Chapter I: DO not mean the old wall of London, that which was built by the (4)

Its neighbor, formerly also a village a little nearer London and called West Ham, presents on the map of 1891 the aspect, familiar to the growing suburban town, of a small central area covered with streets, and with new streets running out north, south, east, and west. It is quite obvious from the map that West Ham was destined to be rapidly built over. It is now a huge town of two hundred and seventy thousand people, also, like East Ham, entirely consisting of working-people. It was at one time a place much loved by Quakers; evidence of their occupation still remains in certain stately old houses, now let out in lodgings; their gardens are built over; the character of the place is changed; the streets are crowded with people; trains and omnibuses run about all day; one of the Quaker’s gardens still survives; it belonged to a member of the Gurney family; the house has been pulled down, but the lordly garden is kept up and the grounds around it have become the park for the West Ham folk. The quickened demand for lodgings has caused the whole of this town to be overrun with streets of small workmen’s houses, containing four or six rooms each, most of which are let to families by two rooms or by single rooms. But the demand still continues; by-streets are run across, narrow lanes usurp the small backyard or little slip of garden; when the whole available space is built over, what will happen next? The crazy condition of these jerry-built houses, after a few years, opens up another and a different set of questions. The case of West Ham represents only on a more rapid scale what has been going on for many years over the whole of industrial London. And now we seem at last to have arrived at an end to the accommodation possible on the old method of small houses and narrow streets.

The results of the overcrowding are, as might be expected, deplorable in the extreme. Among other evils, it kills the infants; it dwarfs those who grow up among its evil influences; it poisons the air; it deprives the house of comfort, of cleanliness, of decency; it drives the man to drink; and it makes the life of their unhappy wives one long-continued misery of hopeless battle with dirt and disease. The late Sir Benjamin Richardson would allow, in his “City of Health,” no more than twenty-five persons to an acre; in some of the outlying suburbs of London there are no more; in others there are, or have been, actually as many as 3000 people crowded together over a single acre of ground. Put them up all together in a solid square; each person will take 2 feet by 1½ feet—that is, three square feet. The whole company of 3000 will stand on 9000 square feet, or 1000 square yards. This is about a fifth of an acre, so that if we spread them out to cover the whole of the acre each person will have no more than a square yard and a half in which to stand, to sleep, and to breathe.

Of course, the first effect of the overcrowding is the vitiation of the air. The extent of this vitiation has been ascertained by chemical analysis. But, indeed, the senses of sight and smell do not require the aid of chemical analysis in order to prove that the air is corrupt and unwholesome. It is poisoned by the breathing of so many; by the refuse that will always be found lying about where a multitude of people are massed together; by all the contributions of all the unwashed. Sometimes the kindly rains descend and wash the pavements and the roads; sometimes the fresh breeze quickens and drives out the malodorous air from the narrow streets, but wind and rain cannot enter into rooms where the occupants jealously keep the windows closed, and fear cold more than they fear the fetid breath of diphtheria and fever; the wind drops; the warm sun comes out; then from the ground under and between the stones, from the saturated road, from the brick walls, from the open doors, the foul air steals back into the street and hangs over the houses invisible, yet almost as pestilential as the white mist of the morning that floats above the tropical marsh.

The magnitude of the evil may be estimated by the fact that nearly a million people have to live in London under these conditions. A whole million of people are condemned to this misery and to the moral and physical sufferings entailed—the degradation of decent women, the death of children who might have grown up honest and respectable men and women! A whole million! We cannot think in millions; the magnitude of the number conveys no impression as to the magnitude of the evil. We can only realize it by taking a single case. Let us take the case of A. B. and his family. He was by trade a mechanical engineer; perhaps they called him a fitter, but it matters nothing; he was a decent and a sober man; he had a wife and five children, the eldest of whom was twelve and as “likely” a girl as one would see anywhere—but they were all likely children, clean and well kept and well fed and well mannered, the pride of their mother. The man had employment offered him in some works. It was absolutely necessary for him to live near his work. He broke up, therefore, his “little home”—they all delight in making a “little home”—and brought his children to live in the overcrowded quarter near his work. After a great deal of difficulty he secured one room. It was no more than ten feet square; in that room he had to pack all his children and his wife and all his effects. There was simply no room for the latter; he therefore pawned them; it would be only for a time, a few days, a week or two, and they would find a house, or at least better lodgings. Imagine, if you can, the change. This unfortunate family came from a decent flat of three rooms, in which the two boys slept in the living-room, the three girls in one bedroom and the parents in the other. They had on the staircase access to a common laundry; the roof was the place for drying the clothes; it was also a place where on a summer evening they could breathe fresh air. In place of this flat they had to accommodate themselves in a single small room. This had to contain all their furniture; to be at once the common bedroom, living-room, kitchen, wash-house, drying-room, dressing-room—think of it! There was, however, no choice. They pawned most of their “sticks”; they brought in nothing but absolute necessaries; they had a large bed, a table, a cupboard, two or three chairs, some kitchen things, and a washtub—little else. And so, uncomplaining, they settled down. It would only be for a week or two. Meantime, the rent of this den was 6_s._ 6_d._ a week, and a pound for the “key.”

