. They are certainly frank and it will be noticed that only two out of the hundred alleged that they took to the life out of poverty. Cause of Fall Drink 14 Seduction 33 Willful Choice 24 Bad Company 27 Poverty 2 Total 100 Condition When Applying Rags 25 Destitution 27 Decently Dressed 48 Total 100 Out of these girls, 23 have been in prison. The girls suffer so much that the shortness of their miserable life is the only redeeming feature. Whether we look at the wretchedness of the life itself, their perpetual intoxication, the cruel treatment to which they are subjected by their task masters and mistresses or bullies, the hopelessness, suffering and despair induced by their circumstances and surroundings, the depths of misery, degradation and poverty to which they eventually descend, or their treatment and sickness, their friendlessness and loneliness and death, it must be admitted that a more dismal lot seldom falls to the fate of a human being. I will take each of these in turn. Health This life induces insanity, rheumatism, consumption, and all forms of syphilis. Rheumatism and gout are the commonest of these evils. Some were quite crippled by both, young though they were. Consumption sows its seeds broadcast. The life is a hotbed for the development of any constitutional and hereditary germs of the disease. We have found girls in Piccadilly at midnight who are continually prostrated by hemorrhage, yet who have no other way of life open, so struggle on in this awful manner between wiles. Drink. This is an inevitable part of the business. All confess that they could never lead their miserable lives if it were not for its influence. A girl who was educated at college and who had a home in which was every comfort, but who, when ruined, had fallen even to the depth of Woolridge Dusthole, exclaimed to us indignantly, Do you think I could ever, ever do this if it weren't for the drink? I always have to be in drink if I want to sin. No girl has ever come into our home's front street life, but has been more or less a prey to drink. Cruel treatment. The devotion of these women to their bullies is as remarkable as the brutality of their bullies is abominable. Probably the primary cause of the fall of numberless girls of the lower class is their great aspiration to the dignity of wifehood. They are never somebody until they are married, and will link themselves to any creature, no matter how debased, in the hope of being ultimately married by him. This consideration, in addition to their helpless condition when once character has gone, makes them suffer cruelties which they would never otherwise endure from the men with whom large numbers of them live. One case in illustration of this is that of a girl who was once a respectable servant, the daughter of a police sergeant. She was ruined, and shame led her to leave home. At length she drifted to Woolridge, where she came across a man who persuaded her to live with him, and for a considerable length of time she kept him, although his conduct to her was brutal in the extreme. The girl living in the next room to her has frequently heard him knock her head against the wall, and pounded, when he was out of temper, through her gains of prostitution being less than usual. He lavished upon her every sort of cruelty and abuse, and at length she grew so wretched, and was reduced to so dreadful a plight, that she ceased to attract. At this he became furious and ponded all her clothing but one thin garment of rags. The week before her first confinement he kicked her black and blue from neck to knees, and she was carried to the police station in a pool of blood. But she was so loyal to the wretch that she refused to appear against him. She was going to drown herself in desperation when our rescue officers spoke to her, wrapped their own shawl around her shivering shoulders, took her home with them, and cared for her. The baby was born dead. A tiny, shapeless mass. This state of things is all too common. Hopelessness, surroundings. The state of hopelessness and despair in which these girls live continually makes them reckless of consequences, and large numbers commit suicide who are never heard of. A West End policeman assured us that the number of prostitute suicides was terribly in advance of anything guessed at by the public, depth to which they sink. There is scarcely a lower class of girls to be found than the girls of Woolrich Dusthole, where one of our rescue slum homes is established. The women living and following their dreadful business in this neighborhood are so degraded that even abandoned men will refuse to accompany them home. Soldiers are forbidden to enter the place or to go down the street on pain of twenty-five days imprisonment. Pickets are stationed at either end to prevent this. The streets are much cleaner than many of the rooms we have seen. One public house there is shut up three or four times in a day sometimes, for fear of losing the license through the terrible brawls which take place within. A policeman never goes down this street alone at night, one having died not long ago from injuries received there. But our two lasses go unharmed and loved at all hours, spending every other night always upon the streets. The girls sink to the Dusthole after coming down several grades. There is but one on record who came there with beautiful clothes, and this poor girl, when last seen by the officers, was a pauper in the workhouse infirmary in a wretched condition. The lowest class of all is the girls who stand at the pier head. These sell themselves literally for a bare crust of bread and sleep in the streets. Filth and vermin abound to an extent to which no one who has not seen it can have any idea. The Dusthole is only one, alas, of many similar districts in this highly civilized land. Sickness, friendlessness, death. In hospitals it is a known fact that these girls are not treated at all like other cases. They inspire disgust and are most frequently discharged before being really cured. Scorned by