Chapter VI: Vagrom Men

[AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE WORKING MEN’S CLUB, ST. MARGARETS’]

“_In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground._”--GENESIS iii. 19.

In the November of last year--1905--I was invited to consider the problem which is known as “The Unemployed Question,” and to write something about it in a London daily paper. In 1905 the subject was attracting the attention of every one, and it was thought that by means of my own method--the method of Fiction--I might possibly interest people.

I welcomed the opportunity, and wrote a story expressing my views, which was published among the news columns of the _Daily Mail_.

Before the tale began to appear I had several conferences with Lord Northcliffe, then Sir Alfred Harmsworth, the editor of the newspaper. Certain facts were told me; a mass of expert opinion and evidence was placed at my disposal, and I was enjoined to study my new material and write exactly as I felt about the question. No restrictions were placed upon my point of view. I suppose that very rarely indeed has it happened to an ordinary novelist that the ruling powers of a journal which has one of the largest circulations in the world have said, “Here are our columns; come and say what you think in them.”

It is, no doubt, good journalism to print a single article written by a man whose conviction on the subject of the article is diametrically opposed to that of the newspaper in which it is published. A standard of value is created by an exhibition of contrasts. It is good journalism also to print the views of experts such as Mr. Booth or Mr. McKenzie. Both these things are constantly done. But to give a novelist columns of enormously valuable space for some weeks--“news space,” not the space generally reserved for fiction--in order that he may express his own ideas, is very unusual. At the time when this was offered to me I thought it a very great compliment. I can hardly believe that I was mistaken, and I think so still.

I wrote the story, and called it, _Made in His Image_. When it had run through the newspaper it was published in book form. Fourteen months have gone by, and during them I have endeavoured to keep myself informed as to the position of affairs. With the additional knowledge that the past year and its inquiries have given me, I find myself still of precisely the same opinion as I was before. If anything, my conviction is stronger than before. What my opinions are, such conclusions as I have come to, I have been invited to tell you to-night.

I will get to the point at once without further preamble, save only to say how much I value the privilege of addressing you.

For a long time past every class of the community has been exercised by the problem of the unemployed. The question has steadily become more acute year by year, and at the present moment its solution is the most pressing and necessary of all that confront thinking men and women.

I propose to touch briefly upon the existing state of things, to explain what I conclude to be the cause of it, and to set before you my belief as to the only remedy.

In London, Manchester, Birmingham, and all the great cities of England, the streets are full of men with bright eyes, and faces cut and whittled to an edge by hunger. Men and women with kindly hearts and sympathetic natures cannot go abroad in winter unless they taste the bitterness of sights and sounds that tear the heart and lacerate the soul.

Dismal and terrible processions move throughout the streets of our capitals like spectres from the underworld. I have myself, in the course of my investigations, been packed tight among a crowd of tattered, coughing humans in London. I have walked with them, brethren of yours and mine, men who offended and distressed every sense, men who groaned and sighed because they had not eaten, men who exhaled an odour like the caged animals in a menagerie, men who fed, when they fed at all, upon garbage, men who could not wash.

I have seen faces all round me like the faces that the great Italian poet Dante describes as flitting through the gloom of hell. On one side is a face grown witless from hunger, sorrow, and foul environment. It is a horrible face, a face like a glass of dirty water. Another face is simply a grey drawn wedge of cunning; a third man has a face that might have been that of a saint, but the horror of his life has put its heel upon the countenance, and has ground the possibility to pulp. I have stood among living bodies which have no heat in them, a company of ghosts that cough and curse in bloodless voices. And among these gaunt, dismal, and hopeless men the one who can snarl and cry his sorrows loudly is the one who is envied by all the rest. He must have had a meal that day.

I expect many of you have seen something of what I describe, and those who have had this sad experience will bear witness that I am exaggerating nothing. This is not Fiction; it is melancholy Truth. In the opening chapter of the story I wrote on the Unemployed question, I described a meeting of the Unemployed in Trafalgar Square. In the course of the chapter I told how some charitable people drove up with a cart full of buns and bread and butter. Immediately there was a riot. The poor starving people fought with each other for the food like wolves. The scene was horrible. This first chapter appeared on November 18, in the _Daily Mail_. Two days afterwards I met a friend in my London Club who had read it. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you’ve let your imagination run away with you. A story is all very well, but it should closely follow the lines of fact. Don’t you tell me that English workmen are in such a pass that they will fight for a morsel of food in the heart of London. You’re coming it a bit _too_ tall, my dear chap.”

He was a ruddy, prosperous friend. As he came into the Club smoking-room he gave a heavy fur coat, which probably cost him fifty guineas, to one of the waiters. He called for a whisky and soda, and sank into an arm-chair of red leather with a comfortable sigh of pleasure. He stretched out his legs towards a blazing fire of logs, and said again, “You novelist johnnies are always coming it a bit too thick, don’t you know!”

My worthy friend was one of those who have eyes but see not; because they won’t see, and don’t wish to see.

Now listen to the sequel--

Three days after this a procession of Unemployed marched along the Embankment in London. Some charitable people did actually bring down a cart of food. _There was a riot and a fight for the food exactly as I had foreseen in my imaginary tale._ It was reported in the newspaper. Five days after I had imagined that, under existing conditions, something _might_ happen, that thing actually _did_ happen--men came fighting for a scrap of bread in the heart of the Metropolis.

This is what we see in the great streets of London and other towns--the streets full of shops which are crammed with costly and beautiful things, thronged with prosperous people. What we see when we follow the procession of the Unemployed back to the awful dens in which they live is impossible to do more than hint at. To tell the absolute unvarnished truth in a public assembly, to publish a faithful description in a public print is an utter impossibility. These dreadful facts are those which despairing clergymen and ministers, doctors, nurses, would-be helpers, tell to each other in whispers.