Outside, the pressure grew worse; the more the factories flourished, the more hands were wanted; new houses were run up with all the speed and all the scamping of work that a jerry-builder could provide, but still the pressure grew. For the man his home brought no comfort; he was not a drinking man, but he began to sit in the public house and to spend his evenings talking; his children could not sit at home; they ran about the streets; the eldest girl, who was so pretty and had been so sweet, began to assume the loud talk and rowdy habits of the girls around her; on the unfortunate woman lay the chief burden of all. She toiled all day long to keep things sweet and clean; alas! what can be done when seven people have to sleep in a room with little more than a thousand cubic feet of air between them all? She saw her husband driven away to the public house, she saw her children losing their bright looks and their rosy cheeks: what could she do? Many of the women around her, giving up the struggle, went in and out of the public house all day. This woman did not. But she was no longer the neat, clean housewife amid her clean surroundings. The stamp of deterioration was upon her and upon the others.

Then the summer came, with a week of hot weather to begin with, and the foundation of the house asserted itself; the house, you see, was built upon the rubbish of the dust-cart. You do not believe it possible? I can show you whole streets in the suburbs which I have myself seen built upon the rubbish of the dust-heap. It contains, among other things useful and beneficial to the occupants, quantities of cabbage stumps and other bits of vegetable matter. So when the hot weather came the cabbage stumps behaved accordingly; the foul air from the foundations crept through the floors and crawled up the stairs and poured under the doors.

First it was sore throat, then it was something else, and from house to house it was spread, and the doctor came and went, and in the broad bed of the little room lay four children sick at once; their soft, white skins were hard and dry and red; their brains wandered; the mother, with haggard face, bent over them.

It is all over now; three of the children lie in the new cemetery; the man has got a house at last; he will not get back his children, nor will the two who are left to him ever be again what they once were. This is one story out of the thousands which may be told of the people who live in the crowded quarters.

Another cause of overcrowding springs from the bad building of the workmen’s houses. It is not only the foundation that is rotten: the house itself is built of bad brick laid in single courses, the woodwork is unseasoned and shrinks, zinc is used instead of lead, the stairs are of matchboard—only the cheapest and worst materials are used. There are laws, there always have been laws, against bad building; there are inspectors, yet the bad building continues. A man who had been an apprentice in the building trade told me how this surprising result of our laws and our inspectors used to be possible twenty-five years ago. “It is this way,” he said; “I was a boy when these houses were built. For a house like this it was £15 to the inspector; for one of the smaller houses it was £10.” We must not believe it possible for such a thing to happen now; one’s faith in human nature would suffer too severe a blow, but when one looks around in certain quarters that little transaction between the honest builder and the faithful inspector recurs to my unwilling memory.

In course of time authority interposes. The houses are condemned. Out go the people, with their sticks, into the street; the houses are boarded up, the boys throw stones at the windows; the place is deserted. But where are the people to go?

There is a riverside parish entirely inhabited by the lowest kind of working-people, chiefly dock laborers and casuals and factory girls. There are literally no inhabitants of a higher class, except the clergy and a few ladies who live and work among the people. There was until recently a population of eight thousand in this parish. But street after street has been condemned; the houses, boarded up, their windows broken by the boys, stand miserably waiting to be pulled down; the parish has lost three thousand of its population. Where have they gone? Nobody knows; but they must go somewhere, and they have certainly gone where the rents are higher and the crowding worse.

Or the London County Council, becoming aware of the insanitary condition of a whole area, condemns it all, _en bloc_, takes it over, pulls down the miserable tenements and erects new buildings in their place. Nothing could be better; everybody applauds this vigorous action. Yet what happens? I will show you from a single example.

There is an area of fifteen acres in Bethnal Green, one of the worst and most overcrowded parts of London. It contains twenty streets, all small; there were 730 houses, and there were 5719 people. About a third of this army lived in tenements of one room each; nearly a half lived in tenements of two rooms. This area has been entirely cleared away; the London County Council turned out the people, and built upon the site a small town whose streets are fifty feet wide, whose houses are five stories high; water and gas are laid on, workshops are provided, there are only thirty one-room tenements, there are only five hundred of two rooms, and so on; the rent of the two-room tenements is six shillings a week; the center of the area is occupied by a circular terraced garden. Nothing could be better. Moreover, to crown all, the cost of the whole will be repaid to the ratepayers by means of a sinking fund spread over sixty years.

