 Section 10. Is There No Help? Part 2. The question of prison reform is all the more important because it is only by the agency of the jail that society attempts to deal with its hopeless cases. If a woman, driven mad with shame, flings herself into the river and is fished out alive, we clap her into prison on a charge of attempted suicide. If a man, despairing of work and gaunt with hunger, helps himself to food, it is to the same reformatory agency that he is forthwith subjected. The rough and ready surgery with which we deal with our social patients recalls the simple method of early physicians. The tradition still lingers among old people, of doctors who prescribed bleeding for every ailment, and of keepers of asylums, whose one idea of ministering to a mind diseased was to put the body into a straight waistcoat. Modern science laughs to scorn these simple remedies of an unscientific age and declares that they were, in most cases, the most efficacious means of aggravating the disease they professed to cure. But in social melodies, we are still in the age of the blood-letter and the straight waistcoat. The jail is our specific for despair. When all else fails, society will always undertake to feed, clothe, warm, and hose a man, if only he will commit a crime. It will do it also in such a fashion as to render it no temporary help, but a permanent necessity. Society says to the individual, to qualify for free board and lodging, you must commit a crime. But if you do, you must pay the price. You must allow me to ruin your character and doom you for the rest of your life to destitution, modified by the occasional successes of criminality. You shall become the child of the state, on condition that we doom you to a temporal perdition, out of which you will never be permitted to escape, and in which you will always be a charge upon our resources and a constant source of anxiety and inconvenience to the authorities. I will feed you, certainly, but in return you must permit me to doom you. That surely ought not to be the last word of civilized society. Certainly not, say others. Immigration is the true specific. The wastelands of the world are crying aloud for the application of surplus labor. Immigration is the panacea. Now I have no objection to immigration. Only a criminal lunatic could seriously object to the transference of Hungry Jack from an overcrowded shanty, where he cannot even obtain enough bad potatoes to dull the ache behind his waistcoat, and is tempted to let his child die for the sake of the insurance money, to a land flowing with milk and honey, where he can eat meat three times a day, and where a man's children are his wealth. But you might as well lay a newborn child naked in the middle of a new sown field in March, and expect it to live and thrive, as expect immigration to produce successful results on the lines which some lay down. The child, no doubt, has within it latent capacities, which, when years in training have done their work, will enable him to reap a harvest from a fertile soil, and the new sown field will be covered with golden grain in August. But these facts will not enable the infant to still its hunger with the clods of the earth in the cold springtime. It is just like that with immigration. It is simply criminal to take a multitude of untrained men and women and land them penniless and helpless on the fringe of some new continent. The result of such proceedings we see in the American cities, in the degradation of their slums, and in the hopeless demoralization of thousands who, in their own country, were leading decent, industrious lives. A few months since in Parramatta, in New South Wales, a young man who had emigrated with a vague hope of mending his fortunes, found himself homeless, friendless, and penniless. He was a clerk. They wanted no more clerks in Parramatta. Trade was dull. Employment was scarce, even for trained hands. He went about from day to day seeking work and finding none. At last he came to the end of all his resources. He went all day without food. At night he slept as best he could. Morning came and he was hopeless. All next day he passed without a meal. Night came. He could not sleep. He wandered about restlessly. At last, about midnight, an idea seized him. Grasping a brick, he deliberately walked up to a jeweler's window and smashed a hole through the glass. He made no attempt to steal anything. He merely smashed the pane and then sat down on the pavement beneath the window, waiting for the arrival of the policeman. He waited some hours, but at last the constable arrived. He gave himself up and was marched off to the lock-up. I shall at least have something to eat now, was the reflection. He was right. He was sentenced to one year's imprisonment, and he is in jail at this hour. This very morning he received his rations, and at this very moment he is dodged and clothed and cared for at the cost of the rates and taxes. He has become the child of the state, and therefore one of the socially damned. Thus immigration itself, instead of being an invariable specific, sometimes brings us back again to the jail door. Immigration by all means, but whom are you to emigrate? These girls who do not know how to bake? These lads who never handle the spade? And where are you to emigrate them? Are you going to make the colonies the dumping ground of your human refuse? On that the colonists will have something decisive to say, where there are colonists, and where there are not, how are you to feed, clothe, and employ your immigrants in the uninhabited wilderness? Immigration, no doubt, is the making of a colony, just as bread is the staff of life. But if you were to cram a stomach with wheat by a force pump, you would bring on such a fit of indigestion that unless your victim threw up the indigestible mass of unground, uncooked, unmasticated grain, he would never want another meal. So it is with the new colonies and the surplus labor of other countries. Immigration is in itself not a panacea. Is education? In one sense it may be. For education, the developing in a man of all his latent capacities for improvement may cure anything and everything. But the education of which men speak when they use the term is mere schooling. No one but a fool would say a word against school teaching. By all means, let us have our children educated. But when we have passed them through the board school mill, we have enough experience to see that they do not emerge the renovated and regenerated beings whose advent was expected by those who passed the Education Act. The scuttlers, who knife inoffensive persons in Lancashire, the fighting gangs of the west of London, belong to the generation that has enjoyed the advantage of compulsory education. Education, book learning, and schooling will not solve the difficulty. It helps, no doubt, but in some ways it aggravates it. The common school to which the children of thieves and harlots and drunkards are driven, to sit side by side with our little ones, is often by no means a temple of all the virtues. It is sometimes a university of all the vices. The bad infect the good, and your boy and girl come back reeking with the contamination of bad associates, and familiar with the coarsest obscenity of the slum. Another great evil is the extent to which our education tends to overstock the labor market with material for quill drivers and shopmen, and gives our youth a distaste for sturdy labor. Many of the most hopeless cases in our shelters are men of considerable education. Our schools help to enable a starving man to tell his story in more grammatical language than that which his father could have employed, but they do not feed him or teach him where to go to get fed. So far from doing this, they increase the tendency to drift into those channels where food is least secure, because employment is most uncertain and the market most overstacked. Try trade's unionism, say some, and their advice is being widely followed. There are many and great advantages in trade's unionism. The fable of the bundle of sticks is good for all time. The more the working people can be banded together in voluntary organizations created and administered by themselves for the protection of their own interests, the better at any rate for this world, and not only for their own interests, but for those of every other section of the community. But can we rely upon this agency as a means of solving the problems which confront us? Trade's unionism has had the field to itself for a generation. It is twenty years since it was set free from all the legal disabilities under which it labored. But it has not covered the land. It has not organized all skilled labor. Unskilled labor is almost untouched. At the Congress at Liverpool, only one and a half million workmen were represented. Women are almost entirely outside the pail. Trade unions not only represent a fraction of the labouring classes, but they are, by their constitution, unable to deal with those who do not belong to their body. What ground can there be then for hoping that trade's unionism will by itself solve the difficulty? The most experienced trade's unionists will be the first to admit that any scheme which could deal adequately with the out-of-works and others who hang onto their skirts and form the recruiting ground of black legs and embarrass them in every way would be, of all others, that which would be most beneficial to trade's unionism. The same may be said about cooperation. Personally, I'm a strong believer in cooperation, but it must be cooperation based on the spirit of benevolence. I don't see how any Pacific readjustment of the social and economic relations between classes in this country can be affected except by the gradual substitution of cooperative associations for the present wages system. As you will see in subsequent chapters, so far from there being anything in my proposals that would militate in any way against the ultimate adoption of the cooperative solution of the question, I look to cooperation as one of the chief elements of hope in the future. But we have not to deal with the ultimate future, but with the immediate present. And for the evils with which we are dealing, the existing cooperative organizations do not, and cannot give us much help. Another I do not like to call it specific. It is only a name, a mere mockery of a specific. So let me call it another suggestion made when discussing this evil is thrift. Thrift is a great virtue, no doubt. But how is thrift to benefit those who have nothing? What is the use of the gospel of thrift to a man who had nothing to eat yesterday, and has not threepence today to pay for his lodging tonight? To live on nothing a day is difficult enough, but to save on it would beat the cleverest political economists that ever lived. I admit, without hesitation, that any scheme which weakened the incentive to thrift would do harm. But it is a mistake to imagine that social damnation is an incentive to thrift. It operates least where its force ought to be most felt. There is no fear that any scheme that we can devise will appreciably diminish the deterrent influences which dispose a man to save. But it is idle wasting time upon a plea that is only brought forward as an excuse for inaction. Thrift is a great virtue, the inculcation of which must be constantly kept in view by all those who are attempting to educate and save the people. It is not, in any sense, a specific for the salvation of the lapsed and the lost. Even among the most wretched of the very poor, a man must have an object and a hope before he will save a half penny. Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we perish, sums up the philosophy of those who have no hope. In the thriftiness of the French peasant, we see that the temptation of eating and drinking is capable of being resolutely subordinated to the superior claims of the accumulation of a dowry for the daughter or for the acquisition of a little more land for the son. Of the schemes of those who propose to bring in a new heaven and a new earth, by a more scientific distribution of the pieces of gold and silver in the trouser pockets of mankind, I need not say anything here. They may be good or they may not. I say nothing against any shortcut to the millennium that is compatible with the Ten Commandments. I intensely sympathize with the aspirations that lie behind all these socialist dreams. But whether it is Henry George's single tax on land values or Edward Bellamy's nationalism or the more elaborate schemes of the collectivists, my attitude towards them all is the same. What these good people want to do, I also want to do. But I am a practical man, dealing with the actualities of today. I have no preconceived theories, and I flatter myself, I am singularly free from prejudices. I am ready to set at the feet of any who will show me any good. I keep my mind open on all these subjects, and I am quite prepared to hail with open arms any utopia that is offered me. But it must be within range of my fingertips. It is of no use to me if it is in the clouds. Checks on the bank of futurity I accept, gladly enough, as a free gift. But I can hardly be expected to take them as if they were the current coin, or to try to cash them at the bank of England. It may be that nothing will be put permanently right, until everything has been turned upside down. There are certainly so many things that need transforming, beginning with the heart of each individual man and woman, that I do not quarrel with any visionary. When, in his intense longing for the amelioration of the condition of mankind, he lays down his theories as to the necessity for radical change, however impractical they may appear to me. But this is the question. Here, at our shelters last night, were a thousand hungry, workless people. I want to know what to do with them. Here is John Jones, a stout, stalwart laborer in rags, who has not had one square meal for a month, who has been hunting for work that will enable him to keep body and soul together, and hunting in vain. There he is in his hungry raggedness, asking for work that he may live and not die of sheer starvation in the midst of the wealthiest city in the world. What is to be done with John Jones? The individualist tells me that the free play of the natural laws governing the struggle for existence will result in the survival of the fittest, and that, in the course of a few ages more or less, a much nobler type will be evolved. But meanwhile, what is to become of John Jones? The socialist tells me that the great social revolution is looming large on the horizon. In the good time coming, when all wealth will be redistributed and private property abolished, all stomachs will be filled and there will be no more John Jones impatiently clamoring for opportunity to work that they may not die. It may be so, but in the meantime, here is John Jones growing more impatient than ever because hungrier who wonders if he is to wait for dinner until the social revolution has arrived. What are we to do with John Jones? That is the question. And to the solution of that question none of the Utopians give me much help. For practical purposes, these dreamers fall under the condemnation they lavish so freely upon the conventional religious people who relieve themselves of all anxiety for the welfare of the poor by saying that in the next world all will be put right. This religious cant, which rids itself of all the importunity of suffering humanity by drawing unnegotiable bills payable on the other side of the grave, is not more impracticable than the socialist claptrap which postpones all redress of human suffering until after the general overturn. Both take refuge in the future to escape a solution of the problems of the present, and it matters little to the sufferers whether the future is on this side of the grave or the other. Both are for them equally out of reach. When the sky falls we shall catch larks, no doubt, but in the meantime it is the meantime. That is the only time in which we have to work. It is in the meantime that the people must be fed, that their life's work must be done or left undone forever. Nothing that I have to propose in this book or that I propose to do by my scheme will in the least prevent the coming of any of the utopias. I leave the limitless infinite of the future to the utopians. They may build there as they please. As for me it is indispensable that whatever I do is founded on existing fact and provides a present help for the actual need. There's only one class of men who have caused to oppose the proposals which I am about to set forth. That is those, if such there be, who are determined to bring about by any and every means a bloody and violent overturn of all existing institutions. They will oppose the scheme and they will act logically in so doing. For the only hope of those who are the artificers of revolution is the mass of seething discontent and misery that lies in the heart of the social system. Honestly believing that things must get worse before they get better. They build all their hopes upon the general overturn and they resent as an indefinite postponement of the realization of their dreams any attempt at a reduction of human misery. The army of the revolution is recruited by the soldiers of despair therefore down with any scheme which gives men hope. Insofar as it succeeds it curtailes our recruiting ground and reinforces the ranks of our enemies. Such opposition is to be counted upon and to be utilized as the best of all tributes to the value of our work. Those who thus count upon violence and bloodshed are too few to hinder and their opposition will merely add to the momentum with which I hope and believe this scheme will ultimately be enabled to surmount all dissent and achieve with the blessing of God that measure of success with which I verily believe it to be charged. Such then is a brief and hurried survey of darkest England, and those who have been in the depth of the enchanted forest in which wander the tribes of the despairing lost will be the first to admit that I have in no way exaggerated its horrors, while most will assert that I have underestimated the number of its denizens. I have indeed very scrupulously striven to keep my estimates of the extent of the evil within the lines of sobriety. Nothing in such an enterprise is that on which I am entering could worse befall me than to come under the reproach of sensationalism or exaggeration. Most of the evidence upon which I have relied is taken direct from the official statistics supplied by the government returns, and as to the rest, I can only say that if my figures are compared with those of any other writer upon this subject, it will be found that my estimates are the lowest. I am not prepared to defend the exact accuracy of my calculations, accepting so far as they constitute the minimum. To those who believe that the numbers of the wretched are far in excess of my figures, I have nothing to say, accepting this, that if the evil is so much greater than I have described, then let your efforts be proportioned to your estimate, not to mine. The great point with each of us is not how many of the wretched exist today, but how few shall there be in the years that are to come. The dark and dismal jungle of pauperism, vice and despair, is the inheritance to which we have succeeded from the generations and centuries past, during which wars, insurrections, and internal troubles left our forefathers small leisure to attend to the well-being of the sunken tent. Now that we have happened upon more fortunate times, let us recognize that we are our brother's keepers, and set to work regardless of party distinctions and religious differences, to make this world of ours a little bit more like home for those we call our brethren. The problem it must be admitted is by no means a simple one, nor can anyone accuse me in the foregoing pages of having minimized the difficulties which heredity, habit, and surroundings place in the way of its solution. But unless we are prepared to fold our arms in selfish ease and say that nothing can be done, and thereby doom those lost millions to remedialist perdition in this world, to say nothing of the next, the problem must be solved in some way. But in what way? That is the question. It may tend perhaps to the crystallization of opinion on this subject if I lay down with such precision as I can command what must be the essential elements of any scheme likely to command success. The Essentials to Success The first essential that must be borne in mind as governing every scheme that may be put forward is that it must change the man when it is his character and conduct which constitute the reasons for his failure in the battle of life. No change in circumstances, no revolution in social conditions, can possibly transform the nature of man. Some of the worst men and women in the world whose names are chronicled by history with a shudder of horror were those who had all the advantages that wealth, education, and station could confer or ambition could attain. The supreme test of any scheme for benefiting humanity lies in the answer to the question, what does it make of the individual? Does it quicken his conscience? Does it soften his heart? Does it enlighten his mind? Does it, in short, make more of a true man of him? Because only by such influences can he be enabled to lead a human life. Among the denizens of darkest England there are many who have found their way thither by defects of character which would, under the most favorable circumstances, relegate them to the same position. Hence, unless you can change their character, your labor will be lost. You may clothe the doctor, fill his purse with gold, establish him in a well-furnished home, and in three or six or twelve months he will once more be on the embankment, haunted by delirium