I knew a lady whose husband had turned out worthless, and who finally deserted her. Her one source of income was a row of small houses in the East End of London, houses that were let out in rooms to the very poor. My friend was too poor to employ an agent to collect her rents and draw a commission for his work. Every week she did so herself, and one week she invited me to accompany her. I did so, and it was the most horrible day I ever spent. No working man in a district such as this can form any idea of the filth and misery in which the lost, degraded tenants of these houses lived. I shall not attempt to describe it, for it would be a poor return for your kindness in coming here to-night to rob you of your night’s rest!

I will merely quote some lines written by Mr. F. A. McKenzie, one of the foremost sociologists of the day. They deal with the lives of the Unemployed in the East End of London, and they are guarded, reticent words.

I read--

“To say that scores of thousands of them are facing the coming
winter with fear and dread is but mildly to imply their
situation. They are the derelicts of London, whom the changes
in modern conditions have left hopelessly behind. Without
crafts, without knowledge, many of them with hope dead, they
face a future that good trade can do little to relieve, and bad
trade must greatly darken.”

“The prodigal son” of to-day plays out the last act of his tragedy, not before a fatted calf, but in a Poplar back room. The shiftless and incapables, attracted by low rent, by the chance of casual work, and by the abundance of relief, drift here. To them are added the scores of thousands of locally born people who are trained in such a way that they cannot be anything else than casuals.

The very streets proclaim the lives of these people. Apart from the main thoroughfares and from certain more prosperous avenues, you are swallowed up in an endless succession of long roads of cheaply built houses. The walls are crumbling, and the bricks seem as though they would fall at a blow; many houses have broken, paper-stuffed windows; there are whole streets where the doors and windows have not seen paint for a generation. The children, babies with ophthalmic eyes, girls dirty beyond belief play in the gutters. The women gossip at the doors. The men, strong, yet none wanting their strength, lounge at street corners.

In home after home you will find that the sole regular wage earned is by a young son, who obtains ten shillings a week as errand boy in the City. On this, with occasional additions from the others, the whole family exists. The mother may obtain a few shillings a week at ‘charing,’ although such work is scarce in Poplar.

Twenty years ago the poverty of the East End was lessened by the home work which the women could obtain. It is one of the most serious, although often overlooked, factors of to-day that such home work cannot be had save by a few. The aliens in Whitechapel and in Stepney absorb almost all of it. The foreigners are more capable, more thrifty, and more sober, and, save where brute strength is required, our own derelicts stand no chance before them. The homes inside are often enough indescribable. Here and there you find the one room kept clean, but generally dirt is the outstanding feature. The beds are black masses of filth. The walls of the rooms prevent real cleanliness. I went into one two-roomed tenement inhabited by a man, wife and three children. The kitchen was overrun with rats, which had free entrance and exit through numerous holes in the wall. In the bedroom a large part of the lath and plaster wall underneath the window was torn away, leaving great gaps open to the yard. ‘Why doesn’t your landlord do some repairs here?’ my companion asked. ‘He won’t, sir; he says it is healthy for us to have holes in the walls,’ the woman replied. Many of these Poplar rooms urgently require the active intervention of the local sanitary officers.

In such fetid dens, badly built, ill kept, and furnished with the strangest of oddments, most of the Poplar poor live.

If it were necessary and part of my scheme this evening, I could take up the whole of our time in telling the truth about the existing horrors. But I do not think that any one will deny them. They exist, and no one can disprove the fact. Let us rather consider _why_ they exist, and what their existence means to the working man.

Stated in a few brief words, this is my theory and my unalterable belief.

IF THERE WERE NO UNEMPLOYABLES THERE WOULD BE NO UNEMPLOYED.

To amplify my statement I will say--and in a moment I will endeavour to prove--that if the idle, vicious, hopeless and sullen scoundrels who act as a drag upon the wheel of the Commonwealth, who have been allowed too long to clog social progress, were removed, the whole problem would be solved.

I beg you to listen carefully to me while I tell you how the _Unemployables_ have created the problem of the Unemployed, how they are throttling charitable enterprise, how they are making economic methods of relief impossible, how they are destroying the present and the future of the honest working man. Who are the people I have called “The Unemployables”? What is _their_ idea of work and what is the _real ideal_ of work? I will answer these questions. I will show you who and what the Unemployables are. I will contrast their attitude towards honest toil with the attitude of honest men towards toil, and when I have done this I will try to explain how these people are injuring you and me, what a terrible burden they are upon our backs.

The month before my story dealing with the Unemployed appeared in the _Daily Mail_, a series of articles on the same subject was published. In some of them the Unemployables were painted with perfect fidelity and vividness. I take some paragraphs here and there to make a connected picture.

“Half-past eleven on Friday morning in a back street in the most poverty-stricken and most largely relieved district in Canning Town. A group of women wait around the gates of a chapel, from which doles are being issued. Dirty, ragged and untidy, they certainly are, but hunger-stricken--No! Their children playing in the roadway near by are ill-clad, filthy, and in many cases bare-footed, and do show signs of under-feeding, but not the mothers.

These are the wives of the habitual Unemployed seeking relief.

The curious stranger notices that some of the women go from the relief station to the public-houses. Let us look inside a few of these establishments. In a side bar of the first place we enter, we find eleven women, exactly of the same type as those soliciting charity without. One of them carries a recently-born baby in her arms, and another has a little girl two years old clinging to her apron. Each woman has a glass in front of her. Some of them have been here since half-past nine in the morning, and will stay for hours yet. In the next drinking shop is a party of nine, in the next but two, while in the last of all we find seven. Now one rises to go out, for her hour has come to beg for aid from school or parson or Unemployed fund.

An hour later we can see the husbands of these women amusing themselves at the street corner higher up. Five bookmakers’ touts are busy among them at one cross roads alone.

At this time, when we are threatened with a new Unemployed agitation, it is as well that the causes of much of the distress in some of the Unemployed areas should be understood. For several years the public has tried to deal with the sufferings of the very poor by sentimental means. Each winter has brought increase of relief, and each increase of relief has helped to render more permanent the problem it has set about to cure.