their relations and ashamed to make their case known even to those who would help them. Unable longer to struggle out on the streets to earn the bread of shame, there are girls lying in many a dark hole in this big city, positively rotting away and maintained by their old companions on the street. Many are totally friendless, utterly cast out and left to perish by relatives and friends. One of this class came to us, sickened and died, and we buried her being her only followers to the grave. It is a sad story, but one that must not be forgotten. For these women constitute a large standing army whose numbers no one can calculate. All estimates that I have seem purely imaginary. The ordinary figure given for London is from sixty thousand to eighty thousand. This may be true if it is meant to include all habitually unchaste women. It is a monstrous exaggeration if it is meant to apply to those who make their living solely and habitually by prostitution. These figures, however, only confuse. We shall have to deal with hundreds every month, whatever estimate we take. How utterly unprepared society is for any such systematic reformation may be seen from the fact that even now at our homes we are unable to take in all the girls who apply. They cannot escape even if they would, for want of funds whereby to provide them a way of release. End of Section 6 Recording by Tom Hirsch Section 7. The Criminals This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Hirsch One very important section of the denizens of Darkest England are the criminals and the semi-criminals. They are more or less predatory and are at present, shepherded by the police and punished by the jailer. Their numbers cannot be ascertained with very great precision, but the following figures are taken from the prison returns of 1889. The criminal classes of Great Britain in round figures sum up a total of no less than 90,000 persons, made up as follows. Convict prisons contain 11,660 persons. Local prisons contain 20,883 persons. Reformatories for children convicted of crime, 1270. Industrial schools for vagrant and refractory children, 21,413. Criminal lunatics under restraint, 910 persons. Known thieves at large, 14,747. Known receivers of stolen goods, 1,121. Suspected persons, 17,042. Total 89,046. The above does not include the great army of known prostitutes, nor the keepers and owners of brothels and disorderly houses, as to whose numbers government is rigidly silent. These figures are, however, misleading. They only represent the criminals who were in jail on the given day. The average jail population in England and Wales, excluding the convict establishments, was in 1889, 15,119. But the total number actually sentenced and imprisoned in local prisons was 153,000, of whom 25,000 only came on first term and 76,300 of them had been convicted at least ten times. But even if we suppose that the criminal class number is no more than 90,000, of whom only 35,000 persons are at large, it is still a large enough section of humanity to compel attention. 90,000 criminals represents a wreckage whose cost to the community is very estimated when we add up the cost of the prisons, even if we add to them the whole cost of the police. The police have so many other duties besides the shepherding of criminals that it is unfair to settle the latter with the whole of the cost of the constabulary. The cost of prosecution and maintenance of criminals and the expense of the police involves an annual outlay of 4,437,000 pounds. This, however, is small compared with the tax and toll which this predatory hoard inflicts upon the community on which it is quartered. To the loss caused by the actual picking and stealing must be added that of the unproductive labor of nearly 65,000 adults. Depended upon these criminal adults must be at least twice as many women and children so that it is probably an underestimate to say that this list of criminals and semi-criminals represents a population of at least 200,000 who all live, more or less, at the expense of society. Every year in the Metropolitan District alone 66,100 persons are arrested of whom 444 are arrested for trying to commit suicide, life having become too unbearable a burden. This immense population is partially, no doubt, bred to prison. The same as other people are bred to the army and to the bar. The hereditary criminal is by no means confined to India. Although it is only in that country that they have the engaging simplicity to describe themselves frankly in the census returns, but it is recruited constantly from the outside. In many cases this is due to sheer starvation. Fathers of the Church have laid down the law that a man who is in peril of death from hunger is entitled to take bread wherever he can find it to keep body and soul together. That proposition is not embodied in our jurisprudence. Absolute despair drives many a man into the ranks of the criminal class who would never have fallen into the category of criminal convicts if adequate provision had been made for the rescue of those drifting to doom. When once he has fallen circumstances seem to combine to keep him there. As wounded and sickly stags are gored to death by their fellows, so the unfortunate who bears the prison brand is hunted from pillar to post until he despairs of ever regaining his position and oscillates between one prison and another for the rest of his days. I gave in a preceding page an account of how a man, after trying in vain to get work, fell before the temptation to steal in order to escape starvation. Here is the sequel of that man's story. After he had stolen he ran away and thus describes his experiences. To fly was easy. To get away from the scene required very little ingenuity but the getting away from one suffering brought another. A straight look from a stranger, a quick step behind me sent a chill through every nerve. The cravings of hunger had been satisfied but it was the cravings of conscience that were clamorous now. It was easy to get away from the