BUT—what became of the five thousand while these fine palaces were being built? Did their condition improve? Or did it become worse during the period of construction? They were turned out; they had to go somewhere; they imposed themselves upon districts already overcrowded, their habits most certainly grew more careless and more draggled, their condition most certainly grew worse. How many of the five thousand will come back to the old quarters and enter upon the civilized life offered to them? I know not; but the experience is that the former occupants do not return.

London in all directions is now thickly planted with the huge, ugly erections called model lodging-houses, workmen’s residences, and barracks. South London, across the river, is especially rich in these erections. Drury Lane, the historic Drury Lane, once the home of Nell Gwynne, the site of the National Theatre, accommodates a vast number of people in its barracks; it is favored also with two playgrounds for the children; both are disused burial grounds—one of them is the burial ground in “Bleak House.”

Opinions vary as to the success of these buildings. Their advantages at first sight appear overwhelming. Step out of a Drury Lane block into one of the courts beside it and a dozen advantages will immediately be perceived by all your senses at once. It is a great thing to be clean if you like cleanliness; to have a sanitary house if you like fresh air; to have conveniences for washing if, unlike Dr. Johnson, you prefer your linen to be clean. But there are certain losses about the block building. I do not say that they are greater than the gains. It has always been the instinctive desire of the Englishman to have his own home, to himself, separate. It is a survival of the early Anglo-Saxon custom when each family formed a settlement to itself. The working-man would like to have his cottage and his bit of garden, and to enjoy his own individuality apart from the rest of the world. In the block he loses this distinction; his family is one of fifty, of a hundred; his children are part of a flock, there is no more distinction among them than in a flock of sheep. There are great dangers attending the loss of the individual; it tends to destroy ambition, to weaken the power of free thought, to injure the responsibility of self-government. This loss is a very great danger among a people whose whole history illustrates the value of a sturdy assertion of self, of personal independence, of responsibility, and of a continual readiness to revolt against any encroachments of authority. For these reasons many regard the barrack or block system with suspicion and dislike.

Other reasons there are which make these flats unpopular, even though they continue to be in great request. They are defects which might be managed by the exercise of a little organization. But it has not yet occurred to the managing bodies of these barracks that the tenants who are intrusted with the votes for the government of the country might also very well be intrusted with the government of their own dwellings. Thus it is complained that a whole staircase is sometimes terrorized by two or three roughs, that there are quarrels and drunken brawls on the stairs at night, that there are continual disputes concerning the day for using the laundry, that the stairs are not kept clean, that the children see and hear and learn things which they should not—but then the children of the streets learn things which they should not; I fear we cannot keep the children from the tree of knowledge. The presence of drunken rowdies, the objection of many to take their share in cleaning the stairs, and other scandals of the kind ought all to be remedied or, at least, attacked by the formation of committees of order composed of the tenants themselves. I have long been of opinion that the real remedy of most of the abuses of our streets and slums would be the organization of the respectable inhabitants into committees of order and the banishment of the police. Such committees in our barrack dwellings should have power of ejectment against evil-doers; they should be their own police.

It is characteristic of the Salvation Army that they sometimes attack a rowdy staircase in their own way by sending two girl lieutenants to take a flat and live there, setting an example of cleanly and orderly life, and bringing round the women to a better mind. I have heard that their success in this work has been marked, and I am prepared to believe it. At the same time, the committee would be a permanent police, while the appearance of the girls can only be occasional and only temporary.

Another result of the barrack life—one which the working-man himself does not perceive—is that the children grow up slow of sight, not short-sighted, but slow of sight. They have nothing to exercise their eyes upon; in the country there are a thousand things; children are always looking about them for the birds, the creatures, the flowers, the berries; in the barracks their playground is an asphalted pavement, with the high houses for boundary walls; there is nothing to look at. When they are taken out for a day in the country, once or twice a year, they see in a bank of flowers only a breadth of color, such as a house-painter might spread; it takes time for them to discern the flowers and the grasses which produce the pleasing effect; one bird is to them the same as another; they are not quick enough to catch the rapid flight of the swallow. One tree is the same as another; they do not discern differences of shape or color in the leaf or in the bough. A few summer days in the country cannot give to that child the training of sight which the country-bred child receives every time it goes out into the open.

Here, then, are the facts of the case: overcrowding, with results most dangerous to the community, and the principal causes—increase of population, rapid development of industries, the necessity of being near the work, the condemnation of insanitary streets and areas. There remain the remedies proposed. We have seen that the erection of blocks, while it provides decent accommodation for a vast number of working-men, turns out a large number into the streets to find what accommodation they can. Obviously, therefore, the further extension of this method would result in far worse overcrowding. The housing in big barracks has also, it has been seen, its own dangers.