We have now in one district alone, a large number of people, totalling many thousands, incapable of regular work and unwilling to attempt it. They have been taught to lean on charity to aid them, and they have proved themselves apt pupils. Their homes will, as a rule, for sheer uncleanliness, bear comparison with the dwelling of an Australian aborigine. Their children are systematically made untidy, and are given a neglected air in order more successfully to extort outside aid. Parental love is so dead that, in very many cases, the mothers will sell the boots given to their children in order to buy gin.

This is no vague, general charge. Three years ago the readers of the _Daily Mail_ entrusted the writer with a sum of money to spend on meals and shoes for needy children in this district. Teachers from many schools assured me that such effort would be wasted. ‘Buy the shoes and give them to the children to-day,’ they said; ‘and to-morrow the shoes will be in the pawnshops, and the mothers will have drunk the proceeds.’ It was necessary for us to construct a careful system of guard checks to save the children from their own mothers.

Last year four separate general funds were distributing doles and aid among these people in one district. A fund for the children, the best of all, kept them from starvation. Two outside agencies collected many thousands of pounds and scattered them about. The West Ham Corporation spent over £26,000 on relief works. What has been the result? The first outcome was to draw to this district many of the loafers from other parts, who saw the chance to obtain something for nothing. The more money that came, the more the number of Unemployed grew.

There is, without question, an amount of perfectly genuine distress, distress that should be relieved. But it is not, as a rule, found in the ‘Unemployed’ processions. The men who are making the most noise could not work properly if they would, and would not if they could.

This is a hard saying. Some facts may help to prove it. Many employers of labour around the docks agree in testifying that their difficulty is to induce casual men to remain long at their work. A man will take on a job for a couple of hours, and then ask for his 1_s._ 2_d._ (7_d._ an hour) and go. ‘Look here, guv’nor, I’ve had enough of this,’ he exclaims, with perfect truthfulness. He has secured enough to see him through the day--why should he trouble after more?

The labourer of the casual loafing type who works for two days a week thinks that he has done all his duty. His work is worth comparatively little when it is done. The municipal relief work at West Ham last winter spent £14,000 on material and £12,000 on labour. On the most liberal estimate, the labour value obtained was worth not more than £4500, and the tasks would have been done by any contractor for that amount. Many whose names were down on the Unemployed Register refused work when offered to them.

Last winter the workhouse authorities began to distribute relief on a more liberal scale. A number of distressed cases were taken in without labour. The number increased until it reached 473. Then the guardians resolved to re-establish the labour test, and to make the applicants do some work for the aid they had. The numbers at once fell to 119.

The people have been taught to look upon the outside public as a milch cow, and the guardians and municipal authorities as officials from whom everything possible is to be extorted. The members of an ‘unofficial’ relief committee invited me last week to one of their meetings. A bloated woman came asking them for aid. They gave her a small dole, with repeated injunctions that she was to lie to the relieving officer if he asked her if she had had anything. ‘Take care that your fire is out and your cupboard is bare when the relieving officer comes,’ one member added.

Here, then, is the problem to be solved. A great army of habitual loafers and incapables live off the woes of the genuine Unemployed. The latter, too, often suffer in silence. The spongers, hardened by long experience, adepts in every trick to impress a generous public, ply their calling more boldly each year.

Such are the men who will not work--the ‘work-shy’ men, the ‘bone-idle’ men, the ‘wasters,’ the scoundrels who turn the holy virtue of charity into a foolishness, and who recruit the ranks of those who keep society in a state of siege.

These people form the majority of the Unemployables. Please remember that I am not talking of the _Unemployed_, but of the Unemployables. The men who won’t work form the majority, but the hopeless herd of Unemployables is also swelled by those who _can’t_ work. They can’t work because their life has never taught them how to work. From infancy they have been trained to depend upon charity, from childhood they have been denied an education which will enable them to earn a living.

Their very birth has been charitably conducted. The parish doctor has given free aid, the blankets have come from a local fund, and probably there has been a Salvation lass scrubbing the room for the mother. From infancy they are accustomed to look to charity for their very comfort. A boots fund supplies them with shoes, free meals are their main sustenance, and if they are very fortunate a holiday fund gives them a week in the country. Their first lessons are in begging, and they are taught to lie and to cringe to the givers of doles.

When such children leave their slum schools, what awaits them? There is little or no possibility of the slum boy learning a trade, while the girl finds it impossible, even if she desires, to learn housewifery by going to service. The factory awaits the girl, and odd jobs, as potboy, errand boy, runner for bookmakers, or the like, await the lad. At seventeen or so the youth becomes a man, and applies for casual labour at the docks or elsewhere. About the same time he mates with a girl who has been working at the factory.

By this time he has forgotten nearly all he learned at school. What can reasonably be expected of him?

It is impossible to condemn this second class of Unemployable. If you and I had been brought up in the same way, we should live as they do and behave as they do, in all probability. If a child has seen his father and mother, his grandfather and grandmother, his uncles, aunts and all the friends of the family habitually go to bed in their boots, he will sleep in his boots too. If he lives in a village where every one goes to bed in boots, and has never been out of that village nor witnessed the customs of any other village, who is to tell him that sleeping in boots is an unpleasant trick which spoils the sheets? A stranger who came upon a child of this village and told him that he was a dirty little boy who ought to be punished, would be an idiot who understood nothing of the power of environment, the truth of education or the facts of life.

But the first, and largest, class of Unemployables who have worked, can work, know how to work, but _won’t_ work, is in a very different case, and is formed of very different people.

These are the men who are lost.

For my own part, I believe that idleness is the greatest of all sins, the chief of all crimes. It is not those offences against the law of God and the ordinance of man that we punish which are always the worst. I may be wrong, but I give it as my opinion that sloth is the prime sin of all those lusts and iniquities that war against the soul and destroy manhood. I believe that the thief who works, the drunkard who works, the liar who works, the adulterer who works, may often be a better man than the boneless, bloodless idler who is neither thief, drunkard, liar, or adulterer.