tremens, dirty, squalid, and ragged. Hence, in all cases where a man's own character and defects constitute the reasons for his fall, that character must be changed, and that conduct altered, if any permanent beneficial results are to be attained. If he is a drunkard, he must be made sober. If idle he must be made industrious. If criminal he must be made honest. If impure he must be made clean. And if he be so deep down in vice, and has been there so long that he has lost all heart and hope and power to help himself, and absolutely refuses to move, he must be inspired with hope, and have created within him the ambition to rise, otherwise he will never get out of the horrible pit. Secondly, the remedy to be effectual must change the circumstances of the individual when they are the cause of his wretched condition and lie beyond his control. Among those who have arrived at their present evil plight through faults of self-indulgence or some defect in their moral character, how many are there who would have been very differently placed today had their surroundings been otherwise? Charles Kingsley puts this very abruptly when he makes the poacher's widow say, when addressing the bad squire, who drew back, Our daughters, with base-born babies, have wandered away in their shame. If your misses had slept, squire, where they did, your misses might do the same. Placed in the same or similar circumstances, how many of us would have turned out better than this poor, lapsed, sunken multitude? Many of this crowd have never had a chance of doing better. They have been born in a poisoned atmosphere, educated in circumstances which have rendered modesty and impossibility, and have been thrown into life in conditions which make a vice a second nature. Hence, to provide an effective remedy for the evils which we are deploring, these circumstances must be altered, and unless my scheme affects such a change, it will be of no use. There are multitudes, myriads of men and women, who are floundering in the horrible quagmire beneath the burden of a load too heavy for them to bear. Every plunge they take forward lands them deeper. Some have ceased even to struggle, and lie prone in the filthy bog, slowly suffocating, with their manhood and womanhood all but perished. It is no use standing on the firm bank of the quaking morass and anathematizing these poor wretches. If you are to do them any good, you must give them another chance to get on their feet. You must give them firm foothold upon which they can once more stand upright, and you must build stepping stones across the bog to enable them safely to reach the other side. Favorable circumstances will not change a man's heart or transform his nature, but unpropitious circumstances may render it absolutely impossible for him to escape, no matter how he may desire to extricate himself. The first step with these helpless, sunken creatures is to create the desire to escape, and then provide the means for doing so. In other words, give the man another chance. Thirdly, any remedy worthy of consideration must be on a scale commensurate with the evil with which it proposes to deal. It is no use trying to bail out the ocean with a pint pot. This evil is one whose victims are counted by the million. The army of the lost in our midst exceeds the numbers of that multitudinous host which Xerxes led from Asia to attempt the conquest of Greece. Pass in parade those who make up the submerged tent. Count the poppers indoor and outdoor, the homeless, the starving, the criminals, the lunatics, the drunkards, and the harlots, and yet do not give way to despair. Even to attempt to save a tithe of this host requires that we should put much more force and fire into our work than has hitherto been exhibited by anyone. There must be no more philanthropic tinkering, as if this vast sea of human misery were contained in the limits of a garden pond. Fourthly, not only must the scheme be large enough, but it must be permanent. That is to say it must not be merely a spasmodic effort coping with the misery of today. It must be established on a durable footing so as to go on dealing with the misery of tomorrow and the day after, so long as there is misery left in the world with which to grapple. Fifthly, but while it must be permanent it must also be immediately practicable. Any scheme to be of use must be capable of being brought into instant operation with beneficial results. Sixthly, the indirect features of the scheme must not be such as to produce injury to the persons whom we seek to benefit. Mere charity, for instance, while relieving the pinch of hunger, demoralizes the recipient. And whatever the remedy is that we employ, it must be of such a nature as to do good without doing evil at the same time. It is no use conferring six penny worth of benefit on a man if at the same time we do him a shelling's worth of harm. Seventhly, while assisting one class of the community it must not seriously interfere with the interests of another. In raising one section of the fallen we must not thereby endanger the safety of those who with difficulty are keeping on their feet. These are the conditions by which I ask you to test the scheme I am about to unfold. They are formidable enough, possibly, to deter many from even attempting to do anything. They are not of my making. They are obvious to anyone who looks into the matter. They are the laws which govern the work of the philanthropic reformer, just as the laws of gravitation, of wind, and of weather govern the operations of the engineer. It is no use saying we could build a bridge across the Tay if the wind did not blow, or that we could build a railway across a bog if the quagmire would afford us a solid foundation. The engineer has to take into account the difficulties and make them his starting point. The wind will blow, therefore the bridge must be made strong enough to resist it. Chatmoss will shake, therefore we must construct a foundation in the very balls of the bog on which to build our railway. So it is with the social difficulties which confront us. If we act in harmony with these laws we shall triumph, but if we ignore them they will overwhelm us with destruction and cover us with disgrace. But difficult as the task may be it is not one which we can neglect. When Napoleon was compelled to retreat under circumstances which rendered it impossible for him to carry off his sick and wounded he ordered his doctors to poison every man in the hospital. A general has before now massacred his prisoners rather than allow them to escape. These lost ones are the prisoners of society. They are the sick and the wounded in our hospitals. What a shriek would arise from the civilized world if it were proposed to administer tonight to every one of these millions such a dose of morphing that they would sleep to wake no more. But so far as they are concerned would it not be much less cruel thus to end their life than to allow them to drag on day after day year after year in misery anguish and despair driven into vice and hunted into crime until at last disease harries them into the grave. I am under no delusion as to the possibility of inaugurating a millennium by my scheme. But the triumphs of science deal so much with the utilization of waste material that I do not despair of something effectual being accomplished in the utilization of this human waste product. The refuse which was a drug and a curse to our manufacturers when treated under the hands of the chemist has been the means of supplying us with dyes rivaling in loveliness and variety the hues of the rainbow. If the alchemy of science can extract beautiful colors from coal tar cannot divine alchemy enable us to evolve gladness and brightness out of the agonized hearts and dark dreary loveless lives of these doomed myriads. Is it too much to hope that in God's world God's children may be able to do something if they set to work with a will to carry out a plan of campaign against these great evils which are the nightmare of our existence? The remedy it may be is simpler than some imagine. The key to the enigma may lie closer to our hands than we have any idea of. Many devices have been tried and many have failed no doubt. It is only stubborn reckless perseverance that can hope to succeed. It is well that we recognize this. How many ages did men try to make gunpowder and never succeeded? They would put salt peter to charcoal or charcoal to sulfur or salt peter to sulfur and so were ever unable to make the compound explode. But it has only been discovered within the last few hundred years that all three were needed. Before that gunpowder was a mere imagination, a fantasy of the alchemists. How easy it is to make gunpowder, now the secret of its manufacturer is known. But take a simpler illustration, one which lies even within the memory of some that read these pages. From the beginning of the world down to the beginning of this century, mankind had not found out with all its striving after cheap and easy transport the miraculous difference that would be brought about by laying down two parallel lines of metal. All the great men and the wise men of the past lived and died oblivious of that fact. The greatest machinations and engineers of antiquity, the men who bridged all the rivers of Europe, the architects who built the cathedrals which are still the wonder of the world, failed to discern what seems to us so obviously simple a proposition that two parallel lines of rail would diminish the cost and difficulty of transport to a minimum. Without that discovery, the steam engine, which has itself been an invention of quite recent years, would have failed to transform civilization. What we have to do in the philanthropic sphere is to find something analogous to the engineer's parallel bars. This discovery I think I have made, and hence I have written this book. My Scheme. What then is my scheme? It is a very simple one, although in its ramifications and extensions it embraces the whole world. In this book I profess to do no more than to merely outline as plainly and as simply as I can the fundamental features of my proposals. I propose to devote the bulk of this volume to setting forth what can practically be done with one of the most pressing parts of the problem, namely that relating to those who are out of work, and who as a result are more or less destitute. I have many ideas of what might be done with those who are at present cared for in some measure by the state, but I will leave these ideas for the present. It is not urgent that I should explain how our poor law system could be reformed, or what I should like to see done for the lunatics in asylums, or the criminals in jail. The persons who are provided for by the state we will therefore, for the moment, leave out of count. The indoor paupers, the convicts, the inmates of the lunatic asylums are cared for in a fashion already. But over and above all these there exists some hundreds