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In Darkest England and The Way Out

G >> General William Booth >> In Darkest England and The Way Out




The blood boils with impotent rage at the sight of these enormities,
callously inflicted, and silently borne by these miserable victims.
Nor is it only women who are the victims, although their fate is the
most tragic. Those firms which reduce sweating to a fine art,
who systematically and deliberately defraud the workman of his pay,
who grind the faces of the poor, and who rob the widow and the orphan,
and who for a pretence make great professions of public spirit and
philanthropy, these men nowadays are sent to Parliament to make laws
for the people. The old prophets sent them to Hell--but we have
changed all that. They send their victims to Hell, and are rewarded by
all that wealth can do to make their lives comfortable. Read the House
of Lords' Report on the Sweating System, and ask if any African slave
system, making due allowance for the superior civilisation, and
therefore sensitiveness, of the victims, reveals more misery.

Darkest England, like Darkest Africa, reeks with malaria. The foul and
fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African
swamp. Fever is almost as chronic there as on the Equator. Every year
thousands of children are killed off by what is called defects of our
sanitary system. They are in reality starved and poisoned, and all
that can be said is that, in many cases, it is better for them that
they were taken away from the trouble to come.

Just as in Darkest Africa it is only a part of the evil and misery that
comes from the superior race who invade the forest to enslave and
massacre its miserable inhabitants, so with us, much of the misery of
those whose lot we are considering arises from their own habits.
Drunkenness and all manner of uncleanness, moral and physical, abound.
Have you ever watched by the bedside of a man in delirium tremens?
Multiply the sufferings of that one drunkard by the hundred thousand,
and you have some idea of what scenes are being witnessed in all our
great cities at this moment. As in Africa streams intersect the forest
in every direction, so the gin-shop stands at every corner with its
River of the Water of Death flowing seventeen hours out of the
twenty-four for the destruction of the people. A population sodden
with drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical
malady, these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life
has been spent, and to whose rescue I would now summon all that is best
in the manhood and womanhood of our land.

But this book is no mere lamentation of despair. For Darkest England,
as for Darkest Africa, there is a light beyond. I think I see my way
out, a way by which these wretched ones may escape from the gloom of
their miserable existence into a higher and happier life.
Long wandering in the Forest of the Shadow of Death at out doors, has
familiarised me with its horrors; but while the realisation is a
vigorous spur to action it has never been so oppressive as to
extinguish hope. Mr. Stanley never succumbed to the terrors which
oppressed his followers. He had lived in a larger life, and knew that
the forest, though long, was not interminable. Every step forward
brought him nearer his destined goal, nearer to the light of the sun,
the clear sky, and the rolling uplands of the grazing land.
Therefore he did not despair. The Equatorial Forest was, after all,
a mere corner of one quarter of the world. In the knowledge of
the light outside, in the confidence begotten by past experience of
successful endeavour, he pressed forward; and when the 160 days'
struggle was over, he and his men came out into a pleasant place where
the land smiled with peace and plenty, and their hardships and hunger
were forgotten in the joy of a great deliverance.

So I venture to believe it will be with us. But the end is not yet.
We are still in the depths of the depressing gloom. It is in no spirit
of light-heartedness that this book is sent forth into the world as if
it was written some ten years ago.

If this were the first time that this wail of hopeless misery had
sounded on our ears the matter would have been less serious. It is
because we have heard it so often that the case is so desperate.
The exceeding bitter cry of the disinherited has become to be as
familiar in the ears of men as the dull roar of the streets or as the
moaning of the wind through the trees. And so it rises unceasing, year
in and year out, and we are too busy or too idle, too indifferent or
too selfish, to spare it a thought. Only now and then, on rare
occasions, when some clear voice is heard giving more articulate
utterance to the miseries of the miserable men, do we pause in the
regular routine of our daily duties, and shudder as we realise for one
brief moment what life means to the inmates of the Slums. But one of
the grimmest social problems of our time should be sternly faced, not
with a view to the generation of profitless emotion, but with a view to
its solution.