Work--all work--has in it a fine spiritual element, just as the smallest and meanest thing in the world has a divine side, inasmuch as God made it and saw that it was good. All temporary forms, it has been said, include essences that are eternal. Whatever be the meanness and loneliness of a man’s occupation, he may discharge it on principles common to himself and the Archangel Gabriel. The man who spends his whole life in cleaning codfish in Leadenhall Market is a better and finer man in the eye of God, a worthier and more valuable man to the Commonwealth, than the poor man who loafs away his life in a four-ale bar, or the rich one who lounges through his existence in a palace.

However far I may go in my belief that idleness is the greatest vice of all, hardly any one here would attempt to combat the general view that it is a vice and a very bad one.

But leaving the purely moral standpoint for a moment, let me point out to you the value of work as an aid to _material_ success and happiness.

For a moment we will put aside the fact that toil is a virtue and laziness a sin. Let me briefly repeat what has been said a thousand times by far abler and more important lips than mine--

Work pays.

In the spring of this year I was staying in the South of France with a friend who is a great employer of labour. He employs nearly 16,000 men. He told me that, quite unknown to every one, he has established a system of reports upon the work and ability of each separate man. His agents inform him that Jack Smith, whom he has never met and will never meet in this world, is a hard worker. The next promotion goes to Jack Smith.

Genius, the highest and rarest attribute of the human being, has been said to be “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” A capacity for work which is not infinite but finite, yet which is still strong and vigorous, ought always and in all circumstances to secure a livelihood and ensure respect. This is the very least that it should do. It may do much more. It may command success.

What was it but work that enabled Heyne of Gottingen, the son of a poor weaver, to become one of the greatest classical scholars; that enabled Akenside, the son of a butcher, to write _The Pleasures of the Imagination_; Arkwright, the barber, to become Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning-jenny; Beattie, the school-master, to become Professor of Moral Philosophy; Prideaux to become the Bishop of Winchester from being the assistant in the kitchen at Exeter College; Edmund Saunders, the errand lad, to become Sir Edmund Saunders, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench; Jonson, the common bricklayer, to become Ben Jonson the famous? Adrian VI. rose to his great fame as a scholar from being a poor lad in the streets, who, for want of other convenience, had to read by the lamps in the church porches; Parkes, the grocer’s, and Davy, the apothecary’s apprentice, became the two greatest chemical investigators of their age. What enabled Dr. Isaac Milner, Dean of Carlisle and Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, to rise from the humble position of a weaver; and White, who was also a weaver, to become Professor of Arabic at Oxford; Hunter, the cabinet-maker, to attain the first rank among anatomists? Incredible labour enabled Demosthenes to become the greatest orator of antiquity. _The Economy of Human Life_ and _The Annual Register_ were the production of Dodsley, who by labour raised himself from the position of a weaver and a footman. Labour enabled Falconer, the barber’s son, to write his celebrated poem of _The Shipwreck_. The editor of _The Quarterly Review_, Gifford, somehow acquired the needed capability from being a cabin-boy and shoemaker’s apprentice. Haydn, the son of a poor cartwright, became the eminent composer; Johnson, through sickness and poverty, rose to be the immortal linguist; Jeremy Taylor, a barber’s son, ended as theologian and bishop; Barry, from a working mason, became the renowned painter. Dr. Livingstone attained his celebrity from being a “piecer” in a factory. Indeed, if we read the lives of distinguished men in any department, we find them celebrated for the amount of labour they could perform. There is no exception to this rule even in the military profession. Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, Washington, Napoleon, and Wellington, were all renowned as hard workers. We read how many days they could support the fatigues of a march; how many hours they spent in the field, in the cabinet, in the court; how many secretaries they kept employed; in short, how hard they worked. Superficial thinkers are ready to cry out, “Miracles!” Yes! but they are miracles of industry and of labour.

Great success came to these great workers I have enumerated, people who started life as working men. If they had lived to-day they would have achieved the same, though the task would have been a more difficult one. Men of this stamp cannot be crushed. But more ordinary men who have the capacity for hard work and are willing to do it, what shall we say of many of them in the year 1906? What shall we say of the thousands who want work and can’t get it, of the Unemployed?

We must say just this--the Unemployed are the victims of the Unemployable, and all working men suffer to support the idle and worthless classes of the community.

Every one suffers, every one has to pay for the maintenance of the Unemployable. But the working man pays most and suffers most. Let me put it to the working men here to-night.

Out of every pound I earn I have to pay a shilling to the Government in income-tax. I call this hard, because every penny of my income is made by hard mental work. The parson and the doctor, the farmer, the lawyer, the author, are taxed exactly the same as the man who has not earned his income, but who has been left land or other property by his father. I work ten hours a day nearly every day of my life, and I only make nineteen shillings out of every pound I earn, while the man who has an income without working for it pays not a penny more. You are probably wondering what this has to do with your side of the question. You do not pay income-tax, you may say, it is only the people who make more than three pounds odd a week who have to pay this tax.

You are quite wrong if you think this. In proportion to your earnings, you pay, even here in this country, more than I do, more than the doctor, more than the farmer--more than almost any one, except the parson, who is always the most heavily taxed man in proportion to his means and his duties in the community. It is true that you don’t get yellow papers “On His Majesty’s Service” by the post demanding this or that sum. You don’t get polite gentlemen calling for money, and backed up by the whole force of the British Constitution. You pay in other ways. Take the case of a farm labourer. The farmer rents his land from the original owner, and he makes as much as he can out of it. The farmer has to pay the Government a proportion of every shilling he makes. It stands to reason, therefore, that he can’t afford to pay his labourers as much as he would were he himself less heavily taxed. And there are other ways in which the working man pays out of all proportion to his earnings. The working man who buys a pound of tea, a glass of beer, or an ounce of tobacco, pays exactly the same duty on these articles as people with ten times his income. I may buy a pound of tea at two shillings and the working man may not be able to pay more than a shilling. But that is merely a question of quality, and does not affect the argument. The working man with a very small income pays the same duty as the man with a much larger one.