of thousands who are not quartered on the state, but who are living on the verge of despair, and who at any moment under circumstances of misfortune might be compelled to demand relief or support in one shape or another. I will confine myself, therefore, for the present to those who have no helper. It is possible, I think probable, if the proposals which I am now putting forward are carried out successfully in relation to the lost, homeless, and helpless of the population, that many of those who are at the present moment in somewhat better circumstances will demand that they also shall be allowed to partake in the benefits of the scheme. But upon this also I remain silent. I merely remark that we have, in the recognition of the importance of discipline and organization, what may be called regimented cooperation, a principle that will be found valuable for solving many social problems other than that of destitution. Of these plans, which are at present being brooded over with a view to their realization when the time is propitious and the opportunity occurs, I shall have something to say. What is the outward invisible form of the problem of the unemployed? Alas, we are all too familiar with it for any lengthy description to be necessary. The social problem presents itself before us whenever a hungry, dirty, and ragged man stands at our door asking if we can give him a crust or a job. That is the social question. What are you to do with that man? He has no money in his pocket. All that he can pawn he has pawned long ago. His stomach is as empty as his purse, and the whole of the clothes upon his back, even if sold on the best terms, would not fetch a shilling. There he stands, your brother, with six penny worth of rags to cover his nakedness from his fellow man, and not six penny worth of victuals within his reach. He asks for work, which he will set to even on his empty stomach and in his ragged uniform, if so be that you will give him something for it. But his hands are idle, for no one employs him. What are you to do with that man? That is the great note of interrogation that confronts society today. Not only in overcrowded England, but in newer countries beyond the sea, where society has not yet provided a means by which the men can be put upon the land, and the land be made to feed the men. To deal with this man is the problem of the unemployed. To deal with him effectively you must deal with him immediately. You must provide him in some way or other at once with food and shelter and warmth. Next you must find him something to do, something that will test the reality of his desire to work. This test must be more or less temporary, and should be of such a nature as to prepare him for making a permanent livelihood. Then, having trained him, you must provide him wherewithal to start life afresh. All these things I propose to do. My scheme divides itself into three sections, each of which is indispensable for the success of the whole. In this three-fold organization lies the open secret of the solution of the social problem. The scheme I have to offer consists in the formation of these people into self-helping and self-sustaining communities, each being a kind of cooperative society or patriarchal family, governed and disciplined on the principles which have already proved so effective in the Salvation Army. These communities we will call for want of a better term, colonies. There will be the City Colony, the Farm Colony, the Oversea Colony. End of Section 11, Recording by Tom Hirsch. Section 12, Deliverance, Part II. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Hirsch. By the City Colony is meant the establishment in the very center of the ocean of misery of which we have been speaking, of a number of institutions to act as harbors of refuge for all and any who have been shipwrecked in life, character or circumstances. These harbors will gather up the poor destitute creatures, supply their immediate pressing necessities, furnish temporary employment, inspire them with hope for the future, and commence at once a course of regeneration by moral and religious influences. From these institutions which are hereafter described, numbers would, after a short time, be floated off to permanent employment, or sent home to friends happy to receive them on hearing of their reformation. All who remain on our hands would, by varied means, be tested as to their sincerity, industry, and honesty, and as soon as satisfaction was created, be passed on to the Colony of the Second Class, the Farm Colony. This would consist of a settlement of the colonists on an estate in the provinces, in the culture of which they would find employment and obtain support. As the race from the country to the city has been the cause of much of the distress we have to battle with, we propose to find a substantial part of our remedy by transferring these same people back to the country, that is, back again to the garden. Here the process of reformation of character would be carried forward by the same industrial, moral, and religious methods as have been already commenced in the city, especially including those forms of labor and that knowledge of agriculture, which, should the colonists not obtain employment in this country, will qualify him for pursuing his fortunes under more favorable circumstances in some other land. From the farm as from the city there can be no question that large numbers, resuscitated in health and character, would be restored to friends up and down the country. Some would find employment in their own callings. Others would settle in cottages on a small piece of land that we should provide, or on cooperative farms which we intend to promote. While the great bulk, after trial and training, would be passed on to the foreign settlement, which would constitute our third class, namely the overseas colony. All who have given attention to the subject are agreed that in our colonies in South Africa, Canada, Western Australia, and elsewhere, there are millions of acres of useful land to be obtained almost for the asking. Capable of supporting our surplus population in health and comfort were at a thousand times greater than it is. We propose to secure attractive land in one of these countries, prepare it for settlement, establish it at authority, govern it by equitable laws, assist it in times of necessity, settling it gradually with a prepared people, and so create a home for these destitute multitudes. The scheme in its entirety may aptly be compared to a great machine, foundationed in the lowest slums and perlews of our great towns and cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and the destitute of all classes, receiving thieves, harlots, paupers, drunkards, prodigals, all alike, on the simple conditions of their being willing to work and to conform to discipline, drawing up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth, teaching them methods by which alike the bread that perishes and that which endures to everlasting life can be won, forwarding them from the city to the country, and there continuing the process of regeneration, and then pouring them forth onto the virgin soils that await their coming in other lands, keeping hold of them with a strong government, and yet making them free men and women, and so laying the foundations per chance of another empire to swell to best proportions in later times. Why not? The first section of my scheme is the establishment of a receiving house for the destitute in every great center of population. We start, let us remember, from the individual, the ragged, hungry, penniless man who confronts us with despairing demands for food, shelter, and work. Now, I have had some two or three years experience in dealing with this class. I believe at the present moment the Salvation Army supplies more food and shelter to the destitute than any other organization in London, and it is the experience and encouragement which I have gained in the working of these food and shelter depots, which has largely encouraged me to propound this scheme. Food and Shelter for Every Man As I rode through Canada in the United States some three years ago, I was greatly impressed with the super-abundance of food which I saw at every turn. Oh, how I longed that the poor starving people and the hungry children of the East of London and of other centers of our destitute populations should come into the midst of this abundance. But, as it appeared impossible for me to take them to it, I secretly resolved that I would endeavor to bring some of it to them. I am thankful to say that I have already been able to do so on a small scale and hope to accomplish it ere long on a much vaster one. With this view, the first cheap food depot was opened in the East of London two and a half years ago. This has been followed by others, and we have now three establishments others are being arranged for. Since the commencement in 1888, we have supplied over three and one half million meals. Some idea can be formed of the extent to which these food and shelter depots have already struck their roots into the strata of society which it is proposed to benefit by the following figures which give the quantities of food sold during the year at our food depots. Food sold in depots and shelters during 1889. Article weight measure remarks. Soup 116,400 gallons. Bread 192.5 tons. That is 106,964 four pound loaves. Tea 2 and 1 half tons. 46,980 gallons. Coffee 1500 weight. 