Is it not time? There is, it is true, an audacity in the mere
suggestion that the problem is not insoluble that is enough to take
away the breath. But can nothing be done? If, after full and
exhaustive consideration, we come to the deliberate conclusion that
nothing can be done, and that it is the inevitable and inexorable
destiny of thousands of Englishmen to be brutalised into worse than
beasts by the condition of their environment, so be it. But if, on the
contrary, we are unable to believe that this "awful slough," which
engulfs the manhood and womanhood of generation after generation is
incapable of removal; and if the heart and intellect of mankind alike
revolt against the fatalism of despair, then, indeed, it is time, and
high time, that the question were faced in no mere dilettante spirit,
but with a resolute determination to make an end of the crying scandal
of our age.

What a satire it is upon our Christianity and our civilisation that the
existence of these colonies of heathens and savages in the heart of our
capital should attract so little attention! It is no better than a
ghastly mockery--theologians might use a stronger word--to call by
the name of One who came to seek and to save that which was lost those
Churches which in the midst of lost multitudes either sleep in apathy
or display a fitful interest in a chasuble. Why all this apparatus of
temples and meeting-houses to save men from perdition in a world which
is to come, while never a helping hand is stretched out to save them
from the inferno of their present life? Is it not time that,
forgetting for a moment their wranglings about the infinitely little or
infinitely obscure, they should concentrate all their energies on a
united effort to break this terrible perpetuity of perdition, and to
rescue some at least of those for whom they profess to believe their
Founder came to die?

Before venturing to define the remedy, I begin by describing the
malady. But even when presenting the dreary picture of our social
ills, and describing the difficulties which confront us, I speak not in
despondency but in hope. "I know in whom I have believed." I know,
therefore do I speak. Darker England is but a fractional part of
"Greater England." There is wealth enough abundantly to minister to its
social regeneration so far as wealth can, if there be but heart enough
to set about the work in earnest. And I hope and believe that the
heart will not be lacking when once the problem is manfully faced, and
the method of its solution plainly pointed out.

CHAPTER II. THE SUBMERGED TENTH.

In setting forth the difficulties which have to be grappled with,
I shall endeavour in all things to understate rather than overstate my
case. I do this for two reasons: first, any exaggeration would create
a reaction; and secondly, as my object is to demonstrate the
practicability of solving the problem, I do not wish to magnify its
dimensions. In this and in subsequent chapters I hope to convince
those who read them that there is no overstraining in the
representation of the facts, and nothing Utopian in the presentation of
remedies. I appeal neither to hysterical emotionalists nor headlong
enthusiasts; but having tried to approach the examination of this
question in a spirit of scientific investigation, I put forth my
proposals with the view of securing the support and co-operation of the
sober, serious, practical men and women who constitute the saving
strength and moral backbone of the country. I fully admit that them is
much that is lacking in the diagnosis of the disease, and, no doubt,
in this first draft of the prescription there is much room for
improvement, which will come when we have the light of fuller
experience. But with all its drawbacks and defects, I do not hesitate
to submit my proposals to the impartial judgment of all who are
interested in the solution of the social question as an immediate and
practical mode of dealing with this, the greatest problem of our time.

The first duty of an investigator in approaching the study of any
question is to eliminate all that is foreign to the inquiry, and to
concentrate his attention upon the subject to be dealt with. Here I
may remark that I make no attempt in this book to deal with Society as
a whole. I leave to others the formulation of ambitious programmes for
the reconstruction of our entire social system; not because I may not
desire its reconstruction, but because the elaboration of any plans
which are more or less visionary and incapable of realisation for many
years would stand in the way of the consideration of this Scheme for
dealing with the most urgently pressing aspect of the question, which I
hope may be put into operation at once.