The working man also pays other taxes, called rates, in his house-rent. They are not collected direct from him, they are collected from the landlord, who puts up the rent accordingly.

Therefore, although a superficial view would tend to show that the working man is without many of those burdens which fall upon the shoulders of larger earners, such a view would be utterly wrong.

I have still so much to say that I cannot go further into the economic aspect of the question. Detailed proof, abundant and overflowing, could be easily supplied. I have no time to do so now, I merely repeat the indubitable fact that the working man has to pay for the workhouses, the asylums, and the prisons; poor as he is, he must support the Unemployables.

In the workhouses, at any rate in the London unions, he must support them in a comparative luxury which he himself can by no means afford.

In one great workhouse, for example, we find that the finest butter, the best Irish bacon, the whitest bread, the most expensive cuts of beef are for the pauper. Outside the workhouse the working head of a family who is struggling to bring up his children in honourable independence has none of these luxuries. In place of the best butter, he and his family have the cheapest margarine or dripping; their bacon, if they have any, is bought in inferior scraps; their bread is of common description, and instead of costly cuts of beef, they too often have to content themselves with the cheapest form of food in London--fried fish. At no time have they too much of even this food. Yet, while they are existing in such pinching poverty, fighting their way from day to day and from hour to hour, an enormous tax is levied on them in the form of rates, to maintain in unnecessary comfort those who are living an idle and unprofitable life.

The contrast to the worker must seem poignant. On the one side of the workhouse gate are poverty and incessant misery, with insufficient food to eat. On the other side are warmth and light, complete freedom from care, and abundance of food to eat, with no necessity whatever to earn the day’s food by labour. All the prizes are to the unfit; all the effort and misery are to the laborious. If the honourable working man loses his employment through some change in industrial organization or through the growth of foreign competition, he finds it too often impossible to struggle back to his feet. He sees the help which might have carried him through his misfortune diverted by the blatant outcries of the worthless. He must be content to suffer and die in proud silence, while those who have never done or wished to do an honest day’s work absorb the contributions of public and private charity.

Mr. McKenzie, to whom I am indebted for so many illuminating facts, completes the picture in a few vivid paragraphs. He takes the huge and poverty-stricken London district of Poplar for his text, and he tells us--

“Had the Poplar poor law authorities contented themselves with
dealing adequately with the old and the sick, and the maimed
who are among them, all their resources would have been taxed,
for the district is now very, very poor. They went further.
They deliberately attracted to themselves the great shifting
army of loafers and of idlers from all parts of London.

“How has this been done? By two means. Outdoor relief has been
freely granted to all kinds of folk, and the people inside the
workhouse have been treated in a sumptuous manner far above the
style of their class.

“The guardians decided that the stone-yard is derogatory, and
abolished the labour test. They had no sufficient labour for
men, so they allow them to remain in practical idleness. There
are over two hundred and fifty young men in the workhouse
to-day, amply fed, well clothed, and maintained week by week,
and month by month, in idleness. They are lazy,
good-for-nothing scamps, many of them, as their records clearly
show. Naturally they take advantage of the glorious prospect of
plenty to eat and nothing to do. There is another army, only
less numerous, of young women in the prime of years and of
health, equally idle.

“A few days since, I went over the ‘workhouse’ at midday, and
watched the great rooms packed with legal idlers, all busy
eating a dinner such as few labourers outside have. ‘Do you
mean seriously to tell me that these men have no proper
employment?’ I asked my guide, as we stood in a great room
thronged with not far short of three hundred men, mostly
varying in age from eighteen to forty, all sound limbed, all
physically fit. ‘We use them as far as we can in cleaning up,’
my informant replied.

“The next extraordinary point at Poplar is the feeding of the
inmates. No one denies that the pauper should have a
sufficiency of wholesome food, and most of us would willingly
support the generous feeding of the old and the infirm. But the
Poplar guardians have gone to the extreme here. They work on
the policy avowed by some of them that ‘the poor man ought to
have the best sometimes.’ They are going to give him the best
when he is in the workhouse, and they do! The butter costs,
bought by the ton, 1_s._ 2-3/4_d._ a pound. I am informed that
the contractors are required to supply only ‘Denny’s best
Irish’ bacon. The meat is of the very finest quality to be
bought, and the bread is of a grade and perfection rarely to be
had in shops or restaurants. I examined the dinners being
served in the course of an ordinary visit, and I declare in
sober truth that the quality was at least as high as that given
in an average West End club. The mealy potatoes and the fine
boiled meats certainly equal those served in the modest club
where I lunch.”

This, my working-men listeners, is what you and I are paying for. The obvious result upon any district where the rates must be raised to an impossible height in order to support the idle and worthless, is that such a district ceases to be an area of employment.

The great manufacturing firms decline to continue their operations in a place where local taxation is so heavy that it prevents them from paying a dividend to their shareholders.

The firms go, but their labourers do not go with them. These, after a brief struggle, swell the ranks of the Unemployed, that sorrowful army for which the Government has just voted £200,000 as a small temporary relief.

Now I do not think that I need say much more as to the manner in which the Unemployables have created the class of the Unemployed, and as to how the working man suffers. I have given a brief summary enough--in the endeavour to be as thorough as possible--but it is already somewhat lengthy.

I wish to come at once to the principal point of this lecture--_the remedy for it all_!

I am personally convinced that the remedy I am about to propound is the only satisfactory one, and the object of my presence here to-night is to outline it for you.

There is a time in the history of certain diseases when any malignant growth must be removed with the knife. Cancer, the tiger of all physical ills, can only be treated in this way. The hideous thing which has fastened on the human body must be cut away from it, or the body dies. The gentle measures of medicine and diet are useless. Life must be preserved by the scalpel and knife of the surgeon. “Is there no other way, doctor?” the nervous patient asks. “Don’t you think that I might get well if I kept on the Chian Turpentine treatment or the injection of Tryptic Ferment?”

The surgeon of to-day who knows his business will answer “No.” He will proceed to the stern though inevitable operation.

