And what are the results of such methods as these? What must be the results?
That we read that in the wealthiest nation in the world, one in every thirty-one of our countrymen is a pauper; this, moreover, without including any of that vast number of destitute persons who are maintained in charitable institutions or by private benevolence.
That in the richest city in the world there were in one year 101 deaths from actual starvation, in full sight of well-stocked shops.
That there are about 180,000 apprehensions each year for drunkenness, and over 15,000 persons yearly charged with indictable crimes, and over half a million convicted summarily before the magistrates, of which latter nearly 100,000 are guilty of personal assaults, about 2,500 being aggravated assaults upon women and children.
That there are extensive districts in London, Liverpool, and all our large towns, where our people are living in little more than half the area of ground required for a corpse, and which they could claim if they were dead, in tenements which are the graves of all decency and chastity.
That “in Liverpool alone, by a rough estimate, there are some 10,000 or more children who are neither properly fed, clothed nor housed, and surrounded by such evil associations at home, or in the low lodging-houses where they herd, that there is small chance of their leading afterwards a useful life, and we can predict with certainty that many of them will enter our prisons, penitentiaries and workhouses.”
Surely it must create an uneasy feeling in the most careless to realize this mass of misery and sin on which the life of the well-to-do classes in England is based—
“This deep dark underworld of woe, That underlies life’s shining surfaces, Dim populous pain and multitudinous toil, Unheeded of the heedless world that treads Its piteous upturned faces underfoot, In the gay rout that rushes to its ends.”
It is impossible for me to deal adequately with the subject in the narrow space of a short article, but let me touch on three of our greatest problems—overcrowding, pauperism, and the care of the young.
First, as to overcrowding. This is a question that distinctly affects the state, and with regard to which we have to “live in the whole,” and to see that the welfare of the community is at stake, and that the state must have an authoritative voice in it. Virtue, sobriety, decency, are physically impossible in the conditions under which a vast number of its citizens are living. The national health and morals are in danger. All the arguments that justified the interference of the state with the rights of the Irish landlord, apply equally to the London landlords, and the artificial forcing up of rents, which has resulted from the necessity many workmen are under of living near their work. Yet this question has been the subject of permissive legislation! The Artisans’ Dwellings Improvement Act, an honest attempt on the part of Sir Richard Cross to deal with the problem, was rendered applicable to all towns of 28,000 inhabitants or upward—that is to say, about eighty towns—but it was entrusted to the municipalities to carry it out, the town councils which we have left to be composed chiefly of men of narrow education, largely swayed by self-interest, and probably extensive owners of the very property to be demolished! It is exactly as if the Irish Land Bill had been permissive, and entrusted to the Irish landlords to put it into execution! Can we wonder that in about sixty out of the eighty towns, it remains a dead letter? In eleven it has led to discussion; in two or three it has led to the demolition of buildings, but not to their erection. Is there not a want of ordinary _seeing_ in our moral life? Could we hope to solve a single scientific problem on the methods on which we are content to live?