In taking this course I am aware that I cut myself off from a wide and
attractive field; but as a practical man, dealing with sternly prosaic
facts, I must confine my attention to that particular section of the
problem which clamours most pressingly for a solution. Only one thing
I may say in passing. Then is nothing in my scheme which will bring it
into collision either with Socialists of the State, or Socialists of
the Municipality, with Individualists or Nationalists, or any of the
various schools of though in the great field of social economics--
excepting only those anti-christian economists who hold that it is an
offence against the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to try to
save the weakest from going to the wall, and who believe that when once
a man is down the supreme duty of a self-regarding Society is to jump
upon him. Such economists will naturally be disappointed with this
book I venture to believe that all others will find nothing in it to
offend their favourite theories, but perhaps something of helpful
suggestion which they may utilise hereafter. What, then, is Darkest
England? For whom do we claim that "urgency" which gives their case
priority over that of all other sections of their countrymen and
countrywomen?

I claim it for the Lost, for the Outcast, for the Disinherited of the
World.

These, it may be said, are but phrases. Who are the Lost? reply, not
in a religious, but in a social sense, the lost are those who have gone
under, who have lost their foothold in Society, those to whom the
prayer to our Heavenly Father, "Give us day by day our daily bread,"
is either unfulfilled, or only fulfilled by the Devil's agency: by the
earnings of vice, the proceeds of crime, or the contribution enforced
by the threat of the law.

But I will be more precise. The denizens in Darkest England; for whom
I appeal, are (1) those who, having no capital or income of their own,
would in a month be dead from sheer starvation were they exclusively
dependent upon the money earned by their own work; and (2) those who by
their utmost exertions are unable to attain the regulation allowance of
food which the law prescribes as indispensable even for the worst
criminals in our gaols.

I sorrowfully admit that it would be Utopian in our present social
arrangements to dream of attaining for every honest Englishman a gaol
standard of all the necessaries of life. Some time, perhaps, we may
venture to hope that every honest worker on English soil will always be
as warmly clad, as healthily housed, and as regularly fed as our
criminal convicts--but that is not yet.

Neither is it possible to hope for many years to come that human beings
generally will be as well cared for as horses. Mr. Carlyle long ago
remarked that the four-footed worker has already got all that this
two-handed one is clamouring for: "There are not many horses in
England, able and willing to work, which have not due food and lodging
and go about sleek coated, satisfied in heart." You say it is
impossible; but, said Carlyle, "The human brain, looking at these sleek
English horses, refuses to believe in such impossibility for English
men." Nevertheless, forty years have passed since Carlyle said that,
and we seem to be no nearer the attainment of the four-footed standard
for the two-handed worker. "Perhaps it might be nearer realisation,"
growls the cynic, "if we could only product men according to demand, as
we do horses, and promptly send them to the slaughter-house when past
their prime"--which, of course, is not to be thought of.

What, then, is the standard towards which we may venture to aim with
some prospect of realisation in our time? It is a very humble one, but
if realised it would solve the worst problems of modern Society. It is
the standard of the London Cab Horse. When in the streets of London a
Cab Horse, weary or careless or stupid, trips and falls and lies
stretched out in the midst of the traffic there is no question of
debating how he came to stumble before we try to get him on his legs
again. The Cab Horse is a very real illustration of poor broken-down
humanity; he usually falls down because of overwork and underfeeding.
If you put him on his feet without altering his conditions, it would
only be to give him another dose of agony; but first of all you'll have
to pick him up again. It may have been through overwork or
underfeeding, or it may have been all his own fault that he has broken
his knees and smashed the shafts, but that does not matter. If not for
his own sake, then merely in order to prevent an obstruction of the
traffic, all attention is concentrated upon the question of how we are
to get him on his legs again. Tin load is taken off, the harness is
unbuckled, or, if need be, cut, and everything is done to help him up.
Then he is put in the shafts again and once more restored to his
regular round of work. That is the first point. The second is that
every Cab Horse in London has three things; a shelter for the night,
food for its stomach, and work allotted to it by which it can earn its
corn.