We come, next, to the proposal which seems to meet with the greatest amount of favor. It is the creation and erection of industrial villages within easy reach of town—say not more than twelve miles out. The railways would have to sell cheap workmen’s tickets; the villages should consist of three- or four-roomed cottages, each with a scullery and a garden. There should be a common garden as well; there should be no sale of drink in any of the villages; there should be in each a coöperative store; the rent of a cottage ought not to exceed three shillings a week.

This is the proposal advanced by General Booth of the Salvation Army (“Darkest England,” p. 210).

It is announced (“Times,” February 20, 1900) that the London County Council is about to ask of Parliament an increase of its powers, so that it may buy up land beyond its own limits, with a view of erecting some such industrial villages. We must therefore wait to see the result of this new experiment. We may be quite certain that it will prove to bring with it dangers and evils at present unsuspected, but I think that the gains will be greater than the losses. The country village will be as much better than the barrack as the barrack is better than the narrow and stinking court.

It is hoped that when the advantages of living in the country are understood the men will not mind living at a distance from their work. At the same time, the experiment must be on a very large scale, and if it fails will prove very costly. Objections are taken to the municipality acting as builder and landlord; it is urged that private companies might take up the question; but the experiment made by a private company, if it fails, costs the whole capital advanced by private persons, whereas if the experiment of the County Council fails it will be only the loss of the ratepayers’ money. Whatever is done must be done quickly; mischiefs incalculable are inflicted upon the children by the present overcrowding. To neglect it is to make the evils far worse. The remedy requires a great mind and a clear vision and unlimited powers. As yet little practical attention has been paid to the cry of the houseless and the rack-rented, and to the sobs of the children poisoned physically by the air, corrupt and vitiated, which they have to breathe; poisoned morally by evil companionship, starved and cabined mentally for want of light and air and sunshine, for want of the breeze among the trees and the grass of the meadows and the flowers of the field and the creatures of the air and of the hedge.

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IX

THE SUBMERGED

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IX

THE SUBMERGED

THE word “submerged” likes me not. I have endeavored to find or to invent another and a better word. So far without success. The word must define the class. It is the unhappy company of those who have fallen in the world. There are many levels from which one may fall; perhaps there are many depths into which one may fall; certainly I have never heard of any depth beyond which there was not another lower and deeper still. The submerged person, therefore, may have been a gentleman and a scholar, an officer, a prodigal; or he may have been a tradesman, or a working-man, or anything you please; the one essential is that he must have stepped out of his own class and fallen down below. He is a shipwrecked mariner on the voyage of life, he is a pilgrim who has wandered into the dark and malarious valleys beside the way. We have read in the annals of luckless voyages how those who escaped with their lives wandered along the seashore, living by the shell-fish they could pick up, moving on when there were no more mussels, huddled together at night in the shelter of a rock for warmth. We know and are familiar with their tales of misery. As these shipwrecked mariners on the cold and inhospitable coast, so are the unfortunates whom we call submerged; in a like misery of cold and starvation do they drag on a wretched existence.

They have no quarter or district of their own; we come upon them everywhere. In the wealthy quarters there are courts and alleys, lanes and covered ways, where they find shelter at night; they slouch along aimlessly, with vacant faces, in the most fashionable streets; they stand gazing with eyes which have no longer any interest or expression upon a shop-window whose contents would provide a dozen of them with a handsome income for life; in the warm summer evenings you may see them taking up their quarters for the night on the seats outside St. James’s Park; if you walk along the Thames embankment you will see them sitting and lying in corners sheltered from the wind; they seek out the dry arches if they can find any, happy in the chance of finding them; they sit on door-steps and sleep there until the policeman moves them on; wherever a night watchman, placed on guard over an open excavation, hangs up his red lamp and lights his fire in the workman’s grate you will find one or two of the submerged crouching beside the red coals; the watchmen willingly allow them their share of warmth and light. If you are walking in the streets late at night you will presently pass one of them creeping along looking about for a crust or a lump of bread. Outside the Board-schools, especially, these windfalls are to be found, thrown away by the children; it is a sign that food is cheap and work is abundant when one sees lumps of bread thrown into the gutter. These are the gifts of fortune to the submerged; the day has brought no jobs and no pence, not even the penny for a bare shelter with the Salvation Army; fate, relentless, has refused to hands willing to work—perhaps unwilling, for the submerged are sometimes incapable of work; like their betters, they have nerves. But in the night under the gas-lamps there are the gifts of the great goddess, Luck—the children’s lumps of bread lying white in the lamplight on kerb or door-step.