And that is what we have got to do in regard to this social cancer, this economic disease of the Unemployed question. We must stop the whole thing. You working men have the power to do it, and this is the way in which you must do it.

In the first place, you must realize your own power over the councils of the nation, in the ordering and determining of the laws of England. You who are working men are already beginning to do this. To take only one instance, the Trades Unions have already combined to send a number of labour members to Parliament, and a working man holds a high ministerial position with conspicuous honesty and ability. I don’t in the least agree with most of the aims of what is known as the Labour Party. My reading, education, and experience have taught me that Socialism is the dream of an impossibility, and that the witness of history, the experience of nations, and the laws of God are all hostile to it alike. There has never yet been a continuing Commonwealth in which all men were equal inasmuch as they were State officials. There never will be.

But working men have now the power to remedy the unjust conditions under which they live. The more they realize that power the more able will they be to bring about the change.

One of the first things that they must do is to relieve themselves and others of the burden of the Unemployables--this is the way in which I believe it can be done.

We must follow the plan adopted with signal success by Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and other foreign countries, only, in proportion as our own problem is more menacing and acute than in other States, we must adapt, amplify, and extend their plan to our needs. In these countries every effort is made to assist the deserving poor, while the undeserving are not merely repelled; they are also punished. Relief is given, after a careful visitation of the distressed case and thorough personal inquiry, in the shape of a loan, and repayment of the loan is required except in cases where the assisted are not able-bodied. The lazy and worthless are relegated to labour colonies, or to penal workhouses, whence they can return to ordinary life after a term of labour has been served. The old are cared for, when deserving, in a different kind of workhouse, and receive indulgent treatment. In this way sturdiness and independence of character are assured, and there is no danger of the excessive multiplication of paupers, or of enormous expenditure on relief.

This is speaking generally. The two chief agencies for dealing with the Unemployed question are the systems of insurance against unemployment and the establishment of labour colonies in which the Unemployables are forced to work.

It is impossible for me to-night to do more than sketch the working of these two institutions in a single country. I will, therefore, outline the method of insurance adopted in Germany, and give an account of the greatest labour colony in existence--that of Merxplas in Belgium.

A month or two ago I was in the great German city of Cologne. There I found the following system in operation:--

“The ‘City of Cologne Office for Insurance against Unemployment in Winter’ was established in 1896. The object of the office is to provide, with the assistance of the Cologne Labour Registry, an insurance against unemployment during the winter (December to March) for the benefit of male workpeople in the Cologne district. In order to insure with the office, a man must be at least eighteen years of age, must have lived for at least a year in Cologne, and must not suffer from permanent incapacity to work. He is required to pay a weekly premium, payment of which must commence as from April 1, and must continue for thirty-four weeks.

“The amount of the premium was originally 3_d._ per week for both skilled and unskilled workmen; in 1901 the rate of premium was fixed at 3_d._ for unskilled and 4-1/4_d._ for skilled men; in 1903 the rate was raised to 3-1/2_d._ per week for unskilled and 4-3/4_d._ per week for skilled workmen. In no case must a man be more than four weeks late in paying his weekly premium, otherwise he loses all claim upon the office; but in special cases the operation of this rule may be suspended by the committee of the insured.

“In return for these payments the insured workman, if and when out of work in the period named above, receives, for not more than eight weeks in all, a daily amount, which is 2_s._ for each of the first twenty days (nothing being paid for Sundays), and then 1_s._ on each subsequent day. These payments begin on the third week-day after the date on which the man has reported himself as out of work.

“While out of work, a man must report himself to the office twice daily, and if work is offered him, he must take it, provided that the nature of the employment and the rate of pay be, so far as practicable, similar to what the man had been getting while in work. But he cannot be asked to fill a place left vacant in consequence of a trade dispute. Unmarried men, with no dependants living at Cologne, are required to take work away from that city, if offered to them, their fares being paid for them.

“No money is paid in respect of unemployment caused by illness or infirmity, or by the man’s own fault, or by a trade dispute.

“The administration of the affairs of this Insurance Office is in the hands of the Executive Committee, the Committee of the Insured, and the General Meeting of Members.

“The Executive Committee consists of the head of the Cologne Municipality (_Oberbürgermeister_) or his delegate, of the President for the time being of the Cologne Labour Registry, and of twenty-four members, twelve elected by the insured workmen, and twelve patrons or honorary members (six employers and six employees) chosen by the patrons and honorary members.

“The twelve representatives of the insured on the Executive Committee, together with the business manager of the office, form the Committee of the Insured, referred to above.

“The Executive Committee has the right to decline to make any further insurance contracts, should it become doubtful whether the fund is adequate to meet further liabilities; and on two occasions (in 1901-2 and 1902-3) it became necessary to suspend operations in this manner.”

What an excellent plan this is! The working man has, I know, his sick club, his benefit society, to which he must subscribe. If he is a member of a Trades Union there again is another claim upon his purse. But all working men are not members of Trades Unions. The greater the skill of the trained mechanic, for example, the more the disfavour with which he regards the Trades Unions. It is a splendid thing to be a member of a great and powerful organization which has for its object to ensure that every man shall be paid a living wage. But when a Union forces all its members to a dead level of equality with that of the least skilled, when the good workman is compelled to do no more work, and no better work, than the worst workman in the confederation, then the good workman very naturally takes his name off the books. Once more, many working men, especially in the country, are fairly sure of always being able to obtain work if they are prepared to do it. But in the great, crowded, competitive centres of England, the uncertainty of regular employment, especially in regard to unskilled labour, the establishment of such a system of insurance would be of incalculable benefit, nor do I believe that the infinitesimal premium would be regretted or missed by any sensible and hard-working man.

You may object that probably the funds of the insurance companies might possibly come to be diverted to the support and assistance of the _won’t_ works--the Unemployables. Please hear me to the end and you will see that this objection cannot be upheld.