These are the two points of the Cab Horse's Charter. When he is down
he is helped up, and while he lives he has food, shelter and work.
That, although a humble standard, is at present absolutely unattainable
by millions--literally by millions--of our fellow-men and women in
this country. Can the Cab Horse Charter be gained for human beings?
I answer, yes. The Cab Horse standard can be attained on the Cab Horse
terms. If you get your fallen fellow on his feet again, Docility and
Discipline will enable you to reach the Cab Horse ideal, otherwise it
will remain unattainable. But Docility seldom fails where Discipline
is intelligently maintained. Intelligence is more frequently lacking
to direct than obedience to follow direction. At any rate it is not
for those who possess the intelligence to despair of obedience, until
they have done their part. Some, no doubt, like the bucking horse that
will never be broken in, will always refuse to submit to any guidance
but their own lawless will. They will remain either the Ishmaels or
the Sloths of Society. But man is naturally neither an Ishmael nor a
Sloth.

The first question, then, which confronts us is, what are the
dimensions of the Evil? How many of our fellow-men dwell in this
Darkest England? How can we take the census of those who have fallen
below the Cab Horse standard to which it is our aim to elevate the most
wretched of our countrymen?

The moment you attempt to answer this question, you are confronted by
the fact that the Social Problem has scarcely been studied at all
scientifically. Go to Mudie's and ask for all the books that have been
written on the subject, and you will be surprised to find how few there
are. There are probably more scientific books treating of diabetes or
of gout than there are dealing with the great social malady which eats
out the vitals of such numbers of our people. Of late there has been a
change for the better. The Report of the Royal Commission on the
Housing of the Poor, and the Report of the Committee of the House of
Lords on Sweating, represent an attempt at least to ascertain the facts
which bear upon the Condition of the People question. But, after all,
more minute, patient, intelligent observation has been devoted to the
study of Earthworms, than to the evolution, or rather the degradation,
of the Sunken Section of our people. Here and there in the immense
field individual workers make notes, and occasionally emit a wail of
despair, but where is there any attempt even so much as to take the
first preliminary step of counting those who have gone under? One book
there is, and so far as I know at present, only one, which even
attempts to enumerate the destitute. In his "Life and Labour in the
East of London," Mr. Charles Booth attempts to form some kind of an
idea as to the numbers of those with whom we have to deal. With a
large staff of assistants, and provided with all the facts in
possession of the School Board Visitors, Mr. Booth took an industrial
census of East London. This district, which comprises Tower Hamlets,
Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney, contains a population of
908,000; that is to say, less than one-fourth of the population of
London. How do his statistics work out? If we estimate the number of
the poorest class in the rest of London as being twice as numerous as
those in the Eastern District, instead of being thrice as numerous, as
they would be if they were calculated according to the population in
the same proportion, the following is the result:

PAUPERS
Inmates of Workhouses, Asylums,
and Hospitals .. .. .. 17,000 34,000 51,000

HOMELESS
Loafers, Casuals,
and some Criminals .. .. 11,000 22,000 33,000

STARVING
Casual earnings between
18s. per week and chronic want 100,000 200,000 300,000

THE VERY POOR.
Intermittent earnings
18s. to 21s. per week .. .. 74,000 148,000 222,000

Small regular earnings
18s.to 21s. per week .. .. 129,000 258,000 387,000
------- ------- -------
331,000 662,000 993,000


Regular wages, artizans, etc.,
22s. to 30s. per week .. .. 337,000

Higher class labour,
30s. to 50s. per week .. .. 121,000

Lower middle class,
shopkeepers, clerks, etc. .. 34,000

Upper middle class
(servant keepers) .. .. .. 45,000
-------
908,000
It may be admitted that East London affords an exceptionally bad
district from which to generalise for the rest of the country.
Wages are higher in London than elsewhere, but so is rent, and the
number of the homeless and starving is greater in the human warren at
the East End. There are 31 millions of people in Great Britain,
exclusive of Ireland. If destitution existed everywhere in East London
proportions, there would be 31 times as many homeless and starving
people as there are in the district round Bethnal Green.

But let us suppose that the East London rate is double the average for
the rest of the country. That would bring out the following figures:

HOUSELESS
East London. United Kingdom.