earthly consequences of sin but from the fact, never. And yet it was the compulsion of circumstances that made me a criminal. It was neither from inward viciousness or choice and how bitterly did I cast reproach on society for allowing such an alternative to offer itself, to steal or starve. But there was another alternative that here offered itself, either give myself up or go on with the life of crime. I chose the former. I had traveled over one hundred miles to get away from the scene of my theft and now I find myself outside the station house at a place where I had put in my boyhood days. How many times when a lad, with wondering eyes and a heart stirred with childhood's pure sympathy, I had watched the poor waves from time to time led within its doors. It was my turn now. I entered the charge room and with business-like precision disclosed my errand that I wished to surrender myself for having committed a felony. My story was doubted. A question followed question and a confirmation must be waited. Why had I surrendered? I was a rummin', cracked, more fool than rogue. He will be sorry when he mounts the wheel. These and such like remarks were handed round concerning me. An hour passed by and the inspector enters and announces the receipt of a telegram. It is all right. You can put him down. Learning to me, he said, they will send for you on Monday and then I passed into the inner ward and a cell. The door closed with a harsh, grating clang and I was left to face the most clamorous accuser of all, my own interior self. Monday morning the door opened and a complacent detective stood before me who can tell the feelings as the handcuffs closed round my wrist and we started for town. As again the charge was entered and the passing of another night in the cell. Then the morning of the day arrived. The gruff, harsh, come on, of the jailer roused me and the next moment I found myself in the prison van gazing through the crevices of the floor, watching the stones flying as it were from beneath our feet. Soon the courthouse was reached and hustled into a common cell I found myself amongst a crowd of boys and men all bound for the dock. One by one the names are called and the crowd is gradually thinning down. When the announcement of my own name fell on my startled ear and I found myself stumbling up the stairs and finding myself in daylight in the dock. What a terrible ordeal it was. The ceremony was brief enough. Have you anything to say? Don't interrupt his worship, prisoner. Give over talking. A month's hard labor. This is about all I heard or at any rate realized until a vigorous push landed me into the presence of the officer who booked the sentence and then off I went to jail. I need not linger over the formalities of the reception. A nightmare seemed to have settled upon me as I passed into the interior of the correctional. I resigned to my name and I seemed to die to myself for henceforth three thirty-two B disclosed my identity to myself and others. Through all the weeks that followed I was like one in a dream. Mealtimes, resting hours as did every other thing came with clack-like precision. At times I thought my mind had gone. So dull, so callous, so weary appeared the organs of the brain, the harsh orders of the jailers, the droning of the chaplain in the chapel, the inquiries of the chief warder or the governor in their periodical visits all seemed so meaningless. As the day of my liberation drew near I heard conviction that circumstances would perhaps compel me to return to prison haunted me. And so helpless did I feel at the prospects that awaited me outside that I dreaded release which seemed but the facing of an unsympathetic world. The day arrived and strange as it may sound it was with regret that I left myself. It had become my home and no home awaited me outside. How utterly crushed I felt feelings of companionship had gone out to my unfortunate fellow prisoners whom I had seen daily but the sound of whose voices I had never heard whilst outside. Friendships were dead and companionships were forever broken and I felt as an outcast of society with the mark of jailbird upon me that I must cover my face and stand aside and cry unclean. Such were my feelings. The morning of discharge came and I am once more on the streets. My scanty means scarcely sufficient for two days least needs. Could I brace myself to make another honest endeavor to start afresh? Try indeed I did. I fell back upon my antecedents and tried to cut the dark passage out of my life but straight came the questions to me at each application for employment. What have you been doing lately? Where have you been living? If I evaded the question it caused doubt. If I answered the only answer I could give was in jail and that settled my chances. What a comedy after all it appeared. I remember the last words of the chaplain before leaving the prison cold and precise in their officialism. Mind you, never come back here again, young man. And now, as though in response to my earnest effort to keep from going to prison society by its actions cried out, go back to jail. There are honest men enough to do our work without such as you. Imagine if you can my condition. At the end of a few days black despair had wrapped itself around every faculty of mind and body. Then followed several days and nights with scarcely a bit of food or a resting place. I prowled the streets like a dog with this difference that the dog has the chance of helping himself. And I had not. I tried to forecast how long starvation's fingers would be in closing round the throat they already gripped. So indifferent was I like to man or God as I waited for the end. In this dire extremity the writer found his way to one of our shelters and there found God and friends and hope. And once more got his feet onto the ladder which leads upward like golf of starvation to competence and character and usefulness and heaven. As he was then, however, there are hundreds, nay, thousands now who will give these men a helping hand? What