13,949 gallons. Cocoa 6 tons. 29,229 gallons. Sugar 25 tons. 300 bags. Potatoes 140 tons. 2800 bags. Flour 18 tons. 180 sacks. Pea flour 28.5 tons. 288 sacks. Oatmeal 3.5 tons. 36 sacks. Rice 12 tons. 12 tons. 120 sacks. Beans 12 tons. 240 sacks. Onions and parsnips 12 tons. 240 sacks. Jam 9 tons. 2880 jars. Marmalade 6 tons. 1920 jars. Meat 15 tons. Milk 14,300 quarts. This includes returns from three food depots and five shelters. I propose to multiply their number to develop their usefulness and to make them the threshold of the whole scheme. Those who have already visited our depots will understand exactly what this means. The majority, however, of the readers of these pages have not done so, and for them it is necessary to explain what they are. At each of our depots, which can be seen by anybody that cares to take the trouble to visit them, there are two departments, one dealing with food, the other with shelter. Of these, both are worked together and ministered to the same individuals. Many come for food who do not come for shelter, although most of those who come for shelter also come for food, which is sold on terms to cover as nearly as possible the cost, price, and working expenses of the establishment. In this, our food depots differ from the ordinary soup kitchens. There is no gratuitous distribution of victuals. The following is our price list. What is sold at the food depots? For a child, soup per basin one quarter penny, soup with bread one half penny, coffee or cocoa per cup one quarter penny, coffee or cocoa with bread and jam one half penny. For adults, soup per basin one half penny, soup with bread one pence, potatoes one half penny, cabbage one half penny, haircut beans one half penny, boiled jam pudding one half penny, boiled plum pudding each one pence, rice one half penny, baked plum one half penny, baked jam roll one half penny, meat pudding and potatoes three pence, corn beef tuppence, corn mutton tuppence, coffee per cup one half penny per mug one pence, cocoa per cup one half penny per mug one pence, tea per cup one half penny per mug one pence, bread and butter jam or marmalade per slice one half penny, soup in on jugs one penny per quart, ready at 10 a.m. A certain discretionary power is vested in the officers in charge of the depot, and they can, in very urgent cases, give relief. But the rule is for the food to be paid for, and the financial results show that working expenses are just about covered. These cheap food depots, I have no doubt, have been an hour of great service to numbers of hungry, starving men, women and children at the prices just named, which must be within the reach of all, except the absolutely penniless. But it is the shelter that I regard as the most useful feature in this part of our undertaking, for if anything is to be done to get hold of those who use the depot, some more favorable opportunity must be afforded than is offered by the mere coming into the food store to get, perhaps, only a basin of soup. This part of the scheme I propose to extend very considerably. Suppose that you are casual in the streets of London, homeless, friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding none. Night comes on. Where are you to go? You have, perhaps, only a few coppers, or it may be a few shillings left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air. You equally shrink from going to the Fort Penny Doss House, where, in the midst of strange and rivaled company, you may be robbed of the remnant of the money still in your possession. While at a loss as to what to do, someone who sees you suggests that you should go to our shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the casual ward of the workhouse as long as you have any money in your possession. You come along to one of our shelters. On entering you pay forpins, and are free of the establishment for the night. You can come in early or late. The company begins to assemble about five o'clock in the afternoon. In the women's shelter you find that many come much earlier and sit sowing, reading, or chatting in the sparsely furnished but well-warmed room from the early hours of the afternoon until bedtime. You come in and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and a hunk of bread. You can go into the wash house where you can have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels are free. Then, after having washed and eaten, you can make yourself comfortable. You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing. At eight o'clock the shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern. Two or three hundred men in the men's shelter, or as many women in the women's shelter, are collected together, most of them strange to each other in a large room. They are all wretchedly poor. What are you to do with them? This is what we do with them. We hold a rousing salvation meeting. The officer in charge of the depot, assisted by detachments from the training homes, conducts a jovial free and easy social evening. The girls have their banjos and their tambourines, and for a couple of hours you have as lively a meeting as you will find in London. There is prayer short and to the point. There are addresses, some delivered by the leaders of the meeting, but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been saved at previous meetings, and who, rising in their seats, tell their companions their experiences. Strange experiences they often are of those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice and misery, but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand, and who are, as they say in all sincerity, as happy as the day is long. There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these meetings which is refreshing to the soul. There are all sorts and conditions of men, casuals, jailbirds, out of works, who have come there for the first time and who find men who last week or last month were even as they themselves are now. Still poor but rejoicing in a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of there being no longer outcasts and forlorn in this wide world. There are men who have at last seen revive before them a hope of escaping from that dreadful vortex into which their sins and misfortunes had drawn them, and being restored to those comforts that they had feared so long were gone forever, nay, of rising to live a true and godly life. They tell their mates how this has come about and urge all who hear them to trifle themselves and see whether it is not a good and happy thing to be soundly saved. In the intervals of testimony, and these testimonies as everyone will bear me witness who has ever attended any of our meetings are not long, sanctimonious, lackadaisical speeches but simple confessions of individual experience. There are bursts of hearty melody. The conductor of the meeting will start up a verse or two of a hymn illustrative of the experiences mentioned by the last speaker, or one of the girls from the training home will sing a solo, accompanying herself on her instrument, while all join in a rattling and rollicking chorus. There is no compulsion upon any one of our dossers to take part in this meeting. They do not need to come in until it is over, but as a simple matter of fact they do come in. Any night between eight and ten o'clock you will find these people sitting there, listening to the exhortations and taking part in this singing. Many of them, no doubt, unsympathetic enough, but nevertheless preferring to be present with the music and the warmth, mildly stirred if only by curiosity, as the various testimonies are delivered. Sometimes these testimonies are enough to rouse the most cynical of observers. We had at one of our shelters a captain of an ocean steamer who had sunk to the depths of destitution through strong drink. He came in there one night utterly desperate and was taken in hand by our people, and with us taking in hand is no mere phrase, for at the close of our meetings our officers go from seat to seat, and if they see anyone who shows signs of being affected by the speeches or the singing, at once sit down beside him and begin to labor with him for the salvation of his soul. By this means they are able to get hold of the men and to know exactly where the difficulty lies, what the trouble is, and if they do nothing else, at least succeed in convincing them that there is someone who cares for their soul and would do what he could to lend them a helping hand. The captain of whom I was speaking was got hold of in this way. He was deeply impressed and was induced to abandon once and for all his habits of intemperance. From that meeting he went an altered man. He regained his position in the merchant service, and twelve months afterwards astonished us all by appearing in the uniform of a captain of a large ocean steamer to testify to those who were there, how low he had been, how utterly he had lost all hold on society, and all hope of the future, when fortunately led to the shelter. He found friends, counsel, and salvation, and from that time had never arrested until he had regained the position which he had forfeited by his intemperance. The meeting over, the singing girls go back to the training home, and the men prepare for bed. Our sleeping arrangements are somewhat primitive. We do not provide feather beds, and when you go into our dormitories you will be surprised to find the floor covered by what look like an endless array of packing cases. These are our beds, and each of them forms a cubicle. There is a mattress laid on the floor, and over the mattress a leather apron, which is all the bed clothes that we find it possible to provide. The men undress each by the side of his packing box and go to sleep under their leather covering. The dormitory is warmed with hot water pipes to a temperature of 60 degrees, and there has never been any complaint of lack of warmth on the part of those who use the shelter. The leather can be kept perfectly clean, and the mattresses covered with American cloth are carefully inspected every day so that no stray specimen of vermin may be left in the place. The men turn in about ten o'clock and sleep until six. We have never any disturbances of any kind than shelters. We have provided accommodation now for several thousand of the most helplessly broken down men in London, criminals many of them, medecans, tramps, those who are among the filth in the off-scowering of all things, but such is the influence that is established by the meeting and the moral ascendancy of our officers themselves, that we have never had a fight on the premises, and very seldom do we ever hear an oath or an obscene word. Sometimes there has been trouble outside the shelter when men insisted upon coming in drunk or were otherwise violent, but once let them come to the shelter and get into the swing of the concerned and we have no trouble with them. In the morning they get up and have their breakfast and after a short service go off their various ways. We find that we can do this, that is to say we can provide coffee and bread for breakfast and supper, and a shakedown on the floor in the packing boxes I have described in a warm dormitory for four pence ahead. I propose to develop these shelters so as to afford every man a locker in which he could store any little valuables that he may possess. I would also allow him the use of a boiler in the wash house, with a hot drying oven, so that he could wash his shirt overnight and have it returned to him dry in the morning. Only those who have had practical experience of the difficulty of seeking for work in London can appreciate the advantages of the opportunity to get your shirt washed in this way, if you have one. In Trafalgar Square in 1887 there were a few things that scandalized the public more than the spectacle of the poor people camped in the square, washing their shirts in the early morning at the fountains. If you talk to any men who have been on the road for a lengthened period, they will tell you that nothing hurts their self-respect more, or stands more fatally in the way of their getting a job, than the impossibility of getting their little things done up and clean. In our poor man's home everyone could at least keep himself clean and have a clean shirt to his back, in a plain way, no doubt, but still not less effective than if he were to be put up at one of the West End hotels, and would be able to secure anyway the necessaries