Loafers, Casuals, and some Criminals 11,000 165,500

STARVING
Casual earnings or chronic want .. 100,000 1,550,000

Total Houseless and Starving .. 111,000 1,715,500

In Workhouses, Asylums, &c. .. 17,000 190,000
-------- ----------
128,000 1,905,500


Of those returned as homeless and starving, 870,000 were in receipt of
outdoor relief. To these must be added the inmates of our prisons.
In 1889 174,779 persons were received in the prisons, but the average
number in prison at any one time did not exceed 60,000. The figures,
as given in the Prison Returns, are as follows: --

In Convict Prisons .. .. .. .. .. 11,600
In Local Prisons.. .. .. .. .. .. 20,883
In Reformatories.. .. .. .. .. .. 1,270
In Industrial Schools .. .. .. .. 21,413
Criminal Lunatics .. .. .. .. .. 910
-------
56,136

Add to this the number of indoor paupers and lunatics (excluding
criminals) 78,966--and we have an army of nearly two million:
belonging to the submerged classes. To this there must be added at the
very least, another million, representing those dependent upon the
criminal, lunatic and other classes, not enumerated here, and the more
or less helpless of the class immediately above the houseless and
starving. This brings my total to three millions, or, to put it
roughly to one-tenth of the population. According to Lord Brabazon and
Mr. Samuel Smith, "between two and three millions of our population
are always pauperised and degraded." Mr. Chamberlain says there is a
"population equal to that of the metropolis,--that is, between four
and five millions--"which has remained constantly in a state of
abject destitution and misery." Mr. Giffen is more moderate.
The submerged class, according to him, comprises one in five of manual
labourers, six in 100 of the population. Mr. Giffen does not add the
third million which is living on the border line.
Between Mr Chamberlain's four millions and a half, and Mr. Giffen's
1,800,000 I am content to take three millions as representing the total
strength of the destitute army.

Darkest England, then, may be said to have a population about equal to
that of Scotland. Three million men, women, and children a vast
despairing multitude in a condition nominally free, but really
enslaved;--these it is whom we have to save.

It is a large order. England emancipated her negroes sixty years ago,
at a cost of #40,000,000, and has never ceased boasting about it since.
But at our own doors, from "Plymouth to Peterhead," stretches this
waste Continent of humanity--three million human beings who are
enslaved--some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian
overseer, all of them to destitution and despair?

Is anything to be done with them? Can anything be done for them?
Or is this million-headed mass to be regarded as offering a problem as
insoluble as that of the London sewage, which, feculent and festering,
swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and
flow of the tide?

This Submerged Tenth--is it, then, beyond the reach of the
nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they
rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will
be some incurably diseased in morals and in body, some for whom nothing
can be done, some of whom even the optimist must despair, and for whom
he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of an
asylum or a gaol.

But is not one in ten a proportion scandalously high?
The Israelites of old set apart one tribe in twelve to minister to
the Lord in the service of the Temple; but must we doom one in ten of
"God's Englishmen" to the service of the great Twin Devils--
Destitution and Despair?


CHAPTER 3. THE HOMELESS

Darkest England may be described as consisting broadly of three
circles, one within the other. The outer and widest circle is
inhabited by the starving and the homeless, but honest, Poor.
The second by those who live by Vice; and the third and innermost
region at the centre is peopled by those who exist by Crime. The whole
of the three circles is sodden with Drink. Darkest England has many
more public-houses than the Forest of the Aruwimi has rivers, of which
Mr. Stanley sometimes had to cross three in half-an-hour.

The borders of this great lost land are not sharply defined. They are
continually expanding or contracting. Whenever there is a period of
depression in trade, they stretch; when prosperity returns, they
contract. So far as individuals are concerned, there are none among
the hundreds of thousands who live upon the outskirts of the dark
forest who can truly say that they or their children are secure from
being hopelessly entangled in its labyrinth. The death of the
bread-winner, a long illness, a failure in the City, or any one of a
thousand other causes which might be named, will bring within the first
circle those who at present imagine themselves free from all danger of
actual want. The death-rate in Darkest England is high. Death is the
great gaol-deliverer of the captives. But the dead are hardly in the
grave before their places are taken by others. Some escape, but the
majority, their health sapped by their surroundings, become weaker and
weaker, until at last they fall by the way, perishing without hope at
the very doors of the palatial mansions which, maybe, some of them
helped to build.

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