is to be done with them? Would it not be more merciful to kill them off at once instead of stirringly crushing them out of all semblance of honest manhood? Society recoils from such a short cut. Her virtuous scruples reminds me of the subterfuge by which English law evaded the veto on torture. Torture was forbidden, but the custom of placing an obstinate witness under a press and slowly crushing him within a hair-broth of death was legalized and practiced. So it is today. When the criminal comes out of jail, the whole world is often but a press whose punishment is sharp and cruel indeed. Nor can the victim escape even if he opens his mouth and speaks. End of Section 7 Recording by Tom Hirsch So indifferent was I alike to man or God as I waited for the end. Section 8 The Children of the Lost This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Hirsch Whatever may be thought of the possibility of doing anything with the adults, it is universally admitted that there is hope for the children. I regard the existing generation as lost, said a leading liberal statesman. Nothing can be done with men and women who have grown up under the present demoralizing conditions. My only hope is that the children may have a better chance. Education will do much. But unfortunately the demoralizing circumstances of the children are not being improved. Are indeed, rather, in many respects, being made worse. The deterioration of our population in large towns is one of the most undisputed facts of social economics. The country is the breeding ground of healthy citizens. But for the constant influx of countrydom, cockneydom would long air this have perished. But unfortunately the country is being depopulated. The towns, London especially, are being gorged with undigested and indigestible masses of labor. And as the result the children suffer grievously. The town bread child is at a thousand disadvantages compared with his cousin in the country. But every year there are more town bread children and fewer cousins in the country. To rear healthy children you want first a home. Secondly, milk. Thirdly, fresh air. And fourthly, exercise under the green trees and blue sky. All these things every country laborer's child possesses. Or used to possess. For the shadow of the city life lies now upon the fields. And even in the remotest rural district, the laborer who tends the cows is often denied the milk which his children need. The secular demand of the great town forestalls the claims of the laboring hind. Tea and slops and beer take the place of milk and the bone sinew of the next generation are sapped from the cradle. But the country child if he has nothing but skim milk and only a little of that has at least plenty of exercise in the fresh air. He has healthy human relations with his neighbors. He is looked after and in some sort of fashion brought into contact with the life of the hall, the vicarage and the farm. He lives a natural life amid the birds and trees and growing crops and the animals of the fields. He is not a mere human ant crawling on the granite pavement of a great urban ants nest with an unnaturally developed nervous system and a sickly constitution. But it will be said the child of today has the inestimable advantage of education. No, he has not. Educated the children are not. They are pressed through standards which exact a certain acquaintance with ABC and Pothawkson figures, but educated they are not in the sense of the development of their latent capacities so as to make them capable for the discharge of their duties in life. The new generation can read, no doubt, otherwise where would be the sale of 16 string jack, Dick Turpin and the like. But take the girls. Who can pretend that the girls whom our schools are now turning out are half as well educated for the work of life at the same age? How many of all these mothers of the future know how to bake a loaf or wash their clothes? Except minding the baby a task that cannot be evaded, what domestic training have they received to qualify them for being in the future the mothers of babies themselves? And even the schooling such as it is at what an expense it is often imparted. The rakeings of the human cesspool are brought into the school room and mixed up with your children. Your little ones who never heard a foul word and who are not only innocent but ignorant of all the horrors of vice and sin, sit for hours side by side with little ones whose parents are habitually drunk and play with others whose idea of merriment are gained from the familiar spectacle of the nightly debauch by which their mothers earn the family bread. It is good no doubt to learn the ABC but it is not so good that in acquiring these indispensable rudiments your children should also acquire the vocabulary of the harlot and the corner boy. I speak only of what I know and of that which has been brought home to me in a matter of repeated complaint by my officers, when I say that the obscenity of the talk of many of the children of some of our public schools could hardly be outdone even in Sodom and Gomorrah. Childish innocence is very beautiful but the bloom is soon destroyed and it is a cruel awakening for a mother to discover that her tenderly nurtured boy or her carefully guarded daughter has been initiated by a companion into the mysteries of abomination that are concealed in the phrase a house of ill fame. The home is largely destroyed where the mother follows the father into the factory and where the hours of labor are so long that they have no time to see their children. The omnibus drivers of London, for instance, what time have they for discharging the daily duties of parentage to their little ones? How can a man who is on his omnibus from fourteen to sixteen hours a day have time to be a father to his children in any sense of the word? He has hardly a chance to see them except when they are asleep. Even the Sabbath, that blessed institution which is one of the sheet anchors of human existence, is encroached upon. Many