of life while being passed on to something far better. This is the first step. End of Section 13, Recording by Tom Hirsch. Of the practical results which have followed our methods of dealing with the outcasts who take shelter with us, we have many striking examples. Here are a few, each of them a transcript of a life experience relating to men who are now active, industrious members of the community, upon which, but for the agency of these depots, they would have been praying to this day. AS, born in Glasgow, 1825. Saved at Clerkenwell, May 19th, 1889. Poor parents raised in a Glasgow slum. Was thrown on the streets at seven years of age, became the companion and associate of thieves and drifted into crime. The following are his terms of imprisonment. Fourteen days, thirty days, thirty days, sixty days, sixty days, three times in succession. Four months, six months, twice. Nine months, eighteen months, two years, six years, seven years, twice. Fourteen years, forty years, three months, and six days in the aggregate. Was flogged for violent conduct in jail eight times. W.M. Buff, born in Depford, 1864. Saved at Clerkenwell, March 31st, 1889. His father was an old Navy man and earned a decent living as a manager. Was sober, respectable, and trustworthy. Mother was a disreputable drunken slattern, a curse and a disgrace to husband and family. The home was broken up and little Buff was given over to the evil influences of his depraved mother. His seventh birthday present from his admiring parent was a courton of gin. He got some education at the one-ton alley ragged school, but when nine years old was caught apple-stealing and sent to the industrial school at Ilford for seven years. Discharged at the end of his term, he drifted to the streets, the casual wards, and metropolitan jails, every one of whose interiors he is familiar with. He became a ringleader of a gang that infested London, a thorough mendicant and ne'er-do-well, a pest to society. Naturally he is a born leader and one of those spirits that command a following. Consequently when he got salvation the major part of his following came after him to the shelter and eventually to God. His character since conversion has been altogether satisfactory, and he is now an orderly at Whitechapel and to all appearances a true lad. C.W. Friscoe, born in San Francisco, 1862, saved April 24th, 1889, taken away from home at the age of eight years and made his way to Texas. Here he took up life amongst the ranches as a cowboy and buried it with occasional trips to sea, developing into a typical brass and rowdy. He had two years for mutiny at sea, four years for mule-stealing, five years for cattle-stealing, and has altogether been in jail for thirteen years and eleven months. He came over to England, got mixed up with thieves and casuals here, and did several short terms of imprisonment. He was met on his release at Millbank by an old chum, buff, and shelter-captain. Came to shelter, got saved, and has stood firm. H.A., born in Depford, 1850, saved at Clirkenwell, January 12th, 1889, lost mother in early life. Stepmother difficulty, supervening, and a propensity to misappropriation of small things developed into thieving. He followed the sea, became a hard drinker, a foul-mouth blasphemer, and a blatant spouter of infidelity. He drifted about for years, a shore and a float, and eventually reached the shelter, stranded. Here he sought God and has done well. This summer he had charge of a gang of haymakers sent into the country, and stood the ordeal satisfactorily. He seems honest in his profession, and strives patiently to follow after God. He is at the workshops. H.S., born in A. Blank, Scotland. Like most Scotch lads, although parents were in poor circumstances, he managed to get a good education. Early in life he took to newspaper work and picked up the details of the journalistic profession in several prominent papers in N.B. Eventually he got a position on a provincial newspaper, and having put in a course at Glasgow University, graduated B.A. there. After this he was on the staff of a Welsh paper. He married a decent girl and had several little ones, but giving way to drink, lost position, wife, family and friends. At times he would struggle up and recover himself, and appears generally to have been able to secure a position. But again and again his besetment overcame him, and each time he would drift lower and lower. For a time he was engaged in secretarial work on a prominent London charity, but fell repeatedly, and at length was dismissed. He came to us in utter outcasts, was sent to shelter and workshop, got saved, and is now in a good situation. He gives every promise, and those best able to judge seem very sanguine that at last a real good work has been accomplished in him. F.D. was born in London and brought up to the iron trade, held several good situations, losing one after another from drink and irregularity. On one occasion, with twenty pounds in his pocket, he started for Manchester, got drunk there, was locked up and fined five shillings, and fifteen shillings costs. This he paid, and as he was leaving the court a gentleman stopped him saying that he knew his father and inviting him to his house. However with ten pounds in his pocket he was too independent, and he declined. But the gentleman gave him his address and left. A few days squandered his cash and clothes soon followed, all disappearing for drink, and then without a coin he presented himself with the address given to him at ten o'clock at night. It turned out to be his uncle who gave him two pounds to go back to London, but this too disappeared for liquor. He tramped back to London utterly destitute. Several nights were passed on the embankment, and on one occasion a gentleman gave him a ticket for the shelter. This, however, he sold for Toppinson, had a pint of beer, and stopped out all night. But it set him thinking, and he determined next day to raise four pints and see what a shelter was like. He came to Whitechapel, became a regular customer, eight months ago got saved, and is now doing well. F. H. was born at Birmingham, 1858, saved at Whitechapel, March 26, 1890. Father died in his infancy, mother marrying again. The stepfather was a drunken navy and used to knock the mother about, and the lad was left to the streets. At twelve years of age he left home and tramped to Liverpool, begging his way and sleeping on the roadsides. In Liverpool he lived about the docks for some days, sleeping where he could. Police found him and returned him to Birmingham, his reception being an unmerciful thrashing from the drunken stepfather. He got several jobs as errand boy, remarkable for his secret pilferings, and two years later left with fifty shillings, stolen money, and reached Middlesbrough by road. Got work in a nail factory, stayed nine months, then stole nine shillings from fellow lodger and again took the road. He reached Birmingham and, finding a warrant out for him, joined the navy. He was in the impregnable training ship three years, behaved himself, only getting one dozen, and was transferred with character marked good to the Iron Duke in the China Seas. Soon got drinking and was locked up and in prison for riotous conduct in almost every port in the stations. He broke ship and deserted several times, and was a thorough specimen of a bad British tar. He saw jail in Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Shanghai, Canton, and other places. In five years returned home, and after furlough joined the Belle Isle in the Irish station. Whiskey here again got hold of him, and excess ruined his constitution. On his leave he had married, and on his discharge joined his wife in Birmingham. For some time he worked as sweeper in the market, but two years ago deserted his wife and family and came to London, settled down to a loafer's life, lived on the streets with casual wards for his home. Eventually came to Whitechapel shelter and got saved. He is now a trustworthy, reliable lad, has become reconciled to wife, who came to London to see him, and he bids fair to be a useful man. J. W. S. born in Plymouth. His parents are respectable people. He is clever at his business, and has held good situations. Two years ago he came to London, fell into evil courses, and took to drink. Lost situation after situation, and kept on drinking. Lost everything and came to the streets. He found out Westminster shelter and eventually got saved. His parents were communicated with, and help and close forthcoming. With salvation came hope and energy. He got a situation at Louisham, seven pence per hour, at his trade, four months standing, and is a promising soldier as well as a respectable mechanic. J. T. born in Ireland, well educated commercially, clerk and accountant. Early in life joined the Queen's army, and by good conduct worked his way up. Was orderly room clerk and Paymaster's assistant in his regiment. He led a steady life whilst in the service, and at the expiration of his term, passed into the reserve with a very good character. He was a long time unemployed, and this appears to have reduced him to despair, and so to drink. He sank to the lowest ebb and came to Westminster in a deplorable condition, coatless, hatless, shirtless, dirty altogether, a fearful specimen of what a man of good parentage can be brought to. After being in shelter some time he got saved, was passed to workshops, and gave great satisfaction. At present he is doing clerical work and gives satisfaction as a workman, a good influence in the place. J. S. born in London of decent parentage. From a child he exhibited thieving propensities, soon got into the hands of the police, and was in and out of jail continually. He led the life of a confirmed tramp and roved all over the United Kingdom. He has been in penal servitude three times, and his last term was for seven years, with police supervision. After his release he married a respectable girl and tried to reform, but circumstances were against him. Character he had none, a jail career only to recommend him, and so he and his wife eventually drifted to destitution. They came to the shelter and asked advice. They were received and he made application to the sitting magistrate at Clirkenwell as to a situation and what he ought to do. The magistrate helped him and thanked the Salvation Army for its efforts on behalf of him and such as he and asked us to look after the applicant. A little work was given him, and after a time a good situation procured. Today they have a good time. He is steadily employed and both are serving God, holding the respect and confidence of neighbors, etc. E.G. came to England in the service of a family of position, and afterwards was butler and upper servant in several houses of the nobility. His health broke down, and for a long time he was altogether unfit for work. He had saved a considerable sum of money, but the cost of doctors and the necessaries of a sick man soon