Or, again, if you are in the streets early in the morning, at the hour when the cheap restaurants set out upon the pavement their zinc boxes full of the refuse and unspeakable stuff of yesterday, you will find the person submerged busy among this terrible heap; he finds lumps of food, broken crusts, bones not stripped clean; he turns over the contents with eager hands; he carries off, at last, sufficient for a substantial meal.

One would hardly expect to find history occupying herself with a class so little worthy of her dignity. Yet have I found some account of the submerged in the eighteenth century. They did not prowl about the streets at night nor did they search the dust-box in the morning, because there were no crusts of costly wheaten bread thrown away, and there were no dust-boxes. But they had their customs. And the following seems to have been the chief resource of the class.

There were no police walking about the streets day and night; there were night watchmen, who went home about five in the morning; then for an hour, before the workmen turned out on their way to the shops, the streets were quite deserted and quiet. At that hour the submerged had their chance; they were the early vultures that hovered over the City before the dawn; they went out on the prowl, carrying lanterns in the winter; they searched the streets; where the market carts had passed there were droppings of vegetables and fruit, there were bones thrown out into the streets, there were things dropped; drunken men were lying on door-steps, stretched out on the pavement between the posts, or propped up against the walls; the night watchmen paid no attention to these common objects of the night, the helplessly drunk; they cleared out their pockets of money no doubt, otherwise they left them. But the prowlers, after another investigation of the pockets, carried off everything portable—hat, wig, neck-tie, ruffles, boots, coat, everything. The cold air quickened the recovery of the patient; when he came to his senses and sat up he was ready to repent, not in sackcloth, but in shirtsleeves. Later on in the day the prowlers inveigled children into back courts, stripped them of their fine frocks, cut off their long curls, and so let them go. Or they lay in wait for a drunken man and led him carefully to some quiet and secluded spot, where he could be stripped of all. But the submerged of George III were a ruder and a rougher folk than those of Queen Victoria.

The submerged do not, as a rule, give trouble to the police, nor are they a terror to the householder; they do not rob, they do not brawl, they do not get up riots, they do not “demonstrate,” they endure in quiet. Their misery might make them dangerous if they were to unite; but they cannot unite, they have no leader, they have no prophet; they want nothing except food and warmth, they accuse nobody, they are not revolutionaries; they are quite aware—those of them who have any power of thought left—that no change in the social order could possibly benefit them. They live simply, each man clothed with his own misery as with a gaberdine. And they know perfectly well that their present wretchedness is due to themselves and their own follies and their own vices. They have lost whatever spirit of enterprise they may once have possessed; in many cases long habits of drink have destroyed their power of will and energy.

Many causes have made them what they are. As many men, so many causes. They cannot be reduced to a class; they come from every social station—many of them are highly educated men, born of gentle-folk, some of county families, some of the professional classes. Their tale of woe, if you ask it, is always the lamentation of the luckless; it should be the lamentation of a sinner. Incompetence, especially that kind of incompetence which belongs to an indolent habit of mind and body; the loss of one situation after another, the throwing away of one chance after the other, the shrinking from work either bodily or mental, which grows upon a man until for very nervousness he is unable to do any work; the worn-out patience of friends and relations, drink—always drink; dismissal which involves the loss of character, the habit begun in boyhood of choosing always the easier way; sickness, which too commonly drives a man out of work and sends him on to the streets in search of casual jobs; crime and the gaol—all these causes work in the same direction; they reduce the unfortunate victim to the condition of hopelessness and helplessness which is the note of the submerged.

I think that where the case is one in which the former social standing was good the most common cause is loss of character. This does not mean, necessarily, the taint of dishonesty. It means, in many cases, simply incompetence. How shall a clerk, a shop assistant, find another place when he can only give reference to a former employer who can say nothing in his praise? He goes down, he takes a worse place with lower pay, he continues in his incompetence, he is again dismissed. He falls lower still. In any country it is a terrible thing for a young man to lose his character; it is fatal in a country where laborers of his kind, at the only work he can do, are redundant; while men with good character can be obtained, who will employ a man without a character? For such a man it would seem as if a new country—a new name—were the only chance left for him. He tries the new country. Alas! Incompetence is no more wanted there than at home. If, as sometimes happens, such an one yields to the temptation that is always before the penniless and falls into crime, it is no longer a descent along the familiar easy slope; it is a headlong plunge which the unfortunate man makes, once for all, into the Male-bolge of the submerged.