of the new industries which have been started or developed since I was a boy ignore man's need of one day's rest in seven. The railway, the post office, the tramway all compel some of their employees to be content with less than the divinely appointed minimum of leisure. In the country darkness restores the laboring father to his little ones. In the town, gas and the electric light enables the employer to rob the children of the whole of their father's waking hours. And in some cases he takes the mothers also. Under some of the conditions of modern industry, children are not so much born into a house as they are spawned into the world like fish with the results which we see. The decline of natural affection follows inevitably from the institution of the fish relationship for that of the human. A father who never dandles his child on his knee cannot have a very keen sense of the responsibilities of paternity. In the rush and pressure of our competitive city life thousands of men have not time to be fathers. Sires, yes, fathers, no. It will take a good deal of schoolmaster to make up for that change. If this be the case even with the children constantly employed it can be imagined what kind of a home life is possessed by the children of the tramp, the odd jobber, the thief, and the harlot. For all these people have children, although they have no homes in which to rear them not a bird in all the woods or fields but prepares some kind of a nest in which to hatch and rear its young even if it be but a hole in the sand or a few crossed sticks in the bush. But how many young ones amongst our people are hatched before any nest is ready to receive them. Think of the multitudes of children born in our workhouses children of whom it may be said they are conceived in sin and shape and in inequity and as a punishment of the sins of the parents branded from birth as bastards worse than fatherless homeless and friendless damned into an evil world in which even those who have all the advantages of a good parentage and a careful training find it hard enough to make their way. Sometimes it is true the passionate love of the deserted mother for the child and the visible symbol and terrible result of her undoing stands between the little one and all its enemies but think how often the mother regards the advent of her child with loathing and horror how the discovery that she is about to become a mother affects her like a nightmare and how nothing but the dread of the hangman's rope keeps her from strangling the babe on the very hour of its birth what chances has such a child and there are many such in a certain country that I will not name there exists a scientifically arranged system of infanticide cloaked under the garb of philanthropy gigantic foundling establishments exist in its principal cities where every comfort and scientific improvement is provided for the deserted children with the result that one half of them die the mothers are spared the crime the state assumes the responsibility we do something like that here but our foundling asylums are the street, the workhouse and the grave when an English judge tells us as Mr. Justice Wills did the other day that there are any number of parents who would kill their children for a few pounds insurance money we can form some idea of the horrors of the existence into which many of the children of this highly favored land are ushered at their birth the overcrowded homes of the poor compel the children to witness everything sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark the bitter poverty of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed there are few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilization than that of the compulsory attendance of children at school faint with hunger because they had no breakfast and not sure whether they would even secure a dry crust for dinner when their morning's quantum of education had been duly imparted children thus hungered thus housed and thus left to grow up as best they can without being fathered or mothered are not educate them as you will exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the empire what then is the ground for hope that if we leave things alone the new generation will be better than their elders to me it seems that the truth is rather the other way the lawlessness of our lads the increased license of our girls the general shiftlessness from the home making point of view of the product of our factories and schools are far from reassuring our young people have never learned to obey the fighting gangs of half grown lads and listen and the scuttlers of Manchester are ugly symptoms of a social condition that will not grow better by being left alone it is the home that has been destroyed and with the home the home like virtues it is the dis-homed multitude no manic hungry that is rearing an undisciplined population cursed from birth with hereditary weakness of body and hereditary false of character it is idle to hope to mend matters by taking the children and bundling them up in barracks a child brought up in an institution is too often only half human having never known a mother's love and a father's care to men and women who are without homes children must be more or less of an encumbrance their advent is regarded with and often it is averted by crime the unwelcome little stranger is badly cared for badly fed and allowed every chance to die nothing is worth doing to increase his chances of living that does not reconstitute the home but between us and that ideal how vast is the gulf it will have to be bridged however anything practical is to be done end of section 8 recording by Tom Hirsch section 9 is there no help? part 1 this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Tom Hirsch it may be said by those who have followed me to this point that while it is quite true that there are many who are out of work and not less true than there are many who sleep on the embankment and elsewhere the law has provided a remedy or, if