I do not appeal to the experience of despotic Germany but of democratic Belgium when I describe the largest Continental Labour Colony, that of Merxplas in Belgium. During the present year I have spent some months in Belgium, and have been enabled to gather the opinions of all sorts of people upon the subject. Every thinking man I have consulted in this country is emphatic in his praise of the institution.

The Law of November 27, 1891, “for the repression of vagrancy and begging,” which came into operation on January, 4, 1892, imposed upon the Belgian Government the duty of organizing correctional establishments to be called (A) Beggars’ Depôts, (B) Houses of Refuge, and (C) Reformatory Schools. The Labour Colonies are maintained in order to fulfil the requirements of the Law under (A) and (B).

All persons confined in a Beggars’ Depôt or in a House of Refuge, not suffering from incapacity, are to be put to work of such nature as may be prescribed, and shall, unless deprived thereof as a measure of discipline, receive a daily wage, part of which shall be kept in hand and credited to the “leaving fund” of the inmate in respect of whose labour the same shall be paid.

The Minister of Justice fixes, with respect to the Beggars’ Depôts and Houses of Refuge, the rate of wage which the inmates shall receive, and the deductions to be retained out of this wage towards the “leaving fund.” This fund is handed over partly in the shape of cash, partly in that of clothing and tools, when the inmate is discharged.

The internal regulations of the Beggars’ Depôts and Houses of Refuge are settled by Royal Decree. Any person confined in either class of institution may be ordered to undergo solitary confinement.

The classes of persons whom the magistrates are directed (by Article 13 of the Law) to send to be confined in a Beggars’ Depôt, are all persons not suffering from incapacity, who instead of providing themselves with the means of existence by labour, abuse the charity of the public by habitual mendicancy; those persons who, through laziness, or drunken or immoral habits, pass their lives in vagrancy, and those who live on the earnings of vice (_souteneurs de filles publiques_).

Merxplas is reached from Antwerp by a steam tramway running through a cultivated country with occasional stretches of pine plantations. There are only a few villages, all small, and there is no place which can be in any way styled a town on the way to Merxplas, or indeed, within a considerable radius round the colony. The surrounding country is sandy heath, with pine plantations, but this is transformed at Merxplas by the manual labour of the colonists into excellent agricultural land, with fields and gardens neatly cultivated and well-grown avenues of oak, poplar, and pines. Such a transformation has been rendered more easy by the nature of the sub-soil, which is clay everywhere underlying the top-soil of sand. The buildings are large and handsome, and of good design. They seem excellently built. The main block consists of a large quadrangle, and is entered by a principal gate on the western side. The offices of administration are centred round this gate, with dining-halls capable of seating 1500 colonists at a time, on the left, and reception-rooms, baths, fire-engine house, etc., on the right. The _quartier cellulaire_ as the prison for refractory colonists is named, is easily marked by the exercise grounds. To this is attached on one side a barracks for 150 soldiers and on the other a building set apart for the _immoraux_.

The east side, opposite to the main gate, is occupied by the hospital in the centre, and by two wings on each side for the _infirmes_, who are still capable of light work, and for the _incurables_, who are unfit for any kind of labour. The remaining side on the north consists of four long galleries, _chauffoirs_, which are intended for the use of the colonists in inclement weather. Between these, placed centrally, are the lavatories and the canteen. There also is a library, from which they can obtain books on Sunday, in which at the time of our visit a tramp choir was practising with considerable skill under a tramp organist, and without any supervision.

The dormitories are four large buildings on the west front flanking the approach to the main gate, and beyond these lies the large new church which the colonists have just erected. This will hold 1500 men standing, and is a very effective building. Adjoining are the farm-buildings, which are nearly all on a very lavish scale, and thoroughly modern in construction. To the northward are the workshops. All these also are admirably built, and are thoroughly suited to their purposes. Beyond these lie the brickyards, stoneyards, pottery works, tannery, cement yard, etc.

The inmates are divided into six classes--

Class I. Men sentenced for offences against morality and for
arson.

Class II. Men sentenced to Colony life as a sequel to a term of
imprisonment of less than one year.

Men whose past history shows them to be dangerous to the
community.

Class III. Habitual vagabonds, mendicants, inebriates, and men
generally unable to support themselves.

Class IV. Men under twenty-one years of age.

Class V. (_a_) The infirm and (_b_) the incurable.

Class VI. First offenders.

These come under the normal conditions of Colony life; that is to say, they are obliged to do about nine hours work a day, of a character suited to their capacity, in return for which they receive board and lodging, and in addition, a small amount of pay.... This is partly paid in tokens valid only at the Colony stores and canteen, and partly it is banked against the time when the colonist leaves. The normal day is as follows: the colonists rise at 4.30 (summer), and after leaving the lavatory each man receives his ration of bread for the day (1-1/2 lbs.) and as much coffee (chicory) as he likes. What bread is not eaten then is kept for dinner and supper. At 6 they enter the shops, where they remain until 11.30, with a half-hour interval from 8 to 8.30 a.m., when they can go outside and smoke. At 11.30 they are all marched back to the quadrangle and go into the dining-halls in two relays. After this they rest until 1.30, when they re-enter the shops until 6, with another half-hour interval at 4 o’clock. On their return supper is served, and immediately afterwards they go to bed, when the roll-call is made, requiring every man to stand to his bed, and those missing are noted.

In the winter the short day necessitates the farmhands retiring very early to bed. Those who work in the shops begin their work at 7.30 in the morning, and work on after dusk by artificial light.

The colonists are given no meat, but the soup of vegetables is very good, and each man has a large quantity. They have a sweet drink made of liquorice-wood boiled in water, with their meals; coffee and bread for breakfast; potatoes or other vegetables, with a meat sauce for supper; and chicory-water in large cans in their dormitories. To supplement the above they can make purchases from the canteen of beer, tobaccos, lard, herrings, etc., which are sold at exceedingly small prices, representing only the actual cost price of the article when produced by the Colony labour itself.