I was once in a London police court looking on at the day’s cases which were brought up one after the other before the magistrate. The drunk and disorderly came first; these were soon dismissed; indeed, there is a terrible monotony about them; the reporters do not take the trouble even to listen or to make a note of them unless the prisoner is a man of some note. Then followed the case of a young man, apparently four- or five-and-twenty years of age. He was described as a clerk; he was dressed in the uniform of his craft, with a black coat and a tall hat; it was the cold, early spring, and he had no overcoat or wrapper or collar or neckerchief of any kind, and he was barefooted. The sight of him filled one with a kind of terror. Now, the face of that poor wretch told its own story; it was a handsome face, with regular features, light hair, and blue eyes. As a boy he must have been singularly attractive; as a child, lovely. But now the face was stamped and branded with the mark of one who has always followed the Easy Way; his weak mouth, his shifting eyes, the degradation of what had once promised to be a face of such nobility and beauty, proclaimed aloud his history. I could see the boy at school who would do no more work than he was obliged to do; the young clerk at five shillings a week, who would do no more than he was bidden, and that without intelligence or zeal; the lad rising, as even the junior clerk rises, by seniority; the billiard-room, the public house, the wasted evenings, the betting, the evil companions, the inevitable dismissal for incompetence, the difficulty of finding another place, the influence of friends not too influential, the second dismissal, the tramp up thousands of stairs in search of a vacant desk where character was not required, borrowing of small sums, with faithful promises of repayment, the consequent loss of friends, the alienation even of brothers, the inevitable destitution, the pawning of all but the barest necessaries of clothes, even at last parting with his boots—all this was revealed by the mere aspect of the man. He was charged with stealing a pair of boots to replace those which he had pawned. There was no shame in his face; the thing had come at last which he had felt coming so long. It was not shame, it was a look of resigned hopelessness; he was become the foot-ball of fate, he was henceforth to be kicked about here and there as fate in her gamesome moods might choose. Practically there was no defense; he had nothing to say; he only shook his head; the magistrate was lenient because it was a first offense. Leniency in such a case is only apparent, though the magistrate means well, for a fortnight in prison is as ruinous for the rest of a man’s life as a twelvemonth. So he stepped out of the dock, and presently the wheels of Black Maria—sometimes called the Queen’s omnibus—rolled out into the street with the day’s freight of woe and retribution.

I met this poor creature afterward; I came upon him carrying a pair of boards; I stumbled over him as he sat in the sun in St. James’s Park, monumental in shabbiness; I met him once or twice shambling about the Embankment, which was his favorite boulevard—a place where no work can be picked up, and for that reason, I suppose, dear to him. London is a very big city, but such men as this have their haunts; they are too weak of will to wander far from the way of habit; it requires an effort, a moment of energetic decision, to change his daily walk from the Embankment to the Strand. I never saw him, except on that one occasion when he was a sandwich man, doing any kind of work; I never saw him begging; I never saw him in a shelter at night; I know not how he lived or how, if ever, he procured a renewal of his rags when they fell off him. Presently it occurred to me that I had not seen him lately. I looked about for him. By this time I took an interest in the case; had he asked me for money I should have given him some, I dare say. Why not? The indiscriminate giving of alms is, one knows and has been taught for years, a most mischievous thing; but in this case money will not lift a man out of the slough, nor will it plunge him deeper; give him money and he will devour it; refuse him money and he will go on just in the same way. But I have never seen him since, and I am sure that in some workhouse infirmary he lay lingering awhile with pneumonia, which carries off most of the half-fed and the ill-clad, and that he died without murmuring against his fate, resigned and hopeless. I dare say that those who composed his limbs in death admired the singular beauty of the face. For lo! a marvel—when the debased soul, which has also debased the face, goes out of the body, the face resumes the delicacy and the nobility for which it was originally intended.

Another case of a submerged. I knew something of the man, not the man himself. He began very well; he was clever in some things; he could play more than one instrument, he was a companionable person; he got into the civil service by open competition very creditably; for some ten or twelve years he lived blamelessly. It was known by his friends that he was always thirsty; he would drink large quantities of tea for breakfast; he drank pints of cold water with his pipe. Presently his friends began to whisper—things. Then openly there were said—things. Then I was told that A. A. had been turned out of his place, and that meant a good many—things. For certain reasons I was interested in the man. One evening in July I strolled in St. James’s Park after dinner; the air was balmy; the benches of the park were nearly full. I found a vacant seat and sat down. Beside me was a youngish man; by the light of the gas-lamp I observed that the brim of his hat was broken, and that in other respects rags were his portion. He entered into conversation by a question as to some race-horse, to which I pleaded ignorance. He then began to talk about himself. It was, as I have said above, the lamentation of the luckless. “One man,” he said, “may steal a pig, another may not look over the garden-wall. I, sir, am what I am; in rags, as you see; penniless, or I should not be here; tormented by thirst, and no means of procuring a drink. I, sir, am the man who looked over the garden-wall.” He went on; suddenly the story became familiar to me; he was the man of whose decline and fall I had heard so much.