not a remedy at least a method of dealing with these sufferers which is sufficient the secretary of the charity organization society assured one of my officers who went to inquire for his opinion on the subject all that was needed in this direction they already had in working order and to create any further machinery would do more harm than good now what is the existing machinery by which society whether through the organization of the state or by individual endeavor attempts to deal with the submerged resident I had intended at one time to have devoted considerable space to the description of the existing agencies together with certain observations which have been forcibly impressed upon my mind as to their failure and its cause the necessity however of subordinating everything to the supreme purpose of this book which is to endeavor to show how light can be led into the heart of darkest england compels me to pass rapidly over this department of the subject advancing as I go at the well meaning but more or less abortive attempts to cope with this great and appalling evil the first place must naturally be given to the administration of the poor law legally the state accepts the responsibility of providing food and shelter for every man woman or child who is utterly destitute this responsibility is however practically shirked by the imposition of conditions on the claimants of relief that are hateful and repulsive if not impossible as to the method of poor law administration in dealing with inmates of work houses or in the distribution of outdoor relief I say nothing both of these raise great questions which lie outside my immediate purpose all that I need to do is to indicate the limitations it may be the necessary limitations under which the poor law operates no Englishman can come upon the rates so long as he has anything whatever left to call his own when long continued destitution has been carried on to the bitter end when piece by piece every article of domestic furniture has been sold or pond when all efforts to procure employment have failed and when you have nothing left except the clothes in which you stand then you can present yourself before the relieving officer and secure your lodging in the work house the administration of which varies infinitely according to the disposition of the board of governors under whose control it happens to be not sunk to such despair as to be willing to barter your liberty for the sake of food clothing and shelter in the work house but are only temporarily out of employment seeking work then you can go to the casual award there you are taken in and provided for on the principle of making it as disagreeable as possible for yourself in order to deter you from again accepting the hospitality of the rates and of course in defensive this a good deal can be said by the political economist but what seems utterly indefensible is the careful precautions which are taken to render it impossible for the unemployed casual to resume promptly after his night's rest the search for work under the existing regulations if you are compelled to seek refuge on Monday night in the casual award you are bound to remain there at least till Wednesday morning the theory of the system is this that individuals casually poor and out of work being destitute and without shelter may upon application receive shelter for the night supper and a breakfast and in return for this form a task of work not necessarily in repayment for the relief received but simply as a test of their willingness to work for their living the work given is the same as that given to felons in jail okam picking and stone breaking the work too is excessive in proportion to what is received four pounds of okam is a great task to an expert and an old hand to a novice it can only be accomplished with the greatest difficulty if indeed it can be done at all it is even in excess of the amount demanded from a criminal in jail the stone breaking test is monstrous half a ton of stone from any man in return for partially supplying the cravings of hunger is an outrage which if we read of as having entered in Russia or Siberia would find Exeter Hall crowded with an indignant audience and Hyde Park filled with strong oratory but because the system exists at our own doors very little notice is taken of it these tasks are expected from all comers starved, ill clad half fed creatures from the streets foot sore and worn out and yet unless it is done the alternative is the magistrate and the jail the old system was bad enough which demanded the picking of one pound of okam as soon as this task was accomplished which generally kept them till the middle of the day it was thus rendered impossible for them to seek work and they were forced to spend another night in the ward the local government board however stepped in and the casual was ordered to be detained for the whole day and the second night the amount of labor required from him being increased fourfold under the present system therefore the penalty for seeking shelter from the streets is a whole day and two nights with an almost impossible task which failing to do the victim is liable to be dragged before a magistrate to jail as a rogue and a vagabond while in the casual ward their treatment is practically that of a criminal they sleep in a cell with an apartment at the back in which the work is done receiving at night half a pound of gruel and eight ounces of bread and next morning the same for breakfast with half a pound of okam and stones to occupy himself for a day the beds are mostly of the plank type the covering scant the comfort nil being remembered that this is the treatment meted out to those who are supposed to be casual poor in temporary difficulty walking from place to place seeking some employment the treatment of women is as follows each casual has to stay in the casual ward two nights and one day during which time they have to pick two pounds of okam order the wash tub and work out the time there while at the wash