played havoc with his little store, and he became reduced to penury and absolute want. For some time he was in the workhouse, and being discharged he was advised to go to the shelter. He was low in health as well as in circumstances and broken in spirit, almost despairing. He was lovingly advised to cast his care upon God and eventually he was converted. After some time work was obtained as porter in a city warehouse. Essenduity and faithfulness in a year raised him to the position of traveler. Today he prospers in body and soul, retaining the respect and confidence of all associated with him. We might multiply these records, but those given show the kind of results attained. There's no reason to think that influences which have been blessed of God to the salvation of these poor fellows will not be equally efficacious if applied on a wider scale and over a vaster area. The thing to be noted in all these cases is that it was not the mere feeding which affected the result. It was the combination of the feeding with the personal labor for the individual soul. Still if we had not fed them we should never have come near enough to gain any hold upon their hearts. If we had merely fed them they would have gone away next day to resume with increased energy, the predatory and vagrant life which they had been leading. But when our feeding and shelter depots brought them to close quarters our officers were literally able to put their arms around their necks and plead with them as brethren who had gone astray. We told them that their sins and sorrows had not shut them out from the love of the everlasting father who had sent us to them to help them with all the power of our strong organization, of the divine authority of which we never feel so sure as when it is going forth to seek and to save the lost. The foregoing, it will be said, is all very well for your outcast when he has got fourpence in his pocket. But what if he has not got his fourpence? What if you are confronted with a crowd of hungry desperate wretches without even a penny in their pouch demanding food and shelter? This objection is natural enough and has been duly considered from the first. I propose to establish in connection with every food and shelter depot a workshop or labor yard in which any person who comes destitute and starving will be supplied with sufficient work to enable him to earn the fourpence needed for his bed and board. This is a fundamental feature of the scheme and one which I think will commend it to all those who are anxious to benefit the poor by enabling them to help themselves without the demoralizing intervention of charitable relief. Let us take our stand for a moment at the door of one of our shelters. There comes along a grimy ragged foot-sword tramp, his feet bursting out from the sides of his shoes, his clothes all rags with filthy shirt and tousled hair. He has been, he tells you, on the tramp for the last three weeks, seeking work and finding none, slept last night on the embankment and wants to know if you can give him a bite and a sup and shelter for the night. Has he any money? Not he. He probably spent the last penny he begged or earned in a pipe of tobacco with which to dull the cravings of his hungry stomach. What are you to do with this man? Remember, this is no fancy sketch. It is a typical case. There are hundreds and thousands of such applicants. Anyone who is at all familiar with life in London and our other large towns will recognize that gaunt figure standing there asking for bread and shelter or for work by which he can obtain both. What can we do with him? Before him society stands paralyzed, quieting its conscience every now and then by an occasional dull of bread and soup, varied with the semi-criminal treatment of the casual ward, until the manhood is crushed out of the man and you have in your hands a reckless, despairing, spirit-broken creature with not even an aspiration to rise above his miserable circumstances, covered with vermin and filth, sinking ever lower and lower until at last he is hurried out of sight in the rough shell which carries him to a pauper's grave. I propose to take that man, put a strong arm around him and extricate him from the mire in which he is all but suffocated. As a first step we will say to him, you are hungry. Here is food. You are homeless. Here is a shelter for your head. But remember, you must work for your rations. This is not charity. It is work for the workless. Help for those who cannot help themselves. There is the laborshed. Go and earn your forpence. And then come in out of the cold and wet into the warm shelter. Here is your mug of coffee and your great chunk of bread, and after you have finished these there is a meeting going on in full swing with its joyful music and hearty human intercourse. There are those who pray for you and with you and will make you feel yourself a brother among men. There is your shakedown on the floor where you will have your warm, quiet bed undisturbed by the rivalry and curses with which you have been familiar too long. There is the wash house where you can have a thorough wash up at last after all these days of unwashedness. There is plenty of soap and warm water and clean towels. There too you can wash your shirt and have it dried while you sleep. In the morning when you get up there will be breakfast for you and your shirt will be dry and clean. Then when you are washed and rested and are no longer faint with hunger you can go and seek a job or go back to the labor shop until something better turns up. But where and how? Now let me introduce you to our labor yard. Here is no pretense of charity beyond the charity which gives a man remunerative labor. It is not our business to pay men wages. What we propose is to enable those male or female who are destitute to earn their rations and do enough work to pay for their lodging until they are able to go out into the world and earn wages for themselves. There is no compulsion upon anyone to resort to our shelter. But if a penniless man wants food he must as a rule do work sufficient to pay for what he has of that and of other accommodation. I say as a rule because of course our officers will be allowed to make exceptions in extreme cases but the rule will be first work then eat and that amount of work will be exacted rigorously. It is that which distinguishes this scheme from mere charitable relief. I do not wish to have any hand in establishing a new center of demoralization. I do not want my customers to be pauperized by being treated to anything which they do not earn. To develop self respect in the man, to make him feel that at last he has got his foot planted on the first rung of the ladder which leads upwards is vitally important. And this cannot be done unless the bargain between him and me is strictly carried out. So much coffee, so much bread, so much shelter, so much warmth and light for me, but so much labor in return from him. What labor it is asked? For answer to this question I would like to take you down to our industrial workshops in Whitechapel. There you will see the scheme in experimental operation. What we are doing there we propose to do everywhere up to the extent of the necessity and there is no reason why we should fail elsewhere if we can succeed there. Our industrial factory at Whitechapel was established this spring. We opened it on a very small scale. It was developed until we have nearly 90 men at work. Some of these are skilled workmen who are engaged in carpentry. The particular job they have now in hand is the making of benches for the Salvation Army. Others are engaged in mat making. Some are cobblers, others painters, and so forth. This trial effort has so far answered admirably. No one who is taken on comes for a permanency. So long as he is willing to work for his rations he is supplied with materials and provided with skilled superintendents. The hours of work are eight per day. Here are the rules and regulations under which the work is carried on at present. The Salvation Army social reform wing. Temporary headquarters 36 Upper Thames Street London EC. City industrial workshops. Objects. These workshops are open for the relief of the unemployed and destitute. The object being to make it unnecessary for the homeless or workless to be compelled to go to the workhouse or casual ward. Food and shelter being provided for them in exchange for work done by them until they can procure work for themselves or it can be found for them elsewhere. Plan of operation. All those applying for assistance will be placed in what is termed the first class. They must be willing to do any kind of work allotted to them. While they remain in the first class they shall be entitled to three meals a day and shelter for the night and will be expected in return to cheerfully perform the work allotted to them. Promotions will be made from this first class to the second class of all those considered eligible by the Labor directors. They will, in addition to the food and shelter above mentioned, receive sums of money up to five shillings at the end of the week for the purpose of assisting them to provide themselves with tools to get work outside. Regulations. No smoking, drinking, bad language or conduct calculated to demoralize will be permitted on the factory premises. No one under the influence of drink will be admitted. Anyone refusing to work or guilty of bad conduct will be required to leave the premises. Hours of work. 7 a.m. to 8 30 a.m. 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. 