He had not abandoned his grand air, for which he was always distinguished. I offered him a cigar. He examined it critically. “A brand of this kind,” he said, “I keep in tea for three years.” He lit it. “A gentleman,” he reminded me, “is not lowered by bad luck, nor is he disgraced by having to do work belonging to the service—the menial service. The other day I was a sandwich man—in Bond Street. I met my brother face to face. I have a brother—” the poor man is a member of the Travelers and a few other clubs of that kind. “He will do nothing for me. At sight of me he winced; he changed color. Do you think I flinched? Not so, sir. The disgrace was his; he felt it.” And so on; he was instructive. I believe his friends shipped him off somewhere.

Some of the submerged contrive to make their own livelihood; they are even able, as a rule, to take a bed at the Sixpenny Hotel. One of these institutions has, indeed, the credit of being the chosen haunt of the brokendown gentlemen. Here they are all broken down together; to meet here, to cook their own suppers, to rail at fortune like kings deposed is an agreeable diversion. At least they talk with each other in the language to which they are accustomed. And there is always something about the manner of the brokendown “swell” which distinguishes him from those of lower beginnings. There is something of the old gallantry left; he does not sit down and hang a head and moan like the poor bankrupt small trader; so long as the sixpence is forthcoming he is not unhappy.

It is a strange company; they were once soldiers, sports-men, billiard players, betting men, scholars, journalists, poets, novelists, travelers, physicians, actors. One of the submerged of whom I heard had been a reader of some learned language at one of our universities; another was a clergyman—not, if the story about him was true, quite admirable professionally; both these gentlemen, however, found it best, after a time, to exchange the Sixpenny Hotel for the workhouse, where they are at least free from the anxiety about the sixpence.

One more illustration of the submerged who has been a gentleman. I met him once, only once. It was in Oxford Street; he was standing before the window of a very artistic and attractive shop—a china and glass shop. The window was most æsthetically “dressed”; it contained, besides Venetian glass and other glass of wondrous cunning and beauty, a small dinner-table set out with flowers, glass, silver plate, costly china of new design, some white napery, and those pretty little lights—called fairy lights—which were a few years ago fashionable.

The man was unmistakably a gentleman; his dress betrayed his extreme poverty ; his boots showed a solution of continuity between the upper leather and the sole; his closely buttoned coat was frayed, his round hat was broken, apparently he had no shirt; he certainly had no collar; his red cotton handkerchief was tied round his neck; the morning was cold and raw, a morning in November. Evidently, a gentleman. The poor wretch was looking at the dinner-table; it reminded him of mess nights, of dinner parties, of clubs, of evenings abroad and at home, before he fell; of what else did that dinner-table remind him—of what light laughter and music of women’s voices, while as yet he was worthy to sit among them? One knows not. He was absorbed in the contemplation of the table; as he gazed his face changed strangely; it went back, I know not how many years; it became the face of a hawk, the face of a man keen and masterful. How did he fall? How came the look of mastery and command to go out of his face?

I spoke to the man. I touched him on the arm; he started; I pointed to the fairy lights; “Do you remember,” I asked him, “when those things came in?” “It was about ten years ago,” he said, without hesitation. Then the present moment reasserted itself. He became again one of the submerged. “Lend me half a crown,” he said. “On Monday morning I will meet you here, and I’ll return it.” On the following Monday morning I repaired to the china and glass shop. My friend, however, had forgotten his appointment. Faith in my own expectations would have been shaken had he kept it. I have only to add that he took the half crown as one gentleman accepts, say, a cigar, from another. “Thanks, thanks,” he said, airily, and he moved away with the bearing of one who is on his way to his club. It was pleasant to observe the momentary return to the old manner, though the contrast between the rags and the manner presented an incongruity that could not pass unobserved, and I regret to this day that I did not invite him to a chop-house and to a statement from his own point of view as to the turning of fortune’s wheel.

I have said that the submerged do not, as a rule, give much trouble to the police. They may have had their lapses from virtue, their indiscretions, but they are not habitual criminals. The way of the latter, so long as he keeps out of prison, is much more comfortable; for transgressors the prison in which they pass most of their time is hard, but the intervals of freedom are often times of plenty and revelry. The submerged have no such intervals. The common rogue is generally a brazen braggart, while the submerged is timid and ashamed. Of course, too, it is by no means a common thing that he has been a gentleman; in East London there are over ten thousand of the homeless and the wanderers, loafers, and the casuals, with some criminals. I have before me twelve cases investigated by an officer of the Salvation Army. The men belonged to the following trades: confectioner, feather-bed dresser, tailor, riverside laborer, sawyer, distiller, accountant in a bank, builder’s laborer, plumber’s laborer, carman, match-seller, slater. Out of the twelve, one, you see, had been a gentleman. The cause of destitution was variously stated: age—it is very difficult in some trades to resist the pressure of the young; cataract in one eye; inability to find work, though young and strong; cut out by machinery; last place lost, by his own fault—an admission reluctantly made and not explained; arm withered; brought up to no trade, and so on.