The staff is small, and consists of a Director-in-Chief at Hoogstraeten, who exercises a general financial supervision over all the Colonies, a Director at Wortel and Merxplas, and at the latter place the following officers: Deputy-Directors, 2; Doctor, 1; Priests, 2; Teachers, 5; Clerks, 19; Manufacturing Manager, 1; Warders, 81; Sisters of Mercy, 6.

All offences against the regulations of the Colony and all cases of slack work are summarily dealt with by the Director, who has full power to transfer men from one class to another, and from a more to a less remunerative form of work. He can also award imprisonment or solitary confinement, and bread and water diet in the Colony cells for any period up to sixty days at a time. This power can also, in case of necessity, be used repeatedly, so that a bad character can practically be permanently locked up.

A further help to the maintenance of discipline is undoubtedly the privilege of earning wages and of spending them directly on beer and tobacco, etc.

There is one feature of Merxplas which is at first rather startling; that is, that every day there are a certain number who escape. This does not seem to give the authorities much concern, because they are nearly always brought back again in a short time, either through capture, or because their mode of living brings them again to the notice of the police.

A beginning was once made of digging a moat round the grounds, but it was abandoned because it was thought that the possibility of escape helped to prevent disaffection. The colonists also, in the eyes of the law, are patients rather than criminals. Those in Classes I. and II. are, of course, much more closely guarded. Escape, like all other breaches of Colony discipline, can be punished by the Director with imprisonment in the Colony cells.

The results of the work done at the Colony is thus summed up in the “Blue Book” from which the greater part of the detailed particulars have been taken.

“Even more important than the economy of the system is its effect on the colonists. The men at Merxplas have retained a large proportion of whatever manual and technical skill they possessed when they first began to slip out of employment in the outside world. They have entered the Colony before the rapid deterioration, which is the inevitable result of the tramp life, has had time to take effect, and the opportunity afforded them to practise their trades has, in most cases, prevented their ever sinking to the level of the average English tramp. In every shop the keen interest the men take in their work is most noticeable; only one foreman and one warder are employed in each shop, and without coercion the men seemed all working with remarkable energy and real interest. This is, in our opinion, perhaps the most striking feature of the whole establishment.

“The permanent effect on the individual is less, perhaps, than one would at first sight expect. About ninety per cent are habituals. The reason given by all the authorities was always the same. Outside, this class of man of weak moral fibre, and generally of inferior physique, cannot keep from drink. Sooner or later he breaks down, loses his place and returns. Inside, away from temptation, they work well, and as long as the sentence does not exceed two or three years, seem content to remain. The colonies, it must be remembered, do not claim to deal largely with the temporarily unemployed, but with a class that is more or less permanently inefficient. In this connection, however, it seems that no attempt has been made to bring any strong religious influence to bear. There are the usual masses and other observances of the Roman Church, but there seems to be little personal mission work undertaken.”

I come to my remedy.

As I see it, what we have to do is this--we must establish colonies in which the Unemployables shall spend their lives. When once a man has been proved to be irreclaimable by ordinary methods, when a properly established tribunal, after searching inquiry, has pronounced him a burden and a drag upon the community, then I would put him away for life, if he is irreclaimable, and continues to remain so.

I would make his life just as pleasant as he himself chose to make it. If he refused to work, then his lot should be a prison cell and bread and water until he did. If he made the best of the situation in which his own fault had placed him, he should be enabled to earn enough to keep him in considerable comfort, and to provide him with harmless and judicious pleasures.

Such a man should live in a state of almost freedom. The one thing denied him would be the privilege of mixing with the outside world and of reproducing his kind. Such gratifications and amusements as he had earned should be supplied him with no ungrudging hand. The consolations of religion should be always at his command and should be constantly brought before him.

But he should not be allowed to beget children who would swell the ranks of the Unemployable and increase the intolerable burden already carried by the honest working man. It is just about as certain as science and economic experience can make it, that the child of an Unemployable will become an Unemployable too. It is possible that one child in a thousand may turn out a decent citizen. That is about the maximum percentage, and if, for the sake of possibly producing one ordinary worker we ought to allow nine hundred and ninety-nine hopeless idlers to come into existence, then I have nothing more to say.

I do not think such a position can be maintained for a moment. I venture to think that you will agree with me.

I admit that such a method would be inhuman, immoral and unchristian, if we were to treat the hopeless social failure as a criminal pure and simple. Let us make his life as happy as he chooses to make it; treat him as a criminal if he won’t work in the colony, comfort and pet him if he will. But we need go no further than this. I do not honestly think that our duty as Christians or sociologists imposes more consideration upon us than just this. “If thine arm offend thee cut it off.”

Sir Robert Anderson, for many years Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, has long held the view that the professional criminal is not a necessity of civilization, and that a reform of the method of dealing with him would soon bring about his complete extinction. Sir Robert, with his extensive Scotland Yard experience behind him, declares that the number of high-class criminals in England does not exceed a few dozen, and that if these were got out of the way organized crime against property would cease. The plan which Sir Robert Anderson has conceived is that of providing asylums in place of the present prisons, where a man who has proved to have devoted his life to crime would be sent for life and made to earn his living.

We must provide asylums for the Unemployables also, in order to preserve ourselves. It is no use being sentimental. We must relegate social parasites to a state and condition where they can no longer infest the social body and cannot increase in numbers. When we have done this, when you working men have done this, in less than a generation the question of the Unemployed will be satisfactorily settled. It may well be, moreover, that such a method will change the least degraded Unemployables into honest, hard-working citizens who can be once more admitted into the world on probation.

These are my opinions, and though I have given you but a sketch of them to-night, I submit that they are at least reasonable and worth consideration.

The words of the poet Shelley are no less applicable in the present than they were in the past. He had an unconquerable faith in the spiritual destiny of our race, and his lines, when he wrote his “song to the men of England” were filled with flame:--

“The seed ye sow another reaps;
The wealth ye find another keeps;
The robes ye weave another wears;
The arms ye forge another bears.

Sow seed--but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth--let no impostor heap;
Weave robes--let not the idle wear;
Forge arms, in your defence to bear.”

AN AUTHOR’S POST-BAG