tub they are allowed to wash their own clothes but not otherwise if seen more than once in the same casual ward they are detained three days by order of the inspector each time seen or if sleeping twice in the same month the master of the ward has power to detain them three days the inspectors who visit different casual wards and if the casual is seen by any of the inspectors who in turn visit all the casual wards at any of the wards they have previously visited they are detained three days in each one the inspector who is a male person visits the wards at all unexpected hours even visiting while the females are in bed they are in some wards composed of straw and two rugs in others coconut fiber and two rugs the casuals rise at 5.45am and go to bed at 7pm if they do not finish picking their okam before 7pm they stay up till they do if a casual does not come to the ward before 12.30 midnight they keep them one day extra the way in which this operates however can best be understood by the following statements made by those who have been in casual wards and who can therefore speak from experience as to how the system affects the individual JC knows casual wards pretty well has been in St. Giles Whitechapel St. George's Paddington Marylebone no details but as a rule the doors open at 6 you walk in they tell you what the work is and that if you fail to do it you will be liable to imprisonment then you bathe some places the water is dirty three persons as a rule wash in one water at Whitechapel been there three times and it's always been dirty also at St. George's island. They were short of water. If you complain, they take no notice. You then tie your clothes in a bundle and they give you a night-shirt. And most places they serve supper to the men who have to go to bed and eat it there. Some beds are in cells, some in large rooms. You get up at six a.m. and do the task. The amount of stone-breaking is too much, and the oaken-picking is also heavy. The food differs. As St. Giles, the gruel left overnight is boiled up for breakfast and is consequently sour. The bread is puffy, full of holes, and don't weigh the regulation amount. Dinner is only eight ounces of bread and one-and-a-half ounces of cheese. And it's that short. How can anybody do their work? They will give you water to drink if you ring the cell-bell for it. That is, they will tell you to wait and bring it in about a half-an-hour. There are a good lot of moochers go to casual awards, but there are large numbers of men who only want work. JD, age 25, Londoner. Can't get work, tried hard, been refused work several times on account of having no settled residence. Look suspicious, they think, to have no home. Seems a decent, willing man. Had too penny worth of soup this morning, which has lasted all day. Earned one shilling six-pence yesterday, bill-distributing. Nothing the day before. Then good many London casual awards thinks they are no good because they keep him all day when he might be seeking work. Don't want shelter and daytime, wants work. If he goes in twice in a month to the same casual award, they detain him four days. Consider the food decidedly insufficient to do the required amount of work. If the work is not done to time, you are liable to 21 days in prisonment. Get badly treated some places, especially where there is a bullying superintendent. Has done 21 days for absolutely refusing to do the work on such low diet when unfit. Can't get justice, doctor always sides with superintendent. JS, odd jobber. Is working at board carrying when he can get it. There's quite a rush for it at one shilling topence a day. Carried a couple of parcels yesterday and got five pence for them. Had also a bit of bread and meat given him by a working man, so all together had an excellent day. Sometimes goes all day without food, and plenty more do the same. Sleeps on embankment, and now and then in casual award. Ladder is clean and comfortable enough, but they keep you in all day. That means no chance of getting work. Was a clerk once, but got out of a job and couldn't get another. There are so many clerks. A tramp says, I've been in most casual awards in London. Was in the one in Macklin Street, Drury Lane, last week. They keep you two nights in a day, and more than that, if they recognize you. You have to break ten hundred weight of stone or pick four pounds of okam. Both are hard. About thirty a night go to Macklin Street. The food is one pint gruel, six ounces bread for breakfast. Eight ounces bread and one and one half ounce cheese for dinner. Tea same as breakfast. No supper. It is not enough to do the work on. Then you are obliged to bathe, of course. Sometimes three will bathe in one water, and if you complain, they turn nasty and ask if you are come to a palace. Mitchum Workhouse I've been in. Grub is good. One and one half pint gruel and eight ounce bread for breakfast and same for supper. FKW. Baker. Ben Borg carrying today earned one shilling. Hours nine till five. I've been on this kind of life six years. Used to work in a bakery, but had congestion of the brain and couldn't stand the heat. I've been in about every casual award in England. They treat men too harshly. Have to work very hard, too. Has had to work whilst really unfit. At Peckham, known as Camberwell Union, was quite unable to do it through weakness and appeal to the doctor, who, taking the part of the other officials, as usual, refused to allow him to forego the work. Cheeked the doctor, telling him he didn't understand his work. Result got three days in imprisonment. Before going to a casual award at all, I spent seven consecutive nights on the embankment, and at last went to the ward. The result of the deliberate policy of making the night refuge for the unemployed laborer as disagreeable as possible, and of placing as many obstacles as possible in the way of his finding work the following day, is no doubt to minimize the number of casuals and, without question, succeeds. In the whole of London, the number of casuals in