As for their attempts to get work, the odd job appears to be the most common, if the most hopeless. It will be seen from the cases given above that the men can no longer get work at their own trades; now, they know no other; what, then, are they to try? One cannot expect much resource in an elderly man who has been making confectionery all his life, when he has lost his place and his work; nor in a feather-bed dresser, when feather-beds are no longer made. The former can do nothing in the world except make sugar plums according to certain rules of the mystery; the latter can do nothing but “dress” feather-beds. The ignorance and helplessness of our craftsmen outside their own branch of work are astonishing. So that the run after the odd job is explained. There is nothing else for them to try. A great many working hands are dock laborers, and fight every day for the chance of being taken on; but a man advanced in years, with the sight of one eye gone or with a withered arm—what chance has he of getting employment?

Sometimes they try to sell things—boot-laces and useful odds and ends. But capital is wanted, a few shillings that can be locked up, and the returns are deplorable. Sometimes they try matches; the man with the “box o’ lights” is busy on Sundays and holidays outside the railway station or at the stopping places of omnibus or tram; I believe that threepence or so represents the average daily profit to be made in this branch of commerce. A few try to sell newspapers, but they are cut out by the boys who run and bawl and force their “specials” on the public. Newspaper selling in the streets is only good when one has a popular “pitch.” For instance, at Piccadilly Circus, where the stream of life runs full and strong, a news-vender must do very well, but such “pitches” are rare. Sometimes they offer the latest novelty out for one penny. The trade in “novelties” depends on the attractiveness of the wares; they must be really novel to catch the eye, and they must seem desirable. The principal markets for the penny novelties are the kerb of Broad Street and that on the north side of Cheapside. There is generally a new “novelty” every week, and the ingenuity, the resource, the invention of the unknown genius who provides it are beyond all praise. When he hits the popular taste you may see the dealers selling their pennyworths as fast as they can lay them out on their trays. Sometimes there is a “frost”; the novelty does not “catch on.” Then the poor dealer loses his little capital, and what happens to the inventor no one knows.

It is recorded of a certain collector, who spent his whole life in making a collection of the penny novelties, that at his death his museum, his life’s work, was sold for the enormous sum of £12. I suppose he might have found comfort in the reflection that there are a great many men whose whole life’s work would not fetch as many pence. But his soul must have felt a certain amount of dejection after so busy a pursuit—and one covering so many years—to find it valued at no more than £12. How many poets, novelists, preachers, journalists, could get as much as £12 for their contributions to literature? After all, he was above the average, this collector.

One would think that journalism would offer chances to the submerged. Here, at least, is a door always wide open. I know of one case in which a man just let out of prison met with a singular piece of good luck; he was a man whose character was hopelessly gone, and could never be retrieved, who had committed frauds and cheats innumerable upon all his old companions, whose friends had long since plainly told him that nothing, nothing more would be done for him, and that no mercy would be shown him in case of further frauds. The day came when he was released from prison; he stood outside and looked up and down and across the road; he saw a stony-hearted world; amid this multitude of people there was not one single person to whom he could turn for help; it was a cold, gray morning; he had concocted several little schemes of villainy in his cell; now, in the open air, he realized that they were hopeless; prison had somewhat reduced his strength of mind; he felt that just then he could not sit down and work out any one of his schemes; he saw no prospect before him but that of a casual loafer in the streets, submerged for life.

He turned to the east; he wandered away, he knew not where; he had a small sum of money in his pocket, enough for a short time. After that, the slouch along the streets.

Suddenly he came upon a street scene, a short, quick, dramatic scene enacted in a few minutes. It fired his imagination; he saw a chance; he bought paper and pen at a stationer’s shop; he went into a coffee-house, called for a cup of coffee and the ink, and wrote a descriptive paper on that scene; when it was done he took it to the office of a great daily paper, and asked to see one of the subeditors. His paper was read and accepted; he was told that he might bring more; he did bring more; he became one of the staff; he was presently sent abroad on the business of that paper. I do not know whether he thought fit to tell the editor anything about his own record. Well, the man ought to have become one of the submerged; but, you see, he was a scholar and a man of imagination; he had been engaged, it is true, in frauds, and was morally hopeless and corrupt through and through, but he had not lost his power of will; he had had no experience of the disappointments and the step-by-step descent which rob the submerged of his energy and his resource. The example only proves that journalism opens its doors in vain for the ordinary submerged who has lost his grasp of realities.