2 p.m. to 5 30 p.m. Doors will be closed five minutes after 7 9 and 2 p.m. Food checks will be given to all as they pass out at each mealtime. Meals and shelter provided at 272 Whitechapel Road. Our practical experience shows that we can provide work by which a man can earn his rations. We shall be careful not to sell the goods so manufactured at less than the market prices. In Firewood, for instance, we have endeavored to be rather above the average than below it. As stated elsewhere, we are firmly opposed to injuring one class of workmen while helping another. Attempts on somewhat similar lines to those now being described have hitherto excited the liveliest feelings of jealousy on the part of the trade unions and representatives of labor. They rightly consider it unfair that labor partly paid for out of the rates and taxes or by charitable contributions should be put upon the market at less than market value, and so compete unjustly with the production of those who have in the first instance to furnish an important quota of the funds by which these criminal or proper workers are supported. No such jealousy can justly exist in relation to our scheme, seeing that we are endeavoring to raise the standard of labor and are pledged to a war to the death against sweating in every shape and form. But it will be asked, how do these out of works conduct themselves when you get them into the factory? Upon this point I have a very satisfactory report to render. Many no doubt are below par, underfed and suffering from ill health or the consequence of their intemperance. Many also are old men who have been crowded out of the labor market by their younger generation. But without making too many allowances on these grounds, I may fairly say that these men have shown themselves not only anxious and willing, but able to work. Our factory superintendent reports, of loss or time there has practically been none since the opening, June 29. Each man during his stay, with hardly an exception, has presented himself punctually at opening time and worked more or less assiduously the whole of the labor hours. The morals of the men have been good. In not more than three instances has there been an overt act of disobedience in subordination or mischief. The men, as a whole, are uniformly civil, willing and satisfied. They are all fairly industrious. Some, and that not a few, are assiduous and energetic. The foremen have had no serious complaints to make or delinquencies to report. On the 15th of August I had a return made of the names and trades and motive employment of the men at work. Of the forty in the shops at that moment, eight were carpenters, twelve laborers, two tailors, two sailors, three clerks, two engineers, while among the rest was a shoemaker, two grocers, a cooper, a sailmaker, a musician, a painter, and a stonemason. Nineteen of these were employed in sawing, cutting, and tying up firewood. Six were making mats, seven making sacks, and the rest were employed in various odd jobs. Among them was a Russian carpenter who could not speak a word of English. The whole place is a hive of industry which fills the hearts of those who go to see it with hope that something is about to be done to solve the difficulty of the unemployed. Although our factories will be permanent institutions, they will not be anything more than temporary resting places to those who avail themselves of their advantages. They are harbors of refuge into which the storm-tossed workmen may run and refit so that he may again push out to the ordinary sea of labor and earn his living. The establishment of these industrial factories seems to be one of the most obvious duties of those who could effectually deal with the social problem. They are as indispensable a link in the chain of deliverance as the shelters. But they are only a link and not a stopping place. And we do not propose that they should be regarded as anything but stepping stones to better things. These shops will also be of service for men and women temporarily unemployed who have families and who possess some sort of home. In numerous instances, if by any means these unfortunates could find bread and rent for a few weeks, they would tide over their difficulties and an untold amount of misery would be averted. In such cases, work would be supplied at their own homes where preferred, especially for the women and children. And such remuneration would be aimed at as would supply the immediate necessities of the hour. To those who have rent to pay and families to support, something beyond rations would be indispensable. The labor shops will enable us to work out our anti-sweating experiments. For instance, we propose at once to commence manufacturing matchboxes for which we shall aim at giving nearly trouble the amount at present paid to the poor starving creatures engaged in this work. In all these workshops, our success will depend upon the extent to which we are able to establish and maintain in the minds of the workers sound moral sentiments, and to cultivate a spirit of hopefulness and aspiration. We shall continually seek to impress upon them the fact that while we desire to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and provide shelter for the shelterless, we are still more anxious to bring about that regeneration of heart and life which is essential to their future happiness and well-being, but no compulsion will for a moment be allowed with respect to religion. The man who professes to love and serve God will be helped because of such profession, and the man who does not will be helped in the hope that he will, sooner or later, in gratitude to God, do the same. But there will be no melancholy misery-making for any. There is no sanctimonious long face in the army. We talk freely about salvation because it is to us the very light and joy of our existence. We are happy, and we wish others to share our joy. We know by our own experience that life is a very different thing when we have found the peace of God, and we are working together with him for the salvation of the world instead of toiling for the realization of worldly ambition or the amassing of earthly gain. Section 16 The Regimentation of the Unemployed This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. When we have got the homeless, penniless tramp washed and housed and fed at the shelter, and have secured him the means of earning his forpence by chopping firewood, or making mats or cobbling the shoes of his fellow laborers at the factory, we have next to seriously address ourselves to the problem of how to help him to get back into the regular ranks of industry. The shelter and the factory are but stepping stones which have this advantage. They give us time to look around and to see what there is in a man and what we can make of him. The first and most obvious thing to do is to ascertain whether there is any demand in the regular market for the labor which is thus thrown upon our hands. In order to ascertain this I have already established a labor bureau, the operations of which I shall at once largely extend, at which employers can register their needs, and workmen can register their names and the kind of work they can do. At present there is no labor exchange in existence in this country. The columns of the daily newspaper are the only substitute for this much needed register. It is one of the many painful consequences arising from the overgrowth of cities. In a village where everybody knows everybody else, this necessity does not exist. If a farmer wants a couple of extra men for mowing or some more women for binding at harvest time, he runs over in his mind the names of every available person in the parish. Even in a small town there is little difficulty in knowing who wants employment. But in the cities this knowledge is not available. Hence we constantly hear of persons who would be very glad to employ labor for odd jobs in an occasional stress of work, while at the same time hundreds of persons are starving for want of work at another end of the town. To meet this evil the laws of supply and demand have created the sweating middlemen who farm out the unfortunate and charge so heavy a commission for their share that the poor wretches who do the work receive hardly enough to keep body and soul together. I propose to change all this by establishing registers which will enable us to lay our hands at a moment's notice upon all the unemployed men in the district in any particular trade. In this way we should become the universal intermediary between those who have no employment and those who want workmen. In this we do not propose to supersede or interfere with the regular trade unions. Where unions exist we should place ourselves in every case in communication with their officials. But the most helpless mass of misery is to be found among the unorganized laborers who have no union, and who are therefore the natural prey of the middleman. Take for instance one of the most wretched classes of the community, the poor fellows who perambulate the streets as sandwich men. These are farmed out by certain firms. If you wish to send fifty or a hundred men through London carrying boards announcing the excellence of your goods you go to an advertising firm who will undertake to supply you with as many sandwich men as you want for two shillings or half a crown a day. The men are forthcoming, your goods are advertised, you pay your money. But how much of that goes to the men? About one shilling, or one shilling in three pence. The rest goes to the middleman. I propose to supersede this middleman by forming a cooperative association of sandwich men. At every shelter there would be a sandwich brigade ready in any numbers when wanted. The cost of registration and organization, which the men would gladly pay, need not certainly amount to more than a penny in the shilling. All that is needed is to establish a trustworthy and disinterested center round which the unemployed can group themselves, and which will form the nucleus of a great cooperative self-helping association. The advantages of such a bureau are obvious, but in this also I do not speak from theory. I have behind me the experience of seven months of labor both in England and Australia. In London we have a registration office in Upper Thames Street, where the unemployed come every morning in droves to register their names and to see whether they can obtain situations. In Australia, I see, it was stated in the House of Assembly that our officers had been instrumental in finding situations for no less than 132 out of works in a few days. Here in London we have succeeded in obtaining employment for a great number, although of course it is beyond our power to help all those who apply. We have sent haymakers down to the country, and there is every reason to believe that when our organization is better known and in more extended operation, we shall have a great labor exchange between town and country, so that when there is a scarcity in one place and congestion in another, there will be information immediately sent so that the surplus labor can be drafted into those districts where labor is wanted. For instance, in the harvest seasons, with changeable weather, it is quite a common occurrence for the crops to be seriously damaged for want of laborers, while at the same time there will be thousands wandering about in the big towns and cities seeking work but finding no one to hire them. Extend the system all over the world and make it not only applicable to the transfer of workers between the towns and the provinces, but between country and country, and it is impossible to exaggerate the enormous advantages which would result. The officer in charge of our experimental labor bureau sends me the following notes as to what has already been done through the agency of the Upper Thames Street Office. Salvation Army Social Reform Wing, Labor Bureau. Bureau opened June 16, 1890. The following are particulars of transactions up to September 26, 1890. Applications for Employment Men, 2462. Women, 208. Total, 2670. Applications from Employers for Men, 128. Women, 59. Total, 187. Sent to Work, Men, 301. Women, 68. Total, 369. Permanent Situations, 146. Temporary Employment, Board Men, Cleaners, etc., etc., 223. Sent to Workshop in Hanbury Street, 165. End of Section 16. Recording by Tom Hirsch.