the wards at night is only 1,136. That is to say, the conditions which are imposed are so severe that the majority of the out-of- works prefer to sleep in the open air, taking their chance of the inclemancy and mutability of our English weather, rather than go through the experience of the casual ward. It seems to me that such a mode of coping with distress does not so much meet the difficulty as evaded. It is obvious that an apparatus which only provides for 1,136 persons per night is utterly unable to deal with the numbers of the homeless out-of-works. But if, by some miracle, we could use the casual wards as a means of providing for all those who are seeking work from day to day, without a place in which to lay their heads, save the curb stone of the pavement or the back of a seat on the embankment, they would utterly fail to have any appreciable effect upon the mass of human misery with which we have to deal. For this reason, the administration of the casual wards is mechanical, perfunctory, and formal. Each of the casuals is to the officer in charge merely one casual the more. There is no attempt, whatever, to do more than provide for them merely the indispensable requisites of existence. There has never been any attempt to treat them as human beings, to deal with them as individuals, to appeal to their hearts, to help them on their legs again. They are simply units, no more thought of and cared for than if they were so many coffee beans passing through a coffee mill. And as the net result of all my experience and observation of men and things, I must assert unhesitatingly that anything which dehumanizes the individual, anything which treats a man as if he were only a number of a series or a cog and a wheel without any regard to the character, the aspirations, the temptations, and the idiosyncrasies of the man must utterly fail as a remedial agency. The casual ward at the best is merely a squalid resting place for the casual in his downward career. If anything is to be done for these men, it must be done by other agents than those which prevail in the administration of the poor laws. The second method in which society endeavors to do its duty to the lapsed masses is by the miscellaneous and heterogeneous efforts which are clubbed together under the generic head of charity. Far be it from me to say one word in disparagement of any effort that is prompted by a sincere desire to alleviate the misery of our fellow creatures, but the most charitable are those who most deplore the utter failure which has, up till now, attended all their efforts to do more than temporarily alleviate pain or affect an occasional improvement in the condition of individuals. There are many institutions very excellent in their way, without which it is difficult to see how society could get on at all. But when they have done their best, there still remains this great and appalling mass of human misery on our hands, a perfect quagmire of human sludge. They may ladle out individuals here and there, but to drain the whole bog is an effort which seems to be beyond the imagination of most of those who spend their lives in philanthropic work. It is no doubt better than nothing to take the individual and feed him from day to day, to bandage up his wounds and heal his diseases. But you may go on doing that forever if you do not do more than that, and the worst of it is that all authorities agree that if you only do that, you will probably increase the evil with which you are attempting to deal, and that you had much better let the whole thing alone. There is at present no attempt at concerted action. Each one deals with the case immediately before him, and the result is what might be expected. There is a great expenditure, but the gains are, alas, very small. The fact, however, that so much is subscribed for the temporary relief and the mere alleviation of distress justifies my confidence that if a practical scheme of dealing with this misery in a permanent, comprehensive fashion be discovered, there will be no lack of the sinews of war. It is well, no doubt, sometimes to administer an anesthetic, but the cure of the patient is worth ever so much more, and the latter is the object which we must constantly set before us in approaching this problem. The third method by which society professes to attempt the reclamation of the lost is by the rough, rude surgery of the jail. Upon this a whole treatise might be written, but when it was finished it would be nothing more than a demonstration that our prison system has practically missed aiming at that which should be the first essential of every system of punishment. It is not reformatory. It is not worked as if it were intended to be reformatory. It is punitive and only punitive. The whole administration needs to be reformed from top to bottom in accordance with this fundamental principle, that while every prisoner should be subjected to that measure of punishment, which shall mark a due sense of his crime, both to himself and society, the main object should be to rouse in his mind the desire to lead an honest life and to affect that change in his disposition and character which will send him forth to put that desire into practice. At present every prison is more or less a training school for crime, an introduction to the society of criminals, the petrification of any lingering human feeling, and a very bestial of despair. The prison brand is stamped upon those who go in, and that's so deeply that it seems as if it clung to them for life. To enter prison once means in many cases an almost certain return there at an early date. All this has to be changed, and will be, when once the work of prison reform is taken in hand by men who understand the subject, who believe in the reformation of human nature in every form which its deep gravity can assume, and who are in full sympathy with the class for whose benefit they labor, and when those charged directly with the care of criminals seek to work out their regeneration in the same spirit.